Brexit

Brexit or Alice In Wonderland (Again)

I'm Alice, by the way. wondering at the madness of it all.

I recently read an article in which Brexit was likened to an onion: you peel away a layer and find another underneath, which you peel away to find…....etc ad nauseam. So, to summarise the most recent developments that seem pertinent to me, they are:

1 The highest legal authority in Scotland is to back the High Court ruling in the UK Supreme Court appeal.

2 A consitutional lawyer in the UK has reported the Leave campaign to the CPS.

3 The EU is to debate an amendment that would allow UK individuals to keep EU citizenship if they wished.

4 Jeremy Corbyn has declared that the Labour Party will not oppose the Brexit result.

Let's take each of these in turn.

The Scottish action might have been anticipated. What it does is to strengthen the case aganst the appeal which appears to be quite strong anyway. Unless the government can get at the Supreme Court in some way, my guess is that the Supreme Court will uphold the High Court ruling but that that may have little consequence anyway. The majority of MPs seems to cling supinely to respect(?) for the referendum result and debate will result at most in a «soft Brexit» (see below).

Reporting of the Leave campaign to the CPS (Criminal Prosecution Service) was a surprise to me, even if I have been campaigning to have the gutter press reported to the PCC. It turns out that deliberately and knowingly misleading people to obtain electoral advantage is a criminal offence, of which the Leave campaign is most evidently guilty. But will the CPS take up the case? My guess is that, unless there are some serious renegades in the CPS, government pressure will ensure that the CPS finds some reason not to take the matter further. They'll cite insufficient evidence or some such.

The EU amendment that could allow UK citizens to retain EU-granted rights is an interesting one, one that could even go as far as the European Court of Justice. My guess is that the EU will probably reject this initially, unless mischievous elements in the EU can see that this would create Mayhem (sic) in the UK and would love to see that, but an appeal to the European Court of Justice, if that happened, might just succeed.

Lastly, Jeremy Corbyn's statement that the Labour Party will not oppose the Brexit result. There's a saying: when in a hole, stop digging, to which Corbyn seems impervious. By implication what he seeks to achieve (secure UK jobs, etc) is a so-called «soft Brexit». This is a quite possible outcome but the one that will please fewest, even if it avoids apparent economic suicide. It won't please Remainers because they will be outside the EU; and it won't please Leavers because it will limit control on EU immigration and legislation. So it is not going to attract many votes. In a stroke, Corbyn with pristine socialist (Marxist?) principles intact, dumps the Labour Party on the political scrapheap. The Lib-Dems being more or less invisible, the Tory Party will be able to do what it wants, restricted only by the judiciary that it can't get at.

There are some great corollaries. If May loses the Supreme Court appeal she can appeal to the European Court of Justice. Would she do that???????? If, it's a very big IF, the CPS does take up the «election fraud» case, decides to prosecute and finds the Leave Campaign guilty, who does what and when? It really is pure Alice In Wonderland.

What does Alice think? She thinks that the only rational outcomes are a hard Brexit, with the UK in a probable economic recession for at least a decade, or rejection of the referendum result. But, as Alice knows, rationality doesn't come into it; we're in Wonderland The most likely result? A soft-ish Brexit, a country forever divided, nobody pleased, numerous scarce resources necessarily applied to matters that shouldn't have needed to be addressed. She asks: why hasn't anyone the guts to admit that this was all an awful mistake?