Rascal
El Presidente
You like your "hards" don't you. I assume then you also see Democratic Socialism as "hard" left, if so where is Communism on your scale of "hard" or are you just using hard as a comparison to liberal left?
I don't think Corbyn was a good leader but he did move the Overton window leftwards in the Labour party and the country to some extent, which sadly Keith is now moving back to the centre, so in my mind he was a necessary leader at the right time as Labour had become Tory lite and now are moving back to Tory lite. As Tony Benn was fond of imitating the further right the Labour party get the more comfortable capitalists become with it as they can use the Labour party to shake up the Tories and move them rightwards.
Labour leave is not that distinct from RW leave, but the endgame is very different. That is why i am willing to swallow to RW leave for the time being because of the possibilities arising. What the Liberal left failed to see was that the people of this country didn't want immigration, yes it was embellished by Farage to the point of ridiculousness but there were genuine concerns and it is no surprise that the red wall fell as a result. Traditional old Labour is small C conservative, it is patriotic, but the Liberal left forgot all that all or dismissed it as unimportant.
Orwell wrote
‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.’
Old Labour values are patriotic, the liberal left denied the patriotism of the working class. Emily Thornberry with her white van man incident probably did as much to enable brexit in that one instance than any other politician. You saw the Pro-EU rallies in London and the working class didn't identify with them at all.
As much as Brexit was about immigration, it was also about identity. Fintan O'Toole is brilliant on this in his book "heroic failure" England rather than Wales and Scotland was suffering an identity crisis, it s place in the world was in question and brexit was a reaffirmation of England as being a country that stood alone. This is incredibly powerful imagery in a country that has some sort of strange obsession with WW2 and Nazism. Standing alone against the EU became WW2 reimagined, you saw the analogies in the media right up to the day we left and they will continue because they appeal to a sense of working class identity. Labour leave gets this, its based in the working class not the liberal left so it had to appeal to the same people RW leave appealed to. It was never going to win over the liberal left, because as Orwell writes above. Freedom of movement to the Liberal left meant visiting their holiday home in the Languedoc, Freedom of movement to the working class was Lithuanians taking over their corner shop.
I agree the EU was more than a neo-liberal project, but it has many good points, but it has major failings too. If you live in a town that feels remote from London, then that remoteness is exaggerated when it comes to Brussels. Of course the RW propaganda played on that and exaggerated it further with nonsensical claims and downright lies. Many of them from the pen of Johnson himself.
Remain though was not the way to get back at this brextremists, leaving and then turning it on its head and pushing for a Socialist country would be the best way to ram all those lies down the throats of the ERG and the likes.