Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

Trying to find the positive in this, maybe it will help our society to see leaders from ethnic minorities spout vile racist crap. Prove that racism is a problem that cannot be solved by drawing racial boundaries on who is and isn't the problem - it is an attitude that happily spans across the races so should be fought as such.

[The Larch]

Trying to find the positive in this, maybe it will help our society to see leaders from ethnic minorities spout vile racist crap. Prove that racism is a problem that cannot be solved by drawing racial boundaries on who is and isn't the problem - it is an attitude that happily spans across the races so should be fought as such.

There's a social crisis in Tunisia going on right now in which the country's president is rallying against black sub-saharan migrants to the country, if you want to add to the file.

Tunisian President Kais Saied has called for "emergency measures" to be taken against large numbers of irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

Mr Saied is quoted as saying that the influx of migrants was aimed at changing the country's demographic make-up, in remarks criticised by rights groups as racist.

"The undeclared goal of the successive waves of illegal immigration is to consider Tunisia a purely African country that has no affiliation to the Arab and Islamic nations," the Reuters news agency quotes him as saying.

The president spoke at a meeting with the country's national security council on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights termed Mr Saied's remarks "a racist approach just like the campaigns in Europe... the presidential campaign aims to create an imaginary enemy for Tunisians to distract them from their basic problems".

Tunisia is a key transit point for migrants and refugees seeking to move to Europe.

This month, dozens of migrants have been detained by Tunisian authorities in a crackdown.

[Sheilbh]

This is an issue that has been raised before and not just by Tories - Jack Straw raised it in the 2010s, I believe Hazel Blears also raised it in the 2000s.

As is often the case it's not an issue of race or culture but structural problems.

The reports on grooming in Rochdale, Rotherham and Hartlepool have been bad - I think one was by Baroness Casey who did the recent review into the Met. The problem is that there are young girls who are vulnerable - they often have problems at home or come from an abusive home which means they're out hanging about all night. They are not treated as victims/potential victims by social services or the police and instead assumptions are made about them because they're "chavs". They're poor teenage girls hanging around at night. Very often they are seen not as potential victims but as the problem (and it may well be that's sort of how they behave - with a bit of bravado and wanting to project independence).

There is an issue with those girls being groomed through really simple things like someone showing a bit of kindness, chatting to them, buying them some food - that then escalates into giving them a drink, drugs and abusing them. That is often being done by taxi drivers/minicab drivers in large part because those are people who are also often hanging about all night on the streets waiting for a call. They're also able to communicate which is how it becomes a ring or gang collectively abusing the same group of children. In a lot of Northern towns like Rochdale, Rotherham and Hartlepool taxi drivers are often Pakistani but also often white. It's their position that is a defining factor here - as is often the case with abusive men because it's defined by which victims they have access to.

It is a really complex and difficult issue. New Labour also attacked police and social services for not looking into this for reasons of "politicall correctness" (I know there's a comparison with the 90s but there's a lot of early 2000s stuff in our politics right now) - as you'd expect on a home affairs issue, this government has gone into that difficult issue with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. But I think the bigger and real issue is less around race, than around how the victims are perceived by the institutions and people who are supposed to be protecting them.

I just checked and Baroness Casey did a report on the Rotherham grooming gangs and found the local authority was not fit for purpose on safeguarding. The child sexual exploitation unit was understaffed. They weren't sharing information - so multiple social workers would be aware of individual reports about the same child - similar issue to baby P's death. If you put those reports together you have a credible and alarming picture, but each report on their own maybe lacked credibility or seriousness. The unit was also found to be poorly led and had a culture of assumptions and bigotries about the girls who were being abused which meant they weren't treated seriously. Separately, however, the Independent Police Complaints Commission have looked at police investigations once the social services team take it seriously enough to report - and they have found documents and emails within the police didn't want to investigate for fears it could stoke racial tensions. Often we're talking about towns that had race riots 20-25 years ago and a big BNP presence.

I think that also highlights that in a local area there may be specific context. So in Rotherham, the report ultimately estimated that as many as 1,400 children had been abused since the early 1990s when the first reports about possible abuse by taxi drivers were made (the police didn't investigate). Since 2010 when investigations started, almost 50 people have been or are being prosecuted for child sexual exploitation - about 40 of them have been British Pakistanis. But again I think it is those structural factors of local council social services failing because of who the victims are, meaning the victims and perpetrators are in contact (and in that town taxi drivers are disproportionately Pakistani) plus a history of racial tensions meaning the police weren't keen to disturb any rocks until 2010.


The big issue has always been the way law enforcement, social services and many local politicians (councillors especially) viewed and behaved towards the victims. They were treated by them as as disposable as they were treated by their abusers and they were not given a voice because of who they are: poor girls out on the streets when "good" children are at home in bed.

Where I think there is an issue around race with this was that it was a factor in the police not investigating. They didn't want to "inflame tensions" and on victim's family were told by a police officer trying to dissuade them from making a formal report that the "town would erupt". Also raising the issue was dismissed as race-baiting - Ann Cryer who was the Labour MP for Keighley (and on the hard left of the party) was one of the first to raise the issue in 2003 after she was approached by a group of seven women who said their daughters were being abused by their Asian (taxi driver) "boyfriends" and they had a list of 65 men who were these "boyfriends". She was attacked as a racist and a fantasist for raising that issue - the police didn't launch an investigation until over ten years later and there have since been about 10 convictions. I think that's partly motivated by the same attitude the police displayed. FWIW Cyer's successor as MP is Naz Shah (who I like a lot for her response to her past anti-semitic comments) who has said that there are now "conversations" in the Asian community in the area about the issue and really about respect for women and girls.

I think there is a trap of raising it and you're racist or inflaming racial tensions/giving succour to the BNP; but if it's not raised or investigated then the issue exists and festers and the fact it's ignored is used by the BNP or even more extreme groups. The end result seems to be that mosst of the time the victims are failed/turned into a political football. I think the solution isn't what Sunak's talking about. There's some organisational stuff about making sure social services share information internally (as I say, also a lesson of baby P's death). But I think the bigger issue is that everyone from social services, the police, local councils, local politicians focus back in on the victims - and making sure that all children are seen as children and treated appropriately including the ones who are gobby and having a fag hanging round a taxi rank at midnight.

Edit: And for a sense of scale on that 1,400 abused girls in Rotherham, Rotherham is a town of about 100,000.

[Josquius]

It's a perfect example of how the far right distorts things in order to support their real agenda (brown people) even though doing so clearly hurts the surface agenda they claim to care about (the white working class).

Evil Asian grooming gangs on the prowl = they can use that. Ticks so many of their boxes. As well as the racism and the islamophobia they've also got a big fetish for paedophilia.

Inequality and classism leading to the police dismissing certain girls as nought but slags and not giving a shit what happens to them = that doesn't fit their agenda at all. Forget about it. Listen to the pathetic cope the police put out about not wanting to be called racist. The police are good!

Sadly there's been very little push back either. They've been allowed to rewrite what happened to make it solely a race* issue and that is now a fact.


*sorry. No no. Not racist. It's CULTURE. Brown person wants to integrate then that's totally OK. Got to step gently.


And yep. Social services need a huge overhaul. Seem to be way too many cases these days of young kids being murdered.
Sadly that's just one thing among many underfunded and a hard one on which to measure success and keep it going.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah on social services a lot of these scandals were for decades. Investigations really start around the late 2000s - but (like baby P) it includes a lot of time when they were relatively well-funded by New Labour. But they were under-resourced or cases weren't being allocated properly.

On the police those weren't public statements the police were making. They were internal emails and documents found by inquiries and reports of what victims and their families were told by the police.

As I say I don't think race or culture is part of the explanation - but it plays into the structure. Pakistani men in those towns are disproportionately likely to be taxi drivers. I don't think it's like other examples were abusive men do things to gain access to victims, but rather that people don't look twice at taxi drivers hanging around town centres, taxi ranks or even driving unaccompanied young girls around which, combined with the vulnerability of the girls, means that abusers have access to victims and good cover. I think where race does play a role is in a reluctance to raise it or investigate it for fear of appearing racist, of inflaming racial tensions or of an investigation being misued by actual racists - but the consequence of that is there are still victims and the actual racists prey on the lack of an investigation.

Edit: And in a way I think the Guardian framing there is a little helpful - in part because it plays into Sunak's premise. I think in general with reporting crimes it is better to look less at what defines the perpetrators and more at the victims. Particularly in this case because the key enabling factor is social attitudes towards the victims.

[Duque de Bragança]

I always have to think about it because to me a pensioner is someone that lives in a (en) pension.

That's pensionnaire but the word these days for receiving a pension is pensionné, not that common but still way more common that using pensionnaire in this sense.

Jumping to conclusions again, I guess. 

[Valmy]

Trying to find the positive in this, maybe it will help our society to see leaders from ethnic minorities spout vile racist crap. Prove that racism is a problem that cannot be solved by drawing racial boundaries on who is and isn't the problem - it is an attitude that happily spans across the races so should be fought as such.

Yeah racism is institutional and it seeps into everything. If every white person dropped dead tomorrow it would still be a thing. I don't really know how that is and why but that is how it seems to be.

[Sheilbh]

Incidentally point from Sunder Katwala that simply put we don't know - the best sources is the Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse which was a statutory inquiry set up that issued 19 reports beween 2015 and 2022.

There are huge variations in how different police forces and local authority collect data including by ethnicity (but other factors too - such as crime recorded). So it's difficult to be definitive one way or the other. The data doesn't exist in a way to answer fully but "based on the existing evidence, and our understanding of the flaws in the existing data, it seems most likely that the ethnicity of group-based CSE offenders is in line with CSA more generally and with the general population, with the majority of offenders being White."

As I say I think there are certain contexts where there's clearly been organised sexual exploitation by a group of men who have predominately been British Pakistani and I think it's fine to talk about and try to understand if there is a cultural element there - in exactly the same way you would in any other example of group-based sexual exploitation of children. But that's not exactly the point Braverman decided to make.

[Sheilbh]

RIP Nigel Lawson.

Nigel Lawson, Thatcher's chancellor, dies at 91
Intellectually formidable and somewhat mischievous chancellor who oversaw the Big Bang but later fell out with Mrs Thatcher and became a leading Brexiteer and global warming sceptic
Monday April 03 2023, 9.40pm, The Times

Nigel Lawson with Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool in 1983
SALLY SOAMES/ THE SUNDAY TIMES

Lord Lawson of Blaby, who was chancellor for six years under Margaret Thatcher, has died at the age of 91.

He served in No 11 from June 1983, overseeing much of the Thatcherite economic agenda and was a big supporter of privatisation. His tax-cutting economic agenda prompted what some called the "Lawson boom", turning London into one of the world's leading financial centres.

He resigned in October 1989 after a series of disagreements with Thatcher over the direction of the government. It was his, and later Geoffrey Howe's, resignations that precipitated the events that led to the Iron Lady's fall from power a year later.

Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, described Lawson as a "transformational chancellor" who had been an inspiration to him. Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, called Lawson "a fearless and original flame of free market Conservatism" and a "simplifier who helped transform the economic landscape and helped millions of British people".


With his wife, Thérése, on budget day in 1989 ALAMY

Margaret Thatcher wrote in her memoirs of Nigel Lawson: "If it comes to drawing up a list of Conservative — even Thatcherite — revolutionaries I would never deny Nigel a leading place on it."

Lawson was indeed a key player in Thatcher's governments, serving for ten years in senior ministerial posts and providing much of Thatcherism's intellectual heft until his dramatic and very public falling out with the prime minister.

As financial secretary to the Treasury, energy secretary and the longest-serving postwar chancellor until Gordon Brown surpassed him, he was an architect of her policy of using monetary discipline to suppress inflation. He championed the privatisation of inefficient, loss-making state industries. He reformed taxation, lowered the burden on businesses and individuals and oversaw the Big Bang: the deregulation of London's financial markets. He built up coal stocks so the government was able to defeat the miners' strike of 1984-5.

But Lawson's record was tarnished by the manner of his departure and Britain's subsequent economic problems. He abruptly resigned in 1989 after years of increasingly bitter arguments with Thatcher over his wish to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned as foreign secretary a year later, and the loss of two such senior ministers soon spelled the end for the prime minister.

Lawson's tax-cutting and increasingly lax monetary policy fuelled the "Lawson boom" that ended in the deep recession and economic misery of the early 1990s. And while the Big Bang turned the City into the world's leading financial centre, it also contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-8.

Lawson did not fade away after leaving office, although his ample girth did — he lost five of his 17 stone and wrote The Nigel Lawson Diet Book, which sold considerably better than his excessively long political memoir, The View from No 11.

Ennobled in 1992, Lord Lawson of Blaby became a prominent climate change dissenter, setting up his own think tank to challenge what it called the propaganda of global warming "alarmists". He was also a leading proponent of Brexit — albeit from his home in France — and helped to force David Cameron into calling the 2016 referendum.

Intellectually formidable, self-assured and somewhat mischievous, the Tory elder statesman always delighted in challenging conventional wisdom. A loner beholden to no particular faction of his party, he enjoyed being a contrarian. "I'm always on the alert when there is a consensus. There is no debate. That's lazy," he once declared.

Nigel Lawson was born in Hampstead, north London, in 1932. His paternal grandfather immigrated from Latvia and changed his name from Leibson to Lawson. His father was a well-to-do tea merchant with his own company in the City. His mother came from a wealthy stockbroking family. Though born into a Jewish family, Lawson was from his late teenage years a "committed unbeliever".

He was privately educated, first at Beechwood Park School in Hertfordshire then at Westminster. He won a mathematics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a first in philosophy, politics and economics. In his spare time he skied, fenced, played poker and acted; Ned Sherrin remembered him appearing as a "chorus boy" in his production of The Sleeping Beauty.

Lawson was not a member of the University Conservative Association but he did join a high Tory dining club called the Chatham and was president of the Strasbourg Union which promoted European unity. The Euroscepticism came much later.

After graduating Lawson did two years of national service in the Royal Navy, and ended up commanding a motor torpedo boat, HMS Gay Charger.

Aged 23, he married Vanessa Salmon, a socialite and heir to the Lyons Corner House empire. The couple had one son, Dominic, now a prominent Sunday Times columnist and former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, and three daughters — Thomasina, who died of breast cancer in her early thirties, Nigella, the celebrity chef on whose television shows Lawson occasionally appeared, and Horatia, a television producer.

In 1956 Lawson joined the Financial Times, and within four years he had worked his way up to become chief writer of the highly-regarded Lex column before being appointed the first City editor of the newly formed Sunday Telegraph. "I always endeavoured in my columns to discuss economics in a manner intelligible to the layman," Lawson wrote in his autobiography, and for that reason Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, offered him a speech-writing job in 1963.

Lawson stayed at Downing Street after Macmillan resigned on health grounds, working for his successor Sir Alec Douglas-Home, until in 1965 he was offered the editorship of the Spectator — a position his son Dominic would occupy in the 1990s. In 1970 the owner, Harry Creighton, sacked him while he was campaigning as the Tory candidate in the Labour-held marginal seat of Eton & Slough in 1970.

Lawson was not a natural glad-hander, and he lost the election as well as his job, but two years later he was selected for the safe Tory seat of Blaby in Leicestershire. He was duly elected to the House of Commons in February 1974 with a majority of more than 12,000.

He was 41, older but better known than most new MPs. He soon made a name for himself by goading Harold Wilson at prime minister's questions and specialising in economic policy. He believed strongly in the market economy and the enterprise culture, but within a framework of firm financial discipline to suppress inflation.

Thatcher recognised his talents, and soon after she became party leader in 1975 he joined a team of backbenchers who prepped her for PMQs. The following year he became a whip, and the year after that an opposition Treasury spokesman as the Tories prepared for government.

When the Conservatives won the general election of 1979 Lawson became financial secretary to the Treasury in a government determined to reverse Britain's economic decline. He as much as anyone was responsible for devising its pioneering medium-term financial strategy to suppress inflation and encourage growth by co-ordinating monetary and fiscal policy.

As his political career took off, his private life underwent a period of turbulence. In 1980 he and his wife divorced after 25 years of marriage. Shortly afterwards he married Thérèse Maclear, a Commons library researcher, with whom he had two more children: Tom, now headmaster of Eastbourne College, and Emily, a television producer. Vanessa Salmon subsequently married AJ Ayer, the philosopher, but died of liver cancer in 1985.

In 1981 Thatcher conducted her first ministerial purge and brought Lawson into the cabinet as energy secretary. In that role he anticipated the miners' strike by quietly building up coal stocks at power stations, and set in train the subsequent privatisations of the gas and electricity industries. Despite their later quarrels, Thatcher conceded that he had been "highly effective . . . vigorously promoting competition, taking a real grip on his department and building up coal stocks for the inevitable struggle with the miners".

Following her second election victory in 1983 Thatcher promoted Lawson again, this time to chancellor. "I had by now come to share Nigel's high opinion of himself," Thatcher tartly observed in her memoirs. She issued a concomitant instruction that he should get his hair cut. He obeyed, but soon let it grow again.

Lawson and Thatcher shared a free-market outlook. He was an unclubbable man who led no particular faction within the Tory party and was not, therefore, a potential rival to the prime minister. She doubtless thought of him as a chancellor who owed his position entirely to her, and who would do her bidding, but it did not turn out like that.

His tenure started well. The really tough decisions had been taken in Thatcher's first term, the economy was rebounding and Lawson was able to deliver a series of eye-catching, tax-reforming budgets.

In 1984 he cut corporation tax while phasing out various tax reliefs for businesses. In 1985 he raised personal income tax allowances well above inflation. In 1986 he took a penny off the basic rate of income tax and introduced personal equity plans (Peps). In 1987 he cut 2p off the basic rate but most dramatically, in 1988, he cut the top rate of income tax from 60 to 40 per cent and the basic rate to 25 per cent. Lawson also played a big part in Thatcher's third election victory in 1987 by demolishing Labour's economic manifesto.

However, by that stage his increasingly bitter feud with Thatcher had already begun. Lawson and Howe, then foreign secretary, both favoured British membership of the ERM, the former because he saw it as a counter-inflationary discipline and the latter for more diplomatic reasons. Thatcher, who regarded the ERM as a futile effort to "buck the markets" and a route to the federalist dream of European monetary union, steadfastly resisted.

Lawson secretly adopted a policy of "shadowing" the Deutschmark, and Thatcher was furious when she found out. "How could I possibly trust him again?," she asked in her memoirs, considering whether she should have sacked him.

At an EU summit in Madrid in June 1989, Lawson and Howe forced Thatcher to announce that Britain would join the ERM when certain conditions were met. Thatcher felt "ambushed" and removed Howe from the Foreign Office. She also appointed Alan Walters as her personal economic adviser to rebuff the arguments of her cerebral chancellor.

With conflicting messages from No 10 and No 11 increasingly undermining confidence in the government and sterling, Lawson finally gave Thatcher an ultimatum on October 26, 1989: dismiss Walters or he would resign. Thatcher refused. Lawson duly and dramatically quit. So — that evening — did Walters.

Lawson did not bequeath John Major, his successor, the sort of benign economic outlook he had inherited from Howe. His final tax-cutting budget had served to fuel an already overheating economy. Interest rates stood at 15 per cent. Inflation was 7.5 per cent and rising. "Nigel Lawson's imprudence had already begun to steer us to disaster," Thatcher complained, and his unsustainable boom ended in the misery of the 1991-2 recession and Britain's humiliating exit from the ERM, which she had reluctantly agreed to join after Lawson's departure. "I should have tightened monetary policy at an earlier stage," Lawson acknowledged long afterwards in a rare admission of error.

Lawson delivered a parting kick at Thatcher by endorsing Michael Heseltine when the former defence secretary challenged her for the party leadership in 1990 and ended her premiership. Lawson and Thatcher both retired from the House of Commons in 1992, and both used their memoirs to settle scores with each other.

In later life Lawson became a hardened Eurosceptic, though his main home was an elegant house deep in la France profonde of rural Gascony. His heavyweight support for those Tory MPs demanding that Britain leave the EU helped force Cameron to promise a referendum on Brexit in 2013. Cameron "let it be known he was not pleased", Lawson crowed.

He even served — briefly — as chairman of the Vote Leave campaign at the start of the 2016 referendum campaign. For him the key issue was not economics or immigration, but sovereignty. "Self-government is more important than anything else," he told an interviewer.

Lawson was an outspoken critic of climate change scientists, accusing them of exaggerating the dangers of global warming and downplaying the economic cost of countering it. In 2008 he wrote An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, although he struggled to find a publisher. The following year he set up the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He also became a champion of fracking.

He did not mind being attacked for his views, but he did object to the charge that he did not care about the planet's future because he was old. He argued that he probably cared more about its future than ever before "because I now have not merely a number of children but a considerable number of grandchildren, and I care about my grandchildren as all grandparents care about their grandchildren".

Lawson remained physically and intellectually vigorous well into his eighties, although his daughter Nigella increasingly became the celebrity of the family.

He commuted regularly to his pied-à-terre in central London and participated in Lords debates. Back in France, he was inducted as a Mousquetaire d'Armagnac in the nearby town of Condom. After divorcing his second wife in 2012 he took up with an Oxford academic 37 years his junior and nearly ten years younger than Nigella. She was followed by another girlfriend who was ten years younger than himself. He was lucky, he said, to have a strong constitution and a full head of hair, and to be "not too decrepit".

Lord Lawson of Blaby, chancellor of the exchequer, was born on March 11, 1932. He died on April 3, 2023, aged 91

HMS Gay Charger. We used to be a country, a real country

(Also those names for his daughters - how to give your kids a complex )

Some Euro-war deep cuts there too.

Edit: Incidentally, well done to the Guardian for somehow finding a columnist who I disagree with more than Sir Simon Jenkins writing from his Kensington townhouse about why we shouldn't build more houses. It was a tough task but they managed it:

I lead a litter-picking group, but I will always defend litterers. This is why
Leila Taheri

If any anger is justified, it should be directed at those who create our throwaway culture and make people's lives a misery

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/03/lead-litter-picking-group-defend-litterers

Alternately people just shouldn't litter

[Josquius]

Sometimes it's really sad when someone dies.
This fellow. Absolute irredeemable cunt on all fronts.

[Tamas]

Surely you will not call these decorative bars though?

[Sheilbh]

Sometimes it's really sad when someone dies.
This fellow. Absolute irredeemable cunt on all fronts.

It's slightly fascinating the extent to which his views on Europe across his career basically mirror the Tory Party's journey, even though he was pretty unclubbable and there was never really a crowd of Lawsonites around him.

[Sheilbh]

Another reminder of how bad things got in Labour - which I think is the crucial context for British politics 2015-2020. An activist (and local party social media officer) has been expelled after its been revealed that he was behind a Twitter account tweeting stuff like: "Zionists worked hand in hand with Nazis to send innocent Jews to their deaths... then worked to establish the racist state of Israel", as well as calling the Chief Rabbi (and the late Chief Rabbi) and the Board of Deputies racists and white supremacists.

He also appeared on the Al Jazeera film, The Labour Files, which largely alleged that the allegations of anti-semitism in Labour were fabricated or exaggerated. They presumably didn't know about the link between him and that social media account as he's there mainly to say that as a Corbyn supporter his life was shattered by threatening behaviour from anti-Corbyn Labour members.

Looking at a moderately competent Labour party being 20 points ahead (obviously I still fully fear the Tories will win) just makes me so angry about the wasted opportunity in a really crucial time. I've always thought the Tories were there for the taking if Labour had a halfway presentable leadership.

I've mentioned before that Johnson was the least popular PM on election that we have any polling history for. I think many voters looked at Corbyn v May or Corbyn v Johnson and went for what they felt was the lesser of two evils (and I'm not sure I can say they were wrong - having seen several anti-semites expelled from my local party including one personal friend of Corbyn).

Although, again, a reminder that for all my issues with Starmer on certain issues on anti-semitism and getting them out of the party he's been really very good.

[Josquius]

Yep. Corbyn really should have stood down after the brexit referendum loss. Trouble is at the time basically nobody was willing to stick their hand up and offer to take control. The whole situation was written off seemingly with an air of might as well let the corbynites have the shit time anyway.

Though really if the world was sane Ed miliband would have won and today it'd be all jet packs and lovely proper burgundy passports

[Sheilbh]

Yep. Corbyn really should have stood down after the brexit referendum loss. Trouble is at the time basically nobody was willing to stick their hand up and offer to take control. The whole situation was written off seemingly with an air of might as well let the corbynites have the shit time anyway.

About 175 of 250 Labour MPs voted no confidence in Corbyn and backed Owen Smith as an alternative leader. Not wildly convinced by Smith - or Angela Eagle for that matter (though I think she would've been better than Smith) - but, sadly, over 60% of the membership backed Corbyn again.

Loads of the membership were really enthused and, I think, by 2016 they went into it with their eyes open.

Though really if the world was sane Ed miliband would have won and today it'd be all jet packs and lovely proper burgundy passports