... There are complex technical reasons why the Downing Street plan was a non-starter in Brussels, but the broad outline is simple enough. It would impose a new customs border in Ireland that would be both intrusive and unenforceable. It would give a veto over every aspect of Northern Ireland’s future to the DUP, making a fragile peace settlement hostage to a party that rejected the Good Friday agreement.

Was this plan even meant to be the basis for a negotiation, or was it pure provocation – a phoney offer designed for rejection, setting the Europeans up as the Brexit bad guys in an election? There are certainly Tory MPs who are stupid or uninterested enough in the detail to believe that the government offer was serious. There is also a pro-sanity faction inside Downing Street, led by Eddie Lister, Johnson’s chief of staff from his London mayoralty years, that believes in complying with laws and maintaining relationships with continental allies. But that side of the operation competes with the revolutionary set around Dominic Cummings, who has imported the single-minded fanaticism of the Vote Leave referendum campaign to No 10. In a race to set the terms of debate, there is an advantage to the side that has no interest in diplomacy and no hesitation in setting fire to things, even when one of those things is Britain’s reputation as a rational actor on the international stage...

... Sanity might intrude far enough up Downing Street to allow grudging submission to the law that obliges the government to seek an article 50 extension in the absence of a deal. It isn’t clear how that can be choreographed to spare Johnson the shame of breaking his “do or die” pledge to meet the 31 October Brexit deadline, but his electoral fortunes need not be ruined by the breach. He would present it as a Dunkirk moment for the forces of Brexit – heroic retreat before a Churchillian finest hour standing alone, unbowed against the foreign aggressor. Johnson can count on most of Fleet Street to help narrate events in those terms. Newspapers that gleefully boosted Nigel Farage to torment David Cameron and Theresa May will turn that dial back down for a Tory leader who shows suitably Faragist zeal. The Brexit party is bound to get a boost from article 50 extension, but not perhaps on the scale that Johnson’s enemies would like...

... The past three years have proved the impossibility of turning the fantasy of easy, heroic release from EU membership into a practical policy. There is no alchemy that satisfies leave voters without inflicting harm on the country and diminishing its standing in the world. But for their different reasons neither Johnson nor Corbyn wants to admit that. So they’ll fight an election, not to solve Brexit, but to sustain the fiction that a solution lies just around the next bend down the same infernal road.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/08/boris-johnson-deal-reality-election-brexit

... Last week Varadkar confirmed for the first time that there would be checks on goods coming across the Northern Ireland border. “Some may need to take place near the border” rather than on the border but most would be in ports, airports and at businesses. That is of little comfort to agri-food businesses facing mandatory sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) checks. One poultry business told the Guardian they have been told that “near the border” is actually 100 miles away at Dublin Port, the only place with a Brexit-ready border inspection post...

... Trade to and from the UK is a vital part of Ireland’s economy with €16bn (£14.3bn) worth of exports to the UK in 2018 including around 50% of its beef and almost half its cheddar cheese. The EU has already given Ireland permission to open the coffers to help businesses cushion themselves – and Irish businesses are demanding £1bn to mitigate the Brexit shock.

Representatives of the French government were also at Dublin Castle to explain the special corridor they have set up for Irish freight using the UK as a landbridge to the continent. They have built a new smart-border customs system in Calais which will allow officials to distinguish between trucks carrying Irish and British cargo. Scans of documents will be taken while the truck is passing through the Eurotunnel or on the ferry allowing them to be waved through in Calais as an “EU member state” truck not requiring SPS checks...

... “It doesn’t matter what comes down the track in terms of paperwork, what we can’t deal with is the collapse in sterling,” says O’Leary. “Nobody is making money selling to the UK. We are just surviving.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/12/no-deal-will-be-a-total-disaster-irish-agri-food-sector-on-high-alert

A five-page document spelling out the government’s “planning assumptions” under Operation Yellowhammer – the government’s no-deal plan – was disclosed in response to a “humble address” motion. The content of the document was strikingly similar to the plan leaked to the Sunday Times in August, which the government dismissed at the time as out of date. That document was described as a “base case”; but the new document claims to be a “worst-case scenario”...

... “The lack of trader readiness combined with limited space in French ports to hold ‘unready’ HGVs could reduce the flow rate to 40%-60% of current levels within one day as unready HGVs will fill the ports and block flow,” it warns. This situation could last for up to three months, and disruption might last “significantly longer”, it adds, with lorries facing waits of between 1.5 days and 2.5 days to cross the border. The reliance of medical supplies on cross-Channel routes “make them particularly vulnerable to severe extended delays”, the report says, with some medicines having such short shelf lives they cannot be stockpiled. A lack of veterinary medicines could increase the risk of disease outbreaks, it adds.

On food supplies, supplies of “certain types of fresh food” would be reduced, the document warns, as well as other items such as packaging. It says: “In combination, these two factors will not cause an overall shortage of food in the UK but will reduce availability and choice of products and will increase price, which could impact vulnerable groups.” Later, it adds: “Low income groups will be disproportionately affected by any price rises in food and fuel.”

On law and order it warns: “Protests and counter-protests will take place across the UK and may absorb significant amounts of police resource. There may also be a rise in public disorder and community tensions.” ...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/11/operation-yellowhammer-fears-no-deal-brexit-chaos-forced-to-publish-secret-papers

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Monday he would not request an extension to Brexit, hours after a law came into force demanding he delay Britain’s departure from the European Union until 2020 unless he can strike a divorce deal.

Johnson appeared to have lost control of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union with the approval of the law, which obliges him to seek a delay unless he can strike a new deal at an EU summit next month. EU leaders have repeatedly said they have not received specific proposals...

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu/pm-johnson-i-will-not-ask-for-brexit-delay-idUKKCN1VU0P3

... Bruno Bonnell, who is a member of Emanuel Macron’s party, said France would insist on a lengthier time limit to the UK’s exit in order to avoid repeated crises every three months.

“I think that our president has been really clear. Even the last time the UK requested it, it is really the dead-end limit – after the 31 October the game is over,” Mr Bonnell said. “Now if – and this door was open before – if we’re talking about a long delay like maybe a couple of years, to re-evaluate the whole Brexit situation in light of the truth… because the bottom line is what people are realising is that they have been lied to.”

He continued: “What should have been harmless for the UK and simple to set up and we see after two years of heavy negotiation we still have no agreement, so there comes a time when you need to put a stick in the ground.” ...

https://inews.co.uk/news/brexit/france-to-insist-on-a-two-year-extension-to-allow-brexit-re-evaluation/

... The step, known as Royal Assent, is effectively a rubber-stamp from the monarch for the law which passed through parliament last week despite opposition from the government. The Royal Assent was announced in parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-bill/queen-elizabeth-approves-law-seeking-to-block-october-31-no-deal-brexit-idUKKCN1VU1L8

... To curb the relentless growth of value – at the expense of the biosphere and the global poor – we must create an economy that can restrain itself. Much of the discussion on climate change suggests that we are on a battlefield, confronting evil people who want to obstruct our path to an ecological civilisation. But the concept of capitalism tends to mystify how we are all caught in a game defined by the logic of our own constructions – as if there was an abstract “system” and its morally despicable proponents to blame. Rather than see the very design of the money game as the real antagonist, our call to arms tends to be directed at the players who have had best luck with the dice.

I would instead argue that the ultimate obstruction is not a question of human morality but of our common faith in what Marx called “money fetishism”. We collectively delegate responsibility for our future to a mindless human invention – what Karl Polanyi called all-purpose money, the peculiar idea that anything can be exchanged for anything else. The aggregate logic of this relatively recent idea is precisely what is usually called “capitalism”. It defines the strategies of corporations, politicians, and citizens alike. All want their money assets to grow. The logic of the global money game obviously does not provide enough incentives to invest in renewables. It generates greed, obscene and rising inequalities, violence, and environmental degradation, including climate change. But mainstream economics appears to have more faith in setting this logic free than ever. Given the way the economy is now organised, it does not see an alternative to obeying the logic of the globalised market...

... So the first thing we should redesign are the economic ideas that brought fossil-fueled technology into existence and continue to perpetuate it. “Capitalism” ultimately refers to the artefact or idea of all-purpose money, which most of us take for granted as being something about which we do not have a choice. But we do, and this must be recognised. Since the 19th century, all-purpose money has obscured the unequal resource flows of colonialism by making them seem reciprocal: money has served as a veil that mystifies exploitation by representing it as fair exchange. Economists today reproduce this 19th-century mystification, using a vocabulary that has proven useless in challenging global problems of justice and sustainability. The policies designed to protect the environment and promote global justice have not curbed the insidious logic of all-purpose money – which is to increase environmental degradation as well as economic inequalities.

In order to see that all-purpose money is indeed the fundamental problem, we need to see that there are alternative ways of designing money and markets. Like the rules in a board game, they are human constructions and can, in principle, be redesigned. In order to accomplish economic “degrowth” and curb the treadmill of capital accumulation, we must transform the systemic logic of money itself. National authorities might establish a complementary currency, alongside regular money, that is distributed as a universal basic income but that can only be used to buy goods and services that are produced within a given radius from the point of purchase. This is not “local money” in the sense of LETS or the Bristol Pound – which in effect do nothing to impede the expansion of the global market – but a genuine spanner in the wheel of globalisation. With local money you can buy goods produced on the other side of the planet, as long as you buy it in a local store. What I am suggesting is special money that can only be used to buy goods produced locally. This would help decrease demand for global transports – a major source of greenhouse gas emissions – while increasing local diversity and resilience and encouraging community integration. It would no longer make low wages and lax environmental legislation competitive advantages in world trade, as is currently the case...

https://theconversation.com/a-globalised-solar-powered-future-is-wholly-unrealistic-and-our-economy-is-the-reason-why-118927