I think of Lincolnshire.
Do you lie back when you do it?
Not lately.
The campaign was also hampered by widespread perceptions about Corbyn’s own personality and style, as well as the way their campaign seemed to be flinging out new and unrealistic promises, a different one each day.
Corbyn is an old school socialist from a time when the labour unions virtually ran the UK. His policies brought back nervous twitches in anyone who remembers the ideological battles and industrial battles of the ‘80s. He represented the radical left wing of the Labour party that kept the party out power until Blair and Brown came up with the centrist New Labour. Labour has now swung back to the centre ground under Starmer and so are looking increasingly like a party of government. Just as the Conservatives are compromised by their radical right idealogs and have pretty much run out of road as far as the electorate are concerned.
UK elections tend to be won by whoever dominates the centre ground. It is not often radical governments are elected. But nonetheless there are factions that dream that their time will come again. The Conservatives dream of the Thatcher years. Truss tried, and spectacularly failed, to suddenly implement a radical right wing economic policy.
Sunak will try to move to the centre, but he has a huge amount of economic fire fighting to do and plenty of destructive loony tunes to manage.
Corbyn did have one success: he managed to increase Labour party membership very substantially. It is one of the biggest political parties in Europe. This bucked the long term trend of a steady decline in political party membership. To think that once Labour and Consevatives had a memberships in the millions and is now a small fraction of that. It is an astonishing collapse public engagement that widens the gulf between the party membership and the wider electorate. Policies that please the party membership are quite different from policies that appeal to the wider public. We have seen a lot of party pleasers with these recent changes in leadership. They become quite out of touch with the issues that the public is most concerned about. Issues like thr EU and immigration were never very high on the publics radar. These were, and still remain, Conservative party obsessions.
The public are most interested in ‘home and hearth’ issues like health and education. Now their fuel bills and mortgage payments are top of the agenda. Sunak is going to be the bringer of some very bad news in this respect. The public will want to know where all the borrowed money went and the Conservatives have an awful lot of explaining to do.
Where indeed…
Do you think most Labour rank and file members would like a do-over on the Brexit vote?
Probably not. The country as a whole can’t afford to go through all that again, and Labour can’t risk reviving old internal battles and doing to themselves what the Tories have done. Plus, more importantly, there’s no guarantee the 27 will want us back at all, let alone with all the opt-outs we had before.
So- Tax the rich & a windfall tax on oil, free broadband, 5% raise for civil servants (they had been capped at 1%) , free back to work training, and low income housing. All sound good to me.
These are not “radical”. IMHO.
I’m not sure what the point would be. It’s doubtful the EU would welcome the UK back in at this point. Maybe it’ll be different in a generation, but for the foreseeable future the closest to reversing Brexit the UK could do would be joining the European Free Trade Association and even that isn’t going to be easy. Of course Northern Ireland can get back in the EU just by reuniting with the Republic.
The EU have said they would welcome the UK back. What they won’t do is welcome the UK back without an admission process and admission wouldn’t be on the same terms the UK previously had.
Brexit has happened, unfortunately, and can’t be rewound. What could happen is a move to a softer post-Brexit relationship with the EU and renewed or ongoing participation in things like ERASMUS that have a clear benefit for both parties, and which Johnson rejected pretty much out of petty spite. Also, at some point the whole Northern Ireland thing will need dealing with.
Labour have always had their own Euro-Sceptic faction. The hard Left are very socialist and regard the European single market as a club for capitalists. The Corbin-led Labour party did not actively campaign to remain in the EU during the Brexit vote.
I don’t think there will be very much discussion until the full extent of the economic effects of Brexit becomes clear. Most voters have little idea of international trade or how the economy works. They do notice the cost of living going up and, of course, that can be blamed on Covid and Putins war. These issues have overtaken the Brexit discussion.
Questions might be asked if the coming recession is longer and deeper than in the EU countries and some correlation with the reduction in international trade becomes apparent. But that could take a few years.
And meanwhile the UK hard and semi-hard Right considers the EU to be a thoroughgoing implementer of all things socialist.
Hey, finally something they can all agree on: the EU is baaaaad! 
Yup! The political culture of the UK has always regarded continental Europe as a place where bad things come from. Every now and then some power dominates Europe and threatens England. The Spanish, French, Dutch, Germans or Russians. Napoleon, Kaiser Bill, Hitler, Stalin and the latest megalomaniac despot is Putin.
So not exactly an unreasonable conclusion. De Gaulle knew this very well and opposed UK joining the Common Market for a long time. He was quite perceptive in that respect.
Abroad is beastly, and all foreigners are fiends.
Who said that?
Nancy Mitford, kind of. Well, what she said was said with far less sensitivity:
Frogs…are slightly better than Huns or Wops, but abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends. — The Pursuit of Love* (1945)
Thank you! I just got off my metaphorical lazy butt and looked it up as well.
Did Nancy Mitford say it, or did she have a character in her book say it?
Well, to be clear, I guess, I don’t know. Probably a character, being that she apparently liked France (and was the one Mitford who didn’t keep on loving fascism past the early 1930s.)