No, we can rely on Kier Starmer’s (remember him? Locked away during the election as being seen to be too pro-EU for most Labour voters) detailed exposition of how Labour would have gone about it. He described it very credibly weeks before we ended up deciding to have an election. Corbyn’s campaign waffling about getting a new deal disguised a huge amount of detailed work that had gone into it, that was never allowed to be explained to the electorate. Not that they’d have paid a moment’s attention, but I am I no doubt Labour’s approach would have generated a much closer relationship with the EU than Boris ever could.
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Starmer is great. But, as you say, he was locked away. There is no reason to believe that with Corbyn in charge his exposition has any relevance. OTOH, had Starmer been Labour leader then my main point, which is that Corbyn provided an opportunity for anti-Corbyn otherwise-Labour remainers to not vote Labour, would not apply.
Completely wrong. If elected, Labour would have had him in position and in charge of the negotiations and there is no reason to think they would not have. Corbyn WAS in charge while Starmer built Labour’s position on the EU exit.
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Perhaps you are right, but we have no reason to think that other than faith.
This is getting tedious. We have several reasons to think that. Starmer was already in position as shadow Brexit/EU minister. He had somehow managed to arrive at a position that the whole party could just about get behind - even the arch-brexiteer Corbyn. The whole ‘do a better deal and put it to the country’ was significantly linked to him (among others). And the significant number of non-tankie/moderate Labour MPs Corbyn would have been forced to retain in his cabinet would have meant that any attempt to exclude Starmer or remove him from that position would almost certainly have resulted in wholesale cabinet resignations/party kickback. He could not have done it without huge political risk of internal Labour fracture much worse than it currently suffers. The war would have been for real and out in the open and he would not have risked it.
Yes, you may say this is all speculation - but it is at least based on arguable and observable political actions and circumstances, unlike your own ‘no reason to believe’ anything approach.
I won’t be bothering to give you any more reasons to believe anything, as you clearly don’t want to. (And it no longer matters anyway.)
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None of this changes my original point, which was that Corbyn as leader made it possible for remain voters who loathed Corbyn for other reasons, especially Jewish remain voters, to hold their nose and vote for other parties or just stay home, in a way that practically anyone else as leader, including Starmer, would not have. Most people aren’t going to go through convoluted calculations to convince themselves to vote for someone they despise and distrust.
Nor was it intended to. It addressed a different point, about the scale of the economic mess caused by Brexit, in both hypothetical (as in ‘yet to come’) Tory and Labour (real hypothetical), scenarios, which you engaged with.
Have a good evening.
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The Troubles on two fronts then?
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No. (Yes, I probably saw the invisible /s tag there) Most unlikely. Not least because the SNP leadership has been at pains today to emphasise there will be no civil disobedience or unlawful ‘indicative’ referendums.
Their message is clear: Dear Boris, every time you claim your mandate, we’ll remind you of ours. You have no mandate in Scotland and we have a clear mandate to demand another independence referendum.
Of course, it’s idiotic futility because nobody ever got anywhere by thinking they could shame or embarrass Boris into doing anything - the man has no shame and thrives on hypocrisy.
But stranger things have happened, so Boris might capitulate (and lose his job) or some Scots might get a little, shall we say, “extra-parliamentary” in due course.
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I would like to think that. But his speech to the Palestinian Return Centre, where he all but said that English Jews aren’t really English, makes it hard.
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Er, you know that drumpf didn’t think of that. It was most successfully used last century by one Josef Goebbels.
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Acknowledged. (EDITED TO ADD - ref the conversation with @anon15383236 below - I should not have quoted that part of SheiffFatman’s post in my reply, I should have quoted the Guardian’s text that it was Zionists who were accused by Corbyn of not getting irony.)
And saying it was despite living in the UK for a long time was the biggest faux-pas in that comment, because Zionists are no different to others in any ‘political’ movement or organisation - the more zealous they get about their cause the more they seem to have had a humour/irony by-pass.
I could have granted him a comment about extremists in general not getting irony but he chose to go further and blame British Zionists for not having ‘assimilated’ - because, obviously, if you ‘assimilate’ you can pardon all sorts of comments as merely ‘ironic’, can’t you!
The real irony here is, of course, that Corbyn himself shows clear signs of not getting irony, from time to time. He certainly gives every impression in public of not having much of a sense of humour. In some senses the whole election was a battle between humourlessness and humour, given Boris’s stark contrast to Corbyn on that front.
Momentum is another organisation that seems to require an irony by-pass in order to be a senior member of it.
He was talking about Zionists, not Jews. Some Zionists aren’t Jews, and some Jews aren’t Zionists.
Anyone listening to that discussion of Israel and Palestinians has to shut out a lot of it, and then misinterpret the rest, to interpret it as evidence that he’s smearing Jewish people in general.
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I fully agree, and was fully aware of that, and nothing I posted indicated anything to the contrary.
I was responding to @SheiffFatman’s reference to the Guardian article’s headline, which specifically mentions Zionists only. SheifFatman’s own text …
… may have been what you meant to reply to and perhaps should have quoted.
Except where you “acknowedged” this?
his speech to the Palestinian Return Centre, where he all but said that English Jews aren’t really English,
Not that it matters much, really. We seem to agree that the press in general did a right effective hatchet job on Corbyn.
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Yeah, sorry about that - I also picked the wrong part of SheiffFatman’s post to quote - a brain fart. I’d go and edit it, but that would make this conversation stranded. I have added a comment in my original reply above.
Indeed, and he was not helped by his own hatchet job on himself with all his very mixed signals about anti-semitism, given the actual track record of how the whole debacle emerged and developed over the past couple of years.
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He said:
This was dutifully recorded by the, thankfully silent, Zionists who were in the audience on that occasion, and then came up and berated him afterwards for what he had said.
They clearly have two problems. One is that they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, don’t understand English irony either.
[Emphasis added.]
So he’s talking about people born in England yet who don’t fully partake of the English character.
Do you really think he meant non-Jewish Zionists?
I’d like to think so, but it seems a stretch.
And so does finely combing through the possible nuances of this decontextualized snippet from a talk in search of evidence for Corbyn’s supposed, rabid antisemitism.
Meh, fuck it. In a way, it’s not worth arguing about anymore. Corbyn is effectively gone, banished to the realm of irrelevance, largely by a Tory-favoring press functioning as a lapdog for rich fucks who will never have enough money. That press went right along with the smearing of Corbyn as a rabid antisemite, when chances are much stronger that overt distrust of The Jews, and a conception of them as a permanently non-English Other, animates a hefty percentage of the Conservative Party. There’s a lesson for the future there, but I doubt the English public will be allowed to learn it.
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