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There is so much of this to Cummings’ “people vs parliament” brand of politics, but the patsies – the Tory MPs – are yet to catch on. While most women could read that New York Times column and work out what it basically meant for them, a lot of Conservative MPs are dutifully spouting Cummings’ lines, but don’t yet seem to have worked out where they leave them.

But listen, Tory mooks – I’m here to help. While you’re getting a tiki torch and standing a post, let me tell you what a “people vs parliament” election ultimately means for you. First, if you whip up an angry mob, why do you assume they won’t end up angry with you? Do you think the mob is going to come upon an MP and go, “Wait, wait – this is so-and-so. He voted for Meaningful Votes 2 and 3, so we should, you know, definitely not put our pitchforks up his arse”? Eventually, you’re going to get a pitchfork up your arse either way.

To adapt that phrase of the alt-right to whom you tack closer every day: mobs don’t care about your feelings. If I had to come up with an adjective to help you understand mobs, it would probably be mob-like. Very mobby. Mobtastic. If you go to the country in a people v parliament election, you may indeed get elected and be part of a triumphant Tory majority. But when you have been elected, and when you’ve “got Brexit done” – which is to say, when you’ve either taken the UK off the no-deal cliff, or opened up the next however many painful years of trade negotiations fuckery-pokery, which is never going to solve the problems it is magically supposed to – you, then, are “parliament”.

The even angrier people are then versus YOU. That’s when they come for you, because you asked them to. You invited them in. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this line “the revolution devours its children”? That’s you, babe. Second, I know you’ve already only read about one war, but bad news: it’s the wrong war. You need the first world war, not the second. By way of a crash course of what Dom’s got planned for you, take the line in Blackadder, where the general brays to the guys he’s sending over the top: “We’ll be right behind you!” and Blackadder mutters: “About 35 miles behind you.” You’re the cannon fodder, you’re the Twenty Minuters. But, hey – enjoy it out there.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/27/tories-dominic-cummings-people-v-parliament-election

One of Boris Johnson's billionaire leadership backers was, as early as July, urging the prime-minister-to-be to prorogue parliament to force Brexit.

Just as Johnson was poised to become leader, hedge fund financier Crispin Odey, said that he was backing Boris because he would be ready to "dissolve" parliament for a no-deal Brexit.

Speaking to Channel 4 the day before Johnson won the leadership, Odey also said he was urging Johnson to pack the House of Lords with sympathetic new peers in order to "get this done".

The statements, revealed in the documentary Tories at War, suggest Johnson was considering prorogation at the behest of hard Brexiteer backers before he even became prime minister.

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/channel-four-tories-at-war-crispin-odey-1-6283173

Rosamund Urwin @RosamundUrwin

What's different about the new Yellowhammer document that the government has just published compared with the one I got hold of last month? The heading.

What did the version I had say? BASE SCENARIO

Now what does the new one say? HMG Reasonable Worst Case Planning Assumptions

Rosamund Urwin @RosamundUrwin

"15. Facing EU tariffs makes petrol exports to the EU uncompetitive. Industry had plans to mitigate the impact on refinery margins and profitability but UK Government policy to set petrol import tariffs at 0% inadvertently undermines these plans." [More to come]

Rosamund Urwin @RosamundUrwin

"This leads to significant financial losses and announcement of two refinery closures (and transition to import terminals) and direct job losses (about 2000). (2/3)

Rosamund Urwin @RosamundUrwin

Resulting strike action at refineries would lead to disruptions to fuel availability for 1-2 weeks in the regions directly supplied by the refineries." (3/3)

Appeal court says prorogation order ‘void’ but fails to issue injunction for MPs to return

Scottish appeal court judges have declared Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament in the run-up to the October Brexit deadline is unlawful.

The three judges, chaired by Lord Carloway, Scotland’s most senior judge, overturned an earlier ruling that the courts did not have the power to interfere in the prime minister’s political decision to prorogue parliament.

Lawyers acting for 75 opposition MPs and peers argued Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament for five weeks was illegal and in breach of the constitution, as it was designed to stifle parliamentary debate and action on Brexit.
...

The court issued an official summary of its decision declaring the prorogation order was “null and of no effect”, but Carloway said the judges were deferring a final decision on an interdict to the UK supreme court, which will hold a three-day hearing next week.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/11/scottish-judges-rule-boris-johnsons-prorogation-unlawful

Privately-schooled Dominic Cummings, whose baronet father-in-law owns a haunted castle, had a characteristically blunt response while leaving his £1.6m townhouse
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The senior No10 advisor told a TV reporter: "You guys should get outside London and go to talk to people who are not rich remainers."
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The son of an oil rig manager and teacher, who has repeatedly portrayed himself as the scourge of the civil service establishment, was educated at the fee-paying Durham School and Oxford University.

He and his wife Mary Wakefield - whose father, Sir Humphrey, owns 'Britain's most haunted castle' Chillingham Castle in Northumberland - bought their Islington townhouse for £1.65m in 2013 and later applied to extend it.

The luxurious home features a separate 'Tapestry Room', 'Reading Room' and 'Formal Living Room' spread across two floors.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/pm-aide-dominic-cummings-blames-19928675

Brexit was not the voice of the working class nor of the uneducated – it was of the squeezed middle

Over the past year or so, Brexit has been interpreted as the symbol of a historical shift to anti-establishment politics, kicking off a surge in the ‘outsider’ vote across Europe and the United States. In line with this narrative, initial interpretations of the vote depicted Leave voters as marginalised segments of the population – both educationally and economically – who had channelled their discontent through the referendum.

Another popular view that emerged is that Brexit was the unified response of the working class which finally found its long-lost voice. Yet subsequent, rigorous analysis showed that the profile of Brexit voters is more heterogeneous than initially thought, and that it includes voters with high education and ‘middle class’ jobs. If Brexit is really connected to socio-economic factors, how do we make sense of this apparent contradiction?
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The left-out argument has been constructed around voters whose low levels of education render them unable to compete with those with a university degree in the globalised economy. Academic research has already argued against this. For example, Goodwin and Heath show that voters with A-level education from low skilled communities had similar pro-Leave voting profiles to those with no education.

...

Our findings confirm a negative relationship between education and voting Leave: the higher the level of one’s education, the lower the likelihood of them voting Leave. Our findings, however, reject the dichotomous view of the low-educated Brexiter vs the high-educated Remainer, by showing that two groups with intermediate levels of education (voters with good GSCEs and A-levels) were more pro-Leave than the low-educated (those with no formal education and with low GSCE grades).

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/brexit-and-the-squeezed-middle/

It has become commonplace to ascribe the leave victory in 2016 to the votes of working-class Labour supporters. This is misleading. Most leave voters live in Conservative constituencies. The Tory shires mattered more than Labour’s industrial heartlands.

A YouGov analysis of more than 25,000 voters suggests the following division of leave voters in the referendum, linked to the 2017 election result.

• Middle-class leave voters: Conservative 5.6 million; Labour 1.6 million.

• Working-class leave voters: Conservative 4.4 million; Labour 2.2 million. (A few of the remaining 3.6 million leave voters supported smaller parties; most did not vote in 2017.)

So the largest block of leave voters were middle-class Conservatives, followed by working-class Conservatives. Just one in eight leave voters was a working-class Labour supporter. To be sure, had even half of these 2.2 million voters backed remain, the result of the referendum would be different. But to suggest that the referendum’s 17.4 million leave voters were dominated by working-class Labour supporters is simply wrong.

8 reasons we should stop assuming “northern” means “pro-Brexit”

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1) Many regions within the North were majority Remain – and many down South were majority Leave
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2) Everywhere has large numbers of Leave and Remain voters
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3) The North has an awful lot of people – but not necessarily enough to stop Brexit alone
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4) Differences aren’t as big as percentages make it look
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5) Non-voters narrow the margins further
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6) Opinion polls show Remain gaining ground in the North
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7) Referendums don’t work like elections anyway
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8) In general, stereotyping is just a bad idea
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https://www.citymetric.com/politics/8-reasons-we-should-stop-assuming-northern-means-pro-brexit-4513

The picture of Jacob Rees-Mogg lying down on the job will haunt the Tories for decades



When the tale is told of the first parliamentary vote of Boris Johnson’s premiership, it will mention his spectacular failure to win it; his removal of the whip from lifelong Conservatives including former cabinet members and Churchill’s grandson; and his loss of a majority, and potentially the forcing of a general election on a tired and bitterly divided British public.

But after the immediate repercussions of this weeks' vote are over, there will be an image from last night that hangs around Tory necks for years to come: Jacob Rees-Mogg lying horizontal on the front bench as he listened to the debate, lounging insouciantly like a rebel child defying nanny, showing all the grace of Kevin the Etonian Teenager.

Rees-Mogg’s disdain for parliament, for democracy, for his colleagues could not have been made clearer. His body language screamed “I shouldn’t have to be here listening to you people”. It was a pose designed to suggest this debate shouldn’t have taken place at all. But it was a mistake – and one that will haunt him and his party for decades.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jacob-rees-mogg-brexit-debate-lying-down-boris-johnson-tories-ed-miliband-a9091156.html

Peter Walker ✔
@peterwalker99

I just bumped into Dominic Cummings, who was clutching a glass of red wine and wandering along the parliamentary press corridor, lost and looking for a particular newspaper office. This is not a usual occurrence.

Cat Smith ✔
@CatSmithMP

As one of several shadow cabinet members stood right next to Jeremy (who was on the phone at the time) I just thought there was some loud bloke who stunk of booze yelling at us. https://twitter.com/shippersunbound/status/1169004516840235014 …

Day of the Remainer purge: how Dominic Cummings ranted at Tory rebels in Downing Street

If the 15 Tory rebels who headed to 10 Downing Street were hoping that Boris Johnson and his team would 'love bomb' them with entreaties not to vote against the Government, they were sorely mistaken.

"I don't know who any of you are!" Mr Johnson's chief adviser Dominic Cummings yelled at a some of them as they waited to meet the Prime Minister outside the Cabinet room.

The former head of the Vote Leave campaign - wearing his trademark crumpled white shirt - continued to hector the smartly dressed MPs in this way for a "considerable period of time".

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/09/03/day-remainer-purge-dominic-cummings-ranted-tory-rebels-downing/

Aubrey Allegretti ✔
@breeallegretti

Wow. Sam Gyimah, one of the Tory rebels, tells @SamCoatesSky that "coming in here this evening it looks like they've also disabled our passes, which is a hostile act".

There are 72m road vehicle crossings a year between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, according to the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (Nisra). There are also eight trains daily in either direction between Dublin and Belfast.

About 14% of those crossings are consignments of goods, some of which may cross the border several times before they reach a consumer. In border areas it is common for milk which is collected in Ireland to be pasteurised and packaged in Northern Ireland and then sent back over the border for sale in supermarkets.

Overall, 32% of Northern Ireland's exports to Ireland are classified as "food and live animals".

A no-deal Brexit would effectively end this trade. UK government advice says that "to transport animals, products of animal origin (POAO), fish, shellfish, crustaceans, germplasm or fishery products from the UK to the EU in the event of no deal, you’ll need to ensure the trade route for your goods allows for your consignment to be checked at a border inspection post (BIP) at the first EU country you enter for export."

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2019/sep/02/a-typical-hour-in-the-life-of-the-irish-border