Jacobin has an article up suggesting that the best person to carry on with the Corbyn agenda is Rebecca Long-Bailey. She seems to have a pretty impressive biography, and she was one of the MPs who signed Corbyn's nomination paper for the leadership. What other good left choices are there, and which Blair dead-enders can we expect to give it a go?
Long-Bailey would be strong. So would be Angela Rayner. The next leader should be female, pretty much has to be a Northerner who is either Full or Soft Brexit, and needs to have the willingness to fight back against personal attack that Corbyn lacked. That leader will need to have better communication skills, especially when addressing other voices in the party, than the outgoing leader, but those other voices will also need to develop better, more conciliatory communications approaches.
That leader, while establishing better communication, will need to be far better at instilling discipline in the PLP-that is, to make it clear that, while honourable dissent is fine, dissent-with-the-intent-to-undermine-and-sabotage, dissent meant solely to do damage to the party's chances of winning, will result in consequences. That leader will also need to make it continually clear TO the PLP that the PLP's reason for existence purpose is to attack the Tory party and the Tory party alone, while advocating for the policies of THEIR party-not to attack their own leader and demand the removal of all within the party who challenge their arrogance.
I would strongly recommend that that leader support Open Selection for all sitting MPs
This is necessary, in my view, because it is now clear that the sense of entitlement created within the PLP by the current "guaranteed reselection as long as you hold the seat" policy, has achieved nothing positive for Labour, and created and perpetuated what can only be called a culture of arrogance within the PLP.
This culture of arrogance is grounded in toxic, antidemocratic, and ultimately anti-Labour assumptions:
1) That the PLP IS the Labour party and is above everyone else within Labour;
2) That the PLP has the right to talk down to and impose its will upon everyone else who identifies as Labour, and is entitled to see itself as the natural rulers within the party;
3) That Labour MPs owe no respect and no accountability whatsoever to their own constituency parties-the people who do more of the work than anyone else to elect and re-elect these MPs.
I also strongly recommend that whoever becomes leader return full control over candidate selection, as well as the restoration of full control over policy to the party conference. Labour never needed to become internally undemocratic to win, and the best thing it can do now is to become the most internally democratic party in the UK.
The other advantage either Long-Bailey or Rayner will have is that, while each is just as much a committed socialist as Corbyn-any Labour leader has to be a clear socialist; without such convictions a Labour leader clearly ends up with no core values at all and inevitably ends up doing stupid things like sending British troops to unwinnable wars against the Muslim world-(on edit)neither seems to share Corbyn's total unwillingness to fight back against personal attack, an unwillingness that simply made it look as though Corbyn was conceding the validity of the smears by not challenging them.
The worst choice any new leader could possibly make would be to emulate Neil Kinnock and launch a war against socialism and socialists within the party. Kinnock blamed the left for his defeat in the 1987 election, when in truth the fault was solely within himself-it was not the left's fault that Kinnock was never popular with the electorate and was never trusted by the voters. The gains Labour made in the 1992 election had nothing to do with Kinnock's was against the left-a war which saw Kinnock abandon every core value he had ever held in his life and reduce the Labour program to nothing more than tiny, insufficient increases in benefits, combined with a total surrender to the ruling class on economics-and were simply the gains Labour would have made by default after the unusually weak showings it made in 1983 and 1982.
Jacobin has an article up suggesting that the best person to carry on with the Corbyn agenda is Rebecca Long-Bailey. She seems to have a pretty impressive biography, and she was one of the MPs who signed Corbyn's nomination paper for the leadership. What other good left choices are there, and which Blair dead-enders can we expect to give it a go?
A key passage from the article:
"The policy agenda, in other words, is not to blame. Among the general public, 60 percent of people support Labour’s broadband policy, 64 percent support renationalizing the railways, and 63 percent support a Green New Deal. The centrist politics of Jo Swinson, Anna Soubry, and Chuka Umunna were roundly — and hopefully finally — defeated at this election."
Jacobin has an article up suggesting that the best person to carry on with the Corbyn agenda is Rebecca Long-Bailey. She seems to have a pretty impressive biography, and she was one of the MPs who signed Corbyn's nomination paper for the leadership. What other good left choices are there, and which Blair dead-enders can we expect to give it a go?
A key passage from the article:
"The policy agenda, in other words, is not to blame. Among the general public, 60 percent of people support Labour’s broadband policy, 64 percent support renationalizing the railways, and 63 percent support a Green New Deal. The centrist politics of Jo Swinson, Anna Soubry, and Chuka Umunna were roundly — and hopefully finally — defeated at this election."
Long-Bailey would be good. As long as they don't go back to a Blairite or some MP who worked to undermine Corbyn.
I disagreed strongly with Blair on civil liberties issues as well as Iraq.
the facts remain however:
1. He was the most electorally successful leader in Labour history.
2. He is the only Labour leader to win a election in 45 years.
Unfortunately none of the posters on this topic reveal any understanding of what caused Labour’s monumental drubbing last week.
I disagreed strongly with Blair on civil liberties issues as well as Iraq.
the facts remain however:
1. He was the most electorally successful leader in Labour history.
2. He is the only Labour leader to win a election in 45 years.
Unfortunately none of the posters on this topic reveal any understanding of what caused Labour’s monumental drubbing last week.
So who do you think would be a good leader?
Betrayal arrogance and open contempt - a party founded to give the working class a voice methodically set out to silence it. As always babblers went along with all of it.
Betrayal arrogance and open contempt - a party founded to give the working class a voice methodically set out to silence it. As always babblers went along with all of it.
We didn't "go along with it". It's just that some of us didn't see any point in personally demonizing Corbyn for something the Labour Right forced him to do, something he had no way of undoing, was going to serve any purpose. It wasn't worth doing what you ended up doing, which was basically campaigning for Farage.
I agree that the Brexit stance should not have been changed, but it was the Blairites who made Corbyn take that stance.
Nothing good would have come of the rest of us joining you in calling Corbyn a traitor.
Betrayal arrogance and open contempt - a party founded to give the working class a voice methodically set out to silence it. As always babblers went along with all of it.
So why does half of the UK'S working class support remaining in the EU? It seems to me that you are the one disrespecting the voices of others. And what does this have to do with Labour choosing a new leader? It's easy to always just criticize others as no one is perfect. It's a lot harder to support organizations like Labour that the working class depends on.
I disagreed strongly with Blair on civil liberties issues as well as Iraq.
the facts remain however:
1. He was the most electorally successful leader in Labour history.
2. He is the only Labour leader to win a election in 45 years.
Unfortunately none of the posters on this topic reveal any understanding of what caused Labour’s monumental drubbing last week.
Tony Blair hasn't won an election since 2005. In this election, Blair actively campaigned against the Labour Party, as did many of his former Cabinet ministers, some of them as candidates for other parties-all of whom were defeated.
Tony Blair won the 1997 election against a Tory government which was losing to Labour in the polls before he took over as leader, which was certain to be voted out that year no matter what. He had the UNIFIED and active support in that election of all Labour MPs, including Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn. No Labour MP briefed against, plotted against, or spread unfounded rumours of abbetment of bigotry against him. He was never at any point made the subject of relentless media attack.
Those factors accounted for about 90% of the reason for the Labour victory of that year.
It had nothing to do with the abandonment of socialism.
It had nothing to do with the abolition of internal party democracy.
The voters demanded neither.
And in referencing Blair-who is now universally reviled throughout the UK, as is virtually everyone who played any part in his government- while implying that Labour would make a massive recovery if only it went back to Blairism and expelled 90% of the socialists again, you ignore two incovenient electoral truths:
The elections of 2010 and 2o15.
In those elections, Labour campaigned on rigidly Blairite manifestos. Its campaigns were run exactly as Blair's own had been run. The campaigns could not have moved any further to the antisocialist right without simply adopting the Tory manifesto and being done with it. And the vote share and raw vote totals abour received in both of those elections was LOWER than that received even in Corbyn's second campaign. In the 2015 campaign, Labour, on an ultra-Blairite manifesto, not only lost again but was nearly wiped out in Scotland-something that should never ever have been possible-largely because the sectarian Blairites had insisted on opposing any proposals for devolving greater powers to the Scottish Parliament and then, once the "Indyref", or Scottish indeoendence referendum was underway, had made the arrogant, insensitive and totally out-of-touch decision to refuse to make a distinctly Labour-that is, at least social democratic-campaign against independence but, instead to join an essentially Thatcherite all-party campaign against not only independence but any change in the terms of Union at all-thus becoming a party of the right in Scotland and destroying any reason for traditional Labour voters to stay with the party at all. As a result, most of the Labour base in Scotland has voted for the Scottish National Party since 2015 and will probably keep doing so for decades to come, assuming that Scottish independence is not, in fact, a certainty. No Blairite has yet acknowledged that it's their fault that Labour is now, for all purposes, a dead party in Scotland.
And your "just bring Blairism back" argument ignores the major reason for the vast majority of Labour seat losses in this election-the bloodyminded, antidemocratic, arrogant and elitist insistence on the part of Labour Remainers that the party disregard and disrespect for the voters of the North and Northeast of England, voters whose support Labour desperately needed to hold onto in order to have any chance of victory, by rejecting the results of the EU referendum and calling for a second referendum. Remainers were told, over and over, that your insistence on disregarding the wishes of the North and Northeast would throw those seats to the Brexit Party or the Tories, yet you would not stop demanding that Corbyn agree to it. And when he DID agree to the second referendum, your lot, nicky, still wouldn't let it go at that-you kept pushing for Corbyn to pledge the party to an all-out Remain position and pledge to campaign for Remain himself-the last one being a particularly weird demand given that Corbyn had campaigned hard for Remain in 2015 and the Remainers still wouldn't admit that it wasn't his fault that Leave won-even though you knew that position would do nothing but electoral damage, even though you knew there were no significant number of constituencies in which an all-0ut Remain position would help Labour gain seats, let alone anywhere near enough seats like that to make up for the dozens of losses you all knew the second referendum pledge was certain to cause.
Labour lost lasr week. We all know that. We all recognize that.
Corbyn made mistakes-mainly in listening to the bad advice to never fight back against personal attack. Nobody denies that.
But it is ludicrous to assert that the results prove he should have been forced to stand down years earlier, or never allowed to become leader at all. And it is delusional to think the party would gain anything from expelling his supporters or once again adopting vindictively antisocialist economic and spending policies or the bloodthirsty myth of "humanitarian intervention".
Labour would have lost this election just as badly under any other leader who was subjected to the treatment Corbyn received from the PLP.
It would have lost just as badly, if not worse, standing on an all-out Remain policy, as the disastrous effects of the Remain-adjacent policy the Blairites forced Corbyn to adopt-most ordinary Remain voters actually accepted that the matter was settled in the referendum and that there was no good reason not to let it go at that-since that would have cost the party even more seats in the North and Northeast without gaining any seats for the party anywhere else.
It would have lost just as badly with another rigid right-winger like Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper, Tom Watson or Owen Smith leading the party, given that none of those people had any personal popular appeal at all, had no support among the older voters they would have focused on trying to win over, and no possible chance of holding the younger voters Corbyn brought in.
And in a country where most people hate the effects of post-1979 capitalism, Labour can never make a comeback by putting another spiteful, nasty, vengeful antisocialist like Blair as leader-especially since any neo-Blairite leader will always be a hardline Remainer and a hardline English supremacist. and therefore doomed never to regain any of the seats Labour lost in the North and Northeast this year NOR any of those lost in Scotland in 2015.
Finally, no MP who played any part in the four year long plot to crush Corbyn can ever unite the party for victory, since none of those people will ever be trusted or forgiven by the majority of Labour members and supporters who still hold to, and will always hold to the values of the Corbyn movement; the need to be anti-austerity, the immorality of any present wars and all future wars other than wars of territorial defense, the need to end economic inequality and the need to stand in solidarity with all those who are oppressed.
Labour cannot win if it drives Corbyn's supporters away-no one will come in from further right to replace them and no party can prosper by driving large numbers of its current membership away. And no future Labour leader who played any role in undermining Corbyn will have any right to expect or even ask for support from those who mourn the fact that Corbyn will never be prime minister.
Any new leader will have to be completely disconnected from the anti-Corbynites.
While she might not be a Corbyn supporter herself, she will have to be a proud, committed socialist-for a Labour leader who is not a socialist will have no passion, no courage, and no core values.
She must be willing to do the one thing Corbyn would not or could not do-fight back quickly and decisively against unjust and unfounded personal attack.
She must keep Corbyn's supporters in the party and mend fences with those in the North and Northeast who were lost when the second referendum pledge was forced on Corbyn, and must recognize that their support for Leave was generally not racism or ignorance, but the only way they had to lash out at the Tory and Blairite Southern England snobs who had colluded to leave them to rot.
And she must be willing to discipline anyone in the PLP and the party bureaucracy who engages in the type of sabotage the PLP endlessly inflicted on Corbyn.
THAT's what's needed in the next leader-not another Blairite. Support for Blairism is extinct in the UK.
Michael, I am not sure yet who wd be a good Labour leader.
I think Starmer might be a strong choice. I have had a soft spot for him ever since his heroic role in the McDonalds libel trial years ago.
Jess Phillips is a strong media performer but has been very clear-eyed about the perils of Corbynism. She would represent the clearest break from Corbynism and this would be of immense benefit to Labour.
I think myself that there should be a neutral interim leader with a transition to allow leadership issues to clarify. Labour rushed into replacing Ed Miliband with no such transition and that led to its present plight.
I am sure who would not be a good leader and that would be another Corbynite . Corbyn and his sect have been thoroughly discredited by the election results and Labour needs to take a starkly different direction or be tainted into the future by its present leadership.
unfortunately, many canter-left members have been driven out of Labour so the membership which will chose Corbyn’s successor is skewed to the left.
The big question is whether those members take an objective view of events or whether they accept the excuses propagated by his acolytes, many of which are perpetrated here on Babble.
We read for example that Corbyn only lost because the Remainers pressured him into a Remain position. Corbyn never took a Remain position to begin with. This dubious excuse sounds much like the “good tsar” exucuse propagated by the Romanoffs to justify their rule - that the tsar was inherently good and any misfortune was the fault of some misled advisors.
What Labour does not need is a leader who buys into the excuses that Corbyn and Corbynistas was not refuted by the electors, who ignores the plain evidence as reflected in this poll:
We asked voters why they had not voted for particular parties in our on the day poll (12th December). For Labour the key issue was the leadership.
That poll says the issue was just Corbyn himself, not what he supported or his supporters. Keir Starmer is hated in the North and Northeast of England for pushing for Labour to go all-out Remain. They will never forgive him for that and they will never vote Labour again if he is anywhere close to the leadership.
Labour could never be worth electing again as a "center-left" party, because no "center-left" government would be different than the one Boris will give Britain. And Labour can't win if it anathemizes and drives away those who supported Corbyn. Those people are the majority of the party and if they are driven away no one else will come in to even replace their current numbers, let alone come in in sufficient numbers to do the work needed to elect a Labour government.
And if those pe0ple sounded like a cult to you, its because the anti-Corbynites never engaged them, never tried to meet them halfway, never granted the validity of anything they had to say, never acknowledged that Corbyn's election as leader was not about him-he never even wanted the damn job-but was about the Labour base's conviction that the Third Way was a dead end, a project which no longer had anything to offer, could no longer elect Labour governments-as 2010 and 2015 proved-and needed to be replaced with something entirely different. The anti-Corbyn types refused to accept that, refused to accept that the left had any right to have a say in the party, and refused to be open to any change at all.
Why the refusal to accept that the Labour base had voted for change? Why the refusal to accept that Labour needed to re-democratize, needed to re-empower the grassroots?
Why was the only thing the anti-Corbyn people could say, even after 2017, when Labour did better under Corbyn than it could have under any "moderate", was "Corbyn has to go, the party must simply be turned back over to us, and no one has any right to disagree"?
Why not offer compromise with the left now-most of the policies were and are popular after all-rather than just seeking annihilation, rather than just sounding like "center-left" Daleks?
The left would not have won in the 2015 leadership vote if the previous two elections hadn't proved that Blairism was politically extinct and if the Blairite decision to start abstaining on the Tory benefit cut votes-a decision which proved that Blairites no longer cared about the poor-had not proved that there was no longer any difference between the Third Way and Thatcherism.
Your lot has had four years to learn from that, and you've learned nothing.
If nothing else, learn from this:
The Blairite party, Change UK, took a grand total of 10,006 votes in the whole of the UK.
And every former Labour MP who defected from that party to run against it from the "center-left" lost, badly.
Corbyn's campaign failed, as the PLP wanted it to fail, as they proved by continuing to attack him during that campaign, even when they knew he couldn't stand down if he'd wanted to. The Blairite campaigns of 2010 and 2015 failed too, which proves that going back to Blairism would be pointless.
You can't just keep the abuse going until everyone says Corbyn was wrong to ever run for the leadership. And I doubt you'd let it go at that-y0u most likely won't stop until the idea of socialism apologizes for ever having existed-even though, without socialism there would have been no reason for the Labour Party to have ever existed, since Labour values could only exist within the possibility of the creation of a socialist future.
And even though Labour would have no reason to continue to exist if the party went permanently antisocialist. The decades long decline of the no-l0nger socialist "social democratic" parties of the European mainland, all of which have abandoned not just socialism, not just social democracy, but any defense of the social welfare state and any left-of-centre policies at all other than reproductive choice and the most watered-down forms of LGBTQ rights at all. All of those parties are stuck at or below 20% support in the polls and none have any realistic chance of forming government.
Is that really what you want Labour to consign itself to, nicky? If so...why? What's the point?
If the issue is the leadership, its enough that someone else will be leader. And someone else will.
That's all that's needed, not scorched-earth retribution, not witchhunts, not mass expulsions, not the return of policy by "focus group".
The replacement should be someone who supported Corbyn, or at least did not undermine him. And preferably someone from the north or Wales. The people who did everything in their power to undermine him from day one should not be considered.
'Definitely, definitely put Emily Thornberry in charge.'
https://twitter.com/typofoto/status/1206144601523916800
"Emily Thornberry told a Labour MP in a pro-leave seat: 'I'm glad my constituents aren't as stupid as yours."
Or Clive Lewis MP. What a brilliant line sure to win back the Labour lost!
https://twitter.com/Ben_Smyak/status/1206165181828665344
@JKR - I was responding to nicky's comment on 'what caused Labour's monumental drubbing' - and noting these same causual elitest attitudes towards the UK working class pro-brexit 'deplorables' are quite prevalent in the relevant threads as any perusal will show. They will also show that I energetically supported Corbyn until it became obvious he was not going to stand on principle against either the Anti-Semitism campaign, (adopted IHRA) or for the democratic right of the majority voters on Brexit. In short, as Neil Clark succinctly stated recently, " it's undeniable that Corbyn - when he got to the brink of power - treated his enemies much better than he did his friends. That, sadly, will be his epitaph. A golden opportunity for the left in Britain has been squandered."
"Ken Livingstone was right and Corbyn's fateful mistake to throw him under the bus for stating accurate historical facts about Zionist collaboration with the Nazi government in the 1930s."
https://twitter.com/AsaWinstanley/status/1206527913266470912
The Brexit Song - ('What caused Labour's monumental drubbing')
"17 Million Fuck-Offs!"
Michael, I am not sure yet who wd be a good Labour leader.
I think Starmer might be a strong choice. I have had a soft spot for him ever since his heroic role in the McDonalds libel trial years ago.
Jess Phillips is a strong media performer but has been very clear-eyed about the perils of Corbynism. She would represent the clearest break from Corbynism and this would be of immense benefit to Labour.
I think myself that there should be a neutral interim leader with a transition to allow leadership issues to clarify. Labour rushed into replacing Ed Miliband with no such transition and that led to its present plight.
I am sure who would not be a good leader and that would be another Corbynite . Corbyn and his sect have been thoroughly discredited by the election results and Labour needs to take a starkly different direction or be tainted into the future by its present leadership.
Thank you, nicky, for finally acknowledging what many of us have believed for years. Your opposition to Corbyn wasn't really about Corbyn at all, it was about the socialist policies which he put forward. You would have been equally negative about any other leader who took the same policy positions. Nothing wrong with that, but it does make it clear that you are in no sense a leftist.
I and some other babblers agree with the Marxist critique of capitalism. We think that it is an inherently unstable system which will always tend to unfairness and inequality. As Piketty has shown, wealth and income inequality will only get worse under this system. Liberals like you think that capitalism can be tamed by sufficient regulation and oversight. Marxists like me think that is impossible, and all the evidence of the 21st century points in that direction.
I really think the best thing for you to do would be to join the Liberal Party of Canada, where your ideas are dominant, and just ignore the crazy lefties ranting about socialism. If you were British, you proper home would be the Lib Dems. These are acceptable political positions to take, even though I think they are badly mistaken. What do you gain by pretending to be something you are not? Come out of the closet, man.
From the Jacobin article in the opening post:
Despite their flaws, it must, and indeed will, be acknowledged that Corbyn and McDonnell have done a huge amount to move forward the conversation about austerity, the climate, and the economy in this country. Given the challenges we face — a looming recession, a housing crisis, and climate breakdown — it is clearer than ever that there can be no returning to the austerity-lite policies of the pre-Corbyn era.
Michael, thank you for your recomendation that I switch parties. If the Corbynites prevail in the new leadership contest a huge number of previously loyal Labourites will undoubtedly switch.
I abhor the Liberal Party of Canada as anyone reading my posts will know. I suspsect you are much closer to the CPC (M-L) than I am to the Liberals.
And Ken, do you have any basis whatsoever to say that Starmer is "hated" in the north of England? Some poll or mass demonstarion against him perhaps? I doubt he is disliked there nearly as much as is Corbyn, as was amply proven last week to everybody but you.
Here are some somewhat dated leadership numbers:
From our Times Labour party members poll in July. Proportion who think x would hake a good leader of the Labour party:
Keir Starmer - 68%
John McDonnell - 64%
Emily Thornberry - 59%
Angela Rayner - 41%
Tom Watson - 37% 
RLB - 34%
Jess Phillips - 33%
Laura Pidcock - 31%
Michael, thank you for your recomendation that I switch parties. If the Corbynites prevail in the new leadership contest a huge number of previously loyal Labourites will undoubtedly switch.
I abhor the Liberal Party of Canada as anyone reading my posts will know. I suspsect you are much closer to the CPC (M-L) than I am to the Liberals.
What exactly do you abhor, or even disagree with, about LPC economic policies? A few examples would help me understand why you imagine you are to their left.
Long-Bailey, Tipped As Next Labour Leader Says Corbyn Has Lost Trust of Jewish Community
"With Mr Corbyn's future looking more uncertain than ever - mainly due to anger over his failure to deal with Brexit and antisemitism - many on the left back Ms Long-Bailey as the woman to carry forward their project in the future."
'Rebecca Long-Bailey is the obvious candidate' - The Jacobin
' Long-Bailey would be good to carry on the Corbyn agenda. What other good left choices are there? '
Carry On Labouring...
Michael, thank you for your recomendation that I switch parties. If the Corbynites prevail in the new leadership contest a huge number of previously loyal Labourites will undoubtedly switch.
I abhor the Liberal Party of Canada as anyone reading my posts will know. I suspsect you are much closer to the CPC (M-L) than I am to the Liberals.
And Ken, do you have any basis whatsoever to say that Starmer is "hated" in the north of England? Some poll or mass demonstarion against him perhaps? I doubt he is disliked there nearly as much as is Corbyn, as was amply proven last week to everybody but you.
Here are some somewhat dated leadership numbers:
From our Times Labour party members poll in July. Proportion who think x would hake a good leader of the Labour party:
Keir Starmer - 68%
John McDonnell - 64%
Emily Thornberry - 59%
Angela Rayner - 41%
Tom Watson - 37%
RLB - 34%
Jess Phillips - 33%
Laura Pidcock - 31%
1) That shows that John McDonnell, who'd be the ultimate "continuity Corbyn" candidate" was essentially just as popular as Starmer was then;
2) There's no reason to assume that Starmer's popularity would be anywhere near as high now, given that he sabotaged Corbyn by continuing to push, until the bitter end, for Corbyn to adopt an all-out Remain position. Now that we know that even pledging the second referendum and refusing to accept Leave was the main reason Labour lost 55 Labour Leave constituencies, what possible appeal can you still imagine Starmer having?
The man's only been an MP for four years.
He's a dreary public speaker.
He has no strong convictions on any issues other than his pointless obsession with trying to overturn the EU referendum and trying to force his party to commit to an all-out Remain position the polls show could never have elected it on. All he has was winning one court case years ago-that and the fact that he happens to look like the actor you'd cast as a Labour politician in a BBC crime drama.
Corbyn is leaving. You have no one to continue to be fighting against.
And the 2010 and 2015 results prove Labour would gain nothing from going back to the kind of policies you would drag it back to.
I'll be happy with whoever Labour chooses to be their next leader as long as that person maintains acceptable approval ratings with the general public.
The Corbynites in a diversion campaign worthy of Trump are casting blame on everyone but themselves.
this is obviously to undermine anyone from outside their own myopic faction who might be the next leader.
they even claim that Thornbury and Starmer are to blame by “forcing” Corbyn to tentatively back a second referendum.
The Corbynites must not be allowed to perpetrate this deception.
Here is another poll that shows emphatically that Corbyn and his faction and NOT Brexit are to blame for the debacle:
Was it really ‘Brexit wot lost it’ for Labour?
Tuesday, 17 December, 2019 in Elections
John McDonnell was first with the theory, as soon as the exit poll had stunned the nation. “Brexit dominated the election,” he said. “I think people are frustrated and want Brexit out of the way.” The theme was taken up over the hours and days that followed, culminating in the claim Labour “won the argument” and that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership had nothing to do with the party’s worst result since 1935. Brexit alone was to blame.
Well, if this is the result you get when you win the argument, we can only imagine what losing it would look like. But what about the idea that the result can be put entirely down to Brexit, rather than the broader questions of policy and leadership that usually go into people’s voting decisions?
It would be absurd to deny that Brexit played a big part in the result. My election-day post-vote poll of 13,000 voters found the idea that a Conservative vote was most likely to lead to “the Brexit outcome I wanted” topped the list of broad explanations for Tory voters’ decisions – but only 37% mentioned it as the single most important reason, and a third of them didn’t mention it in their top three. The view that the Conservatives “would do a better job of running the economy” was close behind, as was their view that Boris Johnson would make a better Prime Minister.
But even though Brexit policy was a clear dividing line between the parties, this cannot be disentangled from Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership on the issue, or lack of it. Since the referendum, voters have found Labour’s policy muddled and unclear. Time and again, people told us in focus groups that they suspected Corbyn really wanted to leave the EU but wouldn’t say so. They understood that he was caught between his mostly Remain MPs and activists and his many Leave voters, but that didn’t make him seem any stronger or more decisive. When telling us what they understood Labour’s policy to be – usually in terms like “they will negotiate a new deal and then have another referendum and campaign against it,” if they knew it at all – they would often do so with a smirk which betrayed what they thought of it. Corbyn’s ultimate declaration that as Prime Minister he would be “neutral” on the biggest political question facing the country simply invited derision.
It is true that only 64% of 2017 Labour Leave voters stayed with the party last week (just as 66% of 2017 Conservative Remainers stayed loyal to the Tories). Certainly, Brexit was important to these people, and as we found week after week in our focus groups, many were torn over whether they could bring themselves to vote Conservative. But Corbyn made their decision to do so easier, not harder. Regularly we heard that he was an ultra-left-wing backward-looking 1970s throwback with terrorist sympathies and no fondness for Britain, who had at the very least failed to deal with antisemitism in his own party and simply did not have the qualities to be Prime Minister. Many former supporters told us they could not vote Labour in its current form, Brexit or no Brexit. Indeed, in our post-vote poll, only 14% of Conservative voters said they would have voted differently had Brexit not been on the agenda, and only a quarter of themsaid they would otherwise have voted Labour.
But even though Brexit helped some Labour Leavers away from the party, how to explain the defections among its 2017 supporters who voted Remain? Sixteen per cent of 2017 Labour Remainers declined to vote for the party last week – twice the proportion of Conservative Leavers who failed to vote Tory – despite the adoption of a policy on the supposedly overriding issue of the election which was designed to keep them on board.
Perhaps the starkest evidence of all on this question came midway through the campaign, when I asked voters what, if anything, they feared about a new Conservative or Labour government. In third place for Labour, “their plans might damage business and the economy.” Second, “they would spend too much and get Britain into more debt.” And top of the list? “Jeremy Corbyn being Prime Minister.”
We should understand why many in the Labour Party want to hold fast to the idea that Brexit alone cost them the election. After a traumatic setback, it is only human to grasp at the most comforting explanations that come to hand. It is also a regular habit of losing political parties, as we saw with Labour in 2010 and, let us not forget, with the Conservatives after 1997, who took years, not days, to grasp the reasons for their predicament. But the longer Labour clings to its consolation theory, the more distant will be the first step on the road to recovery.
One Labour MPs view as expressed at Labour caucus today:
Here’s a little more on Creagh’s comments about Jeremy Corbyn: She told Channel 4 News she had confronted him in Westminster because, in her view, he’d “enabled a hard Brexit” and “five years of austerity”.
Creagh blamed Corbyn for Labour’s losses, adding: “This was Jeremy’s manifesto [...] Jeremy’s NEC [Labour’s governing body].” She added that the views she’d heard expressed about his policies on the doorsteps could not be broadcast pre-watershed. And she said:
In Jeremy, we have a man without honour and without shame.
It is true that only 64% of 2017 Labour Leave voters stayed with the party last week (just as 66% of 2017 Conservative Remainers stayed loyal to the Tories). Certainly, Brexit was important to these people, and as we found week after week in our focus groups, many were torn over whether they could bring themselves to vote Conservative. But Corbyn made their decision to do so easier, not harder. Regularly we heard that he was an ultra-left-wing backward-looking 1970s throwback with terrorist sympathies and no fondness for Britain, who had at the very least failed to deal with antisemitism in his own party and simply did not have the qualities to be Prime Minister. Many former supporters told us they could not vote Labour in its current form, Brexit or no Brexit. Indeed, in our post-vote poll, only 14% of Conservative voters said they would have voted differently had Brexit not been on the agenda, and only a quarter of themsaid they would otherwise have voted Labour.But even though Brexit helped some Labour Leavers away from the party, how to explain the defections among its 2017 supporters who voted Remain? Sixteen per cent of 2017 Labour Remainers declined to vote for the party last week – twice the proportion of Conservative Leavers who failed to vote Tory – despite the adoption of a policy on the supposedly overriding issue of the election which was designed to keep them on board.
Perhaps the starkest evidence of all on this question came midway through the campaign, when I asked voters what, if anything, they feared about a new Conservative or Labour government. In third place for Labour, “their plans might damage business and the economy.” Second, “they would spend too much and get Britain into more debt.” And top of the list? “Jeremy Corbyn being Prime Minister.”
Nicky, I honestly wonder why you aren't affiliated with the Conservatives if you believe these things to be true. All of these kinds of smears just thrown at Corbyn are the same kinds of smears that are thrown at the NDP on a regular basis. Heck, in the dying days of the Romanow administration in Saskatchewan, a casual observer of MSM in Saskatchewan at that time would be forgiven for believing the Bolsheviks were about to take over.
No matter. These are all right-wing talking points, and we have to have better media sources to call them out. But if it is more important to voters to believe that Crobyn hates the UK and that he sympathizes with terrorists than it is to take action on climate change, end homelessness, protect the NHS, and design a jobs policy for people, then the Conservatives are the right fit for the country, and the people will have to bear the consequences of the decision they made.
It’s hardly just me Aristotle. Look at the British press today and what virtually every Labour MP at their caucus said about Corbyn being the reason for the election catastrophe.
i think they are more knowledgeable about this than you or me ( or even Ken)
It’s hardly just me Aristotle. Look at the British press today and what virtually every Labour MP at their caucus said about Corbyn being the reason for the election catastrophe.i think they are more knowledgeable about this than you or me ( or even Ken)
Would this be the same press that was cheerleading for Blair to join in the Iraq war?
Deflecting again Aristotle rather than face up to the stark facts.
Corbyn and his faction are the greatest menace Labour has ever faced to its very existence.
Look at the British press today and what virtually every Labour MP at their caucus said about Corbyn being the reason for the election catastrophe.
We are not allowed to have a candidate that attempts to upset the corporate agenda...this is the clear message of this election. the corporate press will not allow it. So Labour must choose another Blair...
why anyone takes this democratic farce seriously, anywhere the corporates control the media, is beyond logic.....
Babblers should once and for all begin to focus on how we can make change, outside this farce!
Nicky, how can you have been part of this online community for this long and it seems to be lost on you that the perceptions towards the MSM here generally range from skeptical to not trusting of MSM?
It’s hardly just me Aristotle. Look at the British press today and what virtually every Labour MP at their caucus said about Corbyn being the reason for the election catastrophe.
i think they are more knowledgeable about this than you or me ( or even Ken)
If Corbyn was the cause, it's enough that Corbyn has said he is standing down as leader.
He doesn't need to be exiled from public life, for god's sakes.
He doesn't need to be made into a pariah.
It still goes without saying that Labour could not have held those 55 Labour Leave seats with a Remainer as leader and that the party would have done even worse with an all-out Remain policy that committed the leader to campaigning for Remain in a second referendum.No Remainer can ever connect with working-class voters in the North and Northeast of England, especially since any Remainer as leader would have to be antisocialist and thus antiworker and elitist.
Let the Remain thing go already. The issue is decided and was decided once and for all in the referendum. The Remainers should just have accepted that and moved on.
Why can't you?
And nicky, it goes without saying, and even you would have to concede, that any possible Labour leader who WOULDN'T be attacked as left-wing and not-arrogantly patriotic enough could possibly be worth electing.
Blair wasn't.
And if Labour went back to a Blairite program, the 2010 and 2015 results prove, once and for all, that certain defeat would be the result.
If the party had done what David Miliband wanted and gone to the RIGHT of Blair, the party would have had no reason to continue to exist.
And it goes without saying that no Labour MP who voted to abstain on May's benefit cuts rather than voting against could possibly still have any recognizable Labour values. No one who was fine with May's benefits policy has any right to claim to care about the poor, and a Labour leader who isn't on the side of the poor would be a betrayal of what the party is about.
Even nicky would have to admit that.
Well, guess what. Labour’s “radical” manifesto of 2019 achieved precisely nothing. Not one proposal in it will be implemented, not one pound in it will be spent. It is worthless. And if judged not by the academic standard of “expanding the discourse”, but by the hard, practical measure of improving actual people’s actual lives, those hate figures of Corbynism – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – achieved more in four hours than Corbyn achieved in four years. Why? Because they did what it took to win power.
I have never denied that Labour won an election in 1997 with Blair as leader. No one does.
It's still not an unchallengable point that Blair HAD to move the part that brutally and undemocratically to the right to do so. The Tories were totally discredited with the electorate by then. Labour had been in a lead in the polls under Blair's predecessor as leader, a leader who was not vindictively anti-left.
The way Labour won in 1997 is not the only possible way for Labour to win an election for the rest of eternity. Nor is there any reason to think it WOULD work now.
The Blairite party in this election, Change UK, won 10,006 votes in the whole of the UK.
All of the Blairite former Labour MPs who defected to Change, the LibDems or to stand as nasty, spiteful right-wing independents, like Frank Field, went down to humiliating defeats.
The leader of the LibDems was beaten in her own constituency by the Scottish National Party-a party that, while Remain(Scotland is Remain because of the way they were jerked around on the EU issue in the Indyref followed by the subsuquent Eu Ref)is solidly left-wing.
There is simply no reason to think that Labour would make gains with a hardline Remainer(and thus someone totally indifferent to the misery of the North and Northeast of England) standing on a tightfisted, militaristic manifesto, totally supressing internal democracy, like Keir Starmer.
If the issue is in any way Corbyn's, the MPs could have got him to stand down long before the election if only they had shown that they could be trusted not to block all left-wing candidates from the ballot at all.
You would concede, if nothing else, that an all-centrist leadership ballot, in a party whose rank-and-file is overwhelmingly socialist, would not be democratic or legitimate, would you not?
And I hope you will at least concede that Labour can't win if it drives all the socialists out again, given that no one from any other part of the spectrum would replace them, will you not?
(self-delete. dupe post).
Well, guess what. Labour’s “radical” manifesto of 2019 achieved precisely nothing. Not one proposal in it will be implemented, not one pound in it will be spent. It is worthless. And if judged not by the academic standard of “expanding the discourse”, but by the hard, practical measure of improving actual people’s actual lives, those hate figures of Corbynism – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – achieved more in four hours than Corbyn achieved in four years. Why? Because they did what it took to win power.
What did they exactly achieve? Putting monetary policy outside of democratic control. Which even the Tories didn't do. Neo-Thatcherite economics. An illegal war.
Yet more polling refuting Corbynites nonsense that defeat had nothing to do with the leader or the party’s direction. In particular Labour lost just as many leave and remain voters because of Corbyn’s ridiculous Brexit position:
Undoubtedly, Brexit was a key issue for those Labour respondents who had voted Leave. Weariness of the issue even among those not committed to Leave meant the Tories’ message of “get Brexit done” had a simple appeal.
But it should be noted that Labour defectors are equally split, with 38% saying Labour should support Remain and 38% saying Labour should support Leave. Among Labour loyalists, the figure saying Labour should support Remain was 60%.
“What united Leave and Remain voters in the groups was that Jeremy Corbyn had not provided leadership on this issue, with constant derision of his “sitting on the fence”. He ended up with a reputation for being both weak and ideologically extreme.”
the blame is overwhelmingly on Corbyn and his incompetent leadership.
https://institute.global/news/northern-discomfort-why-labour-lost-general-election
Yet more polling saying the same thing. This time a post-election pollof 12,000:
The reason Jeremy Corbyn is not preparing to lead the first majority Labour government since 2010 is Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour leader is proving the falseness of the cliché that ‘oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them’. Unless enough people are convinced of an opposition’s competence and decency it will not take power, even when all it has to do is beat the mendacious rabble that make up today’s Conservative party.
Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition did not win a majority and could never win a majority because millions could not vote for the incompetent and indecent Jeremy Corbyn. It’s that simple.
I am not just repeating anecdotal evidence from Labour MPs and canvassers. A vast poll of 12,000 voters, released tonight, showed Jeremy Corbyn was by far the single biggest reason voters gave for deserting Labour. Of those who voted Labour in 2017 but were less than 50 per cent less likely to vote Labour now, Deltapoll found the overwhelming reason people gave was they ‘don’t like Jeremy Corbyn’ with 46 per cent agreeing with that blunt statement.
As tonight’s epic defeat shows, Labour could not win because of Jeremy Corbyn and the rancid political clique he led. Do not underestimate the scale of the rout for a moment. Johnson’s triumph is absolute. The Conservatives could be in power for most of the 2020s because a bunch of student politicians and narcissist performance artists destroyed a once viable party.
[quote=Aristotleded24]
Nicky, how can you have been part of this online community for this long and it seems to be lost on you that the perceptions towards the MSM here generally range from skeptical to not trusting of MSM?
[quote=NDPP]
Except when their propaganda campaigns coincide with views held here.
Bliar Attacks...
General Election 2019: Blair Attacks Corbyn's 'Comic Indecision' on Brexit (and vid)
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50829352
"Labour 'pursued a path of almost comic indecision' over Brexit during the election and 'alienated both sides of the debate', Tony Blair has said..."
Except when their propaganda campaigns coincide with views held here.
Well, it wouldn't be any fun if we all relied on the fair, factual and objective RT.
Bliar Attacks...
General Election 2019: Blair Attacks Corbyn's 'Comic Indecision' on Brexit (and vid)
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50829352
"Labour 'pursued a path of almost comic indecision' over Brexit during the election and 'alienated both sides of the debate', Tony Blair has said..."
Well, he has a point. My biggest complaint about Corbyn, other than his failure to fight back strongly enough against the anti-Semitism smears, was letting himself be a prisoner of the pro-EU crowd in the party after the 2017 election.
Aristotle just what news organization do you trust to be objective aboyut the execrable Corbyn and his faction?
I once asked Ken whether I shd pay any attention to Corbyn criticism in The Guardian, The New Statesamn, Left Foot Forward or Labour List. and if not what publication could I trust. He said all of them were Blairite sellouts and I should rely instead on the Red Ballooon or something like that.
Broken clocks are sometimes right and these particular broken clocks (if that's what they are) do happen to be right about Corbyn.
You make it sound as though Corbyn is fighting to stay on as leader and that everyone else here is fighting to keep him int he job. Neither of those things is the case. Corbyn has announced that he is standing down within two months. It will make no difference if he goes in early February rather than now. Therefore, there's no reason for you to still be attacking.
We know that no Remainer, especially no Blairite Remainer, would have held those 55 seats in the North and Northeast. We know that all-out Remain would simply have lost all the other Leave seats in those regions.
Corbyn had flaws. He is going. But it is not as simple as saying Labour would have won if only someone else had led the party. We know that simply isn't the case.
And we especially know, based on the 2010 and 2015 results and the absolute failure of Change UK in this election, that Labour will never win another election with a Blairite policy offer.
As to Corbyn being unpopular, if you're to be honest, at least some of the responsibility for that has to be assigned to the Labour MPs who spent four years refusing to accept him as leader and tried to force him out the whole time, the ones who never stopped attacking and disrespecting the man in the press. You'd have to admit that the results would be far better if they'd given up trying to remove him after the 2017 result and started treating him with respect and loyalty then.
What good would it be to have allowed him to be driven out of the leadership by the hate campaign? There's no way it would have resulted in Corbyn being replaced by anyone better and there's no way Labour would have done better with a right-wing leader imposed by the PLP against the will of the rank-and-file.
Corbyn lost. Blairism became electorally extinct in 2015. What happens next must neither be a repeat of how the last campaign was won OR a reversion to 1997.
And Corbyn as a person is no longer the issue, nor is the presence of his supporters in the party. Labour can win if the Blairites drive all the leftists away again. Even you know that.
Why couldn't the Remainers just accept that the issue was settled and that staying in the EU wasn't worth costing the party any chance of victory? There was no such thing as a humane, progressive case for trying to stay in the EU at this point and certainly no possible case for pushing for Labour to go all-out Remain that would not have cost Labour even more seats in the North without gaining it seats anywhere else(there were no constituencies that would have gone Labour but ONLY if it went all-out Remain and forced all Labour MPs to campaign for Remain).
And really, there was no difference between Corbyn being neutral in the second referendum and Harold Wilson being neutral in the 1975 EEC referendum. The position was the same thing with both.
(self-delete. dupe post).
Well, guess what. Labour’s “radical” manifesto of 2019 achieved precisely nothing. Not one proposal in it will be implemented, not one pound in it will be spent. It is worthless. And if judged not by the academic standard of “expanding the discourse”, but by the hard, practical measure of improving actual people’s actual lives, those hate figures of Corbynism – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – achieved more in four hours than Corbyn achieved in four years. Why? Because they did what it took to win power.
Nice to know you "disagree" with Blair choosing to be one of the 2 worst war criminals of the 21st Century but, hey, boys will be boys. Nice to know, but as long as he did what needed to do to "win power" under the fake banner of "Labour", its not a biggie. Your moral depth depends on what color of t-shirt your gang is wearing--too bad Boris doesn't change his first name to "Labour" to get your support.
Who will replace Corbyn? ---WHO gives a F...
There is no chance for a progressive replacement of Corbyn that would have a chance of election. Anyone running who attempts to roll back corporate control supported by the security state/corporate media would get the same saturation propaganda treatment which has been fine tuned in recent years.
The media role:
DECEMBER 17, 2019
Corbyn’s Defeat has Slain the Left’s Last Illusion
by JONATHAN COOK....
But the BBC always was the propaganda arm of the state, of the British establishment. Once, briefly, in the more politically divided times of my youth, the state’s interests were contested. There were intermittent Labour governments trying to represent workers’ interests and powerful trade unions that the British establishment dared not alienate too strongly. Then, countervailing popular interests could not be discounted entirely. The BBC did its best to look as if it was being even-handed, even if it wasn’t really. It played by the rules for fear of the backlash if it did not.All that has changed, as this election exposed more starkly than ever before.
....
A rigged political systemWe on the left didn’t lose this election. We lost our last illusions. The system is rigged – as it always has been – to benefit those in power. It will never willingly allow a real socialist, or any politician deeply committed to the health of society and the planet, to take power away from the corporate class. That, after all, is the very definition of power. That is what the corporate media is there to uphold....
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/12/17/corbyns-defeat-has-slain-the-lef...
The security state agencies role:
How the UK military and intelligence establishment is working to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister
By Matt Kennard• 4 December 2019Officials in the UK military and intelligence establishment have been sources for at least 34 major national media stories that cast Jeremy Corbyn as a danger to British security, new research shows.
....
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-12-04-how-the-uk-military-a...
Russiagate media smears against Corbyn brought to you by US and UK military-intelligence apparatus
Days before Britain’s historic election, the UK’s military-intelligence apparatus is turning to the corporate media and US government-funded NATO cut-outs to smear Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with evidence-free Russiagate allegations.....
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/08/us-uk-military-intelligence-apparatus...
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/11/jeremy-corbyn-faces-russiagate-smear-...
nicky still hasn't explained why he is ok with the PLP spending four years undermining their party's leader, or why he thinks the smear campaign they helped lead had nothing to do with the result of December 12th, or who, if anyone, would have done better.
He hangs on to the delusion that, if only Labour had had a leader who was arrogantly all-out Remain-the sort of leader whose attitude towards voters in the North and North East would invariably be "shut up, know your place, and take what you're given", an leader who would have told the leftists to go to hell, somehow the result would have been an improvement.
That's what nicky thinks, based on what he has written-that Labour lost because its leader wasn't a nasty right-wing elitist like Blair.
He thinks voters will only elect Labour if its leader hates and runs against the party itself.
He has learned nothing from the 2010 and 2015 elections, when Labour did worse in the vote share than this year and when it lost Scotland as a result of going too far to the right.
He has learned nothing from the slow death experience European social democratic parties who have stayed with the Blairite line have experienced.
It can fairly be asked if nicky is on the progressive side of the spectrum in any sense at all, since he clearly despises the left and everything it has ever stood for, and when he posts without having actually read and absorbed anything any of the rest of us have posted.
Paul Mason: The Next Labour Leader Must Challenge the Sectarian Left
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/12/next-labour-leader-must...
"So here are the criteria I would apply once we know who all the candidates are...do they look like they could be prime minister? Corbyn didn't, frankly - and the lesson is, if someone has a personal net rating of minus 50, do not assume this won't contaminate and neutralise a good popular policy offer...Will they crack down ruthlessly on anti-Semitism, and wage ideological war against the crank political ecosystem in which it has flourished? Watch Chris Williamson's latest video if you want to experience that first hand.
Corbyn's team needed centralised control because they could never make a workable deal with Labour centrism. The solution to that is not another left leader and more control. And in any case the 'left' is now really two lefts - one Stalinist and economic nationalist, one open and socially liberal. Since the entire left could not run the party on its own, I doubt half the left can."
back to Bliarism..
Ok, some things to take in there:
1) Most of Corbyn's rank-and-file supporters would go along with, and indeed have demanded Open Selection.
2) Give it a rest about anti-Semitism-it needs to be fought, and Corbyn himself did fight it, but it's a minescule problem within Labour and there was never any reason to equate criticism of the Israeli government or non-support of Zionism with anti-semitism. Israel is simply a country-it's not synonymous with Jews and Judaism and quite frankly, the world's Jewish communities would lose nothing if the State of Israel, as currently constituted and run, was replaced with something else-they'd certainly lose nothing if it were replaced by a secular democratic state in which all faiths and all communities were treate equally and expected to treat each other equally and with acceptance.
3) I'm glad he's against Jess Phillips. That's a good sign, because Jess has nothing to offer and Blairism is extinct in electoral terms.
4) He doesn't deal with the consequences of the Remain/Leave split or of the petulant, childish demands that Corbyn make the party go all-out Remain and force all Labour MPs to campaign for Remain in a second referendum. He also doesn't deal with the bloodymindedness and total disrespect and contempt the PLP showed towards Corbyn.
