What would various literary and historical figures have made of Brexit?

We asked all of the Labour leader and deputy leader candidates five questions to help us decide who we nominate.

In politics, as in life, it is always dangerous to believe your own vanities or succumb to myths because blind belief is so much easier than rational analysis.

So too with Brexit and Labour as it stares into the infinity of an era of opposition without seats in Scotland and with a voter base that is no longer automatically on tap as it was in the 20th century and up to the end of the last Labour government.

Article from March 15th, 2017

John Prescott’s view that Jeremy Corbyn and his top team are “not up to the f***ing job” which earned him a “potty mouth Prescott” headline in the Mail on Sunday won’t have come as a surprise to the Labour leader.

We are the 52 per cent - the 52 per cent who voted against leaving the EU in the general election. Of course under the UK’s electoral system we lost. And of course, having a Labour leader and a wider party leadership including trade unions that could not defend EU membership with style or panache either in 2016, 2017 or 2019 did not help.

Tory members who propelled Johnson into Number 10 can have had no doubts they were choosing a serial liar for their leader. After all, he was sacked in 2004 by their former party leader, Michael Howard, when his denial that he was having an affair was proven false. Years earlier he was sacked by another boss - Times editor Charles Wilson - for fabricating a quote.

A top Lib Dem has admitted that the House of Commons was edging towards a People’s Vote when the election was called. Former Tory MP, turned Change UK, turned Lib Dem, Heidi Allen, told the Evening Standard the numbers were almost there for a People’s Vote.

In a piece for The Guardian, Sir Simon Jenkins makes very heavy weather of the obvious point that this, like most other elections, turns on the question of identity as well as economics. The Brexit plebiscite of 2016 was an anti-immigration vote - the posthumous revenge of Enoch Powell. Every referendum in European nations this century (bar two small ones) with the EU on the ballot paper has been rejected by voters.

The Germans have a word for the pleasure I felt when I read the verdict from pollster YouGov that “Since becoming Lib Dem leader, Jo Swinson’s detractors have grown at a faster rate than her fans” - it’s schadenfreude. It means “pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune. 

Her performance in the Leaders Question Time programme won’t have changed You Gov’s findings.

Once again as at every moment since the 2016 Brexit plebiscite, Labour is getting mixed and messed up over European citizens working in Britain.