https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... der-lesson
But if we did not know already that this is fantasy, we know it now. The climbdown we are seeing on all three of the preliminary negotiating issues surely ends the illusions of all but the most deluded fanatics about Britain’s real position in the Brexit process. It is not in a position to make demands – certainly not demands that the EU destroy its whole raison d’etre by allowing a member state to leave the single market but still enjoy all its advantages.
It was always stupid to turn the border issue into a face-off between mighty Britain and little Ireland. But that’s how the hard Brexiters and their Tory press allies chose to construe it.
Having done so, they might now ask themselves: if, for the first time in 800 years, Ireland is proving to be in a much stronger political position than Britain, what does that say about what Brexit is doing to Britain’s strength? It is being forced to accept what it claimed to be unacceptable, not because Ireland has suddenly become a global superpower but because it has the unflinching support of EU member states, the European parliament, and the EU negotiating team. There might be a lesson in there somewhere for a country facing a future without the allies it has long taken for granted.
and from the comments on it:
These are unbelievable times. The British Prime Minister calls an ill-advised referendum to both placate and silence the right wing of his own party. He proceeds to lose that referendum, overnight devaluing the nation's assets by 20% and setting off a chain of events which may well lead to not only an exit from the EU without a deal and casting the country into a friendless international wilderness (the US special relationship being dead in the water). He resigns and his vanquishers turn on each other allowing a mediocre milquetoast to take the highest office in the land at a time of the greatest international challenges since WW2.
The new PM, who voted to remain, executes a volte-face and promises a successful Brexit, with no deal if necessary. In one of the worst political misjudgements in history, she calls a totally unnecessary general election, believing that she will wipe out her unpopular, beleaguered rival and gain the strongest hand possible in advance of the negotiations. Instead she runs the worst campaign in modern political history and loses her majority. Instead of running a minority government she chooses to get into bed with a party of Christian fundamentalists with antediluvian views on gay marriage whose raison d'être is to keep their province, the part with a future land border with the EU, in the UK at all costs- albeit a version of the UK set in 1950s aspic. Not only this, their own province did not vote for Brexit yet they see their own political leverage as more important than enacting the will of their constituents.
To add spice to the fiery mix, an openly gay half-Indian man then becomes PM of the country they long to keep separate from, and which they have long derided as a conservative theocratic backwater, and proceeds to run rings around the British PM.
Meanwhile the First Minister of Scotland, a wily political operator with every intention of steering her country out of the UK and keeping it in the EU, watches with barely disguised glee as the Brexit UK begins to disintegrate. In a further irony, the country she represents is the ancestral homeland of many of the Northern Irish Unionists, although it modern iteration wants to remain in the EU, and now has a stronger than ever argument to want to leave the UK.
To return to the UK electoral debacle, the British PM's electoral charge of the light brigade not only torpedoes her own majority but revitalises her moribund opponent, who enhanced and emboldened, goes on attack after attack and now looks odds on to succeed her as PM if and when her own bloodthirsty and fractious party stab her in the back.
It sounds like an extra dystopian modern take on Macbeth crossed with King Lear..
