Should the UK remain a member of the EU

[Section_31]

It's funny that Corbyn often takes shit for not being politically minded, yet by remaining non-committal he's played a blinder. 

 

What is it that May wants more than anything at this point in time? To unite her party. what's the best way of doing that? A common enemy. 

 

The minute Corbyn comes out for a people's vote or whatever the fuck, Labour loses a swathe of working class voters that gravitated back to them from UKIP, and also gives May a crusade and a clear selling point for her plan 'It's my Brexit or no Brexit' 'If you want to keep free movement and Romnaians with their Roma-hating and wandering sex hands, vote Corbyn!'

 

Besides which, if being pro EU is such a vote winner, how come the Rotary club of Little Hulton currently has more members than the Lib Dems? 

 

When your enemy is making a mistake, never interrupt them. 

 

Also, Soubry can fuck off, the grotesque spineless cunt. 

[Anubis]

1 hour ago, Captain Turdseye said:

 

You’d like to think so but where I live, which is not prosperous by any means, Hancock increased his majority last time round. And when I knock on doors wearing a Labour rosette I get people in council houses slamming doors in my face and shouting “not while that cunt’s in charge”

 

This is a place like most others. Town centre being run down, can’t get a doctors appointment, violent crime starting to creep in, etc, but old people that actually still vote will read the S*n/Mail and believe any old shite. 

 

I’ve not been involved very long but I’ve almost had enough. We’ve got no money and we’re lucky if we get 10 branch members turn up at a meeting. Two of them are me and my 14 year old stepson. It’s a battle that can’t be won. 

 

What baffles me most is that it was a Labour area until 1997, when seemingly the rest of the country went the other way. 

Our CLP are everywhere. We’ve had a daily presence at the Arriva, train guard and Camell Laird disputes. We camapaign regularly in Walton, Liverpool and Southport areas and are involved in loads of community projects. We even went campaigning in other parts of the country during the general election. As I’m losing more weight I’m feeling able to get better involved. Sack your CLP off and come to us!

[AngryOfTuebrook]

1 hour ago, magicrat said:

After the dust settles from yesterday's fiasco I am actually very concerned that there is no majority in the house for any outcome and by default we crash out. With May a dead woman walking a new leader in the likely form of a Brexiteer makes that prospect more real. 

 

Corbyn is wrong not to go for the jugular ,call a NC vote and swing fully behind the peoples vote. Labour are not getting their dream of a GE.  The Tory Turkeys and the DUP will not vote for Christmas. The lunatics have truly taken over the asylum .

Right now, the Tories would win a No Confidence vote - Anna Soubry knows.

 

They need to lose the vote on May's Brexit deal first. 

 

 

[AngryOfTuebrook]

36 minutes ago, Strontium Dog said:

 

Come on, he gave the EU a mark of 7 out of 10, how can you argue with enthusiasm like that...

When obviously he should have said "it's perfect! I especially love all the recent neoliberal drift that has caused so much damage to the working people of Europe."

 

Guaranteed vote-winner, that.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

39 minutes ago, Strontium Dog said:

 

Come on, he gave the EU a mark of 7 out of 10, how can you argue with enthusiasm like that...

I still remember the good old days of *checks a few pages back* last week, when you were slating Corbyn for not being honest and implying that you'd rather he told the truth, even if it means handing untramelled control of Brexit to the loons in the Tory Party. 

 

What happened to you, man?

[Captain Turdseye]

17 minutes ago, Anubis said:

Our CLP are everywhere. We’ve had a daily presence at the Arriva, train guard and Camell Laird disputes. We camapaign regularly in Walton, Liverpool and Southport areas and are involved in loads of community projects. We even went campaigning in other parts of the country during the general election. As I’m losing more weight I’m feeling able to get better involved. Sack your CLP off and come to us!

 

Youre in a safe Labour seat. You should bring your lot down to me.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

51 minutes ago, Strontium Dog said:

 

Come on, he gave the EU a mark of 7 out of 10, how can you argue with enthusiasm like that...

Well considering it’s not a perfect thing, 7/10 isn’t a bad score to give it. 

 

I’d give it 7.0123/10 myself. 

[SasaS]

32 minutes ago, Anubis said:

Our CLP are everywhere. We’ve had a daily presence at the Arriva, train guard and Camell Laird disputes. We camapaign regularly in Walton, Liverpool and Southport areas and are involved in loads of community projects. We even went campaigning in other parts of the country during the general election. As I’m losing more weight I’m feeling able to get better involved. Sack your CLP off and come to us!

Talk about that people starving austerity measures blowing up in the Tories' faces.

[Anubis]

29 minutes ago, Captain Turdseye said:

 

Youre in a safe Labour seat. You should bring your lot down to me.

The fact we’re in a safe seat hasn’t stopped us campaigning in others or doing what we do. We were campaigning in the marginal Wirral seats on GE day, with only a skeleton presence in Walton. If you want us to campaign in your area at any election just tell us and we’ll try and get there. If you want me to sort you out with a copy of our (now much copied) welcome booklet for new members, PM me and I’ll get it to you. It does sound like we are a lot more enthused than your lot though. Maybe we could send you some fireworks to light under their arse.

[Anubis]

The thread currently under this is Curb Your Enthusiasm....

[Manny]

Christ, Labour and Corbyn getting any shit whatsoever about this really boils my piss. Brexit is 100% square at the door of the Tories:

• It's their common-room debate that's wrangled on since the 70s
• It's the issue that's divided their party since the days of Thatcher
• It's their fucking MP's who've written editorials in the Spectator and so on making up myths about the EuroBogeyman
• It's their party that decided to call a referendum to settle this bullshit
• It's their party that insisted that an advisory referendum had to become a national mission statement
• It's their party that has lost MP's to fucking UKIP because Euro-skeptcism is so openly rife throughout their ranks
• It's their party that gave the leave campaign all it's big-hitting fronters
• It's their party whose membership voted to leave in much bigger proportions
• It's their party that has been in charge of the post-referendum government since day 1
• It's their party that has been in charge of all of the negotiations, all of the appointments to DExEU and the Foreign Office, all of the whole fucking process
• It's their party that triggered A50 before they even came up with a strategy, and then triggered a general election during the negotiations to try and capitalise
• It's their party that have pulled all sorts of shenanigans in Parliament to block, obfuscate and delay any kind of unity solution and try and keep the whole process in-(messy)house

In the face of all of that, what is there? Corbyn was "7/10" on the EU? It's total bullshit whatever else you think about him or his party - this entire fucking shambles was and is a Tory construct, it's their fucking bullshit that's come out of the rotary clubs and into the public mainstream. They're an absolute cancer on this country, the damage they've done in the last 8 years is absolutely catastrophic and running away from their reckoning is the rectal cherry on the fucking shit cake.

[Captain Turdseye]

3 minutes ago, Anubis said:

The fact we’re in a safe seat hasn’t stopped us campaigning in others or doing what we do. We were campaigning in the marginal Wirral seats on GE day, with only a skeleton presence in Walton. If you want us to campaign in your area at any election just tell us and we’ll try and get there. If you want me to sort you out with a copy of our (now much copied) welcome booklet for new members, PM me and I’ll get it to you. It does sound like we are a lot more enthused than your lot though. Maybe we could send you some fireworks to light under their arse.

 

The active members are mostly 50+ and have all had a go on the town council and a turn as mayor. There’s a couple of younger, newish members and that’s it.

 

It’s not worth the journey, mate. Four hours each way and his majority is currently something like 40,000. Stick to the marginals closer to home where it could end up being worthwhile. Cheers for the offer though. 

[Jairzinho]

I thought Corbyn was being pretty generous.

[Vincent Vega]

Paul Mason's piece in The Guardian today is pretty much how I see things now.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/11/brexit-labour-second-referendum-vote-remain-paul-mason

 

Brexit is a failed project. Labour must oppose it
Paul Mason

The opposition should get behind a second referendum – and vote to remain

Sometimes, in politics, you just have to fight for what you believe in. I believe that – amid the current geopolitical meltdown – staying in the European Union and reforming it is safer than casting ourselves adrift with a bunch of rightwing Tory xenophobes at the helm.

 

But since the referendum, I’ve understood that a leftwing Labour government can only be achieved by building a coalition of voters across the Brexit divide. It’s a belief based on the experience of the 2017 general election, when I campaigned in solidly working-class areas where, to keep a doorstep conversation going for more than 30 seconds, the first sentence had to be: “We will deliver Brexit.”

However, the voters chose Theresa May to deliver Brexit, and it is she who has to take responsibility for the catastrophe that’s unfolded. As she heads for Brussels, and further fruitless days of negotiatons, those who supported Brexit have to face the fact: there is no form of possible Brexit that you are going to like.

May’s negotiating strategy handed all the power to Europe; she knew the deal would be unsellable to her own voters, so she delayed revealing it until last summer, when – as predicted – it split the cabinet and paralysed the government.

 

If we ever get to the point where the prime minister summons the courage to stage a vote on the deal, I want Labour to vote it down and then use every possible parliamentary tactic to bring down this government. That could include a no-confidence vote, a censure against May herself or – if the votes are there – a minority government headed by Jeremy Corbyn.

 

 

May had one job – to do a Brexit deal and get it through the Commons. Once she fails there is no workable combination of Tory plus DUP votes that can keep the show on the road. So what next? For as long as the referendum result remained valid, Labour was right to try to deliver a form of Brexit that mitigates the economic risks and keeps us geopolitically close to the EU. It would have been electoral suicide for Labour to have become the “remain party” – and would have needlessly polarised the politics along the lines of a culture war, as Trump has done in the US.

 

But once May’s deal is rejected in parliament, that period should come to an end. The Labour party’s front bench needs to face the fact that – through no fault of its own – the space for a bespoke “soft” Brexit, keeping Britain inside the customs union and close to the single market, is shrinking rapidly.

 

The only form of softer Brexit available is likely to be the one called Norway-plus, as advocated by both Tory and Labour backbenchers. It means joining the customs union, staying in the single market and applying an “emergency brake” to free movement. Though not ideal, it is a solution that could achieve what so many voters in hard-pressed towns want: to sort the Brexit issue, give us a modicum of control over migration policy, and move on. I would back it, if it were enacted by a temporary coalition of Labour and the nationalist parties. But the numbers don’t seem to be there in parliament and I expect it to fail.

 

So what is Labour’s fallback? Should it be, as John McDonnell and Keir Starmer have intimated, a second referendum with the party campaigning for remain? Or should it conduct a rearguard action on behalf of the June 2016 referendum majority, in an attempt to get a soft Brexit deal that can unite the population? It’s a challenge that hinges on a question that many in Corbyn’s Labour party don’t want to answer: who does Labour really represent?

Since 2014 it’s been clear that the tribal alliance that used to put Labour into power is pulling in different ways. Traditionally this included the working-class towns of England, the inhabitants of Great Britain’s largest cities and the wider population of Scotland and Wales plus – to seal the deal – the suburban middle-class swing voter. Once a majority of young, educated Scots had swung behind the independence project, and the Scottish radical left joined them, the old tribal alliance began to fall apart.

 

Meanwhile a cultural divide has opened up: the cities, the university-educated, the public-sector employees and the professional middle class are more socially liberal, more globalist, more supportive of a migration than before. But in small towns, and among those with low skills and low incomes, the cultural pull is in the opposite direction.

 

Finally, the middle-class swing voter just wants all the chaos and fractiousness to go away. If Labour had remained a hollow shell, bereft of a vibrant intellectual life and mass involvement, the problem would be less acute – the manias and enthusiasms currently energising grassroots politics would, in Ed Miliband’s day, have been filtered through layers of dull technocracy.

 

But hundreds of thousands of people have flocked to Corbyn’s project – and it is important to recognise that they come both from working-class towns and university cities; from the manual working class and the educated salariat.

What unites most of them – including, I stress here, those from working-class communities – is a globalist and socially liberal attitude to life, the desire for a radical programme of redistribution and investment in, and support for, human rights. In the industrial town where I grew up, the labour movement was always a line drawn through the working class, in favour of values: social justice, tolerance and solidarity. There were always people on the other side, though they used to vote Tory rather than Ukip.

 

The answer to “who does Labour really represent?” should be a no-brainer. It represents people who are prepared to put evidence before prejudice, fight for social justice, save globalisation by doing less of it – and who are not prepared to throw their black, brown and eastern European colleagues under the bus of xenophobia. It represents women not misogynists, internationalists not nationalists.

 

 

Nobody knows that better than the Labour activists who – in the pubs, clubs and high-street stalls of small-town Britain – have to argue face to face with racists and Little Englanders, week in, week out. I know, from talking to my friends among them, that they do not look forward to a second referendum campaign. Even if the numbers supporting leave are falling, their anger is getting stronger as their dreams evaporate.

 

But I have met hardly anyone inside the Labour party who wants to go into the next election supporting Brexit. Anecdotally, among Labour branches who’ve been loyal to Corbyn, and among Momentum members, I find tolerance for that line at breaking point. Because, as designed and managed by its backers, the Brexit project has failed. The only possible form of it is something its supporters can’t accept.

 

So if Labour can’t trigger an election, it should push in parliament for a second referendum and vote remain. But what if an election can be triggered? Given that parliament is sovereign, why should Labour tie itself to a failed project that was the brainchild of its enemies, and in which no significant part of its family believes?

 

The strategy of letting leave supporters learn by experience was a good one: they have learned that hard Brexit is a fantasy, that Boris Johnson is a coward and that the Tories are a chaotic mess. But this strategy has to be superseded by a struggle over principles and vision. To weather the backlash, Labour needs to fight for the values its members, activists and loyal voters believe in. That does not look like any form of Brexit achievable in the conditions of 2019.

 

So in a snap election I want Labour to embrace its old position: remain and reform – with the offer of a “final say” referendum once Labour is installed in office. The moral authority of the old result will have evaporated. There are three new cohorts of 18-year-olds who should have their say, a worsening geopolitical situation – and three left governments in Europe we can ally with to replace the Lisbon treaty with something better. I don’t dismiss the fears of some union leaders and north of England MPs over a Brexit backlash; I want to hear them debated openly, just as they were at Labour’s conference. That’s why, if we do get a snap election, like the TSSA union leader Manuel Cortes, I want to see the decision on what’s in Labour’s manifesto taken by an elected body of the Labour party – the NEC, a special conference or the Clause V committee – with a public debate inside the party based on evidence.

 

Labour’s conference left “all options on the table”, including a second referendum and a remain vote. Nowhere in its conference motion on Brexit did it say a second referendum would be a “betrayal”. That’s the language of our opponents. We should counter it with a narrative of hope.

[Section_31]

I don't mind Mason but he seems to change his tune on an almost daily basis about a whole range of stuff. 

[Numero Veinticinco]

20 minutes ago, Jairzinho said:

I thought Corbyn was being pretty generous.

Yeah, I mean I think it's a fair position to take that the EU is a mess, and isn't perfect, and actually isn't great, whilst also being safe in the knowledge that it's better than not being in it or retracting from it after you are in it. It's a strange criticism. It's almost as if the acceptable position to SD was blind partisan loyalty where you can't acknowledge complexity and nuance. Hmn... 

[Strontium]

56 minutes ago, Numero Veinticinco said:

Yeah, I mean I think it's a fair position to take that the EU is a mess, and isn't perfect, and actually isn't great, whilst also being safe in the knowledge that it's better than not being in it or retracting from it after you are in it. It's a strange criticism. It's almost as if the acceptable position to SD was blind partisan loyalty where you can't acknowledge complexity and nuance. Hmn... 

 

It's almost as if the acceptable position to SD was to not denigrate the thing you're supposed to be arguing in favour of by publicly rating it as mediocre. Especially when he, a man who has happily shared a stage with the likes of Hamas and Sinn Fein, refuses to appear at pro-EU events alongside his predecessors as Labour leader. Sooner or later people pick up on a reluctance to say nice things about the EU.

[Strontium]

1 hour ago, Jairzinho said:

I thought Corbyn was being pretty generous.

 

Looks like you'd best start planning your return to Blighty, eh.

[Numero Veinticinco]

8 minutes ago, Strontium Dog said:

 

It's almost as if the acceptable position to SD was to not denigrate

I've got to stop you there. Understanding something isn't perfect isn't the same as denigrating. 

[Strontium]

2 minutes ago, Numero Veinticinco said:

I've got to stop you there. Understanding something isn't perfect isn't the same as denigrating. 

 

We all acknowledge that the EU isn't perfect. But if you're trying to sell something - anything at all - you try to talk it up.

 

If I went into a shop to buy something, and the shop assistant, after umming and ahhing for a bit, rated my potential purchase as a 7 out of 10, then I'd probably not buy it. And guess what - people didn't buy it.

[Numero Veinticinco]

1 minute ago, Strontium Dog said:

 

We all acknowledge that the EU isn't perfect. But if you're trying to sell something - anything at all - you try to talk it up.

 

If I went into a shop to buy something, and the shop assistant, after umming and ahhing for a bit, rated my potential purchase as a 7 out of 10, then I'd probably not buy it. And guess what - people didn't buy it.

So, essentially, you want him to lie?

[SasaS]

EU > Hamas.

[Section_31]

10 minutes ago, Strontium Dog said:

 

It's almost as if the acceptable position to SD was to not denigrate the thing you're supposed to be arguing in favour of by publicly rating it as mediocre. Especially when he, a man who has happily shared a stage with the likes of Hamas and Sinn Fein, refuses to appear at pro-EU events alongside his predecessors as Labour leader. Sooner or later people pick up on a reluctance to say nice things about the EU.

Why has he got to say nice things about the EU?

 

Also, why do you raise Corbyn 'sharing a stage with Sinn Fein' as though that's got anything to do with anything? He also got arrested for protesting apartheid did he not? 

 

Nick Clegg works for Facebook, an organisation that arguably helped contribute to not only the election of Donald Trump but ironically, quite possibly Brexit too. Where do you stand on him? 

 

The EU IS shite. I voted remain due to the devil you know, but it's shite. It works well as a trading block but has wrought economic and social ballyhoo on member nations which themselves have spawned populist and right wing leaders as a result. It's also got zero balls when it comes to facing down belligerent activities. Why should I, or Corbyn, or anyone else be expected to paint a rose tinted picture in order to sell it to people who happen to disagree with you?

 

Seriously, hearing Tory and lib dem backers, vehement anti Corbyn and anti Labour voices bemoaning the fact he hasn't ridden to their rescue (even though he's got ZERO power to stop it is political and moral cowardice on an unprecedented scale. It's the equivalent of when a kid gets the shit kicked out of it by its dad and the mum blames the kid for making too much noisee.

 

Your party's austerity enablement helped bring Brexit about, Rico's party LITERALLY brought it about and fucked it up. You should both own that shit.

[Em City]

Stronts, you once said the Brexit vote was illegitimate because the entirety of the Leave campaign was based on distortions and outright lies (a point I'm not entirely unsympathetic to). You gave me the standard neg when I pointed out lies and distortion was par for the course with any democratic election even though that's a hard and indisputable fact. 

 

You're now criticising Corbyn for doing the exact opposite in being completely honest. No doubt you'll indulge in the usual semantic gymnastics and draw a distinction between lying and playing a bit of election PR, but this latest hypothesis of yours reeks of intellectual dishonesty and partisan opportunism.

[Strontium]

25 minutes ago, Numero Veinticinco said:

So, essentially, you want him to lie?

 

Not even slightly.