A wilding

It is boring to reprise, but as I recall I did not ask you any questions at all. My points were: Recent opinion poll and election results show that Corbyn is not massively popular - e.g. Labour got 28% in this year's council elections. That this is evidence that a large number of people who voted Remain are not that enamoured of him. That Labour unfortunately does have some issues with how it is handling some anti-semitism in its ranks, which I backed up by examples quoted as fact by the BBC. If you do now have any counter arguments to the above, feel free. But please try to avoid the personal insults. As for: ... but apparently not so COMPLETELY against it as to be willing to compromise and let someone else be the temporary caretaker PM!

Agreed. As in various other countries, a section of the UK press is basically propaganda, constantly demonising the left and extolling the right. And it unquestionably has its effect. It is why BS Johnson has made it to PM. Like many in the UK I know people who uncritically read the Daily Mail/Telegraph/etc, and are convinced that Johnson is the destined saviour of the country. The parallels with Trump are extremely clear. One not immediately obvious unfortunate consequence of this is that Corbyn, his team, and his supporters have stopped listening to any criticism whatsoever, attributing it all to that propaganda. (Indeed my opinion is that Corbyn stopped listening to anyone who disagreed with him on anything a long time ago.) That bunker mentality in his team, not taking on even constructive criticism from potential friends and allies, and scarcely even pretending otherwise, has worried and alienated many people. A lot of the issues with Corbyn stem from it. In my opinion it does genuinely make him potentially dangerous, thus only reinforcing the right wing propaganda. Which is a big shame because the propaganda can and has been beaten, though it needs someone with a great deal more political ability than Corbyn. Instead we now have two polarised camps. The only glimmer of upside is that there does still seem to be a large number of people in the middle, not willing to join either camp.

Certainly BS Johnson is an appalling PM. But it is not difficult to imagine that a principled right of centre politician (if there is such a thing) might think that Corbyn is little better. The prosecution case is that over the last few years Corbyn, for all his decent core principles, has shown himself to be an stubborn incompetent tin eared idealist with his head in the clouds and an infallible ability to screw things up by sticking on some obscure point at exactly the wrong moment. Plus he is surrounded by a coterie of hard left people who are managing him and carrying out their own agenda in his name. On top of that it is obvious that Corbyn considers Brexit as his lever to make himself PM, and does not care what the Brexit outcome is provided only that he gets to be PM (though his preference is obviously for some sort of Brexit). Given that, you can see that while this hypothetical politician would never support Johnson, they might not be able to bring themselves to (even temporarily) support Corbyn either.

Hey, I got accused first, of being alt-right. (Or at least I think so, I had some difficulty parsing the relevant paragraph.)

@Safiya I think this was the only thing in your post relevant to anything I said. It seems that you think that me linking to information stated to be fact by the BBC is insufficient. All I can say to that is that if you prefer alternative facts (for example that only widespread electoral fraud is concealing that Corbyn is actually massively popular) then there is nothing I can do to stop you, and probably no point in us continuing to engage. However, while I obviously have no knowledge of your personal circumstances, and while it is true that we are spied on online on an industrial scale, if you really think that the establishment has made multiple attempts to assassinate members of your family in the UK, then you might want to seek help.

Went to see the demolition of the remaining towers of the old Didcot power station today (UK) and got a bit more excitement than we had bargained for when it caused a pylon near us to blow and left a swathe of South Oxfordshire without power. Fortunately nobody was seriously hurt and we were unscathed. This slightly shaky video (not by us) gives a good impression of what happened (see about 2 minutes in).

Oh, his principles certainly don't include any requirement to bow to majority opinions when he disagrees with them. Certainly not when that majority are against something he does regard as a principle ... Hence concerns about whether he can be trusted as a Stop No Brexit caretaker PM.

@Safiya Better, so I will address what points you make. So at the general election some time ago, before a lot of the recent events, about 13 million people voted Tory, another 13 million Labour, while about 25 million voted for other parties or not at all. Given our first past the post system, is that really proof that neither the current Tory party nor the current Labour party are disliked by wide swathes of the electorate? As to your unsupported claim of Tory gerrymandering I am not clear how that is relevant, other than as an indication that you also favour the idea that our first past the post system has a distorting effect. However, I was of course referring to more recent electoral results in my post, notably the last set of council elections in which both Labour and the Tories got only 28% of the vote. I was explaining why the 16 million people who voted Remain might not trust Corbyn to understand their concerns. That is nothing to do with whether they would trust Corbyn to try to rein in the 0.1%. Private schools and central banks have nothing to do with that either. If Corbyn wants to reform the EU, then leaving it is a strange way to go about it! He certainly has made no practical proposals for reform that I have heard. (And given that the UK did not adopt the Euro it is relatively insulated from the EU Central Bank anyway.) You literally wrote this under a post in which I quoted examples! I said: None of that is controversial, if you really want chapter and verse you could start with the BBC: A guide to Labour Party anti-Semitism claims (Unless you were just asking for examples of anti-semitics in the Labour party, in which case that link will give you examples of people in the party who have actually been disciplined for it.) P.S. Though thanks for describing me as "regurgitating from the Daily Fail" - Mrs W had a good laugh at that.

I see Jeremy Corbyn as a person of principles and ideals (whatever one thinks of them). He lives his life by them and is totally unwilling to compromise on them, to an extent that clearly weakens his ability to be an effective politician. Stopping Brexit is clearly not one of his principles or ideals - so I personally don't think his fence sitting and avoiding this issue is any contradiction. I could easily see a scenario where Corbyn deviated from an agreed Stop No Deal Brexit plan because he got hung up on one of his principles. Who knows, maybe the EU only offer an extension on some condition he feels personally unable to sign up to? Obviously the grouping that voted him in would be able to VoNC him at will. Except that by now it really would be one minute to midnight and doing so would probably make No Deal Brexit inevitable. So in fact he would have them over a barrel. Then there is that word "coalition". That is want Corbyn wants, to lead a coalition. But the centre group does not want to be in any coalition led by him. What they want is to perform an unprecedented once off manoeuvre to stop BS Johnson from bypassing the will of parliament. Corbyn's insistence on that term shows the difference in viewpoint between them and I can see how it would make then uneasy. @Safiya You are new here. So just to let you know that on this board posters are generally expected to manage something a little better than just content light, angry, insult laden rants.

Yes, LinkedIn does seem just to be about keeping in contact with ex colleagues these days as far as I can tell. When I do log on I see that I am now getting link requests from people at recruitment agencies at a rate of about one a day. Many do not even bother to include a personal message. Others have personal messages that look like they have been generated by a bot. ("Looking at your profile, I was very impressed with your skills in X and Y. I have several roles available in your area that I think you would be interested in."). Most of the rest are for roles that would be obvious non starters ("I am recruiting for a 3 month contract using [a technology I have never worked on] at [somewhere inconvenient a long way from where I live]."). Some are just sad, e.g. one from a agent who has clearly done some research into me and carefully crafted a personal message but equally clearly had a poor understanding of the industry and no jobs available. All this despite the fact that my LinkedIn CV is basically a list of companies and job titles. If I am at all typical then it is no wonder that LinkedIn is dying.

@Safiya Hmm Most British people would probably agree with you that the current generation of Tories are obnoxious. You only have to look at recent opinion polls and election results. There is also widespread agreement that their austerity programme was purely ideologically based and that it has been a disaster for large swathes of the country. But that does not automatically make Corbyn the answer. It certainly does not mean that a majority of British people think he is the answer - again look at recent opinion polls and election results. And public opinion here is all the more important, given that Corbyn is wedded to the two party system of his younger days (we see repeatedly his demands for special status as leader of the official opposition). In that context, the fact that he is failing to pick up the support that the Tories have justly lost ought to give him pause. At best his team appear to think that people will ultimately be forced to vote for his Labour as the slightly less bad alternative. Also Brexit cannot be left out of this. Most Remainers are convinced (rightly or wrongly) that the economic impact on the UK will be huge, basically that the country would be locked into a long term austerity at least as bad as that of the last nine years, one that could not be swept away by simply electing a government that stops favouring the 0.1% so outrageously. For these people the fact that Corbyn does not get this is a massive red flag (no pun intended) that disqualifies him from office. As for: This sort of shrill line really does not help Corbyn's cause. Yes many people would agree that Israel has taken a dark path and that the the Palestinians are getting a raw deal. Corbyn's personal views on this are not too extreme. However, most dispassionate people looking at the facts would say that the Labour party does have an issue with anti-semitism at the moment, it is not just about people being pro Palestinian and anti Israel. The sad thing is that competent leadership would have dealt with this and made it a non issue long ago. Instead we get things like Corbyn's office interfering with investigations while denying they are doing so, cancelling and then reinstalling disciplinary actions, denouncing people pointing out the problem and so forth. (Incidentally that last one raises the hackles of people old enough to remember the old days of the Hard Left, where the only virtue was exact following of the Party line on everything, and anyone who deviated was called a traitor and considered worse than anyone on the Right.) Liked the subtle references to historical inevitability though

On the caretaker PM plan: Personally I think Corbyn has once again displayed his lack of political nous. I am reminded of when May decided to be flexible about Brexit, and so called a meeting with other party leaders to lecture them about how they had to be flexible by doing exactly what she told them. Corbyn almost managed to make it a story about himself instead, by flouncing out of the meeting on a technicality before it started. The centre grouping of MPs sees the possibility of a no deal Brexit as an existential crisis, a reason to take extraordinary and unprecedented actions such as electing a caretaker PM whose only actions will be to immediately ask the EU for another extension and then call an election. For Corbyn it is all about getting the Tories out of power and getting himself into No 10. He gives the impression of being quite relaxed about a no deal Brexit, especially if he can escape blame for it. He thinks he is just playing the normal game of two party politics, hence his standing on his rights as leader of the Opposition. That being so, it is obviously that much harder for left wing Tories to support a VoNC. Indeed, given Corbyn's de-emphasis of Brexit, and his long standing dissembling of his pro-Brexit views, why should they even trust him not to decide on some last minute change of direction once he is installed? Especially as he seems not to care too much if their caretaker PM plan fails, and may even have made his offer just to scupper it?

^^ I am in total alignment with Iskaral Pust. ^^

A hard no deal could be pretty bad for them. Depending on country and circumstances, they could lose all free access to state services. Most obviously that would mean having to pay for all medical care, which could be serious for those who have retired. Of course most of the smarter ex-pats who could have long since obtained dual nationality. A substantial number have obtained an Irish passport (which only requires having has one Irish grandparent). Indeed a good many British people in the UK have variously obtained dual nationality as a precaution against the worst. But all this leaves a great many ex-pats who would be shafted.

I have just finished a reread of James McClure's Kramer and Zondi series. I had forgotten how good they are, so I thought I would post a recommendation. The books are decidedly uncosy police procedurals set in apartheid era South Africa. While being a good read just for the stories, they also have the added bonus of their setting. The books are superb examples of "show not tell", showing the horrors and wrongs of apartheid in clinical detail without any authorial comment at all (indeed I have seen a review that seemed to think McClure actually supported apartheid). It works all the more in that Lieutenant Kramer is an unthinking supporter of the system, except that he is humanised by constantly surreptitiously breaking the rules in favour of his very able black sidekick Sergeant Zondi, with whom he has a close working relationship based on mutual trust and respect.