Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[garbon]

It's a nice story of youths being wholesome

What is wholesome about it? They freed some food?

[Valmy]

It's a nice story of youths being wholesome

What is wholesome about it? They freed some food?

Eh they paid for it. You don't have to eat your food.

[Josquius]

I'm just shocked they could afford such a lengthy journey.

[Sheilbh]

I'm just shocked they could afford such a lengthy journey.

It's only 40 minutes and about £15 for an adult (I love Southend ) - not sure what the discount is for a young person railcard are because I don't want to feel nostalgic and sad.

[The Brain]

I assume it wasn't the Angolan Aggressive-Invasive Crab?

[HVC]

It's a nice story of youths being wholesome

What is wholesome about it? They freed some food?

At least the food isn't going to endure a cruel death (presumably) like when idiots "rescue" mink and farmed foxes

[garbon]

It's a nice story of youths being wholesome

What is wholesome about it? They freed some food?

Eh they paid for it. You don't have to eat your food.

Yes which is why they can choose. Doesn't answer why it would be wholesome.

[Josquius]

I'm just shocked they could afford such a lengthy journey.

It's only 40 minutes and about £15 for an adult (I love Southend ) - not sure what the discount is for a young person railcard are because I don't want to feel nostalgic and sad.

Wow.
The south gets all the nice things. You'd need a mortgage for a similar journey here.

[Sheilbh]

In further crazy British negotiation strategies - just seen a senior SNP advisor spitballing that in the independence talks Scotland should agree to sign up to One Belt One Road, ask for Chinese loans for developing infrastructure and building new ports (including, possibly, former Royal Navy bases) to use as leverage against rUK

I cannot see anything that could possibly go wrong with this approach.

[Josquius]

5 years ago that would be controversial.
Now... That's just stupid isn't it.

[celedhring]

In further crazy British negotiation strategies - just seen a senior SNP advisor spitballing that in the independence talks Scotland should agree to sign up to One Belt One Road, ask for Chinese loans for developing infrastructure and building new ports (including, possibly, former Royal Navy bases) to use as leverage against rUK

I cannot see anything that could possibly go wrong with this approach.

Heh, the loon wing of the Catalan separatists proposed the same back before the referendum. If the EU kicked us out after independence, we should become a Chinese protectorate and lease them our harbours.

[Sheilbh]

Heh, the loon wing of the Catalan separatists proposed the same back before the referendum. If the EU kicked us out after independence, we should become a Chinese protectorate and lease them our harbours.

I mean this theory - from my understanding - is Scotland would basically do all that with China as leverage against rUK in negotiating the independence settlement. But Scotland would still join NATO, the EU etc because apparently only rUK would care.

5 years ago that would be controversial.
Now... That's just stupid isn't it.

Yeah I feel like that's about it. We know there's a quid pro quo although I'm just not sure if China would be that interested which would be a little awkward.

[Sheilbh]

Long read in the New Statesman basically looking back at the last 20 years for Labour. A lot of it is stuff that we've all been over a million times - as has everyone else. I find it sort of crazy that basically the debate in and around Labour is exactly the same argument that was being had in 2010, with Brexit as a sort of extra ingredient. But I think there are a few particularly interesting bits in particular:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/09/labour-s-lost-future-inside-story-20-year-collapse

The 2001 landslide (a point when we were all wondering if the Tories would ever win again - and it felt probably impossible) as a canary in the coalmine:

1. A feeble victory

In 2001 Labour won 15 more seats than Margaret Thatcher had at her peak in 1983. But Blair's triumph was hollow: voter turnout had collapsed, falling from 71 to 59 per cent. In victory, New Labour had lost nearly three million votes. Fewer than one in four of those eligible to vote backed Labour, giving Blair a weaker mandate than any prime minister in the 20th century.

Few paid attention to this at the time – MPs were elected just the same – and Blairites casually blamed Labour's vast poll lead for discouraging voters from showing up. Why vote in a foregone election? But a warning light was flashing. Rob Ford, professor of politics at the University of Manchester, tells me the 2001 collapse in Labour's turnout is one of the "most underestimated statistics" in politics. For many core Labour voters, abstention was their first break with a party to which they never returned.

That makes the 2001 election look like the "canary in the coal mine" today, says Ford. "You know all those people who stayed at home? They vote Tory now." In Sedgefield, Blair's seat in County Durham, 7,000 Labour voters dropped out of the voting bloc. Blair still won comfortably, but at each successive election, Labour's base ebbed away. In 2019 Boris Johnson's Tories seized the seat, overturning what had once been a Blair majority of 25,000.

It took two decades of errors to lose Sedgefield and many seats like it. But for too long New Labour took its heartlands for granted. "With the exception of by-elections, I don't recall doing a focus group in those core Labour seats from 1997 to 2008," says Deborah Mattinson, Starmer's director of strategy and a longtime Labour pollster. There were no grounds for complacency: Blair's win in 2001 was always weaker than it looked. It was a triumph won in apathy. Beneath the surface, Labour's base had already begun to crumble and drift.

And in the more recent stuff I think Cruddas' analysis of Corbyn's leadership campaign is spot on. I also think Schneider is very interesting on 2017 (and the difference between then and 2019) - it seems striking that Starmer isn't sure how to position 2017: triumph or defeat:

9. False dawn

Ed Miliband's team had expected to prevail in the 2015 election, only for Labour to lose badly. "The party was in trauma," says Alan Johnson, who remembers being briefed on how to claim victory on election night. Instead, Labour collapsed in Scotland and Ukip surged under Farage, as Rob Ford predicted a decade earlier. In the shock of defeat, Miliband stepped down, and Labour's MPs inadvertently ceded control of the party.

"Words fail me," says Gisela Stuart, remembering the way MPs allowed Jeremy Corbyn on to the party leadership ballot in a bid for "balance". Miliband had diluted the power of MPs in leadership elections, depriving them of a say in the final vote, but they still controlled the ballot. The key was to select candidates the party could tolerate, which they failed to do. Thirty-six MPs backed Corbyn (35 were required), but few wanted him to win. Labour, soon to be faced with a fraught dilemma over Brexit, had chosen the worst possible time to pick a leader who could not lead the party.

Corbyn attracted tens of thousands of new supporters, eligible to vote under cavalier rules approved by Miliband. "People were joining from organisations that had spent their whole lives detesting the party," says Alan Johnson. William Hague is not alone in thinking Corbyn was the "nail in the coffin" for Labour. But Jon Cruddas, who nominated him, sees it differently: Corbyn was "the only one with a moral critique of capitalism", he tells me. "There had to be a reckoning." In 2015, the party's energy was all on the left. Any pride in New Labour was dead. Corbyn won easily against a weak field of candidates with little to say and even less ability to say it.

Within a year, Corbyn's approval ratings, weak since day one, had sunk to 25 per cent. Labour MPs moved a no confidence vote against him, only for party members to re-elect him. In spring 2017 Theresa May sought to capitalise, calling a snap election for June with the Tories 13 points ahead. By mid-May, when Corbyn launched Labour's manifesto, that lead had not fallen. Ruin seemed imminent.

Three weeks later, Labour stunned observers by losing the popular vote by only 2.4 points, outperforming polls that had been narrowing rapidly. Corbyn might even have won a slightly later election. (Within a month Labour led in the polls, as it would for much of the next year.) James Schneider, a key Corbyn adviser, credits Labour's bold manifesto pledges: to scrap tuition fees, renationalise the railways and reverse austerity by taxing corporations and the rich. "The outrage those policies caused in the media and political establishment helped to present them," he tells me.

Schneider also points to the party's 2017 slogan: "It was not just for the many, but not for the few", purposefully tapping into the "antagonism of populism". Farage also sees Corbyn as a populist – a fellow traveller, even. "He was doing the sort of thing I've done for years," he tells me. "He spoke for those 'left behind' in a way that Miliband could never do."

Many inside Labour say the 2017 results are an aberration. Corbyn temporarily held together Labour's two warring Brexit tribes, while winning over disaffected Greens and protest voters. The Tory campaign was disastrous, they add, and May's leadership lifeless: it is no surprise Corbyn did well. "If large sections of the electorate thought we might actually win, I think they would have run a mile from us," says David Miliband.

But for some, 2017 was a roadmap, not a fluke. A leading member of Starmer's shadow cabinet describes it to me as the great "inconvenient truth" in Labour's 20-year collapse: the moment when the party's move away from New Labour was shown to be all but justified.

Yet what was Corbyn's triumph? Labour lost. Even Starmer errs when we discuss 2017, initially calling Corbyn's campaign "successful" before correcting himself. In truth, the election was a success only on Labour's own impoverished terms. Corbyn's narrow appeal had subtle and severe consequences. The party racked up votes in its urban strongholds, but won 55 fewer seats than the Tories, a worse margin than in 2010. Labour now had a severe structural weakness: its support was overwhelmingly concentrated in cities and university towns. In 2017 few noticed this. Catastrophe had been avoided. But for how long?

10. Broken by Brexit

The tantalising truth of Labour's two-decade decline is that it might have been arrested at the last. Despite Corbyn's vacuous politics and his gross inability to deal with anti-Semitism, a failure that casts a long shadow, Labour may yet have escaped its fate. Had Corbyn known where to lead the party in March 2019, it might be in power now.

Labour in 2019 faced a stark choice: back May's Brexit deal or cave in to demands for a second referendum. A Corbyn aide remembers thinking in Christmas 2018 that "when we get back to parliament, we're just going to get railroaded into a People's Vote". Those who wanted a rerun are unrepentant. "The mistake wasn't calling for a second referendum," Andrew Adonis tells me, "it was falling to get one", for which he blames Corbyn. Rob Ford is unconvinced. "Why didn't we get a second referendum? I'll keep it simple. Not enough votes. A majority of MPs would not back one."

Corbyn's team shirks responsibility. The then Labour leader, long suspected to be an undeclared Brexiteer, was "never going to be a convincing advocate for an anti-democratic policy", they say. Not only was a second referendum impossible to pass in their view, but it would have hurt Labour in any future election. Under Corbyn, the party could not trade Labour Leavers for Tory Remainers. "Tory Remainers hate Brexit substantially less than they hate Jeremy," says James Schneider. "Your programme is going to have to shift and be milquetoast [to accommodate them], which was never going to work, as we did threaten moneyed interests."

So why not back May's deal? Here, perhaps, lies the party's last lost hope. Both Farage and Hague tell me that, had Labour backed May, it is the Tories who would have suffered long-term damage. "If May's deal had gone through," says Farage, "there's a very good chance that a large number of the Spartans [the fiercest Tory Brexiteers] would have got together with my crowd." Hague agrees that backing a deal "would have transformed" Labour's situation. May's team thought Labour was close to supporting them, says Hague, but Starmer, as shadow Brexit secretary, was pivotal in resisting a deal.

Jon Cruddas regrets that Labour failed to respect the referendum and split the right. Corbyn, he says, "didn't have the authority" to marshal the party. Schneider is similarly rueful about where Labour ended up. "In 2017 we said, 'Big change can happen at the ballot box: you voted Leave, now vote for social democracy.' In 2019 we said, 'Big change can happen, but not that big change you voted for three years ago.'"

When I ask Starmer if Labour should have backed May's deal, he is unequivocal. "No. And it's very important that the history of this is accurately reflected. The Labour Party's response to the referendum was to argue for a deal, a close economic deal, with the EU. We argued for that up hill and down dale." May's deal did not offer that, says Starmer. "The fault here lies squarely with Theresa May." But wherever the fault lies, the fallout lay with Labour.

[Josquius]

As I've always said - Corbyns manifesto was good. It's one thing that is respectable about him, despite being far left he didn't impose his vision on the party and instead followed the labour average.
With a leader from the right of the party the far left nonsense smears would have been harder to sling.
With a competent leader who did his job right.... Who knows.

We have to stop repeating this nonsense that it was the second referendum that killed Labour though. An awful lot of the left are saying that these days (helps to bash starmer). Labours handling of brexit had been awful over the years, the European election was a massive wakeup call to them on this. They were going to lose far bigger than they did. When they came out with a rational approach to brexit they clawed back a fair bit of support from the lib dems- those they turned off had already been alienated by the comrade Corbyn stuff.
That was the number one reason for the last election - Corbyn. The image had been built that he was this evil terrorist lover who was going to destroy the country and nothing had been done to try and quash this at any point.
The second biggest pint was the lack of focus in the campaign. A collection of great policies are how you govern. Not how you win policies. Against the Tories simple slogans they just kept tossing out a mish mash of good ideas, so many it sounded infeasible they'd do it all.

[Sheilbh]

Schneider is definitely on the left and was on Corbyn's team - his take on Brexit is really quite bracing for centre-left Remain types (https://ukandeu.ac.uk/brexit-witness-archive/james-schneider/ - they're a really interesting contrast with MacDonnell as well). So that is where that criticism is coming from.

I think Labour's position was the best way to hold the party factions together - I don't know if it was the best pitch electorally. I don't actually think the issue was a second referendum, but rather the idea that Labour would negotiate a new deal so we'd have two more years of this paralysis in the rest of politics v get Brexit done.

The thing that I always find mad is even if Labour won the Withdrawal Agreement would be substantially the same as Johnson's because all the stuff Labour wanted and cared about (dynamic alignment on workers' rights, food safety environment etc, opt outs on state aid/public ownership/nationalisation issues) would be covered by the future relationship.

I will never not find it carzy that the UK political establishment spent two plus year's having a breakdown over an agreement that looked exactly like you could predict it would on day 1 - because it covered cash, citizens' rights and Northern Ireland and we knew what the EU would accept. But instead British MPs spent ages arguing over whether we should be in or out of the customs union - which wasn't covered by the WA