Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Polling shows it’s the young, not Boomers, who are most keen on rejoin.
And yet it's the Boomers who keep bleating on about it.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
That's true of a whole bunch of countries, none of which have joined the Euro.
Like Sweden.
Yes but Sweden are in a very different position than us. They are members already and fairly committed to the EU. I think that if we were applying again we would be made to join the Euro right away. It would be proof of commitment and make a further withdrawal almost impossible. And since we are not France we would probably have to comply with Euro rules too which would require a sharp cut in the deficit. Which may not, in fairness, be a bad thing.
I might add that getting our borrowing rates down to ECB levels would undoubtedly be by far the biggest single gain from rejoining. It would make some sense economically.
Joining the Euro is a process that takes time. We would not have to join right away, because it’s not practical for anyone to join right away.
I never want to join the Euro. Ever.
I find it fascinating how europhiles think they can mollify eurosceptics just by saying it "takes time" and "not right away". See also "two-speed Europe". Exactly the same people who'd then shrug their shoulders a few years down the line when European politics or its treaties demanded we adopt a law, regulation or commitment despite domestic opposition.
Being disingenuous is baked in. It's calculated deception.
We've been here before, and that's precisely why we left.
The promises made for what Brexit would deliver have all turned out to be disingenuous, which is why the polling shows a large majority see Brexit as a mistake and a small majority support rejoin.
Ah, whatabouttery.
When you dig into the polling beneath the headlines, you see strong polling against the idea laws & regulations or trade deals shouldn't be made here and little desire to return to free movement (and that's before you get to the money, yet alone the currency)
That small majority that you think supports Rejoin would disappear in a flash as soon as this came into focus.
My faith in our ability to govern ourselves has been shaken by Thursday. As a country we are simply not being serious about our challenges, our choices and the consequences of those choices. Membership of the Euro removes huge areas of governance from our elected politicians, from any form of democratic oversight really. I used to believe that was a bad thing. But I am beginning to wonder.
The Euro is forever. It's no solution to that, and would greatly inflame it. People aren't going to accept very difficult decisions made by remote bureaucrats and apparatchiks just because the treaties say so, and they can't elect or eject them. It would lead to social disorder and we know where that confrontation ultimately ends up in a undemocratic system.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Polling shows it’s the young, not Boomers, who are most keen on rejoin.
And yet it's the Boomers who keep bleating on about it.
That's just the PB demographics.
No, it's reflected in the commentariat, politicians and leading activists as well.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
I meant something slightly different. A rather pessimistic take for which I apologise...
I suspect, over the next generation, polycrises like the coming crunch from Hormuz being shut will cause many Britons to reverse the calculation that led to Brexit i.e. sovereignty will seem less important than economic prosperity.
I'm not saying that rejoing the EU specifically will be the result, rather that we will choose to cede sovereignty to a supranational body in exchange for the collective security and economic prosperity that gains. DavidL's point about the relative price of our debt is one example of the arguments that will, I think, gain more force.
Though it might need us to test the sovereignty argument to destruction, via Reform, first.
Yes, I think the paradox is that a Reform government makes Rejoin much more appealing and likely. It will be a clown car crash from day one, like Trump 47.
"Here is why event X makes outcome Y, which I've always favoured anyway, even more inevitable."
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
I think that's wrong.
But it's not on the cards in the next few years: our current government is too timid even to have implemented serious planning reform.
Circumstances change, though. And the new multipolar world is a far less friendly place for either committed Atlanticists (with whom I had a great deal of sympathy) or the advocates for Singapore on Thames.
And it's demonstrably wrong to say that "no one wants to go through that again". You need only look at polling on it.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
I meant something slightly different. A rather pessimistic take for which I apologise...
I suspect, over the next generation, polycrises like the coming crunch from Hormuz being shut will cause many Britons to reverse the calculation that led to Brexit i.e. sovereignty will seem less important than economic prosperity.
I'm not saying that rejoing the EU specifically will be the result, rather that we will choose to cede sovereignty to a supranational body in exchange for the collective security and economic prosperity that gains. DavidL's point about the relative price of our debt is one example of the arguments that will, I think, gain more force.
Though it might need us to test the sovereignty argument to destruction, via Reform, first.
Fair enough.
I think it could make the argument for better alliances/arrangements and cooperation.
I don't think that invariably leads to "Rejoin the EU".
Yes, agreed. Not least because, by then, the EU could have changed significantly.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Reform aren't in any sense centre. But yes the right block would win most GEs by default if united.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Good morning
I am hoping I may last a wee bit longer though, and pleased to see our well liked conservative MS returned to the Senedd last Thursday
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The Greens are even more explicitly pro-Rejoin than the Lib Dems.
Interesting Substack here from Patrick English of Yougov on how Labour is shedding more voters to Green than Reform:
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
I don't think we are that stupid. We don't need to try every single wrong avenue before we choose the correct one. Apart from anything else, we don't have the luxury of time or vast buffers of national wealth and resources to support us while we indulge our stupidity. We need to get real before the country falls apart.
The country isn't falling apart. It is getting torn apart by billionaires who want to weaken the power of the nation state (not just the UK, globally).
Until people understand that we are going nowhere good.
To be honest, I don't actually believe it's the billionaires. We just resent the fact they're still doing ok, and dominate areas of new tech, whilst the rest of us are left behind.
We are in the place we're in because the West is no longer absolute top-dog and we're not growing, largely due to increasingly unaffordable welfare commitments to older voters, not enough young workers and not enough hard-work and innovation.
Try telling people we need more people doing more hard-work and being creative more, and they'll get less money in the meantime.
Tough sell.
Both things can be true. There are some billionaires who are just doing their thing. They aren't healthy for the country because e.g. they spend silly money on London houses which distorts the housing market in our capital (and perhaps elsewhere). The size of these effects are highly debatable. OTOH some of them pay eye-watering proportions of our tax take.
But there are other billionaires who have accrued very significant political power through patronage (Harborne being the salient example) or through capture of the public discourse (Zuckerberg, Musk etc) who are doing exactly as noneoftheabove suggests.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
If Tories are voting for Reform, they’re not Tories! You can’t claim the Tories aren’t dying out because their vote is moving to Reform.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
If Tories are voting for Reform, they’re not Tories! You can’t claim the Tories aren’t dying out because their vote is moving to Reform.
Worth noting that turnout in Local elections is lower by far than General Elections so even more weighted to older property owners.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The Greens are even more explicitly pro-Rejoin than the Lib Dems.
Interesting Substack here from Patrick English of Yougov on how Labour is shedding more voters to Green than Reform:
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Reform aren't in any sense centre. But yes the right block would win most GEs by default if united.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
A tweet by a European campaign group from over 6 weeks ago quoting the tail end of some comments by Polanski where he says Brexit might not be all that?
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
If Tories are voting for Reform, they’re not Tories! You can’t claim the Tories aren’t dying out because their vote is moving to Reform.
The argument was that the Tories are dying out due to demographics.
That is demonstrably not the case.
A large chunk of the vote has decamped, which is a very different thing, whilst there's still a residual chunk that is still there and stable.
Kellner says reform has peaked. And more nuanced on the picture for both Labour and Tories.
Has Reform peaked though? And what of the Greens whose returns, while impressive, fell short of their more optimistic predictions?
And not least, what is the point of the LibDems now their NOTA space has been usurped by Reform and the Greens? They consolidated power in areas of traditional strength but can they be taken seriously as a national party?
The point of the lib-dems is to be the non-racist NOTA party.
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
Linking the two parts of the thread the obvious (only?) way for Labour to appeal to its left and to its right simultaneously is to focus on Europe rather than lefty/righty issues. Especially as the lefty/righty issues are constrained by tax and spending issues that mean neither side will ever be happy anyway.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Based on 2026 data, if the UK government’s total debt was financed at German borrowing rates, it would potentially save in excess of £50 billion per year in interest costs. We should join the Euro tomorrow!
You're honest.
There is an argument (I think @edmundintokyo is another) that could megaphoned by Europhiles that joining the Euro is an "upgrade" and we should embrace it wholeheartedly.
This is on the basis it'd cut our borrowing costs, debt, reduce interborder trade frictions and help cement London unreservedly as the financial centre of Europe, and its place in the world. It'd also free up cash for other bit of public spending, in time.
Sure, the transition would raise prices, we'd never control our interest rates again, or monetary policy on quantitative easing/tightening, it'd really limit our national fiscal policy choices, make our exports more expensive, and our economic interests would be forever negotiated over late night dinners in Berlin or Paris, but there is a macroeconomic argument there that could convince some, especially affluent well-off professionals, if you took it rather than hide and pretend it doesn't really exist.
controlling our interest rates is really helping us , basket case compared to EU.
Kellner says reform has peaked. And more nuanced on the picture for both Labour and Tories.
Has Reform peaked though? And what of the Greens whose returns, while impressive, fell short of their more optimistic predictions?
And not least, what is the point of the LibDems now their NOTA space has been usurped by Reform and the Greens? They consolidated power in areas of traditional strength but can they be taken seriously as a national party?
The point of the lib-dems is to be the non-racist NOTA party.
Aren't they supposed to, y'know, believe in and fight for Liberalism?
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
Linking the two parts of the thread the obvious (only?) way for Labour to appeal to its left and to its right simultaneously is to focus on Europe rather than lefty/righty issues. Especially as the lefty/righty issues are constrained by tax and spending issues that mean neither side will ever be happy anyway.
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
Linking the two parts of the thread the obvious (only?) way for Labour to appeal to its left and to its right simultaneously is to focus on Europe rather than lefty/righty issues. Especially as the lefty/righty issues are constrained by tax and spending issues that mean neither side will ever be happy anyway.
Kellner says reform has peaked. And more nuanced on the picture for both Labour and Tories.
Has Reform peaked though? And what of the Greens whose returns, while impressive, fell short of their more optimistic predictions?
And not least, what is the point of the LibDems now their NOTA space has been usurped by Reform and the Greens? They consolidated power in areas of traditional strength but can they be taken seriously as a national party?
The point of the lib-dems is to be the non-racist NOTA party.
No, the point of the LDs is to guide Gails into where to open their next store.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The Greens are even more explicitly pro-Rejoin than the Lib Dems.
Interesting Substack here from Patrick English of Yougov on how Labour is shedding more voters to Green than Reform:
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Polling shows it’s the young, not Boomers, who are most keen on rejoin.
And yet it's the Boomers who keep bleating on about it.
can you name one, and for you to complain about bleating takes hte biscuit, give your head a wobble big time larry the Lamb
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
If Tories are voting for Reform, they’re not Tories! You can’t claim the Tories aren’t dying out because their vote is moving to Reform.
The argument was that the Tories are dying out due to demographics.
That is demonstrably not the case.
A large chunk of the vote has decamped, which is a very different thing, whilst there's still a residual chunk that is still there and stable.
I didn't think before Thursday that Farage could be PM, but that has changed and a right government of some form looks very likely in 2029
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Estimated NEV for the Tories from Thursday is 17%, the same as Labour, with the LibDems on 16%.
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
Linking the two parts of the thread the obvious (only?) way for Labour to appeal to its left and to its right simultaneously is to focus on Europe rather than lefty/righty issues. Especially as the lefty/righty issues are constrained by tax and spending issues that mean neither side will ever be happy anyway.
That would be a serious mistake
How would you do it?
I would suggest we move closer to the EU but do not fall into the trap of wanting to re-join
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Reform aren't in any sense centre. But yes the right block would win most GEs by default if united.
Same with the left block. But neither are.
I don't think so. Conservatives vs Labour for decades has been Conservatives winning about 70% of GEs. When Labour have won they have mostly done so from the centre rather than its own centre on the left. I think that would still apply in a two party version of today.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
If Tories are voting for Reform, they’re not Tories! You can’t claim the Tories aren’t dying out because their vote is moving to Reform.
The argument was that the Tories are dying out due to demographics.
That is demonstrably not the case.
A large chunk of the vote has decamped, which is a very different thing, whilst there's still a residual chunk that is still there and stable.
Tory voters are dying out at something like three times the rate for other parties. And, yes, a good number of others have decamped to Reform, but Reform has picked up support from all over including a lot of people who definitely have no intention of voting Tory, as you'd know if you'd spoken to any of them.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
What you are advocating however is not the Conservative Party.
RefCon will subsume the Conservative Party and the grouping will assume the cache of the Conservative name at some stage in the future. Hoorah the Conservatives survive, but they bear no relationship to the politics of McMillan, Butler, Heath or even Thatcher for that matter.
In essence the name alone lives on.
FWIW the existential threat to Labour is a clear and present danger. Labour's USP is social equality. What we have seen so far has been hidden under a bushel by this Government and taking money from OAPs and the poor shoots their USP down in flames.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The Greens are even more explicitly pro-Rejoin than the Lib Dems.
Interesting Substack here from Patrick English of Yougov on how Labour is shedding more voters to Green than Reform:
Pretty obvious really. The (new) Greens are Labour without the faragist bits that Starmer decided to add. It's no wonder he needs Harman and Brown to remind himself what compassionate Labour used to look like.
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
Linking the two parts of the thread the obvious (only?) way for Labour to appeal to its left and to its right simultaneously is to focus on Europe rather than lefty/righty issues. Especially as the lefty/righty issues are constrained by tax and spending issues that mean neither side will ever be happy anyway.
That would be a serious mistake
How would you do it?
I would suggest we move closer to the EU but do not fall into the trap of wanting to re-join
I said they should focus on Europe, I didnt mention rejoin.
Jacob Rees-Mogg believes the Prime Minister should resign:-
I'm not advocating any individual new Labour leader. I see difficulties in all of them, and I'm a conservative, but I do at least see that Angela Rayner is charismatic. I do at least see that Ed Milliband is a competent administrator. I do at least see that Wes Streeting is trying to reform the health service. All three of them have greater virtues than Keir Starmer. They have some idea of what they want to do.
For me, the last sentence there is the killer. What is Starmer for? There’s never been a meaningful answer to that question.
It is obvious to me that Starmer should have gone some time ago, but this is politics and the Labour party. There is one thing he could do this week to shift the ground of the discussion, which is to throw a genuinely novel and interesting, for immediate action, policy dead cat on the table. Rejoin EU, or adopt 'Norway' option with EU, and/or introduce PR this year for general elections are possibles.
He won't I suspect. He will continue to believe in abstract nouns and breakfastclubism.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Estimated NEV for the Tories from Thursday is 17%, the same as Labour, with the LibDems on 16%.
It seems some quote 17%, and Railings & Thrasher on Sky at 20% NEV for the conservatives
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
I think it would be a disaster if Britain rejoined the EU out of a sense of national failure. It would make continued EU membership a reminder of that failure.
If future British membership of the EU is to be a lasting success then it needs to be on the basis of a confident Britain choosing to join the EU for optimistic reasons.
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
Linking the two parts of the thread the obvious (only?) way for Labour to appeal to its left and to its right simultaneously is to focus on Europe rather than lefty/righty issues. Especially as the lefty/righty issues are constrained by tax and spending issues that mean neither side will ever be happy anyway.
That would be a serious mistake
How would you do it?
I would suggest we move closer to the EU but do not fall into the trap of wanting to re-join
I said they should focus on Europe, I didnt mention rejoin.
As one election fades, there will be others on the horizon.
What's happening on Local Government reorganisation? Do those successful councillors who are in areas deemed to be reorganised just sit on their hands in the hope of being successful the next time? Will they actually be able to achieve anything?
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
Linking the two parts of the thread the obvious (only?) way for Labour to appeal to its left and to its right simultaneously is to focus on Europe rather than lefty/righty issues. Especially as the lefty/righty issues are constrained by tax and spending issues that mean neither side will ever be happy anyway.
I think that the left/right pendulum is as useless as a Lab/Tory swingometer when looking at elections with 5 or 6 major parties. We now live in a multipolar political environment.
This Substack also answers the question differently.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The Greens are even more explicitly pro-Rejoin than the Lib Dems.
Interesting Substack here from Patrick English of Yougov on how Labour is shedding more voters to Green than Reform:
There has been some discussion on pb in the past about whether Labour was right to attack Reform, who were more a threat to the Conservatives, and whether that opened the opposite flank.
However, at a more simplistic level, there is a pleasing symmetry in England that might mislead:- Reform gained 1,451 councillors Labour lost almost the same number: 1,496. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cr45k7vqw1pt
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
If Tories are voting for Reform, they’re not Tories! You can’t claim the Tories aren’t dying out because their vote is moving to Reform.
The argument was that the Tories are dying out due to demographics.
That is demonstrably not the case.
A large chunk of the vote has decamped, which is a very different thing, whilst there's still a residual chunk that is still there and stable.
It was, until quite recently, a bad arguement. Until quite recently, there were a fairly high number of young Conservatives. Some people flipped rightwards as they got older, but many stayed where they were.
Enough people getting more right wing as they age to keep the Conservatives in business may have been true in the past, but 'enough' is having to carry a lot more load now than it used to.
Jacob Rees-Mogg believes the Prime Minister should resign:-
I'm not advocating any individual new Labour leader. I see difficulties in all of them, and I'm a conservative, but I do at least see that Angela Rayner is charismatic. I do at least see that Ed Milliband is a competent administrator. I do at least see that Wes Streeting is trying to reform the health service. All three of them have greater virtues than Keir Starmer. They have some idea of what they want to do.
For me, the last sentence there is the killer. What is Starmer for? There’s never been a meaningful answer to that question.
It is obvious to me that Starmer should have gone some time ago, but this is politics and the Labour party. There is one thing he could do this week to shift the ground of the discussion, which is to throw a genuinely novel and interesting, for immediate action, policy dead cat on the table. Rejoin EU, or adopt 'Norway' option with EU, and/or introduce PR this year for general elections are possibles.
He won't I suspect. He will continue to believe in abstract nouns and breakfastclubism.
Good morning everyone. It's nice and sunny here, but cold at 8C. Lunch out beckons.
It's a busy weekend.
A new boiler fitted in a house yesterday, and a partial garden clear out today after the tenancy went somewhat off the rails - the first real problem I have had for years. I need to keep the neighbours happy. And lots of new paperwork to serve formally (you send it from a Post Office with a Certificate of Posting as proof) to inform tenants of what has changed under the Renters Rights Act, and potentially new tenancy agreements.
Plus a last minute tree removal and a round of full electrical 5-year checks to organise. If these are not up to date it is a potential £30k civil penalty from the Council per case, even before they get into going to court where it would escalate.
Interesting ancillaries - this boiler is in the loft of a normal compact 1910 semi. Hint: Don't put your boiler in the loft, Mrs Robinson. So it needed a hole core-drilled at loft level in a tall house built of very hard bricks, plus a link in to the drainpipes. It may be a useful data point - from a reliable plumber who gets about 10 jobs a year from me, this was £3k for a good Ideal boiler incl. 10 year warranty at ~£300 extra, walk around controller, magnetic filter, and fitting / balancing, not including ancillaries. This plumber manages her workload to stay below the VAT threshold.
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
Linking the two parts of the thread the obvious (only?) way for Labour to appeal to its left and to its right simultaneously is to focus on Europe rather than lefty/righty issues. Especially as the lefty/righty issues are constrained by tax and spending issues that mean neither side will ever be happy anyway.
I think that the left/right pendulum is as useless as a Lab/Tory swingometer when looking at elections with 5 or 6 major parties. We now live in a multipolar political environment.
This Substack also answers the question differently.
It's one thing to think that Starmer should Leave. It's another to have a good idea as to what should happen next.
Unless the next step is understood, broadly agreed and has reasonable prospect of success, it risks turning into a greater fiasco. In which case, he should probably Remain for now.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Reform aren't in any sense centre. But yes the right block would win most GEs by default if united.
Same with the left block. But neither are.
I don't think so. Conservatives vs Labour for decades has been Conservatives winning about 70% of GEs. When Labour have won they have mostly done so from the centre rather than its own centre on the left. I think that would still apply in a two party version of today.
Under the two-party system that solidified after the war and started to break down in the 1980s, British voters elected Conservative governments, except when those had disaffected sufficient of their supporters into voting Liberal, that Labour then got a go, with a further precondition for the latter being that Labour wasn't sufficiently threatening to drive those swing voters to hold their noses and vote Tory regardless.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The Greens are even more explicitly pro-Rejoin than the Lib Dems.
Interesting Substack here from Patrick English of Yougov on how Labour is shedding more voters to Green than Reform:
There has been some discussion on pb in the past about whether Labour was right to attack Reform, who were more a threat to the Conservatives, and whether that opened the opposite flank.
However, at a more simplistic level, there is a pleasing symmetry in England that might mislead:- Reform gained 1,451 councillors Labour lost almost the same number: 1,496. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cr45k7vqw1pt
Another thing missed in this is people are asking/answering different but similar questions:
Who are Labour losing voters to? Who are Labour losing seats to?
Nigel Farage says a “serious” hack of his computer led to the revelation that he received a £5m undeclared gift
Reform UK is “exploring” its legal options
Hahahaha
So he had no intention otherwise of ever declaring it?
Interesting.
Out of interest, what's the law on this?
If some randomer gives me £5m, I don't have to declare it to anyone, as I'm just a random private citizen. (Gifts of any size are always welcome!).
If the same rando gives £5m to the PM, or indeed any serving MP, it would have to be declared.
At the time Farage received the £5m, AFAIK he was a private citizen, effectively the same position as me, who doesn't have to declare anything.
Shortly afterwards, he goes back into the fray as leader of Reform, and a month or so after that, he's elected as an MP.
I suspect (but don't know) that the reporting requirements are not retrospective; so as long as get given gifts before standing for Parliament, you don't need to tell anyone. In which case, I suspect the law can't lay a glove on him, even if one might think the whole thing isn't quite in the spirit of the law.
Incidentally, I'm not sure why everyone seems to think that Farage has been "bought" for the cause of crypto deregulation. I'd hazard a guess he didn't need to be bought, he was already in favour - underneath the coat of many colours he's using the get elected, I think he's got a pretty libertarian streak that likes the idea of the stare having no direct control over people's use of money.
I think it's more likely that the £5m was given *because* Farage believes in crypto deregulation, in the hopes that he'd go off and get elected and enact some of his beliefs. And I'm not sure that we can frown too much about this - most of the money given to political parties is from people or organisations (cough, unions, cough) who think they share the same policies or beliefs, and want to see them enacted. The only difference in this case is the number of zeros on the end of the cheque is above average. I suspect a lot of the stink is really bitterness from other politicians whose policies are less likely to appeal to the seriously wealthy donor class.
Very much one of those irregular verbs: I have received a supportive donation, you have been bought for cash, he has been charged under the bribery act...
I think the rule book offers guidance is you should always urge on the side of caution i.e. over declare stuff, when it comes to MPs having received donations / gifts. So getting a big gift and very shortly after becoming an MP, I think you are expected to be declaring such potential conflicts of interest.
Its all a bit of an irrevelant argument now, we all know he got it, MPs are regularly caught having not properly declared everything e.g Starmer has fallen foul of this a load of times. I can see Farage getting a slap on the wrist and told to be much more careful in the future and it make no different among the Reform fan club.
The thing with donations, the public seem to just expect that rich people donate and suspects their might be a bit of you scratch my back. The Guardian banged on about Lord Ashcroft for years and years and it made no difference to Tory vote.
Gifts / donations have to be from a permissible donor (on UK electoral register) and new MPs have to declare any registrable benefits they've received in the last 12 months. Which is common sense, otherwise you give the prospective MP a massive bung the day before they're elected.
Farage is absolutely bang to rights on this, by his admission he received the £5m in early 2024, there's no way £5m isn't a benefit that should have been declared and the deadline was within 28 days of his election.
"5. Members must fulfil conscientiously the requirements of the House in respect of the registration of interests in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. New Members must register all their current financial interests, and any registrable benefits (other than earnings) received in the 12 months before their election within one month of their election, and Members must register any change in those registrable interests within 28 days." https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmcode/1083/report.html
He says it wasn't political, fine, but it's very clear it needed to be declared for the reasons you set out. Rules like this are also to protect the elected person from malicious accusation by being open and transparent.
The public don't care right now so he'll be fine, but it doesn't pass the 'Would he complain if an opponent did it?' test. He'd tear them to pieces if it happened to someone else.
To the average man and woman in the street, or more specifically in the departure lounge at Leeds Bradford Airport, the two best bits of EU membership would be Schengen and the Euro.
If are going to rejoin, it needs to be all-in, not the semi-detached worst of both worlds we had before.
It's one thing to think that Starmer should Leave. It's another to have a good idea as to what should happen next.
Unless the next step is understood, broadly agreed and has reasonable prospect of success, it risks turning into a greater fiasco. In which case, he should probably Remain for now.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
If Tories are voting for Reform, they’re not Tories! You can’t claim the Tories aren’t dying out because their vote is moving to Reform.
The argument was that the Tories are dying out due to demographics.
That is demonstrably not the case.
A large chunk of the vote has decamped, which is a very different thing, whilst there's still a residual chunk that is still there and stable.
It was, until quite recently, a bad arguement. Until quite recently, there were a fairly high number of young Conservatives. Some people flipped rightwards as they got older, but many stayed where they were.
Enough people getting more right wing as they age to keep the Conservatives in business may have been true in the past, but 'enough' is having to carry a lot more load now than it used to.
I'm suspicious of the idea that people get more right wing. It seems to me that often they stay still and it is the zeitgeist that shifts.
But I do wonder how much damage to the Conservatives was done by Cameron's chumocracy. People could aspire to be thrusting entrepreneurs in the Thatcher years, even if only a few made it. But how can voters aspire to be aristo-adjacent and to have gone to major public schools? From prosperity being achievable, it returned to being a birthright, and most of us weren't born right.
It's one thing to think that Starmer should Leave. It's another to have a good idea as to what should happen next.
Unless the next step is understood, broadly agreed and has reasonable prospect of success, it risks turning into a greater fiasco. In which case, he should probably Remain for now.
Starmer is the story now. There will be no scrutiny of Farage's £5m bung whilst Starmer remains the story. He simply cannot stay.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
If Tories are voting for Reform, they’re not Tories! You can’t claim the Tories aren’t dying out because their vote is moving to Reform.
The argument was that the Tories are dying out due to demographics.
That is demonstrably not the case.
A large chunk of the vote has decamped, which is a very different thing, whilst there's still a residual chunk that is still there and stable.
It was, until quite recently, a bad arguement. Until quite recently, there were a fairly high number of young Conservatives. Some people flipped rightwards as they got older, but many stayed where they were.
Enough people getting more right wing as they age to keep the Conservatives in business may have been true in the past, but 'enough' is having to carry a lot more load now than it used to.
One of my favourite charts. A cast iron rule of politics that is actually a very recent innovation.
To the average man and woman in the street, or more specifically in the departure lounge at Leeds Bradford Airport, the two best bits of EU membership would be Schengen and the Euro.
If are going to rejoin, it needs to be all-in, not the semi-detached worst of both worlds we had before.
What if, while the Rejoiners are asking us to Rejoin, a country like Germany elects a governing party like the AfD?
Because that is very possible in coming years. Especially with OFFICIAL data like this
🇩🇪 Germany 2025 Crime Stats dropped and it’s jaw-dropping:
Algerian nationals are committing crimes at 18x the rate of native Germans… and nearly 100x the rate of Japanese nationals.
The breakdowns are even wilder:
- Murder: Tunisians at 27x the German rate - Rape & Sexual Assault: Guinea 21x, Gambia 19x, Algeria 16x - Robbery: Algeria 111x, Libya 50x the German rate
We're talking about official numbers here.
The disparities are INSANE
Source: German Federal Crime Statistics (PKS 2025)“
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Estimated NEV for the Tories from Thursday is 17%, the same as Labour, with the LibDems on 16%.
It seems some quote 17%, and Railings & Thrasher on Sky at 20% NEV for the conservatives
BBC Projected National share based off the council results.
Reform 26% Green 18% Labour 17% Conservative 17% Lib Dems 16%
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
Linking the two parts of the thread the obvious (only?) way for Labour to appeal to its left and to its right simultaneously is to focus on Europe rather than lefty/righty issues. Especially as the lefty/righty issues are constrained by tax and spending issues that mean neither side will ever be happy anyway.
That would be a serious mistake
How would you do it?
I think the core issue is what here we probably have a broad consensus on - SKS has not had it within himself to write HIS agenda and make people fight on that, rather than be blown off his course. Plus he has not been able to do a huge list of obvious things - for example dealing with the tax cliff-edge at £100k income.
We all disagree on particular measures, but I think we quite generally agree that we needed a PM with purpose that could be seen without a microscope and X-ray specs.
Nigel Farage says a “serious” hack of his computer led to the revelation that he received a £5m undeclared gift
Reform UK is “exploring” its legal options
Hahahaha
So he had no intention otherwise of ever declaring it?
Interesting.
Out of interest, what's the law on this?
If some randomer gives me £5m, I don't have to declare it to anyone, as I'm just a random private citizen. (Gifts of any size are always welcome!).
If the same rando gives £5m to the PM, or indeed any serving MP, it would have to be declared.
At the time Farage received the £5m, AFAIK he was a private citizen, effectively the same position as me, who doesn't have to declare anything.
Shortly afterwards, he goes back into the fray as leader of Reform, and a month or so after that, he's elected as an MP.
I suspect (but don't know) that the reporting requirements are not retrospective; so as long as get given gifts before standing for Parliament, you don't need to tell anyone. In which case, I suspect the law can't lay a glove on him, even if one might think the whole thing isn't quite in the spirit of the law.
Incidentally, I'm not sure why everyone seems to think that Farage has been "bought" for the cause of crypto deregulation. I'd hazard a guess he didn't need to be bought, he was already in favour - underneath the coat of many colours he's using the get elected, I think he's got a pretty libertarian streak that likes the idea of the stare having no direct control over people's use of money.
I think it's more likely that the £5m was given *because* Farage believes in crypto deregulation, in the hopes that he'd go off and get elected and enact some of his beliefs. And I'm not sure that we can frown too much about this - most of the money given to political parties is from people or organisations (cough, unions, cough) who think they share the same policies or beliefs, and want to see them enacted. The only difference in this case is the number of zeros on the end of the cheque is above average. I suspect a lot of the stink is really bitterness from other politicians whose policies are less likely to appeal to the seriously wealthy donor class.
Very much one of those irregular verbs: I have received a supportive donation, you have been bought for cash, he has been charged under the bribery act...
I think the rule book offers guidance is you should always urge on the side of caution i.e. over declare stuff, when it comes to MPs having received donations / gifts. So getting a big gift and very shortly after becoming an MP, I think you are expected to be declaring such potential conflicts of interest.
Its all a bit of an irrevelant argument now, we all know he got it, MPs are regularly caught having not properly declared everything e.g Starmer has fallen foul of this a load of times. I can see Farage getting a slap on the wrist and told to be much more careful in the future and it make no different among the Reform fan club.
The thing with donations, the public seem to just expect that rich people donate and suspects their might be a bit of you scratch my back. The Guardian banged on about Lord Ashcroft for years and years and it made no difference to Tory vote.
Gifts / donations have to be from a permissible donor (on UK electoral register) and new MPs have to declare any registrable benefits they've received in the last 12 months. Which is common sense, otherwise you give the prospective MP a massive bung the day before they're elected.
Farage is absolutely bang to rights on this, by his admission he received the £5m in early 2024, there's no way £5m isn't a benefit that should have been declared and the deadline was within 28 days of his election.
"5. Members must fulfil conscientiously the requirements of the House in respect of the registration of interests in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. New Members must register all their current financial interests, and any registrable benefits (other than earnings) received in the 12 months before their election within one month of their election, and Members must register any change in those registrable interests within 28 days." https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmcode/1083/report.html
He says it wasn't political, fine, but it's very clear it needed to be declared for the reasons you set out. Rules like this are also to protect the elected person from malicious accusation by being open and transparent.
The public don't care right now so he'll be fine, but it doesn't pass the 'Would he complain if an opponent did it?' test. He'd tear them to pieces if it happened to someone else.
The Mandelson history shows so clearly that you can survive all sorts of stuff until you can't and then all the stuff from the past you survived at the time piles up as evidence.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Estimated NEV for the Tories from Thursday is 17%, the same as Labour, with the LibDems on 16%.
It seems some quote 17%, and Railings & Thrasher on Sky at 20% NEV for the conservatives
BBC Projected National share based off the council results.
Reform 26% Green 18% Labour 17% Conservative 17% Lib Dems 16%
So if they all take about 1.25% off Reform we would have a five way dead heat!
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Estimated NEV for the Tories from Thursday is 17%, the same as Labour, with the LibDems on 16%.
It seems some quote 17%, and Railings & Thrasher on Sky at 20% NEV for the conservatives
BBC Projected National share based off the council results.
Reform 26% Green 18% Labour 17% Conservative 17% Lib Dems 16%
Yes I know
Two different projections are being used by BBC and Sky
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Estimated NEV for the Tories from Thursday is 17%, the same as Labour, with the LibDems on 16%.
It seems some quote 17%, and Railings & Thrasher on Sky at 20% NEV for the conservatives
BBC Projected National share based off the council results.
Reform 26% Green 18% Labour 17% Conservative 17% Lib Dems 16%
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
I think it would be a disaster if Britain rejoined the EU out of a sense of national failure. It would make continued EU membership a reminder of that failure.
If future British membership of the EU is to be a lasting success then it needs to be on the basis of a confident Britain choosing to join the EU for optimistic reasons.
Yes, very fair point.
But I think I'd fall into the camp of: "if we are confident and optimistic outside the EU, let's not rejoin." I accept this is a political choice.
The reason for this choice is that I do think the sovereignty arguments for Brexit had weight in theory, I just think those making them were not being realistic about our prospects for sovereignty.
In a nutshell: for me the EU would always be a project of necessity (such as it was founded in response to WW2) rather than a destination of choice.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
What you are advocating however is not the Conservative Party.
RefCon will subsume the Conservative Party and the grouping will assume the cache of the Conservative name at some stage in the future. Hoorah the Conservatives survive, but they bear no relationship to the politics of McMillan, Butler, Heath or even Thatcher for that matter.
In essence the name alone lives on.
FWIW the existential threat to Labour is a clear and present danger. Labour's USP is social equality. What we have seen so far has been hidden under a bushel by this Government and taking money from OAPs and the poor shoots their USP down in flames.
That is my prediction on what will happen for the Tories. Probably 2030. Just depends on whether it's a reverse takeover by Reform or not.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
If Tories are voting for Reform, they’re not Tories! You can’t claim the Tories aren’t dying out because their vote is moving to Reform.
The argument was that the Tories are dying out due to demographics.
That is demonstrably not the case.
A large chunk of the vote has decamped, which is a very different thing, whilst there's still a residual chunk that is still there and stable.
It was, until quite recently, a bad arguement. Until quite recently, there were a fairly high number of young Conservatives. Some people flipped rightwards as they got older, but many stayed where they were.
Enough people getting more right wing as they age to keep the Conservatives in business may have been true in the past, but 'enough' is having to carry a lot more load now than it used to.
The tories are continually having to move left on some issues (marriage equality, fox hunting, etc.) in order to stay in business so the definition of 'right wing' is changing. Once Generation Brexit is gone (maybe hantavirus can help us out ) the politics of EU-UK relations will look very different but we're at least a decade away from that.
Wikipedia seems to have the final seat totals for London.
Labour are still the leading party in the capital with 696 councillors, a loss of 460 on the number elected in 2022.
The Conservatives are on 407 and are up 3.
The Liberal Democrats are on 243, up 63.
The Greens are on 297, up 279
Reform are on 79, up 79
Others are on 93, up 34 and include 33 Aspire in Tower Hamlets, 24 Newham Independents and 14 Residents in Havering with a further 22 in other Boroughs.
Labour have majority control of 9 Boroughs, the Conservatives have 6, the Liberal Democrats 3, the Greens 3, Aspire 1, Reform 1 and the remaining 9 have No one party with majority control.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
If Tories are voting for Reform, they’re not Tories! You can’t claim the Tories aren’t dying out because their vote is moving to Reform.
The argument was that the Tories are dying out due to demographics.
That is demonstrably not the case.
A large chunk of the vote has decamped, which is a very different thing, whilst there's still a residual chunk that is still there and stable.
It was, until quite recently, a bad arguement. Until quite recently, there were a fairly high number of young Conservatives. Some people flipped rightwards as they got older, but many stayed where they were.
Enough people getting more right wing as they age to keep the Conservatives in business may have been true in the past, but 'enough' is having to carry a lot more load now than it used to.
The tories are continually having to move left on some issues (marriage equality, fox hunting, etc.) in order to stay in business so the definition of 'right wing' is changing. Once Generation Brexit is gone (maybe hantavirus can help us out ) the politics of EU-UK relations will look very different but we're at least a decade away from that.
But much of the EU is moving to the hard right. Or even far right. So this is your usual half-arsed, half-thought-through piffle-shit
Wikipedia seems to have the final seat totals for London.
Labour are still the leading party in the capital with 696 councillors, a loss of 460 on the number elected in 2022.
The Conservatives are on 407 and are up 3.
The Liberal Democrats are on 243, up 63.
The Greens are on 297, up 279
Reform are on 79, up 79
Others are on 93, up 34 and include 33 Aspire in Tower Hamlets, 24 Newham Independents and 14 Residents in Havering with a further 22 in other Boroughs.
Labour have majority control of 9 Boroughs, the Conservatives have 6, the Liberal Democrats 3, the Greens 3, Aspire 1, Reform 1 and the remaining 9 have No one party with majority control.
London not yet caught up fully with this 'disruptor party' fad that's all the rage thesedays. Exemplified by the very centre where, IIRC, Westminster is literally only Con and Lab.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Polling shows it’s the young, not Boomers, who are most keen on rejoin.
And yet it's the Boomers who keep bleating on about it.
can you name one, and for you to complain about bleating takes hte biscuit, give your head a wobble big time larry the Lamb
As one election fades, there will be others on the horizon.
What's happening on Local Government reorganisation? Do those successful councillors who are in areas deemed to be reorganised just sit on their hands in the hope of being successful the next time? Will they actually be able to achieve anything?
It seems to be a strange mix - in Hampshire the 'old' county council has elected councillors for another, legally, four year term, whilst knowing that the government intends to truncate this to probably two years, so they disappear probably in 2028. Meanwhile I think the original plan was to elect 'shadow' councillors to the new councils next year, although this too may fall back to 2028 as I wouldn't think having both sets of councillors serving together makes any sense. Meanwhile in Surrey they've gone ahead and elected the new shadow councils this year.
The big problem with Farage on his £5m is that following SKS being an idiot to avoid the Privileges committee even a referral to it is now a political issue
We need to remember that MP self-regulation, even though improved after the scandals around expenses, has its own problems.
I'd cite the case of Elizabeth Filkin who was respected as doing a good job, but was not reappointed in 2002 after a campaign against her amongst MPs. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1693721.stm
On labour, when you consider where they lost and who they lost to it seems to me they are caught in a bind not able to square the circle of lost votes to right and left
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
Linking the two parts of the thread the obvious (only?) way for Labour to appeal to its left and to its right simultaneously is to focus on Europe rather than lefty/righty issues. Especially as the lefty/righty issues are constrained by tax and spending issues that mean neither side will ever be happy anyway.
That would be a serious mistake
How would you do it?
I would suggest we move closer to the EU but do not fall into the trap of wanting to re-join
I said they should focus on Europe, I didnt mention rejoin.
Fair comment - sorry if I misunderstood
Personally I would agree that there are better options that should be explored ahead of rejoining.
Tactically for Labour, I'm not sure how much it matters which route they go down.
The EU wants us for our money and our clout. The Eurozone doesn't want us, because we'd be a total pain in the arse, and suck financial services away from Frankfurt. And we'd leave the ECB with the job of effectively guaranteeing British banks.
If we wanted to join the EU with a big cheque and no Eurozone (for now at least), we probably could.
But it's a bullshit argument, because I don't believe a referendum on EU membership would be won. No one wants to go through that argument/fight again.
That's a good argument for now, for the next ten years or so.
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
I've heard this argument my whole political life. "The Tories are dying out" is another one.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
Although, judging by Thursday, the Tories ARE dying out.
Not at all. A huge chunk are now voting Reform, but the Tories still won over 800 seats and 20% of the ENV. Not great, not terrible.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
Estimated NEV for the Tories from Thursday is 17%, the same as Labour, with the LibDems on 16%.
It seems some quote 17%, and Railings & Thrasher on Sky at 20% NEV for the conservatives
BBC Projected National share based off the council results.
Reform 26% Green 18% Labour 17% Conservative 17% Lib Dems 16%
Once again those who blithely aruge for a "union of the Right" - a merger between Reform and the Conservatives - fail completely to understand how political parties work. Yes, of course, it's not meant as a merger based on principles but simply on a desire to block a Labour majority or Labour minority Government seeking support from other parties.
I struggle with the notion Reform are "right wing" inasmuch as that term, like Conservative, Socialist and Liberal, is widely misused and misinterpeted.
In any case, as I discovered when two supposedly like-minded parties, who had even forged an electoral pact, merged in the late 1980s, you don't get spmething which is better than the old two parties or even the sum of the parts. I'd argue the Liberal Democrats, who emerged out of that merger, have never been the same party as the Alliance and have struggled to achieve similar levels of public support.
Those who assume Reformative or should that be ConForm = Reform + Conservative are seeing numbers and not understanding them.
The language matters too - the SDP were supposed to be "strangled at birth" while Reform's own leader has openly talked about destroying the Conservative Party. Yes, there may be some friendliness but it's hard to forgive and forget when you have to be friends with someone who has openly called for your destruction.
The anti-merger Reform and anti-merger Conservatives (and they will exist) might find their way to other parties or survive as a rump. The Owenite SDP went on to capture both the Labour and Conservative parties to an extent and one could argue a lot of what Blair did would have been smiled on by David Owen.
Sunday quiz. Guess where this is from (capitals mine)? Which country produced this document?
“single / lone parent - state pension age or over: 244.40 256.00
couple - state pension age or over: 366.00 383.35
single / lone parent - reached state pension age on or after 1 April 2021 couple - both reached state pension age on or after 1 April 2021: 227.10 346.60 238.00
for the claimant and the other party to the marriage where one or more members of the marriage are state pension age or over for each additional spouse who is a member of the same household as the claimant and one or more of the members are state pension age or over: 366.00 383.35
If the claimant is a member of a POLYGAMOUS marriage and all of the members of the marriage have attained pensionable age on or after 1 April 2021
For the claimant and the other party to the marriage
For each additional spouse who is a member of the same household as the claimant: 346.60 363.25 119.50 125.25”
Getting Inflation down - even by subsidising energy prices or cutting import costs would really help. Approximately 25% of the UK government's debt is in inflation-linked bonds (index-linked gilts). This is a very high proportion compared to other G7 nations (next highest is Italy at 12%), meaning UK debt interest payments are exceptionally sensitive to Retail Prices Index (RPI) spikes. FFS why is RPI still used?
It's used by Junior Doctors when calculating their pay rise demands !
But it has also been going out - eg my Feed in Tariff increases have changed recently aiui from RPI linkage to CPI linkage.
I'm also interested in what happened to our excellent management of Government debt. Back at the grate financial crisis we hand longer term debts than other countries which helped tide us over.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The Greens are even more explicitly pro-Rejoin than the Lib Dems.
Interesting Substack here from Patrick English of Yougov on how Labour is shedding more voters to Green than Reform:
There has been some discussion on pb in the past about whether Labour was right to attack Reform, who were more a threat to the Conservatives, and whether that opened the opposite flank.
However, at a more simplistic level, there is a pleasing symmetry in England that might mislead:- Reform gained 1,451 councillors Labour lost almost the same number: 1,496. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cr45k7vqw1pt
And in a lot of those results, the split vote between Labour and the Greens is what got Reform elected.
That's one way of looking at it; another is that attacking opponents isn't what gets you the bulk of your vote. If the electorate don't want you for positive reasons then you don't get their vote.
The reality is that attacking the Greens wouldn't have gained Labour many votes.
Reform won so many seats because it was a multiparty election, with five national parties in a FPTP system, and Reform got a few percent more backing than anyone else.
Good morning everyone. It's nice and sunny here, but cold at 8C. Lunch out beckons.
It's a busy weekend.
A new boiler fitted in a house yesterday, and a partial garden clear out today after the tenancy went somewhat off the rails - the first real problem I have had for years. I need to keep the neighbours happy. And lots of new paperwork to serve formally (you send it from a Post Office with a Certificate of Posting as proof) to inform tenants of what has changed under the Renters Rights Act, and potentially new tenancy agreements.
Plus a last minute tree removal and a round of full electrical 5-year checks to organise. If these are not up to date it is a potential £30k civil penalty from the Council per case, even before they get into going to court where it would escalate.
Interesting ancillaries - this boiler is in the loft of a normal compact 1910 semi. Hint: Don't put your boiler in the loft, Mrs Robinson. So it needed a hole core-drilled at loft level in a tall house built of very hard bricks, plus a link in to the drainpipes. It may be a useful data point - from a reliable plumber who gets about 10 jobs a year from me, this was £3k for a good Ideal boiler incl. 10 year warranty at ~£300 extra, walk around controller, magnetic filter, and fitting / balancing, not including ancillaries. This plumber manages her workload to stay below the VAT threshold.
After such an informative post it seems positively cruel to point out that it should be 'Don't put your boiler in the loft Mrs Worthington'. Although I like the idea of a Noel Coward X Simon & Garfunkle collab as the young people would put it.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The Greens are even more explicitly pro-Rejoin than the Lib Dems.
Interesting Substack here from Patrick English of Yougov on how Labour is shedding more voters to Green than Reform:
There has been some discussion on pb in the past about whether Labour was right to attack Reform, who were more a threat to the Conservatives, and whether that opened the opposite flank.
However, at a more simplistic level, there is a pleasing symmetry in England that might mislead:- Reform gained 1,451 councillors Labour lost almost the same number: 1,496. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cr45k7vqw1pt
And in a lot of those results, the split vote between Labour and the Greens is what got Reform elected.
That's one way of looking at it; another is that attacking opponents isn't what gets you the bulk of your vote. If the electorate don't want you for positive reasons then you don't get their vote.
The reality is that attacking the Greens wouldn't have gained Labour many votes.
Reform won so many seats because it was a multiparty election, with five national parties in a FPTP system, and Reform got a few percent more backing than anyone else.
On a PB pedantry, I think Reform are down to 1450 as they have already chucked one out.
There are some more lining up on the plank around various anti-semitism problems.
Rejoining the EU - or attempting to Rejoin (we might be vetoed) - would be easily as agonising as Brexit and probably much worse. Because quitting a club is ultimately easier than joining. Especially joining a club that isn’t sure you’d be a good member
It would five-ten years of anguished and tedious negotiations during which the EU - and every member state - would try to extract as much juice from the British Orange as possible. They would make the pips squeak
And, despite what “Ben Judah” says, we would certainly have to join the euro. It’s the one way to shackle us forever
we would not be vetoed per se. We would be told full fat including Euro and Schengen, or no.
Actually, I don't think that necessarily true. The EU is happy to have many countries indefinitely delaying Euro membership, because the time is never quite right. I have no doubt that -if we were going to be writing a large cheque- then we would get the same treatment.
No, we would be legally obligated to adopt the euro in future, under law, once we met the convergence criteria.
Even if the UK government tried to game in the medium-term it would never go away and with the way things work in the UK I could even see domestic legal challenges to compel us to join.
There may be a "legal obligation to join", yet there are a number of countries within the Single Market with their own free-floating currencies - Sweden since 2003, and they have had a referendum which said "do not join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II", which is a required stage on the way to the Euro.
It can be done. Perhaps we need to be pragmatic to find the best for the UK in an era which has been significantly changed geopolitically, not obsessively ideological.
Sweden. Swe-den. Sweden!
Sweden Sweden Sweden!
SWEDEN!
It just doesn't wash. These arguments are nothing but a vain attempt to play down the risks out of fear that it'd otherwise be a real political obstacle to winning a Rejoin vote.
We'd be obliged to adopt the euro and committed to do so, by law.
No ifs, no buts.
Agreed.
I suspect that in the next generation there will come a point at which that will be the price we are willing to pay, and we will indeed rejoin (if we are let back in).
But I also suspect it would need a failed Reform government (and perhaps even a failed Green one) before we were to contemplate that reality as a nation.
Yes, or not?
Rejoin being the primary objective of British politics - and weirdly always seen as gravitationally inevitable - might just be a very Gen X/Boomer thing, who dominate political leadership and the chatterati but future younger generations may not be quite so bothered.
To be honest, it all feels quite passé. It's not the 1990s anymore, which was peak 'The Future is Europe'.
Setting aside your imaginary "future younger generations", support for rejoining is strongest among those aged 16-24.
None of them are talking about though, are they? You are.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The Greens are even more explicitly pro-Rejoin than the Lib Dems.
Interesting Substack here from Patrick English of Yougov on how Labour is shedding more voters to Green than Reform:
There has been some discussion on pb in the past about whether Labour was right to attack Reform, who were more a threat to the Conservatives, and whether that opened the opposite flank.
However, at a more simplistic level, there is a pleasing symmetry in England that might mislead:- Reform gained 1,451 councillors Labour lost almost the same number: 1,496. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cr45k7vqw1pt
And in a lot of those results, the split vote between Labour and the Greens is what got Reform elected.
That's one way of looking at it; another is that attacking opponents isn't what gets you the bulk of your vote. If the electorate don't want you for positive reasons then you don't get their vote.
The reality is that attacking the Greens wouldn't have gained Labour many votes.
Reform won so many seats because it was a multiparty election, with five national parties in a FPTP system, and Reform got a few percent more backing than anyone else.
In a land of high teen vote shares the mid 20s voteshare party is king.
'We are the only party that can bring our country together'
I think that's probably true. I just wish they'd have bloody well done it over the past couple of years.
It’s really really not true. Labour has lost its white working class vote in much of England and Wales, forever. Or for a very long time. The WWC have worked out that Reform will better represent their interests. And they will
It’s exactly what happened to Labour in Scotland with the SNP but much worse, because this is absolutely Labour’s core vote. Unless they get it back they will never again win a majority. But the kind of policies needed to win them back would be intolerable for Labour MPs and hugely alienating for their London and middle class vote
Comments
The catch is that the demographics of the Leave/Stay Out/Faragists vote are horrible. Unless they can convert a meaningful number of middle-aged people to the idea that staying out is a good idea every year, the popularity of Brexit dies in a generation or so. There won't be an argument, because only a handful of freaks will want to argue it.
That would be different if Brexit were unambiguously going well, but the best case can be made is that it's doing less harm than the worst-case scenario. So it's not going to sell itself.
I've done the 'Brexit is a ghastly heirloom, currently kept to not annoy the family patriarch' analogy before. One of the reasons the Greens are surging is that the youth seem increasingly impatient to book a skip and dump it.
No, we need to face up to the debate.
It doesn't work like that, because politics and people aren't static.
But it's not on the cards in the next few years: our current government is too timid even to have implemented serious planning reform.
Circumstances change, though. And the new multipolar world is a far less friendly place for either committed Atlanticists (with whom I had a great deal of sympathy) or the advocates for Singapore on Thames.
And it's demonstrably wrong to say that "no one wants to go through that again". You need only look at polling on it.
They talk about Gaza, gyms, influencers, gender identity, debt, and personal growth.
They don't talk about the EU. If they did the LDs would be riding high, not the Greens.
The centre-right block is very comfortably well above 40%, and sometimes approaches near 50%.
It'd be near certain to win the next GE were it constituted as one.
No.
I am hoping I may last a wee bit longer though, and pleased to see our well liked conservative MS returned to the Senedd last Thursday
Interesting Substack here from Patrick English of Yougov on how Labour is shedding more voters to Green than Reform:
https://patrickenglish.substack.com/p/local-elections-analysis-labour-struggled?r=8jnjk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
But there are other billionaires who have accrued very significant political power through patronage (Harborne being the salient example) or through capture of the public discourse (Zuckerberg, Musk etc) who are doing exactly as noneoftheabove suggests.
https://bsky.app/profile/europeanmovement.co.uk/post/3mhiofml5kg25
Next.
But neither are.
A tweet by a European campaign group from over 6 weeks ago quoting the tail end of some comments by Polanski where he says Brexit might not be all that?
Lol.
It may well be that labour's only hope is to move left with someone like Rayner or Miliband because in Scotland, Wales, London and the cities that is where their missing votes are
Starmer is labour's biggest problem and bringing in Brown and Harman defies belief
He just has to go if labour want to start the process of being electable again
That is demonstrably not the case.
A large chunk of the vote has decamped, which is a very different thing, whilst there's still a residual chunk that is still there and stable.
Enjoy your Sunday everyone.
This was in the campaign period:
https://bsky.app/profile/implausibleblog.bsky.social/post/3mhejxqydtk2z
https://bsky.app/profile/europeanmovement.co.uk/post/3mj2rs2eeoz2g
RefCon will subsume the Conservative Party and the grouping will assume the cache of the Conservative name at some stage in the future. Hoorah the Conservatives survive, but they bear no relationship to the politics of McMillan, Butler, Heath or even Thatcher for that matter.
In essence the name alone lives on.
FWIW the existential threat to Labour is a clear and present danger. Labour's USP is social equality. What we have seen so far has been hidden under a bushel by this Government and taking money from OAPs and the poor shoots their USP down in flames.
He won't I suspect. He will continue to believe in abstract nouns and breakfastclubism.
If future British membership of the EU is to be a lasting success then it needs to be on the basis of a confident Britain choosing to join the EU for optimistic reasons.
What's happening on Local Government reorganisation? Do those successful councillors who are in areas deemed to be reorganised just sit on their hands in the hope of being successful the next time? Will they actually be able to achieve anything?
This Substack also answers the question differently.
https://patrickenglish.substack.com/p/should-labour-move-left-or-right
However, at a more simplistic level, there is a pleasing symmetry in England that might mislead:-
Reform gained 1,451 councillors
Labour lost almost the same number: 1,496.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cr45k7vqw1pt
Enough people getting more right wing as they age to keep the Conservatives in business may have been true in the past, but 'enough' is having to carry a lot more load now than it used to.
It's a busy weekend.
A new boiler fitted in a house yesterday, and a partial garden clear out today after the tenancy went somewhat off the rails - the first real problem I have had for years. I need to keep the neighbours happy. And lots of new paperwork to serve formally (you send it from a Post Office with a Certificate of Posting as proof) to inform tenants of what has changed under the Renters Rights Act, and potentially new tenancy agreements.
Plus a last minute tree removal and a round of full electrical 5-year checks to organise. If these are not up to date it is a potential £30k civil penalty from the Council per case, even before they get into going to court where it would escalate.
Interesting ancillaries - this boiler is in the loft of a normal compact 1910 semi. Hint: Don't put your boiler in the loft, Mrs Robinson. So it needed a hole core-drilled at loft level in a tall house built of very hard bricks, plus a link in to the drainpipes. It may be a useful data point - from a reliable plumber who gets about 10 jobs a year from me, this was £3k for a good Ideal boiler incl. 10 year warranty at ~£300 extra, walk around controller, magnetic filter, and fitting / balancing, not including ancillaries. This plumber manages her workload to stay below the VAT threshold.
It's one thing to think that Starmer should Leave. It's another to have a good idea as to what should happen next.
Unless the next step is understood, broadly agreed and has reasonable prospect of success, it risks turning into a greater fiasco. In which case, he should probably Remain for now.
Who are Labour losing voters to?
Who are Labour losing seats to?
The public don't care right now so he'll be fine, but it doesn't pass the 'Would he complain if an opponent did it?' test. He'd tear them to pieces if it happened to someone else.
If are going to rejoin, it needs to be all-in, not the semi-detached worst of both worlds we had before.
But I do wonder how much damage to the Conservatives was done by Cameron's chumocracy. People could aspire to be thrusting entrepreneurs in the Thatcher years, even if only a few made it. But how can voters aspire to be aristo-adjacent and to have gone to major public schools? From prosperity being achievable, it returned to being a birthright, and most of us weren't born right.
'We are the only party that can bring our country together'
If Starmer's sole aim is survival that will dictate if he goes for Rejoin or not.
Because that is very possible in coming years. Especially with OFFICIAL data like this
🇩🇪 Germany 2025 Crime Stats dropped and it’s jaw-dropping:
Algerian nationals are committing crimes at 18x the rate of native Germans… and nearly 100x the rate of Japanese nationals.
The breakdowns are even wilder:
- Murder: Tunisians at 27x the German rate
- Rape & Sexual Assault: Guinea 21x, Gambia 19x, Algeria 16x
- Robbery: Algeria 111x, Libya 50x the German rate
We're talking about official numbers here.
The disparities are INSANE
Source: German Federal Crime Statistics (PKS 2025)“
https://x.com/marionawfal/status/2053312822574997950?s=46
Reform 26%
Green 18%
Labour 17%
Conservative 17%
Lib Dems 16%
We all disagree on particular measures, but I think we quite generally agree that we needed a PM with purpose that could be seen without a microscope and X-ray specs.
Two different projections are being used by BBC and Sky
But I think I'd fall into the camp of: "if we are confident and optimistic outside the EU, let's not rejoin." I accept this is a political choice.
The reason for this choice is that I do think the sovereignty arguments for Brexit had weight in theory, I just think those making them were not being realistic about our prospects for sovereignty.
In a nutshell: for me the EU would always be a project of necessity (such as it was founded in response to WW2) rather than a destination of choice.
Wikipedia seems to have the final seat totals for London.
Labour are still the leading party in the capital with 696 councillors, a loss of 460 on the number elected in 2022.
The Conservatives are on 407 and are up 3.
The Liberal Democrats are on 243, up 63.
The Greens are on 297, up 279
Reform are on 79, up 79
Others are on 93, up 34 and include 33 Aspire in Tower Hamlets, 24 Newham Independents and 14 Residents in Havering with a further 22 in other Boroughs.
Labour have majority control of 9 Boroughs, the Conservatives have 6, the Liberal Democrats 3, the Greens 3, Aspire 1, Reform 1 and the remaining 9 have No one party with majority control.
Good morning, gentlemen
And with Bridget Phillipson
I'd cite the case of Elizabeth Filkin who was respected as doing a good job, but was not reappointed in 2002 after a campaign against her amongst MPs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1693721.stm
Tactically for Labour, I'm not sure how much it matters which route they go down.
Losing London and the bigger cities in some desperate attempt to appease those who’ve moved to Reform would be terminal .
Labour MPs still clinging to the Red Wall need a reality check .
I struggle with the notion Reform are "right wing" inasmuch as that term, like Conservative, Socialist and Liberal, is widely misused and misinterpeted.
In any case, as I discovered when two supposedly like-minded parties, who had even forged an electoral pact, merged in the late 1980s, you don't get spmething which is better than the old two parties or even the sum of the parts. I'd argue the Liberal Democrats, who emerged out of that merger, have never been the same party as the Alliance and have struggled to achieve similar levels of public support.
Those who assume Reformative or should that be ConForm = Reform + Conservative are seeing numbers and not understanding them.
The language matters too - the SDP were supposed to be "strangled at birth" while Reform's own leader has openly talked about destroying the Conservative Party. Yes, there may be some friendliness but it's hard to forgive and forget when you have to be friends with someone who has openly called for your destruction.
The anti-merger Reform and anti-merger Conservatives (and they will exist) might find their way to other parties or survive as a rump. The Owenite SDP went on to capture both the Labour and Conservative parties to an extent and one could argue a lot of what Blair did would have been smiled on by David Owen.
“single / lone parent - state pension age or over: 244.40 256.00
couple - state pension age or over: 366.00 383.35
single / lone parent - reached state pension age on or after 1 April 2021 couple - both reached state pension age on or after 1 April 2021: 227.10 346.60 238.00
for the claimant and the other party to the marriage where one or more members of the marriage are state pension age or over for each additional spouse who is a member of the same household as the claimant and one or more of the members are state pension age or over: 366.00 383.35
If the claimant is a member of a POLYGAMOUS marriage and all of the members of the marriage have attained pensionable age on or after 1 April 2021
For the claimant and the other party to the marriage
For each additional spouse who is a member of the same household as the claimant: 346.60 363.25 119.50 125.25”
But it has also been going out - eg my Feed in Tariff increases have changed recently aiui from RPI linkage to CPI linkage.
I'm also interested in what happened to our excellent management of Government debt. Back at the grate financial crisis we hand longer term debts than other countries which helped tide us over.
That's one way of looking at it; another is that attacking opponents isn't what gets you the bulk of your vote. If the electorate don't want you for positive reasons then you don't get their vote.
The reality is that attacking the Greens wouldn't have gained Labour many votes.
Reform won so many seats because it was a multiparty election, with five national parties in a FPTP system, and Reform got a few percent more backing than anyone else.
There are some more lining up on the plank around various anti-semitism problems.
Was it the UK ? Even though polygamy is illegal here was it something put forward by a Muslim group ? In case there was a law change .
will better represent their interests. And they will
It’s exactly what happened to Labour in Scotland with the SNP but much worse, because this is absolutely Labour’s core vote. Unless they get it back they will never again win a majority. But the kind of policies needed to win them back would be intolerable for Labour MPs and hugely alienating for their London and middle class vote
TL;DR: Labour are fucked