Danny

Hence why I said "most". And I'm not really sure a constituency where a majority voted to leave (however narrow the majority) suggests it would be a good strategy for Labour to be enthusiastically pro-EU

I think they should've basically done exactly what Corbyn did: said they were voting Remain, but kept a low profile and made clear he didn't see it as the make-or-break issue. Frankly, I suspect that's the stance Blair would've taken if this referendum happened while he was opposition leader: no matter how pro-EU he was in his personal opinion, he would'e known back when he had a sense of public opinion that the EU would be deeply unpopular with sections of the Labour vote. On the other hand, the current "moderates" in Parliament wanted Labour to be "passionate" in supporting Remain and made it the party's defining issue, and essentially send out the message that anyone who voted Leave would be banished from ever supporting Labour again. That would've been a recipe for a Scottish-style meltdown. It's not only a matter of them having the wrong policies in principle, the "moderates" also do not even have a better sense of public opinion than Corbyn does, as they've shown over the EU.

There really aren't plenty of areas, at all. In most of the marginals in the Midlands and South, Leave won by a landslide. The swingier Tory seats went Leave, while generally only the most "core" of Tory areas voted Remain. Breakdown by council area here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics/eu_referendum/results That's leaving aside how impossible it would be to "unite" the completely disparate groups that voted Remain, anyway.

Such as where? Do you believe that Labour could potentially gain Mole Valley, The Cotswolds, Tunbridge Wells, and the like in any circumstances then? Because that would be required to win an election with "the 48%". Talk about it being "stereotypes" all you like, but it doesn't change that, outside of the big cities and a few university towns, the Remain-voting areas in England are generally a "who's who" of the few seats who stayed with the Tories in 1997.

Whether they're "Blairite" or "soft left", all of the "moderate" MPs thought it was a good idea to enthusiastically cheerlead for the Remain campaign, and didn't foresee how badly it would go down with the voters Labour needs to win an election. If their political judgement on that was so wrong, why on earth should we trust their judgement enough to hand the whole party over to them?

Also, I'm loving how Labour MPs say Corbyn is unable to connect with the public, and their solution to that is to elect......Angela Eagle or Tom Watson.

I implicitly conceded if it turns out to be a complete disaster then it would be different, but that is incredibly unlikely. In the far more likely scenario of there being some short-term turbulence but little really affected in the long run, the vast majority of Remain voters who were only very half-hearted will stop caring, and will have the EU WAY down their list of priorities when deciding which party to vote for in elections. To compare pro-Europeanism to nationalism (whether Scottish nationalism or otherwise) as a political force is laughable -- nationalism quite obviously has a bigger and more lasting emotional force on voters than the kind of pragmatic "it's the lesser of two evils" that most Remain voters had last week.

Also, talking about uniting "the 48%" like the SNP completely ignores how grudging most Remain voters were, compared to how fervent "Yes" voters in Scotland were. **Anecdote alert**, but at my work even quite a few people who half-heartedly voted Remain are getting caught up in the excitement of "getting our country back" and the feeling that "maybe things might finally change for the better". It might be similar to a honeymoon after a newly-elected government, where even people who backed the losing side want to believe things are going to change. Unless there really is complete armageddon, most Remain voters are going to stop caring about the EU within months, since they weren't especially bothered about it in the first place. It's only the London group-thinkers who will still be in mourning (but then they were convinced that it was inconceivable the country would vote to Leave in the first place, which shows how good their political judgement is).

Sorry, but have you looked at the map of which areas voted Remain and Leave? With a handful of exceptions, the Remain areas were the most Corbynista boroughs (people who were culturally liberal, and who are the more "core" Labour voters of all right now) and the most historically Tory boroughs in the southern stockbroker belt (people who are not culturally liberal AT ALL, who didn't even vote Labour in 1997, and probably dislike immigration and "our rules being made by Brussels" as much as Leave voters, but who were just spooked by the talk of economic turmoil hitting their own huge incomes). They are two diametrically-opposed and diffuse groups, who voted Remain for completely different and incompatible reasons, and NO party is ever going to be able to come up with a platform that unites them both, since their values on everything are so completely different. By contrast, the more vulnerable part of Labour's current vote (the white working-class) AND the more reachable part of the Tory vote who swing elections all voted Leave. Look at the map - Nuneaton, Basildon, Cannock Chase, Derby, Ipswich - all Leave landslides. Those are the Tory voters that are in play for Labour, not the true-blue Tories in Surrey and Oxfordshire who will always vote with their pocketbooks and for whom Blair wasn't even centrist enough. It's utter madness to base a political strategy on appealing to the most in-the-bag voters for a party AND the most off-reach voters for a party at the complete other end of the spectrum, while writing off the voters in the huge swathe of the middle. With respect, you (and others on your wing of the party) are doing exactly what you accuse Corbyn of: you want Labour to be a party which is just purity on the issues you care about most, even though it's patently obvious it would lead to electoral annihilation.

With respect, don't you see the contradiction here? You admit you're not very concerned about the poor - that's totally up to you, but in that case you can't expect the poor to altruistically vote to save your own job and livelihood. It's a two-way street. The bottom line is, this is Thatcher's individualistic society (continued ever since by governments of both parties) eating itself. For 30 years, much of the middle-class has just voted on the basis of "me me me", whoever advances their own career prospects and keeps their taxes lowest - without any concern for the jobs they were voting to throw poor people out of (mining, heavy industries, public sector), or without concern for the public services or benefits they were voting to cut from others. Now the working-class are getting in on the act, and are relishing the chance to (as they perceive it) advance their own interests at the expense of the middle-class. It's a sad and counterproductive state of affairs, but it's going to continue until the political class start to actually make the economy deliver for everyone, get a sense of "society" going again and make the selfish attitudes go away.

Christ. I am actually seeing suggestions on Twitter from self-styled "centrists" that Labour should forget about all Leave voters and just try to build a coalition of support on Remain voters. They genuinely seem to think Labour should be targetting ultra-wealthy true blue Tories in Oxfordshire and Surrey (the best results for Remain outside of London) and writing off three-quarters of their current seats. And they say the Corbynites don't understand politics.

The problem was the message, not the messenger(s). The official Remain Campaign (which, again, was partly designed by some of the politically-clueless Labour "moderates") decided to turn it into a referendum on the economic status quo - "the whole of the current economy will be ruined if we leave". The great many people who are already at rock bottom decided they quite liked the sound of torching the status quo since they're getting so little from it. They simply chose the completely wrong strategy, for a campaign which was based on winning working-class voters.

Careful, you're almost sounding like us loony lefties talk about austerity - you'll be talking about "Overton windows" next :P If Labour chooses to go down the route of being economically conservative but culturally liberal, then the party is finished outside of London. Seriously. Cultural liberalism is just too niche a market. The white working-class generally actively dislike it, and most of the wealthy, even if they agree with cultural liberalism, will always go for the party which is best for it's pocketbook. Left-wing parties only EVER succeed (in any Western country) when they have a left-wing economic message that the middle-class idealists and the working-class "self-interested" voters can unite behind, to distract from the cultural issues on which they're ALWAYS going to disagree.

And Caroline Flint is on TV right now laughably saying "Corbyn should've been more positive about the EU". These people can't have it both ways, they can't criticise Corbyn for not being flexible enough to public opinion generally AND at the same time that he didn't defy public opinion enough on the EU.

Well, it depends what's meant by "anti-immigration". I don't want to see dog-whistle stigmatising of immigrants as individuals (by talking about them bringing HIV, raping the women, etc.), but I don't see the problem in principle with some moderate controls on low-skilled immigration, who DO pull average wages downwards, like any unregulated free market would. But there's nothing new about huge sections of the Labour vote being socially conservative -- Enoch Powell was very popular in some Labour heartlands back in the day, after all. But they got around it by telling them "you may disagree with us on these cultural issues, but we'll still improve your lot and pull the rich down a peg or two, so you can still stick with us". This really is the consequence of the Blairites washing out the mainstream economic debate; cultural issues inevitably rise to the fore when that happens.

Well, many of the Labour "moderates" (Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall, Emma Reynolds) are among the people who designed the official Remain Campaign strategy. Their messages, all based on the premise that "economic credibility" with the elites was the key to winning, clearly didn't work out so well, so it surely follows that they would have similarly doomed strategies if they took control of the Labour Party? The Blairites' preference for economically conservative / culturally liberal policies are the exact opposite of what the traditional Labour heartlands want. Atleast with Corbyn at the helm, there's atleast a chance that working-class Labour voters will overlook their HUGE differences with Labour MPs on cultural issues, and nonetheless vote Labour on the basis that Corbyn would be a kick to "the Establishment" and that it would shake up the economy to make it work for normal people.

Meanwhile, Labour MPs want to respond to a public vote to leave the EU by......replacing Corbyn with a leader who's even more pro-EU. What could possibly go wrong.

A bit of a sad day - I very grudgingly voted Remain - but not very surprising. The middle-class Establishment have spent so long shafting/ignoring the working-class, they can't be surprised when the working-class refuses to come running to save the middle-class's wealth when it's at risk. That's especially in the case when you throw in the element of foreign leaders (Obama especially) being perceived to "bully" the country.

What would be the point in replacing him with one of the Labour "moderates"? The likes of Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall et al were some of the leaders of the In Campaign - therefore, they've just shown they have as little feel for public opinion as Corbyn has.

But the problem is that, for a hell of a lot of people, the economy is already ruined. If there is no chance of a decent job with prospects on the horizon, and even the public services that were providing the most basic of help are being endlessly cut back by the politicians, what is there to lose by taking a risk??

No-one on the Remain side in this debate is doing anything to convince me why I should vote Remain, except Frances O'Grady on rare occasions. No, Sadiq Khan, various big businesses who've never done anything for the country threatening to throw their toys out of the pram if we don't do as they say, is not convincing me.

Again though, Ed Miliband shows that you can't rely on negative sentiment / fear to drive young voters to the polls. Hatred of Tories wasn't enough to drive them to the polls. Nor was hatred/disdain for Bush enough to get them to the polls in 2004, or at the mid-terms in 2010 and 2014. Fear and "lesser of two evils" campaigning might work for older voters who see it as a duty to vote no matter how unpalatable they find all the choices, but for younger voters, you'll simply HAVE to give them something to enthusiastically vote FOR.

Eh? Obama would have lost 2012 without the youth vote, without question. A high youth turnout obviously isn't enough to win on its own, but it's a necessary pre-requisite for the Democrats to have a chance, especially when they're fielding a candidate with as little appeal to swing voters as Clinton has. Incidentally, I'm not saying Sanders would be unbeatable if he was the Democrat candidate either (I think there is a legit argument he would be less-bad than Clinton now, but he still wouldn't be perfect). I still maintain Joe Biden was the Democrats' best shot of winning the election. Shallow or not, likeability and trustworthiness matters, as does the sense that someone isn't at Richard Nixon levels when it comes to ethics. I think Biden would've made a FAR more effective foil to Trump in particular than Clinton will ("you can still get someone who understands your pain, who is vaguely like a humanbeing and can give an honest answer to a question, without going for the racist").

I thought the consensus from the pollsters was that the polling failure was caused by people who were saying they were going to vote Labour, being too lazy to actually vote on the day (especially younger voters)? "Millennials" are generally so uninterested in politics that it appears they need to actually like and feel passionate about a candidate to show up at the polling station -- it's just not enough to pitch yourself as "not as bad as the other guy" to a demographic who question the whole point of voting in the first place. Obama was able to make the young feel passionate, in a way that Ed Miliband and his timid politics was not able to, and (on the basis of the primaries) Clinton is not able to either. Yes, Trump probably will do worse than Romney with Latinos, although that won't do much good for Clinton in terms of swinging the election result, since most swing states don't have very high Latino populations. Against that, Clinton has much less appeal than Obama had among the young, the white working-class, and the generally disinterested who vote on the basis of which politician they like the most personally or trust the most. It's also far from proven so far that Trump does especially badly with women (or atleast, with women in demographic groups who are otherwise favourable to him) -- in the latest polls, Clinton has done worse with men overall than Trump does with women overall.

Surely the "Labour beating the Conservatives" analogy suggests if anything that Clinton is being overestimated by the polls? As we saw last year, "millennials" might tell pollsters that they'll vote for one candidate as the lesser evil, but they're just not going to show up at the polling stations on the day unless a canditate/party positively enthuses them to vote -- and there is no evidence so far that Clinton is capable of inspiring that kind of enthusiasm. The bottom line is that, for all the misgivings Republican voters might have about Trump, they all almost universally detest Clinton even more (some of the reasons they detest her MIGHT be motivated by sexism, but their reasons being inappropriate doesn't make them any less of a political problem) and were always going to rally round Trump as soon as the primaries were over. Add into that that she has little appeal to the white working-class swing vote, and that planks of the Democrat core vote are not enthused by her, and the fundamentals were always pointing to a very tight contest.