Wes Tender

No, hands up, other countries held referenda on whether to accept treaties, then overturned the original decision. My train of thought was that the EU being used to others reversing their decision, that they would expect us to do the same.

Oh dear, here is a misspelling of the word on a Politico report, even worse as it is shown as two words. It is difficult to keep these people on the strait and narrow, isn't it? https://www.politico.eu/article/france-eu-minister-quick-uk-trade-deal-depends-on-brits-amelie-de-montchalin/ Which one of you pedants is going to contact them to put it right?

No I won't. My knowledge of geography and pop music won't allow it.

I've already told you, it is permissible to spell it both ways. Who cares whether my opinion renders you dozy? If all you can do is nit-pick, and then not even make a good job of that, you'll just make yourself look like a prat.

Is that really the best response you can muster? Both are permissible. It isn't like you to be a petty, small-minded nit-picker. Oh, sorry, it is.

As much as those bribes to the elderly seem attractive, I recognise that a Marxist Corbynist government would probably in short order produce higher unemployment and massively higher inflation than any previous Labour government. Many pensioners wouldn't have the strength to push the wheelbarrows of worthless bank notes around.

It seems to have gone right over your head that we haven't yet left the EU and that any inclination for other nations to follow us out will be influenced by how well we fare economically once freed from the EU's straightjacket. As you know, other countries have voted to leave the EU and then held second referendums which overturned that decision. The EU and the remoaner establishment, aided by a majority in the House, did their best to engineer a second referendum here too, in order that we thickos who didn't know what we had voted for, could change our minds and make the right decision if given the chance. When we are finally out, then those others who might join us will wait to see what sort of deal we can arrange with the EU on the one hand, and with the rest of the World on the other. When it comes to predicting our economic prospects, I bet that you were among the cognoscenti who thought it would be economically damaging if we didn't join the eurozone and that just voting to leave the EU would result in the necessity for a punishment budget, a huge rise in unemployment, house prices and a fall in GDP that would cost the average household an extra £4300 per annum. What happened to that lot, eh? Prediction wise, I was confident that once having voted to leave the EU, that the best efforts of the remoaner establishment to thwart Brexit would fail eventually, that the broken promises to allow a referendum on those EU treaties would force a day of reckoning when the pent-up frustrations of the Europhobes would exact their retribution. As it turns out, the political wrangling by firstly Cameron and then the useless May, the 2015 and 2017 elections, the shenanigans from the remoaner dominated House and the rogue speaker, Chequers, the Benn Surrender Act, all conspired towards a fed-up and exasperated electorate giving Boris the stonking majority he needed to get Brexit done finally. In many ways, the three and a half years delay brought about a situation whereby we negotiate with the EU with a far stronger hand than before, the threat to leave without a deal and to trade on WTO terms being far more forcibly weaponised than previously. If it was the case that this outcome had been war-gamed in some way by Cummings and others since Boris took over, then indeed he has played a blinder. You are on the wrong side of history on this issue, Gavyn, so I am not about to pay much attention to advice from you about what I think will happen in the future post-Brexit. I believe that we will thrive. You will have to wait a few years in order to crow about how you were right and I was wrong. But you will be the disappointed one again.

I put my hands up and admit that I benefited quite a bit from Labour policies further back from that period. When inflation hit 27% under Dennis Healey as Chancellor, I had taken out my first mortgage and the high inflation and rising house prices allowed me to borrow to the maximum to step up the housing ladder quickly, with the value of those early mortgage payments decreasing quickly. Unfortunately for Labour, although it was good for those borrowing, it was a disaster for those with savings or fixed incomes such as pensions.

I mentioned the Common Market in an ironic way, but you don't do irony, do you? I was being flippant about how we started off all those years ago before the whole thing morphed in the direction of a United States of Europe via the Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon treaties without the electorate having the opportunity to vote on any of them, and now we will revert back to trading with the EU either with a free trade arrangement that suits us, or on WTO terms. Further down the line, the EU will fall apart because the Euro will collapse and other member states will follow us out of the door when they see how beneficial it was for our economy outside of the EU straightjacket. I give it a decade.

It wouldn't be the EU then, would it?

What, a Common Market, as it were?

I thought that Lisa Nandy acquitted herself quite well on the Andrew Neil show last night.

Are you being self-deprecating there, Gavyn? That makes a change.

Did you think that me calling him a stupid old duffer inferred that I did? You're always going to get a small percentage of nutters across the political spectrum, but to draw comparisons with Germany in the thirties and the rise of Naziism just because we are leaving the EU is just plain barmy.

Lord Grieves, Lib Dumb Peer:

A good idea, before you embarrass yourself more by trying to infer some sort of equivalence between being called a racist or a leftie.

Are you really trying to conflate the two things as being somehow of equal standing?

Sorry that I misjudged your mood as being upset when you spoke of gutter politics and dishonesty. To that I'll add your implied opinions that my failed actions were weird, odd, strange and hypocritical, but note that you were not at all upset. Regarding the jibe about my views on democracy, no doubt you will be grateful for the prompt from Gavyn, who also loves preaching about democracy whilst lauding the establishment elite who have tried the best to thwart it.

Quite. I never managed to join because Labour realised belatedly that a massive surge in applications to join the party could be because a significant number of them were for the purpose of supporting the most unelectable candidate. It was naive of them to set the membership fee at such a pathetically low level, which encouraged rival party supporters to join and cause mischief, yet as I said, it allowed the Corbyn clique to claim that it demonstrated support for him and the shift to the left. Aintforever claims that those votes didn't influence the decision anyway, and that those who joined to distort the vote wasted their money, so I don't know why he is so upset. And I expect that it also went on with supporters of other parties joining the Conservative Party to influence the two leadership elections since the referendum result. However, that would have cost a minimum of £25 and risked them being accused of dishonesty by prissy moralists on football forums. Politics is a dirty business and the pursuit of power and influence makes it so. Whether it is getting more dirty over time because of the increasing ease of mass communications via social media is debatable, but it would be naive to believe that it was not always thus.

There are people as misguided as you in the EU parliament, Soggy. Once we're out, we're never going back.

Read that Guardian article again. You are in the unhappy position of either having to agree with its conclusions (that people become more inclined towards the right politically as they grow older), or in contradicting your own argument if you disagree with the conclusion that it is mainly Tory voters whose numbers are decreasing as they die of old age. Which is it? As for attempting to conflate people's readership of certain newspapers with their political views and claiming that if they didn't change their newspaper, they didn't change their political allegiance, I agree with CB. That is a simplistic example. A very, very simplistic one.

As you are more inclined naturally to believing what the Guardian says, then you will happily accept the conclusion reached by their journo in this article on the subject, wont you? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/03/do-we-become-more-conservative-with-age-young-old-politics And I thought that you had insisted that the Guardian was a newspaper of the centre, not the left? In any event, it isn't the case that reading a certain newspaper dictates one's voting intentions throughout one's life, is it?

Oh, diddums. In your opinion voting for a party you don't support in order to ensure that another party's leader isn't elected Prime Minister is fine, whereas paying a poxy, almost negligible sum to join a rival party to vote for the most unelectable the leader of that party isn't? The small amount, not much above the price of a pint of beer, stacks up well as a small token insurance premium when measured against the economic cost that I would have to pay in the event of the Marxist becoming Prime Minister. I didn't say that tactical voting was dishonest, did I? But neither is joining a party to register a vote for its leader either. I can understand how you, Gavyn and Soggy might not like that, but then why would I care a damn what annoys you?

You seem to naively believe that people stick to the same party all through their lives. I'm sure that there is evidence that people tend to vote more for left-leaning parties when they are younger and for right-leaning parties when they are older. That is in line with your assertion regarding the demography of the electorate by age, but you miss the point entirely that a significant number of those currently to the right of politics were on the left when they were younger. Therefore your conclusion that the Tory vote is dying out is complete nonsense. Labour couldn't stop their traditional support from changing horses in this election, so it is only by adopting policies and a leadership that is electable that will prevent it happening in future. That has little to do with the voting age. Regarding people from other parties joining Labour to skew their leadership election, I tried myself to pay their paltry £2 or whatever it was to vote for Corbyn initially, but they belatedly applied a minimum previous membership term, probably realising that the massive increase of membership was down to numerous Tories joining to distort the vote. But then they were able subsequently to point to the massive increase in membership of the party as evidence of Corbyn's popularity, the idiots. If they had any sense, they would have made membership £25 as a minimum, so that if people joined as spoilers, then at least party funds would have received a massive boost. I see nothing wrong with joining another party in order to vote for the most unelectable candidate as leader if you want. It is not much different in essence from tactical voting, is it? Parties appeal for donations to help their campaigns to win elections, so why shouldn't people effectively contribute their money attempting to weaken the opposition by facilitating the election of a weaker leader of that party?

If my uncle had been a woman, he would have been my aunt.