No you are right and the whole back the second referendum position is proof of that although I wonder what was in McDonnell's head at the time or his motive. I am interested in who would have been likely to split though,throw the first stone and what forces they would have thought they could bring with them.
Well, the way they were dragged kicking and screaming more accurately. We can only speculate what might have happened had they maintained their previous policy, but we can see the direction it was going in and I'm pretty sure it would have involved either a loss of a substantial number of MPs and vast swathes of the activist base, or a successful leadership challenge and a change of policy anyway.
Weren't all the TIG MPs in remain areas though ? That still leaves the question as to what was the strategy for shoring up the leave areas unanswered. Surely it cant just have been that the referendum result wasnt important and that we'll buy them off with economic policies . Even if it was the majority of those policies came very late in the day, too late.
Only in retrospect to be fair.
Economics for the w/c - politics for the m/c.
To be fair, they kinda tried to do that..
Maybe not then but this was about Brexit and Corbyn was definitely in charge this time round.
You keep going on about Tory voters being racist and blaming it on northerners while the Tory heartland is in the south so it's the southerners who are most likely to be racist by your logic.
Thee is no logic. And btw it's w/c northerners. Those m/c ones who voted tory etc are off the hook.
I knew it was a big risk, but thought it might be possible the - substantial - non-Brexit offer Labour had might break through. It's possible that if the electorate had trusted corbyn to be able to deliver them it might have done. Of course, one of the reasons he wasnt trusted to deliver is because of his vacilations on brexit...
They were being pushed by their own brains and assumptions. You don't have to do what the guardian tells you to do. What is the point of the party otherwise?
In that case we can only say that the one they made didn't pay off. I think they made that decision for classic top down labour party reasons and positions. same old same old. Small group of posh people. Nothing changed that much really.
Yes, that's undeniable. That's where i recognise they were trapped. This time it's not like the membershiop vs nuclear bombs and nye telling off conference though. It's both sides actually wanting the same thing but the leadership knowing it might harm them outside. That's where political leadership comes in. Corbyn should have used his political capital to deal with it - if he/they saw the dangers that is. I'm not sure they did. McDonnell, the big brain certainly didn't. Len Mcluskey (not an endorsement) was screaming at them for months to no avail.
So what did Labour actually do, in local government and as representatives of these formerly Labour constituencies, to reconnect with these communities between 2005 and 2019?
