And therein lies the problem… It only took a minority of labour voters in key seats to vote Tory for the shit to hit the fan… Where I differ from other views is that i dont believe that these folks voted that way because of some principled stance against Labours ‘policy’ to hold second ref… seeing it as ‘anti-democratic’…they would have done so anyway as they had voted Brexit… convinced that milk and honey was around the corner now we no longer had johnny foreigner telling us how we can run our business… this big shift to the right, which is far from just being as an ‘affluent politic’, came with Brexit. We can pretend its about Corbyn, or a second ref position all we like, but iMHO, the parts of the country lurched right emboldened by Brexit…
… but had as you say labour done the opposite and insisted on no second ref, how many of the the 12 million Remain voters who voted Labour would they have retained? If you say many, then that would suggest the Labour remain vote was a darn site more loyal and principled than the Northern ‘labour’ voters… convinced the EU had shafted them as opposed to the 10 years of Tory austerity… you cant have it both ways…
The dullest bit of all is how the usual media suspects will now dig out tweets from five years ago where someone has criticised Israel for their Eurovison entry, or they’ll expose how that bastard Starmer didn’t leave a tip once after a meal he didn’t enjoy.
Meanwhile Boris will be making up stuff and peering over a stack of body bags that a decade of austerity has allowed and we’ll be told what a great job he’s doing.
Forget all the fucking clapping and community shit, it’ll be business as usual at Cummings House, and the sunbathing simpletons will lap it up as they do Michael McIntyre, The Daily Mail and Mrs fucking Brown.
Things need to change.
But the ‘people’ who voted for something, were predominantly not labour voters. Those that were, were also many who swing vote, or who believed the EU had a bigger impact on their shite situation was than 10 years of Tory austerity…
They should have backed what their voters wanted from the outset… a pragmatic recognition of compromise… EU has plenty of issues/problems, but alternatives potentially much worse. Better in and helping address challenges, than on outside just pissing on it all the time… would have collected large swathe of Lib Den voters as well…
But just like the tories, too many factions and splits within; the old school left through to modernists… its no longer one party… more factions than the ‘Peoples Front of Judea’… the Tories have just railroaded any non-believers in their new Cumming’s philosophy out of the way…
There were two ballots which were single-issue as far as the UK electorate were concerned; the referendum itself, (absolutely definitely a single issue,) and the EU elections following it (almost certainly a single issue to UK voters.) Both ballots showed a near-identical result.
However you want to spin it with ideas about people voting for parties committed to a second referendum, the referendum being technically non-binding, or all the other wriggling around the result, the reality is that 52% of voters wanted us to leave the EU. Those views were subsequently polarised and hardened, and the only comments I heard from people changing their minds were from those who were against leaving but had accepted the referendum result, and after the vote felt the result should be respected. The most pro-remain party of all had a former leader on record as insisting that the result must be acted on, whatever it was.
So, more than half (only just, but more than half) of us wanted to leave. Corbyn’s approach, while it might have been sensible and pragmatic on the face of it, still rejected the basic expectation of that majority. Therefore he had no real chance of winning power with that policy, and I’m personally convinced that his advisers were well aware of that.
Backwards, it would seem. Back to the 2017 general election, which has now been confirmed as what I described it at the time. A giant stitch up and an attempt to lose the election, finally perfected in 2019.
There were rumours that Iain McNicol, then general secretary, had deliberately defunded campaigns in marginal seats. Now you can read the whole sorry spectacle on Whats App.
It’s utterly depressing. We kind of suspected it at the time. The result was managed in spite of all that, and it is largely down to Momentum, a separate party within a party, that marginals were attended at all.
I would expect that exactly the same plan was executed in 2019.
People complained about not having an effective opposition. Perhaps the biggest reason is factional civil war, and the fact that Corbyn either didn’t know he was in one or didn’t have the guts to win it.
We’ve now got Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy basically propping every decision the government makes up.
Appalling, but hardly surprising. I’ve been banging on about certain factions in Labour deliberately sabotaging Corbyn, it’s been so fucking obvious, but it’s nice to see it actually in print.
