Brexit

Brexit, Stay or Leave.

  • Stay

    Votes: 28 59.6%

  • Leave

    Votes: 19 40.4%
  • Total voters
    47
Grasshopper said:
John Smith would have been turning in his grave at half the things Blair did as Prime Minister. Lets not kid ourselves on that they were cut from the same political-cloth.

As far as 'leadership' goes, getting elected is one of the desirable attributes - no dispute there - and if Blair had been smart enough to have swerved the Iraq War, his legacy would probably be very different.

However, that is merely one example of a policy-stance that was at odds with Labour's core vote. To the Iraq War, you can add cosying-up to Big Business/the City, the acceptance that Thatcher wasn't all bad, ditching Clause 4, aligning with a neo-Con White House, and flipping ten-bob in the direction of pensioners, for evidence of how Labour's core vote started to dissipate.

In my view, all of the above contributed to Labour's current malaise, because it led to Brown's defeat, the selection of the insipid Milliband, and the current desperate lurch to the left, in a bid to appeal to a constituency that went underground in the mid-80's, in the mistaken belief that they still exist in sufficient numbers, to win an election.

Newsflash. They don't.

I've no comment on the rest of it.
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"all the above" led to power and the opportunity to carry out soft left reforms. Browns defeat was down to brown. Nothing else. A few months earlier he could have won but he dithered and became more exposed to voters for what he was

clause 4 was a vote loser. Even amongst supporters.
 
That's true gigilo. And that's another deeper problem for labour. In fact labour is finished if corbyn isn't shifted. We all know that and I also believe that they are doing everything they can to finish the oarty in its current form

the hard left hate nothing more than the soft or moderate left. Excepts Jews of course
 
Nigel Farage is standing down as leader of UKIP

Baron Farage of Boston, the Cabinet Minister to negotiate Brexit ? :)
 
I hear that the leading Brexiters have been rowing back on their campaign promises quick enough to be considered for Olympic selection.
 
Great to see Johnson's team starting the process of trashing Gove's reputation.

Apparently, Gove is not only fond of a drink, but he also has a tendency towards 'loose lips' when he is on the potion; being variously described as "an untrustworthy gossip" and "unfit to be PM" by a senior Johnson aide.

This hopefully will terminate any chance he has of securing the Tory leadership (and thence the PM job), and will soon see him cast-back into whichever dark corner of Hades, the horrible cu*nt first emerged from.
 
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Arch, it somewhat sickens me to confirm that Gove was actually born in the fair city of Edinburgh, a mere handful of months before I was..........though he was quickly adopted/stolen from the laboratory, and moved to Aberdeen at 4-months old.

Gove's departure from Auld Reekie's environs, happened around November or December in 1967, clearing the way - and the air - for me to emerge, in January 1968, which is of some consolation.
 
Grasshopper said:
Arch, it somewhat sickens me to confirm that Gove was actually born in the fair city of Edinburgh, a mere handful of months before I was..........though he was quickly adopted/stolen from the laboratory, and moved to Aberdeen at 4-months old.

Gove's departure from Auld Reekie's environs, happened around November or December in 1967, clearing the way - and the air - for me to emerge, in January 1968, which is of some consolation.
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Now that I come to think of it, I've never seen Grasshopper and Michael Gove in the same place at the same time before.
 
Shamelessly pinched from 5Live but the recently resigned are:
David Cameron - posh
Roy Hodgson - sporty
Chris Evans - ginger
Boris Johnson - baby
Nigel Farage - scary

The Spice Boys
 
i only just missed running into that march for corbyn in town last week. Thank god for that. imagine the smell.... bet they had to fumigate trafalgar square

Broadest hint yet by Rachel Sylvester in the times (who is usually spot on) but the labour split is odds on certainty now and wheels are in motion. They should be able to declare themselves the official opposition

Corbin has refused to meet Tom Watson, his deputy ffs, for a week.
 
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clivex said:
i only just missed running into that march for corbyn in town last week. Thank god for that. imagine the smell.... bet they had to fumigate trafalgar square
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Saw it on da telly.
All of them crying tears of atonement over their "white guilt" -- a totally imagined mindset of course and one without foundation.
All of them condemning racism too but at the same time, by their silence, willingly sanctioning the anti-Israel hatespeak of their leader and his like-minded loyalist MP's.
 
clivex said:
i only just missed running into that march for corbyn in town last week.
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That old chestnut hey. You mean you were late turning up

EDIT - I'm reading the market wrong of course (below) the next PM market is the current vacuum (I've jumped ahead of myself), but I'll leave the post up rather than perform a ninja edit as the fundamental logic is still sound if you can find a market to support the bet (the prices I've quoted clearly don't apply though). It's the PM after the 'next one' (Theresa May, that we want)

Incidentally, for those who like speculative long-shots, Dan Jarvis and Trsitram Hunt at 949/1 in BF's Next Prime Minister market according to Oddschecker. No idea how much liquidity is there, probably buttons, but there is a plausible line that doesn't make either of them this price, which all revolves around when Theresa May triggers article 50

If she waits, until the spring of 2017 the Tories have a potential problem

We know the next GE is in May 2020, and we know that article 50 is 2 years minimum, with an expectation that 3 years will be needed. This drags the whole thing into the electoral cycle. That being so the opposition parties will almost certainly take their chance to stand on a 'rip it up and start again' platform, and effectively turn the 2020 election into a backdoor referendum2

Will the Tories win this? Well that's anyone's guess but there would be grounds for believing that they could well experiencing a backlash of buyers remorse by then, plus the early headwinds that we might be seeing today could have turned into a recession by then. It makes it near on impossible however for the Tories to occupy the same ground as the opposition parties. They're pretty well committed to the 'leave' agenda, so the gamble revolves around that looking nowhere near attractive in the lead up to 2020 as it did 2 weeks ago

So what of the opposition altenratives? It seems likely that UKIP will melt away into a vocal pressure group. Their votes will migrate back to whence they came. The Labour party will become the socialist workers party, likely to vote against the Tories, but still a massively reduced bloc.

The new party (lets call them the progrssive democrats for want of another name) will almost certainly turn to a Blairite after this dose of Corbyn and will probably form a popular front along with the Liberals and the SNP. The popular front could easily win the most seats given the national mood circa 2019/20 and it seems logical to assume that the leader of the progressive democrats will be their nomination for PM

Theresa May looks like a female John Major to be honest, and even though he won in 1992, it was narrow. If you can work out who will emerge as the leader of the new Progressive Democrats then you've probably got a decent bet to be the next PM at a massive price as I'm not sure the collapse and regeneration of the centre/left opposition has been factored into the current prices if the likes of Hunt and Jarvis are 949/1
 
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FWIW, I wouldn't be surprised if every mainstream party went in to the next GE, with manifesto pledges to re-run the EU Referendum, based on the veracity (or otherwise) of the deal being struck with Brussels.
 
I can easily see this panning out. If it hadn't been for the history of the SDP then the split would probably have occurred last week.

Im not much interested in the markets and its very difficult to predict three years hence but I totally believe there is now a really strong appetite for a centrist party which is pro european, pro business, engages with the middle ground and doesn't wish to eradicate jews

Tristram Hunt wrote a well received book on the cities of the british empire. Great idea but it was crap.
 
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I'd considered that (the Tories standing on a platform of a second referendum), but felt they would likely try and present themselves as the voice of the people and defenders of due democratic process first. After all it was their foolish PM that has visited this whole situation on us. Walking it back won't be easy, and certainly not something they can do very quickly (well not within a matter of a few months, and most certainly not weeks)

The timing of the article 50 trigger is critical. I can see that the new PM might want to delay this decision, not only because they want to see if there's any change in the direction of the wind, but quite apart from anything, they actually haven't got the expertise in the civil service to handle this. It might actually be attractive to jump in prematurely though, as politically speaking, this is going to generate less noise than holding out will do. It also denies the opposition parties the chance to drag the whole thing into the 2020 cycle. But Theresa May was a 'remainer' (didn't always give the impression of being a committed one) might she also be calculating that she wouldn't mind dragging it into 2020 in the hope that it hands her a 'get out of jail' card?

She might go one of two ways. If she delays, she can drag the whole thing into the electoral cycle and keep her options open. If she goes early though, she won't have necessarily committed herself 100% to Brexit, but she's made it much more difficult to select reverse gear. I doubt that from a tactical perspective she really wants to risk being isolated on a maifesto unless there's clear evidence that Brexit is working and is going benefit the UK

The other thing to consider is that she's going to face a lot of pressure from her own party to go early (they can see what the ramifications of a delay will be), and she's also going to have UKIP snapping at the heels of her colourful shoes
 
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icebreaker said:
Saw it on da telly.
All of them crying tears of atonement over their "white guilt" -- a totally imagined mindset of course and one without foundation.
All of them condemning racism too but at the same time, by their silence, willingly sanctioning the anti-Israel hatespeak of their leader and his like-minded loyalist MP's.
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This "silence" that you speak of - is that a silence from lack of reporting or an actual silence. Here's the transcript of yesterday's Home Affairs Select Committee interview of Mr Corbyn on the subject of anti-Semitism. You might want to read it before blabbing your ill-informed "hatespeak" any further.

http://data.parliament.uk/writtenev...ffairs-committee/antisemitism/oral/34783.html
 
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I remember reading somewhere that on his mps website there were something like 150 posts on Israel compared with 140 on his actual constituency Islington.
I wonder how many posts there were on Sudan ?


Of course he's obsessed as we saw with his comparisons last week and the pre planned hounding of Ruth Smeeth
 
clivex said:
I remember reading somewhere that on his mps website there were something like 150 posts on Israel compared with 140 on his actual constituency Islington.
I wonder how many posts there were on Sudan ?


Of course he's obsessed as we saw with his comparisons last week and the pre planned hounding of Ruth Smeeth
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so you haven't bothered reading it then. either that or you're just a thick racist Englander.
 
i saw the excerpts. plenty of time to get his excuses together.

i wonder if you would be making excuses for cameron sharing a platform with the KKK or "visiting" David Duke ??

Say what you like about the tories but such associations would have had him thrown out of the party let alone leading it
 
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Thats entirely different and you know it

Does it really need explaining that that was a issue on their doorstep whereas a politician scouring the world to find jew haters to engage with is a little bit different shall we say?


Tom Copley ‏@tomcopley 21h21 hours ago
Corbyn's performance at HASC anti-Semitism enquiry is shocking. Took 4 or 5 attempts to get him to agree the Hamas Charter is anti-Semitic

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