It is my personal experience that in my lifetime our country has never been so badly governed, nor has it been subjected to such a grossly dysfunctional economic model which continually makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. Aside from Brexit chaos, transport muddle, Universal Credit failure and unreasonable pressure on all public services from increasing demand and reducing resources, we were treated to our immature Defence Secretary announcing the deployment of our giant carrier to the South China Sea so as to confront China, with other measures to needle Russia. This is not only militarily illiterate given the actual state of our forces, but adventurist posturing for which the minister has no money. He is part of a government whose policies have lead to well over a million people relying on food banks.
Yet it beggars belief that the latest in depth poll shows that the government would win a snap election. Of course the poll could well be wrong. At the last election polls, all of them, predicted a landslide for May when she suddenly went to the country and we all recall the shock on election night. Yet even the appearance of the poll, when Labour should be far ahead, is a stark warning to the Labour leadership to sharpen up its act. It cannot please everybody across the country, nor even in the Labour party itself, so it must stop trying. At the moment its stance on Brexit, nuanced, clever and cerebral to the pros, is an indecipherable muddle to ordinary people. That is blocking out its very popular policies on public services, utilities, ending austerity, sorting out the railways and no end of other positive ideas to reboot the country, currently suffocating under decaying carcass of what was once known as Thatcherism.
As for Brexit. It is a mess. Nobody voted for it. What they were offered was stay or leave. Leave was easy like cancelling Amazon prime. Well it’s not. It is a massive legal disentanglement, with unknown economic consequences, with the greatest curb on personal freedom and personal sovereignty, at the moment I am a citizen of the EU with full voting rights for its parliament, in our history. There will be no Brexit dividend whatever shape it takes.
The majority both of Labour members and Labour voters want to stay in the EU. The right and democratic thing is to go for a People’s Vote. It is clear cut, simple and in full accord with Labour’s heritage of championing the rights of ordinary people and the universal nature of democracy. It is also, with the present factinalised and divided political class and the polarised country, the only course that makes any sense. The Labour leadership are going for a general election. There are two problems with this.
First it will not resolve the big historic issue of the hour and second Labour might well lose it. A People’s Vote will end Brexit once and for all. The Tory government will fall. And Corbyn will coast into Downing Street.