I don't know how it was reported elsewhere but the BBC might as well have been reporting a state funeral. They were all but playing solemn music as they reported on how comprehensively May's proposals were rejected.

The gap over Ulster is just too great, everything else can be finessed but Ireland requires a hard solution.

She did look kinda shell-shocked actually. After months of tough negotiations with Jacob Rees-Mogg to create a set of proposals that avoid destroying the Tory party, she seemed genuinely surprised that she wasn't being applauded to the rafters in Salzburg for her clever proposals. It's almost as if it never occured to her that the EU had a viewpoint that needed to be considered.

It's not long until the Tory party conference and, given this debacle, I'd be shocked if there weren't stand up fights in the auditorium, resignations and a, metaphorical or otherwise, stabbing or two backstage.

And there's already talk of a General Election being called.

The EU has never really understood that brexit was all about holding the Tory party together. So the EU never had a counter-party to negotiate with.

The finnicky details of leaving were never something leavers were concerned with. They were self-styled brexiteers, blue-sky big-picture people. Details were for little people and they were affronted to find that people expected them to actually get off their butts and drive negotiations forward. That was the point when the wheels came off cos they didn't have a plan, heck they didn't even have a clue. They didn't know what the EU did and didn't know how they did it. So, it's no surprise they didn't know how to organise leaving.

May tried to make Davis, Johnston and Fox, the three loudest most pomous windbags the focal point of the leave campaign. But, that was never gonna fly;-
Davis is a fool who, even in a Westminster populated by the vain and stupid is notable for being vain and stupid,

Liam Fox is a man who understands Ministerial Responsibility to involve going to sunny parts of the world, often with his special "friend" and adviser, and having expensive meals with foreigners. the idea that work might be involved baffles him.

As for Boris Johnston; this is a man who, if he was outside the tent, would piss in, but when he is inside the tent he only improves his aim. He wants to be Prime Minister; not because he has idea of how to run the country, but in the Trumpian wants-to-tell-everybody-what-to do tin-pot-dictator kind of way. Everything he does is designed to advance his cause and frustrae those who stand in his way. So he was never interested in brexit cos a succesful one would burnish May, not himself. A No-Deal brexit has always been the catastrophe he sought.

After they spent 18 MONTHS faffing about, we are where we are, which is that the UK is no nearer knowing how to leave the EU than it was before Article 50 was invoked. There is still no concensus of opinion, even within the brexiters, let alone the Tory party at large, about what a good brexit would look like.

Yes, you'd think these things are basic that any normal group of people would do before entering into one of the most complext legal and political negotiations in the country's history. But they're not normal, they're tories. For the last 40 years their entire credo of "governance" has been about the abdication of responsibility for anything.

We have had a summer of chaos on the railways from organisational meltdown for which a Board of inquiry has decided that the problem is that there was nobody in charge. Yet the Minister for Transport is going around TV studios saying that none of this has anything to do with him.

We have a Minister for Ulster who not only doesn't understand the difference between Unionists and Nationalists, she boasts about it on national radio. Because why should a mere Minister in CHARGE know anything about the situation they're managing.

Seriously, even Dilbert's pointy-headed manager is better than this lot.

So May's idiot plan based on customs rainbows and border unicorns and please please can we carry on trading with Europe like before but without all the bits we don't like has run into adult reality and been smashed to bits.

Quite frankly we are in unknown territory. As they said at the start of the TV puppet show "Stingray";-

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN IN THE NEXT HALF HOUR!!!!

keep to the Fen Causeway

from the Guardian's Jonathan Lis

Don't buy the Brexit hype: it's a border in the Irish Sea or the customs union

which begins

Donald Tusk's clear rejection of Theresa May's Chequers plan at the Salzburg summit yesterday should not come as a surprise. The most important lesson of the Brexit negotiation is that it is not a negotiation, and never has been. Blessed with superior size, wealth and power, the EU has been able to dictate the framework and substance of the talks, and has refused any deviation from its red lines.

and finishes:

The [UK] government has never understood the Brexit process and therefore has always botched it. It expects the EU to treat the UK both as an equally powerful third country, and as a member state still deserving the EU's protection. It is neither. And so in a battle of red lines, the UK will lose. That is the most brutal lesson of all.

and again The Guardian - Rafael Behr

The EU couldn't help May at Salzburg because she's seeking the impossible

Ultimately the EU cannot give May what she really needs, which is a Brexit model that will simultaneously satisfy the whole Tory party and win support from a majority in the Commons, without inflicting harm on the country. They cannot give her that because it doesn't exist, never did, never will.

At politics.co.uk, Ian Dunt applies his usual critical analysis:

Brexit: Brussels just got serious

But today's events suggest something has changed. You could see by May's expressions, which were even more strained than normal, that she had been taken by surprise. Things had fallen apart.

In reality, nothing has changed - Chequers was never going to happen this morning and tonight it remains something that is never going to happen - but it is extremely significant that Brussels has changed its attitude.

Perhaps they grew tired of Britain presenting Chequers as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. After all, May's shock suggests she might have really believed it would fly. We must pray that is not the case because it would suggest that she is so detached from reality that she cannot functionally perform the role of prime minister. [Emphasis added by me]

From the pieces I quote, you will realise I believe that for 27 months there is an inevitablity about the position we have reached.

She has correctly identified that the EU27 is only offering two options : Norway or the highway.

And she's perfectly clear that neither is acceptable to her.

Then it gets worse...

May says she wants to clarify several issues. She says she wants to be clear that the rights of EU citizens will be protected in the event of no deal.

She says to the people of Northern Ireland that they will do everything to prevent a hard border with the Irish republic.

... but it won't be possible, is the subtext.

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

Why Theresa May's plan to bypass Barnier was doomed. The idea made no sense but fed into the British tabloid narrative about Brussels.

There are probably many reasons for the contrived fiction about bypassing Barnier. For a start it is difficult for anyone to accept that their arguments are simply not gaining traction. It also feeds comfortably into the British tabloid narrative about Brussels bureaucracy. The fiction seeks to shift the focus from the British red lines, which define the limits of a solution but are apparently sacrosanct, towards the EU's stance in defence of its basic principles, which it suits some to portray as inflexible.

Moreover, the nonsense about Brussels bureaucrats helps the British government to argue domestically that a solution would be at hand if only the right people would engage. It helps to keep alive the illusion that the German and French business cavalry are about to appear on the horizon, riding to the UK's rescue, although it is clear that the cavalry are sitting comfortably back at base camp.

'You're gonna respect us even if we have to jump off the cliff to show you!' The downside being not just the damage on British side but also a long-term strategic splintering. It will be very toxic. Will they turn themselves into an American colony (like some Brexiters are dreaming) just out of spite? A remarkable reversal of fortune and irony of history. Anyway, not good for Europe's wealth and security.

_{Schengen is toast!}

They didn't know what the EU did and didn't know how they did it. So, it's no surprise they didn't know how to organise leaving.

then I read this. In it he talks about the dangers of people in Government who simply hve no idea of what their departments do or how they do them.

Guardian - Alex Bladsel - Michael Lewis: The Big Short author on how Trump is gambling with nuclear disaster

Lewis was contemplating the nation's dire risk portfolio when Trump tapped the former Texas governor Rick Perry to be secretary of the Department of Energy. Five years earlier, Perry had said in a presidential debate that he wanted to eliminate that cabinet-level department. At least, he had tried to say it: in a moment that helped sweep his ruinous candidacy into oblivion, Perry forgot the department's name.

"It's bad enough Rick Perry has no sense of this," Lewis thought after hearing of his appointment. But he had to acknowledge he didn't know anything about the department either. So he decided to find out. "It took about two phone calls before I learned, `Oh, that's where the nuclear weapons are. Oh my God.'"

What Lewis went on to discover was even more shocking. On the morning after the presidential election, as the balloons from the previous night's parties are still settling on the ballroom floors, the president-elect is expected to send teams into every department of the US federal government to begin the transition of power. But at the Department of Energy last November - and, it turned out, at many of the country's 14 other federal departments - one day passed, and then another, and no one came.

Bureaucrats in the Obama administration had worked for a year to prepare thousands of pages of briefings on the risks their successors could face. Yet by Thanksgiving, no one from the Trump team had arrived to receive them. "I was fucking nervous ... ," Steve Bannon later told friends about Trump's handling of the transition, Lewis reports in the book. "I go, `Holy fuck, this guy doesn't know anything. And he doesn't give a shit.'"

According to the well-known model created by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the first three stages of grief are denial, anger and bargaining. In their approach to Northern Ireland and the Irish Border, the Brexiteers have broadly followed this pattern.

First, clothing their naked indifference in wilful ignorance, they denied that the problem existed at all. Next, they resorted to anger at the bloody Irish, the perpetual disturbers of the British peace without whom Brexit would have been, as promised, the easiest deal in the history of the world. And now we are at the bargaining stage.

But there is a dramatic twist: the bargaining is not so much about Northern Ireland. It is bargaining with Northern Ireland. The sheer cynicism of what is going on is so breathtaking that it is hard to credit and thus easy to miss.

The British approach to Brexit has been so chaotic that it has seemed silly to look for method in the madness. In relation to the Irish dimension of Brexit, we've become inured to magical thinking (the wonderful efficacy of not-yet-invented technological solutions), blithe misapprehension and sheer fatuousness (Boris Johnson's insistence that the Border is just like that between two London boroughs).

This has been oddly comforting. Since this stuff is so evidently childish, we can wait for the adults to enter the room.

But the comfort is false. The adults did enter the room. The Brexit negotiations are now in the hands of serious, skilful professional mandarins. And they've done something remarkable with the Irish Question. Remarkable in that it takes some nerve even to contemplate it.

For what it comes down to is a strategy of using the human suffering of the Troubles to try to extract a favourable post-Brexit trade deal from the EU. You have to be very clever to think of trying this - and utterly shameless.

Essentially what Fintan O'Toole is arguing that the British position is to force the EU to concede the benefits of the Customs Union and Single Market membership without the responsibilities, as the only way to ensure there isn't a hard customs border in N. Ireland.

The EU have been prepared to concede this for N. Ireland as a special case, because it is relatively small in the context of the EU as a whole, and because of the special historical circumstances surrounding it.

However the EU has not been prepared to concede this for the UK as a whole, or even just for industrial products as opposed to services, thus creating a need for customs controls somewhere between Great Britain and the EU.

Worse, from Theresa May's point of you, most in her own party have rejected her Chequers proposals as well, as turning the UK into a "rule taker" and vassal state of the EU.

Hence the impasse, with the DUP standing in the way of the obvious solution.

It is really quite something to seek now, in the midst of a self-inflicted crisis of authority in Britain, to turn the North's suffering and the EU's care for it to advantage. The dead are surely not to be bargained with.

The next stage in the grieving process after bargaining is depression. Perhaps we are moving into it now, for it is deeply depressing to find what is still in many ways a great country giving way to such cynicism.

It is a reminder that the damage from Brexit is not just economic or political. It is also moral.

New song & video:

OWN YOUR SH!T (sweary)

My heartfelt message to the Brexit ringleaders and cheerleaders (please RT).https://t.co/8C4POiFzMj pic.twitter.com/ClGJLFeRtr

— Mitch Benn 🇪🇺 (@MitchBenn) 21. September 2018