The Financial Times on Theresa May.

“Narrow, rigid, unimaginative, sly, secretive and wholly lacking in the political skills necessary to win over voters or build alliances, rarely can a leader have looked less suited to the task before them. This is the consensus view of the British prime minister….”

Robert Shrimsley           

Quote of the Week from Oliver Letwin, Conservative MP

When interviewed on Thursday 28 March, on his proposal to hold another session of indicative votes soon, following the failure the previous day of any of the eight indicative votes to gain a majority in the Commons as alternatives to a Prime Minister May’s Brexit deal, he said "It's very difficult to translate from how people vote the first time, when they don't know how other people are voting, to how they will vote when they can see how other people are voting under new circumstances," 
 If the last few months have proved anything it is that our MPs are not fit for purpose and that our government are an embarrassment and a shambles.

The Corbyn abuse Plan.

 The following is an extract from an article in Counterpunch by Johnathan Cook.

Britain now has within reach of power the first truly progressive politician in living memory, someone seeking to represent the 99 per cent, not the 1 per cent. But Jeremy Corbyn’s experience as the leader of the Labour party – massively swelling the membership’s ranks to make it the largest political party in Europe – has been eye-popping. 

I have documented Corbyn’s travails regularly in this blog over the past four years at the hands of the British political and media establishment. You can find many examples here. 

Corbyn, even more so than the small, new wave of insurgency politicians in the US Congress, has faced a relentless barrage of criticism from across the UK’s similarly narrow political spectrum. He has been attacked by both the rightwing media and the supposedly “liberal” media. He has been savaged by the ruling Conservative party, as was to be expected, and by his own parliamentary Labour party. The UK’s two-party system has been exposed as just as hollow as the US one. 

The ferocity of the attacks has been necessary because, unlike the Democratic party’s success in keeping a progressive leftwinger away from the presidential campaign, the UK system accidentally allowed a socialist to slip past the gatekeepers. All hell has broken out ever since. 

Simple-minded identity politics

 What is so noticeable is that Corbyn is rarely attacked over his policies – mainly because they have wide popular appeal. Instead he has been hounded over fanciful claims that, despite being a life-long and very visible anti-racism campaigner, he suddenly morphed into an outright anti-semite the moment party members elected him leader.

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