Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish - reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I reviewed the British part of the story in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America (I finished the review in Sunday's post). Sim's virtual walk in London took us to Kensington Palace, with lots of memories of Princess Diana along the way. Mike provided us book lovers with a look at Rudyard Kipling's home in Sussex. Heather dissected the problems of Regency romances and contemplated how to surmount them in her NaNoWriMo project. Karen gave us three short book reviews from her backlog. Becky gave us a review of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde just in time for Halloween.
Just when I thought I understood Brexit, things got complicated again.
I worked out the Leave and Remain sides just before the referendum.
I researched Hard Brexit when the term was making the news last month. I learned that from the perspective of the EU it was Hard Brexit (a clean, fast break with no guaranteed concessions on trade from the EU or immigration from the UK) or no Brexit.
Yesterday's headlines complicate things.
Theresa May, the new Prime Minister of the UK was determined to make this Brexit thing happen, based on the results of the referendum which she believed gave her all the authority she needed. Parliament has been pushing for the right to have some say in it for weeks (I read some stories about that when I was researching the term 'hard Brexit'). UK's High Court declared, yesterday, that Parliament was right. But, there's an appeal to the Supreme Court, so that battle isn't over yet.
The members of Parliament, as I understand it, were more on the Remain side. But, of course, they're elected officials and unlikely to go against the wishes of voters who voted to Leave. Some Members of Parliament (MPs) with constituents who voted Remain may see this as an opportunity to reverse course, but none of the news sources I read thought that was likely. Parliament clearly wants a softer Brexit than they feared that Prime Minister May would deliver, but that doesn't take into account that the EU has a say in that.
The Mirror has a fun and enlightening article complete with videos and tweets: High Court Brexit ruling: What happens next? Guide as judges tell PM she can't invoke Article 50 alone. The BBC take on the news is more serious, assumes more knowledge of the British way of doing things, and goes into more depth.
I'm still confused. And, I bet I'm not the only one in the US or the UK.
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
