EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

^^If Corbyn pushes this to, and wins, a GE and then takes us out of the EU he will guarantee that the Tories sweep back in at the next GE due to the impact on the economy that leaving will bring.

Corbyn is neither stupid nor ideologically committed to leaving the EU. As I said, my prediction is that he would first buy time by citing May's crashing into every hurdle and then set about changing the political climate.

Every single credible forecast shows negative impacts - and they range from "bad", where we stay as close as we can to the EU, to "Mad Max undersold this" of the ERG version.

There's a lot to be said about economic forecasts. I'm not sceptical about them, but what you have to understand is that they are always premised on how the economy is run at the moment. The key thing is that for millions it's not running well. The large European economies (and at least some of the smaller ones, too) have become far more unjust than they were 30 years ago. People rightly feel ignored and marginalised. You have massive regional imbalances. Wealth distribution has become massively uneven and the relatively just post-war settlement (consider how the war effort brought people in Britain closer together, across classes; in Germany 1945 was year zero, etc.) has been thoroughly dismantled. Tax evasion and avoidance are rampant, public services have been and are being cut to the bone, vulnerable people and poorer people are suffering terribly as a result, racism and xenophobia are on the rise and as usual, 'divide and rule' is causing people at the lower ends of the income scale to fight each other.

That's how many people see 'the economy' and vote 'Brexit' or AfD in Germany. In Germany, the situation has strong echos of Depression-era Germany. So, frankly, many people don't give a stuff about the forecasts. (For the avoidance of doubt, I do.) So what if large corporations can't constantly roll their lorries out of their Amazon warehouses easily or export cars across borders any more? We'll rebuild a British car industry. We'll have more local businesses again that employ more people. So what if we can't get tomatoes from Holland easily again? We'll make British farming great again. If the Dutch can build hydroponic greenhouses, so can we. Oh, of course, there may be a period of adjustment, but we'll fill that vacuum. 'We have to start somewhere' instead of continuing further down the rabbit hole, don't we?

NB these are not my views, but I certainly have an overlap with them. It's just that while the inferences from the current situation are all good and correct, I'm sure, many of the 'Leave' voters are challenging the premise. Not all, of course, and I do think that the EU is completely the wrong target, but you can't just reply to their concern with 'the economy as we know it will collapse'. They may be insufficiently aware of how difficult it is to get back out of a depression and have too few positive proposals to chart a way forward, but their profound unhappiness with how it is at the moment is something you need to recognise.

And voters will follow the economy - the Tories will advance a line of "Labour destroyed the economy, only we can bring it back and therefore have money for the NHS".

Sure, except that, as above, voters may want a different economy to the status quo.

Once Brexit is done it cannot be recalled, and even if Labour are the ones to do it the Tories can then take advantage of it. It's a box that should not be opened, as to do so enables the sort of horrors that the Mercers only dream of.

Well, I obviously agree that 'Brexit' would be a disaster. I can't predict what would happen, but I certainly don't think that Corbyn doesn't see that possibility.