The End of May in June

 

Well, well, well. Looks as if the ‘bloody difficult woman’ has finally caved in to the inevitable. Who would have thought the incompetent would fail to deliver the impossible to the terminally ungrateful? The only thing that seemed to matter deeply to Theresa May, much more than her own citizens burning to death in an avoidable tragedy say, was the support and respect of her beloved Conservative and Unionist party. At the end, even her former acolytes and cheerleaders in the press were bullying and besmirching her on a level formerly only reserved for Jeremy Corbyn. May’s fall from grace, from her stratospheric polling levels as she first took office, to being hounded out as the worst Prime Minister since Lord North (with the exception of her pig bothering predecessor) would seem staggering in any other time, but Brexit has dissolved all of the usual orthodoxies and expectations. The fact she continued blindly on after losing her majority, losing 1300-odd council seats and suffering the worst defeat in modern British parliamentary history doesn’t seem nearly as incredible as it should, all because of the dreaded ‘B’ word.

 

Every strategic move she made was a mistake, and, while she appeared almost comical in her inability to think on her feet or defend those choices, her chilling levels of contempt for both parliament and the majority of the public who didn’t vote for a hard Brexit means she deserves not an iota of sympathy for her wretched ousting from office. At every stage of the process, she sought to ignore first her backbenchers, then parliament, then the country and finally her cabinet, thinking the biggest constitutional upheaval in a generation should be dictated by her and her alone. As has been well documented, finding logic in her decisions was fiendishly difficult at first, until a pattern began to emerge; the only consistency in those decisions being that they delayed conflict, if only for a week. As time went by, her tin ear to criticism or advice led to kicking the can so much it practically disintegrated. Her stupendous intransigence defied belief at times: it was as if she had drawn up a plan at the beginning (using red pen for her red lines obviously) and framed it. Every time reality dictated she must change some aspect of it, she shook her head and repeated the line: “Nothing has changed.” Her inner monologue must have been humming: “This is my plan. We can negotiate anything as long as my plan is carried out to the letter. Everyone is wrong but me and we will talk until they realise I am right.” Experienced European negotiators and diplomats must have thought they were reasoning with a child, except a child would quickly understand the concept of an entirely open border in Ireland being incompatible with different regulatory regimes on either side.

 

Despite seeming moderate on the surface, May was capable of some despicable acts of cowardice. Sending Amber Rudd in to cover for her on a television debate just after Rudd’s father had died was a particular low, though hiding from the Grenfell survivors and creating the conditions for the Windrush scandal meant it was not actually rock bottom for her. After all of May’s bluster had been pretty much swept away, it seemed as if her legitimate remaining tactic was to run down the clock to browbeat MPs into supporting her withdrawal agreement; an astonishing dereliction of public duty.

 

One of her biggest problems from the start was siding with the know-nothing zealots of the ERG. By giving their notion of withdrawal being a simple process with minimal consequences credibility, she chained a mighty stone to herself that she would never be able to unpick, because if she tried to the whole country would see her as an unprincipled liar and fraud. How can you explain to the country that the reason Brexit hasn’t happened yet is because unwinding 40 years of regulatory and economic alignment is incredibly complex, will eat up almost all government activity for the best part of a decade, and will inevitably leave us poorer and weaker as a nation, when you have continually declared that Brexit will definitely happen on a specific date come hell or high water? How can you explain that the backstop is crucial to keep an open border in Ireland when you have banged on non-stop of the amazing trading fantasies that will come true when we are out of the customs union? So instead you are reduced to inciting abuse and potential violence against members of parliament, by going on national television and blaming them for not voting for a withdrawal agreement clearly inferior to membership purely driven by your self-imposed ‘red lines’.

 

She has allowed the ERG free reign to convince the gullible that trading solely on ‘WTO rules’ would be fine. It would have been so easy to shoot this down by explaining two obvious truths:

 

1. The World Trade Organisation is a group of countries applying rules to other members. How is this different to the EU’s rules applied to members, other than us not having a say in them?
2. Once we drop out to WTO conditions, even discounting the disruption and economic damage that will ensue, the EU will not even begin negotiating a new trading relationship until…you’ve guessed it, the hated Withdrawal Agreement is passed!

 

If she had the bottle to call these truths out immediately, the ERG’s bombastic polemic would have been effectively castrated. But it was more important for May to not offend MPs from her beloved party, so she continued with the unicorns fantasy that eventually destroyed her with its obvious contradictions. Didn’t she realise zealots are never satisfied? Anyone with half a brain could see that these people never want to be in charge, they just want to snipe from the shadows. Being in charge means reality and compromise, sniping means talking of ‘betrayal of democracy’, ‘treachery’ and half the country and its institutions apparently being in on a gigantic conspiracy to thwart Brexit because…well I don’t know. Are we all being personally bribed by the European Union? This idea that anyone who opposes Brexit has a nefarious agenda is bizarre because the agenda is never actually defined. Neither is the reality of WTO rules nor contravening the Good Friday Agreement and its effect on our world standing as a trustworthy trading partner. Our lamentable press and broadcasters hold those opposed to Brexit for rational reasons to greater account than those who you wouldn’t trust to watch your pint urging us to just take a punt into the unknown because jingoism.

 

So May has finally fallen on her sword and the good news is it will only get worse. That bloviating excrescence Johnson will most likely ascend to the throne to the tune of circus music and belch more unicorn stories about ‘No Deal’ being the way to go when he wins the approval of the geriatric reactionaries that make up the dwindling Tory membership. Then he will have all the same opposition in parliament, because he is Prime Minister in a minority government, not a feudal king. So we will stagger on until October, when he will have to decide whether to unleash the shitstorm of No Deal and reap what he sows, or whether he sees sense for once in his life and delays the inevitable again because every course of action will result in more chaos. The only course of action that will cause the least chaos ironically is to revoke immediately. But we are then told it will “kill democracy”, which is ironic coming from a party that called an advisory referendum won with such manipulation that had it been a legally binding plebiscite it would have been decreed void, who are rolling out ID checks in elections to prevent UK citizens from exercising their legal right to vote, and are about to be sued by EU citizens for denying many of them the right to vote in the UK European elections this week.

 

So long then, worst Prime Minister since the last one. Let’s welcome the next failure and cross our fingers. It’s about to get a whole lot worse, for all of us.

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Let’s accept the best version of the worst idea

The amount of people I keep reading who parrot slogans like “Labour’s complicit in Brexit”, “Corbyn’s betraying the young”, “Corbyn wants Brexit more than Theresa May” are either anti-Corbyn zealots or letting emotions override logic almost as badly as the worst Brexiteers.

 

I agree that Brexit is the stupidest thing this country has ever done. It was a gutless chancer Prime Minister, whose arrogance was only matched by his inflated sense of statesmanship, throwing a bone to the Extremist wing of his party in order to cling to power that he would only abuse. Even after scraping an improbable General Election victory, he could have done things correctly, and demanded a supermajority for such a major constitutional change, or ensured all expats who would be affected, as well as 16 and 17 year olds who would soon be adults, should get the vote. But no. He decided to make it ‘advisory’ while pledging in every interview to carry out the result, and creating the media impression it was legally binding. Cowardice followed by arrogance followed by incompetence.

 

I agree that every form is Brexit is inferior to the status quo. We will trade in tangible benefits for restrictions, less money and undefined ‘sovereignty’. We are the first First World nation to autonomously enact legislation to deliberately make us poorer and less influential in the world, and be determined to force it through whatever the costs.

 

But what other option is there?

 

“Corbyn could oppose! He could listen to his members and offer a People’s Vote!”

 

Here’s the sequence of events the minute Corbyn does that, in short order:

 

1. Right-wing media will have a field day blasting out the narrative of Corbyn betraying the working class voters who trusted him.
2. Theresa May will negotiate a short extension to Article 50 and call a General Election.
3. Right-wing media will forgo the usual tired smears and lead with the narrative of Corbyn being anti-Brexit traitor.
4. Theresa May will win a comfortable, though not landslide victory, giving her a small working majority to enact the hardest version of Brexit, potentially without an initial agreement i.e. deferred no deal.
5. Liberals will presumably combust at the irony of striking down their perceived enemy, only to hand more power to their actual enemy.

 

This is the reality of our unhinged media allowed to print demonstrable lies with impunity, and the First-Past-The-Post electoral farce. As many youngsters and educated Labour members as there are begging for Brexit to be reversed, there are Northern towns obsessed with Brexit and nothing else. Lose those seats and you lose a potential majority. This is realpolitik.

 

The EU seems too much of an ideology in itself, rather than a practical good thing we shouldn’t be throwing away. Too many EU proponents are talking more about Corbyn’s failings than May’s, giving the distinct impression their agenda is more about toppling the genuine left in the short term than keeping us in the EU. At a time when the right is hugely divided, the centre would rather hold the left at arm’s length than take advantage of these schisms together.

 

To summarise: we’re fucked. Brexit has to happen. There is no conceivable way Theresa May will ever call another vote, and Corbyn couldn’t get one even if he genuinely demands it: he is in Opposition, not Government.

 

The only thing we can hope now is the softest form of Brexit, preferably Single Market and Customs Union, meaning the only privilege we would lose is voting rights.

 

“What the Hell would be the point of Brexit then??

 

Exactly. Every Brexit is pointless. We won’t get another vote with The Tories in power, it’s not going to happen. So let’s take the smartest version of a stupid idea. We don’t deserve voting rights any more, and it will be for the best. Think of who we used to send to the European Parliament: UKIP and free-market Neoliberals. The UK pushed for some of the worst aspects of the EU! Ironically most of us will probably be better off if the economic extremists on the right were kept away from any EU negotiations forevermore. So let’s all pray for a Brexit with oceans of lubricant and double-protection – it’s the best we can get.

An unstoppable force meets an immovable object, on a unicorn

The time to laugh is now. Laugh from now until eternity, because the alternative is to cry until your core shrivels up like a raisin. We are in terrifying times. The biggest bait-and-switch in political history could be about to be unleashed upon a populace that mostly still believes the unicorn stables are being unbolted.

 

Every day a new fiasco, every day Theresa May defies all convention to cling on to power she doesn’t have. She is a pitifully powerless figurehead; a broken mast of a ship heading for the rocks at a rate of knots. Even a new captain would not have enough time now to prevent a colossal wreck.

 

The terminally delusional are chanting to get on with hitting the rocks so we can do other stuff. Other stuff that won’t be done because Brexit will dominate political action for the best part of a decade. All the debates, emergency measures, legislation, border contingencies, negotiating staff; this is going to cost a fortune in time and money for nothing tangibly positive other than pleasing the right-wing press and their far-right goons.

 

Representatives from SMEs, the CBI, trade unions, scientists, leading economists, border forces and more say no-deal Brexit will be an unmitigated catastrophe, but we don’t trust experts now and prefer the demagogic caricatures of Lord Snooty, a corpulent buffoon who makes Donald Trump sound consistent and that twat who runs Wetherspoons.

 

Meanwhile, the Mail (and the Guardian) tries to spin the leader of the opposition as the villain of the piece, the Express intimates that most of the Commons should be hanging from Tower Bridge for not even ordering the unicorns yet, and the BBC continues their quest to make the far right a genuine political force in the country.

 

It doesn’t get any better outside the Westminster bubble either. I steadfastly avoid talking about Brexit in polite conversation unless others initiate it as a discussion topic. And they do, though they prefer less discussion than broadcasting their opinion, which remarkably tends to be in line with the tabloid opinions. A massive conspiracy that thousands of professionals are in on is apparently a sensible suggestion for why the Brexit fantasy can’t be realised. They’re all negotiating in bad faith apparently. That must be it.

 

People I otherwise like and really get on with triumphantly display ignorance of even fundamental principles of representative democracy. A colleague who supports Brexit actually believed every MP in the Commons was described as the government. Another made up an anecdote about their child’s school being overrun with interpreters to justify their support for Brexit. Imagining that this was actually true, I don’t know what it has to do with the EU, seeing as most EU children are more multilingual than our own homebred brats. But it doesn’t matter, what matters is that they ‘won’ and we should get on with it.

 

I don’t say this to somehow sound superior, but I grew up being made to believe that being made a fool out of was undesirable, and the way to avoid it was to do a little research when you make a choice, not trumpet your ignorance so loud you drown out the mockery. When you ask what leavers think they won or what we have to hope for, vagueness is the watchword. You wouldn’t buy a car without viewing it from a proven liar, yet people are happy to do this with a decision that will affect their own children for generations.

 

Then again, the ultra-remainers are at times worse. The People’s Vote campaign, started for good reasons, has quickly morphed into the Establishment Trojan horse for ousting Corbyn us ‘moderate’ remainers feared it would be. I’ve been urged to ‘kill myself’ by a supposed left-wing remainer. Despite being generally more clued up, those on my ‘side’ of the debate can be every bit as intransigent as the most oafish Brexiteers.

 

So where are we now? Two utterly obnoxious tribes on either side, millions caught in the middle, no parliamentary consensus, a Prime Minister who is to all intents and purposes a worthless sock puppet held in place solely to prevent a Corbyn government.

 

We were told a Labour government ‘in hoc’ to the SNP was a chaotic betrayal of English voters, yet an internecine warfare-ridden Tory minority ‘in hoc’ to regressive Northern Irish bigots is exactly what the English voted for, and the model of stable governance.

 

Every option going forward will have bad ramifications, so, what the fuck do we do now?

No way, Jose

I’m sad it came to this. I never approved of Jose Mourinho’s appointment, but I understood its logic. There were massive question marks about Jose, and how typecast he had become, but not about his success rate. There were a number of guarantees that came with his career trajectory:

1. He would always win at least one league title
2. He could never be relied on to play expressive, attacking football for any consistent period of time
3. He would never trust youngsters, let alone nurture them into finished articles
4. Things would start to decline in the third season (if he actually got to one). In his later career, this would not so much be a decline as a crash
5. He would spend huge amounts of money and yet alienate some of these hugely expensive talents, culminating in the aforementioned crash

It is indeed tragic that the only one of these guarantees that failed was number one, the most important and only positive trademark.

He was not a man you could easily admire, but I could separate the man from the coach. The egotistical, petty bully from the Machiavellian schemer whose tactics could overturn the mightiest of teams, including in the past Ferguson’s conquerors, Arsene Wenger’s Invincibles and Guardiola’s Irresistibles. The coach who led two wholly unfancied teams in Porto and Internazionale to European glory, something I can’t imagine Guardiola or Ancelotti doing. A look at how those teams have fared since indicates the scale of his accomplishments.

But when given the very top jobs with the biggest treasure chests: Chelsea, Real Madrid and now United, he fell short. The underdog siege mentality would not translate. Reactive football is alien to the latter two sides particularly, and the egos of the stars must be, to a certain extent, pandered to.

I was delighted after the League cup and Europa League triumphs, particularly the latter for the first time in our history. Jose can at least take that away, as well as giving us a golden season of the Zlatan show. But the wheels had started to come off in the second season. There were some brilliant highs: Rashford’s double shooting down Liverpool, the Arsenal counter-attack masterclass, the incredible comeback to give City a kick in the bollocks among them, but these were balanced by more dismal moments. Losing numerous great records to City, even when we had the power to prevent it following the derby win; a wretched FA Cup final display to end Mourinho’s Wembley unbeaten spell; extending Marouane Fellaini’s contract.

This season had all the makings of a disaster. I was baffled that we didn’t think of snapping up a hungry Xherdan Shaqiri instead of the declining Alexis Sanchez. Jose seemed angry he wasn’t given another fortune to blow on central defenders despite already buying a squad’s worth of expensive defenders who couldn’t keep Ashley Young and Chris Smalling out of the team. The excuses seemed to be lining up, and the ‘third season syndrome’ script was ready to be rehashed. And so it has proven.

The Liverpool game represented something of a watershed moment for most United fans. As Roy Keane said, this feels like a Ron Atkinson United. Good bets to win a cup now and again, but no threat in the league besides the odd big game. We are reduced to hoping City walk it again just to prevent the Scousers from finally getting their day in the sun again. More than that, we have tolerated the worst kind of football imaginable. Worse than Moyes, who at least kept the ball on the floor until the 70th minute or so.

Mourinho has managed to turn Ander Herrera; a technical, between-the-lines schemer, into little more than a hatchet man, while simultaneously having us believe Marouane Fellaini is a subtle playmaker cunningly disguised as a bull in a china shop. Ashley Young’s go-to move now seems to be head-down running into blind alleys mixed with the odd launch into the mixer. It is dispiriting in the extreme to watch our most gifted midfielder (Pogba) and our most gifted attacker (Martial) constantly sat on the naughty step until desperation takes hold.

I don’t know if there is any coach available who could turn this season around, but any change would at least make for some optimism. Only the delusional United fans demand that we should be winning the big prizes right now, let’s make do with trying to regain an identity we’ve lost somewhere along the way.

The Ghost of Christmas Future says resign

FFS Theresa GIVE IT UP!

You’re beaten. You’ve ran out of road to kick the can down. The headlights are blinding you now. Face the music for all of our sakes. Please.

What good is you fucking around in Brussels going to do? It took two years and three Brexit Secretaries to get to this stage (though as you seem to do most of the diplomacy, it’s unclear what these secretaries actually did for their significant salaries other than posing as ceremonial monkeys shaking hands with bemused EU negotiators), and the EU explained this was the final agreed deal, the only deal that would fulfil their obligations to the remaining member states. You going back whining that nobody in the UK parliament likes it is not going to have them eager to offer you more concessions, not least because their constituent member states would not allow them to.

Understand this: it’s over. You tried to force through a ruinous hard Brexit to appease the extremists in your party. You tried to annihilate the left with the worst election campaign since Groundskeeper Willie promised to slaughter everyone and burn the town to ashes. You branded the opposition traitors and anti-democrats. You attempted to first evade parliamentary scrutiny, then simply withhold information you were obliged to present. You have failed in all of these schemes and machinations, and it’s time to do what’s right.

Present your deal to the House of Commons for a vote before the Christmas recess, as time is incredibly short. Then, when it fails to pass, accept that you must either call a People’s Vote, a general election, or simply revoke Article 50.

There is still time. Time to prevent job losses, mortgage defaults, mass unemployment and chaos at the borders. What have you got to lose? The country largely sees you as an incompetent at best, and lying fraud at worst. Most of your party deride you. There is no conceivable way of standing down with your reputation in anyway enhanced, unless…

…summon up some backbone. Tell the ERG to go fornicate with themselves. Call a news conference where you speak like a normal human being. Explain how hard this has all been, that you tried with every sinew to make it work, but with the narrow result you did not have a mandate for a hard Brexit, and to leave without a deal would mark you as criminally negligent in public office. Then announce that you are sending the revocation of Article 50 letter immediately, and will stand down as Prime Minister when this has been received and accepted by our friends in the European Union.

It’s not too late to salvage some dignity and a partial restoration of your besmirched reputation. I hope it won’t take three festive spirits to visit you to make this clear.

No confidence in anything at all

Finally Theresa May has been called out, not that it may do most of us any good knowing the other contenders, but it’s incredible that May has based her entire Premiership on being the ‘least worst’ candidate or negotiating the ‘least worst’ deal.

She only ascended to the throne when all other candidates flopped and the ridiculous Andrea Leadsom revealed her dim-witted unpleasantness to all; and since then has not inspired anyone with anything close to a plausible positive message. I sometimes wonder whether she is a bit slow or actually terrified of people knowing what she really believes. “Brexit means Brexit” indeed. Talk about playing to the cheap seats.

“Back me or you’ll get Corbyn!” she shrieks!
“Back my negotiations or it’s no deal!” she threatens.
“Back my deal or it’s no Brexit!” she cries!

There is something quite sociopathic about a person who believes not in forming a consensus but instead getting their own way only by blackmail and threats. Then again, this is the former Home Secretary who sent round the ‘Go Home’ vans and instigated the ‘hostile environment’ policy that led to the Windrush scandal, and seems so preoccupied with immigrants that it often seems as if nothing else bothers her at all. Humiliation? Defeat after defeat? First government in history to be found in contempt of Parliament? No confidence vote? Water off a duck’s back compared to her pathetic ‘red lines’.

To interpret the Brexit vote as meaning people wanted to end free movement, yet then claim to the business community that it is about allowing more Indians and Angolans to move here ahead of Poles is duplicitous in the extreme. If you were genuinely so concerned about immigration that you voted leave to cripple your own country to stop it, I’m fairly certain this wasn’t based on the specific nationalities of said immigrants.

May signed up to the worst Prime Ministerial berth in modern history with her eyes wide open. She knew what she was getting into, and so sympathy should be in short supply. She could have dealt with this fiasco in any number of ways, but that would have required levels of diplomacy, consensus and statecraft that she has yet to apparently recognise, let alone possess. She could have formed a national unity government to help deliver the most consensual Brexit. She could have consulted all sides and drew up a comprehensive plan prior to recklessly triggering Article 50 for another. She could have tried her best at negotiating a deal for all voters, but when the writing was on the wall, could have addressed the nation and explained she tried her best but couldn’t in good conscience make the country much poorer and divided, and revoked Article 50 before her resignation.

But of course all of those options have one thing in common: they risk personal and electoral damage to her and the Conservative Party, despite being strongly in the national interest. So she staggers on, making blunder after blunder, solely in order to serve the interests of her party. Triggering Article 50 was solely intended as an imbecilic statement of intent to show she ‘meant business’ to the 17.4 million leave voters whom she presumed would hail her as their champion, never mind the recklessness of starting a countdown before even agreeing what you actually want from the negotiations. Calling the snap election was to extinguish the genuine alternative to neoliberalism that Corbyn represented, and potentially leave more wriggle room against her own extremists. At every stage of the process, she has sought to create her own fiefdom, where she calls all the shots without having to bother with consulting parliament, even being found in contempt of the very house whose sovereignty was apparently the predominant motivation for Brexit. Not one decision she has made has been in anyone’s interests other than her own survival, and the Tory party’s grip on power.

She placates her extremists at every turn to protect herself, and placates the right-wing media at other times, desperate to prove that she’ll teach those bloody Europeans a lesson they’ll never forget by cutting our own nose off and firing shotgun shells into both feet.

Oh, and she KEEPS MAKING MY HOLIDAYS MORE BLOODY EXPENSIVE BY REPEATEDLY TANKING THE POUND!

This recent cowardly evasion of accountability by delaying the deal vote when there is so little time left anyway deserves a reckoning of sorts, but I fully expect her to survive this no-confidence vote, mainly because, yet again, she will proclaim herself the ‘least worst’ option and nobody else has the guts to hang the Brexit albatross about their neck.

Can’t we just come to our collective senses and take the ‘least worst’ option of calling the whole thing off and having a general election?

Maybot will not compute.

The Ludicrous Art of Quantum Politics

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of Quantum Politics, where everything is possible and nothing is the way it seems!

 

Gasp in horror at Theresa May, following up the last-minute progression of Brexit negotiations in December by informing everyone that she will now do exactly the opposite of what she agreed to do to keep EU negotiations progressing, by ruling out membership of the customs union and single market! See her vacillate wildly between minimal economic disruption and 20 mile tailbacks at Dover in perpetuity!

 

Scoff with incredulity at the DUP cheering on the Prime Minister’s casual dismissal of the customs union, while also maintaining that they will never sanction any kind of border in Ireland!

 

Guffaw at the buffoon’s buffoon BoJo making the same tired jokes about imperialism at speeches denouncing xenophobia, while declaring Brexit will be a resounding success in the face of all empirical projections compiled by his own side!

 

Because these are not examples of extreme cognitive dissonance or blind optimism in the face of adversity, they are Quantum Politics, where mutually exclusive scenarios can all be true at the same time!

 

You see, Theresa May currently inhabits a paradoxical Shangri-La where she can satisfy Anna Soubry and Jacob Rees-Mogg simultaneously; where erudite people, conniving ideologues and reactionary simpletons will come together in a spirit of brotherhood, and she will lead her party to a 300 seat majority on the back of the resurgent economy she has planned for when everything changes for the better, and nothing at all changes for the worse. We will have a cake for every man, woman and child that can be both fully consumed and saved for later at the same time, because the EU will surely capitulate when they realise us leaving their organisation should allow us more benefits of association, rather than less, and that leaving a frictionless market of 500 million people is worth it to become the global money-laundering tax haven, and withered client state of the US and China.

 

Of course, Jeremy Corbyn is the only politician currently playing Schrodinger’s Brexit brilliantly, by refusing to show his hand while the stakes are high. He’s talking the language of Hard Brexit, but appointing sensible negotiators like Keir Starmer, who would never sanction the ruinous calamity of a Hard Brexit. Many on the left seem to hate him for this, and I would suggest they don’t really understand political strategy, which is deeply ironic as this is an accusation that is continually flung at Corbyn by his detractors. He is apparently both an ideologue who can’t appeal to a wider majority, and also an unprincipled triangulist who is too obsessed with winning power to be principled over reversing Brexit to protect the interests of his core supporters.

 

But of course, Corbyn doesn’t have to be definitive at this point. He’s not in charge and no election has been called. He is following Sun Tzu’s immutable sagacity of not disturbing his enemy while they are busy making mistake after mistake. He sees the Lib Dems throwing their shirts at reversing Brexit and shuffling home in the raw, and comprehends the wisdom of hedging his bets until such time as he is called on to lead the negotiations.

 

Whether you are a Brexit cultist, or actually rely on logic and evidence, it seems pretty obvious that a large proportion of deprived areas in Britain would still follow the burning Brexit disaster bus into the volcano and vote for any party that would guarantee their economic destruction. We can mock this reality or despair over it, but pretending that if only Jeremy came out and proclaimed Brexit a colossal clusterfuck which he would cancel forthwith, he could take over and lead us into salvation, is almost as braindead as believing Brexit will see a new British empire rise. Let’s not be suckered into Quantum Politics. All is not yet lost.