I'd just like to place on record that #NoDealBrexit is just about the worst *political* idea I've ever heard. In the 1000% unlikely event I was advising the PM, I would be extremely strongly against.

It's the classic Weak Man's Strong Man decision, like Steve McClaren dropping David Beckham. Sugar rush of the call, then all your problems get much worse.
It supercharges your opponents, allows Labour all the political landscape, is a *vast* gift to the SNP, revives the Lib Dems - all at a stroke.
The public don't want No Deal. You just won an election promising to make it all go away. You're under attack for your competence on Covid. The last thing you need is loads more blame.
You need to move on, convince middle of the road voters who have peeled away. You need to talk infrastructure, jobs, Covid recovery, climate change, hospitals.
No-one cares about arbitration mechanisms and customs forms. They just want to get it done. Get Brexit done.
Balls this up today, you could be bundled out of office within a couple of years after an ERM-style debacle on the borders, on supermarket shelves, in Northern Ireland.
...While Sunak and then Starmer have to face the Q of how to build the hard border with Scotland, and where in England and Wales to base Trident.
Do the deal. /END

More from Brexit

This very short article by Jeremy Cliffe is the best thing I have ever read on Brexit and the EU. It pivots on the contrast between Delors’ and Thatcher’s authentically provincial Christian visions and suggests the battle in Britain between the two is not over.


Thatcher: Protestant believer in the totally free market and absolutely sovereign centralised nation state. Delors: Catholic believer in third way personalism, corporatism and federalism. Individualism versus relational love. Heterodoxy versus Orthodoxy.

The article useful gives the lie to the idea that the Catholic vision of the EU has altogether vanished even though it is weakened. Delors wanted a social dimension to the free market and single currency and yet lexiteers laughably insist the EU is more neoliberal than the U.K.!

Subsidiary federalism is a doctrine of democracy and human fraternity. State sovereignty is a doctrine of naked power. It is a face of Antichrist. Leviathan.

Those combined that democracy can only be inside a single state fail to power just how much of private law and evermore so is necessarily international. Thus if political institutions don’t extend over borders there can be no democracy.

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