Does he want a trade deal with the EU because he does not want to include any possibility of an extension beyond the 31/12/2020. I guess he is pinning his hopes on Trump.

Quote ="Scarlet Pimpernell"I thought it would take longer than one day before the truth comes out. The nurse numbers are now over 10 years and his promise to retain current employment legislation and environmental protections will be removed because what he said in October to get his deal through no longer stands.'" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 1576502501

Quote ="Scarlet Pimpernell"I thought it would take longer than one day before the truth comes out. The nurse numbers are now over 10 years and his promise to retain current employment legislation and environmental protections will be removed because what he said in October to get his deal through no longer stands.'" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 1576502501

He may be, but without a trade deal with the EU, the UK economy will be far worse off than it was before, and any benefits from a deal with the US will be negligible compared to what is lost from access to EU markets. The US are just not in the business of opening up their markets to foreign competitors - their trade deals are very aggressively negotiated in their favour - even before Trump - so a deal with the US will be America First and not to the benefit of the UK.

Boris will know that walking away from the EU for no deal will have only short term political benefit, and he doesn't even need that next year anyway as the next election will be 4 years away. But it will lead to an economic decline that will hit the northern/midlands regions where there is still a manufacturing base that exports to the EU very hard. By 2024 if there has been a decline and higher unemployment, people won't say 'well done Boris for walking away with no deal in 2020', they will be angry at their economic situation.

Also he will need to watch the employment figures. Under Cameron and May we've been at or approaching full employment for a while now, which has mitigated the effects of austerity. If an economic downturn /recession hits following Brexit and a lot of people who previously earned wages are forced in to dealing with the state safety net they will realise just how much it has been reduced and how brutal it has become. It's easy to be supportive of measures to 'tackle scroungers' when you don't think you'll lose your job yourself but in those northern / midlands regions there aren't many jobs around when a major industry starts getting in to closures. If unemployment rises then the reality of dealing with DWP, benefit sanctioning and food banks will reach a lot of people who currently don't think it's an issue for them.

Putting a fixed date to agree a trade deal with the EU into law means either he must agree to what the EU offer of he walks away. If he reduces employment protections to make us more competitive at the expense of the work force than the EU will not offer us a deal anyway.

Indeed - who will blink first and does anyone believe that we will leave with a deal ??
He (Boris) is certainly going to please the "I just want us out" voters, the ones that Email Thornbury mentioned (allegedly)

I think those that want Brexit don’t really care if we leave without a trade deal. I regret they have been brainwashed into believing that we are something we are not which is a leading force in the world.
I guess time will tell but it unfortunately will be too late for the current generation who are facing years of uncertainty because of the votes of those at the wrong end of their working lives. The problem is further compounded by the election of Johnson and the ERG.

At this point, it's the actual working majority that is the problem, in that Johnson and the right of the Tory party can pretty much please themselves.
Although many people have (rightly) not forgiven Blair for our part in the Iraq conflict, if Labour want to ever regain power and especially as Scotland is now, politically speaking, a write off, Labour will have to find a way to take the centre ground.
This wont sit well with staunch left wing Labour supporters, who will once again accuse this o as a move to create "red Tories" but, only with this type of compromise and one hell of a lot more universal appeal, will they ever stand a chance of regaining power.
My two kids cant comprehend that Scotland used to be dominated by Labour MP's - John Smith must be turning in his grave with the current political landscape north of the border.
Labour has abjectly failed with all of the previous leaders from the left of their party. Foot, Kinnock and Corbyn, together with their brand of concentrating so much of their policy on the very poorest in society just hasn't worked.

Whoever they select must be squeaky clean or the right wing press will vilify them. I wonder if the press would be happy if Labour proposed a change to their code of practice much like Johnson is doing with the BBC and Channel 4.

We were talking today about who should be the next Labour leader, and it was mentioned that whoever it is will need to have a spotless past, otherwise the Mail, Sun and Express will just go with the usual Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Communist smears which have the old Tory duffers pooping in their easy-waist, mail order slacks.

I threw a ringer in, and everybody laughed, until they realised he'd be absolutely perfect to throw the gutter press the biggest curve ball this century... Nigel Farage. Imagine the 360 degree turn the right wing rags and shock jocks would have to make! Not only that, he'd be able to hold their golden boy Johnson's feet to the fire on Brexit. I think he's a big enough chancer to actually take on the job, too.

I regret Farage is even more right wing than the current Conservative party albeit they are getting closer. My choice would be Starmer but I suppose the press would have a go because he is a Sir and therefore proof the party is no longer connected with the working class.

The EU has more power on that one because the potential cost savings to businesses from slashing EU employment regulations are not going to be enough to counter the costs the EU can apply from forcing the UK to accept their standard 'rest of the world' tariff levels. The UK won't be able to use employment rights to draw inward investment away from the EU.

If they really wanted to reduce the cost of employment they would do away with the minimum wage, which is a UK government thing and has never been an EU policy. Sajid Javid seems to want to increase this!

The employment rights that were in EU law that the UK would be able to strip away are in:

- Working Time regulations: biggest one being annual leave entitlement, other than that the right to rest breaks and rules on how many hours you can do in a certain period. You could allow more extreme long-hours of working, but most industries don't use those anyway.

- Agency Worker regulations: require firms to treat temporary staff the same as permanent staff, you could remove these but again it will only benefit certain businesses and isn't going to be a huge dividend to firms.

- Rules around redundancies: this covers stuff like being required to consult with the workforce before redundancies. Again lots of firms might prefer this but it's not going to be a saving that drives investment decisions.

- Maternity rights: mostly small businesses that would welcome the removal of these, not the ones who would be potentially looking to relocate from the EU

- Discrimination protections: you can make it easier to fire people on the basis of things that are currently protected characteristics but again this isn't going to be a big ticket money spinner.

A lot of those kind of deregulations would just attract negative publicity that outweigh their value to businesses, and would help Labour brand the Tory party as the 'nasty party'.

I think they need to take a nuanced look at where the public are. On some issues they lean to the left, on others to the right. Even Boris has noticed this and some of his talk about scrapping State Aid rules so that the state can support struggling industries, state-driven local regeneration plans, increased spending on public services, not to mention this guff about 'The People's Government' are straight out of the rhetoric of the Old Left. One of the ironies is that when you add Brexit in to the mix, this Conservative government is actually implementing some of the policies of the Labour party under Michael Foot in the 1980s which were seen as dangerously extreme at the time and would have been vigorously opposed by Thatcher!

I think the public is left-leaning on issues like:
- they think the state should start building houses again
- they think investment in public services is a bigger priority than tax cuts
- they support taking back some parts of the privatised industries in to public hands (eg rail, possibly water), but not stuff like broadband
- they are broadly supportive of stuff like same sex marriage
- increasingly they are concerned about damage to the environment
- aside from those on the extremes of the generational divide debate, they recognise that younger generations have a lot of stuff stacked against them

The public is right-leaning on issues like:
- national security, they are scared of terrorism and want to make sure the security services are supported to keep us safe (although I think post-Iraq they are sceptical about military interventions overseas)
- I think they are more willing to accept some compromises on personal freedom in the interest of keeping us safe than they were in Blair's day - I reckon ID cards would have had more support now than when he tried it.
- law and order: people have no time for those who disrupt the lives of law-abiding citizens, especially in poorer areas where they face the brunt of living near anti-social families, gangs and so on. They want criminals to be locked up and kept away from them rather than 'rehabilitated' etc.
- immigration, when you get past the xenophobes and bigots, most of the population don't mind being treated by a migrant doctor, they aren't keen on immigrants competing with them for lower paid jobs, they certainly don't like the idea of anyone from outside taking the UK for a ride by being able to exploit the welfare system.

I think a Labour leader who took some of the Corbyn agenda, on limited nationalisation, more progressive tax system to fund increased spending on public services and green investment, without the scattergun approach of stuff like free broadband, and who was free from any hint of 'anti-UK' sentiment (ie previous associations with IRA/Middle Eastern terror groups), and strong on issues of law and order, would be well placed to recapture a broad coalition of public support.

Blair himself came in to prominence, when he was Shadow Home Secretary during a time of a crime wave (a lot of measures of crime in the UK peaked in the mid 1990s), when the Tories veered between Ken Clarke's excessively laid back manner and Michael Howard's 'prison works'. Blair spoke articulately about the problems crime was causing in the poorest communities and linked the experience of poverty to being in neighbourhoods where you lived in fear rather than the more affluent areas where crime didn't affect you so much. That message really resonated in the 1990s.

Farage would do anything for the right price or media exposure!

On a serious note, Starmer would be the obvious choice. But as you say, the working class would be suspicious of him being a Sir (awarded for services to law and criminal justice, and a title he prefers not to use), despite the fact his dad was a toolmaker and his mother a nurse, and despite the fact the working class have just wilfully voted in droves for a priviliged Old Etonian, whose path through life has been paved with gold, and whose only contribution of note to the working class has been spreading lies about bendy bananas, prawn cocktail crisps and smoked kipper packaging.

Why would the working class be suspicious of Starmer's social background? It's not like Johnson and Farage grew up in coal mining families?

There must be an academic study available somewhere to explain this phenomenon. I can't get my head around it.

When I heard people say they were suspicious of Corbyn's long-standing social campaigning because he was a 'middle-class Londoner', then in the next sentence, without a hint of irony - "but I like that Jacob Rees-Mogg fella, he's a card".

Some people are happy to follow a leader, regardless of their views, even if said leader is a total T***.
There are plenty of examples in the history books and I believe that the Trump and Johnson premierships are, ironically, largely as a result of austerity, with the masses happy to vote for a change - of any sort.

The writing was on the wall for Labour before the last election and it's just a pity that, during the last election, Corbyn has some bounce in the polls, lulling Labour and many of their supporters that he was actually a credible leader, with credible policies.
Having said that, I believe that Labours utterly inept Brexit policy is the main reason for their antihalation but, most importantly, it was definitely not the reason that they lost.

Corbyn was butchered in the media and press and again , it's important that they have aspiration for success in their new policies and not just protection for the very poorest, commendable as that may be.

I think you're wrong about that - large sections of the big policy stuff were very popular with the public; including the nationalisation of utilities and such.

Where I think you are right, is that the Brexit policy killed us off - Corbyn was forced into a strange and untenable position by people like Keir Starmer, because they are ultra-remainers who insisted on the PV being included; so Corbyn tried to find a grown-up way to include that by saying he'd stay neutral and implement the result, but it was far to ambiguous and easy to attack. And of course this was a Brexit election.

There's also the fact that Corbyn has been the target of an unprecedented and vicious smear campaign, not just from the Tories, but from the RW media, the BBC and a large contingent of his own MP's - the Blairite rump - who hate the members, and yearn for a return to the halcyon days of New Labour, when they could pretend to be socialists and thereby maintain their place on the parliamentary gravy train, because they represented no threat to the established order in this country. It's not a coincidence that Blair is the only Labour leader that the Murdoch evil empire has ever endorsed.

The battleground in 5 years time will be interesting; Brexit will be a wholly Tory mess, and Johnson will have failed to deliver on his key and seemingly made up on the spot promises - and that's quite aside from any new scandal which could emerge at any moment, given the character of the man. He won't represent change, and his tousle-haired posh boy schtick will have worn decidedly thin.

With regards to the Labour leadership - I'd go for Angela Rayner; and I'll do everything I can to resist Keir Starmer or Jess Phillips, both of whom would be a disaster in my view.

Labour's problem is they preach about being the party of the working class yet none of the people running the party come from the working class. Even Milne went to Winchester then Oxford - how can the strategist with that background relate to the working class. Corbyn is another never had a job outside of politics, all those that came through the union route wouldn't have worked in a real job, they will have full time working for the union paid for by either the public sector employer or a private employer. A lot of the main Labour shadow cabinet come from a legal background, Starmer, Thornberry, Long Bailey. Phillips worked in the family quango, Nandy a public quango. Then you add the aforementioned young activits: Jones, Sakar & Blakeley who come from a media background then you add Momentum: Lansman - Cambridge graduate no jobs outside of politics, James Schneider - Winchester then Oxford worked in the media etc. Wherever you look in Labour you see privilege no connection to grass roots.

Much was made of the Brexit situation - the Tories has as many Remainers as Labour - probably more - so why didn't they have the issues Labour had? Possibly because it wasn't really Brexit it was Corbyn and trust in him and the wider Labour party.

see the lefties cannot accept defeat, there was no "smear campaign" against Cringebin, Socialism is NOT WANTED, deal with it.

Angela Rayner - are you serious? Labour can kiss goodbye to ever getting in power - Boris will eat her for breakfast. Next you will be saying Laura Pidcock as deputy.

Labour lost because of Corbyn and a huge credibility issue - the idea that all their give aways' could be funded by a few rich people wasn't credible and could not have been delivered - everyone would have been poorer. The media bias was a complete deflection from the fact that a hard left Labour wasn't attractive and if you look at the arrogance of these people like Corbyn, like McDonald and the anger they showed when questioned it shone through big style. Labour on the left is a party to bring the people together it was quite the opposite policies for a few to hurt the mass. C4 fought tirelessly for Labour - Sky gave them a huge platform as did Marr.

Sadly not - because she lost her seat; and unlike the Tories, Labour don't have the option of sidestepping the electorate by putting non-MP's into the HoL but retaining them in Cabinet positions. Question - given the way that Tory maths works - are there now 2 Nicky Morgan's?



I think Labour did indeed lose partly because of Corbyn - I haven't said otherwise; where I differ is that I don't think this election was won or lost on policy; it was largely based on spin and smear and personalities - and he suffered more of that than even Michael Foot. But the single biggest factor was Brexit - this was effectively a 2nd referendum, and Workington Man has clearly been persuaded that 'getting Brexit done' was more important than any other issue.

I think "Workington Man" was convinced that the result of the referendum should be respected, not dithered over, which is what Labour were doing.

Indeed - we can only hope that it doesn't result in him being Out-of-Work-ington Man; but that will of course be a mess wholly owned by the Tory party, long time champions of the downtrodden masses.

where are these downtrodden masses?

FWIW Bren, whether the Nationalisation program was right or wrong, it mad such an easy target.
The spend on something that IMO was neither urgent nor essential is just so bloody huge, it allowed the Tories to point the finger and suggest that Labour could not be trusted with the public purse.
Brexit too was a disaster.
Such was the divide within the party that, they couldn't stomach choosing "leave" as their policy, as it went totally against the majority of their party and was at odds with a large proportion of their supporters. However, their largely "remain" position was at odds with the referendum vote.
Months and months ago, I suggested on here that they had to pick a side and either work damned hard to "sell" the "peoples vote" option or, actually opt for "leave". However this would have meant losing swathes of votes to the Libdems and they would still have suffered at the election.

Either way, the 2 major parts of their policy have utterly stuffed them and it will be a very, very long way back for them. Something that, with the "loss" of Scotland, may even be impossible.

For me they have to take the centre ground or they are doomed as a serious opposition party.