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Morning all

I don't think those figures mean much - I don't know if "Europe" is in the political background as much as it was for us from rebates via Bruges via Maastricht to the Euro to Lisbon etc. We had 35 years of Europe being in our politics from Thatcher to Major to Blair to Brown to Cameron - each one of them had "issues" with the EEC and later the EU.

Arguably, it destroyed the Conservative Party - now, whether you think that's another "dividend" or not is up to you but I'm certain the party would not be where it is now otherwise but every party had a fracture on this issue of some degree.

Claims of the death of the Tory party are massively premature. They were in government last year and lost an election after 14 years in power. People were and still are sick of them. Add in the purge of the pro Europeans and a lot of ‘talent’ and centrism has gone from the MP roster.
But. They are still polling more than Ed Daley’s apparently hugely sucessful Lib Dem’s, and pretty close to the party who won a huge majority last year.

Those who would welcome the extinction of conservatism should be careful what they wish. Conservative politics isn’t right wing nastiness. It’s personal responsibility, a state which lets individuals get on with their lives, but includes a safety net for those who struggle. It believes that those who can work, should. It believes in wealth creation, which aids all.

And if you have no conservatives, you risk being left with Reform.

There speaks a loyal Conservative.

The Conservatives clearly aren't "dead" but they aren't well - look at the results in Surrey last week. Towns like Caterham and Whyteleafe were once strongholds of the party - now, it's not just they are a close second to the LDs, they are a poor third .

Yes, you can be as waspish about the LDs as you like but in their historical context, 72 seats is a success, albeit for the most part built on the Conservative Party's collapse (but you can say the same about Labour, Reform and Green - we are all picking over the corpse of a once formidable electoral winning machine).

It’s personal responsibility, a state which lets individuals get on with their lives, but includes a safety net for those who struggle. It believes that those who can work, should. It believes in wealth creation, which aids all.

As the cobbler would tell you, time wounds all heels and in a couple of decades, there may be an opportunity for a "new" Conservative Party, predicated on the old principles of one nation Conservatism, to emerge and in all probability return to Government but that requires a clearout of augean proportions both of who are in the Party now and of their half-baked thinking.

I'm not a conservative, I'm a centrist who hangs to the right. I voted Lib Dem at the last election, voted to remain, despite being sceptical of the EU political project (something Ydoethur has made an excellent point above).

We seem to have very short memories on here. How long ago was it that Labour was dead? Yet now they are in power with a whopping majority. Of course the current Tory party is struggling. They were in power for 14 years, culminating in covid (not their fault) and the war in Ukraine (not their fault). They are paying the price for that and are now making some really poor choices, desperately flailing for anything that stops the rot.

But the challenge for wider politics is that what once motivated anti-EU feeling (hence UKIP) is now driving Reform. A sense of failure from the traditional parties. And thats all of them. I think any one in Labour or the Lib Dems who believed that their success last year was down to their brilliance and campaigning and people thinking they have the right policies are somewhat mistaken. It was very much a get the Tories out vote, across the board.

Many on PB will not like it, but a large number of people in the country simply think that immigration is too high and that this is the reason for all their ills.

Thats almost certainly not true, but it doesn't stop them believing it. My neighbour completely unprompted talks to me about Farage - 'He's right!', he says. My neighbour doesn't talk about politics in general, but Farage, ever the populist has once again found the right scab to pick at. How the grown ups counter it is crucial. The Tories seem to think being like Reform is the way - I don't, personally. Politicians are meant to lead the country - at the moment too many are following what the voters 'think' they want.

But ultimately the way to kill Farage and Reform is to get the economy growing, get peoples lives improving. Get the good times back. And part of that is to acknowledge that if we are borrowing 20 Billion to pay the bills a month, maybe we need to stop some spending. And look better are taxing fairly.

The one abiding Brexit bonus is that nearly a decade on, Remainers are still desperate to prove that there are no Brexit bonuses...

A bold claim under an article by a Remainer pointing out a Brexit bonus!

Seriously, I think there is a case for saying we did the rest of the EU a big favor by showing how effing stupid it was to leave the world's largest and most successful free trade association. Shame we had to pay the price, but from a broadly European standpoint you could well say Brexit was a good thing.

Absolutely, we did the rest of the EU a massive favour. Given the rise of global bullies like Trump, Putin and Xi I don't think anyone else in Europe would want to be as lonely as we are right now.

The only slight irony of that remark is that when European leaders met to discuss the Ukraine/Trump disaster, they held their meeting in *checks notes* London.

Ultimately, the whole thing was a complete waste of time effort and money that could have been better spent but the header touches on and yet somewhat misses the point of our departure - it destroyed the EU's belief in ineluctable unification and led to them behaving somewhat more cautiously. No idiots like Juncker saying 'if it's yes, we go on and if it's no, we continue' any more.

That's actually been a very good thing for the EU and in itself done a lot to quiet discontent. If they'd had that attitude before 2016 odds are it would have tipped enough to Remain to win the vote.

At some point Trump is going to realise that there’s no good faith in Russia to actually end the war, and the only way it’s ending quickly is by arming the Ukranians with more and better weapons, so that the Russians are forced to the negotiating table from a position of weakness.

Do you not think that is obvious to everyone already? Why is Trump particularly slow to come to that conclusion?

A more likely explanation is that he has a fixed position of not wanting to help Ukraine, and all this stuff about summits, peace, being upset with Putin, etc, is simply shadow play to deflect pressure on him to act.

When will Republican congressmen realise that waiting for Trump to decide to act is futile, and they need to take their own action?