If this is fascism can the trains please run on time?

"If this is fascism can the trains please run on time?"

So says Juliet Samuel in the Daily Telegraph today.

It's not and they don't. Boris has been fly but done nothing dodgy.

Not setting a date for the conference recess was a masterstroke in lulling Boris's opponents into a  false sense of security though.

If only Boris and Cummings had been in charge 3 years ago, not Theresa May and Olly Robbins. 

I cannot see the House of Commons passing a bill through the House against the Government's wishes but if they did so, even if the House of Lords filibustered it out of time with David Owen and Michael Howard speaking for ten hours each, surely the Government would have to call an election. And in that election the Government and Nigel Farage would be obvious allies.


More likely is a vote of confidence, which I suspect would fail though some papers say it would pass with a majority of 30. It depends how many Tory MPs want to give up their seats and careers.

But most likely is that the House fails to do anything, as it has failed for so long to do anything.

Professor Vernon Bogdanor is right in his article in today's Guardian, except that the Fixed Term Parliaments Act would not have stopped Theresa May making her Withdrawal Agreement Bill a matter of confidence.

I quote from it.

“Some have compared the situation to 1628, when Charles I prorogued parliament before dispensing with its services entirely. But Charles I was not, unless the history books are grievously mistaken, faced with the problem of implementing the outcome of a referendum.”

And: 

“Looking at the sorry performance of the House of Commons elected in 2017, it is difficult to avoid remembering Winston Churchill’s condemnation of the parliaments of the 1930s as being “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent”. Parliament has shown itself not to be the solution to Brexit but the problem.”

This is an interesting alternative to the backstop.


Another alternative is the Canadian model. Is it too late for this?


It is too late for the Norway option which does not solve the Irish Question but would continue free movement of people. I had thought that was a temporary solution but it would destroy Boris and the Tory Party.


This brilliant piece by Alexander Pelling-Bruce is the best analysis of where we are that I have read.



A philosophical piece by Ed Conway in The Times explains how the internet and Artificial Intelligence mean supply chains start to shorten and the advantages of the single market (and free movement of unskilled workers) become less important.

"A few decades ago the main things companies wanted were precisely the things the EU offered: low barriers to trade in goods and harmonised product standards so something could be made in Warsaw and consumed anywhere in the continent. They wanted the removal of barriers to movement so a technician from Paris could mend a machine in Coventry. However, while EU membership may have made plenty of sense in the late 20th century, it is not altogether clear it is the best model for the 21st. Indeed, those massive supply chains that to some extent personify EU membership have started to shrink. According to research published this year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the proportion of global economic output reliant on trade has been in decline since 2007.
"There are plenty of explanations for this but one is that the business case for hiring low-wage factory workers in emerging economies is no longer so compelling. As robotics and artificial intelligence improve it is quite plausible that manufacturing that was “offshored” to low-wage economies will be “reshored”."