Period Pains

Of course the "transition period" will last more than two years. It will last however long the transition takes. The transition in question being transition back into the EU. With no referendum.

On immigration, all that is going to happen is a registration scheme of the kind that already exists in several EU member-states. If you move to, for example, Belgium, and thus to Brussels, from another EU country, then you already have to go through the kind of registration that is proposed for anyone who moved to Britain from an EU country after Britain had supposedly left the EU. That's it.

The members of the European Research Group need to face the fact that, when even David Davis and Michael Gove do not care what they think, then nobody does. There are those who support Brexit for the Morning Star's reasons, and there are those who do not really support Brexit at all. But there is no Third Way. If you are a Third Way person, then you are an unperson. You do not exist. If you do not believe me, then ask David Davis or Michael Gove. They would tell you. They have already told you.

By the way, today's list of unpersons is replete, as is the Government, with people who were fanatically devoted to Pinochet's Chile and to apartheid South Africa at the time when Jeremy Corbyn may or may not have been in the same room as a man who now claims to have organised Live Aid on behalf of the intelligence agency of Czechoslovakia. At that time, this country had a Prime Minister who was campaigning for an all-white state in South Africa, a far more extreme position than was ever taken by the apartheid regime itself.

One of the most fanatical of all asked a Question to the Prime Minister this afternoon. Bob Blackman blocked the Freedom of the London Borough of Brent for Nelson Mandela, he fought through the courts to stop an acknowledgement that that proposal had received a simple majority even if not the necessary two thirds, and he now battles for the legal right to engage in caste-based discrimination, which the last Labour Government outlawed, but which this lot has relegalised. In such good causes, he serves on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, as well as on the Procedure Committee and on the Backbench Business Committee.

Even Andrew Neil has baldly announced on air that Corbyn's fabled Stasi file does not exist, so that is clearly the view of all three of the Government, the spooks and the Conservative Party. The only story here is "dying newspapers smear the man who wants to make their billionaire proprietors pay some tax". And even that is not much of a story. It is not really a story at all.

What is very much a story, however, is that the "transition period" will last more than two years. It will last however long the transition takes. The transition in question being transition back into the EU. With no referendum. Let's talk about that.