You might as well ask a scorpion to stop stinging.
Edit - in many ways, Clive Lewis encapsulates the electoral problem for Labour. When he won Norwich South (amazingly, just three and a half years ago) he took it off the back of a Liberal Democrat collapse, where even allowing for churn around 50% of their vote seems to have migrated to Labour. In 2010 it was a genuine three-way marginal. In 2015 I'm guessing tuition fees were just a bit of an issue.
Now let's say 40% of his vote last year was solidly Remain (probably an underestimate) and this migrates back to the yellows. Suddenly, even though he has a huge majority, he seat looks vulnerable again to either of his challengers.
So I'm not surprised he's a bit nervous.
Well more than 40% of them were remain I'd imagine but as their top reason for voting?
Yes it was the top issue for Conservative voters. That doesn't really come into a conversation about Labour losing voters for their Brexit policy though...
Despite uncertainty over its position on the single market, Labour was seen as the best bet by those wanting to keep closer ties with Europe. Not only did it win over a large number of Remainers from the Conservatives, but also from the pro-EU Greens and Lib Dems. Overall, nearly two-thirds of 2015 Greens went to Labour, as well as about a quarter of Liberal Democrats.
There was a deliberate strategy of the Greens to prevent the impending landslide majority. The left united over what looked like an impending Conservative hegemony. What’s impressive is Labour has managed to maintain that.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I know she got burned last time she did it but TMay really needs to call a snap general election. Labour activists aren't going out in the cold to knock on doors for a marginally unicornier version of Theresa May's Brexit.
Absurd; it would be the most irresponsible thing right now (marginally improved if an agreed A50 extension came with it) and I cant see May doing that.
Well, we all know her deal isn't likely to pass, and nobody has a plan for what happens when it doesn't. The knot would be less tangly on almost any Commons arithmetic except the current one; A small Con majority would allow things to happen without the DUP, and a few less Con seats would make other combinations practical. She's already planning to stall most of the way through January...
If May can keep kicking the can down the road until 30/3/19 she will have done an excellent job, and hopefully JC will facilitate this by doing sweet FA until this date is reached. That is the will of the British people as expressed in the votes on 23/6/16 and 8/6/17.
Another case of wishful thinking. If they didn’t want a eurosceptic leading the Labour Party, then they should not have voted for a eurosceptic.
It's pure cognitive dissonance.
The writing has been on the wall for years. In fact, without Corbyn as Labour leader, Brexit wouldn't have happened.
You make strange bedfellows.
With a Labour leader elected in 2015 like Yvette Cooper, for example, we'd have seen stronger official campaigning from the Labour party for Remain.
That wouldn't have blown all Labour leavers out the water - far from it - but would probably have been enough to tip the referendum result the other way.
A similar percentage of Labour voters voted for Brexit as SNP supporters.
Not far off the level of Lib Dem voters. Add into this consideration where Labour voters live.
That stat is surprising. In fact, I'll go so far as to say it's barely credible.
It shows the Lib Dems had fifty voters in 2016.
?
Are you criticising the amount of Lib Dems featured in the poll?
Happy to see a different poll if you have one you prefer but everything I have seen has shown Labour, Lib Dems and SNP on very similar percentages of Leave and Remain. Lib Dem always better with SNP and Labour very close...
Childhood obesity is little more than a moral panic, and is no worse now than it was just over a decade ago when they started standardised measuring for it.
Difficult not to feel schadenfreude for both Corbyn and Labour after all the clueless posturing they have indulged in over Brexit. I don’t suppose the Tories will find the cohesion to exploit Labour’s difficulties but still - a temporary respite from their own troubles is not to be sniffed at.
Doesn’t show Remainers in a good light either and rather highlights why they lost in the first place. That tolerant, urbane, outward looking image they like to project shattered for the myth it is on the fact that they actually lost and can’t live with that democratic verdict of the electorate.
Leavers have not attempted to include Remain supporters in their post-referendum vision of Brexit. Admittedly it was always a huge challenge after having campaigned by pandering to xenophobia but if Leavers want to know why the decision to leave the EU has not been embedded in consensus they need to look in a mirror.
So the arrogant hypocrisy continues. If Remainers had accepted the results of the referendum rather than launch into a desperate campaign to try and overturn it, at the behest of their European overlords who also told Ireland and France to think again after Lisbon, they might have been able jto build a consensus themselves. After all, most of the current Cabinet voted Remain. Instead, they resorted to the bitter and twisted empty rhetoric that cost them the referendum and tried to ignore the votes of 17.4 m of their fellow citizens. The “we wuz robbed” mentality of self pity that you wallow in doesn’t work because too many people outside London don’t benefit from EU membership or the prosperity of London and the SE.
It’s partly about it being a quieter news period. There was a much bigger tsunami in Indonesia in September.
Yes, I’ve found it fascinating that the prevelance of a particular news story has no correlation to its frequency, or less or more. If something becomes an issue it gets repeatedly reported, which gives the impression that the particular issue has got worse, or better if no longer reported.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I know full well that people didn't elect Corbyn first time around to fight Brexit because Brexit hadn't happened.
I know full well that people didn't re elect Corbyn to fight Brexit as his opponent had differentiated himself from Corbyn by being the fight Brexit candidate.
The people above, who clearly in both those cases didn't vote for him to fight Brexit didn't vote for him in 2017 to fight Brexit (or at least it isn't the only reason)
Those statements are all logical, I didn't claim why everyone who voted for Labour voted for Labour because the people I described above isn't everyone who voted for Labour
Corbyn's Brexit position is entirely sensible from a political perspective. Labour inclined Remainers have nowhere else to go. They aren't going to reward the tories for their ArmEUgeddon and the LibDems are deader than their erstwhile bootie leader.
I don't think this is true - and to see why we can look back to 2015 and what some of those now loudly advocating for (and in one case advising) Corbyn did. Essentially Ed Miliband's strategy relied on hoovering up the anti-Tory vote and reassuring some centre ground waverers who were a bit fed up of Cameron. It didn't work, in part obviously due to the 'chaos with Ed Miliband' stuff putting off middle-England - but the scale of the defeat was also because a significant chunk of left voters refused to play ball despite 'having nowhere else to go'. The greens got a record vote share (despite having a shocking leader). In Scotland Lab was savaged from the left by a (fairly mendacious) campaign by the SNP. Youth turnout did not surge. A lot of people do vote with their heads, but rightly or wrongly some draw a red line and refuse to vote for something they don't like much - and in a tight election it's enough to do severe damage. This failure was arguably one of the predicates for Corbyn's leadership - the voters who if they voted like pragmatists should be in the bag for the left but didn't go for Miliband Labour who would go for him.
But we're now likely to see something similar with remainers. Most will fall into line. Others won't - either because they're that passionate about the issue, or because they have problems, moral or otherwise, with Corbyn for other reasons and need a big reason to set those aside. The Labour brand has always been far more popular than its leader.
There's a view among Corbynites that only they have and are allowed hard unwavering principles, and that others' motives are inherently suspicious. They maybe about to find out that a significant section of the liberal left are just fed up and not going to take it any more and prove they can be every bit as stubborn about voting with their conscience.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are talking about Labour members, not voters. The bit about the affection felt for Jeremy makes that clear. But the adoration of 350,000 Labour members is not going to put him into Downing Street.
The great mystery of our times is how Corbyn has managed to keep his appeal with a sizeable section of voters who really don't have anything much in common with the guy. He's like an air ace, whose warplane Magic Grandpa proudly displays his kill marks: 8 Star of David's, 5 Eurocrats, a Stupid Woman and Tony Blair.
The question going into 2019 is can he hold together this coalition of matter, anti-matter and Does it really matter? all in the same vessel?
(Probably. He managed it in 2018. But then, we didn't actually Brexit in 2018....)
You might as well ask a scorpion to stop stinging.
Edit - in many ways, Clive Lewis encapsulates the electoral problem for Labour. When he won Norwich South (amazingly, just three and a half years ago) he took it off the back of a Liberal Democrat collapse, where even allowing for churn around 50% of their vote seems to have migrated to Labour. In 2010 it was a genuine three-way marginal. In 2015 I'm guessing tuition fees were just a bit of an issue.
Now let's say 40% of his vote last year was solidly Remain (probably an underestimate) and this migrates back to the yellows. Suddenly, even though he has a huge majority, he seat looks vulnerable again to either of his challengers.
So I'm not surprised he's a bit nervous.
Well more than 40% of them were remain I'd imagine but as their top reason for voting?
Yes it was the top issue for Conservative voters. That doesn't really come into a conversation about Labour losing voters for their Brexit policy though...
Despite uncertainty over its position on the single market, Labour was seen as the best bet by those wanting to keep closer ties with Europe. Not only did it win over a large number of Remainers from the Conservatives, but also from the pro-EU Greens and Lib Dems. Overall, nearly two-thirds of 2015 Greens went to Labour, as well as about a quarter of Liberal Democrats.
There was a deliberate strategy of the Greens to prevent the impending landslide majority. The left united over what looked like an impending Conservative hegemony. What’s impressive is Labour has managed to maintain that.
A large number of Green voters went to Labour for the reason I did, the Greens were seen as a very left wing party. I would have voted Green previously if I had the option as Labour were too right wing. That is why Corbyn has stuffed the greens to an extent, with a right wing Labour party they can attract lots of dissatisfied left wingers.
Difficult not to feel schadenfreude for both Corbyn and Labour after all the clueless posturing they have indulged in over Brexit. I don’t suppose the Tories will find the cohesion to exploit Labour’s difficulties but still - a temporary respite from their own troubles is not to be sniffed at.
Doesn’t show Remainers in a good light either and rather highlights why they lost in the first place. That tolerant, urbane, outward looking image they like to project shattered for the myth it is on the fact that they actually lost and can’t live with that democratic verdict of the electorate.
Leavers have not attempted to include Remain supporters in their post-referendum vision of Brexit. Admittedly it was always a huge challenge after having campaigned by pandering to xenophobia but if Leavers want to know why the decision to leave the EU has not been embedded in consensus they need to look in a mirror.
So the arrogant hypocrisy continues. If Remainers had accepted the results of the referendum rather than launch into a desperate campaign to try and overturn it, at the behest of their European overlords who also told Ireland and France to think again after Lisbon, they might have been able jto build a consensus themselves. After all, most of the current Cabinet voted Remain. Instead, they resorted to the bitter and twisted empty rhetoric that cost them the referendum and tried to ignore the votes of 17.4 m of their fellow citizens. The “we wuz robbed” mentality of self pity that you wallow in doesn’t work because too many people outside London don’t benefit from EU membership or the prosperity of London and the SE.
Democracy is a bitch when it doesn’t go your way.
If you want the result to stick you are going to have to start persuading your former opponents rather than abusing them. Since you prefer to abuse them I conclude you would prefer to see the result overturned.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I would be interested in seeing the membership figures. I bumped into a friend who was a Corbyn fanatic who has now lost faith. She'd given up on him and she suspected the feeling was widespread though she had no knowledge beyond her immediate circle.
The left, denied power and influence, have been able to cry betrayal from their sofas and marches. They have spent decades complaining about the world.
Now in charge, they can’t quite do that.
We are beginning to see the left having to make choices and alienate people. It turns out the choices never went away.
No doubt they will twist and turn and claim that it’s someone else’s fault and they are the good guys, but reality is catching up with them.
Corbyn is a red Tory now.
Oh what amusement it would be to see Corbyn's face if he were confronted by a comrade and accused of being the thing he hates the most: a Tory.
I'm far from convinced. All options are still open even if the plan is to try to brexit, that members didn't know what party policy is doesn't make it a betrayal and they'll forgive him. Vote Tory or and get a tory brexit. Or vote labour and they try to brexit and if they fail who knows? Maybe remain.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are talking about Labour members, not voters. The bit about the affection felt for Jeremy makes that clear. But the adoration of 350,000 Labour members is not going to put him into Downing Street.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are talking about Labour members, not voters. The bit about the affection felt for Jeremy makes that clear. But the adoration of 350,000 Labour members is not going to put him into Downing Street.
What are you even arguing with me about?
I said that Brexit could heavily affect the result of an election. My original comment was disagreeing with some comments that seemed to imply Corbyn's popularity was due to Brexit. Which is obviously untrue.
Do you disagree with that? if your point is Brexit will affect the next election I fully agree, if your point is that every single Labour voter doesn't have my opinion on Corbyn I fully agree as well. Tell me the bit I've said you are actually disagreeing with...
Edit: Some confusion as I thought I was talking to the same person I was originally talking to but the question about which bit you disagree with still applies, some of the rest not so much!
I always thought once we lost the FBPE crowd we were done for...
The one Clive Lewis retweeted means a lot more, the FBPE crowd have always been very anti Corbyn.
Yep, it's also significant that Lewis retweeted it in the first place. He is nothing if not a loyalist. I did a thread on this whole issue and why the leadership's stance poses such a risk for Labour. The one thing you just cannot get around is that the large majority of Labour voters are Remain ... https://twitter.com/SpaJw/status/1076474121549217794
I read that thread when you posted it a few days(?) ago and entirely agree with you on the risks to Labour of sticking with the current stance even if they have the option to pivot. What I’m less sure about is whether the other option is actually worse. The Tory dream is for Brexit to not happen, and it to be Labour who stopped it - it’s the indyref strategy of making Labour act as the responsible adults who stop the zealots from getting their unicorns. As happened in 2015 north of the border, there’s a huge risk that a Labour Party that adopts an anti-Brexit stance is wiped out in 2022.
It can oppose Brexit in order to retain its pro-EU base without losing too many floating anti-EU votes only if Brexit goes ahead despite that opposition - the anti-EU voters won’t care too much once it’s over.
What do you think - can Labour oppose Brexit *and* get more than 30% at the next GE if Brexit doesn’t happen?
Another case of wishful thinking. If they didn’t want a eurosceptic leading the Labour Party, then they should not have voted for a eurosceptic.
It's pure cognitive dissonance.
The writing has been on the wall for years. In fact, without Corbyn as Labour leader, Brexit wouldn't have happened.
You make strange bedfellows.
With a Labour leader elected in 2015 like Yvette Cooper, for example, we'd have seen stronger official campaigning from the Labour party for Remain.
That wouldn't have blown all Labour leavers out the water - far from it - but would probably have been enough to tip the referendum result the other way.
A similar percentage of Labour voters voted for Brexit as SNP supporters.
Not far off the level of Lib Dem voters. Add into this consideration where Labour voters live.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I would be interested in seeing the membership figures. I bumped into a friend who was a Corbyn fanatic who has now lost faith. She'd given up on him and she suspected the feeling was widespread though she had no knowledge beyond her immediate circle.
And will your friend at the next GE
a) not vote at all b) vote for another party than Labour c) reluctantly with nose peg on vote Labour?
Corbyn is calculating that, whatever the disillusionment, the answer for your friend and many others will be c).
Difficult not to feel schadenfreude for both Corbyn and Labour after all the clueless posturing they have indulged in over Brexit. I don’t suppose the Tories will find the cohesion to exploit Labour’s difficulties but still - a temporary respite from their own troubles is not to be sniffed at.
Doesn’t show Remainers in a good light either and rather highlights why they lost in the first place. That tolerant, urbane, outward looking image they like to project shattered for the myth it is on the fact that they actually lost and can’t live with that democratic verdict of the electorate.
Leavers have not attempted to include Remain supporters in their post-referendum vision of Brexit. Admittedly it was always a huge challenge after having campaigned by pandering to xenophobia but if Leavers want to know why the decision to leave the EU has not been embedded in consensus they need to look in a mirror.
So the arrogant hypocrisy continues. If Remainers had accepted the results of the referendum rather than launch into a desperate campaign to try and overturn it, at the behest of their European overlords who also told Ireland and France to think again after Lisbon, they might have been able jto build a consensus themselves. After all, most of the current Cabinet voted Remain. Instead, they resorted to the bitter and twisted empty rhetoric that cost them the referendum and tried to ignore the votes of 17.4 m of their fellow citizens. The “we wuz robbed” mentality of self pity that you wallow in doesn’t work because too many people outside London don’t benefit from EU membership or the prosperity of London and the SE.
Democracy is a bitch when it doesn’t go your way.
If you want the result to stick you are going to have to start persuading your former opponents rather than abusing them. Since you prefer to abuse them I conclude you would prefer to see the result overturned.
If you want democracy, you have to accept that it doesn’t always go your way. As you are incapable of accepting the result, the logical conclusion is that you are not a democrat.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I know full well that people didn't elect Corbyn first time around to fight Brexit because Brexit hadn't happened.
I know full well that people didn't re elect Corbyn to fight Brexit as his opponent had differentiated himself from Corbyn by being the fight Brexit candidate.
The people above, who clearly in both those cases didn't vote for him to fight Brexit didn't vote for him in 2017 to fight Brexit (or at least it isn't the only reason)
Those statements are all logical, I didn't claim why everyone who voted for Labour voted for Labour because the people I described above isn't everyone who voted for Labour
There's also a huge section of the Labour 2017 vote that was if not stop Brexit then soften or stymie it. You can look at polling since which shows remaining in the EU as being more popular than Corbyn himself among Lab 2017 voters. Will they all decamp en masse? Of course not. Some will vote for a local MP who is pro-remain in defiance of the leader and his acolytes. Some will tactically stay in the Labour camp. But others won't - and the idea that the far left, after moaning that a centre left Labour Party wasn't getting their vote, can have any complaints when people say "Sorry Corbyn isn't my politics, I think he's a fraud, I've had enough" shows a tremendous lack of self-awareness.
Another case of wishful thinking. If they didn’t want a eurosceptic leading the Labour Party, then they should not have voted for a eurosceptic.
It's pure cognitive dissonance.
The writing has been on the wall for years. In fact, without Corbyn as Labour leader, Brexit wouldn't have happened.
You make strange bedfellows.
With a Labour leader elected in 2015 like Yvette Cooper, for example, we'd have seen stronger official campaigning from the Labour party for Remain.
That wouldn't have blown all Labour leavers out the water - far from it - but would probably have been enough to tip the referendum result the other way.
A similar percentage of Labour voters voted for Brexit as SNP supporters.
Not far off the level of Lib Dem voters. Add into this consideration where Labour voters live.
Presumably there are cycles over which pressure builds up and is released. I’m not surprised it’s predictable and it’s just coincidence it’s in December
Corbyn [snip] voted and campaigned for remain.....
Did he fuck
He was there but he wasn't involved
^This.
With respect* to Jezziah there is a basic rule at play here that as long as we remember that he is under the influence of the black sleep of the Kali Ma Corbyn cult, you can trust every word he says to be unadulterated truth
The Labour Party is fucked. As deeply and as badly as the Tories are fucked. Brexit will smash the ability of both parties to pretend that they remain single parties where even if we retain FPTP neither party will have a "majority" even if on paper they do.
Time for TSE to roll out a Christmas PR thread. Perhaps PR is how the country is able to move on. We could have a German style CDU/CSU group for the Tories and a Lab/Co-op/Green group for the left.
I was a remain voter but one of the problems I've always felt we've had is that leavers like Britain whereas remainers don't really like the EU. Do they like Europe? Possibly but anymore than the rest of the world? Isn't internationalism the real creed? So I'm surprised to see Curtice's polling that shows there are now more 'very strong remainers' than the equivalent leavers. My fear is that very strong remainers = very hostile to leavers. But perhaps the reality of leaving the EU is bringing out a latent European identity in people. Who knows?
With some people I'm sure. But I think you're right much of it is probably strong hostility to leave and what they think leave represents.
Anecdote alert, an acquaintance of mine who is a staunchly remain, new European reading sort, has openly stated wishing we could be ruled by Europe after raising some of the parliamentary shenanigans of recent weeks. When things like the gov collapse in Belgium, the results in Italy, Hungary or France came up, suddenly they rolled back a bit. Still as fervent a remainer as ever if course and fair enough, but there seems a lot more push factors behind that position than pull factors
I know she got burned last time she did it but TMay really needs to call a snap general election. Labour activists aren't going out in the cold to knock on doors for a marginally unicornier version of Theresa May's Brexit.
Earlier this year, the British Chambers of Commerce outlined 24 critical risk questions that businesses needed answering in order to cope with any Brexit scenario. The BCC reports today that, with under 100 days left, the government has produced a satisfactory response to just two of the 24, while 15 “are still flashing red”.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I would be interested in seeing the membership figures. I bumped into a friend who was a Corbyn fanatic who has now lost faith. She'd given up on him and she suspected the feeling was widespread though she had no knowledge beyond her immediate circle.
And will your friend at the next GE
a) not vote at all b) vote for another party than Labour c) reluctantly with nose peg on vote Labour?
Corbyn is calculating that, whatever the disillusionment, the answer for your friend and many others will be c).
Precisely the mistake New Labour made. And as New Labour found out, once you cross a voter's red line it is very hard to persuade that voter to turn out for you.
I know full well that people didn't elect Corbyn first time around to fight Brexit because Brexit hadn't happened.
I know full well that people didn't re elect Corbyn to fight Brexit as his opponent had differentiated himself from Corbyn by being the fight Brexit candidate.
The people above, who clearly in both those cases didn't vote for him to fight Brexit didn't vote for him in 2017 to fight Brexit (or at least it isn't the only reason)
Those statements are all logical, I didn't claim why everyone who voted for Labour voted for Labour because the people I described above isn't everyone who voted for Labour
There's also a huge section of the Labour 2017 vote that was if not stop Brexit then soften or stymie it. You can look at polling since which shows remaining in the EU as being more popular than Corbyn himself among Lab 2017 voters. Will they all decamp en masse? Of course not. Some will vote for a local MP who is pro-remain in defiance of the leader and his acolytes. Some will tactically stay in the Labour camp. But others won't - and the idea that the far left, after moaning that a centre left Labour Party wasn't getting their vote, can have any complaints when people say "Sorry Corbyn isn't my politics, I think he's a fraud, I've had enough" shows a tremendous lack of self-awareness.
Brexit didn't feature at the top reason for enough people to get its own group...
Not that this has anything to do with the post you replied to which is about why the people who elected Corbyn leader being nothing to do with fighting Brexit.
If anyone is really struggling with it ask yourself why people who elected Corbyn originally (those that actually did elect him by voting for him) would have done so to fight Brexit that hadn't even happened and was a year away?
Presumably there are cycles over which pressure builds up and is released. I’m not surprised it’s predictable and it’s just coincidence it’s in December
I must confess if I noticed at the time it rather passed me by. We are fortunate not to live in that part of the world despite our somewhat dismal weather.
I know she got burned last time she did it but TMay really needs to call a snap general election. Labour activists aren't going out in the cold to knock on doors for a marginally unicornier version of Theresa May's Brexit.
Great plan, until someone has a word in Corbyn's ear after the first round of polling during the campaign and he pivots to a second referendum...
Leavers have not attempted to include Remain supporters in their post-referendum vision of Brexit. Admittedly it was always a huge challenge after having campaigned by pandering to xenophobia but if Leavers want to know why the decision to leave the EU has not been embedded in consensus they need to look in a mirror.
So the arrogant hypocrisy continues. If Remainers had accepted the results of the referendum rather than launch into a desperate campaign to try and overturn it, at the behest of their European overlords who also told Ireland and France to think again after Lisbon, they might have been able jto build a consensus themselves. After all, most of the current Cabinet voted Remain. Instead, they resorted to the bitter and twisted empty rhetoric that cost them the referendum and tried to ignore the votes of 17.4 m of their fellow citizens. The “we wuz robbed” mentality of self pity that you wallow in doesn’t work because too many people outside London don’t benefit from EU membership or the prosperity of London and the SE.
Democracy is a bitch when it doesn’t go your way.
If you want the result to stick you are going to have to start persuading your former opponents rather than abusing them. Since you prefer to abuse them I conclude you would prefer to see the result overturned.
If you want democracy, you have to accept that it doesn’t always go your way. As you are incapable of accepting the result, the logical conclusion is that you are not a democrat.
If I were an MP I would vote for Theresa May’s deal as implementing the mandate given in the referendum.
There is nothing that stops democrats hating the result of a vote or campaigning to reverse it. If you want it to stick, you need to show to the unpersuaded that it was the right decision.
Democracy did not stop on 23 June 2016. The hateful fecklessness with which Leavers have pursued their mad obsession since that date has done nothing to convert doubters and as time goes on Brexit looks like a mistake to more and more people. And that, not some anti-democratic impulse, is why it will be reversed sooner or later.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are talking about Labour members, not voters. The bit about the affection felt for Jeremy makes that clear. But the adoration of 350,000 Labour members is not going to put him into Downing Street.
But is it still 350,000?
Seeing that Clive Lewis Tweet makes me wonder that for the first time. However, I still think that Corbyn's position is very strong to untouchable inside the party
Doesn’t show Remainers in a good light either and rather highlights why they lost in the first place. That tolerant, urbane, outward looking image they like to project shattered for the myth it is on the fact that they actually lost and can’t live with that democratic verdict of the electorate.
Leavers have not attempted to include Remain supporters in their post-referendum vision of Brexit. Admittedly it was always a huge challenge after having campaigned by pandering to xenophobia but if Leavers want to know why the decision to leave the EU has not been embedded in consensus they need to look in a mirror.
So the arrogant hypocrisy continues. If Remainers had accepted the results of the referendum rather than launch into a desperate campaign to try and overturn it, at the behest of their European overlords who also told Ireland and France to think again after Lisbon, they might have been able jto build a consensus themselves. After all, most of the current Cabinet voted Remain. Instead, they resorted to the bitter and twisted empty rhetoric that cost them the referendum and tried to ignore the votes of 17.4 m of their fellow citizens. The “we wuz robbed” mentality of self pity that you wallow in doesn’t work because too many people outside London don’t benefit from EU membership or the prosperity of London and the SE.
Democracy is a bitch when it doesn’t go your way.
If you want the result to stick you are going to have to start persuading your former opponents rather than abusing them. Since you prefer to abuse them I conclude you would prefer to see the result overturned.
If you want democracy, you have to accept that it doesn’t always go your way. As you are incapable of accepting the result, the logical conclusion is that you are not a democrat.
That is nonsense. Mr Meeks is making a different - and important - point: if you radically change a country’s political settlement it makes sense to try and bring on board those who weren’t on your side in the first place if you want that settlement to be long-lasting and successful. He has rightly criticised the Leave campaign for not doing that since their victory.
He has also - both below the line and in a recent thread header - made the point that if the country now remains in the EU, Remainers will need to do the same reaching out to Leavers, something few of them have shown any signs of doing and that this merely echoes the problem Leavers now have, in reverse.
Corbyn's position to me just demonstrates yet another hurdle that remainers have to overcome. The fact is that the current crop of Labour MPs were elected in 2017 on a Manifesto committed to implementing Brexit. Corbyn seems to have meant it. The majority of Labour MPs simply thought it was a clever way of taking Brexit out of the election which worked better than they could have dreamed when it became apparent that May's thinking on everything else was not particularly coherent and far from convincing.
So we have Corbyn standing up for what proved to be a very successful Manifesto and the majority of Labour MPs wanting to ditch it. That majority now want to overturn both the basis on which they were elected and the 2016 vote. Its consistency of a sort I suppose.
Pretty amusing really. Parties change after an election, ditching manifesto commitments can be right and they didn't win after all. But feeling betrayed because he meant it and they did not (It is pretty clear despite triggering A50 with no clear idea it could be revoked that hundreds of mps were going to do anything it took to remain) is laughable. Anger at him for not changing yet sure. But it's not betrayal.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I would be interested in seeing the membership figures. I bumped into a friend who was a Corbyn fanatic who has now lost faith. She'd given up on him and she suspected the feeling was widespread though she had no knowledge beyond her immediate circle.
And will your friend at the next GE
a) not vote at all b) vote for another party than Labour c) reluctantly with nose peg on vote Labour?
Corbyn is calculating that, whatever the disillusionment, the answer for your friend and many others will be c).
Corbyn's Brexit position is entirely sensible from a political perspective. Labour inclined Remainers have nowhere else to go. They aren't going to reward the tories for their ArmEUgeddon and the LibDems are deader than their erstwhile bootie leader.
Yes cannier than he looks. It's a risk, but as you say they're not going anywhere.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are talking about Labour members, not voters. The bit about the affection felt for Jeremy makes that clear. But the adoration of 350,000 Labour members is not going to put him into Downing Street.
What are you even arguing with me about?
I said that Brexit could heavily affect the result of an election. My original comment was disagreeing with some comments that seemed to imply Corbyn's popularity was due to Brexit. Which is obviously untrue.
Do you disagree with that? if your point is Brexit will affect the next election I fully agree, if your point is that every single Labour voter doesn't have my opinion on Corbyn I fully agree as well. Tell me the bit I've said you are actually disagreeing with...
Edit: Some confusion as I thought I was talking to the same person I was originally talking to but the question about which bit you disagree with still applies, some of the rest not so much!
I agree with you if you believe that the Labour leadership is running a significant risk of alienating a chunk of the Remain-backing vote the party got in 2017. I disagree with you if you are saying that Brexit was not a significant driver of Labour votes at that election.
Corbyn [snip] voted and campaigned for remain.....
Did he fuck
He was there but he wasn't involved
^This.
With respect* to Jezziah there is a basic rule at play here that as long as we remember that he is under the influence of the black sleep of the Kali Ma Corbyn cult, you can trust every word he says to be unadulterated truth
The Labour Party is fucked. As deeply and as badly as the Tories are fucked. Brexit will smash the ability of both parties to pretend that they remain single parties where even if we retain FPTP neither party will have a "majority" even if on paper they do.
Time for TSE to roll out a Christmas PR thread. Perhaps PR is how the country is able to move on. We could have a German style CDU/CSU group for the Tories and a Lab/Co-op/Green group for the left.
With respect Rochdale you are a member of progress, I don't think you can really criticise anyone else for being in a cult.
You group is dedicated to worshipping has been who can only influence things by whining from afar, the rest of us are more realistic and look to a man with the potential power to change things whilst you prefer to look back a couple of decades will listening to your things can only get better single.
The great mystery of our times is how Corbyn has managed to keep his appeal with a sizeable section of voters who really don't have anything much in common with the guy. He's like an air ace, whose warplane Magic Grandpa proudly displays his kill marks: 8 Star of David's, 5 Eurocrats, a Stupid Woman and Tony Blair.
The question going into 2019 is can he hold together this coalition of matter, anti-matter and Does it really matter? all in the same vessel?
(Probably. He managed it in 2018. But then, we didn't actually Brexit in 2018....)
One of the three great mysteries of our age. The other two being Trump and Brexit.
It’s partly about it being a quieter news period. There was a much bigger tsunami in Indonesia in September.
I've checked, 2256 poor souls lost their life to the tsunami on the 28th. In fairness to the BBC they did give it top billing on the news website for 4 or 5 days after when the death toll became apparent
Also in the news conscious at the time was:
i) Kavanaugh nomination/Blasey Ford testimony ii) Facebook hack iii) Theresa May at Salzburg iv) St Jeremy's speech to the faithful v) Boris Johnson on maneuvers vi) Princess Meghan closing a car door
Leavers have not attempted to include Remain supporters in their post-referendum vision of Brexit. Admittedly it was always a huge challenge after having campaigned by pandering to xenophobia but if Leavers want to know why the decision to leave the EU has not been embedded in consensus they need to look in a mirror.
So the arrogant hypocrisy continues. If Remainers had accepted the results of the referendum rather than launch into a desperate campaign to try and overturn it, at the behest of their European overlords who also told Ireland and France to think again after Lisbon, they might have been able jto build a consensus themselves. After all, most of the current Cabinet voted Remain. Instead, they resorted to the bitter and twisted empty rhetoric that cost them the referendum and tried to ignore the votes of 17.4 m of their fellow citizens. The “we wuz robbed” mentality of self pity that you wallow in doesn’t work because too many people outside London don’t benefit from EU membership or the prosperity of London and the SE.
Democracy is a bitch when it doesn’t go your way.
If you want the result to stick you are going to have to start persuading your former opponents rather than abusing them. Since you prefer to abuse them I conclude you would prefer to see the result overturned.
If you want democracy, you have to accept that it doesn’t always go your way. As you are incapable of accepting the result, the logical conclusion is that you are not a democrat.
If I were an MP I would vote for Theresa May’s deal as implementing the mandate given in the referendum.
There is nothing that stops democrats hating the result of a vote or campaigning to reverse it. If you want it to stick, you need to show to the unpersuaded that it was the right decision.
Democracy did not stop on 23 June 2016. The hateful fecklessness with which Leavers have pursued their mad obsession since that date has done nothing to convert doubters and as time goes on Brexit looks like a mistake to more and more people. And that, not some anti-democratic impulse, is why it will be reversed sooner or later.
Well you are not an MP, so far as i am aware, so your first para is meaningless. Dismissing all Leavers as xenophobes as you routinely do is not trying to persuade anybody of anything. It just shows you don’t Leavers and you bear a grudge. It’s not a mad obsession to respect the will of the majority of the electorate despite the grudge borne by the bitter and twisted minority.
All told, your last comment doesn’t really have anything going for it.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I would be interested in seeing the membership figures. I bumped into a friend who was a Corbyn fanatic who has now lost faith. She'd given up on him and she suspected the feeling was widespread though she had no knowledge beyond her immediate circle.
And will your friend at the next GE
a) not vote at all b) vote for another party than Labour c) reluctantly with nose peg on vote Labour?
Corbyn is calculating that, whatever the disillusionment, the answer for your friend and many others will be c).
Precisely the mistake New Labour made. And as New Labour found out, once you cross a voter's red line it is very hard to persuade that voter to turn out for you.
Yep forgetting the voters that put you in power is fatal, if there is one advantage to not having power and being in opposition instead...
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I would be interested in seeing the membership figures. I bumped into a friend who was a Corbyn fanatic who has now lost faith. She'd given up on him and she suspected the feeling was widespread though she had no knowledge beyond her immediate circle.
And will your friend at the next GE
a) not vote at all b) vote for another party than Labour c) reluctantly with nose peg on vote Labour?
Corbyn is calculating that, whatever the disillusionment, the answer for your friend and many others will be c).
Precisely the mistake New Labour made. And as New Labour found out, once you cross a voter's red line it is very hard to persuade that voter to turn out for you.
Perhaps, but at the moment Corbyn's position seems to be that Labour would negotiate for Brexit but with continued membership of the customs union, single market and freedom of movement.
The thinking Remainer might prefer Labour's BINO on those terms, to Conservatives with either May's deal or no deal. So might the thinking Leaver.
So the arrogant hypocrisy continues. If Remainers had accepted the results of the referendum rather than launch into a desperate campaign to try and overturn it, at the behest of their European overlords who also told Ireland and France to think again after Lisbon, they might have been able jto build a consensus themselves. After all, most of the current Cabinet voted Remain. Instead, they resorted to the bitter and twisted empty rhetoric that cost them the referendum and tried to ignore the votes of 17.4 m of their fellow citizens. The “we wuz robbed” mentality of self pity that you wallow in doesn’t work because too many people outside London don’t benefit from EU membership or the prosperity of London and the SE.
Democracy is a bitch when it doesn’t go your way.
If you want the result to stick you are going to have to start persuading your former opponents rather than abusing them. Since you prefer to abuse them I conclude you would prefer to see the result overturned.
If you want democracy, you have to accept that it doesn’t always go your way. As you are incapable of accepting the result, the logical conclusion is that you are not a democrat.
That is nonsense. Mr Meeks is making a different - and important - point: if you radically change a country’s political settlement it makes sense to try and bring on board those who weren’t on your side in the first place if you want that settlement to be long-lasting and successful. He has rightly criticised the Leave campaign for not doing that since their victory.
He has also - both below the line and in a recent thread header - made the point that if the country now remains in the EU, Remainers will need to do the same reaching out to Leavers, something few of them have shown any signs of doing and that this merely echoes the problem Leavers now have, in reverse.
And yet we have May's deal which I would suggest pretty much every reasonable remainer should be happy to sign up for. Much closer to the EU, indeed subservient to it in some respects, minimal disruption to trade and supply lines, remaining involved in many joint projects, it is about as soft a Brexit as you can imagine. Has this softened the remainer opposition? Not a bit of it.
I am content with a soft Brexit for the reasons you state. We have to recognise that a significant proportion of the population wanted to remain and that whilst respecting the result the changes should be kept to a minimum. Pointing to the ravings of JRM and others, as Alastair is wont to do, really ignores that reality.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are talking about Labour members, not voters. The bit about the affection felt for Jeremy makes that clear. But the adoration of 350,000 Labour members is not going to put him into Downing Street.
What are you even arguing with me about?
I said that Brexit could heavily affect the result of an election. My original comment was disagreeing with some comments that seemed to imply Corbyn's popularity was due to Brexit. Which is obviously untrue.
Do you disagree with that? if your point is Brexit will affect the next election I fully agree, if your point is that every single Labour voter doesn't have my opinion on Corbyn I fully agree as well. Tell me the bit I've said you are actually disagreeing with...
Edit: Some confusion as I thought I was talking to the same person I was originally talking to but the question about which bit you disagree with still applies, some of the rest not so much!
I agree with you if you believe that the Labour leadership is running a significant risk of alienating a chunk of the Remain-backing vote the party got in 2017. I disagree with you if you are saying that Brexit was not a significant driver of Labour votes at that election.
You disagree with various polling that showed Labours vote wasn't based on Brexit then.
There were certainly people attracted to Labour solely by Brexit although very small in number, Brexit just simply wasn't the driver for most people when it came to the Labour vote, or even a significant number. YouGov ended up shoving it in the other category.
Now you can make a good argument that people will vote more along Brexit lines next election, that is an unknown but if it happens pre Brexit you would expect so.
OT some of the, erm, more industrial language this morning might lead to pb being blocked under HMG's new porn rules, or people's workplaces (those who've not already blocked it as a gambling site thanks to all those dodgy links down the side).
I know full well that people didn't elect Corbyn first time around to fight Brexit because Brexit hadn't happened.
I know full well that people didn't re elect Corbyn to fight Brexit as his opponent had differentiated himself from Corbyn by being the fight Brexit candidate.
The people above, who clearly in both those cases didn't vote for him to fight Brexit didn't vote for him in 2017 to fight Brexit (or at least it isn't the only reason)
Those statements are all logical, I didn't claim why everyone who voted for Labour voted for Labour because the people I described above isn't everyone who voted for Labour
Brexit didn't feature at the top reason for enough people to get its own group...
I'm not talking about the people who elected Corbyn leader though am I? I'm talking about voters. Now, I happen to think members are catastrophically wrong and may continue to be, but I concede that within Labour there's a lot of members who are anti-Brexit but intensely loyal to Corbyn for other reasons who aren't going to desert him let alone Labour because of Brexit.
But that's not the point. If you're denying Labour received a huge boost from remain voters in 2017 then you're just wrong and selectively quoting a YouGov doesn't change that. See this from the British Election Study: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-40630242 . Brexit the biggest issue - Labour losing a few remainers to the Lib Dems but gaining far more from other parties (and let's not forget keeping those who really don't like Corbyn but were horrified at the idea of a May-Brexit landslide). We know that demographic groups that trended remain switched to Labour from 2015 in an almost unprecedented fashion. Was some of that down to other correlated issues - housing, low wages? Indubitably. But to deny it was a large motivation for a significant chunk of both the voters Lab drew in, and those it kept despite not liking the leader much is for the birds.
Will all those people abandon the party in a rage? No. But my point is you don't need that to happen. A small but not-insignificant chunk of liberal left Labour voters who don't like Corbyn much but held their nose in 2017 deciding they've had enough would put Labour in big difficulties.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I would be interested in seeing the membership figures. I bumped into a friend who was a Corbyn fanatic who has now lost faith. She'd given up on him and she suspected the feeling was widespread though she had no knowledge beyond her immediate circle.
And will your friend at the next GE
a) not vote at all b) vote for another party than Labour c) reluctantly with nose peg on vote Labour?
Corbyn is calculating that, whatever the disillusionment, the answer for your friend and many others will be c).
Precisely the mistake New Labour made. And as New Labour found out, once you cross a voter's red line it is very hard to persuade that voter to turn out for you.
I await with interest the New Year polls. I suspect the LibDems will be up and Labour further down as some LDs take back the vote they have loaned to Labour and some Labour decide it is not worth turning out to vote.
It is quite possible that Corbyn's stance on Brexit will split the left wing vote and enable the Tories to get an overall majority on 35% of the vote with Boris as PM.
Corbyn [snip] voted and campaigned for remain.....
Did he fuck
He was there but he wasn't involved
^This.
With respect* to Jezziah there is a basic rule at play here that as long as we remember that he is under the influence of the black sleep of the Kali Ma Corbyn cult, you can trust every word he says to be unadulterated truth
The Labour Party is fucked. As deeply and as badly as the Tories are fucked. Brexit will smash the ability of both parties to pretend that they remain single parties where even if we retain FPTP neither party will have a "majority" even if on paper they do.
Time for TSE to roll out a Christmas PR thread. Perhaps PR is how the country is able to move on. We could have a German style CDU/CSU group for the Tories and a Lab/Co-op/Green group for the left.
And have permanent coalition between the centre right group and the centre left group regardless of who the people actually vote for? Genius.
Corbyn [snip] voted and campaigned for remain.....
Did he fuck
He was there but he wasn't involved
^This.
With respect* to Jezziah there is a basic rule at play here that as long as we remember that he is under the influence of the black sleep of the Kali Ma Corbyn cult, you can trust every word he says to be unadulterated truth
The Labour Party is fucked. As deeply and as badly as the Tories are fucked. Brexit will smash the ability of both parties to pretend that they remain single parties where even if we retain FPTP neither party will have a "majority" even if on paper they do.
Time for TSE to roll out a Christmas PR thread. Perhaps PR is how the country is able to move on. We could have a German style CDU/CSU group for the Tories and a Lab/Co-op/Green group for the left.
With respect Rochdale you are a member of progress, I don't think you can really criticise anyone else for being in a cult.
You group is dedicated to worshipping has been who can only influence things by whining from afar, the rest of us are more realistic and look to a man with the potential power to change things whilst you prefer to look back a couple of decades will listening to your things can only get better single.
Move with the times or get left behind.
The cult is collapsing. The process started over the he summer with the anti-semitism crisis (Corbyn's handling of it), and saw Momentum declare war on itself as Lansman and Williamson supporters tore into each other. The current crisis - Love Corbyn, Hate Brexit - puts people on thespott as to whether He truly represents their dreams.
If he continues his support for leave as manifested in the referendum campaign where he declared for remain and promptly disappeared, he will be finished. The Labour leave supporters largely hate him - not a popular figure on working class doorsteps. He was always the trophy of middle class supposed intelligensia and they won't put up with this.
One of us will be left behind. I am very confident it won't be me. Comrade.
The sooner than the false left fuck back off to whichever splitter scab groups they came from the better. Their vote was tiny, and better that they agitate for TUSC or Scargillite Labour again than agitate against the Labour Party from the inside
Every new political figure goes through a brief honeymoon where many supporters are willing to hope that the figure in question secretly agrees with them. It's something of a mystery that this has lasted so long with Jeremy, but not a mystery that it happened at all.
What is more of a mystery is why the Lib Dems aren't benefitting. There seems to be a big constituency whose worldview is far, far closer to that of the Lib Dems than to either of the other two big parties, but seem almost unaware of the existence of the party. To be honest, I have to stop and think for a bit nowadays if for some reason I want to remember who the leader of the Lib Dems is.
Mr. Cookie, Labour supporters tend to be more tribally loyal than Conservatives. Means less infighting and more unity, which is helpful, but also a greater unwillingness to topple rubbish leaders.
Was surprised the MPs actually went through with a no confidence vote against Corbyn, but the stupid Labour rulebook meant that didn't have any real effect whatsoever.
Every new political figure goes through a brief honeymoon where many supporters are willing to hope that the figure in question secretly agrees with them. It's something of a mystery that this has lasted so long with Jeremy, but not a mystery that it happened at all.
What is more of a mystery is why the Lib Dems aren't benefitting. There seems to be a big constituency whose worldview is far, far closer to that of the Lib Dems than to either of the other two big parties, but seem almost unaware of the existence of the party. To be honest, I have to stop and think for a bit nowadays if for some reason I want to remember who the leader of the Lib Dems is.
As it was too funny to not bring up again, at a family gathering a week or so ago one person thought Vince cable was leader of UKIP, 'the chap snuggling up to Tommy Robinson'.
OT some of the, erm, more industrial language this morning might lead to pb being blocked under HMG's new porn rules, or people's workplaces (those who've not already blocked it as a gambling site thanks to all those dodgy links down the side).
The wanking license is a disaster waiting to happen.
I actually think pornography is very harmful to children, but the genie is out of the bottle. It will be easy to circumvent (with a VPN or with Tor), impossible to enforce (the big sites will ask for age verification, the grotty/fetishy amateur stuff on niche internet forums will still be available), opens people to blackmail ("please give us your name and address before telling us what type of porn you like to watch"), but more importantly than all these things, it sets a dangerous precedent of the government censoring the internet and deciding what we can and cannot see.
It is indicative of a government whose first instinct is to control, to ban, to interfere, to tell us what we can and can't do. It is the same cack headed thinking that gave us the 2016 psychoactive substances act that was so poorly thought out and drafted that sniffing a rose could technically count as taking a "drug".
Now this may not be the major issue of the day. But it's policies like these that make it very hard for me to vote Conservative next time around. I sure as shit won't be donating the three figure sum I did in 2017. And ultimately to win, Corbyn doesn't have to secure my vote or the vote of the people like me. He just needs us to stay at home and not vote Conservative.
Every new political figure goes through a brief honeymoon where many supporters are willing to hope that the figure in question secretly agrees with them. It's something of a mystery that this has lasted so long with Jeremy, but not a mystery that it happened at all.
What is more of a mystery is why the Lib Dems aren't benefitting. There seems to be a big constituency whose worldview is far, far closer to that of the Lib Dems than to either of the other two big parties, but seem almost unaware of the existence of the party. To be honest, I have to stop and think for a bit nowadays if for some reason I want to remember who the leader of the Lib Dems is.
It would not surprise me if Vince Cable announces his retirement as leader on 17th March at the Conference in York.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
You are describing why you voted Labour. You do not speak for "the people". None of us do. We can only talk for ourselves. Roughly one third of the Labour party voted against Corbyn and should not be ignored. They are the difference between defeat and victory.
I would be interested in seeing the membership figures. I bumped into a friend who was a Corbyn fanatic who has now lost faith. She'd given up on him and she suspected the feeling was widespread though she had no knowledge beyond her immediate circle.
And will your friend at the next GE
a) not vote at all b) vote for another party than Labour c) reluctantly with nose peg on vote Labour?
Corbyn is calculating that, whatever the disillusionment, the answer for your friend and many others will be c).
Precisely the mistake New Labour made. And as New Labour found out, once you cross a voter's red line it is very hard to persuade that voter to turn out for you.
I await with interest the New Year polls. I suspect the LibDems will be up and Labour further down as some LDs take back the vote they have loaned to Labour and some Labour decide it is not worth turning out to vote.
It is quite possible that Corbyn's stance on Brexit will split the left wing vote and enable the Tories to get an overall majority on 35% of the vote with Boris as PM.
Despite his reputation I think Corbyn will bend. He can afford to annoy the members by making leavery noises right now, it's still not crunch time, but push cones to shove will he really let his principles stop him from being pm? After years at the top he's changed.
OT some of the, erm, more industrial language this morning might lead to pb being blocked under HMG's new porn rules, or people's workplaces (those who've not already blocked it as a gambling site thanks to all those dodgy links down the side).
The wanking license is a disaster waiting to happen.
I actually think pornography is very harmful to children, but the genie is out of the bottle. It will be easy to circumvent (with a VPN or with Tor), impossible to enforce (the big sites will ask for age verification, the grotty/fetishy amateur stuff on niche internet forums will still be available), opens people to blackmail ("please give us your name and address before telling us what type of porn you like to watch"), but more importantly than all these things, it sets a dangerous precedent of the government censoring the internet and deciding what we can and cannot see.
It is indicative of a government whose first instinct is to control, to ban, to interfere, to tell us what we can and can't do. It is the same cack headed thinking that gave us the 2016 psychoactive substances act that was so poorly thought out and drafted that sniffing a rose could technically count as taking a "drug".
Now this may not be the major issue of the day. But it's policies like these that make it very hard for me to vote Conservative next time around. I sure as shit won't be donating the three figure sum I did in 2017. And ultimately to win, Corbyn doesn't have to secure my vote or the vote of the people like me. He just needs us to stay at home and not vote Conservative.
Well said. The Tories are very vulnerable to that reaction on a range of issues.
I can't understand all of these Labour Remainers spitting their dummies out and throwing their toys out of the pram just because Jezza restates the policy set out in our 2017 manifesto.
If you think that stopping Brexit is the number one priority for a radical Socialist party you need to think again.
I'm sure that the LibDems would welcome those who just want to be members of an anti-Brexit pressure group. Some of us want to transform the country.
Corbyn [snip] voted and campaigned for remain.....
Did he fuck
He was there but he wasn't involved
^This.
With respect* to Jezziah there is a basic rule at play here that as long as we remember that he is under the influence of the black sleep of the Kali Ma Corbyn cult, you can trust every word he says to be unadulterated truth
The Labour Party is fucked. As deeply and as badly as the Tories are fucked. Brexit will smash the ability of both parties to pretend that they remain single parties where even if we retain FPTP neither party will have a "majority" even if on paper they do.
Time for TSE to roll out a Christmas PR thread. Perhaps PR is how the country is able to move on. We could have a German style CDU/CSU group for the Tories and a Lab/Co-op/Green group for the left.
And have permanent coalition between the centre right group and the centre left group regardless of who the people actually vote for? Genius.
Yes - that would satisfy most people. It would only be the extreme left and right wingers who would complain.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
Many people clearly did vote Labour as an anti-Brexit tactical vote. It would be a mistake to ascribe this to enthusiasm for Corbyn.
OT some of the, erm, more industrial language this morning might lead to pb being blocked under HMG's new porn rules, or people's workplaces (those who've not already blocked it as a gambling site thanks to all those dodgy links down the side).
Like 'Archbishop Cranmer' and 'Heavy Petting'....or should that be 'Betting'
I'm not talking about the people who elected Corbyn leader though am I? I'm talking about voters. Now, I happen to think members are catastrophically wrong and may continue to be, but I concede that within Labour there's a lot of members who are anti-Brexit but intensely loyal to Corbyn for other reasons who aren't going to desert him let alone Labour because of Brexit.
But that's not the point. If you're denying Labour received a huge boost from remain voters in 2017 then you're just wrong and selectively quoting a YouGov doesn't change that. See this from the British Election Study: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-40630242 . Brexit the biggest issue - Labour losing a few remainers to the Lib Dems but gaining far more from other parties (and let's not forget keeping those who really don't like Corbyn but were horrified at the idea of a May-Brexit landslide). We know that demographic groups that trended remain switched to Labour from 2015 in an almost unprecedented fashion. Was some of that down to other correlated issues - housing, low wages? Indubitably. But to deny it was a large motivation for a significant chunk of both the voters Lab drew in, and those it kept despite not liking the leader much is for the birds.
Will all those people abandon the party in a rage? No. But my point is you don't need that to happen. A small but not-insignificant chunk of liberal left Labour voters who don't like Corbyn much but held their nose in 2017 deciding they've had enough would put Labour in big difficulties.
Not sure you can accuse me of selectively quoting considering the link you just gave...
My link (contained information) and our discussion was all about Labour voters. Your link is about voters in general, not just Labour voters.
As the poll on my link pointed out Conservatives had it as the top issue. I bet it was a big issue for Lib Dems and UKIP as well. Which is what that BBC polls shows.
If you have different information about Labour voters I will happily look at it but I am yet to see it.
The types of people attracted to a left wing manifesto are the types of people who vote remain if it was the cause for their vote we would have more direct evidence of it.
Every new political figure goes through a brief honeymoon where many supporters are willing to hope that the figure in question secretly agrees with them. It's something of a mystery that this has lasted so long with Jeremy, but not a mystery that it happened at all.
What is more of a mystery is why the Lib Dems aren't benefitting. There seems to be a big constituency whose worldview is far, far closer to that of the Lib Dems than to either of the other two big parties, but seem almost unaware of the existence of the party. To be honest, I have to stop and think for a bit nowadays if for some reason I want to remember who the leader of the Lib Dems is.
OT some of the, erm, more industrial language this morning might lead to pb being blocked under HMG's new porn rules, or people's workplaces (those who've not already blocked it as a gambling site thanks to all those dodgy links down the side).
The wanking license is a disaster waiting to happen.
I actually think pornography is very harmful to children, but the genie is out of the bottle. It will be easy to circumvent (with a VPN or with Tor), impossible to enforce (the big sites will ask for age verification, the grotty/fetishy amateur stuff on niche internet forums will still be available), opens people to blackmail ("please give us your name and address before telling us what type of porn you like to watch"), but more importantly than all these things, it sets a dangerous precedent of the government censoring the internet and deciding what we can and cannot see.
It is indicative of a government whose first instinct is to control, to ban, to interfere, to tell us what we can and can't do. It is the same cack headed thinking that gave us the 2016 psychoactive substances act that was so poorly thought out and drafted that sniffing a rose could technically count as taking a "drug".
Now this may not be the major issue of the day. But it's policies like these that make it very hard for me to vote Conservative next time around. I sure as shit won't be donating the three figure sum I did in 2017. And ultimately to win, Corbyn doesn't have to secure my vote or the vote of the people like me. He just needs us to stay at home and not vote Conservative.
Well said. The Tories are very vulnerable to that reaction on a range of issues.
That whole post ties in very well with what Paddy Ashdown was talking about in the interview posted by CarlottaVance last night. It’s well worth watching.
Corbyn [snip] voted and campaigned for remain.....
Did he fuck
He was there but he wasn't involved
^This.
With respect* to Jezziah there is a basic rule at play here that as long as we remember that he is under the influence of the black sleep of the Kali Ma Corbyn cult, you can trust every word he says to be unadulterated truth
The Labour Party is fucked. As deeply and as badly as the Tories are fucked. Brexit will smash the ability of both parties to pretend that they remain single parties where even if we retain FPTP neither party will have a "majority" even if on paper they do.
Time for TSE to roll out a Christmas PR thread. Perhaps PR is how the country is able to move on. We could have a German style CDU/CSU group for the Tories and a Lab/Co-op/Green group for the left.
And have permanent coalition between the centre right group and the centre left group regardless of who the people actually vote for? Genius.
Yes - that would satisfy most people. It would only be the extreme left and right wingers who would complain.
I'm not so sure about that.
Just because 30% support party A and 30% support party B, it does not follow that 60% support the combination of parties A+B.
Corbyn [snip] voted and campaigned for remain.....
Did he fuck
He was there but he wasn't involved
^This.
With respect* to Jezziah there is a basic rule at play here that as long as we remember that he is under the influence of the black sleep of the Kali Ma Corbyn cult, you can trust every word he says to be unadulterated truth
The Labour Party is fucked. As deeply and as badly as the Tories are fucked. Brexit will smash the ability of both parties to pretend that they remain single parties where even if we retain FPTP neither party will have a "majority" even if on paper they do.
Time for TSE to roll out a Christmas PR thread. Perhaps PR is how the country is able to move on. We could have a German style CDU/CSU group for the Tories and a Lab/Co-op/Green group for the left.
And have permanent coalition between the centre right group and the centre left group regardless of who the people actually vote for? Genius.
Would they actually get a majority though?
And if they did how long would a constant centre right centre left coalition last before the left or the right got to strong to be excluded?
I suspect it could easily end up as a quick fix for centrists to grab power back and find themselves even worse off in a few years time.
Mr. Glenn, aye. The idea of a database of onanists is so obviously flawed, not only in terms of the meddling, voyeuristic state, but also because it's a blackmailer's/hacker's wet dream, that it's staggeringly stupid even by the standards of the British political class and its woeful grasp of technology/freedom of action.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
Many people clearly did vote Labour as an anti-Brexit tactical vote. It would be a mistake to ascribe this to enthusiasm for Corbyn.
With any other leader Labour would be 10-20% ahead against this government. The only thing keeping Jeremy in the game is that he's the only anti Brexit (or so we thought) leader on offer
Corbyn [snip] voted and campaigned for remain.....
Did he fuck
He was there but he wasn't involved
^This.
With respect* to Jezziah there is a basic rule at play here that as long as we remember that he is under the influence of the black sleep of the Kali Ma Corbyn cult, you can trust every word he says to be unadulterated truth
The Labour Party is fucked. As deeply and as badly as the Tories are fucked. Brexit will smash the ability of both parties to pretend that they remain single parties where even if we retain FPTP neither party will have a "majority" even if on paper they do.
Time for TSE to roll out a Christmas PR thread. Perhaps PR is how the country is able to move on. We could have a German style CDU/CSU group for the Tories and a Lab/Co-op/Green group for the left.
With respect Rochdale you are a member of progress, I don't think you can really criticise anyone else for being in a cult.
You group is dedicated to worshipping has been who can only influence things by whining from afar, the rest of us are more realistic and look to a man with the potential power to change things whilst you prefer to look back a couple of decades will listening to your things can only get better single.
Move with the times or get left behind.
The cult is collapsing. The process started over the he summer with the anti-semitism crisis (Corbyn's handling of it), and saw Momentum declare war on itself as Lansman and Williamson supporters tore into each other. The current crisis - Love Corbyn, Hate Brexit - puts people on thespott as to whether He truly represents their dreams.
If he continues his support for leave as manifested in the referendum campaign where he declared for remain and promptly disappeared, he will be finished. The Labour leave supporters largely hate him - not a popular figure on working class doorsteps. He was always the trophy of middle class supposed intelligensia and they won't put up with this.
One of us will be left behind. I am very confident it won't be me. Comrade.
Ahh yes the right wing papers actually started to go at him accusing him of anti semitism, we haven't had that before..
The criticism over Brexit is pretty new as well..
I'm worried they might follow this up by suggesting Corbyn is linked with the IRA... at that point he's done for....
Good luck with the progress mission, I suspect you guys will still be whining about anything and everything in a few years time.
Every new political figure goes through a brief honeymoon where many supporters are willing to hope that the figure in question secretly agrees with them. It's something of a mystery that this has lasted so long with Jeremy, but not a mystery that it happened at all.
What is more of a mystery is why the Lib Dems aren't benefitting. There seems to be a big constituency whose worldview is far, far closer to that of the Lib Dems than to either of the other two big parties, but seem almost unaware of the existence of the party. To be honest, I have to stop and think for a bit nowadays if for some reason I want to remember who the leader of the Lib Dems is.
The Lib Dems are below the relevance threshold.
What is their USP to raise them back above it?
Their long term USP is social and economic liberalism. Their short term USP is pro-Remain.
Their problem is that the brand is badly damaged, It's not cool. People scoff. It needs a relaunch with a new leader and campaigns that support its long term USP.
Social liberalism: Decriminalisation of drugs "Dignity in Dying" etc
Economic liberalism: Big problem here! It's why I'm a red LibDem.
If Labour policy really was to 'pursue Brexit' against its will I would as outraged as anybody. Nothing and nobody should be pursued in that way. It's not acceptable in this day & age.
But Labour policy is not that. It is nothing like that. Labour policy is to implement the result of the 2106 EU referendum. The party is Labour not Remain. People ought to realize this.
Every new political figure goes through a brief honeymoon where many supporters are willing to hope that the figure in question secretly agrees with them. It's something of a mystery that this has lasted so long with Jeremy, but not a mystery that it happened at all.
What is more of a mystery is why the Lib Dems aren't benefitting. There seems to be a big constituency whose worldview is far, far closer to that of the Lib Dems than to either of the other two big parties, but seem almost unaware of the existence of the party. To be honest, I have to stop and think for a bit nowadays if for some reason I want to remember who the leader of the Lib Dems is.
The Lib Dems are below the relevance threshold.
What is their USP to raise them back above it?
Well, that they're led by an enthusiastic remainer.
]I'm not a remainer personally. But clearly many people are; clearly there are many people to whom 'Remain' is a more compelling ideology than any other. You would have thought that a party which until recently got quite a lot of coverage in politics might provide a natural home for these people. But seeming not - so far, at least. Instead, remainers cling to a party led by a man who for 30 years in the upper decile of leaviest MPs in the house of commons. It's not as if mainstream remainers have much else in common with Jeremy either.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
Many people clearly did vote Labour as an anti-Brexit tactical vote. It would be a mistake to ascribe this to enthusiasm for Corbyn.
A small number of people voted Labour as an anti Brexit vote but the vast majority of Labour voters voted Labour for other reasons, Brexit didn't feature in Yougov's categories, the idea it was the major driver lacks evidence.
I have only pointed to those enthused by Corbyn as being those enthused by Corbyn.
Every new political figure goes through a brief honeymoon where many supporters are willing to hope that the figure in question secretly agrees with them. It's something of a mystery that this has lasted so long with Jeremy, but not a mystery that it happened at all.
What is more of a mystery is why the Lib Dems aren't benefitting. There seems to be a big constituency whose worldview is far, far closer to that of the Lib Dems than to either of the other two big parties, but seem almost unaware of the existence of the party. To be honest, I have to stop and think for a bit nowadays if for some reason I want to remember who the leader of the Lib Dems is.
The Lib Dems are below the relevance threshold.
What is their USP to raise them back above it?
Their long term USP is social and economic liberalism. Their short term USP is pro-Remain.
Their problem is that the brand is badly damaged, It's not cool. People scoff. It needs a relaunch with a new leader and campaigns that support its long term USP.
Social liberalism: Decriminalisation of drugs "Dignity in Dying" etc
Economic liberalism: Big problem here! It's why I'm a red LibDem.
I could actually get behind most things that the Lib Dems stand for, with the exception of their position on Europe.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
Many people clearly did vote Labour as an anti-Brexit tactical vote. It would be a mistake to ascribe this to enthusiasm for Corbyn.
A small number of people voted Labour as an anti Brexit vote but the vast majority of Labour voters voted Labour for other reasons, Brexit didn't feature in Yougov's categories, the idea it was the major driver lacks evidence.
I have only pointed to those enthused by Corbyn as being those enthused by Corbyn.
Good point. The majority of voters pay little attention to party leaders or policy positions.
It wasn't Brexit that caused Labour's vote to rise. People on the left are delighted to have an option again.
People didn't elect Corbyn as leader of Labour to fight Brexit, there weren't two surges in membership, to elect him and then re elect him to fight Brexit. People elected him because they want a left wing Labour leader. Brexit isn't going to take away from any of those people's desire.
There are people whose vote it will affect and Labour's Brexit policy could heavily influence the next election but the affection felt for him and the reason he has such strong support is not because of Brexit.
Many people clearly did vote Labour as an anti-Brexit tactical vote. It would be a mistake to ascribe this to enthusiasm for Corbyn.
With any other leader Labour would be 10-20% ahead against this government. The only thing keeping Jeremy in the game is that he's the only anti Brexit (or so we thought) leader on offer
So why didn't all the people voting Labour in 2017 do so for anti Brexit reasons?
Is there some conspiracy by voters to lie and pretend they are voting for Labour for different reasons?
Also the 20 ahead thing is a fantasy number that someone once mentioned and people like to bring up...
I would be fascinated to see the original workings or some polling evidence, I mean I assume people didn't just like the sound of something and start repeating it without any idea if it is true or not.
Comments
Are you criticising the amount of Lib Dems featured in the poll?
Happy to see a different poll if you have one you prefer but everything I have seen has shown Labour, Lib Dems and SNP on very similar percentages of Leave and Remain. Lib Dem always better with SNP and Labour very close...
We have this from referendum day
https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-voted-and-why/
Lib Dem 70% remain
SNP 64% remain
Lab 63% remain
https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2016-eu-referendum
Lib 69% remain
Lab 64% remain
They all seem to be similar, I suppose they could all be wrong but I am not sure on what basis you could argue it.
Democracy is a bitch when it doesn’t go your way.
I know full well that people didn't re elect Corbyn to fight Brexit as his opponent had differentiated himself from Corbyn by being the fight Brexit candidate.
The people above, who clearly in both those cases didn't vote for him to fight Brexit didn't vote for him in 2017 to fight Brexit (or at least it isn't the only reason)
Those statements are all logical, I didn't claim why everyone who voted for Labour voted for Labour because the people I described above isn't everyone who voted for Labour
But we're now likely to see something similar with remainers. Most will fall into line. Others won't - either because they're that passionate about the issue, or because they have problems, moral or otherwise, with Corbyn for other reasons and need a big reason to set those aside. The Labour brand has always been far more popular than its leader.
There's a view among Corbynites that only they have and are allowed hard unwavering principles, and that others' motives are inherently suspicious. They maybe about to find out that a significant section of the liberal left are just fed up and not going to take it any more and prove they can be every bit as stubborn about voting with their conscience.
The question going into 2019 is can he hold together this coalition of matter, anti-matter and Does it really matter? all in the same vessel?
(Probably. He managed it in 2018. But then, we didn't actually Brexit in 2018....)
Sad news about Paddy Ashdown.
On topic, all for well for Labour Remainers to rant and rave about Corbyn on social media. But they will likely still vote for him and he knows that.
Meanwhile that hole convicted MP Fiona Onasanya has dug for herself just got a bit deeper - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6523895/Disgraced-MP-convicted-lying-speeding-claims-targeted-supports-Corbyn.html
Yes he did.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/oct/12/jeremy-corbyn-says-would-vote-remain-second-eu-referendum
He was there but he wasn't involved
I'm far from convinced. All options are still open even if the plan is to try to brexit, that members didn't know what party policy is doesn't make it a betrayal and they'll forgive him. Vote Tory or and get a tory brexit. Or vote labour and they try to brexit and if they fail who knows? Maybe remain.
I said that Brexit could heavily affect the result of an election. My original comment was disagreeing with some comments that seemed to imply Corbyn's popularity was due to Brexit. Which is obviously untrue.
Do you disagree with that? if your point is Brexit will affect the next election I fully agree, if your point is that every single Labour voter doesn't have my opinion on Corbyn I fully agree as well. Tell me the bit I've said you are actually disagreeing with...
Edit: Some confusion as I thought I was talking to the same person I was originally talking to but the question about which bit you disagree with still applies, some of the rest not so much!
a) not vote at all
b) vote for another party than Labour
c) reluctantly with nose peg on vote Labour?
Corbyn is calculating that, whatever the disillusionment, the answer for your friend and many others will be c).
With respect* to Jezziah there is a basic rule at play here that as long as we remember that he is under the influence of the black sleep of the Kali Ma Corbyn cult, you can trust every word he says to be unadulterated truth
The Labour Party is fucked. As deeply and as badly as the Tories are fucked. Brexit will smash the ability of both parties to pretend that they remain single parties where even if we retain FPTP neither party will have a "majority" even if on paper they do.
Time for TSE to roll out a Christmas PR thread. Perhaps PR is how the country is able to move on. We could have a German style CDU/CSU group for the Tories and a Lab/Co-op/Green group for the left.
Anecdote alert, an acquaintance of mine who is a staunchly remain, new European reading sort, has openly stated wishing we could be ruled by Europe after raising some of the parliamentary shenanigans of recent weeks. When things like the gov collapse in Belgium, the results in Italy, Hungary or France came up, suddenly they rolled back a bit. Still as fervent a remainer as ever if course and fair enough, but there seems a lot more push factors behind that position than pull factors
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/23/bluff-blackmail-brinkwomanship-why-a-no-deal-brexit-is-still-on-the-cards
Earlier this year, the British Chambers of Commerce outlined 24 critical risk questions that businesses needed answering in order to cope with any Brexit scenario. The BCC reports today that, with under 100 days left, the government has produced a satisfactory response to just two of the 24, while 15 “are still flashing red”.
Brexit didn't feature at the top reason for enough people to get its own group...
Not that this has anything to do with the post you replied to which is about why the people who elected Corbyn leader being nothing to do with fighting Brexit.
If anyone is really struggling with it ask yourself why people who elected Corbyn originally (those that actually did elect him by voting for him) would have done so to fight Brexit that hadn't even happened and was a year away?
I must confess if I noticed at the time it rather passed me by. We are fortunate not to live in that part of the world despite our somewhat dismal weather.
There is nothing that stops democrats hating the result of a vote or campaigning to reverse it. If you want it to stick, you need to show to the unpersuaded that it was the right decision.
Democracy did not stop on 23 June 2016. The hateful fecklessness with which Leavers have pursued their mad obsession since that date has done nothing to convert doubters and as time goes on Brexit looks like a mistake to more and more people. And that, not some anti-democratic impulse, is why it will be reversed sooner or later.
He has also - both below the line and in a recent thread header - made the point that if the country now remains in the EU, Remainers will need to do the same reaching out to Leavers, something few of them have shown any signs of doing and that this merely echoes the problem Leavers now have, in reverse.
You group is dedicated to worshipping has been who can only influence things by whining from afar, the rest of us are more realistic and look to a man with the potential power to change things whilst you prefer to look back a couple of decades will listening to your things can only get better single.
Move with the times or get left behind.
Also in the news conscious at the time was:
i) Kavanaugh nomination/Blasey Ford testimony
ii) Facebook hack
iii) Theresa May at Salzburg
iv) St Jeremy's speech to the faithful
v) Boris Johnson on maneuvers
vi) Princess Meghan closing a car door
All told, your last comment doesn’t really have anything going for it.
The thinking Remainer might prefer Labour's BINO on those terms, to Conservatives with either May's deal or no deal. So might the thinking Leaver.
I am content with a soft Brexit for the reasons you state. We have to recognise that a significant proportion of the population wanted to remain and that whilst respecting the result the changes should be kept to a minimum. Pointing to the ravings of JRM and others, as Alastair is wont to do, really ignores that reality.
There were certainly people attracted to Labour solely by Brexit although very small in number, Brexit just simply wasn't the driver for most people when it came to the Labour vote, or even a significant number. YouGov ended up shoving it in the other category.
Now you can make a good argument that people will vote more along Brexit lines next election, that is an unknown but if it happens pre Brexit you would expect so.
It is quite possible that Corbyn's stance on Brexit will split the left wing vote and enable the Tories to get an overall majority on 35% of the vote with Boris as PM.
If he continues his support for leave as manifested in the referendum campaign where he declared for remain and promptly disappeared, he will be finished. The Labour leave supporters largely hate him - not a popular figure on working class doorsteps. He was always the trophy of middle class supposed intelligensia and they won't put up with this.
One of us will be left behind. I am very confident it won't be me. Comrade.
What is more of a mystery is why the Lib Dems aren't benefitting. There seems to be a big constituency whose worldview is far, far closer to that of the Lib Dems than to either of the other two big parties, but seem almost unaware of the existence of the party. To be honest, I have to stop and think for a bit nowadays if for some reason I want to remember who the leader of the Lib Dems is.
Was surprised the MPs actually went through with a no confidence vote against Corbyn, but the stupid Labour rulebook meant that didn't have any real effect whatsoever.
I actually think pornography is very harmful to children, but the genie is out of the bottle. It will be easy to circumvent (with a VPN or with Tor), impossible to enforce (the big sites will ask for age verification, the grotty/fetishy amateur stuff on niche internet forums will still be available), opens people to blackmail ("please give us your name and address before telling us what type of porn you like to watch"), but more importantly than all these things, it sets a dangerous precedent of the government censoring the internet and deciding what we can and cannot see.
It is indicative of a government whose first instinct is to control, to ban, to interfere, to tell us what we can and can't do. It is the same cack headed thinking that gave us the 2016 psychoactive substances act that was so poorly thought out and drafted that sniffing a rose could technically count as taking a "drug".
Now this may not be the major issue of the day. But it's policies like these that make it very hard for me to vote Conservative next time around. I sure as shit won't be donating the three figure sum I did in 2017. And ultimately to win, Corbyn doesn't have to secure my vote or the vote of the people like me. He just needs us to stay at home and not vote Conservative.
If you think that stopping Brexit is the number one priority for a radical Socialist party you need to think again.
I'm sure that the LibDems would welcome those who just want to be members of an anti-Brexit pressure group. Some of us want to transform the country.
(Sorry I can't stay around to debate)
My link (contained information) and our discussion was all about Labour voters. Your link is about voters in general, not just Labour voters.
As the poll on my link pointed out Conservatives had it as the top issue. I bet it was a big issue for Lib Dems and UKIP as well. Which is what that BBC polls shows.
If you have different information about Labour voters I will happily look at it but I am yet to see it.
The types of people attracted to a left wing manifesto are the types of people who vote remain if it was the cause for their vote we would have more direct evidence of it.
What is their USP to raise them back above it?
https://www.li.com/events/the-strange-death-of-liberalism
Just because 30% support party A and 30% support party B, it does not follow that 60% support the combination of parties A+B.
And if they did how long would a constant centre right centre left coalition last before the left or the right got to strong to be excluded?
I suspect it could easily end up as a quick fix for centrists to grab power back and find themselves even worse off in a few years time.
The criticism over Brexit is pretty new as well..
I'm worried they might follow this up by suggesting Corbyn is linked with the IRA... at that point he's done for....
Good luck with the progress mission, I suspect you guys will still be whining about anything and everything in a few years time.
Their problem is that the brand is badly damaged, It's not cool. People scoff. It needs a relaunch with a new leader and campaigns that support its long term USP.
Social liberalism:
Decriminalisation of drugs
"Dignity in Dying"
etc
Economic liberalism:
Big problem here! It's why I'm a red LibDem.
But Labour policy is not that. It is nothing like that. Labour policy is to implement the result of the 2106 EU referendum. The party is Labour not Remain. People ought to realize this.
]I'm not a remainer personally. But clearly many people are; clearly there are many people to whom 'Remain' is a more compelling ideology than any other. You would have thought that a party which until recently got quite a lot of coverage in politics might provide a natural home for these people. But seeming not - so far, at least. Instead, remainers cling to a party led by a man who for 30 years in the upper decile of leaviest MPs in the house of commons. It's not as if mainstream remainers have much else in common with Jeremy either.
I have only pointed to those enthused by Corbyn as being those enthused by Corbyn.
Is there some conspiracy by voters to lie and pretend they are voting for Labour for different reasons?
Also the 20 ahead thing is a fantasy number that someone once mentioned and people like to bring up...
I would be fascinated to see the original workings or some polling evidence, I mean I assume people didn't just like the sound of something and start repeating it without any idea if it is true or not.
Anyone...?