A prospective East Devon Parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Democrats will champion the ‘Stop Brexit’ campaign at the coming General Election.

A snap general election is set to take place on Thursday, December 12, pending House of Lord’s approval.

Eleanor Rylance, a long-standing parish councilor, has been a district councilor for more than two years after gaining a seat on East Devon District Council in a May 2017 by-election.

Since then, she has retained both council seats and joined the South West team of candidates which increased the Lib Dem vote in the European elections, securing the election of Lib Dem MEPs Caroline Voaden and Martin Horwood.

She said: “The Conservative government has had three years to deliver Brexit and has shown itself incapable of doing so.

“The inescapable conclusion is that whatever the deal, leaving the European Union will make the UK poorer, more isolated and with its influence in the world much diminished. Enough is enough – we need to stop this madness by stopping Brexit.”

Last month, the East Devon Liberal Democrat executive unanimously reaffirmed its support for Ms. Rylance.

Local party chair, Penny Lewis, said: “The Liberal Democrats are the strongest national force backing remain and are in this election to ‘Stop Brexit’.

“Here in East Devon, we are proud to be part of that movement to restore sanity and hope to our country. In Eleanor, we have a worthy champion.”

A Cambridge Law graduate, Councillor Rylance is a freelance translator and a trained modern languages teacher.

Apart from her council duties, she chairs her local twinning association and is a keen but time-poor vegetable grower.

She is married to Adrian, a research scientist, and they have four children.

Ms. Rylance added: “As a local councilor active in my local community, I try to help people working their hardest but being hammered by national policies.

“I want to become your MP to join a large national team with the power to change those policies for the better.”

Current MP Sir Hugo Swire has successfully contested the last five consecutive general elections having taken over from Peter Emery who held the seat from 1967 until 2001.

In the last general election, in 2017, Sir Hugo retained his seat with 48.5 percent of the vote.

Source: https://www.midweekherald.co.uk/news/general-election-2019-eleanor-rylance-wants-brexit-stopped-1-6360364

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The question is whether Corbyn has left it too late to get the credit for belatedly and begrudgingly doing what much of his party thinks is the right thing.’ Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Is Labour really the party of remain, or leave? The official answer for a good three years has been both, which increasingly means in the eyes of many voters it is neither convincingly. The paradox of this week’s otherwise seismic shift in Labour Brexit positioning is that once the dust settles, essentially that’s still true.

Jeremy Corbyn does seem finally to have been cornered into a second referendum on Brexit, with trade union leaders unanimously agreeing this week that if a Conservative government brings any sort of deal (or a firm date for leaving with no deal) before parliament, Labour should demand a referendum on it and campaign to remain.

So it’s a pro-remain party now? Well, not exactly. The unions also agreed that if Labour wins a general election before Brexit has been agreed, Labour should pick up where the Tories left off by negotiating to leave and leave open the option of campaigning against remaining in the ensuing referendum on their own deal. Tory Brexit: bad. Labour Brexit: good, even if it’s remarkably similar to the Tory deal, which seems likely given the narrow economic and political tramlines within which the EU is operating. What matters, apparently, isn’t the principle of Brexit so much as who gets to be in charge of it.

Still, credit where credit is due for those who have fought long and hard to get this far. Labour may at least now avoid the humiliation of being outflanked on the pro-remain side by the likes of Philip Hammond, the Conservative chancellor whose willingness to do whatever it takes to stop no-deal is increasingly evident. The wider Labour movement seems to have successfully asserted itself against the leader’s closest advisers, although it should be said we have all been marched up this hill before only to be marched straight down again. The consolation prize for MPs in pro-leave seats is that they might still get to fight them on a manifesto which, like the last one, commits Labour to leaving. The question is whether Corbyn has left it too late to get the credit for belatedly and begrudgingly doing what much of his party thinks is the right thing.

It is a huge thing to rip up your membership card after 40 years, or even to put a cross against an unfamiliar name on the voting slip. Even in volatile times, it takes a lot for loyal voters to give up on a party and once that Rubicon is crossed, it isn’t so easily recrossed. So while many Labour remainers will simply be relieved to have an excuse to come home, others will want to see more than a graceless volte-face executed in a hurry (and in the middle of another embarrassing row about antisemitism). It may take a rather bigger, bolder break with the recent past before they are prepared to trust Labour again.

Meanwhile, the months of confusion have given the Liberal Democrats both a chance to detoxify and a reason to exist, something they have grabbed with both hands. That genie is not going back in the bottle easily, with whoever becomes the new leader likely to seek every opportunity to embarrass Labour on Brexit. There remains a palpable risk of Corbyn finally catching up with last year’s argument, just as time runs out for a referendum and Westminster moves on to contemplating a potential nightmare choice between leaving without a deal and parliament unilaterally revoking the whole thing.

If there is one thing left on which all Labour factions can agree, it’s a longing to move on from arguing about Europe to discussing the issues sorely neglected as a result of it. But on this evidence, they are likely to be disappointed for a while yet.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/09/labour-second-referendum-jeremy-corbyn-brexit

The post Labour is finally backing a second referendum. Is it too little, too late? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Reuters / Hannah McKay

Two parties have dominated British politics since the end of the First World War. The Labour Party, currently led by veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, and the ruling Conservative Party, which—for the next few weeks, at least—is led by disastrous outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May.

Imagine the shock over morning cups of tea, then, caused by an earth-shattering poll published Friday that showed those two parties lodged in third and fourth place. That is to say, if the poll is correct, a British general election would leave neither the Conservatives nor Labour anywhere near forming the next government.

So, what the Hell is going on? In a word: Brexit. The ongoing catastrophe that is paralyzing Britain’s political class has changed how voters think and feel about politics and there appears to be no going back. In second place in the poll was Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which, last week, was by far the most supported group in the EU parliamentary elections.

At the top of the poll was a party equally evangelic about its Brexit position—but on the opposite side of the debate. The Liberal Democrats, which ran the European election campaign with the frank and very British slogan “Bollocks to Brexit,” could win an election if it was held today.

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Our latest Westminster voting intention has the Lib Dems in first place and the Brexit Party second place, with Labour and the Tories pushed into third:
Lib Dem – 24%
Brexit Party – 22%
Con – 19%
Labour – 19%
Green – 8%
UKIP – 1%
Change UK – 1%
Other – 6%

Founded in the late 1980s as a merger of the ancient Liberal Party and the short-lived Social Democratic Party, the Liberal Democrats have never really been a major player.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, it was a refuge for voters who found Labour and the Conservatives unpalatable. The perennial “third party” in parliament, it was an inoffensive minor force who was praised for its opposition to the Iraq War and campaigned on important but ultimately not particularly interesting issues such as electoral reform.

That changed under the leadership of Nick Clegg—now better known in the U.S. as Facebook’s vice president for global affairs.

A few years after he took over, Clegg starred in the 2010 general-election campaign TV debates in a phenomenon dubbed by cringe-inducing pundits as “Cleggmania.” Clegg’s popularity put the Lib Dems in the strong position to form a coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservatives.

But, while Clegg still insists the Lib Dems were a moderating force on the center-right Conservatives—and, given events since, he may have a point—the coalition proved disastrous for the party. After winning a lot of support from young people, and posing with a pledge not to introduce university fees, that’s exactly what the Clegg/Cameron government did.

The anger provoked by that betrayal, and by the party being linked to Cameron’s harsh program of public spending cuts, saw the party decimated at the next general election in 2015. It went from having 57 seats in the House of Commons to a pathetic eight, forcing the perennial third largest party into fourth place behind the Scottish National Party.

Between now and then, there has been nothing but misery.

Despite constant talk of a chirpy #LibDemFightback, the party has spent four years in the political wilderness as voters punished them for the coalition. They gained a couple of MPs in 2017 snap general election, but leader Tim Farron stepped down after repeated criticism over his refusal to say whether he thought that homosexual sex was or wasn’t a sin.

Enter current leader Vince Cable, a 76-year-old party veteran who was seen as an unexciting but reliable short-term leader to give the party time to work out what it was going to do. For two years, he seemed doomed to fail and decided earlier this year that he’d had enough and would soon leave.

But then something remarkable happened very quickly. After unveiling its “Bollocks to Brexit” slogan, the party saw its poll ratings for the European elections surge until they reached second behind the Brexit Party. And so it came to pass—results showed the Lib Dems came in second with over 20 percent of the vote, marking the end of its wilderness years.

Often, voting intention in European elections doesn’t overlap with voting intention in a British parliament because voters focus on different issues. But, in the poll released Friday, the Lib Dems were out in front with 24 percent of the support, the Brexit Party had 22 percent, and the two main parties languished behind in joint third place with 19 percent of the voting intention.

So, what’s going on here? First, Brits seem to love a sweary slogan. But, more fundamentally, it’s showing how referendums with two choices polarize voters, and they choose parties that reflect that. “We did spectacularly well in the European elections because we had a very clear, simple message on Brexit,” Lib Dem leader Cable told The Daily Beast.

After Theresa May failed to deliver Brexit as promised, and negotiated a deal that many anti-EU voters didn’t believe counted as Brexit at all, pro-Brexit voters fled to the clearer and more hardline position of the Brexit Party.

And, as Jeremy Corbyn tried to ride two horses at once by adopting a muddy position designed not to alienate Remain or Leave voters, both deserted him. The Lib Dems picked up support from pro-Europe Labour backers, and the Brexit Party hoovered up voters who want to get on with leaving.

Former leader Farron told The Daily Beast the party was “heavily punished” after the coalition government, but added: “Our rebuilding at local level and our adopting of a clear and principled position opposing Brexit has led to the Lib Dems gaining electoral success in this year’s elections as moderates from Labour and Conservatives leave their parties and switch to the Lib Dems.”

The exact same phenomenon happened in Scotland after its referendum on independence in 2014. Voters chose a side during that vote, and didn’t just stop believing in it after those ballots were counted. Subsequent elections saw a huge rise in support for the pro-independence party, the SNP, and the clear pro-union party, the Scottish Conservatives.

When voters are forced to make a decision in a climactic and emotional referendum with so much as stake, they become entrenched in that position and parties without a clear position just get lost in the fight.

The Lib Dems won’t get carried away. They topped one poll in 2010 under Clegg and quickly slipped back.

Cable said it would be “very difficult” for the party to form the next government “but given the extreme fragility of the British political system at the moment and the fact two major parties are both in a state of civil war anything could happen.”

But it won’t be Cable leading the party on to new successes. He’s due to make way for a new leader in the coming months. Does he regret his announcement to leave now that the party is back from the dead? “In public life, you have to make these kind of big decisions clearly and stick with them,” he said. “I made a commitment three months ago publicly that I would be going by the summer and that I would still be active in political life, so it’s not that I’m just disappearing to Antarctica or somewhere.”

Make no mistake, Brexit is a paradigm-shifting crisis.

Labour has to convince voters it’s a Remain party or the Lib Dem surge will not simply ebb away. The same is true of the Conservatives, whose support will stay with Farage if it doesn’t own Brexit.

If they both fail, then they both face a painful, simultaneous death.

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