Brexit Thread

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

So all those Labour voters switched to SNP because of Ed Milliband?!

They'd been delighted with Blairite policy all these years but then because Ed was slightly to the left of Blair they all jumped ship to the SNP?

I'd be amazed if you could find even a small percentage of SNP voters who would have voted Labour rather than SNP had the labour candidate been more of a Blairite than Ed.

Ed walked into an impossible job in Scotland, just like in 1997 they wanted to kick the Tories out of Scotland except this time they were wearing red rosettes.

I realise you have a lot of bias when it come to Corbyn but don't you wonder at all why Labour had lots of Scottish seats before the Blairites took power but within a few years of them leaving power Labour has lost almost all of them.

Being too left wing isn't the reason all those Scottish voters abandoned Labour, they abandoned them because they did nothing for them in office, they abandoned them because they noticed very little difference to the Tories, which is why they all but kicked them out of Scotland first.

Labour has an identity problem now partially left over from the Blairite years where it is difficult to prove to a large amount of potential Labour voters that we are different. Too many of them remember Blair and believe differently.

I think you have a greater bias regarding Corbyn than I do, frankly, and I think you're confusing electable with political "purity". Corbyn appeals more to Labour's traditional Left-Wing base but it much less popular than any other recent Labour leader - including Blair.

To blame Blair for the losses in the 2010 election doesn't track. By that point Blair was several years out of Office, Gordon Brown was firmly in control and irrc Blair was barely visible during the campaign. If Blair, specifically, was the problem then the collapse would have happened five years earlier. As it was the real collapse happened in 2015 under a leader who was very different ideologically, and definitely Left-Wing.

I'm not a fan of Tony Blair, for a number of reasons, and I probably agree with you in regards to his character but Labour need to stop blaming him for problems when he has been out of Office, and Parliament, for over a decade.

If we want to be fair, the SNP are more "Left-Wing" than Labour are. So it isn't a case where being Left-Wing got them kicked out of Scotland, it was more that the Scottish wanted a Left-Wing alternative which stood up for them, which was the SNP. They were ignored by their own Scottish Labour Prime-Minister (Brown) and the Lib-Dems jumped into bed with the Conservatives.

Lib Dems were actually doing the 'right thing' and watering down right-wing policy, but lost the respect of the general electorate which punished for it, and the Conservatives claimed the successes the Lib-Dem did as their own handiwork as they re-branded them as their 'successes'.

After the coalition government with Cameron and now under Theresa May, you are seeing real conservative policy which is ruining the country. Since they cannot actually win against arguments such as "More funding of the NHS" as they cut-funding by 15% real-terms since the coalition government and even though we have this massive crisis with A&E, 1 in 6 A&E departments are set to close due to lack of funding... they turn to the alternative, attack Corbyn and use the Murdock-Guard-Dog & Daily Fail to do the dirty-work for them.

This is a disappointingly blinkered post. The idea that the Lib-Dems "watered down" Conservative Policy is more Myth than fact. Two examples - legalisation of homosexual marriage and raising of the tax free allowance - were in the Conservative Manifesto.

Fact is - there's little to separate David Cameron and Nick Clegg politically, or indeed socially. There was that famous Mic pickup where they walk off-set after talking to the public and Clegg says to Cameron "if we keep going like this we'll have nothing to disagree about." (sic). The Acrimony in the Coalition (that ultimately killed off most of the Lib-Dems) days to the period after the AV Referendum when, on the direction of George Osborne, the Conservatives ran attack adds against Clegg. This worked tactically to win said Referendum but proved to be a major strategic blunder as it soured the working relationship in government.

The counter-argument is always Tuition Fees but the reality there is they were always going to go up, so long as number of places goes up.

Teresa May is a different Kettle of fish to David Cameron, certainly, but she's also the one who coined the phrase "nasty party" as a warning to other Conservatives.

You say the NHS has had a 15% cut in real-terms in the last five years? Well, the NHS had massive cash injections during the Blair years and it didn't perform much better then - so just throwing money at the problem won't help. Every other department has received bigger cuts, cuts which have resulted in job losses amongst other things, and we're still running a deficit. The NHS has been ring-fenced for a long time, a practice with ideological motives, not practical ones.