General elections will be up soon, quite sure of that, but not before November. And I don't think elections gonna change much. It'll be pretty much the same personell. Unless... ... and again I hear the clanking of the far-right prep'ing their champagne bottles in anticipation.
Creating a situation for your enemy -- in this case parliament as the symbol of democracy -- and driving them to the point where they discredit themselves is a far-right tactic that has, as of late, nowhere across all of Europe been pushed that far and been that successful as in Britain. Crazily enough, non-far-right British politicians went along with it out of free will ! The sooner everybody in Britain realised they'd better stop playing into those hands through half-antidemocratic comments and spite, the better.
Putting a deadline to it all has been a good idea, I think. But the poker game doesn't seem to work out. Maybe because the current government simply forgot to take the opposition on board !? The way it is still being claimed that negotiations are making progress is close to grotesk. Those negotiations must be so highly classified that even EU negotiators don't know about them... Although, there was talk of "papers" with ideas not to be made public.
No matter what it will become --no-deal, second referendum, remain (?) -- it's not going to reconcile the country. (A no-deal would make only the far-right happy, while no-one in their right mind could possibly want that, including the PM.) Apart from that, in the end, it's always pretty much half of British society that will be utterly disappointed -- fuelled also by the circumstances under which the referendum had been held.
One seemingly absurd but possible solution would be, first, for everybody among British politicians and the public to finally realise they have to cut down on their expectations and, second, to finally together strike a deal with the EU that is -- and is rather more than less -- disappointing to most of Brits. Sad but true: nothing reconciles more than the feeling of having "lost something (or someone)".
"Not emotionally attached to (the word !) backstop but the principle behind it" really means: cross out that word and think of another placeholder, or go back to May's first plan. The EU simply cannot and won't give up on that principle behind it. But I think they also coudn't care less about what it's called. There's no shame in going back and picking up on old ideas once rejected. The entire referendum and its outcome, for that matter, after three years and a half (!), is an old idea by now.
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I refuse to believe that the British electorate is fed up with ("selfish elitist") politicians per se (which effectively means all politicians according to current discourse!), but they sure are fed up with purely party political tactics and manoeuvreing, which is clearly taking place on all political sides in the UK.
