Brexit

It's interesting to see that the strengthening of the pound when the election exit poll was announced hasn't lasted. It only lasted for the weekend, in fact.

It isn’t an argument. It’s the law. I cannot understand and never will how we can refer to this as “the will of the people” when it wasn’t a legal referendum. I don’t care what you say or how you phrase it. It will still be illegal in years to come. It is a fact. Not an opinion or an argument. It’s like the earth is round not flat. 
However, perhaps we now no longer live in a democracy. Don’t see how we can ever lecture other countries unless we clear this up. 
I know...shut up, move on. Doesn’t make it right. 

I wonder how many people will never get over it. I will be happy again and accept that life goes on but I will NEVER fail to shout that this is wrong and illegal. It’s not that I can’t bear to leave the EU (not that happy about it but I do believe in democracy) it’s the cheating and law breaking I hate so much. We claim to be a Great country ...how great is a country that cannot even claim that the vote that decided it’s future is legal? 
And I’m pretty sure there’s list somewhere of all the things people have been told to “get over” in years gone by that strong people have not.....(Women’s vote, apartheid, slavery....)   
Or do you prefer a corrupt benign dictatorship? 

In the midst of important economic arguments this was always going to end up being, at a much deeper level, about identity. Brexiters promoted this, more than on the other side, but the fallout is going to make that clearer now, I think.

What happens when millions have part of their identity removed? Especially as it was something gifted to, then taken back from the young? The demographic who will become inexorably more powerful as they grow older in the coming decades, pushing out the currently powerful, has the direction of travel all in their favour.

That is the proper response and if Boris makes a mess of it then the next election is up for grabs and a future new referendum to rejoin the EU is a possibility. But we are at least a decade and more likely a generation away from that happening aren't we?

For an age, academic research has shown it was inevitable. It was there for those who chose to see it, like Cummings. The key: fiscally liberal, 'socially conservative'.

Johnson came left on the economy (thowing money at the NHS and schools), Labour failed to nudge right on society (supporting Brexit).

The NHS and schools were the support act, for sure.

I think people were willing to accept Johnson's NHS pledges, if only becasue it suited. If he didn't match Laobur, he blunted funding as a weapon.

There was no turn to the right. There was helplessness.

You've turned to the right and so did the constituents of Blyth. 

I tend to agree Brexit is a reaction to helplessness and despondency.

The historical solution to this has usually been a shift to the left but at this moment in time it has been focused towards an alien occupying force, the EU.

Once this dragon is slayed the Kingdom can rightly become the force it believes it once was free from the tyranny of its hostile occupation.

The Tories have made their Brexit bed and at the moment feel comfortable in its embracing majority.

The risk is where this helplessness and despondency moves to next as Brexit will not solve the underlying issues of austerity and lack of investment in communities & services which will likely exacerbate the issues in the short to mid-term especially with the Tories already tearing up the more socialist sections of their manifesto.

At the moment my fear is that the direction is towards the far right and is why Labour have to get their act together and find a strong leader who can provide a believable vision to counteract this momentum to the right and can hold this Government to account when we next go to the polls.

Similarly Brown was not brave enough to challenge austerity as a concept after the banking crisis. It didn’t work after the Wall Street Crash and hasn’t worked this time either. The response would have been to borrow to invest. Brown recently said he would have liked to carry out economic reform like Corbyn has been suggesting but didn’t think the public would believe it would work. That was, as with immigration, because Labour had spent years following Tory spending plans and harping on about balancing the books. It takes years to gaslight a nation but we managed it on both immigration and spending. 
The Tories got away with Quantitative Easing as no-one understands that they just printed loads more money...literally. Clever really as this was never talked about....just “tightening belts” and “we are all in it together”....which we can understand from our own budgeting. 

Being pissed off is a valid reaction, now the question that must be answered is how can this anger be channeled to make the best of a bad job and influence the future you/we believe in.

As previously stated I have always been passive when it comes to Politics until the last 6 months which with hindsight was too late and like most people sleepwalked into a situation unthinkable at the start of the decade.

I have now joined the Political Party which aligns closest with my values, slowly becoming integrated with my fellow cohorts and started attending local meetings and building connections in my local community.

My aim is to somehow build from the community outwards, not sure how at the moment, when we next go to the polls I hope to have made or be part of something that has made a difference or at least be able to say I tried.

There are hundreds of thousands of us, we need to channel our frustrations positively and hold this Government to account, ensuring that their lies are and broken pledges are public knowledge at every opportunity.

Knowledge is power and therefore it is vital that we ensure that we have an as knowledgeable electorate as possible over the next five years which is made more difficult as we will have to do it without the mainstream media.

Keep it civil, Keep if factual, Keep it constant, and above all maintain your indignation and use it positively.

The Brexit battle has been lost, the future is, as always up for grabs.

Goodwin and his like have a fundamentally unsustainable view of the working class as being socially conservative. Anti-liberals on the left have fluffed their theories up, so it needs to be knocked down before it becomes an accepted (un)truth. This  happens when academics come up with theories rather than actually living it.

The truth is that the level of social conservatism is spread right across class. The supposed amoral upper classes are also a lie as well (though Johnson does his best to show the opposite). 

A timely article in the Observer, therefore.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/22/idea-that-the-british-working-class-is-socially-conservative-is-a-nonsense

”The problem is not that metropolitan liberals have become too liberal or the working class more conservative. It is that social and economic changes have unstitched the relationship between the social and the liberal that defines the left; the relationship between a defence of community, of policies that put social need before private profit and a defence of rights, whether of gay people or migrants, and of opposition to unequal treatment. It’s a relationship expressed throughout the history of working-class struggles, from 19th-century opposition to slavery, to the defence of Jewish communities against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 1930s, to the support for the Grunwick strikers in the 1970s.

Today, the unpicking of that relationship is visible in everything from accommodation to antisemitism and anti-migrant rhetoric, on the one hand, to the easy dismissal of working-class voters as ignorant and racist, on the other. The challenge for the left is not to embrace social conservatism but to reforge the link between the social and the liberal.”