Putting a fixed date to agree a trade deal with the EU into law means either he must agree to what the EU offer of he walks away. If he reduces employment protections to make us more competitive at the expense of the work force than the EU will not offer us a deal anyway.

Indeed - who will blink first and does anyone believe that we will leave with a deal ??
He (Boris) is certainly going to please the "I just want us out" voters, the ones that Email Thornbury mentioned (allegedly)

I think those that want Brexit don’t really care if we leave without a trade deal. I regret they have been brainwashed into believing that we are something we are not which is a leading force in the world.
I guess time will tell but it unfortunately will be too late for the current generation who are facing years of uncertainty because of the votes of those at the wrong end of their working lives. The problem is further compounded by the election of Johnson and the ERG.

At this point, it's the actual working majority that is the problem, in that Johnson and the right of the Tory party can pretty much please themselves.
Although many people have (rightly) not forgiven Blair for our part in the Iraq conflict, if Labour want to ever regain power and especially as Scotland is now, politically speaking, a write off, Labour will have to find a way to take the centre ground.
This wont sit well with staunch left wing Labour supporters, who will once again accuse this o as a move to create "red Tories" but, only with this type of compromise and one hell of a lot more universal appeal, will they ever stand a chance of regaining power.
My two kids cant comprehend that Scotland used to be dominated by Labour MP's - John Smith must be turning in his grave with the current political landscape north of the border.
Labour has abjectly failed with all of the previous leaders from the left of their party. Foot, Kinnock and Corbyn, together with their brand of concentrating so much of their policy on the very poorest in society just hasn't worked.

Whoever they select must be squeaky clean or the right wing press will vilify them. I wonder if the press would be happy if Labour proposed a change to their code of practice much like Johnson is doing with the BBC and Channel 4.

We were talking today about who should be the next Labour leader, and it was mentioned that whoever it is will need to have a spotless past, otherwise the Mail, Sun and Express will just go with the usual Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Communist smears which have the old Tory duffers pooping in their easy-waist, mail order slacks.

I threw a ringer in, and everybody laughed, until they realised he'd be absolutely perfect to throw the gutter press the biggest curve ball this century... Nigel Farage. Imagine the 360 degree turn the right wing rags and shock jocks would have to make! Not only that, he'd be able to hold their golden boy Johnson's feet to the fire on Brexit. I think he's a big enough chancer to actually take on the job, too.

I regret Farage is even more right wing than the current Conservative party albeit they are getting closer. My choice would be Starmer but I suppose the press would have a go because he is a Sir and therefore proof the party is no longer connected with the working class.

The EU has more power on that one because the potential cost savings to businesses from slashing EU employment regulations are not going to be enough to counter the costs the EU can apply from forcing the UK to accept their standard 'rest of the world' tariff levels. The UK won't be able to use employment rights to draw inward investment away from the EU.

If they really wanted to reduce the cost of employment they would do away with the minimum wage, which is a UK government thing and has never been an EU policy. Sajid Javid seems to want to increase this!

The employment rights that were in EU law that the UK would be able to strip away are in:

- Working Time regulations: biggest one being annual leave entitlement, other than that the right to rest breaks and rules on how many hours you can do in a certain period. You could allow more extreme long-hours of working, but most industries don't use those anyway.

- Agency Worker regulations: require firms to treat temporary staff the same as permanent staff, you could remove these but again it will only benefit certain businesses and isn't going to be a huge dividend to firms.

- Rules around redundancies: this covers stuff like being required to consult with the workforce before redundancies. Again lots of firms might prefer this but it's not going to be a saving that drives investment decisions.

- Maternity rights: mostly small businesses that would welcome the removal of these, not the ones who would be potentially looking to relocate from the EU

- Discrimination protections: you can make it easier to fire people on the basis of things that are currently protected characteristics but again this isn't going to be a big ticket money spinner.

A lot of those kind of deregulations would just attract negative publicity that outweigh their value to businesses, and would help Labour brand the Tory party as the 'nasty party'.

I think they need to take a nuanced look at where the public are. On some issues they lean to the left, on others to the right. Even Boris has noticed this and some of his talk about scrapping State Aid rules so that the state can support struggling industries, state-driven local regeneration plans, increased spending on public services, not to mention this guff about 'The People's Government' are straight out of the rhetoric of the Old Left. One of the ironies is that when you add Brexit in to the mix, this Conservative government is actually implementing some of the policies of the Labour party under Michael Foot in the 1980s which were seen as dangerously extreme at the time and would have been vigorously opposed by Thatcher!

I think the public is left-leaning on issues like:
- they think the state should start building houses again
- they think investment in public services is a bigger priority than tax cuts
- they support taking back some parts of the privatised industries in to public hands (eg rail, possibly water), but not stuff like broadband
- they are broadly supportive of stuff like same sex marriage
- increasingly they are concerned about damage to the environment
- aside from those on the extremes of the generational divide debate, they recognise that younger generations have a lot of stuff stacked against them

The public is right-leaning on issues like:
- national security, they are scared of terrorism and want to make sure the security services are supported to keep us safe (although I think post-Iraq they are sceptical about military interventions overseas)
- I think they are more willing to accept some compromises on personal freedom in the interest of keeping us safe than they were in Blair's day - I reckon ID cards would have had more support now than when he tried it.
- law and order: people have no time for those who disrupt the lives of law-abiding citizens, especially in poorer areas where they face the brunt of living near anti-social families, gangs and so on. They want criminals to be locked up and kept away from them rather than 'rehabilitated' etc.
- immigration, when you get past the xenophobes and bigots, most of the population don't mind being treated by a migrant doctor, they aren't keen on immigrants competing with them for lower paid jobs, they certainly don't like the idea of anyone from outside taking the UK for a ride by being able to exploit the welfare system.

I think a Labour leader who took some of the Corbyn agenda, on limited nationalisation, more progressive tax system to fund increased spending on public services and green investment, without the scattergun approach of stuff like free broadband, and who was free from any hint of 'anti-UK' sentiment (ie previous associations with IRA/Middle Eastern terror groups), and strong on issues of law and order, would be well placed to recapture a broad coalition of public support.

Blair himself came in to prominence, when he was Shadow Home Secretary during a time of a crime wave (a lot of measures of crime in the UK peaked in the mid 1990s), when the Tories veered between Ken Clarke's excessively laid back manner and Michael Howard's 'prison works'. Blair spoke articulately about the problems crime was causing in the poorest communities and linked the experience of poverty to being in neighbourhoods where you lived in fear rather than the more affluent areas where crime didn't affect you so much. That message really resonated in the 1990s.

Farage would do anything for the right price or media exposure!

On a serious note, Starmer would be the obvious choice. But as you say, the working class would be suspicious of him being a Sir (awarded for services to law and criminal justice, and a title he prefers not to use), despite the fact his dad was a toolmaker and his mother a nurse, and despite the fact the working class have just wilfully voted in droves for a priviliged Old Etonian, whose path through life has been paved with gold, and whose only contribution of note to the working class has been spreading lies about bendy bananas, prawn cocktail crisps and smoked kipper packaging.