A wilding

Could he, though? I think you'll find the difficulties of such a coalition are quite real. Can't speak for the LibDems, but from a fair anecdotal knowledge of the Greens, Labour would have to work hard to get their support now. From the Greens' PoV they made multiple attempts at making deals with Labour in the recent past, including in the 2015 general election, and it turned out that the Labour agenda was ultimately always "Get your people to vote for us, and accept your annihilation for the greater good. (Oh, and we are going to throw huge resources at trying to get rid of your sole MP, as we see her as a huge existential threat to us.)"

UK; more specifically south east England.

Very much this. To take the example of the Cratchits, they would almost certainly have been living in what most of us today would consider to to be desperate poverty. Very poor housing insufficiently warmed, generally inadequate poor quality food, limited furniture (the children are likely all sharing the same bed); probably only a couple of changes of clothing and those much patched and darned (with one set of clothes being passed down to each child in turn), few other possessions, and so on. But they of course would not look at their existence in the same way and would know that they were far from being at the bottom of society.

I would say the opposite. A generation or so ago the main parties both had a solid hard core of support who would vote for them come what may. It feels now that there has been a increasing disillusionment all round and both only now have a shrunken and ossified core of supporters, with most of the people who still vote voting for the lesser evil. Hence the recent swings to the LibDems, and then to UKIP, and even initially to Corbyn's Labour. I take your point about the potential issue of Corbyn worrying people in the centre. But I do think there is a wider issue with him of which the anti-semitism stuff is merely a symptom. He is perceived as someone with his head too much in the clouds of idealism to lead effectively. Hence firstly his perceived failure, even before Brexit, to land effective body blows on a Tory party that, as said already, has displayed extraordinary amounts of incompetence ever since 2015; and secondly his apparent failure to notice the behaviour and actions of some of the people who have attached themselves to him and are acting in his name.

Wildly off topic here, but a future left-wing post Brexit UK government can only do things if it has money to do them. Which means it needs to attract global capital. As a smaller unit than the EU, the UK's bargaining power on regulatory framework, wages and the like will be correspondingly reduced. So assuming it is not going to go the Singapore route, the country will be poorer and thus less able to afford the welfare state.

That the problem in a nutshell. The voters were promised a "have your cake and eat it" Brexit. The EU was and is never going to agree to that. So what do our poor spineless MPs do now we are at the crux?

It is clear there is no majority for her version of Brexit. But does that mean that there is no majority for some other sort of Brexit? It is not as if the referendum was remotely clear about what sort of Brexit people were voting for ...

Surely it is clear? May's plan is to delay and obfuscate until the last minute, so that she can then be in a position to tell parliament "vote for my deal as it is this instant, or we will crash out with a no deal, and I have made sure everyone has been made entirely clear as how how much of a disaster no deal will be". With this strategy, getting the Brady amendment passed makes complete sense. It buys more time while she goes back to the EU for another pointless attempt at negotiation that will achieve nothing but run the clock down some more.

While Salmond is obviously still sub judice... A vociferous denial is typical when UK politicians are on the verge of being caught out in some fashion that will be terminal to their career. "I shall fight this with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play" as one once said.

The EU is on the record as saying they will accept an extension to article 50.

I think it is more that politicians, and in particular those making up recent Tory governments, have lied so much that nobody believes a word they say, even when they are telling the truth. In consequence people believe whatever matches their prejudices, steered by the tabloids, Russian trolls etc.

I was being polite. But the point is that the Hyperion duology was written before then, and manages to almost entirely avoid his subsequent Muslim obsession. Indeed it even has a good guy Palestinian refugee. So I will stand by my recommendation.

Late to the party, but you could try Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. Dan Simmons' first books, written before he went a little off the rails. Space opera, possibly a little dated now, a little pretentious, but still a good read.

Of course it was, He has even denied publicly that it will influence him.

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