Labour’s real problem is that it’s estimated that 406 constituencies voted Leave and only 242 voted Remain
That means something like only 162 or 163 constituencies in England and Wales voted Remain
If Labour had taken an explicit Remain position, they would be in much deeper trouble
Corbyn is fair game for criticism but Brexit has created a structural problem in England and parts of Wales that is well beyond his or anybody else’s control - and Labour had already lost Scotland under Ed Miliband
I’d fully expect Fintan O Foole to be writing an article with different views after witnessing last nights Debate.
My own calculations on a seat by seat basis are Tory 359 Labour 199 Lib Dem 22 SNP 45 Plaid Cymru 5 Green 1 Independent 1 DUP 9 Sinn Fein 6 SDLP 2 UUP 1
We may have our political differences but I think we can all get behind a good count night/day
Sssssshhhh
This Lee Anderson chap in Ashfield is some idiot
Called for forced labour camps, was caught staging a doorstep chat with a friend he claimed was a random person who then went on a racist ramt on camera, and now anti-Semitism
This is great, and like all the best comedy is deadly serious at its heart
As the body politic convulses, as the abyss avoids our gaze, we near the end of another election at the behest of a political class that has paid as much attention to David Cameron’s fixed terms as he did to people with emphysema slowly dying over a wood lathe. Christmas seems a strange time for a Tory government to call an election; possibly they guessed that it would be hard for Labour to sell hope in winter; possibly they judged that goodwill to all men would be at its lowest after people had endured a December of accidentally answering the door to a canvasser because they thought it was an Amazon package. Then again, Conservatives would say that the story of Christmas chimes with their values, as it involves a pregnant refugee being treated quite badly.
Brexit supporters are surely among the most likely to get out and vote, especially now Jeremy Kyle isn’t on in the daytime any more. It was impossible to predict that the whole country would be thrown into crisis by middle-aged men outraged about Europe making decisions for them (these are people whose wives buy their socks), but I can understand their subsequent disillusionment. If 434 MPs vote for a general election, we instantly get one; if 0.14% of the populace vote for Boris Johnson, we instantly get him; but if 52% of the electorate vote for Brexit, they get three years of what feels like trying to shit out a pool table. Essentially, Brexit has proved impossible to deliver: turns out it’s tricky for English voters to take back control of their borders when one of them is in someone else’s country. Many people wish David Cameron had never called the referendum in the first place. It says a lot about how badly the last couple of years have gone, that there’s a guy who destroyed Libya, presided over needless austerity and fucked a pig, and we wish that he’d just used his own judgment.
Let’s begin with the Tories. The cabinet is Dickensian in the purest sense: the sort of people who would need more than two ghosts to change their behaviour. After an uncertain start, Jacob Rees-Mogg has had a pretty good campaign, onboard an Arctic clipper ship, nailed into a coffin of earth from his constituency. It’s interesting that someone who thinks ordinary people lack common sense is so heavily invested in upholding the result of a referendum, but like so many lesser ironies in this election, we simply don’t have the time. When people say “The mask has slipped!” after various cabinet gaffes, there must be a moment when the minister wonders whether they have accidentally come out wearing one of the actual masks they wear to the various Eyes Wide Shut-style parties that dot their social calendar at this time of year; their fingers moving reflexively towards their face to see if they’ve worn the head of a golden ibis to talk to Phillip Schofield.
The Conservatives seem to have focused on the phrase “Get Brexit Done”, which has all the conviction of your dad hitting the arms of his chair and saying, “Right…” We also seem to be hearing a lot about “Unleashing Britain’s potential”, despite most of our potential being for food riots, and perhaps some kind of race war. The Conservative manifesto contains elements of both Thatcherism and Reaganism, in that it seems to have been written by someone with dementia. There was probably a discussion about whether to release a manifesto at all or simply airdrop scratchcards over key marginals.
Boris Johnson’s bumbling posho shtick almost resembles buffering, a kind of 3G Wodehouse
Boris Johnson, who looks like something you’d keep your pyjamas in, and who no reasonable person would choose to lead them into a chorus, has a strangely hunched demeanour; perhaps from all the time he spends crammed inside married women’s wardrobes, like a randy jack-in-the-box. This confused sex yeti has been booed by nurses: people who can remove a dressing, examine a festering wound, and still look up at you with a smile. Has any party ever elected a new leader so tired and dated? With a delivery best approximated as a living checklist of stroke warnings, his bumbling posho shtick almost resembles buffering, a kind of 3G Wodehouse. He doesn’t even seem to enjoy it; throughout the campaign he’s sported a face that looks as if it’s been kneaded by a baker going through a particularly bitter divorce, and the irony that comes into his eyes every time he crowbars in a catchphrase means that he breaks the fourth wall more than Deadpool. We thought the office of prime minister was what he lived for, his consuming ambition. It’s all been a bit like hearing Tony The Tiger talk about his diabetes.
Johnson’s deep investment in democracy is highlighted by the fact that his government has been dominated by an unelected special adviser. Usually people with levels of mental activity as low as Johnson’s aren’t surrounded by advisers, but their weeping parents and a member of their favourite boy band. Dominic Cummings looks like he works in television (which I think might be the worst thing you can say about anyone), has the air of a startled testicle, and the name of a character in a porn parody of The Talented Mr Ripley (“The Talentless Fister Ripped Me”). Everyone who’s bored with Johnson pretending to be an idiot should look at Cummings and realise these people are far more dangerous when they pretend to be clever.
It’s perfectly obvious why Johnson has been able to take power: he has an instinctive grasp on Brexit as rightwing eschatology, and he’s used to getting his own way, be it in the halls of Westminster or elbowing siblings off of nanny’s nipples. It’s only when you look at the hideous Tarot formed by his cabinet that you get a true picture of the depravity into which we are sinking. Take Michael Gove, a revanchist endorsement of the science of physiognomy. In any other era Gove would be seen as a uniquely unctuous, unlikable and profoundly talentless figure. Now he’s hardly even remarkable. Gove – looking like someone took all the flesh out of a serial killer’s drains and forced it into some brogues; like Davros fell out of his Dalek; like a rushed cartoon of a horny snail – is somehow not the worst person in cabinet, or even his own marriage. Against pushback from Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, Dominic Raab is attempting to get up to 60 British children back from camps in northern Syria before they freeze to death over the winter. That Raab, the flesh suit of a sentient virus with a forehead vein like a B&B kettle-cord, is somehow the moral heart of this enterprise tells you all you need to know. In all likelihood, you’ll be praying that they prorogue the next parliament.
Someone else who will still be here after the Rapture is the Brexit party’s Nigel Farage. I thought one of the advantages of the Brexit vote was that he might disappear; having him back in public life is a bit like watching a suicide bomber doing a comeback tour. Of course, it would have been nice to see him actually running in the election, particularly from a pack of wild dogs. As for the Lib Dems – well, I thought we’d really miss Tim Farron, bumping around the country on a deserted coach and performing Blue Peter tasks in front of people terrified that he might start talking about gay sex. Jo Swinson has grown on me, and seems to exist as a satisfying, subtle and damning satire of humanity. Swinson’s election started out relatively positively, possibly because people hadn’t heard her speak yet. It quickly became clear that she had the gravitas of a re-education camp supply teacher, and was launching a kind of charm retreat that seemed to involve loans for renting flats and permanent austerity. Some might see misogyny in this reaction to her, but I’m fairly sure I just hate her for being from Milngavie.
The Corbyn thing is a sort of Ealing comedy about a bloke who gets called off his allotment to try to form a government
Labour’s idea to run an election campaign on policy in the middle of all this is a little bit like reciting your poetry at an orgy. Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps weighing up whether he could have more influence by simply dying and haunting his successor, has benefitted from becoming slightly calmer over the course of the campaign. Aggression isn’t a good look for him, shifting Corbyn from Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh towards the territory where you’d expect his face to be captioned with “police suspect the real figure may be much higher”. Labour’s campaign initially struggled to find the right note of warmth or optimism. Normally in a general election, there’s so little mention of Scotland it’s like watching coverage of a major football tournament, but Labour seemed pointlessly determined to get across the message that they would deny a second independence referendum. The Corbyn project started out as a piece of moralising – a token candidate standing in a Labour leadership election to remind the party of its principles – and his Labour is at its weakest when these roots show: it can come across as patronising and entitled. I think Labour presents itself better during elections because it is forced to be more practical. The whole Corbyn thing, at its best, is a sort of Ealing comedy about some old bloke who gets called off his allotment to try to form a government, but it needs to promise a third act where something actually happens. Labour’s campaign also demonstrates the limits of social media compared with establishment media power. If polls at the time of writing are to be believed, owning several TV stations and newspapers still seems to be more important than the democratisation of the ability to troll celebrity Jews.
Before the campaign, there seemed to be a belief among Labour party members that it fared better in elections because of rules about electoral media balance, perhaps because they misconstrued the establishment complacency at the last election. Of course, Labour has been monstered in the media throughout the campaign, and largely been judged by different standards than the Conservatives. Even the gold standard of scrutiny that Johnson dodged was just being interviewed by his former boss at the Spectator.
Media plurality is an issue we need to address in this country: the alternative is living in a timeline where, because Corbyn has wonky glasses, in a couple of years you’ll be living in a tent city outside an Amazon warehouse trying to GoFund a tonsillectomy. The Tories calling Corbyn a communist and a threat to national security after handing nuclear power plants to the Chinese is a bit like getting a bollocking off Charles Manson for putting down slug pellets. Perhaps in a few years our troops will reflect on what a harmless enemy Corbyn actually was, as they stare up at an AI minotaur, pinning them to the floor with a stainless steel hoof and holding their extracted vascular system aloft like a Ford Focus wiring-loom.
You won’t be surprised to learn that I won’t be voting Tory on Thursday, for much the same reasons that I won’t be spending the day kicking children and pensioners into traffic. It’s depressing to think how many polling stations are in schools, and how many people will vote Conservative after walking past a motivational rainbow. As we saw in Stanley Johnson’s Pinocchio gaffe, there is a problem with our elites programming their traumatised children with the idea that they are born to rule. It becomes almost impossible, as a class, to hide your contempt. It’s difficult to keep lying convincingly about things you’ve convinced yourself your audience are too stupid to notice. This current iteration of Conservatism, a kind of mutant nationalism that insists all our infrastructure has to be owned by other countries, has nowhere to go but into an asset-stripped, deregulated wasteland. I don’t know how anyone votes for that, or what happens after they do. British people don’t get on well enough to form militia.
I don’t want to end on a note of pessimism. Instead, I’d like to share with you my two favourite quotes. The first, is a really famous one. Kurt Vonnegut asked his adult son what he thought the meaning of life was, and his son replied: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” The second is what David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, said about the ending of the final episode:
“Well, what Tony should have been thinking, I guess, and what we all should be thinking – although we can’t live that way – is that life is really short. And there are good times in it and there are bad times in it. And that we don’t know why we’re here, but we do know that 20 miles up it’s freezing cold, it’s a freezing cold universe, but here we have this thing called love, which is our only defence, really, against all that cold, and that it’s a very brief interval and that, when it’s over, I think you’re probably always blindsided by it.”
Twenty miles up, it’s a freezing cold universe, we only have the human connections we make here, nothing is permanent, and love is our only defence. I suggest we all vote accordingly, and try to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.
Ah the 2000s were pretty poor really. Too many landslides.
THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY HAS NO CHANCE OF WINNING A MAJORITY IN THE UK GENERAL ELECTION NEXT WEEK. A LARGE PART OF THIS FAILURE IS JEREMY CORBYN’S
It is a mark of the strangeness of current British politics that an epoch-making election is being contested by two would-be losers. Boris Johnson is prime minister because he led a Leave campaign in the 2016 referendum that, as he assured David Cameron at the time, he expected to be “crushed”.
And Jeremy Corbyn had no real intention of becoming leader of the Labour Party for any great length of time. Historians of the future may struggle to understand how things of such consequence have been determined more by accident than by design.
Talk to anyone on the ground in crucial election areas, including those who want Labour to win, and they will tell you traditional Labour voters are bitterly dismissive of Corbyn
Labour ought to be headed for a great victory on December 12th, one that could change Britain as radically as Clement Atlee’s triumph over Winston Churchill did in 1945. Labour should be walking it. But the party has no chance at all of winning a majority and it could well suffer catastrophic losses in its own traditional heartlands. A big reason for this failure can be named in advance: Jeremy Corbyn.
The ambient noise in most parts of the UK is about the state of the health service and social care, cuts to police numbers and the melting away of local facilities, from buses to libraries to playing fields.
The Conservatives have been in power for almost a decade and their fingerprints are all over the austerity policies that have brought the country to this pass. They have also shredded their own brand, abandoning any claims to pragmatism, competence or indeed conservatism. They are led by a man who has very low levels of public trust and who has to dodge TV debates and interviews because he is so liable to self-destruct in a welter of lies and bluster.
Corbyn is relentlessly vilified by the Tory press and there is no doubt this is a huge factor in the election. But talk to anyone on the ground in those crucial areas of the midlands and the north, including those who want Labour to win, and they will tell you that traditional Labour voters are, as perhaps the best journalistic diviner of the popular mood in Britain, John Harris, puts it, “bitterly dismissive of Jeremy Corbyn”.
Polling bears this out. Corbyn is regarded favourably in YouGov’s large-scale surveys by 21 per cent of voters and unfavourably by 61 per cent. The authoritative British Election Study last March showed that the relatively benign view of him in the 2017 election campaign had by then evaporated. Asked to rate him out of 10, voters gave him 2.6 for competence, 2.8 for likability and (crushingly for a man who can claim to have been true to his principles for a very long time), just 3 for integrity.
These dire figures are not all down to anti-Corbyn propaganda; even voters who say they were impressed by him in the 2017 campaign now rate him at dreadfully low levels. More than half (54 per cent) of those who voted Labour in 2017 wanted Corbyn to be replaced as party leader before this election.
It is the misfortune of the British to be faced with a choice between a man who has far too much ambition and, in Corbyn, a man who has far too little
Corbyn is so widely disliked that he has created an electoral paradox that probably deserves to be named after him. The Corbyn Effect is that bad opinion polls for his party are good news because people are more likely to vote for their local Labour MP if they are convinced that there is no chance of Corbyn becoming prime minister. It is not a distinction any party leader can be proud of.
But it does require explanation. Corbyn is, by all accounts, a nice man with a largely avuncular presence. He can become peevish under pressure but he is quite fluent in debates and generally retains his dignity and his innate politeness. He is not corrupt or venal. He clearly cares about social justice and equality. He does not come across as cynical or crazed by ambition. He is not a sociopath.
He is up against an opponent in Johnson from whom just 13 per cent of voters say they would buy a used car. So why are so many traditional Labour voters so “bitterly dismissive” of Corbyn?
One reason has to do with ambition. It is the misfortune of the British to be faced with a choice between a man who has far too much of it and a man who has far too little. Johnson developed as a child the demented desire to be “world king” – he hungers for power above all else and is willing to do and say anything to get it.
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But Corbyn is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Nothing in his political career before he became party leader suggested the slightest appetite for power. This may be personally admirable, but it is politically disabling.
Politics is about power. Voters may not trust those who are too obviously power-hungry, but a politician who is not drawn to power is like a plumber who doesn’t like pipes or a carpenter allergic to wood.
Corbyn has been a politician since 1974 and a member of parliament since 1983. In his 32 years at Westminster before he became leader of the Opposition, he made no effort to be on the Labour front bench or, when the party was in government, to hold office.
He was happy to be a campaigner, taking up causes, many of them admirable (he was an early champion of LGBT rights, for example, and of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six), many not (he voted against the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, a key step in the peace process, because Sinn Féin opposed it). He was comfortable with those who already shared his view of the world – his role was to galvanise and reinforce, not to persuade.
But he had no legislative achievements and avoided the difficult choices that come with power. And avoided, too, the kind of broad alliance-building that those who want power have to engage in.
If Corbyn had more ambition, he would have forced himself outside his comfort zones of like-minded left wingers. The way he has been as leader, surrounded by a bubble of hard-liners who tell him what he wants to hear, is the way he was as a comfortably marginal backbencher. Their disastrous inability even to tolerate his own (elected) deputy leader Tom Watson is a result of Corbyn’s profound uneasiness with challenges from within.
The great current of insurgency has been channelled to a politician who has no great interest in power and no experience of using it
In 2015, when he agreed to stand as a token left-wing candidate for the Labour leadership, his pristine lack of ambition was part of the appeal: as he put it, “I am much too old for personal ambition”.
It is indeed crucial to understand that even the comrades in the hard left Campaign Group who put him forward as a candidate to succeed Ed Miliband had absolutely no notion of Corbyn as a potential prime minister. Subsequent Corbyn boosters like the Guardian columnist Owen Jones did not want him to stand at the time and argued that a “soft left” candidate should be supported instead. (Keir Starmer and Angela Eagle were seen as the best options.)
Most of those on the hard left who did want to run a candidate favoured John McDonnell, a far more obviously adept politician than Corbyn. But McDonnell himself was utterly demoralised. “This”, he wrote in Labour Briefing, “is the darkest hour that socialists in Britain have faced since the fall of the Atlee government in 1951.”
Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty
PHOTOGRAPH: OLI SCARFF/AFP/GETTY
When Corbyn’s name began to be discussed, it was as a short-term, interim figure who could hold the arena open for debate while a more credible leader emerged. As Jon Lansman, who went on to found the pro-Corbyn Momentum movement, put it: “Could we find someone who would be a caretaker leader, who could do it in order to have a debate about the future direction of the party and then have another leadership election two years later? It was in that context that we began to think about people like Jeremy.”
There is no evidence that Corbyn, in putting himself forward, thought of himself as doing anything other than fulfilling a duty to provoke debate. As Alex Nunns puts it in his definitive account of the 2015 Labour leadership campaign, Candidate: “In all probability Corbyn was volunteering for a couple of weeks of lobbying and media appearances, a chance to raise the issue of austerity and, when he failed to make the ballot, to demonstrate that the leadership election rules were rigged against the left.”
Corbyn’s inability even to deal credibly with an issue as egregious as anti-Semitism in his party generates a deep public cynicism
This is where accident took over. Right up to the deadline for nominations, Corbyn did not have the 35 nominations from Labour MPs necessary to be a candidate for the leadership. Oddly, the Corbyn Effect started here – he got the crucial extra nominations from Labour veterans such as Frank Field and Margaret Beckett, purely on the basis that he had no chance of winning and that a broad debate would be healthy.
What no one – including Corbyn himself – had thought through was that Labour’s voting system had been thrown wide open to new members of the party and that there was an incoming tide of anger at the centrist politics that had produced austerity, insecurity and inequality and a new appetite for socialist and environmental radicalism.
Corbyn, instead of being at best a two-year caretaker figure, became the lightning rod for a genuinely transformational energy. His accession to the party leadership has allowed Labour to put forward serious alternatives to the feral capitalism that has unleashed brutal environmental destruction and levels of social inequality that are incompatible with democracy.
But there is something tragic in this – the great current of insurgency has been channelled to a politician who has no great interest in power, no experience of using it and no ability to convince voters that he knows what to do with it.
The brutal truth is that no one (including those closest to him ideologically) would have chosen the unambitious Corbyn as the person to implement the most ambitious governmental programme in the UK since 1945.
There is a vast gap between the scale of the political task Labour has set itself – a profound rebalancing of the economy and society – and the evidence of Corbyn’s capacities. His inability even to deal credibly with an issue as egregious as anti-Semitism in his own party generates a deep public cynicism about his ability to implement such sweeping change. The mismatch is viciously corrosive.
Corbyn is a victim of his own radicalism – he is cruelly dwarfed by the sheer size of the task Labour has set for itself. Labour is asking voters to renew their battered belief in the potency of government but its leader has never shown much personal faith in the possibilities of public office. Corbyn is the Wizard of Oz inside the great edifice of Corbynism.
Being neutral on Brexit means being neutral on the ways it will set back every progressive environmental, social and economic cause that Corbyn believes in
Nowhere is this inadequacy exposed more brutally than with Brexit. The issue is not so much whether he has been right or wrong on the defining question of his years as leader. It is that he has been a study in powerlessness. He was conspicuous only by his absence in the 2016 referendum.
And his promise to remain “neutral” if there is a second referendum, as if he were the queen staying above the fray, does not come across as regal. It comes across as an extraordinary inability to use power to shape his country’s destiny. It means, too, that he is unable to take the fight to Johnson, to expose for what it is the most pernicious reactionary project in contemporary British history.
Being neutral on Brexit means being neutral on the ways it will set back every progressive environmental, social and economic cause that Corbyn believes in. At the heart of his public persona is a contradiction that diminishes him.
If he cannot say what he believes on the question that is dividing voters, voters cannot believe Corbyn on all the other questions he cares about.
The framing of the word “ambition” that O’Toole goes for there is quite interesting - he frames it as a sort of messianic God complex where somebody believes they are born to rule. Johnson certainly has that. Blair had it.
And Corbyn certainly never had that. But he does have ambition where it really counts, or should count - in his policies, given that Labour’s two manifestos have been the most ambitious seen in British politics for generations.
What does personal ambition and a messianic God complex amount to without policy ambition? We’ve had enough politicians with messianic God complexes about themselves and they’re almost universally a disaster.
The structural problems Labour faces haven’t been brought about by Corbyn - Scotland was one and it happened under Miliband - why did it come about? Because a referendum unleashed the forces of nationalism. Luckily for Scotland, the forces of nationalism there are curated by a moderate social democratic party and they are forces of anti-imperialist nationalism.
The Brexit referendum has unleashed much more toxic, imperialist nationalist forces, and any Labour leader would have massive problems battling against them. What’s happening in England now is an Americanisation of politics, and that Americanisation of politics itself has similarities to what happened in 1930s Europe.
That said, plenty of these midlands and northern constituencies have voted Tory plenty of times before. Some of them are quite conservative in nature and a lot of them have a large rural or smaller towns vote.
There’s a really weird “conventional wisdom” out there that says that another Labour leader would be cleaning up in these midlands and northern marginals. I’m still waiting for somebody to tell me who that leader is.
So this is the sort of stuff The Sun is now publishing about Labour, sourced from far right anti-Semitic websites
Anybody who can’t decipher the echoes of actual Nazi propaganda here does not know their history, it’s reminiscent of the Nazi conspiracy theories that Jews ran the world and had tentacles spreading everywhere
This is sort of stuff is genuinely chilling
https://twitter.com/trillingual/status/1203291719707635713
https://twitter.com/trillingual/status/1203293349320548352
The following diagram is literally sitting there on the Sun’s website and Twitter page now
Corbyn, like Johnson, has alienated the centrists in his party. Unlike Johnson, he gives the impression that he actually means it. The hard right will vote for Johnson, as will the elderly bigots. The center may nudge his way also, as they figure that he may not actually mean it.
Most “centrists” in Labour behaved abominably towards Corbyn right from the start, from before the start in fact. They have never, ever been interested in a successful Labour party under him. A bigger demonstration of toys out of the pram you’ll not see. Most of them never had actual Labour values in the first place - that has been proved beyond doubt with a large number of them - and were only there in the first place because the party was winning or looked like it was about to win under Blair. They never wanted to win under Corbyn. Their number one aim was to destroy his leadership, and if that meant Tory victory, so be it.
You could flip that on its head and you’d be about right I reckon.
In any case, it’s easy to shout from the sidelines when people here, as in a lengthy group discussion this morning, all traditional labour voters, distrust him, his policies and especially how he is going to fund them. You can’t just keep heaping more and more debt on the next generation. Manchester City Council, left leaning (solid Labour) but pro-business, is exactly where the majority of people I encounter naturally reside.
My great pal Jeff mcginty, Stretford born and bred, has always voted for Labour, but is really struggling to vote for corbyn, as he sees more tax, even for him who works in kellogs. He is fundamentally the most decent human being you’d ever meet. Honest, generous and kind. If corbyn is losing his vote, and it is corbyn losing it, something is deeply wrong.
I suspect your friend has a similar mindset to that chap who was on Question Time recently, the guy who earns over £80,000 and claimed he wasn’t in the top 50% of earners.
If he’s working in Kelloggs, he’s highly likely to not be earning more than 80k, and so he won’t pay any more income tax.
Tory policy is inherently anti-business because it is based on the destruction of middle class and the working class. Boris Johnson literally said “fuck business”.
The IFS concedes that Labour’s manifesto "is a vision of a state not so dissimilar to those seen in many other successful western European economies. Public spending would still be lower than Germany, that’s failed socialist state Germany.
Labour’s manifesto has redistribution at its heart, and redistribution is good for business. That’s something the media never tells anybody.
Public spending in Britain is through the floor, the Tories only promise more austerity, more poverty, - 500k children thrown into poverty in the last five years and a further million projected by 2023, more disaster and Brexit is going to be a slow car crash, it will never end.
Easy to pontificate when you won’t be paying any of it.
Well presuming your friend Jeff doesn’t earn any more than 80k, he won’t be either
So if anybody is pontificating (I do love how you include that word as an attempt to delegitimise argument because you haven’t got anything else), Jeff is
Sounds like Jeff is talking shite
There seems to be a savage amount of anti semites in the UK. Maybe corbyn is missing a trick here trying to fight it. If he came out and took an openly anti Semitic position he’d romp home
There are a savage amount of racists in general in England, hardly surprising when large parts of the Tory media are openly racist
That’s why Brexit won and why the Tories will win too
Racism in a climate of economic turmoil and fearmongering is always a vote getter
The climate is very much created by the media though, it’s in their interest to run with it, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
It’ll eventually happen here too, you can already see it, and the media won’t call it out, they’ll enable it
