LongTimeLurker

Some people definitely don't seem to be able to understand that other people simply might not care all that much either way on independence and can see it as a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic relative to the issues that they are more interested in.

Thought you were winning 1-0 at HT from what was on twitter and now see you lost 3-0 to a team that would have been viewed as an easy three points during last year's long spectacular unbeaten run. Relegation struggle a possibility or the players are there for an inexperienced managerial team to turn it around once they figure out how to get the best out of them?

Except they cannae. Interesting times ahead and it will be interesting to see how the electorate reacts to the reality of the now almost inevitable hard Brexit.

The SNP can get crazily low or crazily high numbers of seats on relatively small swings from where they were at the last election, so I think Detournement is too confident in his analysis. What should work in the SNP's favour if another referendum isn't seen as imminent is that Labour and Tory voters are probably going to be less likely to vote tactically for pro-Union reasons to keep the SNP out when there is a huge ideological gulf between those two parties now (with Corbyn and the hard left increasingly in control and Blairites marginalised) in a way there hasn't been since Michael Foot led Labour in 1983. Both those parties are also soon going to be seen to have made a royal mess out of the Brexit process for petty party political reasons. I think the party that has the most growth potential over the next decade or so is the Lib Dems if they can become the home of moderate Remain voters that are turned off by the relative extremism of the various other options. With the right leader they could easily generate another wave of "Cleggmania".

Why wouldn't all 27member states agree to extension though? Gibraltar

All 27 member states have to agree to an extension or the clock simply runs down to zero and there is a no deal Brexit. It's all just posturing from Labour. If a deal doesn't get done next month that can be voted through at Westminster with cross-party support this is heading straight over the cliff, so sadly it's all about the general election that is going to follow that at some point rather than averting the associated economic meltdown.

...but but German car manufacturers and Angela Merkel. What should be worrying about that quote is that there's a willingness now to openly put the boot in over making a hard Brexit as difficult as possible to make sure nobody ever tries to do this again and it isn't just something being said behind closed doors.

Don't think the DUP is the natural home for a former Trotskyite. Hopefully she'll soon be a forgotten about footnote after being put out to pasture by the Labour party through deselection.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/26/eu-steps-up-no-deal-brexit-preparations-as-labour-alarms-capitals “I’m sorry to say it so callously: there is something more important for us than the future of the UK, and that’s the future of the EU,” he said. “Any decision that would give European citizens the feeling you can exit the EU and keep all the advantages would be suicidal, and we won’t make that decision.” Bruno Le Maire - French Finance Minister

If anything is going to undermine their social programme it's a hard Brexit, but politicians are more concerned about winning power in the next election than anything else.

The choice in the referendum wasn't predicated on a no deal Brexit. Many leave voters expected something like Norway's EEA status, so a second referendum would be reasonable. Problem is there are only about six months left and Spain can get awkward over Gibraltar before agreeing to any extension to the two years so it's probably too late now anyway. The EU don't want members leaving so having a huge mess unfold to discourage any future repeat isn't necessarily bad from their standpoint given the UK and RoI will be affected by it much more than any of the other parties involved. If Theresa May is expecting movement from them, she is delusional as to who holds the stronger negotiating position. If the EU doesn't like the Chequers plan they can easily just say on you go then at this point and that appears to be what happened in Salzburg.

There was a golden opportunity for that only a couple of months ago and a handful of extremist pro-Leave Labour rebels saved the day for Theresa May with no negative repercussions on their membership of the Labour party. As long as the DUP keep backing Theresa May and Rees Mogg and co see the status quo on Tory leadership leading to no deal exit in the aftermath of Salzburg, the only people that can topple Theresa May are Remainer Tory MPs and given it would be career suicide on their part I wouldn't hold my breath on that outcome. You don't hear much from Ruth Davidson any more about Scottish Tory MPs pushing a soft Brexit agenda, for example, because they know their gains from the SNP were derived in part from a pro-Leave swing away from the SNP in rural and fishing areas and they are more concerned about their careers than anything else in all of this. Corbyn can posture about elections and people's votes at this point to keep his rank and file happy but if he knows there is no way to defeat Theresa May on a confidence motion all he has to do now is let the clock run down at this point if hard Brexit is what he really wants and unfortunately his actions over the last couple of years strongly suggest it might be.

Why is Kate Hoey still a Labour MP? Corbyn's unwillingness to boot out the hard core hard Brexit extremists from his party and bring the rest of his party under control of the Labour party whip on this issue is a big part of why things have reached the point they have. He should have been able to push harder to draft amendments coordinated with the Lib Dems and SNP that pro-Remain Tory rebels would be willing to back so that a soft Brexit outcome could be engineered. Open goal after open goal has been squandered on that. The problem is that a lot of his relative success in the most recent general election came from a UKIP to Labour swing, so it's not clear that he actually wants to avoid a no deal exit.

Also a huge mistake by Theresa May and done against the advise of senior civil servants by all accounts, who understood full well that the fixed two year deadline needed to avoid a no deal exit gave all the leverage to the EU.

A soft Brexit would still have been a Brexit.

If she hadn't called the unnecessary vanity general election she could have easily steered things through to an eventual reasonable Norway type of soft Brexit deal after reality had started to sink in a bit about what a hard Brexit actually means. It took a perfect storm of circumstances such as a greatly strengthened Corbyn and a balance of power holding DUP to drive things to where they are now where a Tory party that is terrified of losing power can be held hostage by a minority of Rees Mogg type Leave nutters making it impossible for the Remain majority in the House of Commons to assert itself effectively.

That will rear its head if they need all 27 states to agree an extension to the 2 year negotiation period that ends in March. At that point the individual states as opposed to the EU get to do some negotiating and Spain will no doubt not let an opportunity like that pass.

It's like having a larger conjoined twin with special needs in control of where you wind up going. No easy answers on what to do next on a rational level when a hard border at the Solway and Tweed would be involved, but can understand the visceral level appeal of independence right now as the way to get back into the EU pronto and leave these imbeciles to their delusions of an imperial twilight.

Looks like a hard Brexit is unavoidable now given the leader of the opposition is not someone that can be depended on from a Remain sort of standpoint and the Tories are not going to want a general election any time soon. Spectacular own goal by the DUP to shore up a Tory government that is creating the conditions where a rational case can finally be made for calling for a united Ireland after well over a century of appeals to not much more than misty eyed Romanticism that left people whose face didn't fit in Irish nationalism's founding myths cold. Independence in the EU now involves selling the concept of a hard border at Carlisle, so think the timeline on Scottish independence has been set back by a couple of decades, but time will tell. Tidal power in the Pentland Firth and pump-storage hydro in the Great Glen could be the way to build a prosperous future in more of a Scottish rather than a UK context even after the North Sea fossil fuels have had their day, so suspect there will still be plenty of wind in Scottish nationalism's sails in the decades ahead. The electorate south of the border will also no doubt eventually see sense and opt to rejoin at some point once people grasp there is no captive imperial market any more to make the global trading option work to the UK's advantage, so the hard border thing will eventually go away again as a serious impediment.

Wonder where Northern Ireland fits with that graphic given the Border Poll that happened in 1973. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_border_poll,_1973

Think the problem is that the former Communists (Left party) also tend to be systematically excluded from holding any real power by parties of the centre right like the Liberals, so with the two extremes holding about a quarter of the vote combined, the possible coalitions for a stable government are difficult to put together. Maybe they will wind up like Germany with the traditional major parties of the left and right having to form some sort of grand coalition.

Mainly due to gains by the former Communists because the Greens lost votes and almost didn't reach the 4% threshold.

Derry is preferred by Nationalists and Republicans, Londonderry by Unionists. Used to be a non-issue because both sides used Derry colloquially up until the 1980s when the SDLP run local council moved to change it officially. Still officially Londonderry in some contexts where it can only be changed by royal charter, but Derry is also used officially in many contexts such as local government.

In Hungary's case there was the very large column of Syrian refugees that passed through, so the media coverage can be a bit disingenuous at times when the suggestion is that there was nothing substantial happening there for populists to fuel the visceral level fears of voters. Think the most worrying thing about Sweden is that this is a right wing party that until relatively recently had no problem with being involved with groups that were openly neo-Nazi, which makes it different from cranky right wing but still somewhat respectable groups like AfD and UKIP. This is much more like the BNP or NPD grabbing the balance of power in a British or German context.

You get a double barreled Derry - Londonderry with the train announcements just to make absolutely sure nobody is confused what city is being referred to.