I have a cunning plan.................

Steve Bell. Guardian 7th February 2019

Mrs May went to Northern Ireland to tell the Irish people all about Ireland. Ireland is a big island, she told them. It’s got water around it. Blue water. The same colour as the Conservative party, which means that she really cares about it. Ireland has fields. It has roads and houses. It has hedges and trees. No one cares more about Northern Ireland than she does, which is why she only spoke to the DUP and no one else.

She told her audience of increasingly bewildered Irish people, because she was being very clear, that she will do whatever it takes to keep the border open apart from keeping the UK in a customs union, keeping Northern Ireland in a customs union or signing up to the backstop. Theresa is committed to doing whatever it takes to keep the border open just as long as it’s not one of those things that really could keep the border open. This is because the union is precious, so very precious, as it delivers her the DUP votes that she needs to keep her show on the road. And Ireland has roads too, so they have so much in common.

Seemingly unaware that she was speaking to an audience which had largely voted to remain, Theresa pressed on. Mostly by repeating herself and saying nothing that made any sense. The single political talent that Theresa May possesses seems to be the ability to utter words that have a semblance of meaning, but as soon as they collide together in a sentence, all sense vanishes.

Faced with people who were obviously not impressed by Theresa’s vacuousness and who were demanding some concrete answers to the question of the Irish border, a question which was directly affecting their lives, livelihoods, and businesses, Theresa backtracked on what she’d been saying last week, which itself was backtracking on what she’d been saying the week before. This is a Prime Minister who changes direction more frequently than the scenic railway at Barry Island, all the while insisting that she’s going in a straight line and isn’t stuck on an eternal loop to nowhere.

Yesterday Theresa was insisting that there was still going to be a backstop, it’s just that some changes were required to it. That’s the same backstop that she’d told Arlene Foster and the DUP just the previous week that was absolutely, positively, definitely out of the question. The DUP have been very upset by the EU’s refusal to renegotiate the backstop. Arlene Foster called the EU intransigent, which is a bit rich common from someone intimately involved in the stand-off of Northern Irish politics.

The EU has repeated that the Irish backstop is not up for renegotiation. It only exists in the first place because of the red lines of Theresa May. It is only necessary because the UK has proven that it cannot be trusted. This is a British government which, with its exceptionalism and its constant demands to have all its cake after eating it, has trashed whatever residual goodwill it once had in Europe. Every change in course from Theresa May, every reversal of a previously held position, and the trust and confidence that the EU has that it’s dealing with a serious negotiating partner vanishes. There’s now no trust left in Britain. Negotiating with the UK is like negotiating with a jelly. Although even a jelly is able to hold its shape for longer than ten minutes.
 
Faced with a UK government which has no clue, no plan, and is plainly just making things up as it goes along and whose political aims consist of getting the Prime Minister through the next ten minutes, Donald Tusk now speaks like a man who has no tosses left to give. He wondered what the special place in hell looked like for those who backed Brexit without so much as the sketch of a plan, he told a press conference on Wednesday.

Unsurprisingly, the Tory press had a field day with Donald Tusk's words. Here's a cartoon by Bob in today's Daily Telegraph.

The Brexists were outraged, which to be fair is their baseline state. What an insult to the British people, they harrumphed. Although here we are over two years after the EU referendum, with less than two months to go until the British government’s own chosen date for Brexit, and they still haven’t come up with a plan. The nearest that they have is unspecified “alternative arrangements” for the Irish border. That’s not a plan, as it encompasses everything from the invention of teleportation to the insistence that goods can be transported across the border on the backs on unicorns, but still manages to rule out anything that counts as realistic. Even Baldrick’s plans were more cunning.

Brexit is almost upon us and the Tories still don’t have a Plan A. And that's because they’re political illiterates. Before you can write a plan you need to know the alphabet. This bunch of clowns would struggle with a unicorn colouring-in book and a crayon. It’s not so much a Plan A as – plan, Eh?
 
From my perspective, that special place in hell is being lectured to by a Prime Minister I didn’t vote for,  who treats us with contempt and who insists that she has a veto over our future. A special place in hell is the loss of our employment and civil rights that awaits us under Tories whose hands are no longer tied by Europe. A special place in hell is Brexit Britain.