Makes you wonder how the world would have gone had the tories ever had a leader in the last three decades who would have just kicked out the professional moaners who hate Europe, Major’s ‘Bastards’. Perhaps an LBJ or Bismarck. “Enough is enough, start your own party.”
UKIP would have started a lot earlier, and mixed with some National Fronters and BNPers ( which is profoundly ironic since their previous icon ( along with Enoch and the Great Loon herself [ who both loathed each other ] ) the ex-Labour MP Oswald Mosley, devoted the last decades of his life to European Union.
One wonders how much May’s weakness is a self-fulfilling prophesy?
I’m thinking that she, and much of the thinking Tory factions, recognize that Brexit is a mistake. So they have decided that they will waffle and hem and haw and do a craptacular job throughout the lead-up to it in hopes that a groundswell of discontent will rise up to solve the problem for them by somehow rescinding the decision. The High Court’s decision that Parliament must vote on the final outcome was/is the slender reed they’re hoping a sabotaged Brexit will founder against.
As well, given Europe’s love of very slow-moving fudge, the Continentals will be glad to play along in this strategy of “delay until moribund.” Not because they want to help the UK, but because they want to manage their own internal issues and this helps them do so.
The obvious problem with such an approach (hard to dignify it with the word “strategy”) is that Brexit, like the Japanese deflation, has the potential to become a lost decade or three, both politically and economically. The whole fetid mess slowly simmers & stirs while everyone involved holds their nose and tries to read the tea leaves to divine a propitious moment to upend the pot for personal gain. Meanwhile the public simmers in anger and resignation and economic malaise.
Just as with the US’ current Trump fiasco, one hopes some major exogenous shock doesn’t come along to really bowl things over.
I think the governing parties of the US and UK are in a competition to see who can mismanage their country more.
When Cromwell was offered the throne by fawning toadies he was visited by some of his fellow generals who tersely informed him they, and the Army, wouldn’t wear it.
Madame May has just been given an ultimatum by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson demanding a harsher, faster, Brexit ; 'Stupider Still, And Stupider: Ever Stupider Yet.
Somehow the two least impressive hard men in history.
It’s not terribly encouraging when you’re looking at Spain, in the midst of a cold revolution, and think that they’re not being too unreasonable in their approach compared to the English-speaking world.
I genuinely don’t understand why Michael Gove has ever been given any sort of responsibility for anything. The man is a buffoon of the lowest order.
And Gove is supposed to be one of the brighter stars of the Conservative Party.
Really, the Brexit issue makes the Tories go a completely doolally, They measure each other against their commitment to Brexit while knowing that the grand ideal of sovereignty that they hold so dear comes at a great cost. Abruptly readjusting the UK economy and the international trading relationships that have been in place for forty years is a huge challenge that will take ten years or more to complete.
Theresa May got to where she is today by being equivocal and calculating, but she screwed up the last elections and made the party weaker. Just as Camerons’ gamble failed with the Brexit vote, so May went to the people for a vote of confidence to see Brexit through and actually lost seats. The next Tory leader faces the prospect of an even greater failure that is looming with Brexit and I am not sure anyone of them really want the job. The most ambitious and calculating would bide their time and let someone else pick up this poisoned chalice.
So it is going to be a joke candidate. The Tories have a few of those.
This reads a bit like the plot of The Producers AKA Springtime for Hitler.
As many of us have said, the Tories recognize Brexit is a loser and whoever is PM will be tarred with it. Labour is similarly aware of the poisoned chalice.
So what happens when both major parties want to win, but not really, and their chosen candidates for PM are ambivalent mediocrities?
A lot of crazy could rise to the fore when the major parties mostly abandon the field.
Fundamentally, the problem is that nobody in Britain actually wants Brexit. What they (at least, a majority of them) want is to have none of the obligations of EU membership, but all of the benefits. Which, of course, Germany and the rest of the EU has no intent of giving them, because they’re not boneheadedly stupid. Since what the voters want is impossible, no government or PM is going to be able to give it to them, and so the voters are going to be angry at whatever government and PM are in power.
Many of us hoped for great things when the American President clasped Farage to his bosom, and it was confidently expected that Nigel would become Trumpie’s Vicar to The British Isles. *
Forward the Faragian Falange !
- Obviously mostly by the vulgarer of the two.
Apropos of nothing, I once knew someone related to both William Jennings Bryan and Sir Francis Bryan, whose full superlative was 'The Vicar of Hell’.
Any fule kno that vicars are rarely taken seriously, or even much noticed, in this country. It would have been a one-man vicars and tarts party.
It’s worth bearing in mind the EU doesn’t want this either. It’s difficult to pretend you’re going along with a divorce because you have to - democracy ‘spoke’, while actually throwing as many spoilers in the way as possible. The chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier is doing that very well.
Fwiw, I still think it’s all a three-ring circus and when push comes to shove, Angela Merkel will offer enough on border control - and that’s all it will take.
I suspect Teresa May is rather banking on that, as well.