Thanks for posting this, save me some time anyway.
Having just finished it, i think the biggest positive for Labour was Corbyn's improvement in simply delivering the speech. It was structured better than previously, and eh seemed more confident about his message.
Policy is where there still exists significant problems IMO. He listed off a lot of government expenditure, but only one means of increasing revenue (aside from widespread borrowing). If he can't show that his sums add up Labour will be open to many of the same charges of the 2015 GE, and rightly so. Corbyn had stated before that he saw no issue with unmanaged, large-scale immigration, so his position there should come as no surprise for all that it will be problematic electorally.
I also thought he should have given a greater emphasis to energy and renewables, as he seemed to be promoting the half-hearted status quo of just a few years ago. His plans for local authorities would be a concern for me, particularly in these times of lax planning laws.
In summary: there were some appealing sound bites for the home crowd, but Corbyn continues to fall short with the wider electorate.
ETA: What percentage of GDP is spent on 'research' at present btw?
Unsurprisingly I was pretty happy with the policy suggestions.
With the Government currently able to issue gilts at negative interest rates, it is a wonderful opportunity for large scale national investment. Any Government worth their salt would take advantage to invest heavily in housing, transportation, and in particular renewable energy. Leaving aside the negative cost of the borrowing, it could provide a significant injection of energy to the flagging post-Brexit construction industry. Whether this is sellable to the electorate is another matter. They have been successfully convinced that running a country's budget is like running a household budget, and therefore debt is a bad thing (even though, ironically, household debt in the UK is incredibly high).
[And now a little ramble about immigration and the next election]
The immigration comments strike me as pretty sensible because the reality is even if we enact a hard-Brexit, and freedom of movement from the EU is totally curtailed, I will happily bet that the total number of immigrants arriving in this country does not fall substantially.
The question electorally is how important is immigration to Labour voters. Labour carried about 65% of its voters for Remain. The Conservatives only carried 42%. So what was the driving motivation of those Leave voters? Were the majority of Conservative Leave voters concerned about immigration, or was it sovereignty? Were Labour Leavers more concerned about immigration?
I don't think the Conservatives, however they enact Brexit, will be able to control immigration as much those who voted Leave for that reason desire. So we will continue to see a far-right anti-immigration party earning a significant number of votes (UKIP or Aaron Banks' rebranding of it). But it will come down to timing. The next election might well happen before these voters feel that the Conservative Brexit hasn't achieved what they hoped, in which case the Conservatives will be able to hold them all together electorally.
In the long run I suspect we will see a lot of disappointment with the reality of Brexit. The question for the left is whether we can funnel that disappointment and anti-establishment feeling into a Syriza/Podemos style movement as part of Labour, or whether it is expressed further right (I mean you can already write UKIP's lines for the next election - We need a party that truly wanted Brexit to enact Brexit. We need a party that won't betray the public on immigration controls. etc)
