Mate… whichever way you slice that the imagery is absolutely horrifying and today is Friday. We don’t need this above all else!
and now you’re making me think of sliced johnsons. Thanks Geoff.
Oh Jesus. And still with 9 days of September left to go before we can kill the thread.
Maybe we can bury it early with a snap election announcement…
Reckon Laura K is just hungover and vaguebooking us all
Ooohhhh…
Might as well just make elections an annual thing. Smash the FTPA down to 12 months. Fuck it.
I can’t quite get my head around why the Labour position is to favour a general election over another referendum.
In a general election, they’d either have to go in with a “We’ll still do Brexit” position, which if they won, would mean they’d then have to own Brexit fallout rather than the Tories. Or go in with a “We’ll cancel Brexit” position, which seems extraordinarily risky.
Surely better to deal with the Brexit issue separately?
Makes perfect sense to me.
Think of it another way - Labour goes balls out behind another referendum (with 3 options - go with whatever May comes back with, go with staying in the EU, go with no deal).
Two things - which of those 3 options does Labour campaign on, and what happens if they lose?
There will be no second referendum. There will be no deal. The Tories will do whatever it takes to avoid another General Election, at least while May remains at the helm. Remainer Tories would rather No Deal than the possibility of Corbyn getting in. ‘Soft’ Tories are still Tories first and foremost.
The only thing that is left is who is going to shoulder the blame. Remainers will blame May and Corbyn, leavers will blame the EU.
I mean fundamentally labour aren’t going to back another referendum because it still (despite nonsensical research like that above) has the potential to cost them seats, and with their current, radical policy of economic reform there’s very limited ability to pick up moderate Tory seats.
So (I would guess) a General Election resulting in a Labour government allows them to negotiate a better withdrawal than the current Government can manage, and get on with restructuring the economy, which is conveniently much easier to do in a crisis.
That’s an interesting way to look at it - benign disaster capitalism, essentially. Can see that working, there’s a strong frame of ‘the Tories and this whole system have failed, time to rebuild’.
The problem is still this bit:
A ‘better’ withdrawal is still massively harmful - so can Labour actually carry out their plans when we’re all beyond thunderdome? I’d like to believe it’s all possible, but at the same time this is a country of and for idiots, starting to doubt we can collectively get anything right tbh tbf
Weird seeing Theresa May try to talk about social housing after tories have spent 30+ years saying people that live in it are feral scumbags.
Of those three, it would have to be staying in the EU (with alternatives being backing a Tory PMs negotiation or No Deal). And thats surely how it could be framed for Labour leavers (we can’t possibly back a Tory deal, and No Deal is awful). I think for what its worth, is that in that 3 option scenario, staying in wins, due to fragmentation of the leave vote.
I think Labour’s positioning on the issue at a general election is a lot trickier, due to then having to be in government to deliver it, and potentially be blamed for the fall out.
Offerton Window can shift back if the opposition stop triangulating themselves into oblivion, who knew.
I mean, absolutely. While the priorities of the current leadership are nothing outside what you would expect from them, I think there’s a real recognition - particularly from McDonald - that this is a 1945/1979 moment where they can tear down the old order, and that the public would get behind it, eg
It’s an absolutely fair point, but it’s worth remembering that the two big past restructures came out of tremendous economic and political stress. The 70s may seem less obvious that the Second World War but you had oil shocks, the strikes, the IMF bailout…
I also suspect Labour would be in a fundamentally better position because, whatever the #FBPE types would do, I don’t think they wouldn’t have the rabidity of the ERG Tories. I think they’d be much more likely to accept some kind of customs arrangement or whatever would come out of a soft Brexit.
Which brings in another problem - any referendum re-run is going to have the air of an establishment stitch up about it, and rightly because that’s entirely what it is. Why would Labour risk getting sucked into that?
The politics of this are all fraught, granted, but the least fraught option is staying out of the ‘another referendum’ mixer, at least for now.
As said before, this and similar has always been the real prize of Brexit for the hardliners, so many of them are hand in pocket with US consultancies and insurance firms. Financial catastrophe would be the perfect excuse to finally kill off the NHS for good and set up a medical insurance type policy, with all that that entails. Hunt has been softening it up for just such a thing all along.
So fucking cruel, and so quintessentially Tory, it’s been made to happen by getting poor, stupid people to vote to give it better funding.
Yep, a three-way (wahey) poll on remain / final deal / no deal that didn’t have some provision for 2 & 3 to be counted together and amount to… something would have deeply unpleasant consequences.
Does anyone know what that would look like? Presumably accepting the four freedoms cos any kind of customs border will screw us and they are indivisible. Bet then it begs the question what’s the point? We really would be EU ‘rule takers’ then in a much worse position then we are now. Surely better to make the argument for remain (maybe after being elected).
Or point out the first one was an establishment stich up (which it was) and this one is doing it correctly (with the disenfranchised of the first vote allowed to take part etc). Just thinking aloud here.