1. no

2. yes, but is there anyone left in labour who would make a decent leader? Richard Burgon is the only one I can think of and he’s made no indication that he wants the job.

They support liberalism, not leftism.

They like making a big deal out of their tokenistic support of LGBT/BIPOC/etc, to distract from them trampling over workers rights.

Good

Even if we take this poll at face value[0], and assume 56% want to rejoin the EU, would the EU want us to rejoin?

Opinions could easily swing 7% the other way after we did, especially if we didn’t get the same conditions as before. Then before you know it someone holds a referendum on leaving and we’re leaving again, it would be a complete mess.

If we should learn anything from the Brexit referendum, it’s that we shouldn’t be making long term decisions based on slim majorities.

[0] The fact that some of the respondents apparently supported rejoining the EU but not the customs union raises questions IMO, since you can’t join the EU without joining the CU as far as I know.

There’s no such thing as an “ex”-spy

There are plenty of political figures saying we should call China the enemy, very few that openly say we should call the USA an enemy.

That’s not my point though, because you could also say it about other countries (Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc), the fact is dealing with countries that do things we consider shitty is a basic part of geopolitics, unless you want to start a war on twelve fronts.

Everything they say about China could also be said about the USA.

At this point I’m convinced he’s deliberately doing everything he can to make himself unpopular.

See also, the Pauli effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect

The Pauli effect or Pauli’s device corollary is the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people. The term was coined after mysterious anecdotal stories involving Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, describing numerous instances in which demonstrations involving equipment suffered technical problems only when he was present.

An incident occurred in the physics laboratory at the University of Göttingen. An expensive measuring device, for no apparent reason, suddenly stopped working, although Pauli was in fact absent. James Franck, the director of the institute, reported the incident to his colleague Pauli in Zürich with the humorous remark that at least this time Pauli was innocent. However, it turned out that Pauli had been on a railway journey to Zürich and had switched trains in the Göttingen rail station at about the time of the failure.

R. Peierls describes a case when at one reception this effect was to be parodied by deliberately crashing a chandelier upon Pauli’s entrance. The chandelier was suspended on a rope to be released, but it stuck instead, thus becoming a real example of the Pauli effect