That’s the more realistic outcome given your two options.
The question is: who are people in the UK going to blame for this? Will the spin that all of the immediate mess is the EU’s fault work? (Potential scale of the mess: from a small traffic jam at customs along the channel coast to a massive resurgence of Irish terrorism. Anything goes.) Also, will it for the long-term mess?
Above, we’ve seen @angusm and @anon73430903 mention lampposts and guillotines, while @tlwest didn’t have any of this.
Seriously, short of pitchforks, what is going to happen in the UK after a hard brexit is an open and quite disconcerting question to me. I don’t think this country has the ability for a revolution, and I wouldn’t think this, of all times, would be the right time for one. But heavens know, by Jupiter and Vulcan: I am out of my wits. I have no idea at all any more.
Well it seems like your current leadership is fucked at the polls one way or another. No form of Brexit is going to please the leave camp, as everyone seems to have their preferred Brexit. But calling it off with piss of the entire bloc. Hard Brexit leaves nothing to placate remainers, who seem to now be a slight majority. And may have always been a slight majority, and were pretty assertively the majority in NI and Scotland. The harder the Brexit the more likely both those countries leave, which will piss off everyone left.
Faced with that it’s really disturbing that those in power, including the opposition, seem only dedicated to triangulation. Dicking around to minimize fallout in the elections. That’s why it’s so frustrating there doesn’t seem to be anyone with the pull to do the smart thing.
In the US we have that whole rise of a new generation of politicians, potentially ascendant progressive movement, demographic change thing to peg our hopes on. Fucked as it it over here. But I don’t follow UK politics close enough to know if you guys have another set of people to swap in there. Does your system even make room for an equivalent to primary challenges and what have? Get some people in there that can at least mitigate?
From the outside it looks like even apart from the damage this will cause it you’re headed for a rotating cast of failed governments and slightly different groups of the current idiots jockeying for position.
At this point I’d put the chance of a real disaster with thousands of lives lost (not to mention irreparable social, political, and economic damage) at about 1-2%. (I’d say the chance of a 2008 economic recession level disaster lasting years at about 50%.)
And to me, that chance seems about an order of magnitude too high to ethically gamble with. I simply do not understand the lack of compromise. I’m at Remainer, but I’d be voting for May’s plan if I felt it guaranteed stability in the face of this chance.
(I’m a non-Briton, so obviously my opinion is irrelevant - it’s the inability to compromise to any choice in the face of a significant chance of disaster that stuns me.)
At this point they might do well to consider making Bercow temporary Lord Protector of the UK. He’s the only leader in that chamber during this situation who’s come close to being a grown-up.
Oh FFS, another version of the Dochstoßlegende in the making?
Did NOONE pay attention in history classes? “Disenfranchised” my arse. One could call that person a self-important hedgefund-owning racist-supporting weasle, but that would be unfair to all weasles.
What’s the victorian villain complaining about? The ERG are comparable to the FN in that they are a racist white extremist group. They are just not an independent political party but rather a party in a party.
Edit “the DUP are obviously the custodians of the Union”. WTF?
Ow glob, this is all so awful. Tories with sympathies for neo-fascists on the one side, a Labour leader who fails to address anti-Semitism on the other side, and both populists of different kind. The middle ground burned, and no true sign of even the ability compromise.
A first step to a Very British Coup?
A last step to domestic politics disaster, if someone asks for my opinion.
Which no-one should do. What do I know. I’m on the continent, and just happened to like tea, scones and clotted cream, etc. And a living democracy.
