Off Topic Politics Thread

  • Please bear with us on the new site integration and fixing any known bugs over the coming days. If you can not log in please try resetting your password and check your spam box. If you have tried these steps and are still struggling email [email protected] with your username/registered email address
  • Log in now to remove adverts - no adverts at all to registered members!
I don’t really know to be honest. I know Corbyn is going to be a hard sell outside of London (where I live and where I will be campaigning). In the next GE I will do what little I can to help Catherine West retain Hornsey and Wood Green for Labour.

In large part I put that down to the relentless orchestrated smear campaign conducted against him by all sections of the media. When people - to quote Steve Coogan - listen to what JC says, rather than to what others say about him, they are often won over by a combination of common sense and decency. So we’ll see. He is the leader elected - not once but twice - by the membership of the only political party I have ever considered belonging to, so I’m happy to be a foot soldier in his GE campaign.

As for the LibDems, I can never forgive them for embracing austerity, but especially (and this is personal) for privatising Royal Mail.

Lynn Featherstone was my MP for a while btw. I respected her as an individual and still do, so Im not virulently anti Liberal; but I’m a socialist and a trade unionist, and she once openly and honestly told a group of Hornsey residents that she was neither of those things.

Finally I don’t know if Labour has any chance of winning the next election (though I’m not as pessimistic as you seem to be). But I know you don’t stop fighting for what you believe in just because you think you’ll lose.
Don’t forget the Lib Dem’s also went into the 2010 election promising to scrap tuition fees and ended up tripling them.

The one unsavoury factor in that brilliant march yesterday was some of the Lib Dem banners and placards. Practically every other political party group I saw carried placards focussing on stopping Brexit, but the LD’s ones were often almost sectarian in their hostility to Labour (Corbyn in particular) as well as the Tories.

They will be a big factor in the 2 upcoming campaigns though, and I am prepared to hold my nose and campaign alongside them in the referendum, and I will be, sadly, forced to vote for them in the General Election. The only consolation is that Tessa Munt was a great constituency MP for Wells from 2010 to 2015, and definitely deserves another shot.
 
Just join them mate, you know you want to.


I first worked for Labour on October 8 1959. My best mate and myself ran the voting sheets from the polling station to the committee room in his parent's house, I was seven. We did the same job in '64 when Wilson won. But you know your idea isn't such a bad one, after sixty years it's time for a change of scenery, so I just filled in the Lib Dem application.

And btw I think Brexit will now pass, not with LD votes, not with SNP votes not with DUP votes, but with Labour votes.
 
I first worked for Labour on October 8 1959. My best mate and myself ran the voting sheets from the polling station to the committee room in his parent's house, I was seven. We did the same job in '64 when Wilson won. But you know your idea isn't such a bad one, after sixty years it's time for a change of scenery, so I just filled in the Lib Dem application.

And btw I think Brexit will now pass, not with LD votes, not with SNP votes not with DUP votes, but with Labour votes.


Regarding your last sentence, if Boris gets his Brexit it will be at least in part due to Jo Swinson grandstanding her personal animosity to Jeremy Corbyn, and in so doing scuppering hopes for a VoNC and interim government of National Interest.

But let’s not start apportioning blame for something that hasn’t happened yet.
 
I sincerely hope that we don't have to. Having said that I really cannot see any way that Corbyn can be absolved of blame. As I said earlier he damned Remain with faint praise and that was most likely crucial in the result. It's no good blaming a party that has been solid for Remain throughout.

What Labour must do now us to make it clear to any tempted to vote for Pfeffels latest wheelbarrow full of lies and half truths that the price for this is instant and permanent expulsion from the party. Just like they did to Alistair Campbell.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Schrodinger's Cat
Well said Beddy.

I think a Final Say vote is looking more and more likely, and will probably be the price Boris has to pay to get his shoddy deal through Parliament. When it happens, there should be some independent authority like the Electoral Commission appointed to monitor all the claims made by the leaders of both sides of the campaign so they can be independently fact-checked. Social media should also be monitored so there can’t be a repeat of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Somehow, during the campaign, the genuine grievances of the millions who voted Leave in 2016 have to be faced up to and addressed. If they are listened to and analysed, most of them will be down far more to Tory Austerity than anything to do with the EU, but the lies of Johnson, Farage and co. over the last 2 or more decades will take a lot of unpicking.

Reference your first paragraph, this is something that should be done for all political programmes, (imagine the damage done to an MP when a claim made is instantly proven to be untrue) but in this instance I would commission an independent programme to do what you say and broadcast it on every terrestrial tv channel, at the same time, in order to TRY and get the majority of the country to watch it.
Let’s take it a step further and enforce the same facts being printed in all the written media outlets, without any editorial comment.
It would be good for right wing newspaper readers to read something actually based on truth, for once.
Totally agree with the Tory austerity comment. That has always been the major cause of unrest, especially amongst the poor, ably assisted by the mainstream media.
 
Pfeffel is going to get it through with ten or a dozen Labour votes. Those people will be motivated by several different things, but essentially they are decent people unable to see through the thin veneer of reasonableness put forward by the government. Once they have been used and it's too late they will find out how they have been lied to and deceived.
 
Regarding your last sentence, if Boris gets his Brexit it will be at least in part due to Jo Swinson grandstanding her personal animosity to Jeremy Corbyn, and in so doing scuppering hopes for a VoNC and interim government of National Interest.

But let’s not start apportioning blame for something that hasn’t happened yet.

There was no chance of that succeeding simply because Corbyn can't get the support of the Tory rebels. Harriet Harman, Ken Clarke or Margaret Beckett would have been acceptable.
 
the people who blocked the deal last time were Boris and his cronies so it wouldnt be a surprise that it gets through now they have got hold of the power they wanted and are now voting for it.

He's deceived the people well into thinking there's been actual movement from the eu in this deal