United Kingdom including European Parliament Election Results

so how did the labour party do were they wiped out?

nicky wrote:

The results so indicate a lead for the unambiguous Remain part is over the unambiguous Leave parties, at least in the popular vote.

Brexit 31.6% + UKIP 3.3 = 34.9

LibDem 20.3 + Gr 12.1 + SNP 3.5 + Plaid 1.0 + ChUK 3.4 = 40.3

polls have shown that 80% of Labour’s voters favour Remain ( 14.1 x 80 = 11.3) as well as 1/3 of Conservative voters (9.1 x.33 = 3)

that gets the Remain vote up to 54.6%, which is very consistent with recent polls.

None of which matters, since no Tory government will call a referendum with Remain as an option.  The only reason you're pushing for Corbyn to go all-0ut Remain is that you want to cost him all the Labour Leave votes.  

The EU question is settled.  What matters is getting the Tories out. If you cared about that, you wouldn't have spent the last four years demonizing the person most likely to get them out, since nobody to that person's right as leader can get young voters to the polls and since Labour can't win if young voters are treated like any Labour "moderate" would treat them.

“The main culprit, of course, is Jeremy Corbyn and the immoveable ideologes around him. This morning, many of the usual faces will agitate for the party to keep its current trajectory. Seamus Milne, Len McCluskey, Caroline Flint, Lisa Nandy, and many others. They are of various degrees of quality and principle. McCluskey is thoughtless, irresponsible, and acts contrary to the values he claims to represent. Nandy is pensive and clearly pained by the moment. But it doesn't really matter. This is a unique historical moment, the kind we will not live through again. It requires bravery and recognition. We will all be judged by it in the end.

There is no point wishing for it to go away. Brexit is happening. It is fundamentally a yes-or-no question. There is no point saying that you want to talk about social justice, or that a many vs few 'hinge' is better than an open vs closed one for Labour. That is like a man in an earthquake saying he'd like to talk about Star Wars. It is irrelevant. Brexit is destroying Britain. Opposing it overrules all other considerations.

Labour's complacency on this issue, it's total absence, is now pounding it into the earth. Pushed into a dismal third place behind the Lib Dems. Down to 14.1% vote share after nine years in opposition. Down to third in Wales. Seemingly wiped out in Scotland. Labour was even beaten into second place in Corbyn's own constituency of Islington. The party is dying. Brexiters are suffocating it.”

https://politics.co.uk/blogs/2019/05/27/european-elections-remain-triumphant

'Brings Me No Pleasure...'

https://twitter.com/CMonehen/status/1132965547681964032

People don't like having their democratic decisions ignored and subverted. 'Let's Go WTO!' 'Full BREXIT NOW'

WTO doesn’t control your domestic economic policy at least.

For a different twist on the EU elections:

Quote:

The Green Wave has swept across Europe. We want to thank everyone who has voted for change and climate action," Ska Keller, a German MEP and one of the Greens' leading candidates for European Commission president, said in a statement Sunday following four days of continent-wide voting.

"This trust given to us by voters is both a task and a responsibility to put green polices into action," said Keller.

As The Guardian reported, the "Greens' surge was strongest in Germany, where Die Grünen finished second behind Angela Merkel's center-right CDU with almost 21 percent of the vote, according to provisional estimates—nearly double their 2014 total."

Greens also had strong showings in Finland, France, and Ireland on the back of higher-than-usual voter turnout.

"Finland's Greens... came second with 16 percent of the vote, while in a major upset, Europe Écologie-Les Verts, led by a former senior Greenpeace figure, came third in France with 13.3 percent, up from 8.9 percent," according to The Guardian. "Against all expectations, a Portuguese Green Party won its first European parliamentary seat."

Projections Sunday indicated that, overall, Greens secured 71 seats in the European Parliament—up from 52 seats five years ago. According to exit polling, the Greens' surge was bolstered by strong support from young voters.

Trump protest signs

Hilarious

https://www.sadanduseless.com/donald-meets-england-funny/#5Mz6gzZeFD9OP4ix.01

And of course Aaron Banks is tied to serious financial irregularity in the Leave campaign.

Word is Labour may have hung on by 500 votes or so.

Tories with their worst result in the constituency since 1886.

https://mobile.twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1136804308723404800

nicky wrote:

Any claim thatPeterborough was a good result for Labour is like Trump pretending he won by the biggest margin in 50 years. Whistling past the graveyard.

labour’s vote fell from 23,000 to 10,000. Its percentage from 48 to 31%. 

Would have been a drop in the Labour share under any leader, and the drop would have been just as deep if not deeper if Labour had centered the unwinnable fight to force the Tories to allow a vote on a referendum with Remain as an option.  We've know the whole time the Tories will never allow that vote and can't be made to, so it's pointless to keep attacking Corbyn for not undemocratically changing party policy to center that hopeless, pointless fight.

What matters is that the new Tory leader will essentially be obliged to call a snap election, which means it's once again for Labour to have a leadership change, even if there was any other possible leader who could possibly unite the party-so, for the good of the party, for there to be any chance of saving the NHS, all attacks on Corbyn need to stop.  

Nothing would be improved if Tom Watson got his way and Corbyn were replaced by somebody who spoke in empty centrist soundbites.

nicky wrote:

Any claim thatPeterborough was a good result for Labour is like Trump pretending he won by the biggest margin in 50 years. Whistling past the graveyard.

labour’s vote fell from 23,000 to 10,000. Its percentage from 48 to 31%.

Did you notice that it was the Brexit Party, not the Conservatives, who were the main challengers to Labour in that seat? What does the rapid rise of the Brexit Party in the polls to the point of challenging for first place tell you about how people really feel about Brexit?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/07/labour-ground-game-peterborough-byelection-analysis

Of course the EU Guardian mistakenly assumes that all the Labour vote came from remainers.  Labour won, as Corbyn said, because it focused on austerity, not Brexit.  But Trump's visit might have been the margin of victory as well.

It seems to me that the situation in the UK is polarizing more and more into two diametrically opposed camps, Remainers and no-deal Brexiters, even though the largest consensus position is probably a soft Brexit where the UK maintains strong ties to the EU but is independent on the issues of austerity and immigration. I think during the last few years Labour has formally supported a soft Brexit but that has been secondary to using the Brexit situation to cause an election. During this time I think Labour has also placed ending austerity above supporting a soft Brexit. As it turns out I think Labour’s first priority should have been, and still should be, supporting a soft Brexit that maintains mostly the status quo with the EU but allows the UK not to follow the EU’s policies on debt, deficits, and, austerity. I think conservatives like Boris Johnson and Farage are trying to establish a kind of Brexit where the UK will have to always adhere to right-wing austerity policies in order to compete with the EU by having lower tax rates than the rest of Europe. Brexit is part of their plan to turn the UK into a right-wing, low tax, free market, pro-corporations, jurisdiction.

"...Are we not going to spend the day using Peterborough to share dodgy maths and bar charts like we did after the European elections? If so then it's Leave 51%, Remain 46%. Are we not doing that? No? How come? Oh..."

https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1136893800796884992

 

WATCH: "The EU's brutal treatment of the periphery states show just how far-fetched ideas of remain and reform/rebel really are. The EU doesn't tolerate 'rebellion' it crushes it. @EddieDempsey  #brexit

https://twitter.com/labourleave/status/1136918508732919808

josh wrote:

They wouldn't need to leave the EU to do that.

I don’t think being in the EU allows the UK to have independent trade agreements with other countries. I think people like Farage and Boris Johnson are looking forward to signing the UK up to many right-wing trade agreements.

Rajeev Syal, "Seven Reasons Labour won the Peterborough byelection," The Guardian 7 June, 2019

Quote:

***

4. Labour concentrated on local issues

Voters told Labour it would lose if it fought Peterborough on Brexit, leadership and the economy. So it focused on three issues that have particularly worried local voters: a rising crime rate, the state of local schools, and fly-tipping. This strategy caused some concern, particularly after the EU elections revealed that a single national issue, Brexit, could dominate all others. Before the count on Thursday night, one Labour fixer said: “If we pull this off, it will show that you can run a local campaign and beat a huge national issue. We have policing, fly-tipping and education; they have Brexit, Brexit and more Brexit.”

5. Momentum mobilised hundreds of activists

Despite internal rows over Brexit and tensions between the head of Momentum, Jon Lansman, and Corbyn’s key advisers, the grassroots organisation that swept Corbyn to the top of the party is still a significant force.

Momentum claims it mobilised nearly 1,000 activists to knock on doors or make calls in the runup to the byelection. This included activists carpooled to Peterborough from North Wales, London, Winchester, Leeds, Grantham, Leicester, Brighton, Bretton, Northampton and Norwich. Others made thousands of calls using Momentum’s distributed phone bank system to mobilise local party members and persuade swing voters. More than 300 people canvassed on the Saturday before polling day and 500 knocked on doors on polling day.

Canvassers successfully squeezed the Lib Dem and Green vote on the doorstep by warning that a misplaced vote could give the Brexit party a foothold. One Guardian reader from the city said he had been visited by Ed Miliband and several activists this week imploring him to vote tactically for Labour – and he was won over.

The % for the Brexit Party was 1) double what UKIP got in 2015 and 2) half of what Leave got in 2016, basically confirming the Brexiters current standing of around 25% in the polls.  Which seems to be a ceiling for them (they can't squeeze any more blood out of the Tory stone.)

nicky wrote:

One thing the results tell me, Aristotle, is that pblic sentiment for Brexit is waning. 

In the referendum 61% voted Leave in Peterborough. Yeaterday osly 51% voted for the Leave parties (TBP 29; Con 21; UKIP 1)

They also tell me that Labour only won, despite a huge drop in support, because of the right-wing split.

The ostriches will of course delude themselves that this was a massive vindication for Corbyn, but they said that after the EU elections too.

It doesn't matter what public sentiment is on Brexit when it isn't possible to get a Tory government ever, under any circumstances, to allow the Commons to vote on a referendum with Remain as an option.

Face facts-soft Brexit, which preserves the good of the EU arrangement without chaining the UK forever to the bad, is the best possibility.  It's a waste of time trying to reverse Brexit when it isn't possible and when no good would come of reversing it.  Keeping the immigration parts of the EU-which are its only progressive and positive features-is enough.

'Remain and Revolt': A Lame Variation of the Bogus 'Remain and Reform'

https://www.thefullbrexit.com/remain-and-revolt

"...The EU's structure is based around insulating international capital from the vagaries of democratic politics. Reforming them is not therefore a serious socialist or democratic agenda but a liberal fantasy. 

Certainly, the parliamentary Labour Party - even its tiny Corbynista contingent, has no stomach to go into battle not merely against European authorities, but against the British state's own courts..."

Corbyn's Brexit-'soft' (BS) = NO Brexit. It's a politrick to persuade Leavers to vote Labour-Remain. 

USW Submission to the Standing Committee on International Trade Regarding CETA

https://www.usw.ca/news/publications/policy-research-and-submissions/usw...

"...We are troubled by the government's continued effort, despite evidence to the contrary, to brand the CETA as a 'progressive' trade deal...If ratified, CETA will further bind our economy to a currently-flawed global economic system that has not only hurt Canadian workers but which will also undermine our democracy, environment and national autonomy..."

 

Macron Tells Trudeau That France Will Ratify CETA 'ASAP'

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/macron-trudeau-ceta-1.5166152

"Opposition to CETA is particularly strong among nationalists and euro-skeptics..."

Those damn Yellow Vests and 'deplorables' in the way again. Not like Canucklheads who go along with pretty much anything neoliberal or supranational nowdays and certainly don't protest 'free trade' anymore...That was soooo 1980s.