Labour’s Ruth Smeeth has branded her own party “racist” as she launched an extraordinary attack on Jeremy Corbyn and called for him to resign. Ms Smith branded the projected election result for the party as a “disaster” as she faced losing her seat in Stoke-on-Trent North. After the exit poll projected Labour would be hit with significant loses at the General Election, Ms Smeeth blamed Mr Corbyn and said he had made the party “the nasty party, the racist party”. Ms Smeeth said she had "definitely lost" the seat she held since 2015 and called on Mr Corbyn to resign as the party faced a humiliating defeat on Thursday night. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/ruth-smeeth-labour-party-racist-sky-news-a4312521.html
lmao at this being posted right after my tweet, yeah it's Labour's problem but somehow the Conservative party gained ground
Wasn't this inevitable at some point post-Good Friday Agreement? I know the loyalist paramilitaries are basically just criminal organizations at this point but I'm sure they could revert back to terrorist activities at the drop of a hat.
Time for everyone in this world to come to the conclusion that most people are shit. Even the ones who side with most your political ideals are only in it for themselves.
Nationalists in Northern Ireland may have their first majority ever over the Unionists. So a desire for a unified Ireland will be a high priority. Or in meme form.
for the record both Scotland independence and Irish unification are long shots because your average Tory is going to scream about keeping the UK together while they scream about wanting out of the EU so Boris will probably do all he can to prevent the UK from collapsing you know, totally internally consistent positions
tfw you have to spend all of history as the dude who blew up a 4 century old global power because a bunch of boomers got mad about memes on facebook.
I forget the thread but I got jumped on because I said people are the worst. Man is bad and we just keep proving it over and over again.
Looking forward to the “Boris will shift his positions to this new constituency since he has no ideology” takes.
eh, Scotland moreso because getting into the EU is a long process (I think the shortest was Austria at 5 years but they were like, a "real" country). Ireland packing its shit and leaving is almost certainly going to happen. the UK is in some very deep doo doo. we're about to eat their country alive with these trade deals.
It's going to be ugly if the old IRA groups decide to dust off their flags and Scotland joins them this time.
Like Lyrtch said, the Tories aren't going to let them do anything which will, hopefully, precipitate a lot of demonstration against them.
A prosperous United Ireland living large while the UK goes into a famine as a result of its own greed and stupidity would really improve my mood
how does everyone know so much about british politics? did i miss a course requirement in college or something
I’d like to see some polling on the Northern Ireland issue, just looking at results, looks like a lot of the Alliance vote, which at one time was nominally unionist went to Sinn Fein over the Brexit issue in some constituencies. Might be a broader shift to nationalism though. Nobody has played this worse the last 3 years than DUP. Should’ve voted for May’s deal—now have no influence over conservatives and still got their regulatory border down the Irish Sea.
That Corbyn isn't popular is not in dispute, but I think people are assigning too much blame to that narrative. The likeability of a candidate ultimately doesn't matter as much as people think it does. In the 2016 US elections and in the aftermath I'd often see people talking about how unlikeable Hilary Clinton was. I mean, ok, maybe so, but it's not like Trump was in any way more likeable. Broader trends and situational variables are much more of a factor usually. Basically, a generally more nationalist trend throughout a lot of the world and disinformation campaigns have a lot more to do with this than anything Corbyn is or isn't I think.
Likability translates into enthusiasm which translates into turnout, and turnout was down from 2017 (albeit not enough to explain the whole of the shift in results). I also disagree about Trump’s likeability - he’s extremely well-liked amongst his base.
Well that's certainly not flattering for Corbyn. I guess I'll retire my hot takes and continue reading posts from people who know what they're talking about.
this is all extremely not true in US presidential election cycles I wasn't sure if it carried to elections like the UK had where it's not like you're checking a box next to Corbyn or Johnson explicitly, but it seems it does.
It was known Corbin was really poorly liked, right? Why didn’t Labour just pick someone else? How does that work? Or is it like Hillary where everyone knew the person was not well liked but the party said by golly it’s their turn?
I can't say the UK is the same for sure but I live in a parliamentary system and it's not at all uncommon to hear someone say they voted for (head of party) or party itself as opposed to the actual candidate running for the constituency. I guess looking at the numbers now I probably don't give enough credit to the likeability of politicians. I've just been more of a big picture mindset I guess. How much of Trump winning was because of Hilary or whatever other reason and how much was just because Democrats had held the presidency for 8 years and an opposing party victory was always a good possibility historically? It's why I can't bring myself to be sure Trump will be voted out. Big picture is that incumbent presidents in the US don't lose very often. Will that end up outweighing all the other narratives? We'll see and I hope not.
I'm not well educated on the Corbyn situation, but having seen leadership fights here it's not really as politically easy as just getting a new leader. It can be messy. You're gonna have different factions fighting for different people and that can be less than ideal in a politically charged time like a looming election or a big situation like Brexit that doesn't have a party consensus.
Long story short, members pick leader not MPs or anybody else. After Ed Miliband’s reforms, there was a flood of left-wind entryism into Labour which is 100% devoted to Corbyn. Corbyn smashed his opponent in the last leadership race. His allies also now control Labour’s National Executive Committee.
Didn’t realize this til looking at some of the results in more detail, but we were talking about Northern Ireland earlier—Unionist parties got more votes than nationalist by a decent bit—Sinn Féin lost 25% of their vote. Alliance vote exploded (about 18% overall) Once upon a time Alliance party was non-sectarian Unionist, now doesn’t take a position.