Granny Danger Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 15% of Labour MPs backed Jeremy Corbyn. 25% of the time on the hustings and in leadership events will be focused on him. I really don't think this is a great thing for Labour. I totally agree! Imagine having an open and democratic debate for the leadership of the Labour Party (the party that was founded by the Trade union movement and is suppossed to be on the left of British politics) where one of the candidates is .... wait for it .... a socialist!!! He will actually want to discuss socialist issues! It's scandalous IMO. Won't someone please think of the children Blairites!? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeeTillEhDeh Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 There was an interesting dissection of a Corbyn Labour Leadership nomination by Dan Hodges in The Telegraph on 5 June - I have to say large parts of it I agree with - especially the political posturing by the Bennite Left: You have to hand it to the Left. They’ve got nerve. Earlier this week, Jeremy Corbyn – the defiantly hirsute member for Islington North who once claimed his beard represented a protest against New Labour – announced he was entering the Labour leadership race. And, having entered the Labour leadership race, he then angrily told his colleagues they had to back him, whether they agreed with him or not. OK, he wasn’t personally quite so brazen, noting only in his declaration statement it was "unfortunate" the nominating process was restricted to MPs. But it wasn’t long before his surrogates were fanning out explaining how he was entitled to be on the ballot by rights. "Everyone contact Labour MPs to put him on ballot paper,” fellow Campaign Group MP John McDonnell ordered his Twitter followers. “If Labour MPs deny the party and the country a genuine debate, it will reflect disastrously on them,” Owen Jones stormed in the Guardian, before demanding: “Come on, Labour MPs. Put your future careers aside for party and national interest. Lend Corbyn a nomination, and let a real debate begin”. A real debate. Is that a really real debate? Or a really unreal debate? Labour desperately needs a really real debate. Where it lost. When it lost. Why it lost. What it needs to do to make sure it doesn’t lose again. Or at least, what it needs to do to make sure it stops losing at some not too distant point in the future. The problem is, to have a debate – a meaningful one – you need as a minimum to have some sort of common point of reference. Each debate must at least have agreed parameters, otherwise they’re meaningless. If you want to have a discussion about the geopolitical implications of 9/11, for example, you can’t do so from the starting point it was some false-flag operation conducted by Mossad. It’s like having an argument over what sort of cheese the moon is made of. And this is the problem with Jeremy Corbyn being given a free entry into the debate about Labour’s post election future. Corby believes last month’s defeat was a false flag operation. And so do all his supporters. Look again at Owen Jones’ argument for Corbyn entering the race. He will be able to draw from the findings of Britain’s leading pollster, John Curtice – who accurately predicted the outcome of the election; these findings dispute that Labour lost for being too Left wing. Corbyn could also draw on the conclusion of Peter Kellner, the YouGov pollster, that however Ed Miliband allowed himself to be portrayed, his policies were less radical than those of Tony Blair in 1997. He could nail why Labour lost: the implosion in Scotland, and the consequent anti-SNP hysteria; the lie of “overspending”; and the lack of any coherent alternative." And Jeremy Corbyn could. He could do all those things. In the same way people meticulously dissect the footage of the collapse of the Twin Towers, and identify rockets and demolition charges and UFOs. But if one of the starting points for the debate is whether Labour lost because it wasn’t Left wing enough, then there’s not much point in having the debate at all. There is a misconception at the moment that Labour’s leadership contest is being stifled by a lack of ideological differentiation amongst the candidates. In reality, the parameters have been correctly set, because they accurately span where Labour needs to position itself to make itself electable again. On the soft Left is Andy Burnham. In the centre is Yvette Cooper. And on the Right is Liz Kendall. Labour’s path to victory lies somewhere amid this ground that has been staked out. Anyone – on the Left or Right – who seeks to move beyond those parameters is effectively trying to drag Labour to final destruction. A second prerequisite for a debate is that – once the parameters have been set – those participating in it must have some capacity to engage constructively with their “opponents”. Most people in Labour’s ranks have been on some sort of political journey. Over time their views have evolved. I started a Kinnockite, became a Blairite, became a pretty strident post-Iraq anti-Blairite, then became an even more strident anti-Milibandite. The defining moment of post-war Labour history was when Kinnock and members of the Campaign Group split from Tony Benn over the deputy leadership election. Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters are not planning on going on any political journeys. They don’t want to engage, they want to pose. Do the leadership strut. As we have seen, they literally want to be part of the contest solely so they can say they were part of the contest. Nothing that any of the other candidates says or does will alter by one iota their – no doubt genuinely held – Left wing convictions. Which is fine. But what is the point? It’s not a real debate, or a real attempt to chart a new course to power. It’s political Vogueing. And this is the other key thing about any genuinely meaningful debate. Someone actually has to win it. Someone’s ideas eventually have to prevail. Otherwise, again, what is the point? In 2010 Labour held the longest leadership election in the party’s history. And then at the end nobody won it. Most MPs voted for David Miliband. Most Labour party members voted for David Miliband. And then Ed Miliband became leader. So for the next five years everyone had to wander around pretending to be “united” in the hope no one outside the Labour party would notice. This time people have to fight, and then someone has to win. But even if he gets the nominations, Jeremy Corbyn will have no role to play in that contest. He can’t win. For all the grandiose rhetoric, he’s a political pygmy. He’ll be crushed. Marmalised. Utterly humiliated. Then when he’s humiliated, he’ll just shrug, and his supporters will just shrug. And then they’ll say “we lost the vote, but we won the argument”. And then they’ll just carry on banging on with the same old, batshit nonsense about how people voted for David Cameron because Ed Miliband wasn’t left-wing enough. You know what would be in Labour’s interests? To finally end this charade. Stop pretending people like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell and Owen Jones have anything at all constructive to contribute to how the Labour party actually wins general elections. Say from the outset “sorry, we’re not interested in being a glorified protest movement any more. You’ve had your fun. Now run along and play with Russell Brand ”. Or at the very least, have the guts to tell Corbyn and his acolytes, “if you want the nominations, you’re going to have to earn them like everyone else. You don’t get special dispensation just because you’ve got a copy of Das Kapital sitting on your shelf." Yes, the Left have certainly got nerve. But they shouldn’t have those nominations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Granny Danger Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 There was an interesting dissection of a Corbyn Labour Leadership nomination by Dan Hodges in The Telegraph on 5 June - I have to say large parts of it I agree with - especially the political posturing by the Bennite Left: FACT - the manifesto presented by the SNP at the last election was considerably to the left of Labour; including the 'unelectable' policy of Unilateral nuclear Disarmament FACT - the SNP swept the board at the election, the Labour vote plummeted OPINION - the traditional Labour vote in England and Wales is different from Scotland but not hugely different, there is a great deal of commonality The Labour party is suppossed to be the party of the left and there is plenty middle ground for others to occupy. There is insufficient evidence to suggest a left-of-centre manifesto would have harmed Labour in england and Wales any more than the Tory-Lite policies that they offered. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sparky88 Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 FACT - the manifesto presented by the SNP at the last election was considerably to the left of Labour; including the 'unelectable' policy of Unilateral nuclear Disarmament FACT - the SNP swept the board at the election, the Labour vote plummeted OPINION - the traditional Labour vote in England and Wales is different from Scotland but not hugely different, there is a great deal of commonality The Labour party is suppossed to be the party of the left and there is plenty middle ground for others to occupy. There is insufficient evidence to suggest a left-of-centre manifesto would have harmed Labour in england and Wales any more than the Tory-Lite policies that they offered. im not sure nuclear disarmament is particularly a big government -ie left wing - policy.The snp s manifesto wasnt so much left wing, as a copy of various labour manifestoes over the years. Yet they were able to take seats in the most well off areas of Scotland like east Renfrewshire. The SNP seem to mean different things to different people. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivo den Bieman Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 It's great to see a socialist like Jeremy Corbyn taking part, but he is as likely to be the next Labour leader as East Germany is likely to be re-created. It will be the sleekit Burnham, or Cooper, who will be the next captain as HMS Labour is (once again) torpedoed in the mid-Atlantic in the 2020 election. The defeat might not be as disastrous but it will be a defeat nonetheless. Labour are finished. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Granny Danger Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 It's great to see a socialist like Jeremy Corbyn taking part, but he is as likely to be the next Labour leader as East Germany is likely to be re-created. It will be the sleekit Burnham, or Cooper, who will be the next captain as HMS Labour is (once again) torpedoed in the mid-Atlantic in the 2020 election. The defeat might not be as disastrous but it will be a defeat nonetheless. Labour are finished. I don't think they are any more than I don't think the LibDems are. It's easy after a disasterous campaign to write off a political party but history will show you that said parties can be incredibly durable. Anyway for the sake of the many decent folk who live in rUK I hope some form of credible left-of-centre party can emerge. It would be a travesty if they ended up with a U.S. Style choice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivo den Bieman Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 It can credibly be argued that we have had a "US style choice" between competing business-genuflecting, right wing neo-liberal parties since around 1995, at Westminster level. I should have been clearer- I think Labour are finished as a party of government. Much like the Liberals hung around long after their inter-war collapse, no doubt an aimless Labour will drift around the political marketplace like a discarded carrier bag, for the forseeable future. It was said that Michael Foot's 1983 manifesto was "the longest suicide note in history". If that's true then the UK Labour leadership contest of 2015 is an extended funeral for the party. No ideas, no vision, no real belief in anything, other than in winning elections not in order to change things, but in order to advance individual careers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeeTillEhDeh Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 FACT - the manifesto presented by the SNP at the last election was considerably to the left of Labour; including the 'unelectable' policy of Unilateral nuclear Disarmament FACT - the SNP swept the board at the election, the Labour vote plummeted OPINION - the traditional Labour vote in England and Wales is different from Scotland but not hugely different, there is a great deal of commonality The Labour party is suppossed to be the party of the left and there is plenty middle ground for others to occupy. There is insufficient evidence to suggest a left-of-centre manifesto would have harmed Labour in england and Wales any more than the Tory-Lite policies that they offered. That might be all and fine but wasn't the point I was making. The real issue that the article was making was that Corbyn and the rest of the Bennite left are nothing more than political posturists. My own experience of them is they are oppositionalists of the worst kind - self-deluded martyrs to what are always the lost causes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elixir Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 Again: the fact that somebody on the 'left' of the Labour Party is seen as a bad thing for them at a UK-wide level just shows why they're consigned to history in Scotland and why independence is now a matter of when. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BerwickMad Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 FACT - the manifesto presented by the SNP at the last election was considerably to the left of Labour; including the 'unelectable' policy of Unilateral nuclear Disarmament FACT - the SNP swept the board at the election, the Labour vote plummeted OPINION - the traditional Labour vote in England and Wales is different from Scotland but not hugely different, there is a great deal of commonality The Labour party is suppossed to be the party of the left and there is plenty middle ground for others to occupy. There is insufficient evidence to suggest a left-of-centre manifesto would have harmed Labour in england and Wales any more than the Tory-Lite policies that they offered. It plummeted in Scotland, but overall it increased by 1.4% Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
invergowrie arab Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 Given the collapse of the lib dems and non appearance of ukip a 1.4% increase is pathetic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Granny Danger Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 That might be all and fine but wasn't the point I was making. The real issue that the article was making was that Corbyn and the rest of the Bennite left are nothing more than political posturists. My own experience of them is they are oppositionalists of the worst kind - self-deluded martyrs to what are always the lost causes. Lost causes like unilateralism? When I was active in the Labour Party we were continually told by the MSM and those on the Labour right that no one would ever vote in numbers for a unilateralist party. Yet over 50% of those who voted in Scotland at the last GE voted either SNP or Green. It plummeted in Scotland, but overall it increased by 1.4% What would it have been if Labour had offered a real alternative? I guess we will never know. Maybe we should ask the psepholgists whose predictions on the result were so accurate. When Sturgeon addressed the SNP conference a few weeks before the election I remember thinking that there must have been countless Labour Party supporters who would have loved to hear a Labour leader arguing an anti-austerity position like she had. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BerwickMad Posted June 16, 2015 Share Posted June 16, 2015 Given the collapse of the lib dems and non appearance of ukip a 1.4% increase is pathetic.Non appearance of UKIP? I think you're confusing number of votes and number of seats. Over 4 million votes is not a non appearance. I also think it's quite clear that the Tories won the election by battering the Lib Dems in Tory/Lib Dem marginals, many of which Labour don't stand a chance in anyway. One of them is my own seat. I'm not saying Labour performed well. They didn't, they needed far more than they got but pretty much held their ground in most of England and Wales while being destroyed in Scotland. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BerwickMad Posted June 16, 2015 Share Posted June 16, 2015 What would it have been if Labour had offered a real alternative? I guess we will never know. Maybe we should ask the psepholgists whose predictions on the result were so accurate. When Sturgeon addressed the SNP conference a few weeks before the election I remember thinking that there must have been countless Labour Party supporters who would have loved to hear a Labour leader arguing an anti-austerity position like she had. I don't think going further to the left would have helped them atall. Being trusted on the economy probably lost them the election in the seats they needed to win, not because they weren't offering a left wing alternative. I'd love Labour to be able to win elections from the left, hence why I wanted a Labour/SNP coalition, but it's not going to happen. A left wing party isn't going to win an election in Britain in the present climate. I'd rather a Labour Party closer to the centre in power than the Tories and I don't think they're just the same. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arsenal till I die Posted June 16, 2015 Share Posted June 16, 2015 New Labour logic is that people don't trust Labour on the economy because of how the economy done under New Labour, so to be trusted on the economy Labour need to return to New Labour. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
H_B Posted June 16, 2015 Share Posted June 16, 2015 Labour are just a good leader away from being election favourites again. Unfortunately for them, none of the options at the moment fall into that category. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colkitto Posted June 16, 2015 Share Posted June 16, 2015 Labour are just a good leader away from being election favourites again. Unfortunately for them, none of the options at the moment fall into that category. Go on, tip them to win the 2020 election like you did the 2015 election. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BerwickMad Posted June 16, 2015 Share Posted June 16, 2015 Go on, tip them to win the 2020 election like you did the 2015 election. I suppose you predicted the election perfectly eh? Play the ball, not the man. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
H_B Posted June 16, 2015 Share Posted June 16, 2015 Go on, tip them to win the 2020 election like you did the 2015 election. Mmm. I think after your Comical Ali performance during the referendum you are just about the last poster who should ever mention correct predictions. I'd only have you slightly ahead of the Arc of Prosperity and Scot Goes Pop blogs in credibility terms. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fide Posted June 16, 2015 Share Posted June 16, 2015 Go on, tip them to win the 2020 election like you did the 2015 election. You've angered the precious wee lamb, hence the barbed response. Super. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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