Any theories as to how long May can delay a new election?

[Ken Burch]

36. I DON'T condemn Labour's support for Remain in the referendum.

And I'm not saying that anyone should stop fighting to prevent Brexit if they still think it can be prevented.

I do think it's time that people stop blaming Corbyn for the Leave victory when it clearly wasn't his fault, or implying he could personally have prevented that result but simply didn't want to.

The reason I've thought it would be political suicide for Labour to take an all-out "stop Brexit" position at this date was that it looks like it would cost them a lot of seats in the North and Northeast of England, the Leave heartlands-that, while UKIP might not come back, it could simply throw those seats to the Tories, without gaining them any votes or seats anywhere else.

As to "soft Brexit" being a compromise with the Right, I'm not sure it's that simple. The EU is half progressive(on human rights and borders)and half reactionary(the budget constraints and deficit limits that have forced evert EU member state to slash the social wage and the insistence on "labor market flexibility" that is making those same states to weaken unions and reduce job security and workers' rights in general). The Social Charter has essentially been rendered moot by the fixation with privatization, austerity, and "free market" economics, no longer offering any real social guarantees at all. If Labour were to take a "Remain and Remake" position...tying continued EU membership to a real fight to end the compulsory Thatcherism the EU imposes on its members, that might hold some of them but would it hold enough? And is there, in your view, any possibility of changing the EU, of persuading its leadership to allow member states to have the flexibility to restore social benefits and re-empower unions to defend the working class?

The question remains...where would such a change gain Labour any voters or any significant number of seats? The only "pro-European" party in the sense you're thinking of is the LibDems, and that party's vote share and seat count is already about as low as it can get. The SNP is pro-EU, but votes aren't going to switch from them to Labour on that issue...if the people who voted SNP wanted out of the UK in 2015 and 2017, would any significant number of them give up on independence simply to stop Brexit?



As to the compromises I did condemn...they went to a basic question: Is Labour going to be a party of change, or simply a slightly more humane Tory government? Is it going to fight for a different vision of life, or is it going to be the enemy of those who do?

Compromising on privatization and worker rights were unforgiveable betrayals...if Labour wasn't going to commit to holding onto "the family silver", to preserving some space in which decisions weren't made on the sole basis of what might make a profit for the few, if it wasn't going to defend working people against corporate greed, if it WASN'T even going to commit to opposing all or at least MOST future cuts in benefits-which is what Harriet Harman was dragging the party towards as interim leader by having them abstain on proposed benefit cuts rather than voting against them-if all that had been left unstopped, wasn't it very quickly going to reach a point at which, with Labour ending up not disagreeing with the Tories on much of anything but MAYBE LGBTQ rights, that the party simply had no reason to exist?

If Labour had gone even further, as many in the PLP wanted, and ended up endorsing the benefits sanctions policy-a policy that has immiserated huge numbers of people, especially the disabled-more than a few of whom died due to arbitrary "fit-for-work"-what could the party ever have done after that that could have been anything but Thatcherite? In what other possible areas could there have been any humane, compassionate values at all?