Verbal

To be fair to Lord Pony - and he really doesn't warrant it - I think he's referring to the Left's rosy view of a forever-lost NHS that was once entirely in public ownership and didn't suffer from shortages (of beds, medicines, doctors, nurses, ambulances...). In fact, that NHS has never existed. The rest of his post is pony, but there you go. The leaked Labour manifesto - on the details so far - appears to make no policy commitments on the NHS at all. And all in a draft manifesto that's trying to play the populist card. The only proposal I've heard so far involves banning car parking charges on hospital grounds - hardly ground-breaking, Blue Skies stuff. What must almightily puzzle Corbyn and his Momentum chums is that they know that individual policies seem to be popular (nationalising railways for example - although they have absolutely no idea how to do this). Their problem is they're playing a silly game of arithmetic. Add in enough popular/populist ideas and - hey presto - the electorate swings in your direction. One problem they either don't see or gloss over is that there's no coherent vision and narrative of a better society that underlies these measures, other than a peevish sense of grievance and a desire to punish the one percenters. A bigger one is that they have a leader completely lacking in the intellectual capabilities, the organisational skills and the charismatic authority to weave these ideas into a convincing political narrative. What Corbyn does bring to the table is, oddly, the one big character flaw he shares with Tony Blair. Both believe in the politically narcissistic idea that if one has good intentions the outcomes will also be good. Blair was informed by a suppurating religiosity, which made him believe that his good-guy actions and outcomes in Kosovo and Sierra Leone could be writ large in Iraq. Corbyn is informed by a staggering political naiveté that amounts to: 'why can't we just all get along?' And if only his way of thinking were the guiding principle in political crises, the world would be a better place. What both Blair and Corbyn fail - for all their ill-judged self-belief - to grasp is that there is something called the Law of Unintended Consequences. Or put another way, reality bites back. More able politicians - like Merkel - understand that how to negotiate reality without reducing everything to realpolitik. In the past, Labour has understood this well too (and has consequently produced much social change for the good). With Corbyn there is no hope. Nor will there be in the near future. Roll on a British En Marche!

Agree, an interesting story. A better comparison might be the NHS with the bits of the US health system that are public. I spent a couple of days in the ER in LA County Hospital a few years ago. Some of the people I saw in the waiting room on day one were still there on day two. The quality of care itself was top class - the senior trauma surgeon there is an acknowledged world leading researcher in treating multiple and extreme injuries. But the sheer sense of despair among uninsured people seeking help was overwhelming. And all in a hospital waiting room which included a feature you won't find in your typical A&E - a set of cells for treating a steady stream prisoners injured in the local jail. A&E in NHS by comparison is quick, efficient, and friendly, even when it's dealing with the Saturday night intake. But all this raises a problem politically. Every election, the arguments about the NHS are wound up to fever pitch. It is supposedly crumbling, duplicitous (when pursuing closures) and increasingly privatised (Labour), or it is in need of endless amounts of reform, making doctors more 'responsive' to their customers (Tories). All of which corrodes morale in a service that depends more than anything on the idea that medical care is a public good and that treating patients is a calling. Both sides are wrong. Labour is wrong, because the NHS has always, from its birth, been a compromise, allowing private care to operate within hospitals (without it, the NHS would never have got off the ground, because of a long stand-off between the '45 Labour government and the BMA). And the Tories are wrong, because endless managerialist reforms have already damaged the very thing the NHS exists to do. So the irony is that the NHS is both a sacred cow and a political football. And the consequence is that we can't have a reasoned, informed, reflective national discussion about what we want the NHS to be. We're trapped between the false nostalgia of the Labour party and the managerialist obsessions of the Tories Yet that discussion urgently needs to take place - without the tribal rancour of the main political parties vying to the ones with whom the NHS is supposedly - and really not - 'safe'.

Great win by Macron yesterday, made even better by a Farage tantrum-sulk: "Macron offers five more years of failure, more power to the EU and a continuation of open borders. If Marine sticks in there, she can win in 2022." You lost Nigel, suck it up. The will of the people has spoken. Nige's Brexit campaign also tweeted yesterday, claiming the French voters, in not supporting Le Pen, had capitulated, just as they had to Hitler. Which is weird, because it places these British bulldogs firmly on the side of the neo-Nazis. Vichy would presumably therefore have been full of little Brexiteers.

As you appear to be a fully paid up (all £3 of it) member of the cult, I'll give you the only answer you'll understand. As someone who thinks Corbyn is ****, which makes me in your odd little mind a Red Tory and therefore an actual Tory, I'm voting for the abolition of the NHS, the removal of any minimum wage, the repeal of the Equality Act, the reduction to all unemployment benefits to zero, and the demolition of all council housing that's not been right-to-bought.

Not really. The Tories are prisoners of the referendum result, not UKIP. Without question, or sensible opposition, she'll get her thumping majority, which will make precisely zero difference in negotiations with the EU (how this non sequitur got any traction I've no idea). The really important question is what happens in the two years after the election. The EU are absolutely united, whatever the cost, in making sure she gets a bad Brexit. The problem for her is she'll own it as far as the electorate is concerned. Provided Labour has ditched the Quisling Jesus and his cult - and quickly - there will be a way back by profiting from the backlash.

There's only one way for Labour to close the gap on the Tories before 8 June - and that's for Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott to resign now. Not only will that not happen, of course, but Corbyn is gearing up for the only fight ahead that interests him: not 8 June, but the Labour leadership election that will follow the disaster. The day after Corbyn hands over complete unchallengeable power to one of the most dangerous Tory governments on record, he'll look forward to diving into the warm embrace of the three-quid recreational 'socialists' and get himself the only thumping majority that matters. The very definition of a death spiral.

Corbyn's Labour party have been all but wiped out as the governing party in the English counties, and Labour have lost control of Glasgow for the first time in 40 years. The most deprived ward in the entire UK (in supposedly Tory-unfriendly Scotland) has gone from Labour to Tory. Still, all this will change when voters get to know Corbyn better. (Corbyn's own reaction to the disaster was to call himself 'Monsieur Zen'). And if not, the cult can always wheel out Diane Abbott to make stuff up. This, from her, on ITN earlier today: Abbott: 'The net losses are about 50.' ITN: 'They're 125.' Abbott: 'Well the last time I looked they were about 100.' Brilliant.

Apparently not. The cult leadership is delighted with the results so far. McDonnell has just told Sky News that the party's losses are "not as bad as some were predicting." Far more important to defeat the psephologists than the Tories.

According to the Financial Times, Tory Party Central Office has been phoning the BBC to complain that Corbyn is not being given enough air time. Corbyn has been largely invisible in key local election battlegrounds, which is presumably by Labour party design. Is any of this normal?

This extra leverage that May thinks she's going to get from having an inevitably thumping Parliamentary majority is going to work wonders in bringing the EU to heel. This would be the same EU that fell straight into line when Syriza went and collected its own thumping majority in Greece, and then ended up with a worse deal than the one on offer before their election. That showed 'em.

Well that didn't last long. May has gone from 'strong and stable' to 'rattled and unhinged'. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-general-election-brexit-eu-countries-influence-uk-with-leaks-a7715851.html

This obsession with demanding a 'simple yes or no' on whether we should have nuclear annihilation is freakishly bizarre. [video=youtube;3z-a5hy7QO8]

Diane Abbott's offence isn't that she's some kind of racist. It's that she's blisteringly incompetent. And so it goes with a number of other Corbynist frontbenchers. The tragedy is that a lot of Labour's policies - including the one Abbott was mumbling about yesterday - are popular with voters. But so long as these policies are espoused by politicians who see an interviewer's trap - really not an easy one to miss: 'how much does it cost?' - and dive straight into it, Labour doesn't have a prayer of holding on to much outside English cities. And the primus inter pares of air-headed uselessness is Corbyn himself, who thought Abbott's performance was just fine. Labour are coming to represent what they actually are on the frontbench - middle class metros with overwhelmingly public sector jobs, secure pensions, and a glut of signalled virtues. That's a pretty narrow, self-congratulatory constituency, worthy only of a party determined to test Disney's theory about lemmings. The greater tragedy is that we need a functioning opposition as never before, but we're going to be left with the Dictatorship of the Maybot, which has its own cliff to leap from.

That thread is doing the rounds because it's staggering - a damning insight into the true character flaws of May, which are being imposed on the Brexit negotiations. The worst of it is that May has now sidelined Oliver Robbins, the senior diplomat who was supposed to be the key British negotiator for May's agenda. This means (a) that no one on the EU side has any idea who to talk to in trying to get talks moving; (b) May still can't grasp the complexity and scale of what's needed to achieve agreement by March 2019, and has no one in a position of sufficient influence to save her from herself; and ©, worst of all, the negotiations have reached a deadlock before they've barely begun, all of because May's ignorance of the other side's red lines and its unanimity. Control freakery and micro-management are all survivable if the control freak has a grasp of the brief. May doesn't - and Britain is headed for a 'no deal' Brexit which will leave us with worse UK/EU trading conditions that pretty much every other country in the world barring N Korea (even Turkey has a detailed customs union agreement with the EU). I'll say again, if the Brexit cult are serious about wanting to leave the EU, they should be very worried about May.

This is something of a trope among the Brexiteers - the belief that the EU is unable to coordinate anything on anything and is constantly on the brink of collapse (see Grexit, Deutsche Bank, the Italian banks, the Euro itself, ad nauseum). It must be such a surprise to the cult that the EU 27 are united and in the shot-calling seat.

Whatever else this election is, it's certainly through-the-looking-glass weird. May has gone to the country just before the CPS announces criminal prosecutions against up to 30 Tory MPs and their agents for electoral fraud - a scale of corruption so large that it might easily have denied the Tories a governing majority in 2015 (and all that followed)... Large numbers of Labour MPs are campaigning on the grounds that it's safe to vote for them because their leader is so epically useless that he's completely unlikely ever to be PM... And all of it framed by a Brexit now being openly talked about in the whackier wings of the civil service (i.e. some higher-ups in the Brexit departments) as "Empire 2.0". An outbreak sanity would be nice.

When did Brexit happen? I must have missed it.

There's also the pleasing irony that while the remaining 27 EU nations are united in their approach to Brexit, the May government, with its competing fiefdoms, split across four government departments and three egotistical loons, can't get even a vaguely coherent message out to the EU. Winners tend to speak with one voice. With the May bunch it's like herding cats.

Really? The same YouGov (and ICM) that gave the Leave campaign a 4-5% lead just before the vote in June? http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-icm-idUKKCN0YS0XO Seems bang on the money to me.

So is this your schtick now? You dig a hole you can't get out of (Trident) so move a couple of feet over and start digging another one (the non-scandal of Wales' leaving the board of one media company to set up another media company)? How much whack-a-mole can we be expected to play?

In the same week that a group of prominent American psychiatrists declared Trump insane, the great orange ball of gas offered evidence to the contrary in an interview with Associated Press: If they can fit it onto a tombstone, this gibberish should be his epitaph.

Like watching a man chasing a pram down a hill.

I'd have thought 'King C n u t was more your style. Celebrating wave-defying dyslexics everywhere.

You have to keep in mind that there's far better talent on the Labour backbenches than the sorry parade of Corbynist nincompoops presently embarrassing themselves on radio and TV. As the election campaign progresses, you might start to see and hear more from those backbenchers, because many are seduced by the fervent hope that Corbyn will pack his bags after heavy defeats on 4 May and 8 June - and they'll be jockeying for position in a rejuvenated post-cult party. Sadly, Corbyn himself has no intention of resigning no matter how bad things get - and his minions are already putting up the excuses ('evil MSM' mostly). Besides, those propping Corbyn up don't want him to leave until the party's leadership election rules have been rigged in favour of the far left, and that can't happen until Autumn at the earliest. But you never know, events might finally do Corbyn in - and you could get your dearest wish of a post-election parliamentary Labour party that will really start being a credible opposition, doing actual damage to a Tory party locked in the grip of economic extremism.

Democracy is already in full swing in this election. May is refusing to take questions during her orchestrated stand-ups, and Corbyn, during his, is employing party members to heckle journalists. Meanwhile, Gerard Coyne, challenging arch-Corbynist Len McCluskey for the UNITE leadership and winning in early returns, has been suspended from his union post without explanation.