Oh damn, still in this dream.

Boris’s brother, Joe, has done a Brutus and resigned, or as good as...

Wow!

The new term starts. Bojo now has to cope with rebellions, cross-party alliances and all the razzmatazz that accompanies such high-stakes constitutional gambling.

Having come across as Uncle Benito in a child's Winnie-the-Pooh costume, because Dominic told him he had to be strict-and-stern to stop the nasty splitters splitting, he now has to deal with a temporarily united opposition.

Of course, the Labour party have finally realised that Bojo still holds trump cards: he can be forced to go to the EU and beg for an extension period, but he can veto it too. (It's in the rules that any member can veto an extension and until we leave; Boris has that vote.) He can be forced to hold a general election, but he can always put back the election date to past our leaving date for a perfect fait accompli. His hands can't be tied. And he cannot be trusted. So he has to be forced out and replaced by a government of national unity for the remainder of the Fixed Term Parliament.

And that's not going to happen.

This is going right to the wire.

www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2019/08/28/johnson-disregards-history-as-british-forces-readied-to-combat-unrest-in-north-of-ireland/

And it appears that the GFA is toast.

The nightmare continues. After a history between England and Ireland spanning millennia, in the last five hundred or so years the occasional periods of peace have been firstly, hard-won, and after some period tossed aside as irrelevant for reasons of "greater issues".

You bastards. You have sacrificed one of those sustained periods of peace to an ideological insanity.

What can a person do? Shout it from the rooftops? Carry placards? Lie in the bath drinking your best Falernian, conversing with your friends; and opening the vein? Pull the duvet cover over your head?

Decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/26/brexit-shutting-down-parliament-gravest-abuse-of-power-in-living-memory-legal-advice

They’ve just cottoned on, you know. And Lady Chakrabarti, although Shadow Attorney General, may have a position which she views this from.

Boris can legitimately argue that parliament has already voted to leave under any circumstances on the 31st Oct. The deal is done and dusted. This is what happens when people vote stupidly, whether they are in parliament, or the general population; or those enfranchised thereof.

I guess I’d say to the 52% that you have brought this upon yourselves, and us all. And the sensible minority among us now have to find a way to repair the damage you have caused. But under our breaths we shall curse you. And when misfortune befalls you we will have some secret joy.

But you’ve done your job; all those snowflake lefties, moderates, old-fashioned folk, gun control hypocrites, etc are all so angry that instead of prayers at night, they probably take a poppet made in one of your heroes’ likeness and stick it full of pins, just to make them feel better. Old-fashioned English sympathetic magic? Well I did read about some pagan chaps who were doing whatever it is they do against Boris and his ilk, but I’ve always thought of that sort of thing as the perfect definition of reaching for the impossible. But I can see it being comforting for some, otherwise powerless folk.

You’ve weaponised the peaceniks, how very droll. And Boris as the cat’s paw, that’s even droller.

...it does rather seem as if it is one he clutches to his manly breast as a totemic good-luck charm. After all, it has gotten him this far.

www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/25/britain-can-easily-cope-with-no-deal-brexit-claims-boris-johnson

www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/26/eu-would-block-trade-deal-if-britain-reneged-on-brexit-bill

But let's see what happens.

One thing certainly has to happen with the next government; the repeal of the Fixed-Term Parliament Act. I don't fucking care about party nonsense; we cannot have this constitutional crisis happen again. Cameron and Osborne's brilliant ideas have put us in this mess. The comparisons with Lord North aren't good enough, I'm afraid. Cameron and Osborne have landed us in worse shit than North ever did. North only lost us the US colonies. Cameron and Osborne stitched up the country in order to patch up their party; and I wonder if party before country is one definition of treason through oversight? It's like accidental manslaughter. It's just the body within the lines is in this case our body politic; slain through unforeseen consequences.

If I were Cameron or Osborne I would have hied me to a monastery to live out my life in prayer, hoping for forgiveness.

As is, this has left us with Bojo the Clown as our Premier. Boris has put on a serious face as the odds of no deal have dropped from a million-to-one to touch-and-go as the EU have refused to throw the GFA under a bus. And this is what it is all about. Because Brexit is incompatible with the GFA one has to go, and democratically speaking, the folk in the UK have voted to ditch the GFA after being lied to quite a bit. Including about the GFA and Brexit being compatible.

Boris knows that he will be arming and recruiting the new IRA with these actions. Rees-Mogg knows this too. But I guess their personal advantage must be such that they are prepared to ignore the consequences of their actions for the rest of us.

That's good government for you.

Have had unintended consequences:

www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/07/dominic-cummings-takes-swipe-at-greive-over-confidence-vote-plan

And now neither Cameron or Osborne can fix this mess. Thanks to the Fixed-Term Parliament Act we will now have a guaranteed no-deal Brexit on the 31st October. Even should Boris lose a no-confidence vote he need only call the election to happen after the legally mandated Brexit date has passed.

Boris and chums are still trying to throw the GFA under a bus, however the US Irish caucus may have something to say about that. I know, as I have rellies who are part of that US Irish caucus, and rellies on both sides of the Irish Border, and the family grapevine yields the odd snippets of intent.

The stupid fucking Brexit berserkers don’t seem to have taken the US Irish lobby into account in their blanket dismissal of the New Irish Question. I hope they are prepared to accept the blame when it all goes wrong. Because they will be blamed, both publicly and privately. Here is an analysis from an Irish person on the border.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/07/northern-ireland-hard-border-brexit-customs

I did hear that the Camerons and Osbornes were snubbed quite a bit after the Brexit vote. I wonder if the authors of the Fixed-Term Parliament Act will feel the same chill social wind?

The UK’s constitutional crisis continues to unfold as predicted. So far each of the points have been reached and ticked. All it needs now is for HM to die and we shall be totally and completely fucked.

Will this matter?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/21/police-called-to-loud-altercation-at-boris-johnsons-home

IIRC Boris was in college at Eton - a scholar who had his fees paid because he was brainy enough to have really aced the scholarship exam. In our day that mattered; as more than one OE has mentioned to me after I remarked that they ended their days as an Oppidan Scholar "It doesn't count unless you start as a scholar." And though, in prewar years, collegers were regarded as clever oiks; around the time of the late '60's and '70's scholarship was briefly in vogue. And Boris was a scholar in that period, and this rather accounts for his reputation for cleverness. And it must be said, at that time, only Wykehamist Scholars and Queen's Scholars at Westminster could be considered his rivals. (It also must be remembered that at this period boy's schools outperformed girl's schools by an unfortunate margin - Expectations? Social constraints? The causes need looking at, obvs.)

Now I disagree with Boris on a lot of things. And I think he's an overachieving chancer with a predisposition to make it up as he goes along. But I've seen humans, and that is most of us barring the saints. As a bloke and a person he evidently has his own demons to deal with, and you know, I hope he can get things sorted, because he always was charismatic, personable, and able within limits; if a bit chaotic and prone to extempore demagoguery. Surrounded by technicians, Boris could do all right given a level playing field. However...

Some drunk fucker drove a bus (with its sides plastered with insane promises) over the playing surface overnight; and that someone looks suspiciously like Boris.

Even so, if a chap is having a bit of a domestic with his GF, he has a right to do so in private as long as no-one is threatened or intimidated.

It worked so well for Charles I.

So we have a second long parliament. Big deal.

Which I blogged about here there is this:

www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/12/universal-credit-delays-a-factor-in-prostitution-government-accepts

Wherein we find that:

Donna Ward, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) senior civil servant responsible for children, families and disadvantage, told the committee chair, Frank Field, that it had fact-checked Alston’s report, which had in passing referred to a rise in survival sex.

“He made a lot of good points. It was factually correct,” she said. “I think where the secretary of state took issue with it, and where I as a civil servant can’t be involved, was the political interpretation of a lot of what’s happened.

“But in terms of the facts, in terms of austerity, cuts to local government, in terms of the reliance that we have on the labour market and the risks we face if there is a recession – all of those things were really good points that we have taken on board, and we should take on board.”

Our last two governments have been pretty disgusting institutional pimps. And now they are admitting it, but no-one appears to care very much.

Where is the sense of institutional shame? When the BBC had to confront the legacy of Saville, it showed institutional remorse, and put safeguards in place. Fat chance that any government will do any of that. Instead a minor functionary will fall on his or her sword. Eventually.

The Department of Work and Pensions needs a complete overhaul. As do the policies which encourage the outsourcing of the responsibility for determining whether folk are eligible or not for welfare; as this means there is no political accountability for this and it can all be blamed on the the private operators providing the service to the DWP.

When it all goes wrong, the government have managed to privatise the blame. That really is the current Tory party's main accomplishment.

www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/05/austeristy-forcing-disabled-women-into-sex-work

Wherein we find:

The disability benefit system is supposed to be there to catch people such as Alice; a safety net for when ill health means she cannot have a job to pay the bills. But she is in a catch-22: she cannot claim the out-of-work sickness benefit, employment support allowance (ESA), because she is still registered as a student, despite the fact that her mental health meant she had to leave her course. “On the one hand, I’ve got someone saying: ‘You’re too unwell to study or work.’ On the other, I’ve got [the government] saying: ‘You’re not unwell enough to get support, and go away.’”

On top of this, she was turned down for the other key disability benefit, personal independence payment (PIP). In the middle of a depressive episode, she could not fill in the extensive paperwork. “Ironically, I wasn’t well enough to chase them,” she says. After reapplying and being rejected again, she had to appeal against the decision, which constitutes a mound of paperwork and then a tribunal in court. Besides, Alice worries that mental health problems are rarely seen by the benefit system as being as debilitating as, say, being a wheelchair user. It is a concern backed up by evidence: in 2018, the high court ruled that the PIP system was “blatantly discriminatory” against people with mental health problems, even going as far as to order the government to review 1.6m disability benefit claims. It all adds up to a situation where Alice could not pay the bills with either a wage or social security. As she put it to me: “I’ve got no income to speak of and the government doesn’t care.”

Instead, she has had to rely on sex work to get by. When I first speak to Alice, she is working. I have accidentally called her early and her client is still in her home. This is an intimate set-up but it generally works for her health. Being her own boss, she has a flexible working pattern and can control the use of her own flat. “When I’m having my down days, I don’t have an employer to answer to, and then, when I’m elated or if I’m actually well, I can sort my own bookings out and organise my own working pattern to cover the days that I can’t work,” she says.

I loathe the morality of the austerity measures which give tax-breaks to the biggest and wealthiest corporations on the planet, and condemn folk with mental health issues to prostitution or criminality. This is a specific case, obviously; but previously, as in the case of Belle de Jour (Dr. Brooke Magnanti) I have opined that we have structural problems which lead our post-grad students and junior academics to supplement their incomes or grants with sex work, as it is the only work which pays enough and which gives them the time to pursue their studies/research properly. But at least for clever folk without mental health issues there is a small element of choice. With folk who have mental health issues however...

Well, at least they're not being radicalised and turned into jihadists. But sex workers with mental health issues... just a recipe for trouble really. I suppose we will have to wait for a captain of industry or an MP to get his cock bitten off by a damaged prostitute before anything gets done about it.

Magdalenes with madness. It will not end well.