Dear Ursula ..

Dear Ursula

Many thanks for the kind words from the floor of your assembly. The United Kingdom will also always love the nations of Europe - and those nations will remain our favourite holiday and retirement destinations. Many of them even use the same notes and coins, which makes it easier!

However, I should point out that we're not actually leaving Europe. Of which we're of course an integral part. And we'll be marketing our many fine comestibles products across the world as 'Food from Europe' as well as 'Made in the UK'. And we remain proud of our continent of 730m people, of whom some 460m are also 'citizens' of your Federation thing.

We'll have a year more to enjoy the madcap, mouth-frothing, carpet-chewing antics of your rantiest stars - Hof's histrionics, petulant posturing and insane rhetoric keep us all in good spirits and we enjoy immensely his little You Tube clips. After that, I'm not sure who we will have to laugh at - unless Labour have elected a new Leader by then, of course.

Anyhow, must close. Good luck with those criminal investigations against you - after all, anyone can accidentally wipe two mobile phones containing incriminating criminal evidence on the same day. If you're not in jail, we'll correspond again in eleven months.

Best -

Britain.

Bob from today's Telegraph

The day Jo Swinson voted for Brexit

On 29th October 2019, the LibDems and the SNP, bloated with hubris and swollen with bluster, led a recalcitrant Labour into voting for a General Election, and Brexit became certain. It was, needless to say, deeply opposed by the haute-remainers - the Blairs, Grieves and Adonises, who were keenly aware that postponing things as long as possible, gaining a year-long extension from Brussels, would give them the best chance of a second referendum and of reversing Brexit. The inflated egos of second-rate politicians won, to the benefit of the nation and the gratitude of the 17.4m who voted to Leave.

On the morning of that momentous vote it was still absolutely unclear which way it would go. I was prepared for months, even a year, of continued uncertainty and the prospect of Brexit becoming ever more distant. Thank you, Jo Swinson, for being such a monstrously vain, conceited and deeply stupid Parliamentarian. We owe Brexit to you.

Nemesis of the haute-remainers - John Gray

Today is yet another crunch day for Brexit. So many crunch days for Brexit have come and gone that I am not getting excited; either the Commons agrees an election and the EU deigns to allow an extension, or something else happens. 

It's always good to take the chance to step back and look at the bigger picture. The Telegraph is absolutely right today in drawing attention to an essay in New Statesman America by John Gray. As the unfortunately-acronymed NS is core leftie-thinking fodder, it will be uncomfortable reading for many of those Gray terms 'haute-remainers' - the Blairs, Adonises, Grieves and others. I commend it to you.

I have said all along that Brexit was not primarily about the EU but about a wider democratic correction in the UK that re-balances power away from an establishment elite and back to the voters. This year the BBC, in a rare act of political prescience, featured Reith lectures by Lord Sumption covering the effects of State capture by this political elite on the relationship between law and democracy. Gray's focus is the way in which the Conservative Party has reacted and changed, as it has throughout its history, to ensure it comes through intact. The same cannot be said of parties embracing the haute-remainer cause.

Gray's essay is too crammed with succinct and tight analysis to usefully select any single paragraph to quote summation, so here then, as a sample of the essay rather than a precis, is just one -

The haute-Remainer mind is an example of what the 20th century’s subtlest and most original conservative philosopher called political rationalism. Michael Oakeshott (1901-90) used the term to describe totalitarian ideologies such as Leninism and National Socialism, but he was clear that any kind of political tradition could succumb to rationalist ideology – including conservatism. (His own version of conservatism – an ultra-liberal variety, in which the ideal role of the state was that of an umpire – itself did.) The core of rationalism in politics is an idea of politics itself. Rather than being a practice in which people negotiate the terms on which they co-exist with one another, politics means the imposition of an idea. The idea is self-evidently true; anyone who questions it is ignorant and stupid, or else wilfully malignant. Though they claim to embody reason in politics, haute-Remainers cling to a view of the EU in which facts are secondary or irrelevant. They fulminate on the dangers of Brexit without ever mentioning that Paris has been convulsed by riots while Barcelona has become the scene of mass demonstration, burning streets and police violence. No mere fact can be allowed to cloud the vision of a sacred institution.

Let's see what the day brings. 

2019 EP elections - SMASHED

The country finally told Theresa May what they thought of her in the European Elections of last year. The vehicle was provided by Nigel Farage, and Conservatives lent him their votes in millions. Even Conservative Home advised Conservative members, who cannot openly vote for another party without risking expulsion, to 'refrain from voting Conservative' nudge-nudge. Theresa May could already see which way it was going, and called it a day. Nigel won by ridding us of May even before the first vote had been cast.

The Brexit Party's party on Friday in Parliament Square is a fitting tribute to itself. It was there to be used when electors needed most to use it, as UKIP had been in the past. The result drove deranged Remainers into frenzies of idiocy; AliGob foamed, PTSD Adonis chewed carpets and 'Howler' Grayling went into Twitter meltdown. 

SMASHED
27th May 2019  
Well, you can read the news as well as I can. Just 3 MEPs for the Conservatives, but including Dan Hannan. I must say 9% of the vote was better than I was expecting - if May hadn't announced her resignation, I'm convinced we would have got no more than 6% and no seats. More good news in PTSD Adonis having been disappointed, but that's thin cheer.

For most people of course TBP's success is the single story. Nothing can detract from 28 seats - possibly 29 when the last two areas declare. If the party had been around a month or two longer I suspect they would have taken even more votes from both Labour and the Conservatives.

And of course the LibDems, the Remain party, with some 2/3rds of the Brexit Party votes, will also now move to consolidate their status as the Brexit opposition party with an eye to the next GE, with the advantage of an established party structure and existing parliamentary incumbency. They can sell themselves as "We're not Corbyn" and also take more voters from Labour and Conservative parties. The CUKs are nothing - forget their grandiose delusions of a 'pact' with the LibDems. Cable can tell them to join-up or FO.

All over Europe the victor has been .... democracy. Turnout up, apple carts overturned, politicians in tears, some dreams shattered, others come to fruition. Nothing earth shattering, but a clear message. The Conservative Party, like Labour, may have no future, the corpses of both parties picked over by the Teal and Orange insurgents, but for now will remain in government . Our MPs will be shitting themselves and will avoid a GE like a vampire eschews garlic.

Have a good day all - Today is a good day.

                                       Predicted %             Actual %
Brexit                                        34                       32
LibDem                                     17                       20
Lab                                            15                       14
Green                                        11                        12
Con                                             9                          9
CUK                                           4                          3
UKIP                                          3                          3

The death of EU-NATO

The election on 8th June 2017 was an utter, unmitigated disaster - May's hubris and rank stupidity had thrown away whatever Brexit majority we had in the House. May of course threw Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill overboard without hesitation; blaming everyone else has forever been her way, but in this case it had some justification. Hill has become decently obscure, but for some reason the 'graph has given Timothy a column, the mere sight of which still raises my blood pressure. I have never read it - and I stopped reading anything by Matthew Parris about three years ago. Life is too short to waste even a few seconds reading anything by men whose judgement is so piss-poor and whose opinions are so deviant as to make the pair of them ink-thieves.

I won't repeat my post of 9th June. It was craven. A few days previously, however, was one of those occasional posts that unaccountably scores big hits; this got almost 3,000 views. It holds good over time and is as true today as it was in 2017.

Germany will never, ever pay more than now for NATO
Many of us will have grown up with the BAOR - either as serving soldiers or like myself as army brats. There was a time when Gütersloh, Fallingbostel or Sennelager were more familiar to us than Slough, Reading or Peterborough. The BBC even had a forces radio programme, and knowing at least half a dozen BFPO numbers was par for the course. Well, BAOR disappeared without notice in 1994. The 25,000 remaining troops in Germany became BFG, now down to about 4,000 and scheduled to pull out completely by 2020, almost exactly in line with Brexit.

The change came with the fall of the wall in 1989. Before then, our lads were to play a vital role in forming a heroic but utterly pointless sacrifice in holding up the Soviet advance through Germany to France for about 72 hours. Then we all thought it an essential sacrifice. Now we wonder, why bother? Perhaps France and Germany would be better off under Russian rule. Why shed British blood in their defence?

When Trump abstained from the traditional annual G7 offering of American blood in Germany's defence last week he too must have felt the same. Germany has been financially raping Europe for thirty years, sitting on a vast pile of gold as she threatens, bullies and manoeuvres others to pay for everything, like some nightmare dining partner endlessly disputing the division of the restaurant bill.

Turkey is now a Salafist terrorist nation and belongs nowhere near NATO. In bullying the Netherlands into ignoring the veto of the Dutch people and extending full EU privileges to Ukraine, the EU has just given Putin another poke with a sharp stick. The UK will find it hard to mobilise even 6,500 troops - we need a standing army of 100,000 to put an adequate force in the field. Germany's armed forces are to all purposes entirely useless. Amidst the ruins of NATO (and oh yes it's now finished in all but name*) there's only France to defend the EU.

Merkel may gamble that she'll get away with it, and perhaps she will. But without British and American wealth and blood to pay for it. We're done.

*Also proving the rule that corporations are most likely to fail at the point at which they open a spanking glossy new multi billion dollar HQ

Theresa May - who?

Theresa May became PM on 13th July 2016, after the stunned Cameron had quit. History will not remember Cameron kindly; the kitchen suppers, bland mediocrity and above all the multiple Cornish holidays will condemn his reputation. Above all those pap shots of Cameron in his Boden beachwear, his chubby formless torso and little mantits exposed to the sun made him look foolish and frivolous. I didn't remark at all on May's appointment - which given the fury of my later invective is a telling gap. Instead I commented on a 'threat' by third-rate Euro academics to go home -

13th July 2016
I was 40 when I took my second degree, and by then the rot had already set into the English universities. Only one member of the research and teaching staff had an adequate command of English and he was an American. The VC and senior admin staff were concerned solely with cramming their own mouths with as much public gold as they could hold, and in pursuing every crooked, academically dishonest scam and scheme to this end. The staff - at best academically mediocre - were under enormous pressure to publish. Anything. The consequences were academic journals full of unreadable rubbish; prolix, poorly written, loaded with jargon and cliches. Worthless dross in the main that did not advance scholarship one iota. The point, of course, was the publishing credit - for both the academic and the institution.

And so our universities became magnets for third-rate European academics who were rightly unable to find employment in their own countries. The only qualification it seemed was their ability to churn out 20,000 words of meaningless drivel like clockwork every quarter.

This spew of garbage encouraged a new wave of academic publishing - The Journal of Otiose Sinology, 4 issues a year, subscription $1,400 - journals bought only with tax-money by university libraries and that exist solely to put into print the worthless drivel from these fourth-rate minds.

The cap of course is that these dreary failures call themselves 'intellectuals' in spite of the fact that we don't have intellectuals in England. We have scholars. Intellectuals are for nations such as Hungary, or cities such as Paris, where they tolerate young men with no change of underpants, little money and with poor social skills.

And now, offended by Brexit, some want to leave, to go back to Europe. That's fine. As 'intellectuals' they will appreciate that their departure will marginally increase the average level of scholarship in both England and Europe. It's a win-win.

Look back sans rancour (1)

In the absence of 'events' this week, until Friday I'll be offering selected snippets from the past three and a half years. Starting today with the referendum itself. This first, on the eve of the referendum, featured the late great Roger Scruton. The BBC podcast is still there, and he still says what I wrote he said. Like Lord Sumption, Roger had a greater faith in representative democracy and a greater fear of the alternative than we, who make up the alternative, of course hold. Both thought the referendum was a bad idea, and of course it will take half a century to prove them wrong. Or right. But both subjugated themselves willingly to the outcome.

22nd June 2016
On this penultimate day I'd like to offer a few reflections and pose a few questions, largely those arising from two events - last night's TV debate, and an unnoticed 10 minute broadcast by Roger Scruton.

I've long admired the work of Roger Scruton, particularly that which I perceived as acting against Totalitarianism and towards the growth of an effective and empowered citizenry. Roger has also long had a view that the purpose of our democratic structures is to homogenise and deradicalise populism; if legislation were enacted immediately on the back of public sentiment, we would have had capital punishment after the murder of Lee Rigby. Roger holds the abilities of MPs and of Parliament in high regard. What I think he's missed is that we no longer trust our MPs, for instance, not themselves to use say the murder of Jo Cox to introduce repressive and Totalitarian measures. MPs are sadly not so well informed or so altruistically disposed as Roger would have them - and we ordinary people not so radical nor so ill-informed that MPs are required to act on our behalf.

So Roger's 10 minute Sunday broadcast ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07flhwb ) against petitions is a diatribe (if one can call such gentle disapprobation) against direct democracy and in favour of representative democracy. People are not capable of making wise choices when given simple binary choices; things are more nuanced, more complex and only our informed and deliberative Parliamentary system is capable of dealing with such matters, including the Referendum, says Roger.

He's wrong, of course. And it pains me to say so. He once valued Burke, and I would direct him back to Burke's little platoons; the smaller the realm of decisions to be taken, the higher the quality of those decisions. The more local the associations, authorities and interests with which we interact, the better the knowledge and the choices. MPs are now a part of a global cabal, a political class that views the world internationally, alongside global corporatism and global finance. They are not therefore well placed to make decisions in the interests of our shires, our towns and metropolii.

And that was demonstrated last night in the BBC debate with a participative audience of 6,000 ordinary people to whom Roger would deny the vote. They were no less well-informed than the experts on the podia, and far better represented the interests of the British people.

Leave or Remain, whatever comes out of tomorrow, I'd always, always trust my future to the votes of all enfranchised Britons whatever their station in life than to a political class no longer wholly trusted or wanted by those voters.

The second was the morning of the result. It was a glorious June alpine day, and even at 6am the sun was blazing and I had the big wooden double windows at the front of the house thrown open. I wrote this as I watched the valley below start its day, unaware of the earthquake, and with the scent of new cut hay from the meadows perfuming my coffee and the joyous sound of birdsong as a backing chorus mocking the shellshocked BBC broadcasters.

24th June 2016
I'll be posting later when my wits and thoughts are collected - at the moment I'm still reeling. I stayed up for the Newcastle / Sunderland results - and when it became clear the picture had changed, snatched a doze and stayed with it. Now I can only say the feeling of lightness as an ugly and enervating succubus has been taken from our backs is wonderful, but with it now comes a duty of responsibility. We must re-weld our people - all our people - back into one nation. We must do it without hate or rancour, and those brave enough to vote Leave are well placed to show their privileged 'Remain' brethren who have either suckled at the dugs of the beast or been its dags how it's done.

I remember the memorial service of Ralph Harris, Lord Harris, at the church in Smith Square just over the way from the EU Kommandantur. God, he would have loved this day. He wrote:

Liberty carries with it individual responsibilities. Responsibility for yourself, and hopefully your family and as far as possible your neighbours. But it does throw responsibility onto our own shoulders. Well, that's what living means; it doesn't mean shrugging off responsibility and taking soft options.

I have confidence in my land and my people and that things have not quite yet gone so far that we cannot rescue the greater part. God bless you all.

Marking our exit from the EU

There will not I think be any evening of television hosted by Jools Holland, with streamers, fizz and jazz bands, on the 31st January to mark our departure from the EU. There will, though, I strongly suspect, be lots of firework displays, which will pose the police with an interesting problem.

The current firework laws allow fireworks only until 11pm other than on Guy Fawkes night, Diwali, Chinese New Year and Christian new year. One of the quirks of the WA is that it specifies midnight on the 31st CET as the exact moment of the UK's departure - 11pm UK time. Technically, fireworks ignited before the hour are quite legal, those exploded after could earn a visit from Plod.

I don't think this will be an issue anywhere outside the most remainery parts of London, in which the victims of Brexit Derangement Syndrome will deluge the Met with phone calls, tweets and emails  complaining about the fireworks. Brexiteers will take a delight I suspect in guerrilla celebrating - sneaking into closed parks and onto open spaces to set off half a dozen rockets after 11pm, then flee. One can understand and sympathise with such actions, and  we could see the skies of the whole of Britain (even Scotland had a substantial Leave minority) lit up in a coruscating display of sound and light.

What we will not hear, it appears, are the bongs of Big Ben. This, I think, is probably right. TPTB have invented a theoretical cost of half a million to ring the bells and that's enough to kill the idea. It is not a good look for any official bodies to appear triumphalist about leaving; our national and state institutions belong just as much to remainers as they do to leavers, and it really wouldn't be right to use them to crow. The fireworks and private celebrations will be quite enough.

A final roll of schadenfreude for 2019

If I have a new year resolution it is to heed the PM's plea to put the bitter Leave / Remain divides behind us and to consign the word Brexit to history. In one month we will leave the EU, and that act will kick-start the healing and reconciliation. However, for now, for this last day of the troublesome teens, let's look back with schadenfreude -

Tony Blair
A man who did his utmost to frustrate Brexit, making visits to the UK's EU adversaries and encouraging them to block and frustrate his own nation's diplomatic efforts. Fortunately, so hated is Blair by all sides of the political spectrum, the Remain side ignored all his pleas to deny Boris an election.

Andrew Adonis & AC Grayling
Both were early victims of Brexit Derangement Syndrome, each starting the Brexit process with an intact and valuable public reputation but ending the decade with their lifetime's reputational achievements in ashes, as mocked and derided figures of ridicule whom absolutely no-one will take seriously in the future

John Bercow
Stripped of his power, the victims of bullying, long suffering Commons staff and all who were subject to his gross unpleasantness will be breathing a sigh of relief at Bercow's fall. While noting he really didn't have that great a height from which to tumble. Bercow is now reduced to Italian game shows and entertaining shoppers on the Clapham omnibus. Ld Lisvane, who suffered little Bercow's bullying as Clerk of the Commons until 2014, cannot be looking forward to the sanctimonious dwarf's seemingly inevitable elevation to the Lords.

Grieve, Gaulk, Soubry et al 
Purged from the Party, humiliated at the ballot box, the miracle is that these narcissistic idiots imagined that people voted for them personally in the first place, rather than for the party for which they purported to stand. How anyone can so delude themselves as to the extent of a non-existent personal popularity defeats me - or perhaps they were willing to undergo this public humiliation, indeed expected it, for the sake of the higher pay-off due from the Commons to defeated MPs than that paid to resigning MPs?

The BBC
Though it has been long building, the BBC's support of every anti-Brexit position, almost in anticipation of the reversal of the 2016 vote, has now condemned it. Polls are now emerging, and will continue to appear, that demonstrate that the BBC has lost the public's trust. Criminalisation of non-payment of the BBC TV tax is now unsustainable, and we will see further major changes before the Charter is due for renewal in 2027.

The Dags - Mark Carney, Barack Obama, the CBI et al
Most dags are now engaged in pretending they never opposed Brexit or never supported Remain at all. Just like all the ordinary members of the NSDAP vanished in 1945, or members of the GDR Communist Party became invisible after 1989. The CBI in particular, having devoted four years fighting Brexit on behalf of the global corps, is now declaring it is 100% behind Boris and always has been.

You'll note I've included none of the capos in Brussels. That, if it comes, will be for this date next year.

In a spirit of non-sectarianism, I have ready both Jamesons and Black Bush, both Catholic and Protestant whisky, in addition to my now favourite Monkey Shoulder blended malt Scotch. I will raise a dram for us all - may we, and may the United Kingdom, have a magnificent 2020!

Economic Dream Team and national dishonour

Why has the Netherlands been so successful? A large part of the place is below sea level, built on reclaimed land, it has no natural resources or mineral wealth, no source of energy, no great natural agricultural advantage and they speak a language that sounds like hawking phlegm. Yet their per capita GDP places them amongst the wealthiest in the world, and in terms of economic freedom they're at the top of the index, along with Switzerland, the UK, Ireland and Iceland. Their courts are un-corrupt, they have a monarchy and a proud history of plucky adventuring, once even sending a fleet of ships up the Thames to destroy the English fleet.

The answer of course is trade, commerce, secondary processes that add value, shipping and above all wide horizons that allow the Dutch to punch above their weight. Chemicals, petroleum refining, electrical engineering, banking and a scientifically productive horticulture and intensive agriculture sector all make the best of the Netherlands' greatest asset - the Dutch. They even enlisted cannabis and prostitutes into the tax economy.

The fact that the Netherlands seem firmly fixed within the EU is our loss and the EU's gain.

In response to the EU's veiled threats to block UK financial services from operating in the EU post-Brexit, a suggestion has resurfaced to form an FinAlliance between the UK, Switzerland, Singapore and HK. It's perfectly feasible, and it must worry at least 26 of the 27. But imagine what such an alliance would be if it included the Netherlands.

Dishonours
========
Again, the reward of the deserving has been fouled and besmirched by the awards of honours to the undeserving, those deficient of either exceptional merit or great worth to the nation. Sally Davies, chief health fascist, Alison Saunders, failed and vindictive prosecutor and Melanie Dawes, Jonathan Jones and John Manzoni are either failures or unknown mediocrities and none of them has a place in our national pantheon. The system stinks. Until we clear this meretricious trash from our honours system, the truly deserving will be devalued and befouled by association. 

Where should Leavers vote for the Brexit Party?

This is the advice for Leavers given by the Telegraph; vote for TBP -

1. If the Conservatives haven’t won the seat since at least 1992 (or since constituency creation);
2. If Ukip beat the Conservatives, and gained a vote share of over 20 per cent, in 2015;
3. And if the Conservatives got less than 30 per cent of the 2017 vote.

OK - so let's look at the two constituencies below

Hartlepool
1. Labour have held the seat since 1974..
2. In 2015 UKIP came 2nd with 28% of the vote
3. In 2017 the Conservatives got 34.2%

Result: Vote Conservative


Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford
1. Labour have held the seat since constituency creation
2. In 2015 UKIP came 2nd with 21.3% of the vote
3. In 2017 the Conservatives got exactly 30.0%

Result: Vote Conservative 

I think this is a fair and sensible algorithm for the Conservative and Brexit parties to use - what do you think? It's too late now for candidates to stand down, so it will mean the lower rated party must start campaigning for the other from now onwards.

Well, do we want to Leave or not?

BrexitCorp™ will deliver victory for Corbyn

This -

Sorry, but there's no polite way to say this. The Brexit party is set to deliver Corbyn an election victory and destroy Brexit. It's the same in a whole mass of Leave seats.

Can you show me any MRP polls that put TBP ahead of the Conservatives in any of these seats?

It's pure Farage vanity and childish conceit and it will destroy Brexit.

I simply don't know what else to say.

Nemesis of the haute-remainers - John Gray

Today is yet another crunch day for Brexit. So many crunch days for Brexit have come and gone that I am not getting excited; either the Commons agrees an election and the EU deigns to allow an extension, or something else happens. 

It's always good to take the chance to step back and look at the bigger picture. The Telegraph is absolutely right today in drawing attention to an essay in New Statesman America by John Gray. As the unfortunately-acronymed NS is core leftie-thinking fodder, it will be uncomfortable reading for many of those Gray terms 'haute-remainers' - the Blairs, Adonises, Grieves and others. I commend it to you.

I have said all along that Brexit was not primarily about the EU but about a wider democratic correction in the UK that re-balances power away from an establishment elite* and back to the voters. This year the BBC, in a rare act of political prescience, featured Reith lectures by Lord Sumption covering the effects of State capture by this political elite on the relationship between law and democracy. Gray's focus is the way in which the Conservative Party has reacted and changed, as it has throughout its history, to ensure it comes through intact. The same cannot be said of parties embracing the haute-remainer cause.

Gray's essay is too crammed with succinct and tight analysis to usefully select any single paragraph to quote summation, so here then, as a sample of the essay rather than a precis, is just one -

The haute-Remainer mind is an example of what the 20th century’s subtlest and most original conservative philosopher called political rationalism. Michael Oakeshott (1901-90) used the term to describe totalitarian ideologies such as Leninism and National Socialism, but he was clear that any kind of political tradition could succumb to rationalist ideology – including conservatism. (His own version of conservatism – an ultra-liberal variety, in which the ideal role of the state was that of an umpire – itself did.) The core of rationalism in politics is an idea of politics itself. Rather than being a practice in which people negotiate the terms on which they co-exist with one another, politics means the imposition of an idea. The idea is self-evidently true; anyone who questions it is ignorant and stupid, or else wilfully malignant. Though they claim to embody reason in politics, haute-Remainers cling to a view of the EU in which facts are secondary or irrelevant. They fulminate on the dangers of Brexit without ever mentioning that Paris has been convulsed by riots while Barcelona has become the scene of mass demonstration, burning streets and police violence. No mere fact can be allowed to cloud the vision of a sacred institution.

Let's see what the day brings.  

* E.g, at random, from 8/4/2010, and in many scores of posts before and after ..

"The Downfall of the Political Class
The public have been way ahead of the moribund old parties on this; we've been sick of the loathsome political class for some time. This hasn't stopped either party from fielding blow-in dags who have no experience other than politics or political organising for seats in the next Parliament, but their time too will come."

Will they or won't they?

It's now up to MPs. Either they swallow the Boris deal and we leave at the end of the month, or they vote it down and we're in unknown territory again. Personally I reckon Boris has played a blinder. Juncker would not have made clear his support for no further extension if he had not been reasonably certain that at least one of the 27 was so much on his wavelength as to veto the necessary unanimous decision of the council that would be necessary.

I won't rehash all the acres of newsprint on this. It's not a good treaty and it's not a treaty that will last for long, I suspect - but it gets us out and it starts the process. As a contributor keeps reminding me, after forty years Brexit is not an event but a process and if it takes ten years to unwind completely then so be it. But we must start somewhere and here is the best we can get.

I can offer only the same message as the Express this morning.

Are we there yet? II

Yes, it's a question we've asked before. This time, no one seems to know. Everyone on our side is terrified that Boris will have given away too much, whilst the Remainers are praying that Boris won't concede enough to allow the EU to change May's Surrender Treaty, thus giving them scope for a second cancelling Referendum (which they will lose if it allows a single Leave option).

No one can get angry until the deal is published. We don't know what the deal proposes. Journalists know no more than I do - they stood outside the Berlaymont last night counting the lit windows and reporting the times at which the lights went out (most by 2.30, it seems).

So our barrels are charged with powder and shot, slow match is burning, and we are waiting. Ready to douse the match and fetch the shot-screw or otherwise.

Brexit to the sound of trumpets

Well, HM has just broadcast our Party's draft election manifesto to the nation - and it didn't cost a farthing of our permitted election spend. I lost count at 24 Bills - it may be 26 - and every single one a feel-good, popular measure that reaches across traditional party allegiances and touches the parts of voters that other parties cannot reach. Labour, the Illiberal Anti-Democrats and the Scot Gnats will be furious - and I'll be listening to the debate in a couple of hours to laugh at the dribbling meltdown on the opposition benches.

That's the price of not enabling a general election - every single day they delay allows the government to use the entire machinery of Whitehall and the State to build voter support.  Their spittle-flecked fury this afternoon will go down like a lead balloon with the electorate - they will just be reinforcing Boris' narrative that the Remainers are unhinged, bigoted saboteurs with little self control and no potential whatsoever to fulfil the duties of HM's Loyal Opposition, let alone be seen as a government in waiting. 

Carry on, Corbyn. You're doing a fine job.

Internet shopping post-Brexit

I am an inveterate internet shopper. This is generally because I am an ingrained price-chaser and source stuff from across the world - including knock-off Poulsen luminaires from China, still a third of the cost of the originals even with shipping and customs duties and VAT added. So I am used to the process, which is simple and efficient here. The Post drops you a card with a URL and reference, one logs-on to the website, enters a few details, scans a couple of documents and makes a SOFORT transfer and then the goods are delivered. Not a problem a few times a year - but what about those regular weekly / monthly purchases from UK suppliers or UK eBay?

Well, those regular suppliers, you won't be surprised to know, are already ready for Brexit. Everything bought via the internet from outside the EU needs a customs sticker as the delivery of a couple of memory sticks from 7-day shop yesterday shows -

After Brexit the value will be the critical factor. No VAT is payable on imports under €22, and no customs tariff on imports below €150. UK suppliers who are VAT registered will in future make sales to EU customers free of UK VAT. Thus purchases under €22 will (I expect) be 20% cheaper - like my memory sticks.

One of my other regular monthly buys is from Screwfix (the Kingfisher group's success story).  Screws, fixings, blades and discs, sealants, adhesives mostly - much cheaper than local. They offer free delivery to Europe on orders over £50 and looking at my order values over the past year -

They're all well under the €150 customs duty limit - the UK cost will (I expect) be 20% lower, local VAT will be payable at 20% so the net result is zilch.

There will always be a few exceptions that will no longer be economic. Pallet deliveries, mostly. I've become used to booking my own pallet deliveries online, for as little as £160 a pallet. Stone floor tiles from Italy, a nation whose border is fifteen minutes drive away, cost no less than £65/m2 plus delivery (a minimum of €200 per pallet load) from any of the EU27 but can be bought from the UK for £27/m2 plus delivery. Yes, the exact same tiles from the same quarries. I need another 14m2 for an unfinished bathroom so will have to figure this out after Brexit. 

But so far, the personal impact of Brexit looks to be .... nil. Bring it on.

A black swan moment for Brexit

Well, twenty-four hours really is a long time in politics. The surprise is not that the EU has demanded Northern Ireland as the price for Brexit but that the gloves are now off and that Number Ten has made it public. I suspect strongly that Mrs Merkel said exactly the same thing to Mrs May, which explains much of the draft Selmayr-Robbins treaty (Selmayr himself said explicitly that losing the six counties was the price Britain would have to pay for leaving). Mrs May did not of course tell us that this was the EU's position - and I wonder whether she mentioned it to the Queen during her regular weekly briefings.

That Downing Street made the demand public - a demand that could not be denied by the Bundeskanzlerei, as the conversation was undoubtedly recorded - marks the real political change. Mrs May aimed for an agreement that the EU would find acceptable; Boris is looking for an outcome that the citizens of the UK find acceptable. That is an enormous difference in approach. 

I've no doubt that some fatuous idiot will pop up and opine that as NI voted 'remain' this is reason enough for the EU to insist on sovereignty over the province. Asinine. Demography in Northern Ireland may mean that at some time, maybe in five years, maybe in twenty-five, that there will be a majority in the Province to join with the republic of Ireland. This is wholly a matter for the people of Northern Ireland, wholly a matter for a referendum for only that purpose. That decision has not yet been made. 

Well, I cannot take pleasure in being correct when I doubted that the Prime Minister's deal would get the three green ticks it needed, but yesterday's events have brought us to a point that is hardly unexpected - a clean Brexit. It also leaves remainers in the position of advocating the loss of Northern Ireland as the price they would pay for a deal with the EU. Not a position, I suspect, that will be popular with voters. 

People -v- Parliament: Round 3

With parliament prorogued today for the rest of the week, at least remain MPs will be unable for a few days to keep digging the hole they're in. Parliament is today held in greater contempt than at any point in my life. The one clear finding of today's Comres poll for the Telegraph is that the nation overwhelmingly blames parliament for the Brexit mess - Boris gets away relatively unscathed;

The public have quite accurately identified their enemies - and any election in the next month or two will irrevocably be coloured by the contest between people and parliament. I can tell you in advance that parliament will lose.

The privileged elite, having captured all the institutions of the State, naively assumed that they could do away with the will of the people, could dispense with democracy. MPs became deluded to the point of imagining that they were important as individuals, that their personal opinions on this matter were more important than the people to whom they had lied in 2017 to win their seats.

All they have done is to ensure that constitutional reform is now inevitable. Everything starts with the elector. Universal suffrage, the secret ballot and the right to associate and form and subscribe to political parties are fundamental to the security of every single citizen in our isles - leavers, remainers and those who don't care. If the elite try to subvert our system of representative democracy, we will constrain our representatives. If the Speaker abuses the privileges of the Chair, we will constrain the powers of the Speaker. If the Supreme Court starts to play politics, we will make its composition a political matter. Power in this nation is delivered via the ballot box, and votes are won not by threat, violence, closing the streets or silly stunts but by reason and argument, by establishing and maintaining a narrative that chimes with the lives and experiences of the electors. People -v- Parliament has lodged in the people's mind and cannot now easily be dislodged.

If you haven't yet seen it, I commend the 27 minute video in the post below. Just ordinary electors, real people, you and me, talking calmly to the camera. The elite will no doubt find it astonishing that we common folk value our democracy so highly.  

Boris fighting for a democratic Britain

The illiberals and anti-democrats have had it their way for so long that they still can't accept that the will of the people, the democratic mandate, can override their wealth, power and privilege. Beaten at the ballot box, they have resorted to the millionaire's cudgel of lawfare; ejected from the leadership and membership of the Conservative party they continue to use power, influence and media to frustrate the will of the British people. A few eminent citizens are so far in the pockets of the Brussels mafia - Blair, Major and their dags - that they directly betray the interests of their own country for their corrupt ideology, their own interest. Their collaboration with those who wish us ill befouls our nation and stains our public institutions.

Macron is an énarque, isolated and shielded from the people by a wall of bureaucracy. The thick windows of the Élysée keep the enraged cries of the people, the fumes of the tear gas and the burning streets from his Lillipution nostrils, a triple line of balaclavered black-clad armed riot police keeps the people from the gates of his palace. No wonder he believes Blair and Grieve more than he does Boris - and they are promising him that they will sabotage democracy from inside the country whilst he acts to damage the UK from without. They are urging him to hold out against a deal, to pin Britain against the ropes. And they are wrong.

We are leaving. One way or another, we are leaving. We will not allow the dismemberment of the Union, not permit the EU to remain as Britain's overlord, not tolerate subjugation as a Satrap state under the heel of the unelected Brussels cabal. M. Macron had better start to believe Boris rather than Blair and the other weasels.

This week the Prime Minister embarks on a series of meetings to tell them this face-to-face. He is bolstered by a whole series of polls that show that his party has a commanding lead, that voters are turning against the illiberals in droves, that two-thirds of voters want Brexit done, now. The sabotage-delays engendered by the establishment elite, the ruling privileged class, are about as popular as a cup of cold sick with voters.

We are Leaving.

French police, exhausted from months of street combat with the Gilets Jaunes, are invited to change sides

Addendum
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This from Spiked - calm, rational and reasonable. Just people who believe in a Fair Go. I commend. 

The UK - Pour encourager les autres?

One sometimes starts to wonder whether the entire mess, blunder and deep divisions of the past three years have not been contrived for the benefit of the EU, as a lesson and warning to the remaining 27 of what will happen to them should they dare to challenge the rule of the EU. Such musing is not discouraged today by Der Spiegel, normally the most illiberal and anti-Brexit of organs -

The EU Must Soften Its Approach

As such, the EU should take a step back -- it's in its own interest -- to meet the British at the halfway point. The EU no longer needs to fear that Brexit will find imitators if Brussels shows itself to be too yielding. The picture Britain has painted over the past three years -- the crises in government and parliament and the threat of the United Kingdom disintegrating -- should have a sufficiently deterrent effect. After more than two years of negotiations and considerable struggle, Brexit has become inevitable. It would be good for the process to finally be completed. Separating in a positive manner is the prerequisite for a reasonable relationship in the future.

Apart from a tacit admission that May's ineffective bodgers had previously been beaten into a wholly unequal deal by Brussels, it is also a plea for Germany not to be burdened with a hostile and belligerent Britain when she has just herself fallen into the most difficult of recessions.

My own view is that we will emerge stronger, renewed and reformed from the Brexit debacle - with some much-needed constitutional cleansing once we have a decent working majority in Commons and Lords, some democratic house-cleaning and electoral repairs. One reform must be to limit lawfare - the ability of the very wealthy to undermine democracy through the courts - and to restate the limits on the power of the courts. We are not the EU, and have no wish to surrender our democratic freedom to the corrupt rule of lawyers and the very rich.