PMs change and lol we're all gonna die (but brexit will never end)

(gazzara's not awake yet so I'm just filling in)

i have been awake since 6:15am fyi

Former Tory Party Chair Baroness Warsi Is Being Wooed By The Lib Dems But Says She Isn’t Defecting — Yet https://t.co/Bb7gxfp65f via @elashton

— Hannah Al-Othman (@HannahAlOthman) September 16, 2019

You'd have to question her integrity if she remains in such a racist party that continually ignores her legit concerns about Islamophobia and has sidelined her for raising these concerns. But then again I'd have even less respect for her joining the current iteration of the LibDems. So basically she's bad and she should feel bad!

Tories joining the Lib Dems is a wonderful thing.

it's p funny for sure!

It's great for the Labour Party.

Plus big lolz @ Chuka.

Wondering if ex-Labour types might start defecting to the Greens, the final resting home for Blairite "best of both wings" fence-sitters.

no reason why they couldn't also defect to the very ambitious LibDem and Unionist Party, under Swinson the sky is the limit

Greens are not remotely Blairite for all of Lucas' recent vacillating

Asked whether the party would stand aside for Labour candidates, the Lib Dem leader said:

That’s a different question because Labour are not a remain party, Labour are trying to deliver a Labour Brexit. But where we agree with others on stopping Brexit, we are in those discussions.

how is she not getting hammered by interviewers pointing out that labour are committed to a second referendum

If a second referendum is being held, and the outcome is more or less the same as the previous one (leave slightly bigger than remain), what would Labour's position then be though?

deliver the wa they agree with the eu, i guess - very much not ideal but compared to no deal it's probably the best we can hope for in the event a referendum goes south again, and britons would (in theory) at least know what they were voting for this time around

it's a risky strategy but it seems more pragmatic than the libdems promising to unilaterally cancel brexit

who's ahead of him? king kenneth of europa?

― imago, Monday, 16 September 2019 bookmarkflaglink

didn't think so

― imago, Monday, 16 September 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Philia or agape?

― pomenitul, Monday, 16 September 2019 bookmarkflaglink

eros m8

― imago, Monday, 16 September 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Comedy from our clowns on ilxor dot com

Send in...the tanks

A second referendum makes more strategic (and democratic) sense than cancelling Brexit altogether. I'm still not sold on Corbyn's unwillingness to brand Labour as an unequivocally pro-Remain party, however, including on purely pragmatic grounds.

^^ yeah, same. And it continues to be a weak spot others can have a go at. Idk.

There ought to...tanks
Well, maybe next year

if parties pledging to revoke article 50 won a majority of seats in an election wouldn't that have as much or more democratic legitimacy as a second referendum? particularly because a second referendum is advocated almost elusively by people whose goal is to stop brexit from happening?

is there a significant constituency of voters who would see article 50 revocation as illegitimate who wouldn't also see a second referendum that resulted in the UK remaining in the EU as equally illegitimate?

If a second referendum is being held, and the outcome is more or less the same as the previous one (leave slightly bigger than remain), what would Labour's position then be though?

it's an enormous if

i know this doesn't go over well on ILX but something close to 50% of the electorate want(ed) to leave and there is no magic hand-waving that away, there is only power and how it can be (ab)used to prevent it - people are gonna be really pissed off, one way or another. which isn't to say fuck 'em, cos yeah probably fuck 'em, but i don't see any magic road to "reconciling the nation". it's war.

v otm unfortch

The hard road is to make this country less of a hell to live in for a lot of people. Working to reduce inequality so that minorities don't get the boot. That also means war on the Tory enemy and also a lot of Lib Dems who hoard more of the wealth.

If it is to be Revoke then it has to come with a program of wide scale transformation. Doing just Revoke so you look more pro-EU is for cunts xp

damn straight

A referendum is really the only way to nullify the first one and loads of people will still be angry. Continuity remain has a lot to answer for - soft Brexit was clearly the least worst option to exit and they kept turning it down. Verhoefstadt at the Lib Dem conference looks and sounds awful and I’d expect to see clips of that heavily used during another leave campaign.

I mean look at this shit:

Jo Swinson struggling to rebut claim that new “revoke” position is undemocratic. Surely just has to say that if Lib Dems win a general election on a revoke platform, that would mean revoke would have won a democratic mandate

— Jonathan Freedland (@Freedland) September 16, 2019

Just saw this and extremely otm too

And this is why things don't get better pic.twitter.com/sySKBIna0D

— .. -.. .. --- - (@LeithMotive) September 16, 2019

how much fucking crack can people smoke? i've got more chance of forming the next government than the CUNTS DIE DIE DIE Lib Dems

I'm down with that. I also happen to believe that such a wide-scale transformation is likelier to occur within rather than without the EU.

xps

i've said it before pom but literally the only thing that led me to vote remain in the end was concern for my European friends and neighbours. the institution is all kinds of a mess and yeah the best way to reform it is from within but all i hear when i see FBPEers bleating is middle class cunts who calmly stood thru 40 years of Thatcherite economics in this country throwing their toys out of the pram because it might be a bit harder to visit their holiday homes in future

i find it really hard to argue with my gammon friends that the votes they cast in good faith mean fuck all. i can josh them about their xenophobia and that xenophobia is real and stupid like all xenophobia but the genie has been released, smug cunts just endlessly saying "fuck 'em" are not helping the ish at all. the only people whose opinions i take remotely seriously on this are non UK nationals living here because you've had the horrible misfortune to be here at a time when England - not the UK's - natural massive racism and exceptionalism has been given full rein

but unless cunts on the remain side get real and think about the consequences, i give up

The closer the Tories get to making up with the Brexit Party, the closer Labour will (I hope) come to making "support Remain in a referendum" - but there will be a lot of carefully worded ambiguity before then.

The 'plastic bag tax' story has a different moral than most people think, by the way*. The sanctions tightening that they swapped it for never happened - the LDs had advice that it was illegal, and supported it with the proviso that it wouldn't require a law change.

But the reveal of it has been the story (the tweet from Polly Mackenzie that reveals that it never happened ends "Ha ha") and the moral is that clever artfulness will do fuck all for you if it feeds into a narrative that people already believe. "Well, actually" will do as much good for Labour's wavy Brexit position as it did for the Lib Dems.

*not that the Lib Dems aren't largely trash, but that's not the moral.

xp her response to the question about how to get young people into politics was really weird - she seemed to be describing herself as a young person (she is 39), which isn’t really what the question was asking. It’s such an easy question too, you just say that you should create policies that address the needs young people have, like housing and employment, but I guess that’s a problem when you don’t have any.

When asked how to get young people involved in politics, Jo says, "I want to respond, you're asking a young politician! I'm not exactly typical!"

— Jonn Elledge (@JonnElledge) September 15, 2019

how much fucking crack can people smoke?

how much have u got

i've smoked all mine, it was a legit question

even if it turns out that there are lots of secret die-hard remainers whose scepticism might suddenly be assuaged and vote won by an announcement from corbyn, and if they are in the relevant marginals like stoke, and if they outweigh losses from pro-brexit voters that labour might alienate with such a position - the party doesn't operate with corbyn making executive decisions on this, people are split on this and the current policy is a v delicate compromise. this has been said a few times itt so any lingering scepticism on this point should be articulated or we're going nowhere

referenda do not work well with the parliamentary party system but if you want a democratic outcome then I think it's better to let ppl vote and go along with it rather than trying to impose consensus onto the party where there is none for no clear benefit, unless you want a pro-remain opposition for purity/'strategic genius' reasons

otm

I want a pro-remain opposition because the alternative is backing up a dumptruck full of votes onto the Lib Dem's lawn.

I also think that long-term keeping the labour party reasonably together is more important than the media optics for the next brexit campaign, esp given that there's no reason to think it will be any more final or decisive than the last one

pro-remain opposition after the next GE

Second referendum is Labour policy and it's a referendum between a properly negotiated Brexit deal and Remain, which is better than the blind-stab-in-the-dark choice that was presented last time. It's the only democratic way forward at this stage because - and this is crucial - at this juncture no one really respects the result of the 2016 referendum *and that includes the people who won*. The mistake everyone in government made was to treat a narrow win as a mandate for any Brexit at all, and it's been hijacked by No Deal ultras as a result.

The problem is that any Labour referendum will be cast as illegitimate by the ultras, it'll be Surrender vs Remain, but what other option is there at this stage?

total nuclear war is looking increasingly attractive tbh

BBC 6music news reporting extensively on a speech by a Liberal Democrat MP called Chuka Umunna, in which he criticizes the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Long clip of CU saying poisonous trash about JC at great length.

This isn't even Radio 4.

i'm afraid if you listen to 6 you deserve everything you get

i mean this is true of the entire BBC at this stage but still

As I was trying to say above, if it's a four-way fight then I'm more relaxed about it - but if it's one Brexit / Tory party candidate per constituency and Labour still half-arsing this and hoping someone asks them a question about housing, then we're going to see what happens when Boris Johnson has a sizable majority, and no-one on this thread is going to like that.

i don't think most of us will blame Labour for the cunts who are stupid enough to vote Lib Dem because they only give a shit about Remain

BBC 6music news reporting extensively on a speech by a Liberal Democrat MP called Chuka Umunna, in which he criticizes the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Long clip of CU saying poisonous trash about JC at great length.

This isn't even Radio 4.

xp otm, Lib Dems don’t give a shit about any of us - they’d have taken the pragmatic approach of aiming for a softer Brexit & working backwards rather than denying anything that’s not full Remain and inviting Guy fucking Verhoefstadt (I am so mad about this ffs) to their conference to make a speech that makes the EU sound like a fucking super villain project!!!

FBPEers bleating is middle class cunts who calmly stood thru 40 years of Thatcherite economics

I hear you, I just don't think 'pwning the FBPErs' is a solid programme for the left, unless resentment – no matter how justified – is your sole MO. Coming at this from a (very) foreign perspective, it's hard to see the UK's current woes as anything but self-devised. It's not as though there were some EU-wide law preventing Sweden, Denmark or the Netherlands from implementing strong social policies (well, unless your actual goal is full communism, in which case ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). You could argue that the EU ought to be more interventionist (see: Hungary, Poland, Italy, etc.), but that comes with its own obvious set of pitfalls, and it's not hard to guess how most of the British public views such a prospect. This is wishful thinking, of course, but my preference for the UK would be: stop endlessly electing and re-electing the Parties of Austerity, crack down on tax evasion, redistribute the shit out of your ill-gotten post-imperial wealth, leave immigrants the fuck alone, etc., all of which strike me as easier to achieve from within the EU (which is, after all, the sum of its parts).

“You cannot be a champion of liberalism when your leader’s supporters think it is acceptable to abuse, vilify and deselect anyone who dares to question the leader.

xp

yeah well i think the sum of my post was a guarded "better in than out"

the class ressentiment at the FBPEeps on here is purely for bitter lulz, not a programme