Calm down, dear, it's just an EU negotiation

Nobody, as all my regulars here 'do know', is quicker to bend the intellectual knee before the wisdom of an editor of The Spectator than me.  This is partly because I have just enough self-knowledge to sense the limits of my education and intelligence but also because for the past nearly 40 years I have rarely (not 'never', just 'rarely') read anything stupid or malignant from those in command of the best weekly magazine in the world.  However, today, the current editor, Mr. Fraser Nelson, a man whose views I normally admire and respect, gives me pause.

In an article at The Coffee House, he names the British bureaucrat who first suggested to 'St. Theresa' that she should, and I paraphrase his words, 'use EU residents in the UK as bargaining chips in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations'.  The official concerned, by the way, is Sir Ivan Rogers, currently the British ambassador to the EU and presumably a man who knows the highways, byways and even the dark alleys of Brussels/Berlin politics.  Even so, Mr. Fraser is affronted at the mere thought of such an action which he denounces as "bizarre and repugnant" and even worse, frightfully un-British!

This is not the first time that Mr. Nelson has re-acted sharply to this notion perhaps, and here I am guessing, because his own wife is Swedish and as a London metropolitan he probably socialises and works with a large number of EU citizens living in this country.  Of course, I cannot match his sources of information but as I understand the matter, from the outside looking in, Mrs. May is simply refusing to rule out ahead of negotiations the possibility that the UK might expel European foreigners, particularly if the Brussels 'thugocracy' take steps to penalise British people living in Europe.  Of course, I am sure that such a thought has never entered the head of, say, 'Junck the Drunk' or 'Presidente Pipsqueak' of France but it would strike me as needlessly chivalrous, in fact downright dumb, to surrender our trump card before they slap down their ace.

Unless the Europeans are determined to toss their toys out of the pram by threatening retribution on British people 'just over there' then there is not a snowball's chance in hell of us taking action against their citizens legally resident here.  Mr. Nelson, a Jock of the first order, should take a wee slug of his nation's favourite tipple and calm down!

 

Comments

[TheBigHenry]

David,

"... downright dumb, to surrender our trump card before they slap down their ace."

You are, of course, cleverly alluding to The Donald's a priori refusal to take anything off the table, are you not?

[David Duff]

Alas, Henry, I am not sufficiently up on the, er, sayings of Mr. Trump to be able to allude to anything he might have said. I know, mea culpa and all that sort of thing!

[Loz]

Ivan Rogers is an idiot.

If he thinks that surrendering a few million young, hard-working, immigrants (including the long-legged, pert-breasted, razor-cheek-boned, inky-blinky-darlinkies) for a few million clapped-out, healthcare-dependant, dribbly-wrinklies is a bargaining position, then God help us.

Handing back said wrinklies for darlinkies is manna from heaven for the EU! Look at the Kaiserin, sucking up immigrants like there's no tomorrow to try to solve her and the EU's ageing population problem.

Expect the EU to say "We're sending your wrinklies home". What are we gonna do then? Send back all the immigrant NHS and care home workers we'll need to look after the wrinklies in retaliation? Who will fill the jobs of the returnees with unemployment at sub-5%?

As I've said before, Juncker, Merkel, et al are like seasoned Ostfront SS veterans when it comes to interest based negotiation. We've had 40 years of subcontracting that role to the EU, which followed 30 years (1945-75) of serial failure trying to do it ourselves. Our domestic political class are the barrel scrapings and unwilling conscripts (ex-remainers). May and her possie of serial underachievers and pressed men are going to be massacred.

And her attention to Ivan "the idiot" Rogers is the first crossfire into which May and her possie has walked.

SoD

[David Duff]

Somehow, I just knew that would draw some 'incoming' from you, SoD, but I forgive you for "the long-legged, pert-breasted, razor-cheek-boned, inky-blinky-darlinkies" which is pure poetry!

[Loz]

Quote
It is staggering,” said one top UK official. “They have not even got to base one in terms of knowledge.” Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform in London, says some “very senior” people in the UK government are deeply ignorant about the single market, and adds that only now are the Brexit-backers beginning to grasp the difficulty of what faces them. “I think that two months down the line the senior Brexiters are beginning to realise that the whole process is going to be a lot more complicated, time-consuming and boring than they had imagined before, when they had presented it all as black and white. They are beginning to realise that this will occupy most of the energies of government for the next five to 10 years.

“That does not mean that Brexit is not going to happen. Of course it is going to happen. But it is a massively complex and lengthy business.”
Unquote

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/20/tory-brexit-negotiators-unpromising-start

May and her three Brexiteers are dead men walking. The Tory party will shred itself over single market access and immigration in a way that makes labour's troubles today look like a storm in a teacup.

Corbyn will pick up the premiership at the next election, and land us on WTO terms and conditions with relish, so he can "Protect British workers from global neo-Liberalism".

With the closed border the IRA will kick off.

The Scots will likely leave, and the Union will disintegrate.

The remnants will degenerate into civil war.

Good call, Brexiteers.

SoD

[David Duff]

For God's sake, SoD, now you are reduced to quoting the 'Graun'! Look, there will be problems because there are always problems. In the first five years of my life the problem was German bombs and rockets raining down on Britain. We managed and subsequent problems never seemed quite as bad. 'Calm down, dear', it's only a Brexit!

[Whitewall]

SoD, civil war is needed from time to time. Like pruning run away plants. There can be more than one type of civil war.

[Loz]

As for the £350, well Christopher "the lady's not for turning, but I bloody well am" Booker now describes how it will cost us more to leave the EU, leaving bugger all for the NHS: -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/20/leaving-the-eu-could-cost-us-even-more-than-staying-in/

SoD

[Loz]

And on the subjects of the "family silver", that's the NHS, and Sir Ian "the idiot" Rogers and his daft tit-for-tat negotiating position on UK and EU migrants that he fails to understand is no negotiating position at all, even the Brexiteer muppets at the Express are trying to cloak their own panic by labelling the rather obvious news that 50,000 NHS doctors and nurses from the EU might not feel as welcome as they once were and go and get better jobs elsewhere as "Project Fear 2": -

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/702422/Theresa-May-give-out-50-000-passports-EU-doctors-save-NHS

Where will the replacements come to keep the NHS from collapsing straight away, let alone when the EU dumps our 2-3 million dribbly-wrinklies back in Dover?

And Sir Ian "the idiot" Rogers thinks the threat of expelling our incumbent EU immigrants is a strong negotiating position?

God help us.

SoD

[Loz]

Well this bit of blarney made me laugh and cheered me up, and a grain of truth in it, too: -

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/declan-lynch/may-is-heading-for-the-exit-from-brexit-34981939.html

SoD

[David Duff]

Well, SoD, the link to that story froze - well, it's 'Oirish', you know! - so I wasn't able to read it. However, I notice that in The Mail they are reporting that J. P. Morgan, the bank that forecast doom 'n' gloom after Brexit, has now changed what passes for its mind and says that that British markets are worth investing in!

[Loz]

Give the link a try again, it works ok for me.

Norman "on yer bike" Tebbit is waking up to smell the Trot coffee: -

"The purblind naivety of those in the Parliamentary Labour Party who put Corbyn's name on the ballot paper for the party leadership has opened the way for the hard Left of Militant and Trots who are now well set to seize control of the Labour Party. Their attacks on our democratic institutions will not be confined to Party games at Westminster. The wave of strikes on the railways are not directed so much at the shareholders, or for the benefit of the railwaymen, but at preventing tens of thousands of commuters from getting to work. The NHS strikes are not designed to improve pay and conditions of NHS workers but to  leave the sick and the injured untreated and in pain.

If the plan is carried through it will make the efforts of the local government workers union to bring down Labour's Jim Callaghan and Scargill's to bring down Thatcher look small beer. The strategy of Mr. Corbyn's  friends  is to convince the electors that no Conservative government would be allowed  to deliver the services on which they and their families depend.

Where and when, I wonder will the leaders of the democratic centre make their stand?  Or will they hide under the bed covers and re-read the grim prophecies of Orwell?"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/22/the-vast-forces-of-the-anti-brexit-elite-are-already-regrouping/

I wonder when he will realize what a grand mistake he made in supporting Brexit? By discarding the only vestige of the Thatcherism from Blighty's governance, that of the single market rules and regs that enforce competition and prohibit or constrain nationalisation and the state, he has unleashed the very forces of statism, public sectorism, monopoly, and socialism that he and Mrs T fought successfully to contain.

And even he can't seem to wait for Blighty's pols to get started with the "program": Another cabinet committee here ...

"My friends in the agricultural industry have also been much relieved by the Prime Minister's indication that as we approach the moment of Brexit there will be a study of how the existing EU subsidy will be replaced by a support scheme tailored to the needs of our industry and our countryside, (as Charles Moore suggested in the Telegraph on August 20), rather that those of the French. That sounds like a job for another cabinet committee."

... another comprehensive policy there ...

"I hope that we might also have a new comprehensive policy on energy."

... and another expansion there ...

"In this column a month ago I expressed my support (not least as a former grammar school boy myself) for Mrs May's sympathetic words on a possible expansion of those proven engines of social mobility. I hope that by now there is a group considering how that might best be achieved within a wider review of education policy. That might lead to  a new expansion of high grade technical schools to provide  the workforce skills needed in both industry and commerce, as Simon Heffer wrote in The Telegraph this weekend. There is much we could learn here from the Germans."

What a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions is about to befall dear old Blighty.

SoD

[Loz]

So if you thought May's possie, the three Brexiteer muppets, was a feckless, backstabbing, shambles then you ain't seen nothing yet - now meet the team! : -

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/department-for-brexit-theresa-may_uk_579f6339e4b0f42daa4ac9a6

Doesn't that sound like a recipe for disaster!

Maybe I should get in there and get some Microsoft SharePoint going for them! It's easy to thrive in a shambles, discord, and anarchy if you've got your hands on the IT and data. No buck ever sticks - it's always passed on!

And if it all gets cancelled, well even better: No come back on the mountainous pile of poo they'll without doubt instruct me to put together for them!

Be some great insider for D&N too ...

I honestly think we are about to witness the most spectacular clusterf*ck in the modern world's political, economic, and social history.

SoD

[Loz]

Another Brexit epic fail: -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/23/five-things-we-learned-from-the-renzi-hollande-merkel-summit/

"Britain has always blocked plans for a so-called ‘EU Army’, arguing that it would undermine Nato as the cornerstone of European defence and (we don’t say out loud) our influence in Washington and at the Nato conference table."

And now the EU is going to press ahead for one.

The one military-political strategic objective that Blighty has sought and fought for in the last 1500 years, specifically: No consolidated military and political force on the European continent (unless we're at its top table), has just been put beyond our reach and power to prevent.

What millions of British men and women gave their lives to prevent the Brexiteers have caused to happen.

And Vlad won't be too chuffed to hear this - so much for this "political genius", as the Ukippers like to call him! He thought Brexit would help him by fragmenting Europe. Now he's got the Kaiserin's Heer and Hollande's Grognards united, plus the US with one direct point of contact with them, to deal with!

And as for Blighty, when anything kicks off it'll be like the fans at a football match when the opposing team brings on an unheard of player: Announcer "And heeeeeere's Billy Britain!", Opposing fans "Who? Who? Who?"

SoD

[Loz]

Gadzooks, the Kaiserin's really going for it! : -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/23/germany-considers-plan-to-bring-back-conscription/

New chant on the terraces: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!"

The greatest own goal in the history of the great game - Brexit Britain 0, Fatherland 1.

SoD

[Loz]

And even the Speccie is pooping in its posh pants: -

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/08/its-time-to-defend-brexit/

"The Brexiteers won the war; but now they risk losing the peace".

"Don't panic Captain Mainwaring, don't panic!"

SoD