[noemon]

How dare Donald Tusk be rude about “those who promoted Brexit without a plan to carry it out?” Those who promoted Brexit have gone out of their way for 30 years to use polite language about Europe, always well-mannered with the highest standards of decorum, because we’re British. We’re not like these rude foreign mental cases with their shitty croissants.

The Sun is especially annoyed, declaring: “Sneering Eurocrat Tusk’s tantrum shows a disregard for democracy.” You can see why the newspaper is upset, as it has always expressed its feelings towards the EU in such carefully crafted terms, with headlines such as “Up yours Delors” and “EU dirty rats”. If anything, The Sun is too polite – so polite its words can be compared to the dialogue in a BBC adaptation of a Jane Austen novel.

For example, the first draft of an earlier message about EU leaders went: “Sire, it is with good grace and humble desire for fine countenance, we consort to implore your eminence to reconsider on certain matters within your treatise. We trust you are in fine spirits.” Of course, the newspaper had to shorten it a bit so it came out as “Hop off, you frogs”. But it meant the same.

Throughout these discussions, Britain insisted on kindly language from delicate spokespeople such as Boris Johnson. So instead of sounding petulant, like Donald Tusk, Johnson calmed everyone down by announcing that Hitler tried to create a European superstate and the EU is trying to do the same.

It’s a proud part of our British heritage: in disputes with other nations we placate all sides, and telling EU leaders they’re like Hitler is exactly the sort of skilled diplomacy that has made these Brexit negotiations pass off so smoothly.

When Jeremy Hunt took Johnson’s place, instead of inflaming matters, like Donald Tusk, he told the EU it was behaving like the Soviet Union under Stalin, right in front of people who had been detained in Stalin’s gulags. If he’s right, this means the EU has arrested several million people who voted to leave, without a trial, and dumped them in a freezing Siberian prison. Across the wastelands of Russia there must be fields full of people from Stoke asking the guards, “Can you find out how we got on away at Ipswich?”

When Hunt was asked if he regretted making those remarks, he said: “Since that speech we have had a very different approach from the EU.” You see, that was the trouble all along – the foreigners just needed telling. That must be why, ever since he gave them a good talking to, everything’s flowed along like a pretty stream, with such jollity that Brexit has hardly been in the news at all.

It’s unfair of Tusk to condemn anyone in Britain for campaigning to leave the EU without a plan. There was a highly coherent plan, which is why Liam Fox could announce Brexit “will be the easiest deal in history”, and we were told that “as soon as we leave, Angela Merkel will be banging on our door”.

It’s not the Brexiteers’ fault if the EU and Merkel mucked that plan up by not doing what we planned for. The same thing happened when I went into an Aston Martin showroom last week. I had a plan that I’d offer £50 for a customised five litre DB11, and then bargain the salesman down to £35. But the incalcitrant arse walked off and called security. How could I possibly have anticipated that?

David Davis also told us that “we will conduct individual trade deals with EU countries” – until he was informed no EU country could do that, as it would break one of the fundamental rules of the EU. So he had a plan and it’s not his fault if that plan was impossible. I expect the same happens if he plays snooker. He says, “If I miss all the balls with the cue, it won’t matter as I’ll ask a friend to ride an ostrich across the table and that should knock them in the pockets.”

In any case, we’re lucky he didn’t have a prominent position in the planning process; he was only the Brexit secretary.

Another part of the plan is the promise that the EU will back down at the last minute, as “that’s what they always do”. As Davis has said, the bloc needs to come to an agreement because we buy one-third of the EU’s Prosecco. This is exactly why we hold all the cards at the moment. It is the EU that is panicking, compared to us with our calm and measured ways. The EU only has 27 nation states to rely on, so without us buying one-third of its Prosecco it’ll struggle to make it to April.

So Donald Tusk is being absolutely outrageous when he says the promoters of Brexit had “no plan”. The plan all along was for the first and then second negotiator to resign, for both to oppose the deal they negotiated, and the foreign secretary to resign, followed by half the cabinet, and for no one to have realised there would be a border with Ireland, and votes to be lost by record amounts, and for rehearsals for when 50,000 lorries are stuck in Kent and businesses to stockpile toilet rolls and insulin, and the government to be dependent on creationists, and plans made for the evacuation of the Queen until it could now be announced we’re in a customs union with The Jungle Book and all have to dance with bears, or Britain has been reclassified as a beehive and Arlene Foster is our queen.

Nobody is surprised, because everything’s going to plan.

[Beren]

[noemon]

They should remove the last bit with:

"This is war"

or

"This is Sparta"

[Heisenberg]

To be fair, we haven't tried the obvious negotiating tactic of parking one of our new Type 45 destroyers off the coast of Belgium yet. If anything, we've been too kind to Johnny Foreigner. If the Anglo-Zanzibar war is anything to go by, we do that and the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

[Beren]

But in a significant step a joint statement from Downing Street and the European commission announced new talks on the “speed” with which the two sides would seek to complete post-Brexit talks on a future trade deal.

May’s critics have voiced fears that slow progress on those trade negotiations would leave Britain trapped in the Irish backstop, under which the UK would stay in a customs union to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.

The statement suggested that wording could be added to the political declaration to reassure MPs that the backstop would only ever be temporary.

So all May can get from the EU is a political declaration that the backstop will be temporary and a promise that post-Brexit negotiations will be a quickie rather than a massive everlasting fuck over.

[Heisenberg]

In all seriousness, I'm amazed at the extent of the opposition to the "backstop". Northern Ireland is already treated differently from the rest of the UK in a lot of important ways, not least the fact that it is officially only a provisional member of the Union (pun absolutely intended) under the Belfast Agreement.

Unless, of course, the opposition to the backstop isn't actually about the backstop at all, but is just a stalling tactic from Hard Brexit maniacs to try and force a "no deal" exit. But what am I thinking. That couldn't possibly be true.

[Beren]

I'm amazed at the extent of the opposition to the "backstop".

I'm amazed at the extent of the opposition to the Customs Union.

Also: “We Have Standards Here” Satan Distances Himself From Brexiteers

[Ter]

I'm amazed at the extent of the opposition to the Customs Union.

Doesn't the customs union include free movement of people (I might be mistaken) ?
Because there are another 450,000 Polish, Bulgarian and Romanian brick layers, truck drivers and plumbers waiting to come over. And Hungarian dentists.

[JohnRawls]

Doesn't the customs union include free movement of people (I might be mistaken) ?
Because there are another 450,000 Polish, Bulgarian and Romanian brick layers, truck drivers and plumbers waiting to come over. And Hungarian dentists.

Customs union doesn't include free movement. The single market does. But countries often join the Schengen and Customs union to have both.

Customs union as the name says, means that the UK will have to rubber stamp all of our regulations without an exception if they want to be part of it. So the so called "Trade Deals" won't be possible to do. Since the main problem in those trade deals are actually not tariffs. Europe wanted to scrap all Tariffs with the US but they couldn't get an agreement regarding regulations.

Customs union provides check-free travel for trade.(well almost) Customs union doesn't rule out tariffs also. There can be tariffs in the Customs Union just the regulations become the same.

[Ter]

I’m loving the BBC’s documentary series Why Voting Brexit Is The Best Thing We Ever Did.
It’s really called Inside Europe: 10 Years of Turmoil but my title’s better and truer.
As I mentioned last week, never have I seen a documentary so utterly damning of the EU project, the ruthless technocrats who run it and the complicit politicians who keep their reluctant citizens enslaved within it. Yet amazingly, it was made with these people’s full consent.

No one tricked Donald Tusk, Nicholas Sarkozy, Timothy Geithner, George Osborne, Manuel Barroso, and co into sitting down in front of a camera and revealing how self-serving and arrogant they are, how utterly contemptuous of the ordinary people they are supposed to serve. If the European Union is a conspiracy against democracy — and it is — it’s a conspiracy in plain sight in which most of the key players are more than happy to boast about their role in it.

This week’s episode focused on the brief attempt in 2010 by plucky little Greece to stand up to the EU monolith and defend its people, its traditions, and its sovereignty.

Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the radical left Syriza party, had, you’ll recall, been elected on a wave of popular enthusiasm to tell the EU exactly where it could stick its austerity plan.

Greece was withering and dying. One-third of its population was living in poverty. Many of its public employees had not been paid for months. Hospitals were running out of supplies. There was rioting in the streets.

Sure, Greece had invited some of this with its profligacy and its grotesquely bloated public sector and its ludicrously unaffordable pensions. Yes, it’s true that in a less corrupt world, Goldman Sachs would never have been able to cook the books in order to ease Greece into membership of the EU when it never should have qualified. But what the EU did to Greece was far, far worse than anything that might have happened had Greece kept its independence.

We learned from Yanis Varoufakis, the Marxist academic who became Greece’s Finance Minister that as part of its austerity plan, the EU demanded that Greece hike the VAT on its island hotels to 24 percent. Self-evidently this could only harm an economy dependent on tourism — especially when just across the water, Turkish hotels were VAT rated at just seven percent.

The EU’s price for bailing out Greece’s bankrupt economy, in other words, was a Carthaginian peace. Greece was to be crushed so utterly that no matter what it did to rejuvenate its economy, no matter how much it cut spending, it could simply never recover. It would languish in perpetuity as the EU’s whipped slave — an example to all the other southern economies (Spain and Italy especially) as to what happens when you are foolish enough to defy Massa.

Not unreasonably, the Greek people objected somewhat to this weird arrangement into which they’d been dragged by Tsipras’s socialist predecessor George Papandreou. They wanted out.

I don’t normally root for governments led by Marxist student types. But on this occasion it was definitely: “Go, Reds! Go!”

Instead — just like Warsaw ’44, Hungary ’56, and Tiananmen Square ’89 — the uprising was mercilessly crushed.

Sure the EU doesn’t dirty its manicured fingers with actual killing — no one wants blood on their Brioni suits — but what its commissars did to Greece was all too redolent of the way ruthless powers such as Rome or Nazi Germany treat conquered states.

Greece was forced to sell its government assets. There was talk at one point that it might even be forced to sell the Parthenon — a particularly cruel twist of the knife.

It had had its chance to escape — but Tsipras lost his nerve and the country reluctantly acceded. The threat of being driven out of the EU and the Eurozone and becoming what Tsipras called a “failed state” was just too scary for a struggling economy of 9 million people.

Somewhere in a parallel universe, I’m writing a piece about the economic miracle of post 2010 Greece; about how, after taking a massive haircut when it crashed out of the Euro and restored the drachma, and after considerable chaos, Greece was now experiencing an extraordinary tourist and export boom — the result of its cheap currency. Yes, Greece had suffered. But the cradle of democracy had got its pride back.

Not in this world, unfortunately.

Don’t let’s be Greece. Don’t let us ever, ever forget what kind of people we are dealing with here. They’re the kind of people who, when the head of the International Monetary Fund threatens to overturn their plans the man gets conveniently arrested under threat of sexual assault charges; the kind of people who chuckle, self-approvingly, at how they put a sovereign nation in its place by reducing it to penury and satrapy.

These people are the Mob. Never get involved with the Mob. And if you’re foolish enough to do so, get out as fast as you can.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/0 ... olved-mob/

When the problems in Greece occurred, I thought they would not give in to Brussels. Yet to my surprise they did.

[Potemkin]

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/02/05/eu-is-mob-never-get-involved-mob/

When the problems in Greece occurred, I thought they would not give in to Brussels. Yet to my surprise they did.

I have to confess, I was disappointed by that as well. I think part of the problem was that Greece has always thought of itself as the heart and soul of Europe, as the founder of European culture. Which it was, two and a half thousand years ago. Now, it's just a peripheral satrapy of the EU. But, because of that heritage and that self-image, the Greek people couldn't bear to crash out of the EU. That, and I think they just lost their nerve.

[noemon]

Breitbart's nonsense again to twist a wonderful documentary by ranting about Greece instead of actually saying anything about the documentary.

That, and I think they just lost their nerve.

As I told you numerous times back then, Tsipras and SYRIZA did not have the democratic mandate to leave the eurozone. So this entire point is moot. I should also remind you that for Tsipras to flinch, the Eurogroup ordered the ECB to shut down all the Greek banks!

Which it was, two and a half thousand years ago.

Greece has been the heart and soul of Europe all through the middle-ages, it's more like for the past two and a half thousand years and today she seems to be more at the heart of Europe than Britain but that is all the by and by. The only relevant fact to take here is that the author of the article is of the ideology that everything that happened to Greece was good and necessary(privatisations, reduction of government and the public sector, fiscal surplus, reduction of imports, rise of exports, etcetera), he is a far-right neoliberal who hates even the mild centre-left and who apparently is only using Greece to attack something he hates even more and that is the EU. Such hypocrites are totally worthless because there is no compass. Greece is currently growing at around 2.5% a year, unemployment has gone down from 28% to 15% it is constantly falling and she has taken a leadership role in several areas(Balkans, East Med, EU military, Immigration) in Europe. Stuff that laymen will only come to realise at least a decade later. The North Macedonia deal alone has immense consequences for Greece and Greek business who have been quietly buying Balkan telecoms, banks, construction companies, mines for decades in anticipation of the Balkans joining the EU and increasing the value of these investments. Not to mention that Greek is the second language of choice for most Balkan people, preferring to learn Greek over English or German!!! I highly doubt you will find a "peripheral satrapy" anywhere in the planet boasting its own cultural and economic periphery, especially one the size and supposed irrelevance of Greece. If you think about this carefully you will come to several realisations for which pundits and yourself have been mistaken about Greece. Greece is the only little country that plays ball with the big boys in several areas(from the military all the way down to culture) and hence the extreme vilification as larger countries cannot fathom how such as thing can even be possible. Greece is not seen as an irrelevant country by the Germans, Brits and Americans, but as a direct competitor in an area that is still ripe for economic and cultural colonisation and hence the insults as well as the effort to put her down, stall her and retard her expansion. Where you see Greek surrender, I see German capitulation to Greek interests & plans in the forthcoming Balkan and East-Med gold-rush. The author is also greatly underestimating Greek bureaucracy which is the ultimate Greek protectionist barrier impossible to shake and untouchable by EU treaties and economics. Greece "sold" her assets indeed but she only sold what she wanted to whom she wanted and from all the assets being sold, not even 2% has actually been sold. Have you not ever wondered Potemkin how come Greece receives more hate and bad press than countries that are currently occupying, ethnic-cleansing, murdering & starving foreign countries & populations? You 're a smart guy, I thought you would have figured it out by now.

Lastly when Greece was literally attacked by the Anglo financial institutions back in 2009, the countries and people that first ridiculed Greece and projected her with all these vile accusations were the British and the Americans. The Germans only got on the blame game later after Papandreou started talking about eurobonds(hubris for the Germans) and the radical change in Europe that he envisioned(after he was gone, not a single EU politician has spoken about eurobonds again) with Varoufakis back then as his advisor before he went onto politics with SYRIZA. If you recall at the time I was quite active in Greece with the same party contesting the Athenian elections under their banner while they were in government without coalition partners.

[Rich]

The hypocrisy of the Brexiteers knows no bounds. Greece engaged in profligate spending way, way beyond anything the EU has done. Many of the original Brexiteers were fanbois of Thatcherite monetarism. Thatcher it should be remembered started her premiership by a huge tax give away and unleashing free collective bargaining after the wage restraint of the previous Labour administration. This fuelled Britain's second worst period of inflation. Relying solely on monetary policy to restrain inflation led to an unnecessarily severe and unnecessarily damaging recession.

Afterwards both right and left have sought to portray this all as some sort of genius plan to get rid of British industry. Evil genius or good genius depending on your take. It wasn't. In fact Thatcher spent considerable money, energy and diplomacy in trying to save British industry. People find the idea of evil deeply comforting. People much prefer to believe their lives have been wrecked by hateful malevolent evil, rather than incompetence and indifference.

The Greek government's problem was that they didn't just want to renege on their past debts, but they wanted to continue to borrow for current spending. If Greece had, had its own currency, massive cuts in living standards would still have occurred, but they would have been implemented through inflation and a falling exchange rate. Living standards would still have fallen but they could have potentially fallen without the deflationary squeeze.

[Beren]

Donald Trump is being urged to play hardball with the UK when it negotiates a trade deal with the US after leaving the EU, Huffington Post reports.

It says the US Department of Trade asked industry what the president should extract from post-Brexit Britain and the answers from lobbyists for big firms included:

• Changing how NHS chiefs buy drugs to suit big US pharmaceutical companies.
• Britain scrapping its safety-first approach to safety and food standards.
• Law changes that would allow foreign companies to sue the British state.
• Removing protections for traditional British products.

Rule the waves and waive the rules, huh?

Special Relationship at its highest.

Also:

Japan and South Korea, like the US - see 11.22am post - are hoping to extract better trade terms from the UK post-Brexit according to the FT and its chief political correspondent.

It will be a gangbang.

[ingliz]

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s message for the Common People.

[youtube]V3TT1VE8Jq0[/youtube]

[Beren]

As to the gangbang, I wonder if China and India are getting ready too.

China: 'Don worry, Britain, Chinese penis won't hurt!'

India: 'Don't be shy, pretty one, we organise the party because we're experts on such parties. Nothing wrong can happen, USA will be there too. Right, USA?'

USA: 'Sure, India, pretty Britain can always rely on us.'

*an elephant trumpets in the background while China's assuring everyone they haven't forgot about the pipe and the opium*

[Beren]

Sumatran tiger killed by potential mate on first meeting in London zoo

I'd say it's a bad omen for Britain's future if I were an augur.

[B0ycey]

Well Tusk was correct. There is a special place in Hell for "No Plan" Brexiteers. The backbenches of the right wing of Parliament. They are no use to anyone.

Anyway May is looking for more time to get a deal with Brussels. Perhaps she shouldn't have wasted time in delaying the Brexit vote and giving everyone Christmas off then. Although she can have as much time as she likes if she agrees to Kyle and Wilsons proposal. Perhaps the UKs only hope since the Brexit whores rejected Coopers plan.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/09/back-theresa-may-brexit-deal-then-hold-peoples-vote-backbencher-plan

If Westminster want to get something past Parliament this is a great offer from Labour - which Corbyn should get behind. Either we stay in the EU or we give May her 'precious' Brexit plan.

Let the public decide our future with Europe and it is time to take the cliff edge off the table. If no one wants "No Deal" except the minions of Hell, why does it still exist in the realms of Westminster as an option?

[Ter]

Let the public decide our future with Europe

They did, and they decided to leave the EU, remember ?
As with every divorce, things have gone too long and too far to change course now and kiss and make up.
The damage is done.
I wish it was 1 April already, then the whining could stop.

[B0ycey]

They did, and they decided to leave the EU, remember ?

They voted to leave but not how remember.

There was no manifesto. Would the Brexiteers accept "Brexit in name only"? Currently such a choice is just as legitimate as "No Deal" - in fact more so as Parliament have voted for an amendment rejecting "No deal" FYI.

Although now we know the options on the table let the people decide our future with the EU. There is no such thing as a "democracy" having too 'little democracy'.

As with every divorce, things have gone too long and too far to change course now and kiss and make up.
The damage is done.
I wish it was 1 April already, then the whining could stop.

Who is whinging? It is May who is trying to get her deal past Parliament. Kyle and Wilson have given her another option. In fact, it is her only option.