by Rab Bruce’s Spider

this really shouldn’t need saying, but it seems the UK Government and their pro-Brexit media allies are incapable of understanding.

Right from the start of the Brexit negotiations, the EU has consistently said that there can be no cherry-picking of certain aspects of membership in the deal for the UK to leave the EU. Despite this, every time a Government Minister or the PM makes a statement on what sort of deal the UK is going to demand from the EU, it involves cherry-picking of some aspects of the current membership arrangements.

how many times do they need to be told. Even the most inept and hapless negotiators cannot have failed to grasp this basic concept. One is drawn to the inevitable conclusion that, with little more than a year to go, the UK Government is intent on forcing a hard Brexit and blaming the EU for its intransigence.

Blaming others for one’s failures is a fairly common human trait, but the UK Government is taking it to new levels. The Irish are to blame because of their indignation over the way the Good Friday Agreement is likely to be trampled, the Scots are to blame because they don’t want a UK power grab of responsibilities which are already devolved but which the UK Government wants to reserve to itself so that it can impose its own rules, and people who raise perfectly sensible objections to the idiotic pronouncements from both Tory and Labour MPs about Customs Unions and tariffs are blamed for not backing a Brexit that works for everyone.

A Brexit that works for everyone? That is pure fantasy. The only people it will work for are the already mega-wealthy tax avoiders who want to turn the UK into a tax haven. The Government’s own analyses demonstrate this, yet they are determined to blunder on with less hap and less eptness than anyone can ever recall from a UK Government.

If this situation weren’t so desperately serious, it would be funny. Even the scriptwriters for Yes, prime Minister would have struggled to come up with this level of bumbling incompetence.

It really must be just about time that Scotland began to man the lifeboats. Independence will bring its own uncertainties, but they surely cannot be any worse than the certainty of Brexit being a disaster for the majority of British citizens.