Brexit thoughts Tuesday morning - today is really the crunch day - we think

Allison Pearson@allisonpearson

So the LibDems will support a second referendum. But, as @joswinson said on live TV, she would not accept the result of a 2nd referendum if it was Leave again.
Roll up, ladies and gentlemen, to have your vote disregarded a second time!
Who could resist?

5,315

6:28 PM - Oct 21, 2019

For the DUP, the separate treatment of Northern Ireland is unacceptable. Yet when Theresa May went to the extreme length of keeping the whole of the UK in a closer arrangement with the EU to save them from this outcome, they were emphatically against that as well. They are also against leaving without a deal. Did it not occur to them when they campaigned for Brexit that it would be very likely to entail one of the three outcomes they are now against?

William Hague, yesterday in the Telegraph



For the Labour Party, the ability of Boris to reach a deal is very bad news indeed. They refused to allow a general election earlier – which could have been held by now – on the assumption that the Prime Minister could not negotiate an agreement. Jeremy Corbyn has always wanted the Conservatives to do Brexit, but do it badly, and is now faced with the possibility of them pulling off an orderly process. By contrast, much of his front bench has never wanted to accept the referendum result at all. This leaves them with only one thing they can agree on – wreck the deal.

Ibid.


Brexit and circuses: The Institute for Government’s Joe Owen, meanwhile, notes the Brexit bill would have less time in the Commons than the Wild Animals in Circuses Act. That act, one exasperated Labour official points out, directly affected only 19 wild animals left in circuses in the U.K. — among them a zebra, two camels, three racoons and a zebu. All of whom now have the honor of attracting more House of Commons’ debate than *checks notes* … the historic legal treaty securing the U.K.’s departure from the European Union.
What’s a zebu? Look it up.

Charlie Cooper, Politico 

London Playbook


Parliament has done its worst – behaved more badly than anyone in his right mind might have expected – but it has also done him a huge political favour. Indeed, he would be justified in thinking that all his birthdays had come at once. Sir Oliver and his allies on both sides of the House have given this Tory Prime Minister, presently in charge of a paralysed, minority government, the most stupendous election campaign theme of all time.

Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph

Parliament and the Supreme Court have both acted unconstitutionally, not to defend the will of the people, but to oppose it.

Robert Tombs in the Telegraph yesterday

On Nov 5 1605, some tried literally to blow up the whole political system in the hope of a religious counter-revolution. In the Forties and Fifties, some worked for the Soviet Union in the hope of a socialist utopia. But never before have hundreds of MPs worked to undermine the edifice of democratic government. Our long membership of the EEC and then the EU has created something like a state within the state. We must look at Ireland, France, Denmark, Italy and Greece, where democratic votes were in one way or another neutered by a Europe-wide political establishment, to understand what is happening. In all these countries, a substantial section of the political, administrative, business and intellectual classes have been absorbed into a supranational system, which treats national democracy as a problem to be circumvented. Absorbed ideologically, absorbed in their material interests, their careers, and even their social lives.

Ibid.