UKC

Most of the attention since the election has focused on how Labour blew it. This article is a very good attempt at explaining how the Tories won it: 

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/boris-johnson-made-politic...

"The Conservative strategy was, therefore, simple: wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth. Ensure the whole experience is miserable, bewildering and stressful, then ask voters to make it go away."

Alternatively, rely on a bunch of c@nts voting for a bunch of c@nts.

... Fits with the current c@nting state of our c@ntry.

Convincing the (99-x)% lowest earners that the X% are the problem and not the reason for 1% having a disproportionate amount.

That and turning minimum wage into a method to control rather than protect lower earners.

I'm wondering what you thought of the people quoted in the article. They didn't particularly seem like 'c@nts'. A key focus in the article is that ordinary people are essentially alienated from the political process by constant lies and misinformation. As a result they go for the easiest option. That doesn't make them 'c@nts'.

I thought that anybody who goes for the easiest option is a bit of a c@nt...

You'll have to be a bit of Atwater to deliberately seek out the hardest option, though 

I am not happy defending the Tories, but " we'll build 40 new hospitals" was better than "we believe the other party should not be trusted with the NHS, as they ll sell it to Trump".

Pretty clear it was the drugs wasn't it?

Edit: did you mean Boris or Ben?

Maybe in some circumstances but it's not simple laziness. People nowadays have to contend with multiple media and multiple voices, and the result is confusion, dissonance, exhaustion, boredom... You can't simply write people off as 'c@nts'. That gets us nowhere in understanding what's going on. In fact this response can be seen as in its own way just looking for the easiest option too.

That was just Gove wasn't it? 😄

My response is anything but lazy: it's based on a more than c@nting cursory c@nting consideration of the way that the c@nting Conservatives have carried on, over the past decade, and the considerable c@nting way in which they are cocking the c@nting c@ntry up. And I can only see it getting c@nting worse, ya c@nt.

I'd suggest Boris didn't win... it was Labour that lost thousands of voters, who had no where else to stick a cross but in the Tory box. 

Another over-simplification. 

I don't agree with the analysis - it's more like a conspiracy theory. I think it's correct to say that Boris was a part of making politics unbearable and people voted for it stop, but I think it was much more the turn of events than some masterplan.

Boris is a liar, as we all know, and has always felt entitled to by PM. He played Brexit to his own political advantage, but the unthinkable happened and we voted Leave. This led to chaos and gridlock, so any opportunist would make significant gains by ending the gridlock, and no one else promised that (you can't count the Lib Dems!). The lying is just a secondary facet of the political ambition and total lack of any moral fibre whatsoever - it's just playing dirty, emboldened by the Brexit win and Trump.

I think that the idea that by being exposed for lying you can get some balancing secondary advantage is a step beyond reality. Much more realistic, I think, is a strategy of playing the facebook lie-machine as hard as you can, in the knowledge that in the current political climate, blatant lying isn't electorally dangerous, so you may as well just go at it.

Perhaps something a little more balanced, that doesn't rely on Tories=bad as an answer to everything:  youtube.com/watch?v=3kf1YKeq7lA&

As a rule of thumb, if an explanation for failure is just telling you what you want to hear and reinforcing your negative views of the winners (essentially crying foul) you probably aren't asking the right questions.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law I will keep my negative view of this bunch of  small town nazi's

Just for once Darren, please let us know how you really feel. Bottling your emotions up for so long can't be healthy. 😉

You may do.  The counter-argument here is that the vote against Labour was a vote against intolerance.  An intolerance to various sections of society who made up the majority of the population in many cases.  So if there are any small town nazis, unable to see what they are, it might well be the Labour voters. 

Just because you think you're on the side of "good" doesn't mean you are.  No one views themselves as bad, this isn't the Empire against Rebels, and perhaps Labour supporters need to have a closer look at their own bias, bigotry and simplistic world views.

The reason I posted the link was because most of the attention has already been on what Labour did wrong. The article looks at the other side of the coin. That's balance too. 

Are you seriously saying that if you question or criticise a party's tactics you're not asking the right questions? 

Matthew Goodwin actually appears to be aware of the tendencies discussed in the article:

"Many voters do not trust Labour on the economy but many are also instinctively receptive to the claim that the system is rigged."  

( https://unherd.com/2019/11/dont-write-labour-off-yet/ )

- but he doesn't look further and discuss why people think the system is rigged. The article above gives one possible explanation. There are others. 

You sound like a bit of a c@nt yourself.....

I'd be disappointed if a tosser such as you thought otherwise.

... Hugs. Big gut.

You really are a pompous prick beneath all the false bonhomie....big gut?

There wasn't one vote against Labour. There's a good chance that many votes against Labour were votes for intolerance. As you know. These oversimplifications are just unhelpful rhetoric. 

Maybe, but you're just trying to distract from the argument of the article. Try addressing the actual content.

What bonhomie is that?...

Rest assured that I genuinely think that you're a tosser. I've been following your political warblings over the past few months, unfortunately.

This is good (in the middle of it, but my concentration span is short), thanks for posting. I'd been unkind about Triggernometry in the past 'cause all the ones I'd I'd seen were just some total dickhead saying "I hate identity politics" and being cheered on as if it was worth saying.

One comment so far though - if the election result wasn't just Brexit and Corbyn (basically my view, although I acknowledge the cultural issues I don't think they play into party politics so much), then why did Corbyn do well in 2017 and then mega-shit in 2019? What had really changed? Two more years of Brexit deadlock and Corbyn promising more to come, that's what.

That doesn't support the idea of "social democracy in crisis across Europe". The rise of the far right I personally see as backlash at the failure of nice centrist politics to protect people from economic hardship following the big crash, and from Islamist terrorism and wider fears of cultural change (losing one's national identity) due to immigration. These of course are things that nice centrist governments were never going to protect anyone from, realistically. I think that the "identity politics" thing is a red herring. It's a weapon against the left for supporting gays or trans people - why are they wasting their time on this nonsense? But then on antisemitism, "identity politics" is the thing we should care about above all else. It makes no sense (well it does, it's just using whatever weapon comes to hand to bash your opponent - and it's vastly hypocritical).

I think he won the most seats?

Quite frankly my dear, I dont give a damn. 

Nah, c*nts are useful...

You really are a horny toad beneath all the false outrage.... My dear?

now now, try  this for analysis - NSFW

youtube.com/watch?v=32iCWzpDpKs&

The sanest commentary yet...

But who is Johnson?

... But it happened, and it seems that c@nts are happy with the state of c@nting affairs?

I would suggest this article is a very good way of explaining how the Tories won it if you want an explanation that confirms your world view that the Tories are inherantly evil and win elections by lies and deceit because the left, being entirely good and virtuous people, would never stoop to such tactics.

Just the title of the piece alone tells you everything about the perspective of its authors. "Boris Johnson made politics awful"

No suggestion that a sizeable group of MPs who mostly voted to give the people a referendum, promised to respect the result of it, were re-elected on manifesto promises to respect it and then did absolutely everything they could to prevent it from happening made politics awful. And all that before Boris Johnson ever even became prime minister.

No suggestion that those MPs, having done nothing at all to win over the hearts and minds of leave voters (quite the opposite), threw everything they could at Boris once he'd become PM because it looked like he might actually do what he'd promised (now how about that for a politician). Every parliamentary obstacle they could muster, every constitutional trick in the book, every scare tactic they could think of, every legal avenue they could pursue.

And throughout, what leave voters saw was a man with boundless optimism standing up to every assault thrown at him doing everything he could to deliver what they had voted for. And ultimately any lies or other wrong doings became an irrelevance because they saw a man on their side fighting for them against a parliament fighting against them.

Now you can disagree entirely with that interpretation of events, but that really is what leave voters saw, rightly or wrongly that's what they saw, even of it's not what you saw and thats how Boris won the election as opposed to how Corbyn lost it.

If you want to believe that article go ahead, you can use the same excuses when the Tories win the next election and probably the one after that again unless the left can get a better grip on reality.

Reality such as FactCheckUk, do you mean?... Transparent stuff such as that. And the rest. We could go on. And on...

If that's the reality that you espouse, then stick it where the sun doesn't shine because it has no place in a decent democracy.

I think that's largely a fair representation of how things looked to leave voters, but there are couple of things it would be worth acknowledging if you want to present a believable and honest picture:

1. Most PMs in the last Parliament were absolutely convinced that Brexit - particularly a hard Brexit - was a humongous f*ck up for the country, i.e. for the lives of ordinary people, their constituents. As such, what they did to oppose Brexit, particularly stopping no deal - was acting with integrity, acting in the interests of their constituents. Demonising them as "not respecting the will of the people" is cheap and thoughtless.

2. Boris Johnson has an horrific record on lying, and much like the Brexit campaign, while there were lies on both sides, on Boris' side, the lying was the overwhelming character.

I think that analysis is a little simplistic.  I would identify three distinct groups of Tory/Leave voter:

C*nts  - people that are just nasty and self-serving like Dominic Cummings and Johnson

Morons - people who are too thick to know they are being manipulated by the c*nts

Moronic c*nts. - people like Tommy Robinson

Not sure why it has to be complicated. 
England has become much more conservative.
Neoliberalism still the preferred economic/policy framework, an increasing nationalism.
A country that seems entirely comfortable with a leadership drawn almost exclusively from a tiny slice of the population.

Hopefully Scotland will find a way to untether itself from this train wreck.

Very good.

A few years ago the rabid separatist website Wings over Scotland commissioned a poll with the intention of proving that the Scot's had a different political outlook to the English. Amusingly the poll proved the exact opposite that in fact there was almost no difference in outlook between us all with the exception of nuclear weapons which can of course be explained by simple nimbyism.

A more grounded and less philosophical explanation of why the Tories won is given here: https://amp.ft.com/content/ab3692b0-2317-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96?__twitter_i...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/northerners-are-gagging-for-the-boris-bo...

I think you're over complicating matters.  Jeremy Clarkson writing in the Sunday Times has the reason nailed down quite simply.

And then there's people like yourself and D Jackson ......nasty c*nts, who really shouldn't be allowed to espouse your vitriol on a mainstream websites like UKC. 

I heard Tim Farron interviewed on R4 last week and he said that whilst out canvassing he got the impression that many people now felt the left to be preachy and self righteous. I think there's something in that. It's certainly something that gets mentioned on here quite often.

Just goes to show how clever the Tories were to hide away most of their condescending pricks for the duration of the campaign.

Of course you can over analyse it until you find someone or something to blame other than Labour. But that won't make them electable again. 

Unite will line up their next stooge, probably wrong-daily, and parliament will continue without any meaningful opposition. 

Hidden in same place as Abbott. The lib dems would have done better if they'd hidden Swinson. 

That's trying to find intelligent design where I am not sure there is any. It seems to me it is more darwinian. In the current environment the phenotype that succeeds is the Johnson. 

The Economist also said the same thing . Voters enjoy being “ bouncy and happy” , the Cons come across like that. Labour just sounds depressing to people. An interesting view. 

Fascinating analysis of the overall position in the Economist. Ranging from the views of blue collar works who consider the Labour Party as “ sponging wasters” to looking at Sedgefield. Where most voters now own their own houses on good estates and have good jobs . Also BJ on his photo shots was always in a hard hat and high viz jacket.

the age of voters more likely to vote for the Conservative party also went down , yes that is right , from 47 to 39. This is despite an ageing population. This is a stunning number alone.

the Economist also points out that the new voters are unstable and capable of being won round  without Brexit and Corbyn.

I think that's spot on, depressing as it is.  It's the fact he was allowed to lie so routinely and so outrageously for so long that's new in politics - starting with the Brexit referendum. 

We used to have something called the Electoral Commission that prevented people telling outright lies in election campaigns.  We used to have a system that required ministers to resign for misleading parliament.  We even used to have members of parliament who felt they should resign when caught in dishonesty just out of a sense of shame. 

Then again, we used to have an electorate that expected better. 

It's not over-analysis to recognise that there are multiple causes behind any electoral victory. And I'm not interested in trying to blame anything but Labour, who I consider to have been useless in many different ways in their campaign this time. But it's pretty stupid not to recognise that what the Tories did had some effect on who won. 

I think Unite may have over-reached themselves. We will see...

Whereas Labour hid their least condescending people... 

3.  When Johnson, Rees-Mogg et al complain that parliament spent three years frustrating "the will of the people" and preventing Brexit, they neglect to mention the part that they themselves played a part in that.  While other MP's voted against May's deal in successive 'meaningful votes' because they feared it would be a disaster, they also voted it down because it suited their own ambition to do so.  Theresa May would not have had to ask for an extension the first time if Johnson et al had been willing to allow her to <ahem> get Brexit done.

They might not have the votes but they hold the purse strings. Labour's not exactly flush at the moment. 

The Tory party is completely responsible.   The day after the referendum Cameron could have said: OK it was 52:48 which is pretty close so we are going to have a really soft Brexit into the EEA.   The coalition government could have handled the negotiations. Nobody would have been happy but it would have been an acceptable compromise remainers would not have fought against.

What actually happened was Cameron quit due to internal Tory politics.  The crazy right of the Tory party took over and argued amongst themselves for years about what Brexit should mean without reference to remainer's opinion at all.

The issue with getting Brexit done is that the Brexiteers were incompetent and had no acceptable destination in mind.  That's an issue with the Brexiteers, not the last parliament or remainers.   It's also an issue for the electoral commission that they allowed a referendum on a LEAVE/REMAIN question which did not state the destination if we left.  

The issue with getting Scexit done is that the Nationalists are incompetent and have no acceptable destination in mind.  That's an issue with the Scexiteers, as well the Scottish government . It's also an issue for the electoral commission that they allowed the last Independence referendum on a YES/NO question which did not state the destination if you left.  

FTFY.

You seem to have missed the 600 page document describing the desired destination.

https://www2.gov.scot/resource/0043/00439021.pdf

FTFY.

Correction - 670 pages

Christ, are you still at it?... Have you considered seeing a specialist about your wind? 

Oh god... not you again. I was rather hoping you had gagged on the juices of your nasty, crude and bitter narrative. 

At your service... Merry Christmas.

so, everyone whose political leanings differ to yours is a c@nt?! how liberal you are! did you vote Nazi?

Except they did.  Unlike the EU referendum the Indy referendum was called by a government which wanted Independence and which set out in an official document what they would do if we voted YES.   If YES had won the referendum the SNP government would not have resigned, the people who created the plan and sold it to the electorate would have been responsible for implementing it. 

The Indyref was done properly - except for the unionists cheating by introducing their so called  'vow' the day before the vote, using the BBC as an anti-independence propaganda channel and handing out honours as bribes for business people to make anti-independence comments.

You could vote Tory for decades without being a c*nt.  It's only after Brexit that the Tory party has compromised its ethics to such a degree that it's moved into the c*ntish territory previously occupied by UKIP and the Brexit Party.

Stealing people's EU citizenship and putting EU citizens who have made their home in the UK into the hands of the 'hostile environment' is the action of c*nts.

There's that... There's also the whole Windrush thing; the continual lies and disinformation; evasion of scrutiny; years of unnecessary austerity; the hardships brought about by Universal Credit; booting reasonable Tories out of the party; inflicting an utter tosser, in Boris, on the country etc. etc... It goes on and on and, tragically, we're stuck with these gits for the foreseeable future. 

... I'd love to stick around and increase my c@nt quotient still further, on this thread, but I'm currently busy training Boris the blue-nosed reindeer to swoop into kiddies bedrooms and nick their Christmas presents. 

If I recall correctly Alex Salmond resigned straightaway. Much the same as Cameron.

Yep. And Corbyn and Labour won all the arguments in the GE. Except they didn't win any arguments and much like the SNP regarding the 2014 Indyref are in denial about the outcome.

That, I think, completely misrepresents what Labour stood on in 2017. Their manifesto was to respect the very narrow Leave vote and negotiate a soft Brexit but they lost the election (again) and the Conservatives pushed on with a very hard Brexit, likely to break up the UK and, by all "expert"opinion, cause huge amounts of economic harm. Labour didn't promise a blank cheque of support to whatever crazed WTO Brexit somebody else chose, so I really struggle to see why they were wrong to oppose what the Conservatives tried to push through with no mandate from the referendum, no consultation and no Parliamentary majority. 

Can't fault that analysis. Add in lots of Remain voters looking at Corbyn and Labour's policies, thinking nah and either abstaining or voting Lib Dem/SNP and we are where are.

Governments should not be holding referendums unless they are arguing in favour of changing the status quo.   The electorate should know who will carry forward the change if they vote for it.  Cameron said he wouldn't resign if there was a Leave vote and he did.

It's the unionists that are in denial: the SNP have won every election since 2014 and nibbled a few percent out of the 5% they need to get a majority in indyref2.  Brexit chaos has not yet hit properly and when it does it will push support for indy over the line.   

Unlike Labour the SNP is winning the argument where it matters i.e. with voters in Scotland.   All the jocksplaining by people who don't live here about why they are failing isn't going to make a jot of difference.

Does jocksplaining lead to scexit? And if it does, does applying some brexit on it help at all with the symptoms?

Cameron could have said that but he'd just been humiliated and carried no credibility any longer. It's inconceivable that he could have remained as PM. I do recall Ken Clarke talking before the vote saying that despite Cameron's claim he would stay on whatever, if leave won then Cameron would be toast. And by the way, there was no coalition government, what are you talking about?

Regarding a compromise, if remainers had wanted a compromise then they couldn't have gone about it in a worse way. I've lost count if how many times I've said this but the response of remainers to the vote was a text book example of how to lose friends and alienate people. You don't get people to compromise by metaphorically screaming abuse in their face. "You f***** bunch of stupid xenophobic, racist retards, now about this Brexit thing, do you think we could come to some sort of arrangement . . . .? "

Do you live in a parallel universe? Don't you remember Theresa May, a remainer, took over the Tory party along with a cabinet stuffed full of remainers (around 90% of her cabinet were remainers), and sidelined the few leavers she had appointed by getting Olly Robbins (another remainer) to negotiate an agreement behind everyone's back which she then presented to her cabinet at the infamous Chequers meeting as a fait accompli?

The Brexiteers certainly did have a destination in mind, it might not have been acceptable to some remainers, but guess what, they lost and in every referendum there has ever been the winners get what they want and the losers don't.

We now have a new withdrawal agreement and guess what, unlike the last one it passed through parliament easily because we now have a parliament that more reflects what people want which just goes to show that the problem really was a parliament that thought what it wanted was more important than what the people wanted.

Labour was not in power so it was never going to get everything it wanted so they should have voted for May's deal when they had the chance because it gave them most of what they claimed to want - a customs union with close regulatory alignment via the backstop until such time as we could replace it with a trade deal giving us a close customs arrangement and close regulatory alignment with a deep and special partnership etc. But they didn't because what they really wanted was to stop Brexit altogether.

Of course if they had voted for it they wouldn't be in the mess they are in now because they could legitimately say to their voters they had respected the result of the referendum and we wouldn't have just had a general election. They'd have been opposing Theresa May, a weak and damaged leader presiding over a party with no overall majority tearing itslef apart over the issue of Europe and they could have forced an election at the time of their choosing.

Instead they are the weak and divided party with no majority at all tearing themselves apart over the issue of leadership.

I simply cannot believe that you don't understand what parliament is. You talk about it as if it were one body (all with more or less the same policies and ideas) speaking with one mind, like one person, 'against the people'. I don't think there's even much point in discussing this with you, if you don't understand the basics. Once we've sorted that out, we then have to accept the consequences of ours being a representative democracy (arguably the best democratic system that's yet been devised), which means that our MPs are representatives rather than delegates. 

Maybe that phantom disliker to my last post would like to explain what they don't like about our democratic system and what they'd prefer in its place ?

Voting SNP did not cause the Tories to get in.  The SNP did it's part by taking Scotland from the Tories, Labour totally failed to do the same in England. 

If Corbyn hadn't wasted his time coming to Scotland to ineffectually fight the SNP for seats he could maybe have saved a couple from the Tories in England.   If anyone was guilty of splitting the anti-Tory vote in Scotland it was Labour and the LibDems.

Interesting article but Labour were on the back foot from the start.

For more than three years Brexit had dominated politics in the UK. The majority of those who voted in the referendum, voted to leave, so they wanted to see the UK leave the EU. I think also quite a few who either, did not vote or, voted to remain and accepted the result, also just wanted to see it completed(or at least see the beginning of the completion).

After May's tenure as PM along comes Boris saying, "I'm for Brexit so vote for me and I'll get us out of the EU."

Large areas of the Labour heartland in the north voted to leave and Labour either failed to see this, or thought, "Its OK because 'our' constituencies in the north will never vote for the Tories"

Labour, in the face of a lot of people saying they wanted  to get Brexit done, a withdrawal agreement that was voted for by parliament said, "If you vote for us we'll negotiate another deal then put it to a referendum again, including the option of remaining. Oh, and by the way we won't tell you what our position is."

This combined with a dislike of Corbyn by quite a lot of Labour voters and that Boris was evasive when he wanted to be and lied meant Labour were going to have a very hard time, but must say I'm surprised by the size of the majority.

Dave

Not on its' own - what about the fifth columnist who sabotaged Cameron's attempt to quash the Brexiteers, and then sabotaged the opposition.

Remember; "I'll give it 7 out of 10 ........ maybe."

Really? You think that Corbyn was attracting votes, so that campaigning by him in a seat would have boosted their vote?

Fair point.

Have you any suggestions for what reprisals we should take on the night our EU citizenship is forcibly removed?

brownshirts don't understand representative democracy, only the Folkwill, which when implemented becomes the Fuckwill

The latest excuse from Laura Pidcock is that a lot of people in her former constituency still hold a grudge against Tony Blair...

Whereas Boris the brave went to the EU, and in just 24 hours was able to get a great new deal which looked identical to the original EU deal offer which Theresa May had rejected. He succeeded in getting rid of the undemocratic backstop by capitulating totally on Northern Ireland. And just for good measure, or because he couldn't be bothered to read it, he chucked away £7bn worth of investments in the European Investment Bank.

The new deal is so obviously worse than May's deal, but Cummings has managed to get the population so fed up with politics that they believe anything they're told. I think he took the rise and rise of Michael Rimmer as his template.

I'm not sure any are necessary.   Pensioners and people from poor constituencies that vote for Boris should be nominated for a Darwin award.

You can tell how much of a sh*t he gives by the fact he went to a party hosted by Lebedev the day of his victory and now he's off to some private island in the Caribbean.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/22/johnson-visit-to-lebedev-p...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-chooses-private-caribbean-...

This clip posits a possible approach, and expresses it quite eloquently:

youtube.com/watch?v=9Ne3VOnnUE8&

theres no better way to persuade the current batch of tory voters to vote for the tories at the next election than to call them names.

and, theres no better way to perduade 'the right' that we on the left are intolerant and 'un-liberal' than to behave in such an intolerant manner.

by calling the majority of the electorate a bunch of c@nts, rather than engaging with them and trying to change their minds, you do absoloutely nothing to alter the status quo. you are condemning us to another tory government after this one. 

...all of which makes you a bit if a c@nt!

That's not really true.

May, following her disastrous election, was stitched up by the ERG to put the UK on a path to a hard Brexit. Labour, representing both leave and remain constituents wanted a soft brexit: to ensure a permanent customs union for starters. The Transition Period for the time being, with the stated intention of leaving the CU and SM, was not a position they could support. With 20/20 hindsight you could argue that they would have been better to vote for May's deal and avoid Boris Johnson, but at the time there was a lot more still to play for - including stopping Brexit.

I think your characterisation of those wanting to stop Brexit as somehow immoral is pretty stupid. They had very good reasons, reasons of national interest not personal interest, which makes their position entirely valid. If you win a referendum by a small margin and haven't defined what it was that was voted for, I think it's a bit thick to be surprised when you encounter opposition rather than capitulation. Be realistic.

Personally, I have never "respected" the result of the referendum, for a long list of reasons: firstly because I don't think there should have been a referendum in the first place; followed by it being fought dodgily; followed by the result being too close to justify the magnitude of change; and I could go on. I think it was bollocks. Viewing those MPs who wanted Brexit as "on the side of the people" and those who didn't as "against the people" is rather stupid. What about MPs for remain constituencies?

Well this is true. They'd be on a different, slightly more moderate path to hard Brexit, but they still wouldn't have got their policies in place because even with Weak and Wobbly in charge of the Tories, Corbyn was always going to be utterly unelectable.

The problems with the Labour party are very deep. Not voting for May's deal is not a meaningful criticism of Labour, given the breadth and depth to which they have f*cked up. Brexit itself - by splitting Labour down basically class lines - has destroyed the party, regardless of any finer detail on which way they voted when. And the whole Corbynism agenda is just completely the wrong set of ideas for government today (even if I happen to theoretically agree with quite a lot of it - what's the point, if you can't get elected?).

Understand your point about the result of the referendum. It was a disaster from the outset.

I think we should have remained in the EU so in some way did not want a referendum. However, if there was going to be one then it should have been done, IMO, properly.

As leaving the EU would have the biggest impact on the UK since the last war, it should never have been a simple majority. That raises the possibility, as happened, of pissing off about half of the voters. It should have required 60% in favour of leaving for it to occur.

To have a referendum before putting the pros and cons of being in, or out the EU to the electorate was, and I use this word deliberately, stupid. For example, who would consent to a serious operation or have an extension built(as I believe David Cameron has had) without considering the benefits and risks?

There is little point in asking a question of people who do not have enough knowledge to provide a reasoned answer. I'm not suggesting anyone who voted to leave was an idiot. They most definitely were not, but they were ill informed.

However, we are have the result and we are leaving.

Dave

I don't disagree, but on balance they're still the nasty party. 

It seems that you might. That 90% remainer Cabinet included Boris Johnson, David Davis, Liam Fox, Priti Patel, Andrea Leadsom and Chris Grayling. The fact that those individuals tended to be lazy (Johnson & Davis), corrupt (Johnson & Fox), traitorous (Patel) and stupid (Davis, Leadsom & Grayling) is another issue.

I live in Scotland.  I'm not interested in wasting my life  trying to persuade English Tories to vote for English Labour in your quaint first past the post Westminster system.

Scotland needs to get the hell out of the UK and emerge as an independent modern state within the EU and let you guys get on with it.   There's 10 x as many of you and you don't listen to us anyway.

Blimey... you've got a short memory!

The main reason the original WAB didn't pass through parliament was because Brexiteers said they wouldn't vote for an agreement with:

- Any NI backstop, clearly stating that a NI only backstop would be unacceptable.

- A commitment to pay the divorce bill before trade talks took place.

They've all just voted for a WAB with both of those. Turns out they were bullshitters who just didn't like Theresa May, but are obviously Bojo fanboys. Political manoeuvring which has damaged the country.

....then why are you posting on this thread? 

By the way, if you openly refer to any of your compatriots who have differing political views as c@nts, you'll struggle to win them over.

Rather less Mel Gibson / blue war paint and rather more reasoned argument would be a better way forward for the SNP. 

Although, I suspect they'll struggle with the reasoned argument element, too.

This is the bit that should concern us all. Politicians have always been relatively untrustworthy. The danger is that this newer blatency feeds into the general day to day and we become habituated to lies. Does that lead to to total lack of trust in the political/legal process? 

If you want them banned, ask, like the rest of us censorous thin skinned snowflakes do apparently. Or don't.

jk