Salzburg Thread.
1. What part of No, do you not understand?
That was the message EU leaders delivered to Theresa May
1. What part of No, do you not understand?
That was the message EU leaders delivered to Theresa May
2. You could see it at her press conference : she hadn't been hit so hard since the general election.
This was not supposed to happen.
This was not supposed to happen.
3. But the surprise was in the timing, and perhaps the directness, not the content of Tusk's and Macron's statements
4. Why now? What was it that tipped them over the edge?
Was it May herself, reading out her own article at the summit, as @BrunoWaterfield suggests?
Was it May herself, reading out her own article at the summit, as @BrunoWaterfield suggests?
5. Was it Orban doing for Theresa May what General Galtieri did for Michael Foot?
6. Was it Varadkar, baffled by May's further failure to respond to the "dedramatisation" of the backstop with detailed plans of her own?
7. Or was it the need to finally puncture the complacency of the British negotiation team? Chequers is not resting, it's an ex-proposal.
8. Britain has a red line - there has to be only one customs territory in the UK; and also passed a law - that precludes it being in the same customs territory as the EU - Mogg's wrecking amendment.
9. To some British politicians this law wasn't serious, it could always be undone by another in Britain's infinitely flexible parliament.
10. But pointing out this flexibility has a fatal flaw. It suggests the backstop itself could not be pinned down and enforced.
11. Worse, Michael Gove said that that's exactly what he thought should be done.
12. Either laws are serious, in which case the backstop is impossible and so is a withdrawal agreement; or they are not, in which case Her Majesty's Government is only as good as its word - a word a Cabinet Minister has himself said is mud.
13. Absent a general election there are two things Britain needs to do get out of its self-imposed crisis.
14 . (A) Scottish Tory MPs need to vote for a customs union with the EU, and overturn the Mogg wrecking amendment
15. (B) The Northern Ireland assembly, or as a last resort the people of Northern Ireland, ideally through a convention elected by PR, not a referendum, should be asked whether they would prefer regulatory checks on ferries and at ports or a hard border with the Republic
16. Let's be clear about the stakes - a general election in conditions of political crisis would produce an extreme left government hostile to NATO that tolerates anti-semitism at its highest levels.
17. A functioning US administration would be pressing this point hard. Without one, it is down to the Conservative leadership to extract itself from the mess of its own making. ENDS
