Perfidious MPs will be running scared of the ballot box

Not all our MPs will betray the promises their parties made at the 2017 election, when their lies induced 86% of electors to vote for their solemn pledges to Leave. Not all MPs will betray their previous votes to trigger Article 50 and to Leave the EU. Not all MPs will betray their moral obligation to enact in Parliament the nation's democratic will. But most will.

For some, those who lied openly and brazenly, their hearts dark with duplicity and treachery, for whom the rewards of place or office were too greatly loved to be foregone, no words are foul enough to condemn their betrayal. For others, the ninnies, unicorn-chasers, naive credulous fools, babblers, mirror-gazers and assorted half-wits, carried up in the vain delusion that their own opinions counted for more than the Referendum, their fate may shock and surprise them.

MPs may not be clever, but most of them are cunning. And many know what the ballot box is likely to bring. Away from the fairyland of Westminster even the deepest self-deceptions and delusions fall away, and their abject failure to enact Brexit will stand them stark bollock naked before the scrutiny of their electors. Even now they feel the fear.

So don't expect an election any time soon. They will delay it - all of them, each and every perfidious arse on those green benches - for as long as possible. In the hope that the anger of electors at their failure will fade. In the hope that something will turn up. In the hope that another three years sitting as frauds and liars, their public regard prone in the gutter and feculent with filth, will lessen the reckoning they will face.

It will not. 

I despair of our dullard Parliament

The 2010 and 2015 intakes of MPs are possibly the most pathetic collection of witless dullards in the history of the House. I suspect that following the exposure of Parliamentary thievery, venality, fraud and crookedness with the Expenses Scandal under the second most corrupt Speaker this century, party managers paid more than cursory attention to the criminal inclinations of PPCs - and as a result we have benches of dreary mediocre imbeciles hardly capable of tying their own shoes but at least also lacking the nous to charge the cost of their crystal grapefruit bowls to the taxpayer. Perhaps if the parties allowed Constituency Associations to select their representatives ... but no, we're governed by a wunch of guileless morons.

Yesterday they gave up taxing their limited collective intelligences and handed Brexit over to the governments of the remaining 27 Federast members. Now these guys know the reality of the EU - that it's run by the unelected officials of the Commission, and as a consequence only two of its five unelected Presidents are worth a spit. They know the European Parliament is just for show, a fake democratic forum in which everything is decided before it hits the chamber and most MEPs are concerned more with maxing the capacity of their personal troughs than with democracy, so the Council don't care whether Nigel pitches up with 73 Brexit Party MEPs in July to create havoc - to them it's utterly irrelevant. Hof, of course, is incandescent with rage at the prospect that his personal theatrical stage set (his party has all of two MEPs but he heads the ALDE grouping of nonentities from elsewhere) may continue to be polluted by those with less than anilingual reverence for his camp caparisons.

May, beyond all reason, is going for MV3 prior to the meeting of the EC on the 21st, and MV4 after it. On the basis that the majority rejecting the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty is shrinking. It may be down to double figures for MV3 - what larks!

I just want a chance now to show my displeasure at the ballot box. I suspect tens of millions of fellow electors of whatever stripe do also. So a long Article 50 extension would be slightly cathartic at least - allowing us to vote in May, and give the tedious dolts in Parliament a taste of what's to come.

The Day the Political Class declared war on democracy

I really can't improve on Allister Heath in the Telegraph this morning.

He believes, as I do, that the Remainer political and patrician elites are ready to overturn democracy itself to get their own way. His opening and final paragraphs -

At moments like this, when democracy is being traduced, it is easy to be angry, to rage or to fulminate. I’ve been prone to such emotions myself over the past few years. Today, I’m merely grief-stricken: sad, but no longer furious....

Yet today, this wonderful political tradition is in jeopardy. Thanks to the sabotage of Brexit by the Remainers entrusted to deliver it, the majority of the political class is declaring war on all Brexiteers and all democrats. I can think of no greater tragedy.

It's all falling apart quite quickly now. May doesn't even enjoy control of her own cabinet any more - ministers, and Hammond, can simply defy her as they wish. I doubt the EU Council on the 21st will grant or require a long extension - they want to isolate the infection, not encourage an epidemic of democracy. Nor I think will they now grant even a short extension - 29th March will be the day.

So my view remains as yesterday's post - the anti-democrats can now only either revoke Article 50 altogether, which I give a 50/50 chance, or between the 22nd and 28th they swallow the Selmayr-Robbins treaty. 

Brexit - the road narrows

At each stage of this protracted Brexit process, the closer we get to the end of the month, the number of remaining options decreases and the choices available to those holding power become more stark. Parliament may today vote against no deal, and may tomorrow vote to ask for an extension of Article 50, but as far as I can see neither vote matters very much. The only meaningful vote that Parliament could now take would be to withdraw Article 50 completely - and this would almost certainly mean a General Election to follow which few now in the House would welcome; voters in most constituencies would slaughter them.

It's now all in the hands of the EU - and this time, not just the unelected officials. If Parliament asks for an extension, it will be up to the individual EU governments whether to agree. There is talk of a year's extension but I don't give this much credence. They've already redistributed the UK seats, will be voting from May and won't want Farage's Brexit Party back in July, crowding the UK seats as they will have annihilated Conservative and Labour MEPs. As far as they're concerned, we've left. So they may agree a few weeks delay - perhaps until the end of April.

So MPs, it appears, can only choose either to cancel the Referendum, or choose to swallow the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty, or choose neither which allows us to Leave by default in either two or six weeks. What other options are there? 

And now for something completely different ...
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It was 25 years ago that I first downloaded Netscape Navigator via a noisy and slow modem. It took more than half an hour to download, and transformed my life. The 'Edit' button I think allowed one to compose and save HTML pages, which could be uploaded by FTP. I once spent an entire day hand-coding nested tables, with reams of 'cellpadding' and 'cellspacing' commands. Now one can do the same in about 20 seconds.

 

This straw may not be worth grasping

How quickly things move. Back in January, in the cold and dark with the fire leaping in the stove, I was inclined, even knowing the manifest traps and pitfalls of the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty apart from the backstop, to accept in my mind Parliament agreeing the document if a binding solution to the most egregious effects of the backstop was found.

We await today two opinions. One is that of the Attorney-General, the second the group of eight lawyers in the House, both of whom will scrutinise the scrap of paper that Mrs May clutched in her hand as she descended from her aircraft.

But quite apart from these assurances, things have changed since January. The EU's malign intentions, and the effects of their scabrous Treaty, have become better understood. Even if May's changes are green-lighted by the legal experts, we have somehow become used to the idea of a Clean Break with no WA at all, keeping most of our £39bn; business has geared for such an outcome, the people have prepared themselves, we were bracing for the end of the month. What seemed acceptable in January is now less so. This straw may not be worth grasping.

The stumbling comical drunk, one of the EU's five unelected presidents, could not resist a few last unstatesmanlike words, to underline the pitiably amateur lack of Statecraft and diplomacy that the cabal of crooked thugs in Brussels has displayed throughout Brexit. Vulgar old shit.

Well, we must wait and see how things play out today, but as I write I anticipate that I will be greatly disappointed should MPs accept the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty today.

For the EU, law is a weapon

Wittgenstein was onto something about language. You can tell an awful lot about a society and culture by the vocabulary it has. These thoughts came to me last year as I and one of the Munich lads struggled with an obsolete solid fuel central heating stove; 300kg of quite unnecessary 3mm and 4mm steel and the size of a washing machine. "Bloody German over-engineering!" I cursed as we struggled to launch the thing over the lip of a skip. And as we rested, for these are also times in which I improve my German, I asked "What's the German for over-engineering?". He thought. He consulted his device for several minutes, then announced gravely "There is no term in the German language for over-engineering".

Wednesbury (1948) will be as much in the mind of every Englishman who has ever studied law as Carlill and the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company. The concept of 'Wednesbury unreasonableness' was the start of a chain of precedents in Common Law that exactly defined whether the behaviour of a public body was excessively bumptious. Whilst Federasts in France and Germany came out of hiding, crawled from their cellars and bunkers and started planning a new Federast Empire amidst the rubble of the last one, the folie de grandeur rising in their breasts, Jurists in England were refining the definition of reasonable behaviour first enshrined in 1903 in the person of the man on the Clapham omnibus. Being reasonable is very important if you're English. Less so if you're a Federast; as Boris writes in the Telegraph

Last week the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, valiantly tried to take things forward. He proposed that the test of “reasonableness” – well known to English common law – could be legally applied to any EU attempt to keep us locked in the backstop. It wasn’t much to ask. Merely asking the other side to be reasonable – it seems a very frail protection by comparison with a proper time limit.

Brussels was having none of it. The EU’s formidable negotiator, Sabine Weyand, observed, with perhaps unconscious irony, that the concept of “reasonableness” was unknown to EU law. The talks collapsed. Michel Barnier then tweeted his supercilious and repetitive offer. Great Britain could, of course, leave the backstop, but Northern Ireland would have to remain behind. He thereby summed up, again, the constitutional humiliation that Brussels wishes to impose.

For Brussels the law and their corrupt political court the ECJ are not there to dispense justice, nor to defend and protect, but as Panzer divisions, to thrust away and crush all opposition in the path of the Federasts. For the EU, law is a weapon, one even more effective in subjugating the peoples and nations of Europe than the steel and cordite of military power. Equity and reasonableness, those essentially British concepts, are shredded under the churning tracks of the EU's King Panzers.

Law, as Boris writes, is just the means by which they wish to impose upon us a humiliation as deep as the Treaty of Versailles - but they can only succeed if Parliament assists them. If we reject and repudiate their poison treaty in its entirety, if we spring free at the end of this month, all their spite and all their malice, all their vindictive hate, cannot reach us.