Three Choices for Brexit

May’s deal was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of the Deal’s burial was signed by the Presidents of the European Commission and the European Council, by France, Sweden, Spain and Belgium, by the Chairman of the European Research Group, and the chief mourner. Leo Varadkar signed it: and Leo Varadkar’s name was good upon Fine Gael, for anything he chose to put his hand to. May’s deal was as dead as a door-nail.

Theresa May’s deal is the EU’s deal.

Our three choices before 29th March 2019 are

• May’s deal, which is bad
• No-deal Brexit, which is catastrophic
• or Remain in the EU

David Cameron: We are now in the 1930s

As I noted in The Ideology of Workfare, the ultimate goal of the cheap-work conservatives in Westminster is to roll us back to 1834, the year of the workhouse.

But as Cameron says:

Today marks an historic step in the biggest welfare revolution in over 60 years.

What is he talking about is rolling back the welfare state, put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945, founded on the principles outlined by William Beveridge, the British economist who wrote Social Insurance and Allied Services, widely known as the Beveridge Report. Cameron is once again raising the giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness – which rightly he describes as a “historic step”.

My government has taken bold action to make work pay, while protecting the vulnerable.

David Cameron’s “bold action” was to institute a system by which high street stores and other commercial organisations can get employees who will work for nothing,

I never liked Charles Dickens

One of the recurring Christmas motifs is A Christmas Carol – the story of how Ebenezer Scrooge goes from a miserable rich man to a happy generous rich man. (We like stories like this.) As George Orwell notes in his famous essay, this is Dickens’ only and recurring solution to the problems of human misery – we should behave decently towards each other.

But I’ve never got on with the Dickensian style of writing, never to use one word where three sentences will convey the same effect, and while Claire Tomalin may say