Donald Tusk is Handed the Official Article 50 Notification

Sir Tim Barrow, the UK Ambassador to the European Union, hands over the formal letter announcing that the UK will leave the EU, to Donald Tusk, President of the European Council.

And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

Book of Revelations 18:4

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu163144.html

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu163144.html

Today is Article 50 Day

Theresa May signed the official notification of Article 50 last night and it will be handed in at 12.30pm today, just as this post goes live.

 And so, finally, and about nine months after it should have occurred, the UK has notified the EU that we are heading for the exit.

To be honest I don't want to quibble too much. It is not the fault of this government and civil service that all previous governments refused to allow the civil service to create a contingency plan for what we now call Brexit. It was as if Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron really thought that if there was no plan then Brexit was impossible. It wasn't and it isn't, but the lack of contingency planning has created this nine month hiatus which has only now come to an end.

Looking ahead there will be a period of willy-waving in London and Brussels as both sides set out their negotiating positions. Eventually, after many ups and downs, some deal will be cobbled together that will satisfy nobody much, but which we can all sort of live with.

We are lucky in that our enemies also happen to be types that the bulk of the British people despise. The Federast reaction is increasingly being seen as a comeback opportunity for the likes of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, George Osborne and the ever opportunistic Liberal Democrats. Their rank and file, inasmuch as it exists to any great extent, is made up of the local government non-job holders from the ever diminishing circle of Guardian readers. We do not need to engage with those scrotes: we can just simply ignore them.

By April 2019 it will all be over. Without a deal, our membership of the European Union will end on the 29th April 2019. Hopefully, much earlier than that, common sense will have prevailed and both sides will have cobbled  something together that the next generation can then argue about.

Either way, we are leaving the European Union, which is all that matters for now.

Few Young People Bothered to Attend the Edinburgh Anti-Brexit March

On Saturday I reported on the poorly attended Edinburgh march for Brussels, and today I want to return to that event and ask where were all the young people? Not many of them were to be seen walking in the Edinburgh sunshine, that's for sure.

That's not to say that everyone was elderly, but most people at the poorly attended event did seem to be ladies of a certain age and gentlemen with grey hair and walking sticks.

I arrived at about 12.45pm when the couple of hundred people who had assembled by then were very noticeable by their advancing years.

The crowd grew to about 500 or so by 1.30pm, and I concentrated on grabbing the video of them all walking past my spot. It was only later when I watched the video properly for the first time and looked at the faces that I realised that the ratio of young to old did not seem to have changed all that much. 

It may be that the kiddies felt that clicking like to the event on Facebook was sufficient, but they have spent the months since June 2016 telling us how outraged they are by the vote, and how they were only waiting for the opportunity to reverse it. The evidence of Saturday in Edinburgh is that actually the precious little snowflakes actually don't care all that much.

As we prepare to abandon the sinking EU ship, the rest of us can be thankful that our opponents are still as bovine and useless as they were during the Brexit campaign last year.

Low Turnout at the March for Europe in Edinburgh

Last year's losers finally woke up today that we are about to leave the European Union and about 500 of them turned out in central Edinburgh to protest.

The Guardian claims that over a thousand showed up, but as you can see from the above video of mine, the true figure was about half that. Still it was a good day for Miss Jean Brodie and her friends, and it was nice to see so many small children being taken along by their parents. I am sure that their Polish nannies appreciated the day off.

As you might expect, the prettiest girls around were put at the front to give the photographers something to snap.

This being Scotland, there were also a few blokes in kilts.

A few SNP people turned up, and more than one of the people that I remember from the 2014 independence campaign were heard to mutter that if they had organised things instead of leaving it to the bloody students things would have gone a lot better.

Tommy Sheppard MP was there, although he does look in this photo as if he wished he wasn't.

As was Deidre Brock, my own MP, who always manages to be courteous. Don't ask me who the kid in the cheap suit is 'cos I have no idea, but he seemed friendly enough.

The sun shone, the 500 had their march, and on Wednesday the 29th March 2017, Prime Minster Theresa May will formally notify the European Union that we are leaving.

Still, at least Miss Jean Brodie and her chums got a day out.

Click here for more about Brexit in Edinburgh!

Calls Grow for the SNP to Govern, Not Play Games

A rather amusing photo that plopped into my in-box today. Nicola Sturgeon is still head and shoulders about the opposition, but she has managed to make Ruth Davidson's Tories look as if they are not completely insane. All Davidson had to do was remind people that this is a government, and not a collection of student union activists, and that she has done rather well of late, helped by the SNP.

The problem is that the SNP really is a campaigning outfit, which exists to push for independence. Its members seem to have little or no interest in governing the country, which is a pity because when they set their mind to it the SNP can govern rather well. However, when they balls it up, they do that quite spectacularly as well.

Today I went along to a conference that discussed the Named Person wheeze, which was recently declared unlawful by the UK Supreme Court. Jim Sillars was one of the speakers, and he made the point that this lunatic bit of authoritarian legislation was passed by a parliament that sits for only three days a week, from 9.00am to 5.00pm. This flawed legislation, which aimed at putting parents under the thumb of the social work industry, was passed by the SNP dominated Holyrood with minimal objections to its poorly drafted wording. Sillars went on to say that in Westminster every line of a bill is considered, but in Holyrood there was not the requisite amount of time needed to do that, with the result that flawed legislation was passed.

You can bet that the SNP will dedicate even less time to sorting out disasters like this now that they are back into full campaigning mode for IndyRef 2.

Russia Replies to UK Troops In Estonia With Mockery

Who says the Russians don't have a sense of humour? This is from their London embassy's Twitter feed and gives their official response to the UK government's decision to send troops to Estonia to deter the Russians from invading that country. The fact that Vlad Putin has no intention of invading anybody is presumably neither here nor there. As you can see, the Russians took that nonsense about as seriously as the rest of us.

Let's be honest: given the unholy row that is looming on the Brexit horizon, should we even be thinking about alienating Russia at the moment? The negotiations that will lead to our withdrawal from the European Union look set to be pretty hairy, so having good relations with Moscow might come in handy. Especially if we need to up the stakes and give Angela Merkel a bowel-loosening reminder of glorious days of yore:

Milo Yiannopoulos and University of Glasgow Feminists Entertain a Whole Country

Here's a good one to start the weekend off with. Some wits over at the University of Glasgow have nominated Milo Yiannopoulos as the university's new Rector. Needless to say the Fem. Soc. had kittens at the news and decided to call for a boycott of the vote.

Various people then pointed out to the girlies that boycotting the vote might just lead to Milo getting elected, so they had a rethink later that day:

The problem was that people were still passing round the original boycott call. So two days later the girlies decided that it might just be a good idea if they altered their original post:

Got that? Clear as mud, I'm sure.

The fems then decided that Milo should not even be allowed to stand for the Rectorship, and started a petition calling for the university to ban him, or something. Anyway, that petition reached a grand total of 3,000 signatures a week ago and has not managed to hit 3,500 even now.

Plan B involved threatening riots if Milo stands. Excuse me, but this is Glasgow we are talking about here, a city that regards street fighting as normal entertainment. Just like the Eskimos are supposed to have over a hundred words to describe snow, the Glaswegians have at least the same number to describe a brawl.

Meanwhile,  Milo Yiannopoulos has decided to pour petrol on the flames by promising to come to dear old Glasgow town to campaign in person.

This has all the making of lots of free publicity for Milo, plenty of outrage for the fems and a bundle of laughs for everyone else as we sit back and watch the cat fight.

The Brexit Collection Starts to Collect Reviews

The Brexit Collection has started to pick up reviews, a fact which pleases me no end. Neil Clark over at SputnikNews.com based his on the fact that the SNP used to oppose Brussels tooth and nail, but now wishes to turn Scotland into a province of the EU. Sputnik is Edinburgh based, and coming on the day that Jim Sillars announced that he will not vote for Scottish pseudo-independence, it looks as if the fightback here in Scotland against the EU is now definitely up and running.

The Amazon reviews have been uniformly positive, so let me give a big thumbs up to the blogger, David Lindsay, who was the first to review The Brexit Collection on the Amazon site.

I must be honest and say that I miss the hate-reviews that Brexit: For a New Country picked up from a few semi-literate Federasts, and I am hoping that this new book will attract a few of its own.

Under normal circumstances my attitude towards the Federasts and their opinions can be summed up with the above graphic, but on the principle that there is no such thing as bad publicity, let's hope that the sexually self-sufficient start leaving more reviews, written one-handedly, of course.

It may cheer them up as they face the totality of their defeat, but we Brexiteers will be on hand to remind them from now until the end of time that we are the winners!