Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Andrea Doria begins to sink after a collision in the North Atlantic; An Air France Concorde crashes outside Paris; First ‘test-tube’ baby born; Golfer Ben Hogan dies; ‘A Chorus Line’ opens on Broadway
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.
After beingbuilt up for months, former special counsel Robert Mueller’s highly anticipated testimony Wednesday does not appear to be the turning point that will take Democrats — and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — down a path toward impeachment.
That doesn’t mean impeachment is off the table. House Democrats are now pivoting to their court cases in an effort to obtain the special counsel’s grand jury evidence and force Mueller’s key witnesses to testify, which they say will give them the information they need to make a decision on impeachment.
But Democrats ahead of the hearing had hoped that Mueller would bring his report to life — that even if he stayed within the confines of the report, he would help illustrate to the public the misconduct the investigation had documented. Instead, Mueller’s constant one-word responses and decision not to engage on a multitude of issues even within in the report prompted Trump and Republicans to declare victory Wednesday and call for Democrats to move on.
‘All Hong Kongers are scared’: protests to widen as rural residents fight back
Sleepy town of Yuen Long becomes battleground after suspected gangster attack on commuters
Yuen Long, a quiet residential area close to the Chinese border, has become the unlikely next battleground of Hong Kong’s protest movement.
Over the last seven weeks, demonstrators have planned rallies across the territory – in parks, along main roads, in the airport and outside government offices – calling for the withdrawal of an extradition bill and making other political demands. But Yuen Long, known as one of the more remote, isolated areas in the north-west, had never been on the agenda.
On Sunday that changed. Commuters returning from dinner, going to meet friends or some coming back from the pro-democracy rally in central Hong Kong, pulled into the mass transit station to find dozens of men in white T-shirts waiting for them. They were masked, armed with rattan rods and other weapons.
Inside the hunt for Iraq’s looted treasures
Decades of war and instability made Iraq a thief’s paradise. Richard Hall meets the archaeologists fighting to retrieve their country’s treasure
Deep in the back offices of Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad, at the end of a long corridor set away from the Babylonian obelisks and Assyrian winged bulls, an international treasure hunt is under way.
Wafaa Hassan is sitting at her desk, poring over a large stack of papers, sighing as she turns each page. She holds in her hands a catalogue of ancient relics that were originally discovered in Iraq, and are now scattered across the world.
“They are in the US, Britain, Switzerland, Lebanon, the UAE, Spain, everywhere,” she says. “They belong to us, and we are trying very hard to get them all back.”
Germany’s Muslims feel increasingly threatened after a number of recent bomb scares at mosques. Now, the heads of the country’s leading Muslim associations want the government to take protective action.
In July alone, bomb threats have been made on mosques in the cities of Iserlohn, Villingen-Schwenningen and Munich, along with Cologne’s Central Mosque — the largest Muslim place of worship in Germany. In recent days, similar threats have been made on mosques in Duisburg, Mannheim and Mainz.
Enough is enough, says 49-year-old lawyer Nurhat Soykan, the spokeswoman for Germany’s Coordination Council of Muslims. The organization was established in 2007 as a platform to bring together Germany’s four major Islamic organizations: the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (known as DITIB), the Islamic Council for the Federal Republic of Germany and the Association of Islamic Cultural Centers.
Puerto Rico governor announces resignation after mass protests
Ricardo Rossello says he will resign on August 2 amid public anger over obscenity-laced text messages.
Puerto Rico‘s embattled Governor Ricardo Rossello has announced he will resign after nearly two weeks of mass protests triggered by a leak of crude and insulting chat messages between him and his top advisers.
A crowd of thousands outside the governor’s mansion in San Juan erupted into cheers and singing after Rossello’s announcement late on Wednesday.
“I announce that I will be resigning from the governor’s post effective Friday, August 2 at 5 pm,” Rossello said in the video posted on Facebook. The protesters’ demands “have been overwhelming”, he said, adding: “And I’ve received them with highest degree of humility.”
Why Native Hawaiians are fighting to protect Maunakea from a telescope
The mountain is among the most sacred sites in Hawaiian cosmology.
On the morning of July 15 — the day Hawaii Gov. David Ige said construction would begin for the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project on the Big Island — a line of elders, known as kūpuna, positioned themselves in the roadway leading up to the summit of Maunakea. Each elder was assigned a caretaker to tend to their health and nutritional needs while they awaited and blocked access to the construction trucks. Farther up the road, a group of seven Native Hawaiian protectors chained themselves to a cattle guard as a second line of defense in case law enforcement arrested the kūpuna.
The group’s first and second days on Maunakea, among the most sacred sites in Hawaiian cosmology, ended without incident. But arrests began on the morning of July 17. Despite pleas from younger activists to protect the kūpuna, the elders insisted on remaining on the front line and being the first arrested, asking the younger protectors to stand down and remain silent while they were taken.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
For those who have read it, the special counsel’s report speaks for itself. For those who haven’t, he can speak for it in Congress.
There are just three simple yes-or-no questions Congress should ask Robert Mueller:
Mr. Mueller, the president said your report found, in his words, “no collusion, no obstruction, complete and total exoneration.”
First, did your report find there was no collusion?
Second, did your report find there was no obstruction?
Third, did your report give the president complete and total exoneration?
That’s it. That’s the ballgame. It makes no difference if there are 20 questioners or two when Mr. Mueller appears before two House committees on Wednesday. All of this speculation about whether Mr. Mueller will go beyond the four corners of his report is largely a waste of time, with one asterisk. The report itself is deeply damning to Mr. Trump, elevating him to the rare president who has been credibly documented as committing federal crimes while sitting in office.
So what accounts for the vast discrepancy between what the report says and the way the American public has received it? It’s not hard to pinpoint three factors and to design the right questions to bring the focus back to the report.
It started with Donald Trump’s racist tweets demanding that four Democratic congresswomen – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar – “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came”.
All four women are American citizens and only one, Omar, was born overseas.
On Wednesday, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump continued his attack, especially on Omar. In response, the crowd chanted: “Send her back!”
Subsequently, Trump tried unconvincingly to distance himself from the chant.
The relevant question is not whether Trump is a racist. Of course he is. Or whether he’s going to continue bashing these members of Congress, who fill all his demonization boxes: Democrats, females, people of color, a Muslim. Of course he will.
The real question is whether the people bankrolling Trump and the Republican party are going to stop this rot before it consumes the politics of 2020, and perhaps more.
What is clear about Brexit is that Boris Johnson thinks crashing out of the EU with no special arrangement to ease the transition is a fine idea that will unleash the “animal energy” of the mighty British Economy to carry Europe and the World in front of it in a golden age of English dominance.
Ok, those of you who have suffered Lucas Electrics can stop laughing now.
Johnson is no more legitimate than May except he cares less about appearing a buffoon and Parliament is no more likely to accept a ‘No Deal’ that it was (which is to say ‘not at all’). I don’t see a solution without a General Election and I only hope Corbyn’s dithering has not screwed up things too much to pull out a Labour victory. Even a re-invigorated Tory Party is not going to be able to paper over the profound fissures in their caucus.
A group of us recently participated in a simulation game to model the future of the Brexit process. By assuming different roles amongst the forces in conflict over the future of the United Kingdom, we hoped to gain a greater understanding of the process and what might come next. We solicited the help of Richard Barbrook, an academic at Westminster University, and director of Digital Liberties, a UK-based cooperative that has pioneered the use of participatory simulations to anticipate political scenarios. His book, Class Wargames, applies the ideas of the French situationist, Guy Debord, who advocated the use of strategy games as performative, even theatrical, exercises to understand one’s political opponents and their strategic thinking. Barbrook designed the game, which he called, Meaningful Votes: The Brexit Simulation.
Collaborating on this initiative with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) and the ERSTE Foundation in Vienna we assembled a group of participants in Vienna comprised of civil society, journalists, academics and intellectuals.They were a mixture of nationalities, from Austria, the Balkans, the United States and Britain, and held a plurality of political views from left to right. For mainland European participants the game provided an opportunity to empirically rationalise a crisis that many had found inexplicable; for example, the refusal hitherto of the British parties to find a compromise on Brexit in Parliament is highly alien to those used to the political systems with a culture of building consensus (often with proportional representation), that exist in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. Each participant took on the role of a faction within Parliament with the game beginning after the defeat of the heavy defeat of the First Meaningful Vote on 15 January 2019.
…
So what happened? And what did we learn from this exercise?
The outcome of the game eventually resolved itself in a new referendum. By this stage the game had moved into the near future of early autumn 2019. The cross-party negotiations had failed to reach a breakthrough acceptable to both leaderships. Softer members of the Tory Brexit Delivery Group then split away from the party leadership, crossing the floor to support a new referendum. Interestingly, this came as a surprise to the game designer, Barbrook, who had anticipated a stalemate and a further extension of Article 50 at the end of October 2019.
If this suggests the game had a Remain bias, other moments in the scenario serve to refute this. At an earlier moment in the game a majority emerged in Parliament in spite of opposition from Labour and the Remain parties, for the kind of technological solution to the Irish border question favoured by the ERG as an alternative to the troubled ‘Irish backstop’. Assuming the dummy-player function, the EU then intervened via the umpire into the Parliamentary scenario to rule out an agreement without the backstop. With Parliament then voting against leaving without a deal, the political factions were confronted with the same problem they have at the current time.
The crux of this decision is ultimately a narrow one: few options are still available to parties, making the outcome relatively straightforward to model. Leave on the deal May has negotiated with the EU, which is unpopular with Brexit voters and with Labour Remain voters who would like a second referendum. Or negotiate changes to the UK-future relationship document (the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened by the EU) to make the Brexit deal softer, making it more palatable for the Labour Party but even less acceptable to Brexit voters and Brexiters in the Tory party. As the changes are not legally binding on a future Tory prime minister even a Labour Party leadership wishing to ‘deliver Brexit’ has little incentive to support such a deal. This leaves only two further choices. Hold new elections in the hope they might produce a balance in the Parliament more conducive to striking a deal. Or, move towards a new referendum, which includes the opportunity to remain in the EU.
The outcome of the game is not an exact prediction of events in the near future. One player’s calculation that at a certain stage the mainstream of the Tory party will have to try and ‘move on’ from Brexit by peeling off towards a referendum is what Carr called an interpretive hypothesis. It will be tested in the months ahead.
Rather the game offers an insight into the interests that will shape this and the core contradiction underpinning the process: that there is not a tangible, pragmatic form of Brexit acceptable to the people that want Brexit. The vote in the game for ‘technological solutions to the Irish border’ was analogous with, though not identical to, Parliament’s vote on the 30 January 2019 for the ‘Brady amendment’, which mandated the government to seek changes to the Irish backstop as a condition for passing the Withdrawal Agreement. Having passed by 317 votes to 301, Theresa May hailed it as demonstrating a ‘substantial and sustainable majority’ for leaving the EU. When the EU insisted on the Irish backstop, the refusal of the hard Brexiters and the DUP to compromise forced a logic of events that points increasingly to ‘no Brexit’.
Underpinning this is a mistaken conception of how sovereignty operates in the twenty-first century. No state, however powerful, enjoys absolute sovereignty. All states are constrained by economic and political forces beyond their border. Larger states or geopolitical blocs, such as the European Union, China, or the United States, have significantly more power to ‘shape’ the way globalisation works and operates. Britain would have to make steep concessions to these larger blocs to get a trade deal. The game successfully modelled this geopolitical logic by demonstrating – through the existence of the EU as a ‘dummy player’ – the limitations placed on UK Parliamentary sovereignty by the fact of its international relations with the wider world.
Leave campaign rhetoric about taking back control comes into contradiction with this material reality. In all Brexit scenarios, exiting the EU entails a loss of substantive sovereignty for Britain. Even the ‘no deal’ Brexit preferred by hardline Leavers would lead to Britain signing a deal on less advantageous terms shortly after the exit – perhaps in as little as ten days depending on the scale of the economic dislocation. Once the legal uncertainty and accompanying economic turmoil is experienced any government would be under huge pressure to end the chaos by striking an agreement with the EU. On the other hand, the Brexit process has also demonstrated the maximising-effect of EU membership for sovereign states: Ireland has been in a far stronger position to protect the open border with the North and the Good Friday Agreement because of the clear support of 26 other EU member-states.
Founded in 1979, after flying high as an independent manufacturer of speakers, B A inked a deal with Chrysler Motors to provide car audio 1n 1983. By 2017 it had been completely acquired by D&M Holdings although products are still available.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
A key ruling during the Watergate scandal; Nixon and Khrushchev hold a ‘kitchen debate’ during the Cold War; Brigham Young and Mormon followers arrive in present-day Utah; Apollo 11’s crew returns home.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
I don’t want to overthrow the government. I wanna fire ’em.
Russia expresses regret after South Korean airspace violation – Korean officials
Russia has said a military jet’s intrusion into South Korean territorial airspace was not intentional, according to Seoul’s presidential office.
A Russian military official expressed “deep regret” to the South Korean defence ministry and blamed a technical glitch, South Korea said.
On Tuesday, Seoul said a Russian warplane had twice violated its territorial airspace.
The Russian defence ministry had earlier furiously denied this.
But South Korea’s Blue House said in a briefing that Russia had now said the violation was unintended and that it would immediately launch an investigation into the case.
“Moscow said if the aircraft flew according to an initially planned route, this incident would not have occurred,” a spokesman told reporters.
‘We saved ourselves’: Hong Kong train attack victims describe 30-minute ordeal
Victims describe ‘smell of blood’ in train carriages as China blames ‘black hands’ of US for unrest
Victims of an attack by masked men in a Hong Kong train station on Sunday have accused police of not responding to their calls for help, saying: “We saved ourselves … because nobody else was there.”
Their faces obscured by masks, they gave emotional testimony at a press briefing on Wednesday alongside the Democratic party lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting, who was also injured in the attacks.
Their statements came as Beijing blamed the unrest in Hong Kong on “black hands” from the US, advising America to remember that “Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong”.
Moscow residents fight back against ‘second Chernobyl’
Plans for a new highway through Russia’s capital have sparked protests. Locals say the project could cut straight through a nuclear waste site, sending radioactive dust into the air and into Moscow’s river.
Their signs read “We want to live!” and “Road to Death,” and many bear the bright yellow symbol warning of radiation. On Monday, several hundred protesters gathered in the south of Moscow outside residential housing blocks that overlook a nuclear waste site.
The site is located between the Moskva river and the popular Kolomenskoe park. It stretches for around 500 meters along sloping river banks and contains tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste from Moscow’s nearby Polymetals Factory. The plant used to extract thorium and uranium from ore and now produces weapons and military equipment.
How China is slowly expanding its power in Africa, one TV set at a time
Story by Jenni Marsh, CNN Business
Photographs by Nichole Sobecki for CNN Business
Updated 0606 GMT (1406 HKT) July 24, 2019
In the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, Michael Nganga is watching a Chinese Kung Fu movie.
His small home in Limuru village doesn’t have running water and its walls are made from corrugated metal. Yet outside, where chickens roam the yard, the father-of-two, who repairs shoes for a living, has a large Chinese-built satellite dish that connects his old television set to hundreds of channels — many of which are being beamed from Beijing.
“It’s advantageous to have many TV channels,” said Nganga, who was limited to a few local Kenyan stations before the Chinese dish. “Because you can know how the world is changing every day.”
Medals unveiled, events held across Tokyo to mark one year to go until Olympics
Gold, silver, and bronze Olympic medals got their first public viewing on Wednesday as Tokyo organizers marked exactly a year until the games open.
Fans, sponsors and politicians were celebrating the day around the Japanese capital, displaying placards and clocks showing 365 days to go until the opening ceremony on July 24, 2020.
A fencing gold medalist at the 1976 Olympics, IOC President Thomas Bach showed off his skills in a demonstration with school children. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe also took part during the day-long festival.
CLIMATE ACTIVISTS FROM EXTINCTION REBELLION GLUED THEMSELVES TO THE CAPITOL TO DISRUPT HOUSE VOTES
ON TUESDAY EVENING, members of the Washington, D.C., chapter of Extinction Rebellion superglued themselves to each other and to the passages connecting the Capitol to the Rayburn and Cannon office buildings, where House members have their offices. The protesters, who are part of an international group that uses nonviolent civil disobedience tactics to advocate for action on climate change, aimed to confront House members on their way to floor votes.
Many of the protesters, who did not expect the protest to last longer than 15 minutes, remained glued for more than two hours, alongside dozens of demonstrators who rallied as a distraction. They wore signs over their shirts that said “Declare Climate Emergency” and chanted: “What do we want? Green New Deal! When do we want it? Now!” Capitol police asked bystanders and reporters to move back and, after three warnings, kicked everyone out — except, of course, those who were glued. They arrested 13 activists, according to Extinction Rebellion, around 8:30 p.m.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Health care was a key factor in Democrats’ victory in the 2018 midterm elections, and it should be a big plus in 2020 as well. The shared Democratic position — that every legal resident should have access to affordable care, regardless of income or health status — is immensely popular. The de facto Republican position — that we should go back to a situation in which those whose jobs don’t come with health benefits, or who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions, can’t get insurance — is so unpopular that G.O.P. candidates consistently lie about their own proposals.
But right now, two of the major contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, are having an ugly argument about health care that could hurt the party’s chances. There are real, important differences between the two men’s policy proposals, and it’s fine to point that out. What’s not fine is the name-calling and false assertions. Both men are behaving badly. And for their party’s sake, and their country’s, they need to stop it.
Let’s back up. There are, broadly speaking, two ways a country can try to achieve universal health insurance. One is single-payer: The government simply pays the bills. The other retains a role for private insurance but relies on a combination of regulations and subsidies to ensure that everyone gets covered.
Refusing to address and acknowledge the prejudices in our country is a big part of the problem.
When did we arrive at the point where applying the words racist and racism was more radioactive than actually doing and saying racist things and demonstrating oneself to be a racist?
How is it that America insists on knowledge of the unknowable — what lurks in the heart — in order to assign the appellation?
Why are so many Americans insisting that racism requires conscious, malicious intent in order for the title to be earned?
Last week, much of America wrestled with whether to label the president racist after he published racist tweets about four congresswomen of color, demonstrating once again in the most overt terms that he is indeed a racist.
And yet many, including those in the media, struggled with whether or not to label his tweet, and by extension Donald Trump himself, as racist.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Race rioting hits Detroit; Former President Ulysses S. Grant dies; Britain’s Prince Andrew marries ‘Fergie’; Vanessa Williams gives up Miss America crown; Golfer Tiger Woods wins career grand slam.
Police in San Juan fired tear gas on Monday night to disperse thousands of protesters demanding Puerto Rico’s governor resign over offensive chat messages, the latest scandal to hit a bankrupt island struggling to recover from 2017 hurricanes.
Police moved in at about 11pm to break up protesters still on the streets of San Juan’s old city following day-long demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of residents. It follows Governor Ricardo Rosselló’s attempt to cling on to power despite resigning as president of the ruling New Progressive party and announcing he will not run for re-election next year.
It was a busy day for the president, who stripped the drug policy council of independent members and legalized dozens of agritoxins. Jair Bolsonaro wants tighter control of Brazil’s deforestation data.
President Jair Bolsonaro wants tighter control of government data on deforestation. He spoke just days after accusing Brazil’s space agency, the INPE, of falsifying data.
Data released by the INPE in July data shows deforestation accelerating — raising concerns as officials negotiate an EU trade deal. Bolsonaro said his Cabinet should review data before the INPE releases it.
The president came out swinging at regulators Monday. His Agriculture Ministry authorized 51 pesticides and herbicides, bringing the number of agritoxins permitted to 290 in the just over half a year of his government so far.
Hong Kong police criticised for failing to protect protesters from attacks
Hong Kong police faced criticism on Monday for an apparent failure to protect anti-government protesters and passersby from attack by what opposition politicians suspected were gang members at a train station over the weekend.
Sunday’s attack came during a night of escalating violence that opened new fronts in Hong Kong‘s widening crisis over an extradition bill that could see people from the territory sent to China for trial in Communist Party-controlled courts.
Protesters had earlier on Sunday surrounded China’s main representative office in the Asian financial hub and defaced walls and signs and clashed with police.
US expands fast-track deportations of undocumented migrants
The Trump administration to expand its powers to deport migrants without allowing them to appear before court.
The administration of US President Donald Trump announced on Monday that it will vastly extend the authority of immigration officers to deport migrants without allowing them to appear before judges, its second major policy shift on immigration in eight days.
Starting on Tuesday, fast-track deportations can apply to anyone in the United States illegally for less than two years.
Previously, those deportations were largely limited to people arrested almost immediately after crossing the Mexican border.
Kyoto arson suspect likely spent hours scouting anime studio area
The suspect in last week’s deadly arson attack on a Kyoto Animation Co studio may have walked for hours scouting the area and that of the nearby company headquarters the day before the fire, investigative sources said Tuesday.
Shinji Aoba, 41, who allegedly ignited the fire that left 34 people dead in the three-story studio building in Kyoto on Thursday, likely bought empty gasoline containers at a hardware store located directly 5 kilometers from the studio, put them on a handcart and pushed it all the way to the area of the targeted buildings, they said.
The walk could have taken more than an hour as anyone trying to get to the anime studio from the store needs to use a bridge to cross a river and to pass through a complex residential area.
Build that wall! Build that wall! So Donald Trump’s fans roared their support for his xenophobic rants. So scream fans of Boris Johnson’s no-deal Brexit. He wants walls against the EU in place by 31 October. But he has no more idea than Trump about how to erect them. This is despite having been foreign secretary and with a former Brexit negotiator, Dominic Raab, at his side.
You cannot be outside a customs union and not have a border. You cannot have friction and no friction. A bureaucratic mountain of technology may withdraw the border some miles back, but somewhere there must be tariffs, payments, forms, regulation and inspection. A 40% tariff on a shipment of lamb is a barrier, wherever it gets levied. A chlorinated chicken inspection is a wall, wherever it is done.
In the Telegraph today, the only answer Johnson could give to this paradox is casually to refer to the moon. If the Apollo mission, he writes, “could use hand-knitted computer codes to make a frictionless re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Ireland border”. This trivialises what, for thousands of businesses, is now misery and, in the case of farmers, bankruptcy.
…
While no-deal Brexit may merely cause severe and costly disruption at Dover and other sea- and airports, the open roads of Northern Ireland cannot be so policed. No deal will mean anarchy, or state-sponsored banditry. Johnson continues to claim he can avoid a “hard Irish border”. But he still wants a hard border with the EU, so where is it to be? It can only be down the Irish Sea. Bang goes whatever is left of Johnson’s commons majority.
There is no majority anywhere, except in Johnson’s scrambled brain, for a no-deal Brexit. As Whitehall officials – if not men in white coats – gather round him in the coming weeks, they will tell him a brutal truth, political as much as administrative. He needs a deal badly, and the only route to that deal is through Dublin.
Johnson must go at once to Dublin and promise its prime minister, Leo Varadkar, to safeguard an open Irish border, which means a de facto customs union, for the time being. That is the only hope of Ireland inducing the EU27 to unlock some cosmetic redrafting of the withdrawal agreement – without which they will simply not play ball. Whatever humble pie he must swallow, Johnson must return from Dublin with a deal. So much for “taking back control”.
Trade is not about control but about power. The UK has little power against its bigger neighbour. If it wanted power it should have stayed in the EU, or at the very least in Thatcher’s single market. Johnson sacrificed such power to outflank his rivals for the leadership. He must now pay the price for that chicanery. An awful awakening beckons. If Johnson cannot get a Northern Ireland deal he faces parliamentary armageddon. Perhaps he can fly to the moon.
