Maybe if she promised to ritually disembowel Boris Johnson with one of his own bikes?
So what’s happening now in Scotland? I understand the Scots are pretty passionate in their desire to stay in the EU; is Nicola Sturgeon still pushing for a second independence referendum? I recall that Whitehall promised to honor the result of the first referendum; is there any reason to believe that they would similarly honor a second? Or that, even if Scotland achieved some sort of independence, the EU would grant them entry; I recall the Spanish objecting to Scottish independence in the fear that it would encourage their own Catalan separatists. Wouldn’t that objection still hold?
And wouldn’t an independent, EU-member Scotland would create the same hard-border issues that Ireland and the UK are trying to avoid in Ulster? So it seems to this non-Brit.
Good news for once! The House of Commons has just passed the Cooper bill at the second reading by 315 to 310. The bill will now go forward in the process of becoming law.
The bill says that if no withdrawal deal has been passed by April 12, Theresa May MUST ask the EU for an extension (and it will be a long extension) rather than leaving with no deal.
This will rule out a no-deal Brexit once and for all.
Update: The Cooper bill will now go immediately to the Committee stage, with the third reading vote at 10pm tonight UK time.
If it passes, it then goes to the House of Lords (where it should pass easily) and then gets the Queen’s assent and becomes law.
Then no-deal is almost certainly dead, since the EU doesn’t want it either.
The EU has already said it is willing to grant a long extension if the UK will do something useful with it. If nothing has been agreed by April 12, then there will almost certainly be a general election, which will be ample excuse for an extension.
My thought, too - I understood that Brussels would only agree to an extension if there was a WD, or at least a very strong possibility of one, at the end of it. And they’d have to rejigger the European Parliament election again, to give Britain back its seats.
Nope. An independent Scotland would want a proper border with England, and vice versa. And the border region is a natural border - there’s only about a dozen roads cross it in total, and only say four or five would need to be open to commercial traffic (and so need commercial customs infrastructure).
Lots of countries have land borders with the EU, they are not a problem in general.
The border in Ireland is specifically problematic. The majority of people living close to the border don’t want it to exist. And it is drawn arbitrarily through the middle of a heavily populated and inhabited region. There’s something like three hundred roads across the border, and some very odd semi-enclaves.
Aren’t Catholics and Protestants roughly equal in number in NI? Since unification is supposed to potentially come down to a popular vote, doesn’t that make unification a constant risk for NI Protestants?
Didn’t Catholics in NI used to have much less power because of gerrymandering and other underhanded tricks to undermine Catholic votes and political power in NI? Is that still going on?
How common is it for NIPs or the DUP to think like Ian Paisley? That guy struck me as a mix between Fred Phelps, a Grand Dragon and snake-handling preacher/militia leader. Him comparing Catholicism to the prostitute that rides the Beast in the Book of Revelations doesn’t seem to be a point of style; It seems to be how he actually perceived the situation, as if NI was the Shire and the pope was Sauron (and the brutish green orcs as the Irish, of course).
How do you think Unionists would start such a war? What would their strategy and targets be?
Oh, come on. It’s not like hard Brexit was some ace you had up your sleeve. Most people didn’t want it so it’s hardly crippling to say “we want to avoid that”. At the end of the day, you can still hard Brexit after the next extension. Not like this can get any more ridiculous.
Why would a general election solve anything? Realistically the possibilities are that the Tories (perhaps in conjunction with the DUP) will win by a small margin or a Labour coalition will win by a small margin. But the Tories are split between May’s deal and hard Brexiters while Labour is split between soft Brexiters and Remainers. So I don’t see the general election giving any one of Remain, soft Brexit, May’s deal or No Deal a majority of parliament.
Note that you need 60% of MPs to call a general election. I’m not sure Tories will see the benefit of a new election when it means each will personally risk losing his seat.
Yeah, I take your point. I watched the video in that BBC article on the backstop, about the road that crossed and recrossed the Irish border four times in thirty or so miles. Seems like a hard Irish border would mean, among other things, a sizable infrastructure project to build customs and immigration posts.
But – and correct me if I misremember – the independence the Scots were mooting back in 2014 still called for things like common defense and foreign policy, a currency and postal union and such, with the UK. Would I be wrong in thinking Edinburgh would want the same frictionless trade with what I assume is Scotland’s biggest trading partner? Or would they accept WTO rules at the Tweed as the price to pay for staying in the EU?
Please tell me where I’ve extolled a no-deal Brexit; the most I’ve done is point out that it’s better than a bad deal Brexit. Now the UK can be forced into a bad deal Brexit.
Unless you’re Sheriff Bart negotiating with a gun to your head doesn’t work. No deal was always much worse for us than the EU. Hopefully more people will now wake up to the fact that revoking A50 is the only sane option.
No, a “No-Deal” brexit is the worst option. Any achievable deal would be less damaging. The problem is that there is no deal that’s better than us remaining in the EU.