Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Richard Hakluyt]

Good old Corbyn; no doubt he gets toasted every time the tories have a get-together 

[Legbiter]

Yeah.

[Josquius]

It really is depressing how after 10 years of this government and the whole no deal brexit mess that is a serious possibility that they are still most likely to win.

[garbon]

It really is depressing how after 10 years of this government and the whole no deal brexit mess that is a serious possibility that they are still most likely to win.

It can't be said that Labour wasn't given enough time to do the right thing.

[Josquius]

It really is depressing how after 10 years of this government and the whole no deal brexit mess that is a serious possibility that they are still most likely to win.

It can't be said that Labour wasn't given enough time to do the right thing.

Things were going OK under Labour until the financial crisis.
They could have done more certainly. But we were generally moving in the right direction.

[garbon]

It really is depressing how after 10 years of this government and the whole no deal brexit mess that is a serious possibility that they are still most likely to win.

It can't be said that Labour wasn't given enough time to do the right thing.

Things were going OK under Labour until the financial crisis.
They could have done more certainly. But we were generally moving in the right direction.

Sorry, I was referring to the last couple years where they could have selected a leader who could defeat May or barring that Johnson.

[Sheilbh]

So far I'm reminded a lot of 2017. Labour up in the polls. NHS dominating.

It's early days, but I'm surprised at how unprepared the Tories are for an election they called (and Britain Deserves Better is a baffling slogan for a party that's been in office for 9 years).

[Agelastus]

According to this the Conservatives will get a fairly comfy majority.

The Conservatives hold a 16-point lead over Labour ahead of the 12 December general election, according to the latest Opinium/Observer poll.

With Boris Johnson set to launch his party's campaign on Wednesday, the Tories are up 2pts on 42% compared with a week ago, with Labour, also up 2pts, on 26%.

If the lead endured until polling day, it would be enough to give the Tories a comfortable overall majority and allow the prime minister to push his Brexit deal through parliament and take the UK out of the EU.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/02/tories-hold-16-point-lead-over-labour-according-to-poll

At least there won't be a hung parliament.

The spread of the polls over the last couple of days has been between an 8% lead and a 16% lead.

At the same time in 2017 May was registering leads of 20%+ over Corbyn.

Of course, the pollsters have altered their methods again after blowing it in 2017 so while we probably could know how the 2017 polls would have looked with 2019 methods at the moment the two sets of headline figures are probably not directly comparable. However, Corbyn closed that gap to 2.5 percent over the course of the campaign.

Although conversely I believe Corbyn's approval ratings are starting from a lower level this time so once again the situation may not be comparable.

Most likely outcome I still think to be a hung parliament, although the consensus among posters on UK Polling report seems to be a small to medium Tory majority at the moment.

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/

The polls almost all show both Tory and Labour support rising at the expense of the Lib Dems and the Brexit Party; it will be interesting to see if that trend continues over the next week.

[Agelastus]

So far I'm reminded a lot of 2017. Labour up in the polls. NHS dominating.

It's early days, but I'm surprised at how unprepared the Tories are for an election they called (and Britain Deserves Better is a baffling slogan for a party that's been in office for 9 years).

It would be if they were playing against Milliband and Clegg, for example.

But against Corbyn the throwback and Swinson the shouter? It may work.

[One thing that's been pointed out on UK polling report is that the age breakdown in the polls of where the majority of respondents support Labour switches to where the majority of respondents support Tory has got younger compared to 2017; I think one poster commented that it suggests that a lot of people who remember or who were born close enough to the 1970s to still feel the aftermath took fright at the probable Labour manifesto. It was about a six year drop in age compared to 2017, I believe.]

[garbon]

Meanwhile in NI.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2019/nov/04/general-election-news-latest-health-chief-urge-parties-not-to-use-nhs-as-political-weapon-live-news?page=with:block-5dc0194c8f08cb84c60a4532#block-5dc0194c8f08cb84c60a4532

Loathing of Brexit united remainers and finally broke Northern Ireland's binary nationalist v unionist divide. Well, so it seemed for a few heady days.

Last week Steve Aiken, the incoming leader of the Ulster Unionist party (UUP), upended convention by ruling out an electoral pact with the Democratic Unionist party (DUP). As an opponent of Brexit Aiken said he felt duty-bound to run candidates in all 18 constituencies to give pro-remain unionists an alternative to the DUP.

Even in north Belfast, he said. Meaning Aiken was willing to split the unionist vote and give Sinn Féin's John Finucane a better chance of taking the seat from the DUP's deputy leader, Nigel Dodds.

An audacious move that prompted swift backlash. Unionists inside and outside the UUP protested. Suspected loyalist paramilitaries threatened retaliation against the UUP.

At the weekend Aiken caved and said his party would skip north Belfast, giving Dodds, the DUP's Brexit policy architect, a clear run at sweeping up unionists, be they leavers or remainers.

The DUP, in turn, will give the UUP a clear run in the marginal seat of Fermanagh and south Tyrone.

The moderate nationalist SDLP then announced it too would stand aside in north Belfast to boost Finucane's chances. (See 12pm.) The stated reason is to let remain voters rally around a single candidate, even one who would abstain from Westminster. The other reason is to pressure Sinn Féin to stand aside in south Belfast and boost the SDLP's chance of nabbing the seat from the DUP.

Unionism and nationalism, remain and leave, all simmering together in a Northern Irish stew.

[Josquius]

I'm inclined to agree with the tories that as with the brexit ref Workington man is key. Will the core Labour vote still come out and vote? And if they do will it be for labour?

I disagree that being alive in the 70s is a huge factor in not voting Labour. Most people don't remember the 70s as being all that bad, certainly when compared to the 80s....
Its rather more the Corbyn loves the IRA/hamas/whoever and is a communist (which just means bad thing) nonsense than any association with labour in the 70s.

I am very skeptical things will work out well. Corbyn isn't a great politician and the same new media approaches that were able to convince a decent chunk of working class people that brexit was somehow a good idea for them have been levied against him. Not to mention the conventional press....

[mongers]

It would be if they were playing against Milliband and Clegg, for example.

But against Corbyn the throwback and Swinson the shouter? It may work.
.....
snip
....

Not a big complain, but that's rather an odd thing to say; in comparison think of all the clear/loud male MPs you hear in the commons/on tv and how many of them are described as 'the shouter' or shouting?

[Agelastus]

It would be if they were playing against Milliband and Clegg, for example.

But against Corbyn the throwback and Swinson the shouter? It may work.
.....
snip
....

Not a big complain, but that's rather an odd thing to say; in comparison think of all the clear/loud male MPs you hear in the commons/on tv and how many of them are described as 'the shouter' or shouting?

It's an odd thing to say but it's because that's what her voice sounds like to me - whether she's on a podium making a speech or sitting being interviewed ever since she was elected leader her voice has registered with my ears as having the tones you would associate with shouting.

Corbyn has two registers*, she only seems to have one.

I can't say whether this was true of my ears before she was elected as I didn't see her on TV enough for her tones to really register.



*may not be the right word.

[Agelastus]

I disagree that being alive in the 70s is a huge factor in not voting Labour. Most people don't remember the 70s as being all that bad, certainly when compared to the 80s....

While I acknowledge that our social circles are very different, I do sometimes wonder if we live in the same country. While there has been a degree of revisionism the consensus I see is that the Seventies were uniquely bad compared to the Fifties, Sixties, Eighties, and Nineties etc.

It's not hard to find articles that agree that that is the perception (although to be fair the next item down the google list from the items I have linked below blames the perception on a successful bit of revisionism by Thatcher; no doubt one of your favourite writers, Tyr...)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17703483

Perhaps never before had the political establishment seemed so impotent and irrelevant - little wonder, then, that for the first time in years, emigrants actually outnumbered immigrants.

https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/1662

In popular recollection, the 1970s have gone down as the dark ages, Britain's gloomiest period since the Second World War. 

[Josquius]

That the 70s were worse than the 60s I think people would agree on.
The 50s were undoubtedly worse than the 70s. From all I hear from people old enough to be adults in that period it was really quite horrible with all the rationing, the news being full of the government's  futile waste of time and effort to stop Britain's decline from great power status, and attempts to attempts to undo what had been gained out of the war (as Attlees government was seen).
Compared to the 80s though I really do think the perception you see dominating the media is down to some very shrewd victors rewriting the narrative and making the mistake of taking overarching gdp figures and the like as representative of people's lives.
Middle aged people I know pretty overwhelmingly look on the 70s well. It probably helps that they were young at the time. But overall the story is if you wanted a job you could get one, if you had a problem in your street you would call the council and they would fix it, wealth was spread far more equally and you went out to towns all around rather than just automatically to the big city. Places that no outsider willingly goes to today attracted visitors from all over on the weekend.