United Kingdom 2

Mike Gautrey

@MikeGautrey

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4h

ComRes poll today: 'a majority (55%) think [Boris]’ll make a “terrible” Prime Minister... two thirds (64%) think Boris will make a better Prime Minister than Jeremy Corbyn.'

Opinium has a relatively good poll for Labour, trailing Conservatives by only 28 to 30.

 But Corbyn is running far behind Labour.

Strongly approve : 7% 

Somewhat approve : 12 %

Somewhat disapprove : 22%

Strongly disapprove: 38%

https://www.opinium.co.uk/political-polling-24th-july-2019/

Johnson pushes EU to give way amid no-deal Brexit warnings (Globe and Mail, 29 July 2019)

Quote:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson pushed Britain closer to a no-deal exit from the European Union on Monday, insisting he will not hold Brexit talks with EU leaders unless the bloc lifts its refusal to reopen the existing divorce deal.

Johnson is trying to pressure the EU to give ground by intensifying preparations for the U.K. to leave the bloc in three months without a withdrawal agreement.

But the pound fell to a two-year low as business groups warned that neither Britain nor the EU is ready for a no-deal Brexit, and that no amount of preparation can eliminate the economic damage if Britain crashes out of the 28-nation trading bloc without agreement on the terms.

Johnson became prime minister last week after winning a Conservative Party leadership contest by promising the strongly pro-Brexit party membership that the U.K. will leave the EU on the scheduled date of Oct. 31, with or without a divorce deal.

The message is clear:  If the Tories are to be beaten, the PLP war against Corbyn and the war to drive Corbyn's supporters out of the party MUST END.  

Ken:

The message is clear:  If the Tories are to be beaten, Jeremy Corbyn, their most important electoral asset must do the right thing and step down from the leadership in order to give Labour a chance of winning.

and contrary to your endless mindless refrain, it is possible to replace him:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leader-jeremy-corbyn-new-replace-election-a9025726.html

BBC: Pound sinks to 28 month low over Brexit fears

Good point.  Corbyn and his allies within the party NEVER treated Blair with even a tenth of the irrational, vindictive rage the Blairites have subjected Corbyn-and worse, his supporters, a group which has been treated just as despicably as Bernie Sanders' supporters were treated by the establishment wing of the Dems during the '16 primaries, when Bernie's supporters were accused, with no justification whatsoever, of not caring about the need to fight racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and the need to defend reproductive choice.   It is likely that Hillary's defeat in the fall of '16 was the result of that abuse, given that it's not reasonable for any candidate to win the votes of people that candidate's supporters have spent months slandering and insulting.

Brexit will be ‘catastrophic’ and the sooner the Irish reunite and get away from these British crazies the better And the same for Scotland and Wales too if the Welsh can.

The very fact all the right-wingers want Brexit tells me all I need to know - the working people will get screwed only this time they will get  royally screwed

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2019/jul/30/boris-johnson-prime-minister-brexit-news-warned-no-deal-brexit-could-lead-to-farmers-blocking-roads-in-protest-live-news?page=with:block-5d405f508f0845f89e317327#block-5d405f508f0845f89e317327

Yanis Varoufakis, 'Jeremy Corey's Finest Hour?' Project Syndicate, 30 July, 2019

[quote]

Despite opinion polls suggesting a Liberal Democrat revival, courtesy of their unambiguous pro-Remain stance, the only impediment to Boris Johnson’s bid for dominance is Corbyn’s Labour Party. Ardent Remainers have lambasted Corbyn for refusing to turn Labour into the electoral wing of the campaign to reverse Brexit. They cite his criticism of the EU’s inbuilt pro-austerity, oligarchic bias as evidence that he was never serious when, in June 2016, he campaigned to remain in the EU while committing to reform the bloc.

But Corbyn was right to be nuanced in his support of Remain. It was not Vladimir Putin, Facebook, or the Leave campaign’s blatant lies that put Brexit over the top. And it was not the critical stance on the hustings of those of us (including DiEM25) who, like Corbyn, campaigned along the lines of: “In the EU. Against this EU!”

No, the best ally of the Leave campaign were establishment figures, from Tony Blair to Christine Lagarde. They oscillated between Project Fear (warning of post-Brexit Armageddon) and a rosy depiction of the EU that whitewashed its anti-democratic decision-making, its misanthropic handling of the euro crisis, and its readiness to sign trade agreements with the United States that usurped parliaments and threatened some of the EU’s greatest achievements.

Since the 2016 referendum, a civil war-like atmosphere has made it increasingly impossible for Leavers and Remainers to hold a civilized conversation. Corbyn valiantly tried to keep Labour’s Leavers and Remainers together by seeking an honorable compromise: The UK would formally leave the EU, to respect the referendum’s outcome, while remaining in as many of the bloc’s structures as possible – including a customs union. Instead of applauding Corbyn for this tricky balancing act, his opponents within the Labour Party, together with a liberal establishment unprincipled enough to deliver all Leavers to Nigel Farage and Johnson, attacked him with extraordinary viciousness.

But that was then and this is now. With Johnson as prime minister, and his strategy crystal clear, Corbyn’s task is to expose the truth about Johnson’s no-deal Brexit – namely, that it means a Trump-deal Brexit – and put forward Labour’s plan to end the interminable Brexit ordeal immediately.

robbie_dee]</p> <p><a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/jeremy-corbyn-alternative-to-boris-johnson-no-deal-brexit-by-yanis-varoufakis-2019-07">Yanis Varoufakis, 'Jeremy Corey's Finest Hour?' Project Syndicate, 30 July, 2019</a></p> <p>[quote wrote:

Despite opinion polls suggesting a Liberal Democrat revival, courtesy of their unambiguous pro-Remain stance, the only impediment to Boris Johnson’s bid for dominance is Corbyn’s Labour Party. Ardent Remainers have lambasted Corbyn for refusing to turn Labour into the electoral wing of the campaign to reverse Brexit. They cite his criticism of the EU’s inbuilt pro-austerity, oligarchic bias as evidence that he was never serious when, in June 2016, he campaigned to remain in the EU while committing to reform the bloc.

But Corbyn was right to be nuanced in his support of Remain. It was not Vladimir Putin, Facebook, or the Leave campaign’s blatant lies that put Brexit over the top. And it was not the critical stance on the hustings of those of us (including DiEM25) who, like Corbyn, campaigned along the lines of: “In the EU. Against this EU!”

No, the best ally of the Leave campaign were establishment figures, from Tony Blair to Christine Lagarde. They oscillated between Project Fear (warning of post-Brexit Armageddon) and a rosy depiction of the EU that whitewashed its anti-democratic decision-making, its misanthropic handling of the euro crisis, and its readiness to sign trade agreements with the United States that usurped parliaments and threatened some of the EU’s greatest achievements.

Since the 2016 referendum, a civil war-like atmosphere has made it increasingly impossible for Leavers and Remainers to hold a civilized conversation. Corbyn valiantly tried to keep Labour’s Leavers and Remainers together by seeking an honorable compromise: The UK would formally leave the EU, to respect the referendum’s outcome, while remaining in as many of the bloc’s structures as possible – including a customs union. Instead of applauding Corbyn for this tricky balancing act, his opponents within the Labour Party, together with a liberal establishment unprincipled enough to deliver all Leavers to Nigel Farage and Johnson, attacked him with extraordinary viciousness.

But that was then and this is now. With Johnson as prime minister, and his strategy crystal clear, Corbyn’s task is to expose the truth about Johnson’s no-deal Brexit – namely, that it means a Trump-deal Brexit – and put forward Labour’s plan to end the interminable Brexit ordeal immediately.

Why is "Soft Brexit" anathema to the People's Vote crowd?  It would keep the tiny number of good things that come of being in the EU, while freeing the UK from the right wing stuff that is carved in stone in the EU rules for the rest of eternity.  Labour values can't exist within a mandatory balanced budget, massive restrictions on nationalization, AND a ban on raising taxes on the rich.  There's no such thing as socialism on a tight budget.

Obviously Johnson is crazy like a fox, but will probably get his way with such a compliant press apart from the Independent and the Guardian!

Labour attacks 'appalling waste' as Johnson adds £2.1bn to no-deal fund

Spending for Brexit preparations increased to stockpile medicines and recruit border officials

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/31/labour-attacks-appalling-waste-as-johnson-adds-2bn-no-deal-brexit-fund

The LibDems have just taken Breton Radner from theCons in the by-election,

Labour has dropped from 17.8 to 5.3%, losing 70% of its vote.

Nothing to do with Corbyn, right Ken? No more than the local elections, the EU elections or the catastrophic polls,  because it is all a Blairite plot.

Surely it is time for Corbyn to start thinking about what is best for the Labour Party.

"The whole direction of travel of the Watson-Starmer-Thornberry axis in the Labour fifth column has been towards an alliance with the Liberal-Democrats to betray Brexit and millions of Labour voters. That's why by hook or by crook they have to destroy Corbyn."

https://twitter.com/georgegalloway/status/1157307783848562688

Will Boris Bottle Brexit?

https://t.co/EXHeFWmHTh

"Johnson is loud in declaring himself ready for a no-deal EU exit, but is that just an electoral ploy?"

If Corbyn truly needed to stand down, the best way to make that happen, while producing a leadership election process that was truly democratic and which produced a leader the Labour rank-and-file would embrace and accept-Corbyn, btw, has always said he would stand down if he truly believed he was dragging the party down-here's the way that people who were actually concerned about "the good of the party" could come together to make that happen at the Labour confrence in September

1) Adopt Open Selection for ALL sitting Labour MPs, so that the PLP, most of whom are only in their seats now because they were imposed as candidates decades ago by the vindictively anti-Left Neil Kinnock and the arrogant, anti-democratic, and essentially Tory Mr. Blair, will have to make an actual case for their renomination as Labour candidates, rather than simply being able to count on reselection for life as a kind of political sinecure;

2) Abolish the MP nomination requirements for getting on the leadership ballot, replacing them by a signature process to do so, since there is no valid reason for the MPs to control who is and who is NOT on the leadership ballot.  The MPs , are simply one PART of the party, they should not be treated as Labour's ruling elite and don't deserve any more say in who gets to be leader than anybody else.  Remember, it was the MPs who doomed Labour to defeat in 2010 by blocking all candidates OTHER than the dreary and unelectable Gordon Brown from the ballot to succed Blair in 2008;  They are the ones-and it wasn't anyone else but them in the party-who wanted Corbyn replaced by Owen Smith, the man who couldn't get ANY CROWDS at any of his leadership rallies and ended up begging to be allowed to speak at CORBYN's leadership rallies.

It would have been much more likely that Corbyn might have stood down if the PLP had agreed, after 2017, to stop treating the party as their private fiefdom, as a place where they should decide what the party stands for and, by controlling the leadership ballot, who leads it.   The PLP, the tiny group who are essentially the only remaining supporters of Blairism and the Iraq War, needs to just get the hell out of the way and let the people of the Labour Party run it.  And they need to stop insisting that the only way Labour members and supporters can prove they aren't antisemites is to agree to permanently exempt the Israeli government from ANY dissent about what it does to Palestinians, which is what adopting the IHRA "examples" would have done. 

Agreed?

Debater wrote:

In some ways, Corbyn reminds me of Michael Ignatieff & Stephane Dion -- too stubborn and disconnected to realize how unpopular he is.

He's only unpopular because those in his party who don't want Labour to work for a real alternative to Toryism-let's face it, there's no difference anymore between being a Tory and being  a "Labour moderate"-as the decision by the last "moderate" Labour leader, Harriet Harman, to have the party abstain-which was no different than voting for-the even deeper Tory benefit cuts in 2015, a policy which, if not stopped, would have erased the last major difference between Labour and the Tories on any major issue-have spent four years relentlessly sabotaging the man.

If Corbyn stands down, it means the smears and the lies win. It means that, within the party, the privileged few will have defeated the many.  It means that those who don't want Labour to be different than the Tories will have prevailed.  No leader who came in because Corbyn was smeared, who came in with the backing and approval of the anti-Corbyn, anti-youth, anti-change cabal, could ever be credible as a leader, could ever be popular, could ever propose anything significantly different than warmed-over Blairism, could ever win the support of the young, a group Labour HAS to win by massive, overwhelming margins to have any chance of forming a government at all, since most of the older people will always vote Tory no matter what.                                  

Whichever leader came to replace Corbyn and was APPROVED of by the PLP and the media, would inevitably be just as unpopular on the merits as Corbyn has been made to be unpopular through lies and smears, because that leader would automatically be discredited.  It simply goes without saying that no Labour leader accepted by those forces would have any Labour values whatsoever.  

Here is an intriguing possibility which may lead to Labour extricating itself from its current leadership nightmare:

http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2019/08/03/is-corbyn-at-risk-from-the-mother-of-all-political-decapitations/

the Lib Dems did carry Corbyn’s seat narriwly in the Euros

nicky wrote:

https://www.thenational.scot/news/17810758.labour-less-popular-brexit-party-scotland/

Corbyn leading Labour to FIFTH place in Scotland with 11%.

ken, even assuming that Corbyn is not to blame for his toxic unpopularity, sure you have to concede he should step down for the good of his party.

I can't speak for Ken, but I think it would be better for Labour to be relegated to third place in parliament than for it to return to the control of Blairites who are very little better than Cons, and not at all better than LibDems. At least then, it would be possible to begin rebuilding it as a true vehicle for socialist policies.

nicky wrote:

Thanks Michael. Good to know where you stand.

you think it is better to have the farthest right government in generations imposing untold misery on all but the very rich than a reformist moderately left - wing Labour government that helps the lives of the great majority.

all for the sake of ideological purity

Nope. But that would be the way a corporate shill such as you would see it.

nicky wrote:

https://www.thenational.scot/news/17810758.labour-less-popular-brexit-party-scotland/

Corbyn leading Labour to FIFTH place in Scotland with 11%.

ken, even assuming that Corbyn is not to blame for his toxic unpopularity, sure you have to concede he should step down for the good of his party.

I can turn that around-surely you have to concede that the PLP should have stopped scheming to force Corbyn out as leader after the 2017 election for the good of the party.  

Surely you'd have to concede that Labour would be in a much stronger position in the polls right now if the PLP HAD stopped scheming to force Corbyn out, and had focused, instead, for the good of the party, on doing what they are SUPPOSED to do: focusing solely on attacking the Tories and working for the defeat of the Tory government.

Surely you'd have to concede that the PLP should not have demanded that Corbyn, a lifelong opponent of antisemitism, accept the IHRA "examples" of antisemitism, examples that equated virtually ALL public criticism of the Israeli government with hatred of Jews, when they knew that criticism of the Israeli government is virtually never antisemitism and therefore there was no justification with ever linking antisemitism with comments about Zionism at all.

Surely, you'd have to concede that Corbyn and his supporters never deserved to be subjected to the most despicable smear campaign in the history of British politics, never deserved to be indifferent to or participants in expressions of hatred against Jews, when throughout the history of the Left the Left has always been the least antisemitic part of the political spectrum.

Surely you'd have to concede that Corbyn's opponents in the party-a tiny, dwindling clique of reactionaries-should never have done any of that, that none of that was ever "for the good of the party".

And surely, you'd have to concede that, with a general election imminent, Corbyn's opponents in the party should just stop doing all of that and should all stand down at the next election so that there is some chance of unifying the party for victory, given that nobody the opponents could put in place would ever be accepted as a legitimate leader by the vast majority of the party who wants Labour to embrace the ideals the Corbyn movement stands for, since doing that would be the best thing the anti-Corbyn MPs could do if they actually cared about "the good of the party".

If the PLP cared about "the good of the party", why could they not see that they should have accepted that the 2017 election settled the leadership issue and finally, FINALLY accepted Corbyn as leader and got wholeheartedly behind him in order to do what Labour MPs are supposed to do-work to defeat the Tories and undo everything the Tory government has done?

None of the attack points raised against the man ever had any validity:

Other than the PLO, nobody had an issue with the suit Corbyn wore at the Cenotaph-and wearing that simply, perfectly acceptable suit, Corbyn actually showed MORE respect to the veterans by being the only party leader who actually stayed after the ceremony to chat with them and ask about their lives and by his work every day sense to get the UK out of the unwinnable and imperialist wars it's been in in the Arab/Muslim world, while the Tory and Labour RIGHT figures in their arrogant, imperialist morning coats were just there to commemorate and celebrate the wars that killed the men honored by the Cenotaph.

He has put the lies about his positions on Northern Ireland and the Israel/Palestine issue to rest-the voters know he was just working for justice for the minority community in Northern Ireland and that working for that HAD to meen working to get Sinn Fein into negotiations, and they know that he was just trying to do the same by approaching Hezbollah and Hamas.  

He's proved he cares about antisemitism and that his supporters are no more antisemitic-and generally less antisemitic-than the UK population as a whole, and the statistics prove that the rise in antisemitic incidents in the UK is almost entirely the responsibility of the Far Right-including the Tory far right.

His positions on the issues of the day are popular with the electorate-by contrast, there is no support for Blairism anymore.

And he has done enough to put the EU issue to rest by pledging Labour to hold a second referendum on any deal.  That's as far as he can go towards Remain without losing the North and Northeast of England to the Brexit Party for the rest of eternity.

Why are you so obsessed with bringing down the leader of a political party in another country?  

And why have you been so relentlessly nasty and dismissive of what anyone else had to say in your discourse on this issue?  You act as though we should all simply defer to you because of...well, what really?  All we have to go on is some vague claim that you did something vaguely left at some point in the past.    

And why is it so important to you to convince people on this board-none of whom have any say in the inner workings of the British Labour Party-that Corbyn has an obligation to stand down?  

Finally why are you so bound and determined to drag Labour back to the non-position of "social democracy", when there is no longer any meaningful  difference between "actually existing social democracy" in European and UK politics and Thatcherism, when "social democracy" means accepting permanent austerity and a foreign policy built on perpetual war, when nothing progressive or egalitarian can be done within an increasingly privatized, increasingly market-driven, increasingly tight-budgeted market economic model of the sort the EU imposes on all its members?

Finally, it's not Corbyn's fault that the party is weak in Scotland.  Labour can't ever be popular there again until it comes out for, at the minimum "devo max", if not an outright acceptance of Scottish independence.  Nobody Labour could choose as leader would ever do that. Labour's popularity was destroyed in Scotland during the IndyRef, which occurred before Corbyn was leader, when Scottish Labour made the fatal mistake-imposed by the still-Blairite Westminster Labour leadership of Ed Miliband-of running a joint "nae" campaign with the Scottish Tories and Scottish Liberal Democrats, when it should have run a specifically Labour Nae campaign which would have pledged a Westminster Labour government to "devo max"-in essence, to full Home Rule for Scotland with taxing powers for the Scottish Parliament of Holyrood.  Labour wouldn't do that, and in the subsuquent general election it refused to allow Scottish Labour candidates to stand on a distinctly Scottish platform, a platform which would have reflected the fact that Scottish voters never supported Thatcherism and that Labour never needed to reduce its program to Blairism in Scotland to win votes there.  Scottish Labour can never recover on a "moderate" platform, and it can never recover on the Blairite "get over it" position.

That is the fault of pre-Corbyn Labour stupidity.  The least-effective way of correcting that would be to put in a leader who'd take the old Blairite stance of saying "we won't make any concessions, we'll just wait for you to get over that 'independence' nonsense and come to your bloody senses".

Just once, nicky, just ONCE, why don't you put some of the responsibility for Labour's current situation where it belongs-on the shoulders of the PLP, a totally out-of-touch cabal who don't care about defeating the Tories, but care only about reclaiming control of Labour for themelves-and who don't care that their insistence on doing so may guarantee that there is never another Labour government.

What you don't seem to realize is that the savagery the PLP has used against Corbyn, and against his supporters, throughout his leadership has guaranteed that nobody who replaced him with the PLP's support could ever be accepted as a credible leader by the vast majority of the party, could ever have any right to ask Corbyn's supporters for their support, or ever offer a program distinctly different than the Tories.  Any leader who came in to replace Corbyn, if the smears succeeded in driving him out, would start out on the job totally discredited.

Does that not matter to you at all?

For all his faults Blair won three elections which is three more than Corbyn will ever win

None of shat you say Ken changes the grim reality that Corbyn will never win an election and may leave Labour so crippled that

it will not be electorally viable for years and years

Mark Carney Accused of Reviving Project Fear With No Deal Brexit

https://t.co/VxH0tsjg6z

"Mark Carney has been accused of undermining Brexit negotiations and failing to move on from Project Fear after issuing a stark warning about a no-deal Brexit.." Nice to know this neoliberal bankster and Goldman Sachs alumnus is on the 'progressive' Remain side. Naturally, he's Canadian too.

On Contact: British Government PsyOps [MUST WATCH]

https://youtu.be/Z_K-j6a9ETI

Chris Hedges interviews Mohamed Elmazzi on the 'network of networks', The Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative. Be warned, these propaganda 'clusters' have also been identified in Canada, where their work will obviously be a piece of cake given the slavish and exclusive adherence to msm master narratives only.

I do thank you, nicky, for admitting what everyone else has been saying the whole time-that your agenda has never been anything other than putting the Blairites back in control of Labour, no matter what damage that will do.