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Jesus I despise Brexit.
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PMM
PMM
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Re: Jesus I despise Brexit.
Dec 06, 2018, 02:43
thesweetcheat wrote:
although I still doubt Labour would win a majority at present, their vacillating over which position to take on Brexit will have put a lot of people off.


They haven't vacillated. They have been consistently ambiguous. I think this reflects both that the Labour Party has moved to the left, and that this change is anything but uniform.

Who are they for? Originally, as I understand things, they were created as a workers and trades union movement, but were always a broad church. That breadth created internal tensions and power struggles over ideology. It has always drawn its following from a mix of the politicised working class and the progressive middle class. These groups have different agendas, and much of the vote for Brexit came from working class areas, to the continued bafflement and bemusement of many, while most of the push towards remain tended to come from the more cosmopolitan urban centres.

I suspect without the freak dynamic that led to Corbyn becoming leader, the Labour Party would have quickly aligned itself firmly in the Remain camp, partly because of political opportunism, but mainly because that's where it was and who it was for. The working class, the strongholds would vote for them anyway.

Yet Corbyn did become leader, and the forces that pushed him into that position have also been at work at every level of the Labour Party's organisational structure. Those forces have to be recognised. With a currently engaged grass roots pushing for deselections and changes to the political balance of the Labour Party's core structures, some of the changes being wrought will last for a good few years, although I think the wave of Corbyn-Mania has probably crested.

If the Labour Party has moved towards the working class, and the working class wants Brexit, it has a mandate, no matter how ill judged that mandate may be.

The question is of course, Why did so many of the hoi polloi vote for it in the first place? I'm not entirely convinced that half the country are gullible or racist or both.
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