Guardina speak with forked tongue

Some semblance almost of near balance today in the Grauniad. It reports the legal challenges to Brexit under way, fairly modestly. One involves a challenge to any view that the dreaded Article 50, inaugurating the leave process can be decided upon without Parliamentary backing. Apparently the Government can invoke the royal prergoative to insist.What an interesting constitution we (do not) have!

Meanwhile, a barrister has issued an unsought judgment that the Leave campaign are guilty of lying. It is the familiar issue of the £350m sent to the EU every week.  It is a rounded up figure,claims the lawyer, using the figure of £341m per week supplied from official sources. Moreover, the rebate is applied before any money is actually taken from the UK, leaving only (!) £117m per week to be actually 'sent to the EU'. I am not sure anyone's mind would have been changed by these corrections, of course - maybe £117m per week is chicken feed to barristers.

A strange addition to this view is that leaving the EU will cause massive disruption to the legal system: 'we need to be clear that a vote to leave is a vote for the needless destruction of our legal system. It is a vote for a process that would consume years of parliamentary time, divert precious public resources to battalions of lawyers, and jeopardise the effective governance of our country',says anopther barrister. This had already been discussed on Facebook in fact, with people pointing out that lots of places retained hybrid systems -- like the former colonies of the UK. It looks like an attempt to pre-legitimate the claims to public resources of the battalions of lawyers who must be rubbing their hands at the prospect.

I do worry that some of the good legislation might be lost -- the protections for the environment for example (and the propsed Tobin tax on bank transactions, which the UK Government was already trying to get exemption from). But the (pretty weak) argument remains -- we can in principle at least vote out UK governments who push through unpopular legislation

The third legal challenge is being mounted by a UK citizen resident in Italy who was denied a vote, like all the other ex-pats. I am not sure people permanently living abroad should have a say, and I can see Scots Nats being rather keen to keep the existing arrangements.

On the other hand and at last, Larry Elliott is arguing that Remain were the ones who misunderstood. The recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 did indeed leave large areas of the country unaffected,and there are other signs of increasing deprivation. Unlike most commentators, Elliot ses the decisionto leave as a rational one: 'They weighed up the pros and cons – as did US investment banks, the CBI and universities – but came up with a different answer.'. And Brexit has had some good effects -- Osborne is no longer Chancellor and with him has gone all talk of a punishment budget. Austerity is being rowed back, both in the UK and in Europe