Theresa May's directionless incompetence never ceases to amaze. Her latest chaotic blunder came when she decided to sling some anti-immigrant red meat to the powerful hard-right Brextremist faction of her own party by claiming that EU citizens in the UK would lose their freedom of movement rights during the transition period that she's just spent so much time begging the EU for.
The problem of course is that the EU27 have no intention of allowing the Tories to cherry-pick which bits of EU legislation they want to abide by during the Brexit transition period.
As the EU negotiating team have stated a ridiculous amount of times before, the four freedoms are indivisible.
If the British government want free movement of goods, capital, and services to continue between the UK and the EU during the transition period, they also have to accept free movement of labour too.
Then there's the fact that Theresa May's proposal to revoke the rights of EU citizens appears to be completely unworkable anyway because the UK government has no infrastructure in place to actually enforce the proposed rules that May appears to have just made up on the hoof just to placate the rabid Tory Brextremist mob.
Then there's the leaked immigration analysis from the Brexit Impact studies that Theresa May and her Tory chums were trying to hide.
The impact studies have revealed what a lot of us knew to be the case already; that tighter immigration rules on European workers will significantly harm the UK economy, and no trade deal with the US to asset strip the NHS, and flood the UK market with their chlorinated chicken and their hormone-riddled beef will make up the shortfall.
If her government's own impact studies show that draconian new immigration restrictions on EU workers are set to harm the UK economy, then why on earth is Theresa May so keen to try to bring them in early?
The answer of course is that she's a powerless prisoner of fortune who is entirely beholden to the secretive hard-right ERG Brextremist faction of her own party.
She knows that her position as Prime Minister is entirely dependent on their support, so she feels the need to regularly promote their leaders into her government (Steve Baker and Suella Fernandes so far, with Jacob Rees-Mogg next in the queue), and to placate them with unworkable anti-immigrant and anti-EU diatribes.
She knows that her Brextremist backers will be delighted if her ridiculous demand to be allowed to discriminate against EU citizens wrecks the possibility of a transition period and triggers a ruinous "no deal" Brexit, because they'll be able to cash in by buying up distressed British assets and infrastructure on the cheap in the resulting economic meltdown, which was always their game.
Theresa May has already demonstrated that she's so weak that she allows these Brextremists to go completely unpunished for spewing the most extraordinary conspiracy theories in the House of Commons, and now she's actually throwing them the red meat of fresh anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the possibility of trashing the transition period that they hate so much.
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Theresa May's latest ploy to appease the hard-right ultra-nationalist Blue-kip demographic that she's so fundamentally reliant upon since her catastrophic vanity election is her announcement that post-Brexit passports will be blue.
This blue passport policy is clearly a ploy to shore up Tory support from the older more Brexit-enthusiastic generations. It's obvious from the way this change of passport colour is being continually framed as getting our blue passports back.
Almost nobody under the age of 30 will have any recollection of having a blue passport, and a hefty proportion of under-40s will only remember having had the burgundy passport that was introduced in 1988.
Framing this £500 million expenditure as getting our blue passports back is rhetoric to appeal to the nostalgia of backwards-looking members of the older generations.
Meanwhile it's a great big "screw you" to the younger generations who voted so heavily in favour of remain and can't even remember the times of blue passports and visa applications for travel in eastern and southern Europe.
To these younger generations (and the significant minority of the older generations who voted against giving the hard-right of the Tory party the green light to conduct a shambolic let's just make it up as we go along stagger out of the EU), the blue passport will serve as a constant visual reminder of the rights that have been confiscated from them against their will.
Perhaps elderly Daily Mail/S*n/Express/Telegraph readers will be delighted and overjoyed at the news that their passports will be blue again if they live long enough to renew them, but those of us who have benefited from having the right to travel, live, work and study in 30 other European nations (in which we enjoyed the exact same rights and protections as the locals), the blue passport will always be a reminder of how we had these rights revoked against our will by a one off confederacy of the backwards-looking, the Europhobic, the Tory right, the delusional, the easily led, and the downright racist.
A recent BMG poll threw up an incredible result. It turns out that the employed (in full-time or part-time jobs) are split 62% - 38% in favour of remaining in the EU and retaining our EU-derived rights, while the mainly retired 65+ demographic is split 62% - 38% in favour of tumbling chaotically out of the EU and abandoning these EU derived rights.
Changing the passport colour to blue is clearly and undeniably a sop to the 62% of mainly retired people who don't give a damn about stuff like our EU-derived workers' rights, or our EU-derived right to settle, work, and/or study in countries across Europe.
They simply don't care about retaining these things because they don't intent to take advantage of these rights.
I mean what use are the right to work anywhere in the EU, or our EU-derived workers' rights to retired people? And what use is the right to free university education that is available to EU citizens across numerous EU states to someone who is enjoying their retirement?
And as far as the Blue-kip demographic are concerned, they're absolutely fine with scrapping rights, liberties and protections they have no use for in their retirement, in return for the simple nostalgia hit of having a blue passport.
One positive from this whole ridiculous debacle is that the longer Theresa May and the Tories insist on exclusively targeting their policies and propaganda at the hard-right Blue-kippers, the deeper they're digging their own demographic graves.
Hundreds of thousands of Brexit voters have died already since the Brexit vote 18 months ago, and hundreds of thousands more will have died long before they ever get the chance to apply for their beloved blue passports.
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of youngsters are entering the electorate every year as they turn 18, and to them the blue passport will serve as a continual reminder of which political party is responsible for revoking rights and liberties from them in order to appeal to blue-kippers who spent decades benefiting from those very same rights and liberties before deciding to smash them all up just so they could have a differently coloured passport.
The more the Tories tailor their policies and their propaganda at the dwindling blue-kipper demographic, the more enraged the younger generations are going to become.
And the blue passport will be a continual reminder to them, and to the rest of us, that the party responsible for this needless destruction of our rights and liberties (not to mention the catastrophic economic fallout) are the callous and inept chinless wonders with blue rosettes on at election time.
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