Shellshocked but still in hope...

The Gurdians's P Toynbee is worried:

Shellshocked MPs of the sensible tendency are now seriously alarmed. You find them in a daze around Westminster and its news studio green-rooms stunned by Tuesday night’s failure of the modest Cooper amendment to prevent a no-deal crash-out...The shock of the failure of the Cooper amendment was that it was brought down by 25 Labour MPs voting against or abstaining: no one expected many beyond the usual Eurosceptics. But they were joined by sensible people – like Jim McMahon, ex-leader of Oldham or Gloria De Piero and others who understand real-world effects of parliamentary gestures. It was shocking too that eight shadow ministers defying a vital three-line whip – the likes of Tracy Brabin, Melanie Onn, Judith Cummins – were not sacked, unlike those forced to resign in June for voting to stay close to the European Economic Area – which later became Labour policy...Those Labour MPs who broke the whip did great damage. Across the floor are unknown numbers of vacillating Tories who voted to let May have one last forlorn chance at renegotiating her plan, but next time might vote to prevent a no-deal result. Richard Harrington, business minister, says he gives her two weeks, but then will vote to stop no deal. Amber Rudd, Greg Clark, Philip Hammond and other ministers might resign to vote against no deal – and others stand on that brink. But they will only break their own whip and take that plunge if they are certain the numbers are there: looking across at those Labour 25 who wrecked the Cooper amendment, they may calculate it’s not worth making a gallant gesture unless certain to succeed. They need another 12 on top of the 16 Tories who rebelled on Tuesday.

All is not quite lost though: 'referendum campaigners always knew it would only be the last option when all else finally fails.' However, referring to the 2016 referendum:  'Tory leaders pandered to Eurosceptic fever – worst of all David Cameron ceding this lethal referendum.' Some referendums are lethal if they deliver the wrong result, but then Toynbee hopes many Leave voters will have died off.

Toynbee is still not sure where to place her bets as long as something is done:

[May] will return effectively empty-handed from Brussels, needing to tell her party only a softer Norwegian-style deal stands a chance. Delay, rethink, renegotiate – or a final say for the voters – these are all more plausible than the Commons opting for no deal. Though she has badly misjudged every stage of Brexit, even she will surely pull back at the last moment. Why would she want to captain the ship when a no-deal tsunami swamps the decks?  

Meanwhile G Younge seems closer to the issues. He notices that some black people rejected slavery even if it made them better off and goes on:

It has long been a challenge, particularly for those who are comfortable, to understand why anybody who is struggling would choose to be worse off. Liberals can take it particularly personally when those who would most benefit materially from a change in policy or circumstance opt to reject it. The assumption is that they must be misinformed, ill-informed, uninformed, stupid, naive or cruelly misled....Quite why well-off liberals in particular would find someone voting against their material interests such a baffling idea is odd. They do it all the time. Whenever they vote Labour, or for any party that plans to raise taxes on the wealthy and redistribute income, they vote to make themselves worse off materially. True, they are better positioned to take a hit than those at the other end of the income scale. But there’s more to it than that. They do so, for the most part, because when it comes to politics they don’t just vote for their own financial wellbeing. They are thinking about the kind of country and world they want to live in, and the values that they hold dear...The notion that working-class voters approach politics differently is extremely patronising. Indeed it is precisely the kind of attitude that provides fodder to the rightwing culture warriors who rail against the “coastal elites” in the US and “do-gooders”. There really are some liberals who think that they know what’s better for working-class people than working-class people themselves do.

 With some notable exceptions, remain advocates have [forsaken] respectful engagement in favour of a combination of face-palming at the stupidity of lemmings going for a leap and promising Armageddon when they land...it’s not working now. This is partly because leave voters don’t believe the hype. A recent poll showed a significant majority of them believed Brexit posed a less serious crisis than either the financial crash or the miners’ strike. In other words, it’s not that they don’t understand things could get worse; they just feel they’ve been through worse.

Polling by the Centre for Social Investigation [not investigated {sic} further] revealed that remain voters significantly underestimated the importance that leave voters attached to sovereignty. The UK making its own rules came a close second out of four (immigration was first) in the reasons why people voted leave. When remain voters were asked why they thought people had voted leave they put the UK making its own laws last, after “teach British politicians a lesson”...[If] someone argues, “If you do this your factory might close,” you might respond: “It’s not my factory and ‘they’ve’ been closing factories around here for years. But it is my country and I don’t want ‘them’ messing with it.” In this story “they” is a moving target. It could be immigrants, it could be Brussels, it could be foreign companies. The only thing “we” know for sure is it’s not “us”.

Younge does well at the end, despite failing to acknowledge that the EU is now on the wrong side:

And it is fanciful about our future: our political sovereignty, like everybody else’s, is primarily constrained not by Brussels, but international capital. And since you can’t vote to leave that, staying in or out of the EU will make us less effective, but not more independent. But I also think, in the absence of other stories, it is compelling. Far more compelling than the threat of a scarcity of fresh vegetables and a run on the pound if we crash out with no deal.

The Grudnia, in a rare piece based on what Leave voters actually say continues the theme: 

Poverty may be acceptable price, say some in seat where Labour MP voted against Cooper proposal

[The local MP] was one of 14 Labour MPs to defy the party whip and vote against Yvette Cooper’s delaying amendment. “It is clear from the feedback I’ve had from constituents in recent days that many people saw this amendment as nothing more than an attempt to delay and frustrate Brexit,” she said.

However, the stereotype persists in the quote from one voter: 'It will be terrible but I still want it, because of immigration.”', although another voter, an immigrant herself said: '"coming here has broadened my mind … there aren’t as many jobs and many of them are on lower pay.”'

Kettle off the boil

Further signs of depression and dis-May in the Guadrina today. M Kettle now has a rather thin prospect of hope,now that the Tories seem to have voted both for a deal and for re-negotiation of a bit of it ( which will be the most important of the two remains[sic] to be seen).

Kettle now seems to be relying on Labour, but only after it organises a coup of its own:

In spite of the upbeat signals that came from Jeremy Corbyn’s meeting with Theresa May on Wednesday, experience suggests that it will not prove a turning point on Brexit....The only thing that would seem to unite them is that both want Brexit to happen, preferably under a Conservative government....Having claimed hers was the only possible deal, May has now pledged to try to change the Northern Ireland backstop arrangement in order to keep her right wing on board. Corbyn, meanwhile, wants her to adopt a soft Brexit approach that would, if she embraced it, trigger a full-scale revolt from her own side and from the Democratic Unionists.... May has less need of [cross-party support]  now. She has regained a bit of control. Her hardliners kept their swords sheathed. The chief whip and the chairman of the Tory backbenchers both played skilful hands, while pro-remain MPs overplayed theirs this time. A second referendum now looks a more distant prospect

On the PV, the Times is reporting splits in the movement between those who want to keep it as a single issue lobby and those who want to use it as the basis for a new political party

Kettle hasn't lost all hope though. There is the strange liberal prayer for further turmoil and indecision:

the vote for the Brady amendment was a vote for something that is both vague and unlikely to happen. The European Union has little incentive to agree to it. And, assuming that it will not happen, certainly not in the small window of time now available, it seems odds-on that May will soon be struggling to find a majority once more....This brings us back to the role that Corbyn may yet play. For most of the parliamentary Brexit process, Corbyn has been a large but inert presence. Brexit politics has happened around him, not with or through him. He remains content, it seems, to go through the motions but not to get his hands dirty. Up to a point, it has been a coherent strategy if your three priorities, like Corbyn’s, are for Brexit to happen, for the Tories to own it, and for your own pristine politics to remain unsullied by the most important argument facing the country...

Then for some new Labour [sic] people to emerge to replace Corbyn:

One pressure is that backbenchers in his party – such as Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn – have emerged as de facto Labour figureheads [really?]. Another is that May has begun to engage with workplace and environmental regulatory issues that Labour cares about.

And some fantasy politics where all right-thinking nice people rally round:

A more adept Labour leader would have been reaching out relentlessly to Tory moderates over recent months on the customs elements of the eventual UK-EU trade deal, searching for common ground and looking for ways to ensnare them in a shared commitment to the open borders and regulatory alignment that the hard Brexiters so loathe....Such a thing may yet happen anyway. If May fails to get the changes from the EU that she seeks, and if this week’s Tory party unity comes under strain, as it may, then a space could open up for a softer Brexit deal...

And of course, the unproblematic 'national interest':

Even Corbyn must see what is now at stake, and why engaging seriously with May is overwhelmingly in the country’s interest.

On the latter, a GNU was spotted again last night on C4 News

Partisan journalism -- let's trust (some) politicians*

The Guardina's R Behr is on good form today after the disappointments.He demonstrates the utter irrationality of the supporters:

Inside the addict’s head the most important thing is getting to the next Brexit fix, scoring the best deal. But from the outside, to our European friends and family [lovely image] , it is obvious that the problem is the compulsive pursuit of a product that does us only harm...

After all their hopes, the wrecking/leaving amendments failed, and Behr has to rationalize that too:

Some MPs can see the situation spiralling out of control. Today 298 lined up to demand an intervention. They backed a cross-party bid to seize control of the Brexit agenda from the government and delay the day of departure if necessary. But the move failed [so is a majority important or not?] . There is ample horror of the no-deal scenario across the Commons (a vaguer condemnation of that option won a narrow majority), but clearly the greater fear is association with anything that looks like an active plot to thwart Brexit [cowardice rather than representing their constituents] . Yvette Cooper and Nick Boles, sponsors of the more controversial amendment, insisted their aim was only to guarantee an orderly departure, and there is no reason to doubt them [Jesus!]

Behr is eager to trot out the line we heard endlessly on TV last night --that the only purpose of the Irish backstop provision is to prevent a hard border which will threaten peace:  'The backstop only exists because May’s Brexit red lines could not be bent around the Good Friday agreement any other way.' Nothing to do with trade terms or punishing Britain! Nothing has been said to remove the threat of a hard border once the EC realized they would have to be the ones to install it.

What Remainers and the EU do is high-minded and civilized  politics aimed at world peace. For others, however:

It is the bluff that Britain holds all the cards, and that if we show enough contempt for treaties and economic logic, Brussels will be intimidated into granting favours that could not be won by conventional diplomacy. There are two possible reasons for pursuing that strategy. One is stupidity: failure to grasp what the negotiations so far have actually been about and how May’s deal was their logical outcome. The second is cynical vandalism: knowing that the plan will fail and hoping, when it does, to pin blame for a chaotic no-deal Brexit on Brussels intransigence.

And/or it is all cynical party politics, but only on one side, of course:

May still acts as if Brexit is something that must be settled to the satisfaction of the Conservative party first, and only then shared with the rest of Europe. The British public is at the very back of the queue [how a Remainer can write that last sentence is beyond belief]

Only the EU ever had a realistic view:

They expected May to start building bridges from the leavers’ fantasy island to the reality of what was available in negotiations with a bloc of 27 countries – the imbalance of power and the calculus of damage limitation....But May never confronted that logic. When she took the referendum result as her personal mission she also anointed herself with sacred oils of Brexiteer mythology. Her inscrutable demeanour and robotic speeches conceal a fervour that would be instantly identifiable as demagogy in a more expressive politician. At first, the prime minister’s rigid mask tricked Europeans into thinking she was a reasonable and capable person. It had a similar effect on the domestic audience...Her parochial mediocrity has nurtured the complacent assumption that the worst cannot happen here, that we are, at heart, a pragmatic nation not given to fanatical lurches.

The contempt and desperate management of any possible objection to Remaining is concluded thus:

It is obvious that Brexit is a disaster [except to half the country and a lot of MPs but we've devalued or ignored them], yet still so many MPs observe a taboo against saying that it should be stopped [perhaps because they don't think it should be -- and stopped how? By coup?]. To our continental friends and neighbours it is scarcely comprehensible. It looks like British social awkwardness [cultural cringe now?] elevated to the scale of a constitutional meltdown

May goes back to Brussels...

After a busy night in Parliament, some public despair for Remainers (for now),after a couple of delaying or wrecking amendments were defeated. One amendment urging the Government to reject no deal was passed. So was a Government-sponsored one urging the PM to return to Brussels to renegotiate the backstop. Curiously, as a number of commentators pointed out, this contradicted the PM's earlier claim that no further dealing was possible. The mugs don't really understand pragmatic politics or negotiation and were also bleating (C4 and Newsnight), that the EU had rejected any chance to renegotiate, so it was all pointless, ignoring the recent wobbling over them having to install a hard border if no deal. EU speaks as last word/revealed truth/only sensible option etc.So:

MPs have voted for a fantasy. It’s an indictment of our entire political class

J. Freedland is left with a consoling fantasy of his own, that one day the truth will come out at a Chilcott -style public enquiry. It will uncover the serial lies told during the campaign (the bus is the main one, of course):

Almost everyone involved, from both main parties, showed themselves to be immersed in delusion, trading fantasies and absurdities, each one refusing to meet reality’s eye, let alone tackle it head on...Theresa May had repeated endlessly, and for weeks, that her deal was the only deal on offer. Yet there she was, standing at the despatch box urging MPs to vote for an amendment that trashes that very same deal...First, it’s really no great achievement to get MPs to agree that they’d like the good bits of a deal but don’t want to swallow the bad bits [notquite trashing the whole deal then]: yes to the sugar, no to the pill. The Tories have united around a position that says they’d like the benefits of the withdrawal agreement, without paying all the costs [sounds perfectly sensible tome]...It’s the familiar Brexit delusion, which Brussels took all of six minutes to crush, by declaring – for the millionth time – that “the withdrawal agreement is not open for renegotiation.” 

Freedland does have some good points to make:

it was that same logic that saw them [Leavers]  win the referendum itself. Their message back then boiled down to: do you want to stay in the European Union, with all its concrete, visible flaws, or would you like “alternative arrangements”? What we’ve all learned since is that the moment an “alternative” becomes real, it loses its all-things-to-all-people appeal.

Quite right -- but applicable to all political policies,a fortiori to the Remainers, who cannot even develop any 'real' intentions because they are entirely negative and conservative. Freedland thinks history will absolve him -- and the delayers:

[any future enquiry will surely forgive]  the handful of MPs who are using every parliamentary wile they can to stop the country from slamming into the iceberg. The names Grieve, Cooper, Boles and others may earn themselves an admiring footnote in the report that will eventually come.

Freedland is especially venomous to the 14 Labour MPs who voted for the amendments,despite a 3-line whip:

14 Labour rebels ... concluded that even a slight delay to Brexit [who is he kidding]  – just a few months – poses more of a threat to their constituents than a crash-out that could see shortages of food and medicine, with more warnings along those lines coming this morning from the leader of a major hospitals group. The future public inquiry into this horror show will damn those 14 especially.

Interestingly, there is a report in the Times that Boles is coming under fire from his constituency and risks deselectio.

Meanwhile, el Grunida carries extracts from reports of the vote in European newspapers. They seem to grasp the politics a bit more accurately, but also look a bit panicky:

Theresa May is now risking a major showdown with the EU and increasing the danger of a damaging no-deal departure,” writes Le Monde’s London correspondent, Philippe Bernard....“As risky as it is, she intends to run down the clock so as to force the EU27 into making concessions before 29 March. And then, if necessary, blame the EU – an easy scapegoat – for eventual failure.”... Björn Finke in the Süddeutsche Zeitung says...May’s weakness is dangerous, for Britain and for the rest of the EU.”...It is true that this “worries the Europeans”, Vidal-Folch [of El Pais] says. “That’s why they’re drawing up contingency plans, which only remind them of the losses ahead. But those who’ll suffer the most damage are the British themselves....NRC Handelsblad in the Netherlands is equally brutal. “To save her Brexit deal, avoid a split in her party and retain the minimum of control a prime minister needs, May aims to provoke a conflict with the EU,”...Libération, France’s leftwing daily, detects a familiar British strategy behind Tuesday evening’s “utterly absurd” scenes in the Commons. “From now till mid-February, aided by the Eurosceptic press, she can deploy the classic British rhetoric: those intransigent, arrogant Europeans are refusing to give us what we want...“Then she can say, ‘I tried, but this is the only deal on the table.’ She is counting on fear of a no deal to win MPs round. It’s a very big gamble, and it could backfire, lamentably.”

Guardian anomalies

Interesting insights today in the Gurdian story: 

Peers and MPs receiving millions in EU farm subsidies

Analysis by Guardian and Friends of the Earth raises questions about impartiality in post-Brexit reform

All the politicians concerned declared their receipt of money, apparently. There are clearly risks of stoking hostility to an already unpopular EU policy , but there are other interesting features of the story. The GUrdnia clearly has allies among Friends of the Earth as well as Remainers. There must be some split loyalites, as there are in all single-issue alliances. 

Secondly, the sting of this story might be that it stokes hostility to one of the targets of the new petit-bourgeoisie -- the aristocracy, despised almost as much as the proletariat. 

The largest single payment – £473,000 – was paid to a Sussex farming firm run by the 18th Duke of Norfolk, a large landowner whose estate dates from the middle ages...Conservative MP Richard Drax, descendant of a 19th-century slave-owner and current resident of the family ancestral seat of Charborough House in Dorset, owns a farm that received £411,000.

 
Thirdly, there is a surprising note of resignation -- this article discusses what happens when the UK leaves the EU, not if. If the Remain cause is lost, maybe the old ones need reviving in the interests of future distanciation?

Elsewhere,it is Graun business as usual. J Harris denounces the racism and intolerance of the English ( mostly the working class English). It all sounds so reasonable at first:

It’s time we started building a new England – one that is modern, diverse and open...To use a phrase habitually deployed by the prime minister herself, what kind of country do we want to be? Put another way, who are we?

But before long it is the same old same old:

England [Celts are forgiven as usual --see below] has come to be understood as a country awash with furies and resentments. Politicians have seen that a significant part of its population apparently thinks that immigration is inherently problematic and ought to be the focus of endless crackdowns, and that supposed benefit “cheats” deserve the same treatment.

There is the usual sort of 'evidence':

When I am out reporting, it usually seems that most of us remain essentially mild, moderate people, seemingly open to compromise. But everyday examples of the worst of the Brexit spirit are easy to find...[as when you talk to staff in a language-learning company, rather than English proles themselves]...staff who had moved to the UK from across Europe, and who had recently started to experience a mixture of discomfort and estrangement. 

There might be something in economic determinism, Harris thinks, but then: 

why do much the same Brexit-ish instincts and opinions run so deep among affluent people with no obvious axe to grind? What students of Marxism would call economic determinism has its place, but it risks constant denial of the fact that politics has long since slipped free of the old simplicities of class and economic complaint. Culture matters. The political right understood this a long time ago, selling a brand of Englishness replete with the reactionary instincts that exploded in June 2016. In his brilliant Brexit book The Lure of Greatness, the writer and activist Anthony Barnett  [of course -- a writer].

Back to an earlier Graun enthusiasm for Scots Nattery, at least at the petit-bourgeois cultural level:

Five years ago I watched a grassroots movement in Scotland lead a conversation about leaving the UK behind, and moving on from an old, patriarchal, hidebound view of their own country....after long years of groundwork, the conversation about a new Scotland had been updated by a coalition of organisations that stood well apart from party politics, known at the time as “the third Scotland”, because of its distance from both the SNP and the Labour party.

If only the nice people of England would rise up:

As against imperial delusions and English exceptionalism, it is time we talked about the realities of our past and a future that necessarily involves being part of Europe – and the fact that in the 21st century, the movement of people is a basic fact of life. I know what a modern, open, accepting, diverse vision of my country looks like: I see it not just in Bristol, Manchester, Leicester, Leeds, and Birmingham [on Remainer demos? Writing workshops?] , but in endless small kindnesses in places that are too often either ignored or reduced to a Brexit-supporting caricature [by him among others] . We need to seize on such examples and make the case for a new England. 

EU conservatism matches Remainer conservatism?*

Another piece in the Observer today, from J Cliffe,  'the Charlemagne columnist and Brussels bureau chief at the Economist', about the underlying appeal of the EU --its cultural conservatism:

The motivations and instincts of our continental partners sometimes baffle us Brits. To un-baffle ourselves, a useful principle is that most of what the EU and its leading members say or do can be traced back to the quest for the quiet life....the European project knows no higher ideal than calm good living...Europe’s quest for the quiet life goes much further. The EU and most of its states were born or reborn from the rubble of war and the traumas of totalitarianism...The opposite of horror and cataclysm is the quiet life... the European lifestyle such as long holidays and universal healthcare...[the EU] ...generally values the stability of uniformity above the bracing fizz of difference. It is unremittingly defensive.

Cliffe argues that the Brits do not understand this (literally reactionary) quest for a quiet life, but in my view, Remainers share it. Their quiet life especially means unemployment and poverty are safely confined to areas where they do not live , where there are no quiet gardens, no long holidays and highly restricted healthcare, where there is street violence and drugs and authoritarian officials operating Universal Credit. The 'European' lifestyle has done very well for them and they want to keep it.

Of course, there is absolutely no guarantee that Brexit will deliver any alternative -- that would require a socialist government (probably not one of the Corbyn gestural tendency). If we ever get one and we are still in the EU, we will see a rather nastier side of EU conservatism, I suspect.

More fake news --from the Observer!

Similar techniques in today's Obsever to those used in its stablemate el Guradino. Eg headline:

UK firms plan mass exodus if May allows no-deal Brexit 

Copy:

Thousands of British companies have already triggered emergency plans to cope with a no-deal Brexit, with many gearing up to move operations abroad if the UK crashes out of the EU, according to the British Chambers of Commerce....the BCC said it believed companies that had already gone ahead with their plans represented the “tip of the iceberg” and that many of its 75,000 members were already spending vital funds to prepare for a disorderly exit

But then:

in recent days alone, it had been told that 35 firms had activated plans to move operations out of the UK, or were stockpiling goods to combat the worst effects of Brexit.[my emphases]

Then a mention for the latest no Brexit heroine, further puffed, together with support for the other amendments coming up -- interestingly, that piece starts with reminding us that:

The local MP, Labour’s Yvette Cooper, led lengthy campaigns to save both [below] . She sought investors and EU state aid [and did she get any?] , met ministers and executives and fought for fair redundancy packages and skills training for those affected. But the campaigns to keep the power station and pit going were ultimately doomed.

Back to the first piece, we are told that now:

Labour MP Yvette Cooper has revealed to the Observer that two major employers in her West Yorkshire constituency – luxury goods manufacturer Burberry and confectioner Haribo – had both written to her, warning of the damaging effects of no deal on their UK operations.

Meanwhile: 

European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has warned Theresa May in a private phone call that shifting her position in favour of a permanent customs union is the price she will need to pay for the EU revising the Irish backstop.

Juncker supports Labour!