Verbal

Which isn't quite what he's saying. His spinners are saying his decision is not because of any particular story, but because of 'pressures'.

There's more to this than meets the eye - wait for the papers on Sunday. As I said earlier, we need the race to be really underway to see who may emerge as a credible leader. I imagine it won't be of the current favourites, and may even be Dan Jarvis, even though he's formally out.

Hmm. Just to add to the conspiracy theories, if Pap said something about me today that got him banned I'm completely unaware of it. Sorry to see him - or anyone - go.

As long as Labour don't elect anyone with the hubris of Kinnock they should be fine with some of the other candidates as well. I think it's too early to make a reliable judgement on leadership just yet - some will grow into the role during the campaign and others will wilt. The opportunity is there though, as this is shaping up to be the most divisive government since the poll tax Tories of 87.

Do you run all these completely fictitious scenarios in your head just to wind yourself up?

I'm sure we won't. FPTP is losing legitimacy at a rate of knots, and will continue to do so. The problem is that FPTP sort of worked when we had a two-party system. Now we clearly don't. And the less we have a two-party system the bigger is the difference between votes and seats. If we stick with FPTP in a multi-party system it will continue to produce perverse results. And that in turn will create a crisis of legitimacy - voters will cease to believe in the outcomes it produces.

I think it's something to do with knots. No wonder he's so angry.

Who the **** do you think you're talking to with this "the Left" cliched nonsense? I've had more than twenty years of running a small business, with all the excitement and drudgery (VAT returns, company accounts, paying more corporation tax than multinationals named after great rain forests, etc) that goes with it. I've also over the years voted Tory, Lib Dem and Labour. What you don't understand, evidently, is that small business is a small player in terms of political power, and certainly does not dominate the economic landscape either. Like all small businesses, I've also had the benefits of that as well as the costs - and that certainly includes paying less tax than if I had been a PAYE employee all these years. Any small business owner who denies that is a liar. The costs have included no safety net - no recourse to unemployment benefit when contracts run out (there's no such thing as unemployment because you're always developing the next thing). No small business I know has the resources to hire political consultants and lobbyists, to negotiate multibillion pound contracts that seem not to contain anything like adequate performance milestones, to have the power just to walk away from government contracts when they feel like it, to not suffer any kind of realistic sanction when they utterly fail (and demand even more money to exit from the failure), to engage in borderline-legal bribery (with donations and inducements) and influence-peddling to win contracts, to slash employees' pay and leverage up executives' pay on taking over public sector contracts, and so on and on. At the top of the tree of national cronies are the banks, of course - too big to fail, too wrapped up in our economic system to allow politicians to do anything other than bung billions of pounds at them when they inevitably overreach. And that's before we even start with the overwhelming power of the multinationals. One of the worst consequences of a Brexit is that the UK will be even more at the mercy of the multinationals without the collective bargaining and policing power of the EU. Not that the EU is an angel. You may (or may not) have heard of TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), something on which the EU and Cameron are at one. It will give American multinationals in particular huge leverage to snap up contracts in the NHS, UK energy, cars, finance, food and drink - all economic activities dominated by corporate behemoths. One of the nastiest aspects of this is that these huge American companies will acquire the power to sue governments when things, in their view, go wrong. So a democratically taken decision, for example, to exclude an American multinational health insurer or medical supplier from NHS bidding will result in endless lawsuits. And with all this, you're bleating about how you 'hate' big business? You've just voted for the party that, more than any other, will railroad big business into ever greater positions of power.

You might try looking up the definition of crony capitalism. Your neat little distinction might have worked in the 1830s but not now.

Ah, I see. You're the first human in the anthropocene epoch to be free of bias because you've "voted Labour in the past." Congratulations on your elevation to new species status.

4. Ed Balls lost his seat (really happy he's gone - the exemplar of a machine politician). But nothing can come close to overshadowing the really bad news that this marks the beginning of the true onslaught against the poor (working and non) and vulnerable in Britain. Nothing now can put a brake on the Tories' deep-seated instincts to crush the weak. I expect the social cleansing of London in particular to pick up pace dramatically, especially as, in the tradition of Lady Porter, there are votes in driving out the remaining working-class communities from the heart of the city.

I doubt it. There was a lot of suspicion about David Miliband within the party in 2010 because of his attempts as foreign secretary to cover up and (in the words of Jon Snow) 'nobble the judges' over the extraordinary rendition and torture of British citizens, and the use of Diego Garcia as a transit point for CIA torture flights. With the Chilcot Inquiry still to report, none of those suspicions have gone away. In his association with all this, he remains a model Blairite, for which few are prepared to forgive him just yet.

I don't think you grasp how toxic deeply the Tories are in Scotland. Labour's campaign during the referendum was outwardly lethargic, largely for this reason. They hoped the Scots would vote no without too much of a campaign so that it wouldn't make them appear as if they were canoodling with the Bullingdon boys.

I'm in a safe Labour seat and mine are three of the votes that keep it that way.

No, he's right. I have no idea why the north of England was ever inhabited (says someone for whom moving to London was a big step north).

Perhaps. The Indy is one of the few national newspaper sites that doesn't moderate. Even the Mail deletes this stuff. However, there's a real far-right-wing tug to a lot of the Indy's stories if you go and look at the troglodytes under the articles. So their declaring for the Tories and the rump of the Lib Dems is no surprise. Touched a nerve, I see.

Is that all? As for free-thinking, the Indy's readership seems far to the right of the politics of the paper. A recent example was an article comprehensively debunking the anti-Semitic myth that Nathan Rothschild built his vast wealth on the back of Wellington's victory at the Battle of Waterloo. The article's comments section was a study in vicious anti-Semitism. To illustrate, with a neat piece of anachronistic 'Zionist' window dressing: And this one is clearly from someone who's 'special': So in going for more of the political same, the paper is, if anything, pandering to the baser instincts of its readers.

Okay, chapter and tedious verse: First, here’s a video of the actual vote which included the motion on ISIS being a “progressive force”. It’s hard to make out what’s going on because it is such an evident shambles. Honestly, if it was a brewery and you were locked in there for a week you’d come out stone cold sober. This is evidently the kind of ‘party’ that that would have made Life of Brian even funnier. I especially love the irony of calling a sub-Trotskyist group of confused and embittered socialist splitters “Left Unity”. And here’s the motion itself, in all its weird, incomprehensible, ignorant glory. The source of the quote you can find here, in the beyond comically dull ‘proceedings’ of the wonderful event you so enthusiastically attended. You have to wade all the way to page 41 if it doesn't sap the will to live. http://leftunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/lumotions-nov2014-final.pdf So the question is: if you had no idea this motion was voted on, did you accidentally vote YES to it? Is it possible that you unknowingly voted for ISIS? You wouldn’t have known anything about it – just like the other sad individuals in the video, all of whom seem lost and fatally detached even from a world of joined-up sentences.

So is ISIS a 'progressive' force? Really, I'd like to know. And why do you keep avoiding this issue? And, no, you can't wriggle out of it with this silly, hair-splitting sophistry - you called UK voters 'morons'. That surely has implications for how you'll cleverly use your vote, no? Or will you after all take the Brand way out? As morons we're all looking to you for guidance.

Honestly, I try to be nice and look what happens. I was simply assuming that your simpering over Brand meant you endorsed his every word. Okay then, how about this? Can we have a choice of Left Unity for the genius (for how could he be anything else?) who thinks that UK voters are all 'morons'? And why did you edit out your being at the Left Unity conference that debated the 'progressive character' of ISIS? That's a source of pride, surely?

Was it all a dream? Anyway, if this sounds like a good idea, could the mods, or someone who knows how to do this, put up a separate thread and poll so we can have a wholly representative Saintsweb general election? To cover it, voting intentions for the following parties should be included: Labour, Lib Dems, Greens, UKIP (don't want to leave Kipper Tender out in the cold, although I suspect there are more than a few kippers on here), SNP, PC, BNP (this will be interesting), Left Unity (for the one genius who tells others not to vote), plus a party called Spoiled Ballot Paper. One person, one vote and whichever party is first past the post (of 10pm 7 May) wins. Missed anyone? We all have to have voted by the close of the real poll on 7 May (so will need locking then) – and we should be able to see who’s voted for what.

This is why the Right's criticism of Labour for poor bank regulation is both right and fatuous. Right because under-regulation was a substantial contributor to the crisis (although it must be said that even those high up in the banking industry didn't understand how some of their own financial products and instruments worked). And fatuous because had the Tories been in power there'd have been even less regulation.

He's almost certainly really saying he won't go into a coalition with the SNP. The answer is hardly difficult to find. If the SNP wins an overwhelming number of seats on 7 May, it will be at the almost total expense of Scottish Labour. So to go into a coalition with the SNP will signal a long-term defeat for Scottish Labour - something from which it might never recover. Yet Labour has historically depended on a stronger than average showing in Scotland to win overall majorities in Westminster. So it would be political suicide to go into coalition with the SNP. It won't happen. Far more likely is that if they're in a position to negotiate they'll do a deal with what remains of the Lib Dems.

Then think harder - especially in this election, where there is more ballot paper choice than ever. I've been in a number of countries during dictatorship, including particularly brutal ones in Chile, Argentina, Pakistan and East Timor. In all of those countries, when the vote was restored, people reacted with a mixture of relief (because many died campaigning for democratic ideals) and joy. We should cherish the right to vote - the system might be imperfect (as most things are) but there's a far worse way to live, and that's without the vote.

Exactly, well said. I'm travelling 230 miles on Thursday to cast my vote in my constituency, and I always enjoy the experience. You do realise, though, that there are some geniuses (only a few would stoop so low) who advocate not voting at all, and who regard all British voters as 'morons' and some of them (for voting the wrong way) as complicit in murder. Yes, really.