Cliff Edge anyone?

ps as he spends so little time in his beautiful house in Chelsea could he let some of the poor people from Grenfell Tower stay there pro tem?

I am not sure he is telling us what to do is he?

Gotta get a Grip?

Is that not telling people what they should be doing?

Lovely man, moral and upstanding, a role model for all.

Isn't that about Trump?

Wouldn't know. Have you actually heard it, whitewave?

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/28/brexit-the-eu-nationals-exiting-britain-a-bit-of-me-is-dying-but-i-cant-stay

The right wing rags are moaning about the chancellors transition statement yesterday.

Perhaps they can come up with an idea?

Two robust opinion pieces from this morning's twitter trawl

Jenni Russell in The New York Times
No Dunkirk Spirit Can Save Britain From Brexit Defeat

www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/opinion/dunkirk-christopher-nolan-brexit.html?mcubz=0

Matthew Parris in The Times

The Conservatives are criminally incompetent

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-conservatives-are-criminally-incompetent-zbnppmx92?shareToken=e8427837054e40e5d6e9f4923a4b6206

(sorry, this link might not work, these 'shared' pieces from behind the paywall can be a bit dodgy)

Thanks for the links MD. The Matthew Parris article is very condemnatory and indeed sobering reading, even for keen Brexiteers, and if a conservative is thinking like this well........over the cliff we go!

This is a bit worrying about Poland.

europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-2161_en.htm

The EU is trying to keep them within the rule of law.

theconversationuk.cmail19.com/t/r-l-jlyumuy-iudkikukhu-t/

Have just read the Mathew Parris article. Everyone in this country should read it and take heed of his warnings.

There is a main culprit here, and it isn’t any of these candidates. Labour didn’t cause this mess. Whitehall didn’t frame the task, even if it is ill-equipped for its execution. Theresa May may not be up to the job but it’s a job into which she has been forced. And “the government”? The government is a collection of individuals. Where do these individuals come from? Who nominated them? Who keeps them in their jobs? Search for the key word in the following text.

“The Brexit secretary is playing it by ear with no guide to the melody

We live in a parliamentary democracy in which voters elect representatives attached to parties. The party as an institution has form, and voice, and policies. The party chooses a leader. The winning party’s leader asks the monarch for authority to govern and if she is satisfied that the party can support its leader in commanding the Commons, she gives it. The leader then chooses every minister from the party’s ranks, and leads a cabinet drawn, too, from the party. And if the party loses confidence in its leader or government, it can, by withdrawing support, dismiss both.

The word that keeps appearing in this passage is hard to miss: an entity, a real thing, the thing that’s now in charge of Britain’s direction. It’s called a party. It’s the Conservative Party. Do the voters even begin to understand how this mess is entirely of the Conservative Party’s creation?

The Tories are turning Brexit into a humiliating shambles. They called a referendum when they didn’t have to, they accepted the result, they willed Brexit, they promised Brexit, and now they’re comprehensively failing to organise it. You can’t blame the voters, who quite reasonably assumed that the Tories would never have offered a referendum if they hadn’t thought leaving Europe could be arranged. The fingerprints for this crime of mismanagement are Tory fingerprints.

“The coming years will be a permanent stain on my party’s reputation

Thirteen months since the referendum and the Conservatives still can’t decide even the broadest outline of the terms on which we hope to leave. The difference between a soft and a hard exit is greater than the difference between staying in and a soft exit, yet the prime minister is still insisting that government policy is for a hard exit, while the chancellor (in her absence) says the opposite.

Nobody really knows what the foreign secretary thinks and I doubt he knows himself. The Brexit secretary, meanwhile, seems to be trying to play it by ear, but with no guidance as to the melody at all. And the trade secretary seems recently to have reconciled himself to three (or, if the chancellor is to be believed, as many as four) further years without any job at all. Some ministers say we’ll be taking back control of immigration when we leave in 2019, others that we will not.

And almost everybody has started to talk of a “transitional” period after leaving, without any hint of a consensus on what we would be transitioning to.

Every Conservative MP bar Kenneth Clarke voted in February for the triggering of Article 50. It now appears they and their leader started the countdown to Britain’s expulsion without even the vaguest plan for what we’d be aiming to achieve, let alone realistically likely to achieve. Worse, they pulled the trigger knowing very well that “Brexit” still meant different things to different members of the party and its government, and there was no reason to hope that divergent aims were ever likely to converge.

I call this criminal: irresponsible to the point of culpable recklessness towards their country’s future. The Conservative Party just thought they’d give it a whirl and all but one of them voted for the adventure.

Even in bad times, even when we Tories messed up, I used to feel a pride in the party to which I owe so much. Often too slow, sometimes too rash, sometimes wrong, sometimes mildly corrupt, often missing the public mood, occasionally cowardly, it was still possible to trace through the party’s long history a line of worldly common sense, a distrust of extremism, and a deep sense of duty to the nation. There was a certain steadiness there. Has this deserted us? Do we yet understand, has it yet been born in on us, that it is we and we alone who have led the whole country into the predicament it now finds itself in?

How shall I look in the eye those householders through whose doors I’ve been dropping Tory leaflets all these years: years that will be seen as a permanent stain on the Conservative Party’s reputation?

The prime minister has gone away. “Ladybird, ladybird,” we might cry, “fly away home! Your house is on fire, your children are gone!” Except that we’re better off without her flapping around, spouting implausibilities. Perhaps reality in the shape of Philip Hammond may gradually bear down upon fantasy; perhaps forlorn hopes may steal silently away and various fools, while not repenting of their folly, allow it to slip their recollection.

I hope so. I left Spain feeling ashamed to be British. I return to England ashamed to be a Conservative.

Share

...for those who don't like 'links'. And this is from a Conservative....

Matthew Parris article should be read out on the news at night, until the message gets through. And still we head inexorably towards the cliff.......just when is someone going to stand up and say STOP! Surely a government is elected to do the best for the electorate, subject to their own party policies, so why is this being permitted? Even leaving out any humanitarian and social considerations about EU citizens and their mobility, surely on pure economic grounds it is starting to look like a disaster?

Until everyone complies and thinks what you tell them to think GillT57 Sounds like a fabulous idea. Can't think why we don't do that.

Does anyone else hear from their MEPs?

I like Matthew Paris as a man.....also as a journalist, but not anything else, and he has always had a propensity to be doom laden.People must remember he is a passionate Remainer.The fact that he is a Conservative is neither here nor there.
I agree that in retrospect they should not have called a GE, but at the time, they were way ahead in the polls.They made a pigs ear of the GE, by the manifesto and useless campaigning.All down to T May.
However, they did come out ahead of Labour and now have a chance to do well with Brexit, which this last week they show some signs of doing, with Hammond taking a leading role at last.

So, what is your opinion of the article, Primrose?We were bombarded with Daily Mail/Express/Sun headlines on the run up to the referendum along with 'the bus' and soundbites such as 'project fear', 'take back control', 'don't listen to experts'etc. Would it be too much to ask that the general public actually hear comments such as this?

..amd I'm still waiting to hear something positive about brexit. And before people say that negotiations have only just started well, should they all be complete in a couple of years time, so we should be somewhere near to knowing what brexit is going to mean to us all [other than brexit means brexit, that is]....

Have a chance to do well with Brexit?
You live in a different world to me, roses.

My view is that the media serves up all flavours of Brexit and Matthew Parris is a skilled journalist who can construct an eloquent argument.
My issue was with forcing people to listen until they tell you that you're right.

Yes I do durhamjen and I thank God that I do.

Never thought you were religious, roses.

Well, there you are then durhamjen.... you don't know everything.