Bozo And Nige

[Canary42]

Boris has rejected a pact with Nigel, so we all know what's going to happen next.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50264395

[jim360]

Maybe, but you keep paying no attention in the face of all the evidence in front of you.

Leave meant different things to different people. That much should be clear and obvious.

[naomi24]

//Leave meant different things to different people. //

Rubbish. Leave meant Leave. There is only one version of Leave - and that is Leave. Just stop with this disingenuous guff, Jim. It's old hat now.

[jim360]

It isn't my disingenuous guff though is it? It's Johnson's. It's May's. It's Dominic Cummings', Steve Baker's, Priti Patels... giants of the Leave campaign. And they all disagree with you. Leave means something different to them.

[naomi24]

Them too.

[Mozz71]

//I agree. The only hope for Brexit lies with the Tory party. Nigel should take a back seat this time.//

An ejector seat would be preferable.

[jim360]

And Khandro too, perhaps, Naomi? Or Jackdaw? Both of them apparently either disagree with you about what Leave is or, at the very least, are prepared to abandon it in order to get *some* form of Brexit.

[Mozz71]

I thought leave meant we leave the EU. The nitty gritty of whether there should be a deal or not was left ambiguous. We should leave, but we should leave in a manner that is most beneficial to us. Doesn't matter who else it benefits, we can only think of ourselves in this matter.

[naomi24]

//The only hope for Brexit lies with the Tory party. //

Except what's on offer isn't Brexit. It's a charade. In one way or another - or more - this country will remain bound to the EU.

[naomi24]

It's called capitulation, Jim. Look it up.

[anotheoldgit]

Boris is making a big mistake why is he prepared to carry that deal around on his shoulders and risk coming out of the election with yet another minority government, get rid of it and join up with Nigel together they can beat Labour and those fringe partys and get us out of Europe.

[Jackdaw33]

Ideal scenario:

Boris gets a working majority, puts his deal before the House. It is rejected. No more negotiations, out we go with no deal.

[naomi24]

And there's Jim thinking you voted Leave but thought it meant something else, Jackdaw. :o)

[jim360]

If Johnson goes ahead and puts out a manifesto that is based on pushing through his deal quickly, and then deliberately pulls it having used that manifesto to secure an election, there would be no great con pulled on the British in history.

JD's ideal scenario is a fantasy. The other simple truth is that No Deal is, and always has been, nothing more than a negotiating tactic, be it an attempt to "threaten" the EU in order to get something seen as more preferable, or an attempt to con the electorate in order to secure their backing at the ballot box. Farage will not be Prime Minister come 13th December, but if he were he still would realise quickly how empty that promise is, even as Johnson has.

[naomi24]

:o)

[New Judge]

The problem is, Jim, that all the alternative versions of "Leaving" which you mention are nothing of the sort. They are alternative versions of remaining. The only substantial contribution to leaving they make is to see the UK's name crossed off the list of members.

The UK should have left the EU in June 2018, having given the required two years' notice. Those two years should have been used to ensure life goes on without threats of blockades at ports and people dying in the gutter through lack of medicine or avocadoes. Then negotiations could have begun on a sensible trade deal to both sides' advantage. It would have concentrated minds.

Instead a year was wasted whilst the EU decided the order the discussions would take and how much the UK would have to pay to ensure we were not caused too much trouble. The die was cast and it gave Parliamentarians ample opportunity to criticise the negotiations and anything that came out of them.

[Khandro]

As I understand the 'deal', only a mechanism for calculating the financial settlement — money the UK owes the EU to settle its obligations has been agreed & no figure is mentioned, estimates seem to vary & depend on which side they come from.
Farage seems to think the UK can simply walk away & rat on its obligations, he appears to be on a permanent war footing, naively indifferent to future UK - EU relations & he won't be getting my vote.

[dannyk13]

One of the reasons that Boris won't agree to an alliance is that he thinks the Brexit Party will struggle for votes in the North.

[Spicerack]

I would have thought the complete opposite is true, danny.

[dannyk13]

SR, dunno, but Boris must have his reasons for thinking so.

[jim360]

The trouble with your post NJ is that it is surely a political judgement, rather than a statement of absolute fact. But therein lies my point. Never mind that any method of leaving the EU would also have to face the reality that, as our nearest neighbours and largest trading partners, it will always be impractical to leave the EU on anything other than close terms, or at least only in a smooth rather than a sharp transition.

What we're seeing instead is some sort of quasi-religious obsession with a "pure" form of Brexit, one in which increasingly even other Leave voters or leave-supporting politicians are dismissed as unfaithful to the cause, or perhaps even as false prophets. No doubt partly this is because it suits Farage's and Johnson's political interests to be seen in competition with each other -- but the only loser here is the UK public. And the chief cause of this is the mistake of presenting Remain or Leave as binary and entirely open choices with room for interpretation.

We see Khandro, for example, arguing that Farage has lost any sense of pragmatism, while on the other hand it's clear that others here think he is still the only one speaking any sort of truth about Brexit. If there is scope for disagreement among some of the most passionate and articulate Leave supporters on AB, how much more so in the rest of the country. Yet this is what we have constantly been told does not exist; that the Leave voters were of one voice. Manifestly, they are not.

This isn't on its own a reason to stop Brexit altogether. Presumably at the heart of this disagreement on AB, there is still consensus among Leave supporters here that we should still leave *somehow*. But as long as there is disagreement as to *how*, there is at least some sense in pausing and working out amongst ourselves what the answer to that question is.