United Kingdom: Support continues to shift in favour of Second Referendum

Staggering statistics!

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/one-third-of-business-leaders-thinking-of-leaving-u-k-as-brexit-looms-survey-1.1207802

Vince Cable, Leader of Liberal Democrats, who are opposed to Brexit, is stepping down so who is favoured to replace him?Where will UK voters, now in a small but growing majority, who want to Remain part of the EC go after Farage has his little moment in the sun once again on Sunday?

The reason for asking this is that Brexit has so polarized the UK citizens that the now majority Remain voters will probably coalesce around one party or one leader (same as voters do for the Liberal party in Canada) to advance their agenda

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/opinion/star-columnists/2019/05/24/nigel-farage-is-in-riding-a-high-but-he-may-ultimately-crush-brexit.html

No wonder Cleese wants to leave the UK.

And he's so dead-on about the media, as like in the USA (Trump), in Canada (Ford, Kenney), and in the UK (Farage, Johnson) all the media has done is give platforms to these buffoons, and then we wonder why we usually have shit for governments. Of course there are exceptions but they  are few and far between.

Boris Johnson prepares UK for no-deal Brexit as he leads race to replace Theresa May

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-brexit-no-deal-theresa-may-resign-replace-conservative-party-a8929786.html

The very first thing the UK needs to do it implement a 10% Inheritance Tax on everything include all off-shore accounts. 

Theresa May was a bad PM – but her resignation will do nothing to arrest Britain’s long-term decline

Her strategic ineptitude and tunnel vision led her to the cliff edge. Yet the country’s crisis runs far deeper than her deficiencies as a leader

Everybody with their feet on the ground has a sense of unavoidable disaster up ahead but no idea of how to avert it; least of all May’s likely successors with their buckets of snake oil about defying the EU and uniting the nation.

It is a mistake to put all the blame on the politicians. I have spent the last six months travelling around Britain, visiting places from Dover to Belfast, where it is clear that parliament is only reflecting real fault lines in British society. Brexit may have envenomed and widened these divisions, but it did not create them and it is tens of millions of people who differ radically in their opinions, not just an incompetent and malign elite.

Even so, May was precisely the wrong political personality to try to cope with the Brexit crisis: not stupid herself, she has a single-minded determination amounting to tunnel vision that is akin to stupidity. Her lauding of consensus in her valedictory speech announcing her resignation was a bit rich after three years of rejecting compromise until faced with imminent defeat.

Charging ahead regardless only works for those who are stronger than all obstacles, which was certainly not the case in Westminster and Brussels. Only those holding all the trump cards can ignore the other players at the table. This should have been blindingly clear from the day May moved into Downing Street after a referendum that showed British voters to be split down the middle, something made even more obvious when she lost her parliamentary majority in 2017. But, for all her tributes to the virtues of compromise today, she relied on the votes of MPs from the sectarian Protestant DUP in Northern Ireland, a place which had strongly voted to remain in the EU.

Her miscalculations in negotiating with the EU were equally gross. The belief that Britain could cherry pick what it wanted from its relationship with Europe was always wishful thinking unless the other 27 EU states were disunited. It is always in the interests of the members of a club to make sure that those who leave have a worse time outside than in.

The balance of power was against Britain and this is not going to change, though Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab might pretend that what has been lacking is sufficient willpower or belief in Brexit as a sort of religious faith. These are dangerous delusions, enabling Nigel Farage to sell the idea of “betrayal” and being “stabbed in the back” just like German right-wing politicians after 1918.

Accusations of treachery might be an easy sell in Britain because it is so steeped in myths of self-sufficiency, fostered by self-congratulatory films and books about British prowess in the Second World War. More recent British military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan either never made it on to the national news agenda or are treated as irrelevant bits of ancient history. The devastating Chilcot report on Britain in the Iraq War received insufficient notice because its publication coincided with the referendum in 2016.

Brexiters who claim to be leading Britain on to a global stage are extraordinarily parochial in their views of the outside world. The only realistic role for Britain in a post-Brexit world will be, as ever, a more humble spear carrier for Trump’s America. In this sense, it is appropriate that the Trump state visit should so neatly coincide with May’s departure and the triumphant emergence of Trump’s favourite British politicians, Johnson and Farage.

Just how decisive is the current success of the Brexiters likely to be? Their opponents say encouragingly that they have promised what they cannot deliver in terms of greater prosperity so they are bound to come unstuck. But belief in such a comforting scenario is the height of naivety because the world is full of politicians who have failed to deliver the promises that got them elected, but find some other unsavoury gambit to keep power by exacerbating foreign threats, as in India, or locking up critics, as in Turkey.

Britain is entering a period of permanent crisis not seen since the 17th century. Brexit was a symptom as well as a cause of divisions. The gap between the rich and the poor, the householder and the tenant, the educated and the uneducated, the old and the young, has grown wider and wider. Brexit became the great vent through which grievances that had nothing to with Brussels bubbled. The EU is blamed for all the sins of de-industrialisation, privatisation and globalisation and, if it did not create them, then it did not do enough to alleviate their impact.

The proponents of Leave show no sign of having learned anything over the last three years, but they do not have to because they can say that the rewards of Brexit lie in a sun-lit future. Remainers have done worse because they are claiming that the rewards of the membership of the EU are plenteous and already with us. “If you wish to see its monument, look around you,” they seem to say. This is a dangerous argument: why should anybody from ex-miners in the Welsh Valleys to former car workers in Birmingham or men who once worked on Dover docks endorse what has happened to them while Britain has been in the EU? Why should they worry about a rise or fall in the GDP when they never felt it was their GDP in the first place?

May is getting a sympathy vote for her final lachrymose performance, but it is undeserved. Right up to the end there was a startling gap between her words and deeds. The most obvious contradiction was her proclaimed belief that “life depends on compromise”. But it also turns out that “proper funding for mental health” was at the heart of her NHS long term plan, though hospital wards for the mentally ill continue to close and patients deep in psychosis are dispatched to the other end of the country.

The Wall Street Crash in 1929 exposed the fragility and rottenness of much in the United States. Brexit may do the same in Britain. In New York 90 years ago, my father only truly appreciated how bad the situation really was when his boss said to him in a low voice: “Remember, when we are writing this story, the word ‘panic’ is not to be used.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/theresa-may-resigns-prime-minister-brexit-austerity-boris-johnson-a8929656.html

The energy behind Farage and his Brexit Party leaves his rivals in the shadows

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/25/farage-brexit-party-remain

The UK if it is to have any hope for a decent future, must stop electing right-wing governments As long as they keep doing that they only have themselves to blame 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/24/un-poverty-expert-hits-back-over-uk-ministers-denial-of-facts-philip-alston

England’s Best

https://www.straight.com/arts/1243926/comedy-legend-john-cleese-explores-joyous-silver-lining-world-no-hope

Why does almost every single right-winger support Brexit? 

That tells me to stay away, as far away as one can from Brexit!

Who would want to be allied with this?

https://m.dw.com/en/who-is-boris-johnson-brexit-champion-and-wannabe-british-pm/a-48866005

Make America Great Again hat says it all doesn’t it

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2019/may/25/a-bitter-and-divided-nation-owen-jones-goes-to-a-brexit-party-rally-video

Brexit leads to degraded Labour and Environmental Standards Go figure!

Theresa May’s Hard Exit

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.macleans.ca/politics/theresa-mays-hard-exit/amp/

Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, or Donald Trump are definitely not people that any progressives in their right mind would want to support or be on the same page with.

The EP election results will be released on Sunday UK time and there will be no shutting Farage up then

It will be a sickening spectacle 

I’m not the big authority on UK Labour politics that some here profess they are, but I do know enough that it is essential that Labour win the next UK general election 

So it won’t be all peaches and cream for Boris, eh!

And even though we are entering a Conservative leadership race all eyes will be on Farage 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-prime-minister-theresa-may-uk-politics-election-a8930441.html

The largest and growing group of UKers want a second referendum.

Definitely the UK local elections, and most probably, according to the polls, the European Parliament election results which we will receive tomorrow, show voters leaving Labour in droves, so I have to agree with his analysis

Labour must back second Brexit vote or lose next election, Tom Watson warns

Deputy leader says far more Remain supporters than Leavers have abandoned the party

Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson today warns that his party will lose the next general election and any chance to form a radical, reforming government unless it quickly rewrites its Brexit policy and commits wholeheartedly to a second referendum.

Watson’s intervention comes after the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, appeared to suggest a shift in Labour’s position towards stronger support for a second public vote.

Writing in Sunday’s Observer, before tonight’s European election results, which he fears will show Remain voters have deserted to the Liberal Democrats and other pro-EU parties, Watson says Labour must develop “backbone” on Brexit as a matter of urgency. It has to end its “mealy-mouthed” backing for another public vote if it is to be in tune with its members, he writes.

He also pledges to back a growing movement within the party which is demanding that Brexit policy is changed before the autumn party conference. This will give Labour enough time to campaign for a referendum with Remain on the ballot paper, before the UK is due to leave the EU at the end of October.

Watson says Labour has been far too timid and unclear, infuriating its Remain voters to such an extent that lifelong supporters have deserted. “Once results are in, we must channel our frustration into preventing this mistake repeating itself and winning those voters back,” he says.

“Never again can Labour policy on the most crucial issue of our generation find itself on the wrong side of its members and our voters.

“Never again can we find ourselves hedging our bets when we needed to make an historic choice about which side we’re on.”

He adds: “ I want the reports of high turnout in Remain areas to reflect a huge gain in votes for Labour, but I fear that won’t be the case,” Watson writes. “Pessimistic predictions put Labour in third place in this European election behind both Nigel Farage’s far-right party and the born-again Liberal Democrats. Even optimists have us in second place and nowhere near the percentage of votes we would need to win a general election.

“This was the first election I can remember where Labour party members, not voters but party members, said they couldn’t support us. One member I met in Bristol broke down in tears as he told me that after 44 years of voting Labour he was going to vote Lib Dem for the first time. Our performance is a direct result of our mealy-mouthed backing for a public vote on Brexit when it is being demanded loud and clear by the overwhelming majority of our members and voters.”

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, McDonnell said it was time for a fresh “conversation” about the way forward on Brexit. “I can’t see any other way but demanding a public vote of some form, whether it’s a general election or some other public vote. We’ve got to stop a hard Brexit situation,” he said.

He added: “It looks almost certain we’re going to be faced with a Conservative leader who is a hard Brexiteer willing to take the country over the edge of a no-deal no matter what the damage to jobs or people’s livelihoods.

“Faced with that situation, I think there may well be a majority in the House of Commons willing to bring about some form of public vote and that could include a general election.”

 Never again can Labour find itself on the wrong side of a historic choice

Watson says polls suggest Labour has been losing up to four times more voters to parties giving full backing to another referendum, than to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. He adds: “I fear that unless our policy on Brexit changes we will not have the opportunity to be the radical reforming government that so many millions of people in our country need. The campaign to change that begins now.”

Senior Labour figures are braced for a bitter backlash from pro-EU supporters if tonight’s results confirm their worst fears. Despite pressure from Remainers in the party for a clear commitment to a second referendum to be included in Labour’s European election manifesto, the ruling national executive committee (NEC) approved wording that merely confirmed a second public vote would be an “option” if the party could not secure a general election or a satisfactory Brexit deal.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/25/tom-watson-labour-must-back-second-brexit-referendum

Next prime minister: People want 'Podium Guy' to replace Theresa May

https://www.indy100.com/article/theresa-may-resigns-next-prime-minister-podium-guy-8928616

Want to revive British steel industry

Brexit is not the answer

Leaving the EU has the potential to cause a great deal of damage to exports, weakening an already troubled sector

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/26/uk-steel-industry-brexit-eu-damage-exports

Will Labour be getting its wake-up call today?

Companies are fleeing the UK no matter what happens with Brexit. Here's all the damage that's already been done

https://www.businessinsider.com/brexit-damaged-city-of-london-2018-11

Brexit has already damaged the economy so why would Labour be supporting it?