She was only pining for the fjords...

Great news! P Toynbee seems to have regained consciousness! She managed to write a whole story about health policy without mentioning, let alone blaming,Brexit!   No worries that the supply of syringe drivers will dry up after Brexit or that supplies of diamorphine will be held up at Dover. A sound argument as well. I am delighted she is on the mend.

R Behr, by contrast, shows the usual frustrating case of Durgiand analysis struggling with ludicrous pro-EU sentiment -- and losing. He notices that politics these days is often about apeparances rather than solid policies, 'performance', 'entertainment', 'show', a 'cult of political celebrity'. It's a bit late (my copy of The Society of the Spectacle has an inch of dust on it), but better than never.

But then -- who is to be the main target for this insightful account?  Boris Johnson (specifically over his hypocrisy over the vote to extend the runway at Heathrow), and, of course, the Brexiteers. As an aside,the public change of mind when D Grieve voted against his own amendment is forgiven as 'legal fastidiousness' and 'lawyerly concern'.

The main example turns on the same rather sad (for Remainers) collapse of the last attempt to stop the progress of the Great Repeal Bill by trying to insist  that Parliament should have a 'meaningful vote' (so there are meaningless votes?) on the final agreed settlement. For Behr: 

...remainers never get any traction with one of their favourite arguments: they accuse leavers of hypocrisy for not wanting parliament to have a stronger say in Brexit. After all, wasn’t parliamentary sovereignty the great cause of Euroscepticism? Yet this isn’t the great “Gotcha!” that pro-Europeans think it is. The charge is logical but Brexit was never a promise of analytical rigour. Johnson and Nigel Farage aren’t shamed by inconsistency. They measure success in laughter and applause. The leave campaign was a show, not a lecture (which helps to explain why it won).

So the Remain case was simply logical. So was the Remain side in the silly and hypocritical politicians' spat over who was the best representative of Parliamentary sovereignty. Probably neither side really cared a stuff about Parliamentary sovereignty as an abstract issue -- Behr admites the context was the struggle over opposing Brexit. One side suggested sovereignty lay in the ultimate power of Parliament to pass a vote of no confidence in the Government, while the other argued for a more detailed kind of sovereignty involving the ability to intervene in detail during negotiations. Both scenarios are abstract and unlikely, but the argument here is about the sovereignty of the whole House of Commons vis a vis the Government. A different dimension is involved when one side wants  (only legal) UK Parliamentary sovereignty in opposition to the unelected institutions of the EU. Remainers are usually silent about this issue. Perhaps Remainer spokespersons, incuding Behr, were hoping the poor old dim electorate would confuse the two?

The leave campaign was a show -- but not the Remain campaign, Project Fear, all the early hype about the money the EU gave us, the accusations of racism, the big march last week, the endless tide of sentimental waffle and partisanship on the BBC and in the Grauniad. As I have argued before, this sort of blatant favourtism and activism convinces no-one, and probably makes people suspect that journalism is a show as well.