So the results of the long-awaited indicative votes are in, and MPs rejected all eight of the options on the table.
The one that got closest was Tory veteran Ken Clarke's compromise proposal for a Customs Union Brexit, but it lost by just eight votes after almost 100 MPs abstained.
Labour's proposal for a confirmatory vote was defeated by 27 votes (with a significantly lower abstention rate than the Customs Union proposal), so MPs don't want to put the decision back to the public.
Jeremy Corbyn's compromise plan (Customs Union, Single Market, workers' rights, cooperation on science, security, and environment, no Irish border) was defeated by 70 votes, which is odd because it's very similar to Ken Clarke's proposal. Presumably a lot of anti-Labour MPs voted against it simply because they didn't want to give Corbyn the win.
A ruinous "no deal" flounce out of the EU was resoundingly defeated by 400 votes to 160, but still remains the default option if nothing changes before the EU finally get sick of this nonsensical game-playing farce.
Joanna Cherry's proposal to Revoke Article 50 if no solutions are found in order to prevent a "no deal" meltdown was defeated by 109. This would have been my preference, but it's perfectly obvious why a lot of MPs opposed it, because if it was adopted as a policy it would give Brexit-sceptic MPs a perverse incentive to steer the UK towards a "no deal" flounce in order to get the whole mess revoked.
The other three proposals were variations on the the compromise-Brexit theme, and all were resoundingly defeated.
So where does this leave us?
After following up the biggest government defeat in history with another humiliating defeat, Theresa May is attempting to bring back her absurd farce of a deal for a third time, and trying convince the Brextremist Tories to defy the national interest to vote it through by promising them that she'll quit as Prime Minister immediately if they pass it.
The problem is that an awful lot of these Brextremists have described her withdrawal plan in the most pejorative terms, including Jacob Rees-Mogg's accusation that it would turn the UK into a "slave state".
Theresa May is banking on the fact that her fellow Tories are now so keen to see the back of her that they'll wilfully vote to turn the UK into a "slave state" (their own words) in order to get rid of her!
The DUP sectarians she bribed into propping up her shell-shocked and shambolic government after the failure of her hubris election in 2017 are having none of it though, which means she's going to have to appeal to the pro-austerity "centrists" again.
The Independent Group squatter MPs have already clearly indicated that they'll actively prop up a Tory austerity government in return for another roll of the dice, regardless of the fact that nothing has been done to deal with the issues that caused Remain to lose the last referendum (no clamp down on electoral cheats an liars, no new regulation on social media dark ads, no real outreach to left-behind areas that voted Leave, no end to the living standards-trashing austerity dogma that caused Brexit in the first place, and the same kind of egotistical, elitist, grandstanding, pro-austerity militants pushing themselves to the forefront of the Remain campaign).
The Lib-Dems have adopted a similar pro-Tory pro-austerity begging strategy in the hope of another reckless roll of the dice. But after the absolute annihilation they suffered in their 2011 Alternative Vote referendum, they should know better than anyone that allowing the Tories to pick the options, the wording, the eligibility criteria, and the timing of the ballot to their own advantage would dangerously load the dice in favour of creating an inescapable double-mandate for a hard-right Tory-conceived, Tory-administered Brexit.
Labour will keep pushing for a General Election to break the deadlock, but it's highly unlikely to happen because the Tories certainly won't be voting no confidence in themselves, no matter how farcical it gets, the DUP definitely won't vote to kill their golden goose, and the Independent Group squatters will never vote for elections because they know the local constituencies they just betrayed will gladly punish them by booting them off the parliamentary gravy train.
So unfortunately there's no light at the end of the tunnel. No Brexit deal, no compromise Brexit, no referendum, no revocation of Article 50, no general election, just more of this interminable Brexit farce.
But this national humiliation is exactly what we get for 17.4 million of us voting for a vague ambition with no actual plan at all for how to achieve it, and then 13.6 million of us flocking to the polls to reelect the malicious and incompetent Tories who created this mess in the first place after they gave us an unexpected chance to get rid of them in 2017.
We can't really expect to see any more coherence and purpose from our political class if we keep voting for absolutely nonsensical things ourselves can we?
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The hard-right Trojan Horse political party UKIP is collapsing into farce and bankruptcy, but the big hitters have already jumped ship. Nigel Farage quit as UKIP leader immediately after the 2016 EU referendum result came in, and the Brexiteer and major Leave.EU donor Arron Banks bailed out soon afterwards too. in order to concentrate on building the profile of his fanatically right-wing Westmonster propaganda operation.
We've all seen how Theresa May has redirected the Tory party towards hard-right ultra-nationalism in order to attract all of these fickle Ukippers fleeing the wreckage of their party.
We've seen how former UKIP councillors have been welcomed into the Tory party with open arms, and even utilised as pro-Tory plants in the BBC Question Time audience.
And we've all seen how the majority of Tories have simply put up with this rapid shift towards the extreme-right political fringe because their power at any price ideology still sees this Blue-kip bastardisation of their own party as preferable to a centre-left government that would work to reverse inequality, protect the vulnerable, and dismantle barriers to social mobility.
They'd genuinely rather see their own party turned into a demeaning UKIP tribute act than live in a slightly fairer society.
The extent to which the Tory party is being colonised by radical hard-right blue-kippers was obvious enough even before the 2017 General Election, but now Arron Banks has come out and actually explained his plot to seize control of the Tory party.
While the Labour Party membership has soared to over half a million since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, the Tory party membership has slumped so pathetically that they've been refusing to even admit how embarrassingly low it actually is for four years. Estimates put their membership at somewhere between 50,000 - 70,000, which is somewhere between 8% - 12% the size of Labour's.
Arron Banks' idea is for UKIP to fold and for their politicians and party members to infiltrate the Tory party en masse in order to push for the hardest and most economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit.
Here's what he said:
"We could have a clear majority in the Tory party for a real Brexit within months if UKIP wound up and all its members and FORMER members, all of its latent support in the country now joined up to the Conservative Party … Maybe by flooding back into the Conservative party we can change the course of history again. With a leadership challenge on the cards once more, this may be the perfect time."
So here we have a former UKIP donor explicitly outlining his plot to infiltrate and usurp the Tory party for his own purposes, yet the Tories are doing nothing at all to stop it. In fact it seems likely they'd welcome the half million or so remaining Ukipper die-hards with open arms, because they're looking down the barrel of an absolute trouncing at the next General Election without them.
If centre-right Tories had any decency and dignity at all they'd be demanding new rules to prevent ex-Ukippers flooding in to their party and taking it over from within (perhaps a ban on membership or leadership election votes for anyone who has been a UKIP member in the last five years).
But the disgraceful reality is that most of them actually seem to see the rapid Ukipification of their party as the only hope to retain their weakening grip on political power.
They realise that they wouldn't have even had sufficient MPs to bribe the DUP bigots into propping up their government if it hadn't been for the support of the fanatically right-wing and demonstrably fickle Blue-kip demographic, so they're now absolutely terrified of making any move whatever that might drive them away again.
One of the most extraordinary things of all is that Tories can look at the undeniable and ongoing Ukipification of their party, and even read about Arron Banks' plot to usurp the Tory party completely, yet believe the reality-reversing mainstream media trope that Labour are the party that has been taken over by a radical fringe element!
They actually choose to believe that Labour's popular centre-left policy platform that has attracted hundreds of thousands of new members to the party is the terrifying and sinister plot, whilst minimising/ignoring their own party's grotesque metamorphosis into a UKIP tribute act headed by a cowardly and directionless leader who is terrified of doing anything that might anger the fickle blue-kip demographic she's courted so egregiously, the secretive cabal of hard-Brexit Tory MPs who could oust her at any moment, the DUP bigots who prop up her government, or the Daily Mail hate mob who unleash torrents of abuse and death threats at anyone who dares defy Paul Dacre's fanatically right-wing and profoundly anti-democratic interpretation of the Brexit vote.
There are still a few centre-right "one nation" type Tories left, like Ken Clarke, Sarah Wollaston, Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry, Nicky Morgan and the like.
Let's be absolutely clear that none of these people are heroes because they've actively promoted grotesque and destructive Tory policies like austerity dogma, wage repression, catastrophic infrastructure funding cuts, privatisation mania, and the systematic abuse of sick and disabled people.
However it's important to distinguish between these old school Tory-Tories and the much more rabidly right-wing Blue-kippers.
The problem is that these old school Tories know from experience that whenever they defy the ongoing Ukipification of their party then they get bombarded with hate mail and death threats from the Blue-kip hate mob.
Will the old school Tory-Tories have the courage and the strength to fight back against the ongoing extreme-right drift of the Tory party?
Or will they simply acquiesce to the Ukipification process because they either believe in maintaining political power at any cost, or they're too afraid of the growing power of the Blue-kip mob to dare stepping out of line again?
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Seven years of wilfully loading the burden of austerity dogma onto the poor and ordinary whilst lavishing tax breaks and handouts on corporations and the mega-rich is proof that there is no such thing as a good Tory. However it's clear that some Tories are certainly a lot less bad than others.
There are around two dozen potential Tory rebels who are expressing opposition to the fanatically right-wing Blue-kip takeover of their party that is happening under Theresa May's leadership. They don't like the way Theresa May is being edged ever closer to the "no deal" Brexit cliff edge by the ideological fanatics in their party, and they have strong reservations about Theresa May's efforts to sideline parliament and give her ministers the power to rewrite thousands of UK laws with no parliamentary scrutiny whatever.
They're not actually trying to stop Brexit completely, but they are determined to prevent the economic catastrophe that a "no deal" flounce out of Europe would entail.
Take a listen to Ken Clarke's speech during the Brexit bill debate to get an idea of where these "rebel" Tory MPs are actually coming from.
The Daily Telegraph's effort to bully these MPs into conformity to the Blue-kip extremism that Theresa May has embraced has backfired dramatically.
By attacking these MPs in the same way that the hatemongering Daily Mail attacked the judges who ruled in favour of parliamentary sovereignty, and the academics who dare to criticise or critique the shambolic Brexit process, the Telegraph have proven beyond doubt that their descent from respected broadsheet to the depths of the contemptible sewer press (Daily Mail, S*n, Express) is now complete.
It's also backfired because their attempt to bully and shame these MPs into conformity to the Blue-kip agenda has actually created a handy list of the minority of half-decent Tory MPs who still give a damn about stuff like the national economy, parliamentary sovereignty, and holding the government to account:
Heidi Allan, Kenneth Clarke, Jonathan Djanogy, Vicky Ford, Dominic Grieve, Stephen Hammond, Oliver Heald, Jeremy Lefroy, Paul Masterton, Nicky Morgan, Bob Neill, Antoinette Sandback, Anna Soubry, Tom Tugendhat, and Sarah Wollaston.
Assuming that this effort to bully these MPs into compliance is unsuccessful, and they do rebel against the lunatic decision to hard wire the exit date so that negotiations cannot be extended even if both sides desire it, and come out fighting to defend parliamentary sovereignty too, they'll be in the minority of Tory MPs who are prepared to put the interests of the nation above the narrow party political interests of the Tory party.
There's no doubt that these people are still complicit in forcing their ruinous austerity dogma on the nation, and in the savage mistreatment of disabled people, but they deserve credit for finally taking a stand against the fanatical hard-right Blue-kip insanity that Theresa May is embracing in order to cling onto power.
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Apparently the British negotiating team still had their papers in their bags when the photo was taken, but the confident Europeans with their stacks of briefing papers sitting opposite the Brits armed only with inane grins and misplaced confidence is a powerful visual metaphor for how the Brexit process is going so far.
The EU negotiating team have finalised and published detailed Brexit position papers on a whole range of different aspects of the Brexit negotiations, and their stance is universally backed by the 27 remaining EU states, which is no mean feat given that they range from the extreme-right governments in Poland and Hungary all the way through to Syriza in Greece and the Communist-backed government in Portugal).
It's a national embarrassment to Britain that our negotiating team is so chaotic. Not only are the British public still deeply divided on whether Brexit should even be going ahead after all the lies and dodgy dealings during the referendum campaign, the Tories who have been charged with delivering Brexit are all pulling in different directions.
Tory Brexit is turning out to be just as chaotic and damaging as almost all of the economic and international law experts predicted during the rushed referendum debate in 2016.
The problem isn't just that the Tories didn't even draw up a contingency plan for what to do in case David Cameron's EU referendum gamble backfired, it's that the governing party is still deeply divided on what they want to achieve out of the Brexit process.
The Tories aren't just split between two camps any more like they used to be (Europhobes and Europhiles) they've fractured into all kinds of factions, each arguing for their own agendas under Theresa May's weak leadership, and agreeing on one thing only, that the opposition parties and devolved parliaments should be given as little influence over the Brexit process as possible.
On Sunday 16th July the Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond made the extraordinary admission that there are some members of the cabinet who don't agree with his stance (brazenly one he just nicked off Labour) that protecting British jobs and the UK economy should be the first priorities of the Brexit negotiations.
We can have a good guess as to who these cabinet members are who would sacrifice other people's jobs and living standards to secure the hard-right extreme Brexit they crave. They're clearly the same ones who talked Theresa May into adopting her toddler tantrum Brexit strategy of endlessly repeating her give us exactly what we want or we'll walk away with nothing threats, that do nothing but massively increase the likelihood of an extreme "no deal" Brexit.
There's ginning David Davis, who is so clearly out of his depth it would be hilarious if our national reputation and the living standards of millions weren't hanging on his ability to suddenly and miraculously develop some basic levels of competence.
There's Boris Johnson who seems to have carte blanche to just make up whatever positions he likes, including telling the EU to "go whistle" during a parliamentary debate, for which he received the usual mild rebuke and no further action for what would be firing/resignation offences under the leadership of anyone but the weakest of Prime Ministers.
Then there are the absolutely clueless gibberish-spewing buffoons like Owen Paterson, who actually claimed that the UK could obtain the benefits of the Single Market by imposing import tariffs on EU produce, meaning he's apparently unaware that the main benefit of the Single Market is the lack of import/export tariffs!
Then there are the reluctant Brexiters, who know perfectly well that Brexit is going to be a social and economic catastrophe for the UK, and campaigned against it during the referendum debate, but who are now clearly prioritising the interests of the Tory party way above the nation as a whole by supporting a policy that they know will do severe long-term harm to the economy and to the national reputation.
Last of all is the almost eradicated Europhile faction which is now represented in the House of Commons by the solitary backbench figure of Ken Clarke (the only Tory MP to vote against invoking Article 50).
The source of this chaos is obviously Theresa May's feeble directionless leadership.
Instead of defining a clear position and making sure her cabinet members stick to it, she's allowing them to say whatever the hell they like, and contradict each other time and again, without taking any real disciplinary action whatever, even when they come out with outrageously confusing and counterproductive gibberish.
Either the Tory cabinet ministers are continually bickering and contradicting one another because they're as unclear about the official Brexit negotiating position as the rest of us are, or they do actually know what the supposed endgame is, but they're got such contempt for their own party leader that they feel free to defy her by claiming whatever they like with total impunity.
Whatever the causes of this chaos, disunity and infighting within Theresa May's cabinet, it's clearly an absolute embarrassment to the UK that while 27 politically diverse nations have come together to formulate clear, timely and transparent negotiating positions after having had Brexit thrust upon them, the Tory party that brought us Brexit in the first place are so shockingly disunited.
I know "I told you so" is not a good look, but anyone who imagined that the fanatical hard-right fringe of the Tory party would be capable of delivering anything but an absolute shambles must at least be feeling their misplaced faith evaporating away quite quickly by now.
These hard-right Europhobes had four whole decades of whinging to actually develop a plan for getting out of the EU, but incredibly they're still too busy fighting and bickering amongst themselves to focus on the job that they created for themselves, even an entire year after the referendum result, and with the Article 50 clock ticking away.
Options
There are four main options for the UK.
1. Just muddle along and pretend that Theresa May and the absolutely chaotic party she's so demonstrably failing to lead aren't slow-marching us off an economic cliff until the ground begins actually crumbling away beneath our feet.
2. Demand a more inclusive Brexit that at least offers the opposition parties and devolved governments some proper influence over the UK's negotiating objectives (highly unlikely with a wannabe tyrant like Theresa May still clinging desperately to power).
3. Demand a second referendum on the final Brexit terms. Whether this would act as a safeguard against Theresa May doing a catastrophic "no deal" strop would depend entirely on the EU, since it's up to them whether they would accept the revocation of Article 50 in the event of a "please stop this madness now" referendum vote.
4. Demand another General Election, in which Labour would almost certainly make significant gains, either winning a majority, or taking enough Tory seats to form a progressive coalition. It would be unlikely that such a move would be enough to stop Brexit entirely, but at least it would hand the task of sorting out the mess to Keir Starmer QC, who is much more qualified for such a vital job than bumbling David Davis.
Obviously none of these options are ideal, but then we're the ones who voted to put ourselves in this ridiculous position last year, so we're just going to have to own the consequences.
Obviously the first option is the worst of the lot, but unless there's some concerted effort to stop it going this way, the cliff edge is clearly the direction of travel.
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Even though I've stated many times that I don't but into the party political tribalism thing, a lot of people tend to think of me as a Labour Party supporter. I guess that's understandable given the way I've often felt compelled to offer a counter-narrative to the savage propaganda war the mainstream media are conducting against Jeremy Corbyn. I can see Corbyn's problems easily enough, but beneath his poor speaking skills and his lack of charisma, he's a decent man with strong political convictions who has been unfairly maligned by the media.
On the other side of the political spectrum there's another guy I quite like. It's obvious that I have a lot fewer political ideals in common with Ken Clarke as I do with Jeremy Corbyn, because it's pretty damned unlikely that I would share much political territory with a guy who served in the governments of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron.
On the other hand I like the way Ken Clarke has become pretty honest and outspoken in his old age.
During the shambolic post-referendum Tory leadership election he was recorded having a candid conversation with his fellow Thatcher cabinet minister Malcolm Rifkind in which he described Theresa May as "a bloody difficult woman" and blasted Michael Gove as being so fanatically right-wing that he even shocked the disgraced Liam Fox.
When it came to the Article 50 vote, Ken Clarke was the only Tory to ignore the party whip and vote against it. It's actually pretty extraordinary that he was the only one given that the majority of Tory MPs campaigned to stay in the EU. However all the rest of them were willing to follow Theresa May's lead and abandon their stated principles in order to vote in favour of this massive act of economic self-harm.
Ken Clarke's explanations over why he decided to rebel were full of more candid political insight.
Clarke on the Tory Brexit shambles
"I've never seen anything as mad or chaotic as this."
This is quite some admission from a guy who served under Margaret Thatcher (Monetarism, 20%+ interest rates, the Poll Tax fiasco), John Major (Rail privatisation, Black Wednesday) and David Cameron (the failed rush to war in Syria, six years of economically ruinous austerity).
"The government are going to extraordinary lengths to try to avoid being accountable to parliament ... It leads me to the unworthy suspicion that they don’t have a clear policy that they have agreed on, so they are trying to minimise its exposure."
It's pretty extraordinary that so little fuss has been made about Theresa May's effort to overrule parliamentary sovereignty and turn the UK into an autocracy where she alone gets to make and repeal laws. Thankfully this dictatorial power-grab was defeated by the courts, hence the hopelessly rushed and error-strewn Brexit white paper and the Article 50 vote.
Clarke on Remain voters
"It's quite obvious that some of the 16 million [Remain voters] were much bucked by the fact that somebody was still being as obdurate as I was and refusing to see why on earth they should all be abandoned. Actually, I think the 16 million were right."
It's pretty sad that the several million Tories who voted Remain are left with just one man to represent their views in parliament because the rest of the Tory MPs are determined to put pure political expediency above what they actually think is best for Britain.
Clarke on Theresa May
"I am trying to minimise giving you opportunities to attack Theresa ... [but] going to see President Trump and President Erdoğan as her first two highly publicised calls showed the limitations of 'the new global politics'."
I suppose that it's good that there's at least one person in the Tory party with a sense of distaste at Theresa May sucking up to a brutal dictator and a bigoted narcissist on the world stage.
Clarke on Donald Trump
"Well, they [the government] have got this slogan about a global Britain, so obviously they want to illustrate this by having good photo-opportunities with leading figures around the world. So I suppose they thought it was quite a political coup to finally land this first meeting with him. But it's a mixed blessing because we happen to have a rather unpleasant and highly unpredictable American president."
Clarke on the fantasy of a beneficial Tory-Trump trade deal
"It's possible that for some reason he [Trump] wants to have a trade deal with us while he's busy repudiating deals with everybody else but I don't ... think ... so."
Conclusion
The reason I quite like Ken Clarke is not because he was the only Tory with guts enough to stick by his principles and vote against triggering Article 50, I quite liked him before he did that.
Back in the 1980s and 90s Clarke was perfectly happy to go along with all kinds of right-wing Tory madness, and he's still a free market fanatic despite openly admitting the catastrophic failure to solve the problem of inequality.
The difference nowadays is that the political spectrum has now shifted so far to the right that a once centre-right Tory has ended up looking like a rebellious leftie these days, simply because he's pretty much stayed where he was while the rest of the Tory party has dashed off into bonkers extreme-right Ukipper territory.
Clarke is still a right-winger, and I fundamentally disagree with him on numerous issues (privatisation, austerity, corporate outsourcing, tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, tax-dodging ...) but I have a certain measure of respect for him. The main reason I've got time for him these days is that as he's got old and a bit cantankerous, he's taken to quite often telling the truth and plainly expressing his views, which is pretty rare for most politicians, let alone a Tory one.
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The Tory MP Andrea Leadsom leapt into the political limelight during the EU referendum debate and even more so after putting her name forward to be the next Tory leader (which would make her the unelected Prime Minister of the UK).
Political track record
Most people would be forgiven for not having a clue who Leadsom was before the Brexit campaign kicked off, because she was hardly a well known politician. She has only been an MP since 2010. After a brief stint as a junior treasury minister for George Osborne, Leadsom was appointed as David Cameron's Minister of State for Energy (a junior ministerial position in the DECC) after the Tories financially doped their way to their wafer thin majority in 2015.
Leadsom's appointment as energy minister nailed the coffin shut on David Cameron's lie about the Tories being "the greenest government ever", because no government with a genuine commitment to environmental issues would appoint a person with a track record of opposing renewable energy schemes and environmental targets as their energy minister.*
Leadsom has only been an MP for six years, and has only held two junior ministerial positions in David Cameron's team. If you think that the UK would benefit from an experienced leader during the post-Brexit restructuring process, then Leadsom clearly isn't that person.
Tax controversies
Readers of Private Eye might be more familiar with Andrea Leadsom than most people are as a result of the magazine's investigations into her dodgy tax affairs.
Leadsom uses tax-dodging schemes in her kids' names in order to avoid paying tax on the buy-to-let property portfolio she has built up with her husband Ben. You'd have to be living in some kind of ludicrous Brexiter fantasy land to believe that such a person would do anything to clamp down on tax-dodgers, or to regulate the rash of parasitical buy-to-let slumlords that has infected the UK housing market.
Another tax controversy Leadsom was embroiled in was a £70,000 series of political donations to her election campaign from her brother-in-law's company which is owned by a British Cayman Islands based holding company. This tax-haven operated company has also handed £816,000 to the Tory party too.
The fact that the ban on political donations from foreign companies can be so easily bypassed through the use of of a British based subsidiary company is appalling. However what is even more concerning is the fact that while in the wake of Brexit the EU has immediately moved to begin the clampdowns on tax loopholes that the Tory led UK government have been blocking and obstructing for years, one of the top contenders to be British Prime Minister has the same kind of shockingly lax attitude to tax-dodging as David Cameron.
UKIP
Andrea Leadsom's campaign to become Tory leader is being supported by Arron Banks (the Tory donor - turned UKIP donor - turned Brexit campaign donor - turned Tory leadership candidate backer) who has openly stated that if it was up to him he would privatise the NHS.
There are two important considerations about the fact that Arron Banks has decided to back Andrea Leadsom for leader of the Tory party.
The first is that if he manages to get his pet politician established as the unelected Prime Minister of the UK, his dream of abolishing the NHS would clearly be a lot closer to coming true.
The other consideration is the fact that under the leadership of a candidate who has been hand-picked by one of UKIP's biggest donors, the likelihood of UKIP being folded back into the Tory party would be increased.
It's still unlikely to happen because UKIP serves as a brilliant Tory Trojan Horse party which hoovers up the votes of dissatisfied working class voters and then uses that support to promote even more of the toxic Thatcherite economic dogma that has savagely undermined working class wages and ruined working class communities for the last four decades.
Whether UKIP is folded back into the Tory party, or kept as a Thatcherite Trojan Horse party isn't the main issue. The main issue is that one of UKIPs biggest donors is now interfering in the Tory leadership election to promote his own favoured candidate. If the same man can have such influence over both parties, isn't it completely obvious that they're essentially the same thing with differently coloured ties?
Workers' rights
Andrea Leadsom's views on workers' rights are particularly appalling, even for a Tory. This is what she said about the rights of people who work for small businesses during a parliamentary speech in 2012.
"I envisage there being absolutely no regulation whatsoever – no minimum wage, no maternity or paternity rights, no unfair dismissal rights, no pension rights." [source]
Make no mistake about it, Leadsom is an even more rabidly right-wing Tory than Cameon and Osborne. They attacked workers' rights throughout their six years at the top, but they did it piece by piece. Attacking unfairly sacked workers with one piece of legislation, public sector workers with another, the trade unions with another and so on ...
Leadsom has openly fantasised (on the public record) about stripping all workers' rights from anyone who works for a small company. She actually seems to believe that such a policy would be good for small businesses, rather than turning them into unscrupulous employer free zones, which any potential employee with any brains would avoid like the plague.
Who on earth would want to work for a small business if they knew that they would have no right to the basics provided by other employers such as sick pay, parental pay or pension contributions?
Who in their right mind would work for an employer who could sack them for whatever reason (refusing to suck their cock for example) with absolutely no right of appeal or compensation?
Leadsom is clearly an absolute crackpot who is so in love with hard-right economic dogma that she's utterly incapable of seeing that her plan to revoke workers' rights from small business employees wouldn't be a marvellous gift to the small business sector as she imagines it, but a curse that drives away any potential small business employees with brains enough to avoid putting themselves in a position where they can be ruthlessly exploited.
Dishonesty
In the aftermath of Brexit the veteran Tory politician Ken Clarke was recorded making a number of unguarded observations about the Tory leadership "fiasco". One of the most interesting was his claim that he didn't think that either Boris Johnson or Andrea Leadom were actually in favour leaving the European Union at all.
It's hardly beyond the bounds of possibility that a self-serving Tory politician would support a policy that they don't actuallybelieve in because they see it as being in their own self-interest to do so.
A look back to what Andrea Leadsom was saying in 2013 only adds to Ken Clarke's suspicion that she only jumped on the Brexit bandwagon because she felt it was in her own political self interest to do so. This is what she said in a speech to the Hansard Society:
"I don't think the UK should leave the EU. I think it would be a disaster for our economy and it would lead to a decade of economic and political uncertainty at a time when the tectonic plates of global success are moving".
Here's what Andrea Leadsom said on her own website on June 20th 2016, just three days before the EU referendum:
"I am convinced that a Vote to Leave on Thursday will not hurt the UK's economy."
Either one of these statements is true or the other. It's impossible for Leadsom or her supporters to argue that they're both true when they're so obviously contradictory. In one she predicted an economic disaster and in the other she predicted no harm whatever. She couldn't be more contradictory if she tried.
Some of her justifications in support of the second statement are outrageously dishonest too. This is an absolute corker:
"My best expectation, with my 30 years of financial experience, is that there will not be an economic impact"
Judged in its own right this is clearly an appeal to authority fallacy, but in light of her predictions of an economic disaster just three years previously, it's also brazenly dishonest. If three years ago she was declaring that Brexit would be an economic disaster, then 27 of her cited 30 years of experience clearly led her to the opposite expectation of what she was claiming.
If Leadsom was even remotely honest she would have admitted her complete U-turn on the economic impact of Brexit at some point in the last three years, and then explained her reasoning for such a total reversal of opinion. But she didn't do that, she chose to exaggerate in a brazenly dishonest manner instead.
Economic illiteracy
Andrea Leadsom worked in the Treasury under George Osborne and actually praises him for doing such a good job as Chancellor, despite the way he has created more new public debt than every Labour government in history combined, overseen an appalling relative decline in UK productivity, and his ideological austerity agenda has completely failed to eliminate the deficit by 2015 as he promised in 2010. Additionally Osborne has had to admit that his 2015 promise to get rid of the deficit by 2020 was a load of rubbish too.
Leadsom voted in favour of one economically toxic batch of Tory austerity measures after another with no regard for the appalling social and economic consequences of such ideologically driven madness, and she shows absolutely no signs of having an economic epiphany that a fiscal policy of "let's cut our way to growth" is unworkable macroeconomic illiteracy.
Perhaps even more concerning is her insistence that Brexit was going to have no economic effect on the UK. Of course nobody expects politicians to have a magic crystal ball to predict the economic future with, but anyone who claims 30 years of financial experience should have been able to see how the market and the value of the pound slumped on every poll favouring Brexit, and how the markets boomed and the pound soared in value on every poll favouring Remain.
Aside from her pathetic inability to read the pre-Brexit market conditions, her claims that Brexit would have no impact on the economy are quite simply bizarre. The idea that such a seismic change in direction for the UK would have no impact on the economy is not only absurd from an economic perspective, it's utterly ridiculous from the most basic rational perspective too. The concept that actions have consequences is such a strongly established scientific principle it's been accepted as common knowledge. The idea that the action of quitting the EU would have no economic consequences is either the opinion of an economic illiterate, or a massively dishonest opinion of someone who knows that it's lamentably pathetic gibberish, but is intent on preying on the economic illiteracy of their audience.
Conclusion
Andrea Leadsom is an inexperience politician who has what can only be described as a very serious sincerity problem. Her economic views are ridiculous. If she actually believes what she is saying she's economically illiterate, if she doesn't, then she's cynically preying on the economic ignorance of her audience.
If this woman ends up being appointed as the UK's unelected Prime Minister, we can expect yet another Tory lurch to the right. An administration headed by an inexperienced political novice like Andrea Leadson would end up being a Thatcherism on steroids government with the appalling Arron Banks in the background pulling the strings.
If UKIP don't fold back into the Tories under Leadsom's leadership, it's hard to see how much space would actually be left for them on the extreme-right of the political spectrum without straying into full bore Britain First style fanaticism.
If you like stuff like workers' rights and the NHS, and dislike brazen insincerity, tax-dodging and hard-right economic madness like ideological austerity, then you should be very afraid that Andrea Leadsom's political star is rising.
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