Rayvin

I actually deeply wish I had your faith in the media. It would make my life so much less enraging.

The Times is owned by Murdoch, why would they want to do anything to harm a Tory victory? I wonder how drunk is drunk enough to be able to handle the results...

Agree that the Tories will win a majority. The rest is academic really. 60 seats sounds about right but frankly, knowing the voting success of the things I care about, it could be horrific. That said, hopefully the polls persuade people to go out and vote.

If that one is right, the Lib Dems are fucked.

happy birthday mate

The government should be sorting that rather than the consumer. It's not like Amazon would ditch us.

Worth bringing back up since May is threatening to tear it up

@wolfy Depends on the extent to which you're a free thinker

I think you're onto something.

If anyone is voting because of patriotism, or nebulous concepts like that, they're brainwashed. Otherwise agreed.

You can have one too.

Even gave you a like for your ego

Not only back, he's voting Corbyn.

The Lib Dems hung their entire political future on it, so I'm certain they remember it

I believe in social liberalism

I can't remember, but ideally it's something I'd like to see changed. I'm pretty sure he could change it without a referendum though. Might get political blowback of course.

Not sure we're hard left tbf. It's not like anyone is looking to bring back Communism. We're just left. But yes, I see the issue. I'm hoping Starmer can be persuaded to take up with a number of the policy positions. Maybe some of the centrists can be persuaded if they were only centrist for pragmatic reasons.

I think Blair's policies worked because at that point, the ideology was still functional. I believed in Blair at the time, things seemed to be working well and there was no reason to think it was all going to go to the wall. It did though, and that's because we didn't appreciate how flawed the ideology was. Not even his ideology I'll stress, and I'm not blaming him for it as such - just pointing out that with the benefit of hindsight, you can now see where the problems have come from. As you say, there was no appetite for socialism. Blair was the best we could have gotten, and did a good job under the circumstances. But the world has changed and the rulebook he wrote no longer applies. Owen Smith might well have been a better option than Corbyn, but there was no chance that he was going to get in because the PLP had made clear it was going to directly challenge the membership. For people who supposedly know how to 'play the game' that was a fucking stupid decision. Corbyn ended up with a bigger mandate than the one he started out with. Burnham, maybe. He was the next best option. But something extreme and radical was needed IMO - apparently other people felt the same way. Corbyn pushed us a long way left, and we have space and room to manoeuvre again now.

All sounds fine to me, but it's about the bigger picture as well. We need to be moving towards something, and that something has to be underpinned by the idea of 'a better tomorrow'. But in effect, what you're saying here is that you support a lot of what he says. Do you think any of it would have been on the table without Corbyn?

Agreed on the EU, agreed on Corbyn not being an intellectual powerhouse. But look, the PLP clearly weren't listening. You could see that through their dogged following of the Tories over austerity. Their voting over that welfare bill. They needed to be shaken and they have been. If they see Corbyn's likely defeat as an opportunity to go back to what they were doing, we're in dire fucking trouble.

I am highly cynical of the world's ability to do anything other than slow down our own (self)destruction, so don't worry about me being disappointed. I'm amazed that the whole Corbyn project even got off the ground. The world needs to transition to a new model for living since we aren't going to have sufficient jobs to sustain everyone under the current model, for very much longer. Whether that means things like UIs, population controls, etc, I don't know. But I'd far rather the solutions were coming from the left. If we leave it to the right, we'll end up with gated communities of the wealthy, with the feral 'normal people' living outside in tribal communities and chewing on each other's legs to pass the time. It's not about whether Corbyn is able to provide a solution, it's about the establishment recognising that it has to change and can't just respond to problems after the fact. We need a long term model for assessing the challenges we're facing, which is very difficult to do in 5 year electoral cycles. Unless you have people like Corbyn who are going to consistently stick to what they believe in, and not just what is a vote winner on that day of the week. He will fail, ultimately. But he's widened the fucking Overton window, and that's a start.

I'm not bothered about Corbyn particularly, save for observations that he appears to be principled, honest and consistent. He's not the point for me though, it's the policies. I don't know how many times I have to say that, but it seems to always need to be one more time. If he goes, and is replaced with someone like Trudeau (but with principles) who the press can all circlejerk over but who still fits the policy profile - then great. Suits me. The PLP should have supported him because the ideology underlying Blairism has collapsed. Utterly. It is on the floor, and it's being kicked shitless by the right. Their absolute refusal to grasp this has greatly damaged the party. So finally then - on people's different points of view. Your view and mine, on politics, were almost entirely identical pre-Brexit. Since the referendum, I have researched, read around, listened to speakers from all sides of the spectrum, and have developed my own view on what is happening based on that. My position moved, yours hasn't. I personally believe that you don't see the bigger picture in all of this, and view things like Trump, Brexit, Corbyn as random and almost unrelated events in a spell of dismal political developments that you've gently posited may come from a resistance to globalisation, but for which you believe there is no solution. Other people are reaching for a solution - that is why we are where we are. That is why this is happening. The genie isn't going back in the bottle until a solution is found. For me, I'd far rather that solution came from the left - because people like Trump are a solution as well. A bad one with all manner of disastrous consequences, but they'll still get the job done given time. Bringing the old Blairite way back into the mix isn't going to help anyone, and will eventually lead to our own version of Trump.

It is how it feels sometimes!!