We waited six months for this idiocy!

It was always completely unforgivable that the Tory government didn't even bother to come up with a Brexit contingency plan just in case David Cameron's reckless EU referendum gamble failed.

They were given a total free ride on this abject strategic incompetence though, because the right-wing of the Labour Party somehow decided that the biggest Tory strategic blunder in decades was the ideal time to launch a coup attempt against their own party leader and ensure the entire summer was filled with headlines about bitter Labour infighting, rather than abject Tory incompetence.

After six months of waiting for the Tories to finally come up with some kind of Brexit plan, Theresa May finally delivered her long-awaited Brexit speech in which she outlined so-called "negotiating strategy".

She has to be given credit for her confidence. It's a bold move indeed to tell Scotland to "piss off" whilst wearing a tartan clown suit, but that's exactly what she did by announcing that she's ignoring the will of the Scottish electorate, and bulldozing away Nicola Sturgeon's "red line" by unilaterally quitting the Single Market on behalf of the hard-right English Tories and Ukippers she's trying to appeal to.

The conclusion of Theresa May's speech was even more gutsy. She told the other 27 European nations that if they don't allow the Tory party to cherry pick access to the Single Market for favoured UK industries (the financial sector and vehicle manufacturing were mentioned by name) then she's going to set about turning the UK into a bargain basement corporate tax haven!

The following day the Murdoch-owned Times boldly reinterpreted this absolutely ludicrous threat as "give us what we want or you'll be crushed"! The rest of the UK mainstream press desperately tried to polish Theresa May's woeful threat-based negotiating strategy into wondrously brilliant speech with one pathetically uncritical appraisal after another, but the continental reaction to this ridiculous display of Tory foot-stamping was far from enthusiastic.

El País in Spain furiously described Theresa May's speech as promoting "shameful xenophobic nationalism", while the German paper Die Welt took the more light-hearted approach of ridiculing her posturing as representing "Little Britain". 

The EU's lead negotiator Guy Verhofstadt pointed out that the British public would actually be the ones to suffer if the Tories follow through on their threat to turn the UK into a huge corporate tax haven, eradicating the vestiges of the social security system to pay for it. He also pointed out that making preemptive threats before the negotiations have even officially begun is a "counterproductive negotiating tactic".

Boris Johnson (who Theresa May somehow saw fit to appoint as our nation's top diplomat) was so perturbed by the icy continental reaction to the threat-based Tory negotiating tactics that he decided to blabber out another one of his insulting Second World War analogies. If the Europeans don't cave in and give the Tories the ridiculous corporate wish list they've drawn up, then they'd be like WWII prison camp guards administering a savage beating to the plucky lovable Brits!

The really sad thing about this is that millions of people actually buy into this drivel. Millions of people actually seem to think that ridiculous threats and crude insults are the key characteristics of a good negotiating strategy!

A post-speech YouGov poll found that an astonishing 47% of British people actually have confidence in Theresa May's negotiating skills and an even more incredible 55% of us actually believe that Theresa May's "cave in and give us our corporate wishlist or we're going to turn our country into a vast corporate tax haven" threat-based negotiating stance will be "good for Britain"!

It really is enough to drive any rational person to despair that our Brexit negotiation team have revealed that they have the diplomatic skills of a toddler having a tantrum; even worse is that it took them six tedious months to come up with such an embarrassingly lame "negotiating strategy"; and what's worst of all is that a majority of British people actually seem to believe that this absurd display of foot-stamping tantrums, ridiculous threats and crude insults is actually going to be good for Britain in the long-run!

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