Danny

Indeed, just as the man on the street wasn't ranting this time about how important staying in the EU was and how it would be a complete disaster if we left (or atleast, the man on non-London streets hasn't been ranting about that anyway). In the case of both Brexit and the Euro, though, there was a big difference between the "man on the street", and a certain section of the liberal commentariat and big businesses, who in both cases were going into meltdown about how "Little England" would be left behind if they didn't "sit at the top table", and about how all businesses were supposedly going to flee the country if it wasn't done.

Because it saved Labour from being annihilated, as the comparison between Labour's results in the local elections in May, and Remain's disastrous results in those same places a month later, shows. Why? He used to be a pragmatist, and he would've foreseen how disastrous it would be for Labour to sound like being pro-EU was an article of faith for the party. In fact, that isn't completely hypothetical -- we actually did see Blair act in a similar way to Corbyn on the Euro question. Blair privately thought it was essential to join the Euro (and remember, the same kind of economists and big business people who were going into hysterics at the prospect of leaving the EU, were acting in the exact same way about the prospect of Britain being left out of the Euro not so long ago), but even so he kept kicking it into the long grass and was always more than happy to give in to Brown whenever he started kicking up a fuss about it, because he knew how hard a sell it would be to the public, and he didn't want to ruin his own reputation and Labour's success for the sake of it.

As far as I see it, the message Corbyn tried to send out was "I'm for Remain, but I don't care about it that much and it doesn't bother me if you have a different opinion". That was by FAR the stance that was in Labour's best interests as a party, when so many of their voters were going for Leave - and frankly, I honestly think Tony Blair would've taken a similar stance if the referendum had happened while he'd been leader (or atleast, it would've been Blair's stance before he became a deranged ideologue himself in his later years). Also you can call it "bizarro" when I say the Labour EU-obsessives wanted to suggest voting Leave was incompatible with voting Labour, but that would've been strongly implied by the sort of campaign they'd have been running. If Labour had been going on and on and for a year about how desperately they wanted to stay in the EU, making clear it was their top priority above anything else, and suggesting they found it incomprehensible that anyone could have a different opinion on the matter, then quite obviously people who were voting Leave would've been majorly put off the party, and possibly felt quite insulted by them. As it is, as May's local election results showed, Corbyn actually showed some uncharacteristic political savviness on the issue which meant Leave voters still feel comfortable with Labour, since the leadership didn't give the impression the EU was a "make or break" issue for them - which is a damnsight better than the situation would be if one of the hapless "moderate" MPs was in charge and they'd been running a "passionate" and "unequivocal" campaign on the EU.

The local elections turnout were average for local elections though? Turnout for locals is lower than in general elections/referendums across the board, across parties and across demographic groups. It's an incredibly spurious line of argument to start saying a lower turnout means the elections are a less reliable guide -- look at the recent Scottish elections -- despite turnout fluctuating wildly (85% for the referendum, 70% for the 2015 general election, 56% for this year's Scottish parliament), the YES/SNP % is eerily constant in most areas throughout, because, like with all contests, there's an equal drop in turnout with SNP/independence supporters as there is with everyone else. And it's exactly the same with local elections - they have generally been shown to be a representative mood-check despite ALWAYS having much lower turnout, because turnout is down pretty much equally among all groups (except usually a little more down with supporters of the government of the day). The bottom line is, Corbyn's Labour won the Sunderlands of the world handsomely in May, before the Leave campaign swept them in landslides a month later. I can't for the life of me understand how that comparison of the elections/referendum, JUST A MONTH APART, could possibly not prove that it's not blatantly obvious that Labour had a lot of room for damage in those places (well beyond any damage Corbyn may or may not have done) if they'd aggressively campaigned for Remain, and essentially suggested supporting Leave was incompatible with supporting Labour (like they suggested supporting Yes in Scotland was incompatible with supporting the party). (Plus, if you're going to raise the anecdote of people on doorsteps, then I'll give you the anecdote of people at my work, where people have barely ever mentioned Corbyn but were filled with fury and contempt at the EU, the Remain Campaign, and rich Londoners thinking they're better than everyone else and trying to tell people what to do - and that includes people who voted Remain in the end.)

I'm really struggling to understand what your point has been in your last few posts. Are you genuinely trying to argue that a passionately pro-EU stance WOULDN'T have damaged Labour in their Leave-voting heartland seats?

Firstly, disingenuousness aside, I'm pretty sure you see the difference between getting 48% out of just TWO options (and coming second), and getting 33% and coming first out of over ONE HUNDRED options? By your logic, Mitt Romney was more popular than Tony Blair since he got a higher % in his election, if you ignore the context of how many opponents there were in the different elections. Secondly, we were talking specifically about Labour heartland seats, in most of which Corbyn's Labour did better than Remain in absolute terms as well as in relative terms (e.g. Labour averaged more than 50% in Sunderland in May, compared to Remain getting 40% there).

That's not borne out by a comparison of Labour's results in May, to Remain's results in June.

That's the point -- the Tories represented BOTH positions, so voters on either side didn't feel disenfranchised by the party. You are suggesting Corbyn/Labour should've been uniformly and loudly pro-EU, which would've thus disenfranchised two-thirds of current Labour seats (most of which were happy to vote for Corbyn's Labour as recently as May's local elections, incidentally, probably because he wasn't alienating them by telling them their opinion on the EU was stupid/racist/antithetical to Labour, and that people should mindlessly obey their superiors in London on whom the rest of the country are supposedly dependent). Again, if you really feel being in the EU is one of the most important issues of all, then you're entitled to your opinion - but do you really not see how "Labour should care about winning elections and not being 100% pure on issues, unless it's an issue that I care about like the EU, in which case they should've been willing to destroy themselves as a party for the sake of being on the morally-right side of the argument" is a ridiculously hypocritical stance?

How much of the 48% do you think were passionately in favour of the EU and considered it their top political priority that should be fought to the death for, rather than (like Corbyn, ironically enough) thinking the EU had a whole load of flaws but on balance there were a few too many unanswered questions about Brexit, and that there were a few too many racists supporting Brexit which people didn't want to associate themselves with?

But passionate support for the EU is considered by the public to be a "mad"/"niche"/extreme policy. Your personal opinion on Europe is not the "mainstream" opinion, as the referendum showed. Once again, you (and many others like you) can't give high-minded lectures about how Labour should compromise more to be seen as appealing to the public, but then when it comes to an issue that you personally happen to think is important, demand that Labour should throw all pragmatic concerns out and become an obsessed pressure group about it, no matter what the huge damage it does to the party.

As well as saying the mansion tax was "politics of envy", saying Labour needed to be tougher on the "workshy", saying Labour should worship the super-rich, saying Labour should dance to the Tories' tune on austerity even more than Miliband and Balls did, etc.

And once again you contradict yourself. You can't call for a more pragmatic Labour Party, at the very same time that you bemoan them being TOO pragmatic and too in line with public opinion on the EU, even when being passionately in favour of it would've been suicidal for the party. If only the Labour mainstream (a) had more MPs like Andy Burnham rather than the talent vacuum they've currently got, and (b ) Andy Burnham himself hadn't spectacularly lost his nerve last summer and based his leadership campaign on a Progress dream manifesto, then the party would be in a much better place.

Was the referendum campaign not already effectively in full swing by this time? My recollection is that there were already daily hysterical news items about the "economic damage Brexit would cause" from the Mark Carneys of the world. We'll see. I would much rather Clinton win obviously, but it does seem to me that, looking at recent election/referendum campaigns, ones that look like Donald Trump's have been having much more success on the day of voting than ones that look like Hillary Clinton's, regardless of what the opinion polls are saying months ahead.

So last week's "convention bounce" polls for Trump were an unrepresentative one-off, yet Hillary's "convention bounce" somehow represents the permanent new way of things? :P Remember that, even with her bounce this week, Hillary's position in the polls is still no better than the Remain campaign's position 3 months before the referendum. The pattern with anti-establishment campaigns seems to be they pick up more and more steam in the last few weeks, because people who previously had misgivings about them just think when it comes to the crunch that they can't resist taking the chance to change things.

I understand the history, but I suppose to me it makes more sense to view it as part of a global phenomenon (Brexit being an example obviously), where scapegoating of minorities has definitely grown in correlation with economic depression. Also, another aspect is that the places where Trump looks set to make the biggest gains (when compared to Romney) are northern Rust Belt states, which don't have as much visceral racism in their recent history as the Deep South does.

While this is all true, again you're only looking at it from one perspective. If you're scared to death that you're never going to get a decent job or that you're going to end up on the street or that you're not going to be able to afford the basics to feed your family, it's possible to see all the things about Trump being a clown, while still thinking he's a lesser evil than sticking with the status quo which is (perceived to be) GUARANTEED to end in disaster. If you were stuck in a burning building on the 4th floor, and someone came along claiming to be a firefighter, are you really going to do a rational analysis of whether they can be trusted, are you going to ask for their detailed plan of how they plan to get you out of the burning building, are you going to turn down their offer to help if you think they're not "credible"? Most people in that situation are going to figure that they have nothing to lose, and they have no choice but to take this slight chance of a way out, no matter what doubts they might have, since the alternative is certain death. And the tragedy is that, because the supposedly "mainstream" left-wing politicians around the world are still too terrified to upset the business lobby and the Establishment, they refuse to even acknowledge even the feeling that a lot of voters have that they're trapped in a burning building -- and, until the Left gets some guts, that means that populist right-wingers are going to continue to win by default purely because, for all their vile scapegoating of minorities, they are the only ones even giving people a glimmer of hope that things could improve for them.

There's maybe an outside chance of it in Utah?

Frankly, I'm not totally convinced that's true. In any case, Boris was probably the main face of the Leave campaign rather than Farage, and Boris would have been very likely to win a presidential contest against Cameron IMO. The problem with this argument is, it rests on the assumption that people don't think the world is already on course to burn and damned to hell if the status quo is stuck with. One of the mistakes when analysing things like Brexit and Trump is to think that, just because they're Marmite figures, that everyone who doesn't love them must really hate them and must be in the bag for the opposition. But that just isn't true right now - people are so desperate that, when some anti-establishment figures come along, people are willing to overlook a whole load of drawbacks as long as it offers atleast a vague chance of things changing for the better. There were many Leave voters who thought there were a lot of unanswered questions on the economy, and who worried that they would be aligning themselves with the more frothy-mouthed people who want to "send them all home", but who in spite of that felt it was a risk worth taking to try and finally improve things - likewise, there will quite possibly be many Americans who think "Trump is a sexist dick and he'd be a bit of an embarrassment to have him representing America to the world, but his opponent is a corrupt out-of-touch liar anyway, and things are so terrible for me and my family right now that we may as well give it a go".

Everyone thinks their own ideology has "firm and solid evidence" supporting it. That is the nature of ideologies: subjective opinions are blown up in the person's mind to certainties, the ideology become self-evidently true to the person even while it looks completely irrational to other people. After all, if people didn't think there was plenty of evidence to support their own beliefs, then by their very nature they wouldn't have those beliefs anymore.

The stuff in the first paragraph is mostly just your own subjective opinions about what Brexit will mean, based on your ideology. Though for what its worth, from my perspective, welfare cuts and inequality in general is still the policy where more people get hurt and is not reversible -- to state the obvious, even if welfare cuts are eventually reversed years down the line by a different government, that won't erase the years of misery while those cuts were in place, nor does it account for the possibility that the person might have permanent health problems caused by those years of misery, which still affect them even if their material circumstances eventually improve. Similarly, people who think unilateral disarmament is the biggest issue (not me) also probably think that renewing Trident is a "seismic and irreversible" decision -- just as you see Brexit as inevitably meaning stagflation and economic depression and all the rest of it, they see Trident renewal as inevitably leading to another arms race which will eventually spin out of control and result in destructive world wars. The point is, you're more than entitled to your own ideological beliefs, but the 'moderates' really need to drop the whole moralising about how they think "the hard left are just about making themselves feel good, instead of wanting to win elections" -- the socalled 'moderates' have their own ideology on which they're not willing to compromise just as much as anyone else.

For a lot of people, there are no decent jobs to lose in the first place.

OK then, some very wealthy people also might lose jobs with multinationals when they "go overseas", and have to suffer the horror of downgrading to a pleb job which only pays them a shockingly small salary of £50,000 a year or something. And some smug middle-class students might have to suffer the indignity of not being able to go backpacking across Europe as easily. I still think the safety net for the very poorest is much more important.

Sorry, but again, yours and Suedehead's whole arguments are based on your own "idelogically-pure" beliefs. From my (ideological) perspective, a family not being able to afford food and electricity after having their welfare cut is much more "seismic" than whether British politicians get to attend Brussels summits anymore.

Wasn't this exactly the attitude you were advocating Labour should take on the EU?

Admittedly it might be completely different in London (where, who knows, the majority of Labour membership might well be concentrated these days), but you'd be surprised how many takers a "reduce immigration" ticket would get from my CLP. There's even a few old guys there who, in a debate on Syria last year, made some comments about Muslims that would've made Farage blush.