BREXIT

I tend to agree that it was never going to work out well, but you're talking as though there were only two options - staying in the EU or Boris Johnson. The point is, the 'Lexiteers' (and christ how many words is that a portmanteau of, 3 or 4?) wanted a different direction for the country and saw both the Conservative government and the European Union as part of the problem. It looks like they've "solved" one problem but increased the other one tenfold. 

Polls have shown that this is total nonsense and yet it remains the common refrain of centrists for the last 5 years. Really weird but strangely enough, I'm never tripping over all of these millions of people who are absolutely crying out for a party led by Yvette Cooper or Jess Phillips.

If you are so confident in your assertion, please could you explain both the political and psephological thresholds that such a leader, and it would also be helpful here if you could varnish your "half decent leader" with a name, would have successfully overcome to "have a majority"? 

You’ve learned absolutely nothing. No reflection of what’s happened. Polls were conveniently disregarded by you and the rest of the cultists when they consistently showed that Corbyn’s approval ratings with the British public were lower than any other opposition leader for 45 years. Quite the achievement when austerity, food banks, in work poverty are all flourishing.


If you think Jess Phillips, Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Yvette Cooper even Lisa Nandy couldn’t capitalise on the open goals that The Dear Leader missed over the years then you’ve let your fan girl fawning overtake reality. Fact of the matter is, we’re in the horrific position we’re in equally down to Labour and Corbyns incompetence as it is down to Tory policy of screwing the country.

By having a leader who was able to articulate that Leaving would damage jobs in manufacturing irreparably and would make austerity seem like a picnic? But as someone who voted Leave you obviously hate the EU more than austerity or job losses? Or was it the halfway house Leave that you wanted that was never going to happen? The ‘we’ll reopen the coal mines and pay for another house for Ian Lavery & wave goodbye to those nasty car manufacturers like Nissan & Airbus version of Leave?’

A leader who can grasp that this will not do any good to the country will be preferable to someone who’d rather spend the whole referendum campaign on holiday/planting radishes.

Face it, you’ve messed up big time. Backed the wrong leader, backed the wrong side in the referendum and now there’s going to be a heck of a lot of work to get this country back to where it was in 2016, let alone the 90s. Time to let the adults have a go. Stick to the students union and Che Guevara t-shirts.

Does The Canary not mention Portugal?

Starmer has my vote

Said it before and I’ll say it again, an ultra-Remainer London-centric knight of the realm will not win Labour back their northern Leave-voting seats.

Ian Lavery has announced he won’t be putting himself forward for the leadership and has thrown his support behind Rebecca Long-Bailey.

Important not to split the left vote.

They want Brexit mate. They wouldn’t trust a hard Remainer.

And they've got it now.

So what else do they want?

What's interesting is that between 2017 and 2019, the actual number of people who vote Conservative went up from 13.6 million to 13.9 million. Considering the UK population is going up by about 400,000 a year, this doesn't really suggest to me that the Tories are attracting many more voters. It's more that other parties (Labour in particular) are losing them.

The Brexit Party, though they didn't win any seats, was a real spanner in the works for Labour, and the fiercely Remain stance of the Lib Dems and Greens probably took a few voters off them too. Because of our peculiar voting system, the margins between a landside and no majority can be pretty small.

One thing that's barely been mentioned is that turnout was down by 1.5% percentage points from 2017. That's out of keeping with recent elections, and I think shows how helpless and fed up a lot of people feel about politics. I think that's especially the case on the left, among liberals and Remain voters, who I don't think are quite as single-minded as those who just seem to want to get out of the EU and worry about everything else later. I've always seen Brexit as little more than a battle over the direction of the Conservative Party, and unfortunately it's had a "divide and conquer" effect on the nation that the far-right has capitalised on.

Fair enough that’s a fair assessment (as is Lobster’s) and I can only hope you are both proved correct.

Corbyn was absolutely superb at the despatch box today, I must say. Let’s hope his successor, whoever they may be, can follow suit of forcing issues and holding the government to account over the next few years.

BBC spending all day focusing on talking smack about Rebecca Long Bailey (including a bizarre pisstake of “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” chants) and hardly a word on the Prime Minister not turning up to address parliament on the dangerous situation in Iran. Shouldn’t expect anything else though should we?