Did I?
Can't say I remember that, but the Tories blatantly needed kicking out and Starmer did give off a veneer of competence
I haven't honestly been paying a huge amount of attention to politics since the election, it's been a lot less entertaining since the Tory clown show have been seen off.
At least this lot have shown a willingness to be practical in their approach to our relationship with the EU, when the Tories were ideologically wedded to thumbing their noses to Europe as much as possible.
You used to be everything to me
Now you're tired of fighting
O'Brien speaks!
(Fair amount of Whataboutism here, but he does have a point)
Ten years ago I quite liked James O’Brien
Now I can’t stand him, i think that’s partly because Brexit changed him and it changed me
It changed him into someone who is grossly puritanical, completely lacking in self awareness and smug and satisfied to excessive degree. Like Mac if he had a brain
It changed me into someone who just despises political tribalism of any kind. There is definitely an argument to be made that Brexit could have been resolved more amicably if people on the Remain side had stopped throwing Teddy out of the pram and compromised. “I didn’t vote for it” is a petulant response, you still have to live in the country where it’s going to be enacted and the more intractable you are the more it’s going to embolden the headbangers.
And like when you join a cult or tribe, your opinion recalibrates so that instead of being nuanced and individualistic you become a mouthpiece for every single belief your tribe holds, and O’Brien is an exemplar of this.
The reason the Starmer free gifts issue is bad, is because a) it makes him look like a massive hypocrite especially when he took a preaching from the bully pulpit approach to the Tories doing it b) It looks especially bad and tone deaf when fairly or unfairly you’ve smashed the winter fuel allowance and have potentially left those just above the cut off point in deep shtuck. Politics is as much about communication as it is policy and this is absolutely stupid and avoidable.
If it’s about Sue Gray, well if her wage is being footed by the taxpayer of course it’s going to cause issues.
What am I wrong about with Remain (bearing in mind that I voted Remain in 2016)
There absolutely was and still is an intractability about Remain supporters that is just as irrational and unreasonable as you most fervent leaver. I do think there’s such a thing as loser’s consent, and in fact more so there’s an obligation if you think leaving the EU is a bad idea to actually get round a table and act like adults in order to mitigate its effects, and thus negate giving power to the zealots (which the ERG absolutely are)
But when so many took this strident rejoin or fuck off position, it created mass instability and led me to conclude that they were no different from the leavers in terms of putting what they wanted above what was good for the country
all the economic evidence shows that 'Project Fear' was actually 'Project Truth' and all the nastiness, racism etc we've seen is a direct result of Fuckrage and co stirring up division and hatred
the majority of people, especially younger people, in this country now want to rejoin but Starmer's too scared to go there again and tbh i get that, as thanks to our febrile media it causes so much strife - give it 5-10 years though and i think the conversation will begin in earnest - we'll rejoin eventually but under worse terms without (ironically) Thatcher's rebate and after a lot of damage has been done
Project Fear became a term that was attached to any negative forecast about Brexit, realistic or otherwise. But the predictions of economic collapse were ridiculous, the inflationary issue has been a global problem caused by the effect of Covid and the Ukraine war on supply chains. Brexit has had a deleterious effect on the uk economy, but it’s a slow puncture rather than the apocalypse predicted.
The main reason Britain is in the state it’s in, is vast underinvestment by the last government and the severe austerity cuts made in the 2010-2015 parliament, other countries which have had their economies more adversely affected than ours had a cushion to fall back on in terms of both existing public service infrastructure and energy independence.
The most affected businesses are those who were directly dependent on frictionless trade with the continent (and around 95% of uk businesses are not)
Plus none of this is germane to the point I’m making is that Remain lost, it ran a bad campaign and lost. Because so many smug people were oblivious to the fact that we had a neglected underclass who had hollowed out communities as a result of us selling off heavy manufacturing, and when we weren’t using freedom of movement to encourage businesses to recruit cheap labour or to fill the skills gap in the labour market (where our education system wasn’t focused on vocational training) we were also domiciling the poorest migrants in the least well off communities (this was a deliberate ploy by Osbourne, cutting services from those communities, telling them that their services are being overwhelmed by immigration and promising to deal with immigration).
Because the liberal/left were too stupid and too unwilling to delineate actual racism from concerns over immigration in economic or social cohesion terms. This created a vacuum in which the populists stepped in to.
The failure to learn these lessons even after Brexit means that is why you see parties like Reform do well, and why you have AfD surging across Germany.
The polls you see that show most people want to rejoin the EU, never take one thing into consideration. How salient the issue is to them. The EU was barely spoken about by any party (the Lib Dem pledged to rejoin the single market) because a) it’s low on people’s list of priorities and b) people don’t want the headache of having another divisive referendum.
It’s not just Starmer being cowardly, no politician in their right mind would re-open that Pandora’s Box