Friday 4 October 2019

Boris tries to square a circle!

All very confusing and contradictory. This is how the Boris government explains what it plans to do re leaving the EU on October 31. The UK WILL leave the EU on October 31 with or without a deal. That we know because Boris has told us many times. It's his only raison d'etre. But there is a thing called the Benn Act which was drawn up by Hilary Benn, Labur MP and fancy speaker and son of the late Tony Benn, pipesmoker, interminable diarist, former cabinet minister, renounced upper class lord of the realm and a man with a bee in every bonnet he may have owned. So son Hilary who seems a regular sort of guy and spends all his time when not in the House of Commons on BBC Newsnight or the BBC Today programme, presented his legislation to parliament which was duly approved that made it obligatory for the prime minister to seek an extension to the October 31 deadline IF he failed to get a Brexit deal agreed by October 19. By law, Boris has to seek an extension if that wretched, sorry Brexit, deal is not reached within the next 15 days. However, while he promises to obey the law, and apparently this is in writing in a Scottish court case, he also absolutely promises that the UK will leave the EU on October 31. How does he square this circle? If he doesn't get a deal from the increasingly stoney-faced EU bureaucrats by October 19 he will be prevented by law from taking our beloved country out of the EU on October 31. But this doesn't seem to bother Boris. He carries on saying that he WILL take the UK out of the EU on the last day of October, never mind the October 19 deal deadline, never mind Hilary Benn and his Benn Act and never mind the law. Although of course he will obey the law? There is only one way to work out this conundrum and if it's what Boris has in mind then it will be a bit like a magician pulling a couple of rabbits and a giraffe out of an empty hat. This is the scenario: Boris fails dismally to get a deal by October 19, even though he reckons he has enough votes in the House of Commnos to get it approved by a majority of MPs. So he sits down at his desk in 10 Downing Street and dictates to his secretary that he is formally asking for an extension. However, he won't mean it and he will tell our EU friends on the phone that when they get the extension letter they should ignore it and instead, place it in the archives as proof that Boris didn't break the Benn Act. So, no reply required. He will then tell them all on the phone that he intends to exit on October 31 BUT will very soon after hold a general election and if he wins a big majority which he thinks he will, then and only then will he come back to Brussels and present an Option B deal which they would be out of their minds not to accept. Thus No Deal becomes a special Boris Deal which will be strictly NO customs Union, NO single market, NO European Court of Justice and NO more UK taxpayers' donations but a new-style trade arrangement that will take on board the border issue in Northern Ireland without having any checks at all. So Boris will obey the law but break it at the same time and not even the eminent judges on the Supreme Court will be able to fathom what the hell happened.

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