With apologies in advance for any incoherence in the above. My Wifi in Spain is has been inoperative for the past week, and I have repaired, in desperation, to a local Spanish hostelry which feels obliged to place a bottle of wine plus chopitos on the table with the standard lunch menu. Politeness and a concern not to offend my hosts has obliged me to accept their hospitality, even thought, dear reader, my primary concern is always to inform and entertain your higher intellectual functions and create a forum for enlightened discourse. Your indulgence is appreciated...(hic!)

Index of Frank's Diaries

We've been up and down and over and out and every which way but backwards about Brexit.  And the conclusion is the same: No Deal Brexit.  The consequences will be harsh but the Brexiters don't care and May is totally focused with her power and keeping the Tory party from splitting.  Thus she won't offer anything even remotely acceptable to the EU.

shrug

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

`Good Friday Agreement not up for negotiation' in Brexit talks

The Belfast Agreement is not up for negotiation in the Brexit talks, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said.

Mr Varadkar told the Dáil that the Government would stand by and defend the primacy of the agreement.

"We see the Government as being co-defenders of that agreement," he said.

"And certainly as far as this Government is concerned the Good Friday Agreement is not up for negotiation in these talks over Brexit."

The Taoiseach was responding to Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald who raised the issue following the publication of a newspaper interview in which DUP leader Arlene Foster said the Belfast Agreement was not sacrosanct and could be changed to facilitate a Brexit deal.

Ms Foster had expressed deep frustration with EU officials and those in favour of the UK remaining in the union, who repeatedly stated that the Belfast Agreement could not be touched.

Ms McDonald said: "The DUP rejected the Good Friday Agreement. They embrace Brexit and on both counts they act in defiance of the wishes of the people in the North."

It should be noted that the Good Friday Agreement is not a matter of simple domestic legislation, as asserted by Arlene Foster, and which could therefore be amended unilaterally by a simple act of Parliament in the UK. It is an international Treaty, lodged with the UN, between the UK and Irish Governments, and which was passed in Ireland only after a popular referendum which amended the Irish Constitution to remove a claim to the territorial integrity of Ireland (to include N. Ireland) unless and until a majority in N. Ireland chose otherwise. It is not within the gift of the DUP (or the UK government) to play around with its provisions to suit their Brexit agenda.

Index of Frank's Diaries

OK so the vast majority of ET denizens aren't golfers or even belong to a golfing demographic, but in the silly season, there is also this...
Europe stands as one at the Ryder Cup - but what about Brexit?

In an act of spectacular cognitive dissonance, tens of thousands of British fans travelled to France to dress up in blue-and-yellow hats and scarves and scream and roar and sing support for a European team representing a community that, to extrapolate, just under 52 per cent of them had recently voted to get the hell away from. And given the demographics of the average golf club clientele, that estimate is likely to be a couple of clubs short of the green. According to YouGov, the average British golf fan is unusually likely to be a right wing man who has an interest in, among other things, BMWs, business and finance, Jeremy Clarkson and Roy Chubby Brown.

Of course the Ryder Cup team represents Europe rather than the Union, although it so happens that every man who has ever played for the team has come from a full member state. But there's the letter, and then there's the spirit. Which was laid out by Thomas Bjørn in his speech at the opening ceremony. "Europe can at times be a fragmented place, but when it comes to the Ryder Cup it's different, when it comes to the Ryder Cup, Europe stands as one," Bjørn said. "This is the week more than ever that flag represents the boundary of this great continent." Bjørn lives in England and has an English girlfriend. He must have known how it sounded.

Index of Frank's Diaries

In one sense Boris is completely correct, the chequers plan is completely stupid and unworkable. Being entirely fantastical, it is impossible to use it even as a starting point for any discussion.

the problem for Boris comes with his next statement: "Do not believe them when they say there is no other plan and no alternative" which, while entirely true, does not include any solution acceptable to the EU as well as Boris and the ultras.

Boris is a wrecker, a man given to grand gestures and spending other people's money as wastefully as possible (his tenure as Mayor wasted billions on his profile-boosting vanity projects). He talks now of glibly building a bridge across the Irish Sea as some sop to Ulster. As if that could solve anything.

Sadly, his destruction of the Tory party as an electoral force is proceeding too slowly to impede brexit.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Some of the countries most sympathetic to the UK's concerns have been the Baltic republics, once part of the Soviet Union and other eastern Europe countries.

Hunt's casual comment didn't go down well in these quarters. Not at all.

Vytenis Andriukaitis, a Lithuanian European commissioner:

Dear @Jeremy_Hunt
I was born in Soviet gulag and been imprisoned by KGB a few times in my life.
Happy to brief you on the main differences between #EU and Soviet Union. And also why we escaped the #USSR
Anytime. Whatever helps. https:/t.co/c2h7gbnj59

— Vytenis Andriukaitis (@V_Andriukaitis) October 1, 2018

Estonia's ambassador to the UK:

EU and USSR not comparable. Soviet regime was brutal, I lived under it, comparison is insulting. @Conservatives @foreignoffice @Jeremy_Hunt @estembassyuk

— Tiina Intelmann (@TiinaIntelmann) October 1, 2018

Baiba Braže, Latvia's ambassador to the UK:

Dear @faisalislam , just FYI - Soviets killed, deported, exiled and imprisoned 100 thousands of Latvia's inhabitants after the illegal occupation in 1940, and ruined lives of 3 generations, while the EU has brought prosperity, equality, growth, respect. #StrongerTogether https:/t.co/BNUvmsgXnR

— Baiba Braže 🇱🇻 (@BaibaBraze) September 30, 2018

Former Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski‏:

Brexiteer comparisons of the European Union to the USSR is cheap and offensive, particularly to us who have lived both. Did the Red Army force you to join? How many millions has Brussels exterminated?  Gulag for demanding a referendum on independence?  Apologise, @Jeremy_Hunt!

— Radosław Sikorski (@sikorskiradek) October 1, 2018

OK, let's say it slowly and see if we can get it out:  P...M...Boor-ass.  Oh gods, it's still disgusting and depressing.  And the UK are supposed to be the SMART anglophones.

Her speech was cloyingly insincere and entirely lacking in imagination, the disco queen stunt hilariously uncool, and the crowd reaction bizarrely enthusiastic.
Boris never disappoints if taking a wrecking ball to the shreds of the Tory party is your idea of a DaDa art form.
He has one important Machiavellian skill, (the shiv between the shoulderblades), but the other of causing fear if respect and love are unattainable is beyond Boris' thespian capacities, considerable though they are.
Boris is entirely un-scary.
Buffoonery will only get you so far.
What did chill my blood though was the bulldog roar that greeted Boris' cluelessly transparent, disingenuous affirmation of the worst little-Englandist rump of the ship of fools that is the Tory party.  
There was a psychotic edge in this full-throated baying at the Brexit moon, an emotion so passionately, tenaciously, self-destructively stupid as to re-beggar belief!
This is what they meant in the saying: 'Those whom the gods destroy, they first make mad'.
Watching the political high jinks across the pond incites identical reactions.


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

There's a telling line from Heseltine in a Long Read on the Guardian (which has terrible search, so I couldn't find the link now that it's gone from their front page) saying that perhaps destroying the UK's manufacturing base during the Thatcher years was "unthinking" - in the sense that letting the markets rip without any planning or foresight really wasn't a sophisticated move.

Then, in a nice editorial move further down in the same piece, someone else points out that Brexit is doing the same thing in the same way. Even more subtly - as long as you're paying attention - this is contrasted with Japanese policy, which is supposed to be based on modelling and rational planning.

The editing is curious, but the point is a good one: the UK doesn't do thinking. This has been the core UK problem since the end of WWII - and possibly long before it, although imperial prosperity disguised the rotten core.

The US-imported horror of so-called big government and centralised planning creates an Economy of Stupidity, where ideology, bluster, and posturing become more important than planned rational action.

It isn't just exceptionalism and narcissism, although both play their part. It isn't even the core moral driver of Brexit, which is a juvenile "I'm British and no one tells me what to do."

It's the fact that British mental processes are pre-modern - in fact pre-Enlightenment - at too many social levels, from the vacuous self-interest of the Johnsons and Rees-Moggs down to the shop floor.

There's an educated middle class which is more sophisticated and occasionally shows evidence of being able to model outcomes and make plans. But the rest of the population literally has no idea how to sift fact from fiction, and makes up for it with bluster and self-serving delusion.

So... the EU needs to understand that it is not dealing with a rational country. The UK doesn't do rational in any observable form.

There's plenty of ideology to go around, and a whole lot of posing and angry rhetoric. But there isn't any rational understanding of the problems caused by Brexit, and even less rational ability to plan for solutions.

Newton Emerson is a unionist commentator from N. Ireland more closely aligned with the anglophile Official Unionist party thinking than with the Paisleyite DUP. Unsympathetic to any notion of a united Ireland, he can nevertheless make some acute observations on the contradictions and difficulties of DUP "thinking".

Foster is rattling around inside a logical trap set by May

Trapped between a hard border and a sea border, DUP leader Arlene Foster has hit out at the Belfast [Good Friday] Agreement. This has conceded a key rhetorical point to nationalists despite all the complaints they have made about her remarks. The point is not "I told you so", as expressed in many quarters, over the DUP never supporting the agreement in the first place. The DUP will happily tell you that itself. As far as the party is concerned it fixed the Belfast Agreement with the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, and it was only then, with the text amended, that it climbed aboard.

The nationalist point Foster has conceded is that some forms of Brexit might be incompatible with the agreement, at least to the extent where it would benefit from further alteration.

In a keynote speech in Belfast three months ago, May ruled out a customs border in the Irish Sea as part of the backstop on the grounds it would breach the agreement by threatening the constitutional integrity of the UK and changing the status of Northern Ireland without consent, thereby denying "parity of esteem and just and equal treatment" to the unionist community.

This novel interpretation was seen as such a sop to the DUP that May was accused of letting the party write her script.

But the prime minister also ruled out any land border infrastructure, saying "the seamless border is a foundation stone on which the Belfast Agreement rests. Anything that undermines that is a breach of the spirit of the Belfast Agreement."

Legally, both sections of the speech were nonsense. The agreement makes no mention of the nature of the Border, while the consent principle only applies to a vote for a united Ireland.

However, by matching nationalist nonsense with unionist nonsense, May was boxing everyone in by turning their own arguments against them. Or, as she summed it up herself with a perfectly straight face, any new customs frontier inside the UK "would be a breach of the spirit of the Belfast Agreement, and for exactly the same reason that a hard border would be".

The absurd over-reaction to her [Foster's] remarks, made off-the-cuff in response to a reporter's question, indicates the extent of nationalist paranoia that the DUP is leading the British government by the nose. However, the intemperance of Foster's remarks suggests the opposite - that the DUP knows that the limits of its influence are about to be exposed as the withdrawal agreement deadline nears.

A party that has never really suffered defeat or had to make a major strategic concession is going to find climbing down on something as totemic as a sea border extremely difficult to process.

Legally, Newton is probably correct in asserting that the principal of consent as written in the Good Friday Agreement applies only to a referendum on a United Ireland. But the political reality is that it has come to apply to any major change to the status quo in N. Ireland - it requires the support of both the unionist and nationalist communities.

Thus Brexit is a breach of this principle, as applied to N. Ireland, quite apart from the fact that it was rejected by 56% of the N. Ireland electorate as a whole. May has now conceded that it applies to how any major change in both the sea border with Britain or the land border with Ireland is regulated and policed.

This may have boxed Arlene Foster into a logical trap to some extent, but the larger logical trap is the one in which May finds herself. If any change in the status quo of how either border is policed is a breach of the principle of consent contained in Good Friday agreement, how much greater is the imposition of Brexit itself on N. Ireland, against the wishes of a majority of BOTH communities?

Some reports suggest the UK will propose making any divergence in regulation between N. Ireland and GB subject to N. I. Assembly approval. This could be difficult, given that that assembly may never meet again. But wouldn't it be much more consistent with the principle of consent as contained in the Good Friday Agreement, if any change in the Status of  N. Ireland (i.e. Brexit) was made subject to referendum approval?

Index of Frank's Diaries

The silly season seems to go on into October. With Brexit coming up, the press is mostly interested in the wedding of yet another of these royal parasites. The Independent

But some people found the choice to read an excerpt from The Great Gatsby at the royal wedding slightly strange, considering the dark thematic elements of the book and Gatsby's character.

"The choice of The Great Gatsby as a reading at the #royalwedding - a book which is about rich people having affairs and being too rich to care when they mess up other people's lives - astounds and muses me in equal measure #nosenseofirony," one person tweeted.

Surely not as strange as the tendency among commoners to use the  Lohengrin wedding march? At least the royal groom probably told his bride his name ahead of time.

Brexit divorce agreement collapses after Raab and Barnier meet

A tentative deal on the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement reached at technical level in Brussels Sunday collapsed following a meeting between EU negotiator Michel Barnier and his U.K. counterpart Dominic Raab.

An EU diplomat said that Barnier would make a statement about the state of play in the talks Sunday evening after updating EU ambassadors.

Indications that a tentative deal at negotiator level was close, began to emerge mid-afternoon Sunday, when the U.K.'s Department for Exiting the EU released a statement that Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab would make an unscheduled trip to Brussels.

"With several big issues still to resolve, including the Northern Ireland backstop, it was jointly agreed that face-to-face talks were necessary ahead of this week's October European Council," a spokesperson said in a statement.

Or have we entered the "Last Minute Brinkmanship" phase?

@BorderIrish on Twitter :

I like to believe that, in my own small way, I have contributed to putting this look of disgusted frustration on Charles Moore's face pic.twitter.com/JMtAE2zyTu

— The Irish Border (@BorderIrish) 13 octobre 2018

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}