Labour take both by-elections

[BertaBobAndMeToo]

Wow! Seismic results, even with turnout down, and this should school conservative HQ to the core.

anyone up and want to talk about it?

And all the European ones cleared off because of that little self inflicted injury called Brexit. That’s why there’s a shortage.And we failed to pay our own doctors a proper wage.

But we needed sovereignty and blue passports didn’t we?

I'm not going to suggest that Brexit has been anything like an economic success but I worry that people think reintegration into the EU will resolve the problems.

It won't. I think Brexit has obscured the other thing: the GFC. For the UK that's the modern equivalent of the 70s oil shocks. The UK got hit particularly hard in the 1970s with inflation because, at the time, it was the world's most industrialised economy. Skip forward to now: what does Britain export? Financial services.

Bailing out the banks was just a rerun of bailing out Fairfields, UCS, Swan Hunter, Rolls-Royce, British Leyland, British Steel etc. And while the banks have recovered in a way that those industries never did it did harm to the reputation of the industry. I wonder how much business in emerging markets like the far east has been lost. And this time there's no oil revenue to ease the transition for the UK.