Mike Holden - Politics blogs

The US and UK elected political hierarchy are currently doing everything in their power to dismantle the institutions which they inhabit, for their own reasons. We have opened our houses to vandals. Donald Trump is doing it because he didn’t realise that the Office of President of the United States didn’t just mean the actual office with the nice chairs & stuff – it meant having responsibilities to care for and steer your country, and behave in a statesmanlike and sensible way. Sadly the words “responsibilities”, “statesmanlike” and “care” (unlike “bigly”, “covfefe” and “unpresidented”) have never been in Trump’s vocabulary. Donald Trump is Al Czervik in Caddyshack – a brash, rich, rude golf-player who doesn’t give a toss about the niceties of polite society. Except in this remake he’s also racist, mean-spirited, not at all funny and can’t dance. When a President refers to a senator as “Pocahontas” at a ceremony honouring Navajo veterans, you know it’s all gone ...

Government Brexit date is less a Red Herring, more a Dead Cat I have a prediction about the government amendment to EU Withdrawal Bill, fixing the time the UK leaves the EU as “before, after or at 11pm on 29 th March 2019”. It will be withdrawn by government  on the evening it is debated, having served its purpose of putting up a massive target for Remain-leaning MPs and newspapers to get hugely upset about, and for Leave-leaning MPs to say “look at that, don’t look at this other stuff”. It’s the biggest  dead cat strategy employed by the Brexit brigade since the days of the Referendum. As we know, the EU Withdrawal bill  gives the government rights to massively trample over Parliament in the name of Parliamentary Sovereignty. Ministers, with a little help from a Gerrymandered Select Committee makeup, can  do almost whatever they like . Naturally for such a hugely important bill, many amendments  have been put forward, to protect EU citizens (...