Brexit: You Look Like You’ve Shat A Lego Garage

Last night’s defeat of Theresa May in the Commons made an already complicated and tense Brexit situation infinitely more fucktangular. Which was obviously cue for politicos of various ways, shapes and forms in Muddy Hollows not to resist the urge and comment on the entire shituation.

Turns out Brexit can be fully explained by quotes from The Thick Of it. (source)

This fact is mildly interesting in itself as Brexit was by far one of the least debated aspects of EU matters in Slovenia, a country where EU matters don’t rate high on the agenda as it is. Unless, of course, it has to do with EU funds, in which case suddenly everyone is an expert.

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Theresa May Day

The much-anticipated Brexit Speech by British PM Theresa May yesterday was dubbed the biggest speech of her career. But if there ever was an overhyped media event, this was it. In fact, even the annual State of the European Union addresses by Jean-Claude Juncker have more zest (especially when he goes off-script). But the fact that she basically reiterated that Brexit means Brexit, only in longer sentences, should surprise nobody.

PM Theresa May using longer sentences to say that Brexit still means Brexit (source)

To be fair, May did try and put some meat onto the shaky English skeleton flipping the bird to Europe. She has, for all intents and purposes, outlined the UK’s opening positions when and if Article 50 is triggered. The meat being so-called Clean Brexit.

OT: Did you notice how the narrative has changed? It’s no longer Hard Brexit versus Soft Brexit (with soft being instinctively preferable) but rather Clean Brexit versus… Muddy (Dirty? Unclean?) Brexit. The name alone is designed to make it instantly more appealing to the masses. So, expect this Clean Brexit narrative to be pushed, well, hard, for the next couple of weeks until the March/April deadline for triggering Article 50 (or will that be rebranded as “launching Article 50”?) starts to loom large.

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For Slovenian Media, A CNN/Obamacare Moment

Earlier today the Constitutional Court ruled on the constitutionality of the 2013 banking bail-in. Back then, Slovenia was on the brink of a financial meltdown with investors and money-men in general being overtly nervous that the country will follow Greece and Cyprus and further lengthen the odds of survival of the common European currency. Once the amount of bad debt and other toxic assets within the banking system was established (5 billion euro cumulative) the nitty-gritty of actually coughing up the dough was worked out. It was decided, mostly by the European Commission, that state-aid-like recapitalisation of the mostly state-owned banks was allowed only if private investors took the hit along with the taxpayers. Effectively, a complete nationalisation.

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