Westministenders: Groundhog Day

[RedToothBrush]

Groundhog day is 2nd Feb.

Its also today. And yesterday. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before. And the day before.

We have all turned into Bill Murray.

That's Brexit in the UK.

The only progress seems to be linguistic gymnastics not policy.

No action has been implemented, we are still on words going nowhere.

Tick tock, tick tock.

I have just emailed Keir Starmer to say how pleased I am with his statement re a Customs Union and that it would encourage me to vote Labour if ther were a GE soon.
I copied to Jeremy C and to my Remainer Tory MP, who has been keeping her head well down. One does what one can.
And have only just realised that Keira is the feminine form of Keir! Why is it so much more popular than the masculine form?

This move to embrace the Customs Union (by some) of Labour is being hailed a a victory, and obviously I'm glad this is their stance, but wasn't Keir Starmer advocating being in the single market not so long ago?

wasn't Keir Starmer advocating being in the single market not so long ago?

I suspect that Keir Starmer, one of the few members of Labour who doesn't have their head up their arse, has been whittling away at Corbyn and co about all this. The customs union thing is his first mini-victory, but I hope that he will wear them down further and make them see sense about the single market too.

I actually think labour have played a blinder. If JC stands up tomorrow and lays out the case for a customs union he will essentially have solved most of the issues of brexit.

He really won't, but the whole point is to win over people who don't have a clue what the terms customs union and single market mean, and (I assume) to gradually shift the window towards a soft Brexit.

A customs union does not come anywhere near to solving the Irish question, which is probably the single largest obstacle to Brexit. It is the one issue where you can be 100% sure that the EU will stand firm. And rightly so, because they are guarantors to the GFA.

Effect of Liberal vote:
High Liberal vote has histoically been bad for Tories, good for Labour - these voters seem to swing between Tory and Liberal
Liberals are the most pro-EU voters, so the harder Brexit the Tories choose, the more likely Liberal-inclined voters will vote Liberal,
or even Labour as seems to have happened in some seats in the last GE

Rees-Mogg and the racist Bojo are totally toxic to Liberals, so

BUT it's also fatal to piss off your core vote:

Tories:
70% Leave; Core of the nationalist Leavers. So Brexit has to be sold as red, shite white & blue
Also, mostly home-owners and overwhelmingly elderly
So don't threaten house prices, paying for their own care, or reducing bungs or benefits for the 60+

Labour:
70% Remain. Their core vote
In the "Labour" Leave seats, how many of the Leave votes were actually from voters of other parties
How many more didn't bother to vote for them last GE, but would with a compromise to go for EEA / EFTA + a CU

Important:
no major party represents the 48% who voted Remain
(in a crisis, most people won't consider small parties like the LibDems, Greens etc)

There should at least be a choice of hard / soft Brexit, not just 2 parties with hard Brexit

A Brexit that is [EEA/EFTA + a CU]
could be tweaked to solve the NI border and to avoid further harm to Uk trade, services, business, agriculture / farming, trade
Would keep air travel and driving licences as they are.

Of course this would infuriate Rees-Mogg, Redwood and all the wealthy Ultras planning massive profits from a no-deal Brexit

but we should prioritise protecting ordinary people, rather than windfall profits for the looters & hedge-funders

Few people voted really expecting to be poorer
( even if some True Beleavers now claim they always knew they'd be poorer and rejoice in it)

In the "Labour" Leave seats, how many of the Leave votes were actually from voters of other parties

Or they could have been traditional Labour voters who didn't want to miss an opportunity to give Cameron a kick in the teeth, expecting that Remain would win.

I have been busy most of the day - have the right wing Press started screaming yet about Starmer wanting to deny the will of the people? He can honestly say he isn't - he's not said he's trying to stop Brexit.

I suspect for a significant % of Labour Leavers, that kicking a posh Tory PM in the teeth, payback for austerity, was the main aim.
Their victory was seeing his cowardly arse scuttling out of Downing St

Most Brits knew little and cared even less about the EU, but many were very angry after years of cruel austerity, when a UK govt slashed services and benefits, while giving tax cuts to the wealthy
made life tougher for ordinary people and more profitable for the wealthy

Most Labour voters would be very motivated to vote against Rees-Mogg if he were chosen as leader, a far more arrogant posh bastard than Cameron.

The Tory members & activists love an aristocrat (even a fake one) especially one with his views on abortion, equal marriage etc
but that's just 70,000 votes, not even representative of ordinary Tory voters

Going back a bit to Corbyn - this is from an article today:

Jeremy Corbyn will promise to pump more than £8billion-a-year of Brexit savings into jobs and public services.

In a speech on Labour’s Brexit position, he will say of the Tories: “Labour stands for a different future.

“We will use funds returned from Brussels after Brexit to invest in our public services and jobs of the future, not tax cuts for the richest.”

He’s still not dealing with reality, wilfully or otherwise. How is this any different to boris? It doesn’t give me much hope.

in a crisis, most people won't consider small parties like the LibDems, Greens etc

Working waaaaaaaaay back from Brexit, part of the bigger problem is the UKs sclerotic and not-fit-for-purpose electoral system. It's not even childish, it's idiotic to think that a 2 party system, that effectively discards more voters wishes than it ever satisfies could cope with the plurality of views amongst modern Britain.

At least PR-based systems attempt to address that problem,

No such fig-leaf in Britain. If your candidate isn't the winner, then all levers of the state effectively work to tell you to go fuck yourself.

I wish I'd bothered to do the math, but I saw a meme last year suggesting that if we'd had the "PR" system proposed in 2013, the Tories would have gotten a true majority. I so hope it's true.

In the absence of such a system, could a pre-election alliance strategy work ? We had the SD-Liberal Alliance in the 80s. I know the Greens are also pro-EU, but I prefer LibDems ...

In the "Labour" Leave seats, how many of the Leave votes were actually from voters of other parties

In lots of the "Labour" Leave seats the Leave votes were UKIP voters. The Conservatives wrongly assumed in 2017 they would automatically transfer to Conservative. That did not happen because Labour successfully hedged their bets on Brexit coupled with a properly Left wing domestic platform. Row back on Brexit and the suspicion would be that would be the excuse to row back to the Centre on everything else.

Outcome could well be 2017 exUKIP who went Labour going Conservative. Add that to the 30% of Labour voters who are pro-Brexit and Left of Centre choosing to stay home and the risk is fairly obvious.

Jeremy Corbyn will promise to pump more than £8billion-a-year of Brexit savings into jobs and public services

I saw that ... all I could hear in my head was my late DMs voice when watching Dr. Who and someone had been put under control ...

Oooo, (s)he's been 'got at' ....

YouGov polling about voting intentions, newspaper readership and immigration .....

DG The SDP split off some of the Labour vote, so Labour, SDP and Liberals gained well over 50% of votes, but MrsT gained a huge Parliamentary majority with just over 42%

fptp really is shite for democracy and voting for whom you want, rather than for whom you hate least

With PR, yes UKIP or AfD might get 20% of the votes, but at least when elected to Parliament they get scrutinised properly - imo, UKIP would have died long before the ref if that had happened.

Also, currently the extremes infect and sometimes dominate a much larger party, e.g. like the hard right have taken over the Tory party atm - it's so much nastier than the Tory party of the 1970s

We see under PR on the continent that without extreme wings the conservative and social democratic parties are right / left of centre rather than hard right / hard left and they subscribe to a shared social contract that is inclusive
e.g. the Christian Democrats

Not on the BBC
Trending on the twitters #ShineALight4Europe Across Europe, people lighting candles and shining torches for EU.
And the 'banned bus' in Oxford, HW and Reading tomorrow.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-43155472

woman The council need to get their excuses straight

It's now going to park in Bonn Square, which IMO is a better place because that's where the shops are. Yes, Broad Street has Blackwells and some smaller shops, but not the main stores.

It's still going there, anyway, BCF

Hunger Strike going beyond Day 3 at Yarlswood Detention Centre.

I was telling ds1 about the maze and Bobby sands last week
I told him I could see it happening again
😔😔😔😔

Exactly the same MrsR indefinite detention without trial. Worse conditions though; they are women. That thread details what they are going through and why they are on hunger strike.

In a note circulated by campaigners online, detainees say the "Home Office is overwhelmed, not fit for purpose and operates in a rogue manner

news.sky.com/story/120-women-on-hunger-strike-in-immigration-centre-11265270.

It's the legal and constitutional chaos which is the danger now.

✊To you and DS.

I don't know how fair the trial was but Bobby Sands was tried and convicted .

He was arrested and tried, you're right *Lala. He went on hunger strike to be given status of a political prisoner.

British Government brought in policy of detention without trial:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Demetrius
Under which no 'loyalists' were detained.

In light of the Conservatives paying for more social media comments, albeit in a transparent way (in that they've declared it), this thread makes for interesting reading, though it is a very different beast.

twitter.com/conspirator0/status/967624693736976384