Thread by @Staedtler

The Eight Fuck ups of Brexit.

Set the scene
The Tories are split over Europe, but they keep winning elections. The country won't stop voting for them, and they won't stop squabbling.

Cameron was in coalition with the Lib Dems for five years, so Europe didn't come up much. Then he won a majority of 10.
So far so ordinary

Fuck Up Number 1

Labour elected Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn was, and indeed still is, a crank. The first warning sign the country was sick was the huge number of people who ever thought he was fit to lead a party, never mind plausible prime minister.

Fuck Up Number 2

The nature of David Cameron's Brexit referendum. A bit of background

Britain's democracy is weak. The House of Lords is unelected and often ineffectual. There is no presidency, so there is no real separation of government from parliament

Britain's parliament provides opposition, yes, but no real obstruction. It's one of those things the English talk around but never address.

There is nothing wrong with holding referendums, but it needs some rigour or you can have a referendum on any old ill considered toss.

Cameron's referendum had no rigour. Parliament was incapable of applying any.
What provision should be made for the result? What should happen in the event of a Brexit win? What exactly were people voting for? What style of majority through the four nations should enact it?

Nobody bothered with any of that. parliament didn't demand anything, the House of Lords didn't ask, and the Queen is just a puppet, so no use expecting anything of her.

The referendum was undefined, so anyone could project their own fantasy onto it. This allowed everyone to vote for whatever was in their own head without bothering to ask what they were voting to happen in effect.

Boris Johnson sabotaged the Tories because he wanted to be prime minister and thought he was going to be up against George Osborne. So he promoted Brexit to establish his street cred with the gammon tendency.

That doesn't count as a fuck up, that's just the nature of politics.

The referendum result came out 52% leave, 48% remain.
It's also true that Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain, while England and Wales voted leave.

Had parliament established what was to happen as a result of the referendum, it would also have had to establish the nature of majority that triggered that action.
As it was they left it all undefined because our parliament is useless and crap at everything.

Fuck Up Number 3

David Cameron resigned. To me that was one of those petulant, vain and ugly behaviours you often get from public schoolboys bloated with entitlement.
Cameron snooted his nose in the air and walked off as though we had all let him down.

Cameron had held a referendum and it had come out in a mess, and instead of staying to take responsibility he walked off and left it hanging in the air.
It needed leadership, and there was none.

Fuck Up Number 4

Theresa May took over from Cameron and gave Article 50 notice. She didn't have a clue what she was doing, and yet again parliament failed to scrutinise.
Parliament never asks the right questions because it's full of weak men who want favour

Fuck Up Number 5

After giving Article 50 notice Theresa May held a general election.
Why, in the name of god?
Because she did not think she had sufficient majority to survive all the betrayals and compromise she was going to have to make.

Why, you may ask, why did she give Article 50 notice if she didn't think she had the majority to conclude it?

Who knows? Because she was a fool? It is, I'm told, a common affliction among politicians.

Fuck Up Number 6
Theresa May should have resigned when she lost her majority. Another example of obsessive arrogance that she thought she could ever conclude Brexit after losing he parliamentary majority.

If may had resigned the Tories could have chosen another leader and had a serious think about what they wanted to do.
But she spent two years bedblocking and achieving nothing.

Fuck Up Number 7
Theresa May wanted to stay in the single market and customs union. This was so deluded it was unbelievable.
Boris Johnson wanted her job, so her soft Brexit forced him into the more extreme position to oppose her.

May's stubborn refusal to resign pushed Johnson to a hard Brexit, her plans came to nothing - as was inevitable from the day she lost her majority - and Johnson took over an inoperative parliament.

Johnson took over the Tory leadership, purged the remainers, turning the party into UKIP pretty much.
In the end the way the Tories dealt with their Euro nutter problem was to let the nutters take over the party.
Uniting them, at least.

Labour had all sorts of fuck ups of their own during all this, but they were never in government so none of their fuck ups carried national responsibility.

Fuck Up Number 8
Only number 8? Yes, because though there were lots of other mistakes by many many people, we're only counting those mistakes of misgovernment that led the country to destruction.

Fuck Up Number 8, as I was saying.
Boris Johnson signed an agreement with Europe that he could never live up to.
That was the big one, the complete system failure of the country.

Nobody scrutinised Johnson's intentions when he signed his agreement.
The Tories never questioned, Labour never opposed, the backbenches never scrutinised, the media never interrogated.
A system failure of the entire governing class of England.

It's obvious now that Johnson only ever signed his agreement with the intention of going back on it later.

Johnson will have to resign, of course, because he hasn't been able to get Brexit done like he not only boasted that he would but laughably even boasted that he had.

I think the inevitable result now is the break up of the United Kingdom.
It looks like we've had a catastrophic constitutional breakdown, and with nobody apparently capable of perceiving it, never mind fixing it.

Except me and you, of course. Throughout the failures of parliament and the media, the one place where you've actually found valid information is twitter.

So here is our situation. Johnson has agreed a treaty that partitions the United Kingdom in the Irish Sea. He has now repudiated his own treaty.
The only other treaty available was Theresa May's customs union which he rejected.

The result is that Johnson will now have to agree something that he cannot politically survive.
Split the United Kingdom, split his government and his party and resign in disgrace.
Or agree a customs union, split his party and resign in chaos.

It's most likely now that Scotland will vote for independence, and the union will end because the English couldn't learn to control themselves.

And that's how a country destroys itself. It was really quite easy in the end. Wasn't it?