And Suella has been sacked

[WellWellSaidTheRockingChair]

not before time - wonder who will get the poison chalice.

if William Hague is still in the commons, but o don’t think he is, Rishi would be wise to draw in his experience and counsel.

I may have said a few things political on MN that haven't gone down well with either remain or leave but have held out fairly well.

The other suggestion about Cameron is he's pro-China which is highly controversial. (And not in line with US political agendas).

I note at this point that since Cameron isn't an MP he can't be held to account as Foreign Secretary by the House of Commons because he can't address the Commons. This is 'somewhat problematic'.

Why would Sunak want a senior member of cabinet on foreign policy who can't be questioned by the house?

I don’t know the answer to last question

On China I’ll wait and see as things have moved on since DC was last in, he may shift as situation has, plus didn’t Biden connect recently with Xi

My next scheduled date to be concerned is Trump and NATO

That is why I said the following election

which is what 6 years away I believe the Tories will have a change of leadership straight after the election but they will quite happily get rid of a leader if they fear losing the next election and there are a few just sitting back as now isn’t the right time and probably won’t be for a few years

a resigning MP in a comfortable seat to make way for a possible future leader or someone in a high profile

I think if Labour are making headway and I suspect they will the Tories will move more to the centre and away from populist politics

@EasternStandard It doesn’t really matter imo that Leave had a good and effective campaign, if it had been a very unpopular idea it wouldn’t have won
what idea though? The (excellent) post from @RedToothBrush you responded too pointed out that people were voting for a whole load of disparate ideas, many of which were not connected to EU membership at all.

Completely agree, and apologies again if I misinterpreted and attributed views to you which you don’t hold.

Well people always bring their own reasons to any vote. That’s not new.

For Brexit immigration was top reason in studies

Like I said. Not really connected to the EU (or not in the way Leave suggested). We need immigration. It’s just coming from different places now. Plus there’s the increasing influence of asylum seeking immigrants - numbers if those will increase with current world conditions. Leaving the EU wasn’t a ‘solution’ to immigration - not least because we need it so what can be done anyway?
Leaving the EU wasn’t a good idea, and wasn’t what was voted on in reality

It’ll likely change, and not just here.

Other immigration models do work btw, without FOM

They do. But by design the Leave campaign tried to fudge it and use this as a strategy precisely because, whilst immigration was a key reason, it also couldn't win the vote on its own.

On a vote which was supposed to be a binary single issue - rather than an election - this is much more problematic.

It essentially kicked the can down the road and didn't give an answer to a binary question for that reason! It just left the mess for others to sort (spoiler, they didn't and still haven't for all the talk of 'get brexit done' and 'oven ready Brexit').

The referendum was also (technically) advisory, rather than binary. It didn't HAVE to be followed. There could have been a viability study which then came back and said this was a problem and that could have been used as a negotiation strategy with the EU in a different way.

Certainly we didn't have to trigger Art50 in the way we did, which put us (not the EU) at a massive negotiating disadvantage compared to the EU).

Then there was the point that since Leave did not lay out a manifesto May COULD easily have said we should leave on much softer terms then she actually proposed which would have been less divisive and would have had more broad support. Instead she shocked even the right of the Tory Party, who weren't expecting the tone and content of the October Speech.

Certainly polling after the referendum did have many remainers who would have supported a soft exit in order to fulfil the advise of the referedum. And many leavers were never in favour of a hard brexit either. So we could have gone down a consensus building Brexit, but May burnt that bridge so early on, there was no roll back on that.

This ALL directly related to the fact that there was NEVER a consensus nor majority over Brexit was because it was a hodgepodge of disparate views which were at times totally contradictory and at odds with each other.

No one could deliver a Brexit which resembled 'what people voted for' for this reason. It was a nonsense idea. No one bothered to try and do consensus building politics - instead they went at it like a hammer to produce diversive politics.

It was fucking irresponsible and poor governance which served individual careers and agendas and party political factions but did nothing in the name of public interest.

I stress in this context that it WAS NOT just the Tory Party who were guilty of this.

@AzureBlue99

It felt more stable in Tudor times.

Wow, how old are you? 😮

I made a post in mid June 2016. One of my points was that Brexit wouldn't sort the immigration issue and we'd just end up with a Sangatte issue on British shores because the French would no longer be obliged to take back refugees who had come via France and then claimed aslyum here.

Now it hasn't QUITE manifested like that - but we DO now have the Bibby Stockholm and the whole Rwanda debate and the entire 'stop the boats' concept. And we had to do a whole pile of renegotation on bi-lateral stuff with France over the issue.

So it definitely wasn't unpredictable or foreseeable that there would continue to be an issue.

Nor have we solved the issue over staffing in particular industries from EU staff. Theres not been investment in training and skills for these industries. We've just had labour shortage in crucial areas. Nor has it given relief on housing.

Nor can we claim that immigration has been the only reason for depressing wages. Indeed, FOM allowed businesses to do better financially in many cases. Instead we've had a cost of living crunch made worse by trade barriers (though covid and other issues also contributed to this).

Some of the highest levels of immigration has come through educational institutions - and non EU immigration at that - but this also hasn't really been cracked down on because instititions have been so dependant on the fees.

In terms of addressing immigration and immigration related questions that Brexit raised, the Tory party has managed to spectactularly miss the point on everything and rather than trying to find solutions to actual problems has been ideologically driven on utter nonsense and with poor governance.

Its pretty farcial all in all really.

I'm not surprised that people who are concerned about immigration have, in some cases, become even more hardline. I personally think its completely the wrong approach, but I get WHY its happened.

No one has a grip on the issues though. I have little faith that Labour have better proposals tbh.

Horrible woman , they should have got rid of her
on strike one tbh

This is a good report on Brexit reasons. They all seem suitably Brexity to me

The protest vote was determined to be overstated though, it was a low reason.

Since immigration was top for Leavers you’d be hard pressed to sell in FOM as the thing that gets let go. They won after all and more Leave voters wanted it over other reasons.

Things will change, FOM will be challenged in more countries, asylum already is. And you can’t do third country with current EU laws so something would have to change. I haven’t heard how Germany would get round that.

https://ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/CSI-Brexit-4-People’s-Stated-Reasons-for-Voting-Leave.pdf

I wonder what Lee Anderson's reaction will be

Really? I don't see many (any?) people making that assumption. Most people seem aware that the country's problems are deep and structural, Labour aren't proposing anything substantially different and Starmer is not exactly a revolutionary. They just figure the Tories have to go, Labour is the only way to make that happen and if the sum total of electoral power we have is to get a government of similar politics but slightly less incompetence and corruption, then we might as well use it.

That's again an indictment of our first past the post system though - the fact that so many people are forced to vote for a party they don't really believe in just to get rid of one that's actively disastrous.

And (1) income tax is not the only tax, and it only represents about 25% of government receipts.

They may be Brexit-ish @EasternStandard but it’s hard to argue people were voting for one idea.

It doesn’t need to be one idea. It’s just Brexit all those top priorities fit into it

And if making it a soft version means keeping FOM then it goes against the top reason

It's too simplistic though.

People wanted to stop immigration as it depressed wages and because poorer people couldn't get skills and training in certain sectors and therefore they were competing with middle class and better educated EU citz which they couldn't.

The solution proposed to that was Brexit. Not doing better on poverty and lack of skills training for people on low income. Indeed we've seen the converse happen (especially with things like removal of nursing nurseries).

There wasn't better focus on supporting businesses develop staff through apprenticeships. Cos it's still cheaper to import workers in the hardest hit industries and there's not the money to invest in training now anyway. So it's just stunting business rather than improving things for British workers.

These are all things that could (and should) have been down WITHIN the EU. But the narrative became that Brexit would solve that.

It hasn't and it won't.

It was the wrong solution to a problem that was poorly looked at. It was easier to come up with rhetoric that it was the big bad EU to blame not Westminster policy (Cameron himself was guilty on this - and people saw through that).

I think that's the frustration for me. There were clearly issues but ideology rather than problem solving was deployed as a means to suggest a solution.

If anything we are seeing more of the same.

Indeed. Barrel-scraping is occurring.

This!

Whatever people voted for or why in 2016 is irrelevant, more recent and consistent polling is people regret the UK leaving the EU, some of that is older voters dying, younger ones coming of age but was ever thus.... pointless argument, it was over 7 years ago.

Cameron will be hard pushed to defend the current Govt policies towards the EU, so i expect a more conciliatory approach to the EU, which can only be good for us all.

I just wonder why Sunak has done this, Cameron is hardly some great former but widely loved PM, disliked by both leavers and remainers! and he was the main driver of Austerity, which has caused a great deal of harm to the UK.

Oh yes he did didn't he? claimed DLA for his son, then scrapped it, used his son to show his support for the NHS, then went and underfunded it for years :(

On Brexit -

Excellent posts from RedToothBrush. It's clear that a lot of people didn't really know what they were voting for. Yes, immigration was a major factor but that was a vote based on ignorance. Immigration as a whole is actually beneficial to the economy and the picture painted by Leave, where immigrants clog up housing and public services but don't provide any additional tax receipts or economic stimulus to pay for them, was a lie.

A lot of comments particularly by working class leavers at the time were about protest, about being pissed off at having no power, no voice, and wanting to stick two fingers up to the Metropolitan Liberal Elite. The unelected EU bureaucrats were successfully painted as the ultimate symbol of remote, unaccountable government, the irony being that the sham democracy we have that people voted to transfer their power to is no more accountable in reality. We get to choose between two parties who are practically the same, most of our votes don't matter anyway because we live in safe seats and the entire election turns on the minority of seats who do. Great.

Some of those leavers traced the origin of their disgruntlement back to Tony Blair and Labour's betrayal (as they saw it) of their working class roots. The massive liberalisation of immigration from 2004 was the most concrete and emotive symbol of that. So the question again arises how things would have played out if those people had lived under a genuinely democratic electoral system in which they'd had the ability to abandon Labour earlier, vote for a party that really represented their views and had those views in the mix of power.

Politicians are not proposing FOM via CU or SM.

So even if people think it would be good to vote on the issue at the GE it’s not an option.

Presumably because politicians are still concerned about losing those votes.

It may be complex to some but for many it is very simple. It’s about control.

You highlighted the trend for Germany, France, Italy below. It’s the general direction of travel, for asylum so far but also countries not sharing so much and we’ll see re FOM

I think these responses are quite remain. The talk of ignorance etc

And sorry for being snippy and also misinterpreting your posts