Weird, the power play of “if you do this for me, I will agree to end my impotent tenure” didn’t work?
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I always thought Boris Johnson wanted to deny votes to May’s plan to have May fail and then he’d make a run at PM/party leader.
If this doesn’t work she will then give Ireland back the six counties and still design!
Ian Blackford of the SNP has been openly saying on the Parliament floor that Scotland would leave the UK if they crash out of the EU. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a SNP member talk about that so bluntly at the House of Commons.
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Absolutely. From a strictly analytical standpoint, trying to engraft referenda into the British system was intrinsically destabilizing and likely to lead to a massive shitshow if it failed to affirm the government’s position. Britain spent five centuries making the House of Commons the sole source of political legitimacy in Britain. Deposing or beheading the odd king, inviting foreigners to invade to unseat another, shrinking the power of Lords down, year on year, into a mere harrumphing society. Five hundred years concentrating legitimacy into the House of Commons, making it the sole entity entitled to speak for the people. And then they throw a referendum into it, engraft a separate and independent source of legitimacy onto a system with no place for it and act surprised when destabilization and sheer multi-party fuckwittery ensues?
Few seem to escape Number 10 with their reputations intact these days, but David Cameron has got to be the most fatuous colossal political fuckwit who thinks he’s just extremely clever to be PM in decades. All he saw was a gimmick to tamp down muttering from the kind of right wing extremists conservatives seem not to be able to ignore in democracies anymore and lacked anything like the intellectual depth to grasp the vast potential for disaster of what he was doing.
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Would give this comment my designated quarterly ‘superlike’ if such a thing existed in the TPM software back end.
and @greylady - I can’t imagine what advantage it would be to the EU to refuse to be flexible. I can’t’ see what they’d lose by it.
Or cancelling Brexit, sitting down and being quiet for a while…
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Yeah, didn’t the last guy to suggest that have his head cut off or something? 
So, this just happened. All 8 indicative votes in the House of Commons, which would’ve been alternatives to Theresa May’s plan, have gone down to defeat. The closest ones were Margaret Beckett’s amendment to have a public vote to confirm any Brexit deal passed by parliament before its ratification (268-295); and Kenneth Clarke’s amendment to have a permanent and comprehensive UK-wide customs union with the EU” as part of a Brexit deal. That lost 264-272.
Basically, outside of our own clusterfk of having a Russian agent as the sitting POTUS and being protected by an entirely corrupted political party that is engaged in a cold civil war to nullify all acts of any Democrat in recorded history, this is one seriously bad clusterfk.
May’s plan doesn’t have the votes, but now she can make the argument that it’s my way or a no deal Brexit where the UK crashes out of the EU. Who knows what happens now??
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I have thought all along that if they Brexit it will be a crash Brexit.
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The citizens of the United Kingdom, by a fairly close margin, voted to eat shit. Since that time, they have been attempting to find a kind of shit or a way of preparing it that doesn’t taste foul, and failing.
This is because it is and remains shit.
Of course, at the time of the vote, they were told that it would taste like candy.
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And the real shame of it all is that the narrow minority who were skeptical enough to realize that no preparation would make a shit sandwich palatable (and hence voted, ‘Remain’) are going to have to eat the shit sandwich with the idiots.
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A lot of that same sandwich going around here in the colonies, don’t ya know?
I think the key will be the details in the proposals - the E.U. would welcome any trend towards undoing Brexit, and they would be receptive towards proposals that equally benefit both sides. But any proposals that benefit the U.K. at the expense of the E.U. would be viewed very skeptically. And the EU representatives are only human - BREXIT has left a bad taste in many people’s mouths and they may not be in the mood to help the U.K. out if there’s no clear benefit to themselves as well.