Baudrillard caused Brexit, but Biden will save us

More news of unpleasant yet hopeful confrontation in the Graun:

Tory rebellion widens over Boris Johnson's bill to override Brexit deal

Criticism grows of plan to break international law as EU calls for bill to be dropped

The critics seem to be, naturally enough, a bunch of m'learned friends, irate that politicians should decide things and not them -- or that 'the rule of law be upheld' in the usual terminology. In bewigged pomposity: “Britain is one of the founding fathers of modern democracy and international law and at a time when the rules-based order is eroding, we should be seen to defend it rather than undermine it.”. Stern defenders of the rules include:

Sir Bob Neill, the chair of the justice select committee...Geoffrey Cox, Boris Johnson’s former attorney general... the justice secretary, Robert Buckland...Lord Thomas, the lord chief justice of England and Wales from 2013 to 2017...The Tory MP Tobias Ellwood, chair of the defence select committee,

Heavyweight politicians also joined in:

Former prime ministers Sir John Major and Tony Blair [which should guarantee the Bill's success]... Former Tory leaders Theresa May and Sir Michael Howard...[ditto]...The shadow Cabinet Office minister, Rachel Reeves, confirmed that Labour would also vote against the bill in its current form [unless it revises its pronouns?] ....Meanwhile, there were new calls from Brussels and EU capitals on Sunday for the internal market bill to be dropped [a good sign then].

There is some useful background:

Frost claimed the EU had made it clear there is no guarantee it will add Britain to its list of approved third countries for food imports. But Barnier said it needed details from the UK on its future health standards for food, plant and animal origin products for export, known as sanitary and phytosanitary standards....Johnson claimed that he had been anxious in recent weeks as negotiators believed there was a “serious misunderstanding” about the terms of the withdrawal agreement. He wrote: “We are now hearing that, unless we agree to the EU’s terms, the EU will use an extreme interpretation of the Northern Ireland protocol to impose a full-scale trade border down the Irish Sea.” Johnson described the internal market bill as a “legal safety net” to “protect the free flow of goods and services between NI and the rest of the UK”.

EC weasels have been rumbled, I would say. 

For J Harris in the Graun,all this is not sensible power play, but just beastly Tory divisiveness:

For the right, exploiting prejudices is all that counts. The things that used to be avoided are now being actively encouraged

At the heart of power, there used to be a distinction that allowed onlookers to make at least some sense of what was going on. For the most part, a government’s day-to-day business revolved around outwardly serious plans and policies – presented, however cynically, as being of benefit to the public – and responding to events. But, politics being politics, this solid core was inevitably accompanied by much more superficial stuff: distraction, spin, the kind of things Tony Blair once termed “eye-catching initiatives”....

Now that division seems to have crumbled....Obviously, what decisively tipped the UK in this direction was the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

But Harris wants the clock not only to stop ticking but positively to be turned back. More bread and circuses, more KitKat. Or just more subtle, tasteful and nice ones? The beastly Tories seem to offer only 'stunts and decoys', while ' Old conventions about probity can now safely be ignored'. The old conventions that the Graun tells us propped up colonialism, slavery,  racism, sexism and transphobia?

Strangest of all for a Garunista, he rues that ' the sense of policy becoming the servant of emotional and ephemeral factors has only grown'. More like a Garunista, it is all based on Continental philosophy, of the sort eagerly consumed by prejudiced plebs: 'the French theorist Jean Baudrillard contended that the difference between actuality and mere simulation had long since broken down, a notion encapsulated in the postmodern concept of “hyperreality”'. Lacan is now out of favour? Thank God the Graun told me before I embarked on Response to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung"

As usual, it is all one struggle for the Graun:

Is there any way to put things the right way up? From the possible arrival of Joe Biden in the White House to the idea that the realities of a no-deal Brexit might finally convince leave voters of their folly, the hope of some kind of restoration of rationality haunts 2020. [Nothing on climate change?] But I would not count on it: those feel like thoughts from the last century, long since buried under a landslide it may now be impossible to dig our way out of.

I can't help asking the quoters of Baudrillard and peddlers of strong, simple,  emotional appeals, a strong, simple and emotional question-- whose f***ing fault is that?