Jo Swinson

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If a Liberal Democrat majority government is elected, then we should revoke Article 50 and I think it's about being straightforward and honest with the British public about that.
—Jo Swinson, September 2019[2]
Boris Johnson is determined to have a general election, but the best way to resolve the Brexit chaos is to have a people’s vote and give the British people the final say about their future.
—Jo Swinson, October 2019[3][note 1]

Joanne Kate Swinson (1980–), better known as Jo Swinson, is a British politician. She is the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, taking over from Vince Cable in 2019, and resigning five months later, still in 2019. She led the Lib Dems to campaign hard against Brexit, although it's unclear exactly what they were campaigning for, seemingly taking the strategy of every theoretical position at the same time — whether it was ignoring the 2016 Brexit referendum and simply revoking Article 50, whether it was holding a second referendum, or whether it was vocally supporting literally any Boris Johnson deal so long as he pinky swore to hold a second referendum.[4] But a Jeremy Corbyn interrim government, the only legitimate way a second referendum could have actually been held,[5][6], was out of the question.[7]

As a result of a self-contradictory Brexit stance, being yet another leader from the Con-Lib coalition, and even Remain voters hating her the more they saw of her,[8] Swinson, led the Lib Dems to yet another catastrophic election defeat, not only seeing their seat total fall from 21 MPs to 11, but also losing her own seat to the Scottish National Party (SNP), forcing her to resign with immediate effect. This has made her the shortest elected Lib Dem leader in history, only being in power for less than 5 months. Rather than working with the Labour Party to install Corbyn as a temporary Prime Minister, Swinson chose to back the general election that destroyed both Labour and her party, giving Boris Johnson a supermajority of seats, and full power to do whatever kind of Brexit he wanted. In an election where both parties had gone farther to their ideological extremes than ever before in the Lib Dems's history, Swinson led the sole centrist party (that mattered) to lose seats. Some have used polling statistics to say this signifies the death knell for British centrism,[9]. However she was just that bad a leader, not to mention a hypocrite.

Notes[edit]

  1. 'Straightforward and honest', huh?

References[edit]