George Galloway on Corbyn and UK's political future (and vid)
https://twitter.com/TheGrayzoneNews/status/1211336183248240642
"Anya Parampil spoke with former MP George Galloway about the Labour Party's devastating loss and the smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn."
Aristotle, I like to think I don’t hate anyone. You will surely appreciate there is a difference between rational analysis and hate.
It is difficult to dislike Corbyn as an individual. He is too mild and ineffectual. But what he and his followers have done to the Labour Party is deplorable, enabling as they have many unnecessary years of Tory misrule.
In the meantime here is some fresh hope that Labour can shake off its Corbynite nightmare:
31% Starmer
20% Long-Bailey
11% Phillips
7% Cooper
6 Lewis
6% Thornberry
5% Nandy
Assuming it came to just Starmer versus Long-Bailey poll has Starmer on 61% to Long-Bailey’s 39%.
In the last two leadership elections the membership gave Corbyn a clear lead.
I think Starmer would disappoint you. He isn't going to back a purge of socialists and he isn't calling for the party to move to the right on the issues. The man isn't going to be Kinnock 2.0-which is only to the good, since Kinnock did the party nothing but harm as leader.
As to wanting Corbyn stopped...he's been stopped. The man is standing down within weeks. Even if Long-Bailey won-and if that poll is correct-she would not run things like Corbyn did.
She would have a ready response team to fight back against personal attack-not defending himself against attack was Corbyn's greatest flaw-and while she would also be left-wing, she would be far more focused on message delivery than Corbyn's campaign was.
At some point, you've got to come to terms with the fact that you're fighting a battle which has ended. Corbyn is not going to stay on no matter what.
For everyone's consideration:
https://https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/23/the-man-behind-the-keir-starm...
Ken , the battle for Labour's fututre is not solely with Corbyn but with Corbynism.
It does need to be curtailed in the Labour Party if the party is ever to return to power.
Although Corbyn himself has mercifully been consigned to the trashcan of history, his followers are attempting to deny that the election was a repudiation of him and them. They are fighting desperately to maintain control of Labour and look like they will bend the rules to do so, as if they were a bunch of US Republicans.
This neeeds to be resited to ensure Labour's future electoral viability.
That's why it is not enough that the party is rid of Corbyn as an individual.
Labour can't abandon the principles Corbyn's supporters-the majority of the party-back, and then still have a reason to exist. '
Nothing to the right of what this election was fought on can even be considered Labour.
Labour must fight to restore all cuts in benefits.
It must be a party where the radical grassroots have a real say-and that say must be increased.
Is should oppose most wars, because war is a largely futile endeavor in this day and age.
And it needs to stay committed to taking rail, electricity and water back into public ownership(and under the management of the workers in that industry) because the last forty years have shown that all privatization in the UK has been is a series of tragedies for the people.
There is no such thing as "Corbynism"-there is simply a commitment to change.
Only the left wing of Labour wants a different, better society for the UK and the world.
The anti-Corbyn right wing of the party-a group made up of part of the PLP and essentially no one else-stands for nothing, fights for no one, and has nothing for offer.
If "the centre ground" was a thing in UK politics now, Change UK would have won a significant share of the popular vote and the LibDems would not have been held to a pathetic 11% of the vote, and you'd have seen at least two or three of the Labour defectors to Change or the LibDems stand down from their seats and then win them back as candidates for their new parties in by-elections, as happened in the 1981-83 period.
As this article points out "the centre ground is a social construct":
https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/11/the-centrist-delusion-middle-ground-p...
One thing about that poll...why does it not include Ian Lavery as a possible candidate? It's looking more and more likely that he will stand for the leadership, and he would be a strong candidate-he's a northerner(which means he can connect with northern voters), a Leave supporter(northerners will only vote Labour if it respects the results of the referendum), as left-wing as Corbyn but not seen as part of the Corbyn phenomenon, seems to have better relations with the PLP than Corbyn does so there's the possibility they won't repeatedly backstab him as they did Corbyn.
Don't you think he should have been listed as an option in that poll?
Ken , the battle for Labour's fututre is not solely with Corbyn but with Corbynism.
It does need to be curtailed in the Labour Party if the party is ever to return to power.
Although Corbyn himself has mercifully been consigned to the trashcan of history, his followers are attempting to deny that the election was a repudiation of him and them. They are fighting desperately to maintain control of Labour and look like they will bend the rules to do so, as if they were a bunch of US Republicans.
This neeeds to be resited to ensure Labour's future electoral viability.
That's why it is not enough that the party is rid of Corbyn as an individual.
Could you kindly define what, exactly, you mean by Corbynism?
What, exactly, do you think the party needs to give up?
You can't seriously be arguing for another round of Kinnock-style purges of the left. Those purges did no good for the party then-the left wasn't the enemy then and it isn't the enemy now.
One issue with Starmer-how do you imagine him ever unifying the party given his role in the anti-Corbyn putsch attempt in '16? He is going to have to apologize to most of the party for that, and for his pointless insistence on pushing for the party to go all-out Remain in the run up to this election(originally, Starmer's position had been that the results of the referendum should be expected, and he never offered an adequate explanation for why he switched to the right-wing position on that).
https://novaramedia.com/2020/01/02/labours-next-leader-must-be-able-to-t...
From the link:
"Over the course of the next parliament, we will creep day by day deeper into the crucial ten year timeframe in which Labour had planned to decarbonise the economy. As that time passes, alongside the inevitable failure of Boris Johnson’s government to take action, we will begin to experience harsher climate shocks. There will be more frequent and severe flooding and wildfires at home and abroad. Devastating extreme weather events will become increasingly commonplace around the world, hitting the poorest hardest.
Labour needs a leader comfortable stepping up to interpret these events, one who will lay blame at the feet of Johnson’s government and articulate a compelling socialist response. Reactionary forces will seek to capitalise on climate impacts. Eco-fascists will call for closing the borders and criminalising forced migration. Capitalists will seek to profit from green technologies and implausible techno-fixes while refusing to dismantle the fossil fuel industry. They will insist that ordinary people should take personal responsibility and subject themselves to eco-austerity for the crimes of billionaires. Labour must counter this by clearly drawing the links between climate impacts, class and inequality, and the denial and delay of Johnson’s government. "
In the last two leadership elections the membership gave Corbyn a clear lead.
What does that tell you about the state of opinion within the Labour Party?
Ken, Labour needs to cleanse itself not just of Corbyn but Corbynism if it is ever to form another government.
As a lawyer, how are you blind to the implications of using the phrase "cleanse itself from Corbynism?" You do remember that there were political leaders in Russia and Eastern Europe who embarked on campaigns to cleanse their parties about one hundred years ago? Remember how that worked out?
In the last two leadership elections the membership gave Corbyn a clear lead.What does that tell you about the state of opinion within the Labour Party?
Ken, Labour needs to cleanse itself not just of Corbyn but Corbynism if it is ever to form another government.As a lawyer, how are you blind to the implications of using the phrase "cleanse itself from Corbynism?" You do remember that there were political leaders in Russia and Eastern Europe who embarked on campaigns to cleanse their parties about one hundred years ago? Remember how that worked out?
Yeah...for a guy who probably self-identifies as an "anticommunist Social Democrat", nicky was sounding really Stalinist there.
You have really gone off the dial this time Ken.
Are you really accusing me of genocidal intent? If so, please say so explicitly.
You have really gone off the dial this time Ken.
Are you really accusing me of genocidal intent? If so, please say so explicitly.
Genocidal is your word, not mine.
And a person can be "Stalinist" without doing EVERYTHING Stalin did. You don't have to literally order the arrests of your opponents, stage show trials, sign off on torture and killings, with the next of kin being billed for the bullet. Obviously, you don't literally want mass executions, and I would never accuse you of that.
To be Stalinist, you just have to have a complete intolerance for dissent and an utter unwillingness to actually engage in the points people make in opposition to your views, and support turning the supposedly "progressive" part of the political spectrum into a reactionary, authoritarian dead zone-and to do this while endlessly repeating the same canned talking points over and over again.
I'm simply going along with Aristotle's observation of what your phrasing sounds like. There's no way to call for "cleansing" Labour without having negative, antidemocratic, and reactionary intent for that party.
And the term Stalinist fits with Blairites such as yourself, since many of them started as Stalinists, and Kinnock's antisocialist project was essentially a Stalinistic campaign to suppress people with democratic and anti-hierarchal Left views-the people your lot endlessly smeared as "Trotskyists" in the late Eighties and Nineties, even though virtually none of them were and even though there was nothing the Labour Left called for that you'd have to have been a Fourth Internationalist to support.Pro-repression, anti-socialist, and anti-solidarity with the powerless and the poor is the implication. You clearly want a party that, as was the case in the Blair era, is just barely different than the Tories if its different than the Tories at all. And you want to suppress all opposition to your anti-democratic and anti-equality vision for Labour's future.
It is clear from your recent posts that you want to suspend expel or simply drive away hundreds of thousands of people from the Labour party, most of them for the sole offense of supporting socialism in a party whose only reason for existence is to fight for socialism.
There's no possible way Labour would benefit from its overall membership being forcibly made much smaller and much more right-wing(sorry "moderate"-never mind that in a Labour Party context, "moderate" and "reactionary" are pretty much the same thing; the final and permanent suppression of internal party democracy and the final and permanent return to policy making by cynical, principle-free hacks based on their interpretation of focus group results).
And despite the fact that you know nobody wants Labour to be that kind of party again, you won't stop until you get the party that would result from that: a party that is pro-austerity; is hostile to the working and kept-from-working poorl and supportive of continued benefits cuts and the "benefits sanctions" policy; is utterly indifferent to the climate crisis and just fine with constructing more nuclear power plants; is "extremely casual" about both massive concentration of wealth in the hands of the few; is "extremely casual" about further military intervention in the Arab/Muslim world, with the sole exception of being implacably opposed to the one military intervention that would make a positive difference, which would be the overthrow of the House of Saud; and is committed to preserving the political and economic status quo for the rest of eternity.
And in the end, you are, perhaps, not so much Stalinistic as deluded-you still seem to believe that Corbyn's victory in the 2015 leadership race was an illegitimate outcome-that the party rank-and-file didn't actually want any break at all from the Blairite/Blue Labour template, but somehow radicalism was forced on the party from outside by a devious, evil cabal. By...of all people...the Trotskyists.
That's right, you think the people who inspired the "Peoples' Front of Judea/Judean Peoples' Front/Peoples Popular Front of Judea" subplot in THE LIFE OF BRIAN were somehow actually capable of orchestrating a takeover of Her Majesty's Official Opposition in the House of Commons.
Did you not notice that, on first preferences, paid Labour members, by themselves, gave Corbyn 49.5% of their votes-a share which guarantees that Corbyn would have won solidly among paid Labour members on second or third preference votes, since there is no way that everyone who voted for the other leadership candidates would have coalesced around a single stop-Corbyn candidate in absolute unison?
Corbyn is departing the leadership, but at some point you have to accept reality, nicky-Corbyn won the leadership not because anybody thought he was a saint-although he was and is clearly the most decent person to lead any of the three major all-UK political parties-Corbyn won because the Labour rank-and-file itself saw Blairism/Blue Labour as a dead end.
And it would be perfectly legitimate for that majority to choose a successor to Corbyn who supports the policies Corbyn's supporters back, because those policies are still popular(the polls put support for each of the nationalization pledges at over 60%).
Starmer has an early lead, but you can't assume it will hold, and you can't assume that he's going to do the anti-Left purge you demand. Among other things, he is going to have to find some way to connect with and earn the trust of the vast majority of rank-and-file Labour supporters who still back openly socialist policies-and he is going to have to explain to them why a man who, arguably, cost Labour any chance of victory by pushing all-out, virtually to the eve of the election call, for the party to go all-out Remain, and pushed for this even though he knew moving the party away from respecting the results of the referendum was going to put dozens of seats in the Labour heartlands into jeopardy.
I would say you should keep your eyes out on whether Ian Lavery enters the race. Lavery holds the views of the socialist majority within the party, but is clearly working class, a Northerner and Leave, so he can connect with the voters the second referendum pledge pushed away. And he will lack Corbyn's greatest shortcoming-Lavery will stand up and fight back when he and the party are attacked.
The stupidest thing is, the massive continued collapse in support for every social democratic party on the European mainland who has chosen and stayed on this path proves that what you want won't do anything to increase the liklihood of the election of a Labour government.
This graph illustrates what has happened to the "social democratic" parties on the European mainland which have rigidly followed the course nicky insists on for UK Labour. I don't think I need to point out the common trend in these charts.
The one party there whose support has held up best, the Socialist Party in Portugal, is the party that has stayed on the left and has worked with parties to its left in coalition governments. Portugal is the one country on the European mainland in which the governing party has not imposed continuous austerity in recent decades.
And here is a similar graph on the recent fortunes of the Irish Labour Party, whose vote share is represented by the downward sliding red line on the bottom of the graph-another party which, for decades, has done exactly as nicky wants and moved further and further and further to the right...spending its last stint as junior partner in a coalition government with Fine Gael(FG)voting without question for every cut in the social wage FG demanded, and has now been overtaken by Sinn Fein, of all parties, as the major party on the left in the 26 Counties.
You have really gone off the dial this time Ken.Are you really accusing me of genocidal intent? If so, please say so explicitly.
I'm not saying you have genocidal intent. I'm pointing out the implications of the language you have chosen to use. I presume that as a lawyer you would well understand that something you say may come off across to others differently than what you intended it to mean.
Ken, you reference Life of Brian when MP and the Holy Grail is more germane to labour's current situation.
The Corbynistas refuse to accept how comprehensively the public detested them. No matter how many limbs were lopped off they keep pretending they are viable. The severed limbs include:
Every opinion poll showing Corbyn's dispproval at 70%.
Every byelection in which Labour's vote fell precipitously
The Local elections in which Labour was shellacked
The European elections in which Labour got 13%
And now Dec. 12, Labpour's worst showing since 1935
You have no limbs left. Labour can only be saved by a wholesale rejection of Corbynism.
To update, Spain is now at 28%
This graph illustrates what has happened to the "social democratic" parties on the European mainland which have rigidly followed the course nicky insists on for UK Labour. I don't think I need to point out the common trend in these charts.
The one party there whose support has held up best, the Socialist Party in Portugal, is the party that has stayed on the left and has worked with parties to its left in coalition governments. Portugal is the one country on the European mainland in which the governing party has not imposed continuous austerity in recent decades.
The public didn't and doesn't detest Corbyn's policies. Labour can't renounce the renationalization of rail, electricity and water, or the restoration of Tory cuts in benefits and the repeal of the Tory benefit sanctions policy and still be Labour in any recognizable sense.
And as to who the voters rejected(they didn't reject Labour in 2017, with a nearly-identical platform, the only difference being that Labour in '17 accepted the results of the referendum)look at the showing of Change UK...the party whose policies you want Labour to adopt. Change UK took 10,006 votes in the whole of the UK. Unlike the Labour defectors who formed the SDP-Liberal Alliance in the 1981-83 period, none of the former Labour MPs who crossed over to form Change ever dared to stand for a by-election in their constituencies as a Change UK candidate. Change UK never won a single local council seat. And none of the former Labour THEN former Change UK MPs who then crossed over to the LibDem bench either fought a by-election in their old seat as a LibDem candidate or came anywhere close to getting elected on December 12th.
If anyone is detested, it's the anti-Corbyn plotters and schemers. That's why Jess Phillips and Yvette Cooper between them are at less than 20% in that YouGov poll. Jess Phillips will never win the leadership after she was shown bursting into laughter on live television when the projection of a Tory majority flashed across the screen.
There is simply evidence that Labour would be better served by moving sharply to the right on policy-there's nothing to the right of left-wing socialism that isn't simply Thatcherism by another name, or that has anything to offer the electorate as remedies for its problems-the voters don't want any more Labour governments getting the UK into useless, unwinnable wars, and they recognize that any wars in the Arab/Muslim world will be pointless and unwinnable.
If you're going to post here, please accept these two things:
1) Corbyn supporters DO accept that the last campaign didn't go well and that they made mistakes. None of them is pretending that they or Corbyn were flawless. It's just that it's not all or even mostly their fault or Corbyn's fault.
2) Corbyn's supporters have the right to fight on for their principles-they are most of the party, after all-and if Labour repudiates the policies of the last election, it would no longer stand for anything.
3) There is no justification for mass expulsions. It's not evil to oppose war and austerity and Corbyn's elections as leader were not illegitimate.
4) The disastrous showings for Change and the LibDems prove that "the centre ground", as Blair knew it, no longer exists.
Even Starmer isn't calling for a swing to the right.
The main thing is that Labour needs a leader who will fight back when that leader and the policies and supporters of that leader are attacked, and that whoever that leader is needs to not only announce policies, but put in a long-term effort making a public case for those policies.
Here's the proof that a return to "the centre ground" would do nothing but destroy Labour: https://againstreactionblog.wordpress.com/2020/01/03/the-slow-death-of-r...
Pay particular attention to the graph in that link which demonstrates that Labour's support had been falling in the "Labour heartlands" for at least twenty years, with the only interruption in that long-term pattern of decline coming in 2017, the first election fought on the manifesto nicky so detests.
Then again, it is increasingly clear that nicky doesn't want a Labour government for the UK. He will tolerate nothing to the left of Tony Blair, who ran a Tory-militarist government that always took the side of the few against the many-the kind of government which thinks it was more important to spend money building the useless nightmare known as the Milennium Dome than on restoring twenty-one years of indefensible benefit cuts-the eighteen years of cuts under Thatcher and Major, preceded by the three years of cuts Callaghan imposed when Healey agreed to the totally unnecessary IMF "bailout" in 1976.
nicky likes those cuts so very, very much that he preferred to attack Labour's leader even during the 2017 election, when that leader had the party on the verge of a political upset no "Labour moderate" would have come close to achieving-as the 2010 and 2015 election results proved-rather than accept and support that leader and bring the nightmare of Tory governance to an end.
https://inews.co.uk/news/labour-leadership-remain-brexit-not-jeremy-corb...
Writing in the Daily Mirror, Mr Lavery said criticism of Labour’s policies during the election, including wide-scale renationalisation and free broadband for everyone, was “ridiculous”, adding: “For some, that would be a neat conclusion allowing them to return to a bland centrism of 2015. But it isn’t true.
“Labour lost because of our Brexit position, infighting, a collapse of industry in our communities and a lack of trust in our ability to deliver. Talk of a second referendum was seen by many as a way to foist Remain upon them. Communities represented by Labour for generations felt abandoned."
The former President of the National Union of Mineworkers added: "It is time to outline a positive vision of the future outside of the EU.”
If Lavery enters the leadership race, he will be a formidable opponent for Starmer, and will run well ahead of the discredited Phillips and Cooper.
Ken, the first time I heard Ian Lavery was on the BBC election night broadcast where he was completely incoherent and tongue-tied as he tried to deflect responsibility for the defeat away from Corbyn and Corbynism.
You might want to review that before you embrace him as a saviour because of his extreme leftism.
Here is a delicious quote about Lavery that you may enjoy:
Ladbrokes have a market up on the Conservatives increasing their majority at the next general election. I can understand why some will want to back the 4/1.
Boundary changes would see the Conservative majority increase to around 104 if the vote shares remained identical at the next election and if Labour choose electoral Ebola in the form of Ian Lavery then this bet looks like a winner.
Boundary changes would see the Conservative majority increase to around 104 if the vote shares remained identical at the next election and if Labour choose electoral Ebola in the form of Ian Lavery then this bet looks like a winner.
So you're quoting an individual who thinks it's okay to compare a human being to a deadly virus?
Totally disgusting and reprehensible. And we wonder why average people not predisposed to jump off a cliff on the orders of a party they support are turned off by politics?
You may not agree with someone's approach to politics, and I understand that people feel strongly enough so I don't expect a kindergarten level of niceness at all times, but some things are simply beyond the pale and inexcuseable. That is one of them.
Here's a thing to consider, nicky: If Labour did what you really want it to do, abandon any significant increase in spending, abandon the nationalization commitments on electricity, water, and the rails, abandon restoring the Tory benefit cuts and abandon fully funding the NHS-all things YOU want to do-in what sense would Labour still BE Labour?
In what ways would Labour be different than the Tories?
You can't seriously think that Labour would win if it did what you want and reduced its message to "it's enough that it's US doing it"?
There couldn't be any difference between a Labour government that didn't raise taxes or spending and just keeping the Tories in power. It's not possible to do anything even mildly social democratic on the existing tax and spending levels, and a Labour government that cut benefits again would be worse than a Tory government.
Nobody wants Labour to go back to being just barely not-Thatcherite again.
And, for that matter, Starmer has made it clear that he won't move the policies to the right, so you'll probably calling him all the things you've called Corbyn within six months after becoming leader.
The Labour heartlands were doomed to be lost the moment a second referendum pledge was announced. It goes without saying that if the party had gone all-out Remain it would have lost even MORE seats there and wouldn't ahve gained any anywhere else. It already held all the Remain seats it possibly could hold. There were no Tory seats that could have gone Labour if only Labour nominated an all-out Remain candidate there.
I see the word police are in high dudgeon again.
The quote does not say that Lavery is “Ebola” but that choosing him as leader would be like electoral Ebola.
Is this any different that saying Corbyn was a plague on the Labour Party? A sentiment of course that all of you must agree with?
Uh, no, none of us agree with that, because you are the only one who loathed Corbyn so much you ended up cheering on the Labour MPs who so hated the fact that most of the party hold the views Corbyn holds that they ended up fighting to drive Labour's vote downas much as possible-they claimed they wanted to elect a "coalition" made up of the LibDems, the SNP, the Green-they knew there was never any chance of more that one Green MP being elected this year-and Labour but with a Tory like Jess Phillips leading the party instead of Corbyn as leader-but they knew all along such a coalition was never had any chance of occuring. Those of you who supposedly wanted that outcome just wanted to keep the Tories in power no matter what. You all knew that none of the people who ran against Corbyn from his right never held any personal charisma and could never have made a case to the electorate that could possibly have led to a Labour victory. You knew the 2010 and 2015 results proved that Blairism was electorally extinct. And you knew that no "moiderate" Labour leader could ever have matched Corbyn's showing in 2017. You know he would have at least matched that showing, if not exceeded it if it were not for the corporate-controlled "P eople's Vote" cabal refusing to accept the reality that the EU question was forever settled in the referendum and that there was no good reason to demand that Corbyn pledge to a second referendum AND if the utterly bogus AS smear hadn't been created by the hasbara machine.
Why are you so obsessed with trying to drag Labour back to policies that are irrelevant, unwanted, and permanently unpopular, as the 2010 and 2015 elections and the utter failure of the Change UK and LibDem campaigns prove?
And why are you so obsessed with purging all socialists out of Labour-there's no such thing as an anti-Corbyn socialist-when mass expulsions can't gain votes for Labour and when no one but Tories would applaud that?
I opened my tablet this morning to read the wild accusation that I am a secret Tory who always wanted the Conservatives to remain in power.
The most repeated concern in my many posts has been the exact opposite, that Corbyn was ensuring Conservative electoral success. Unfortunately therecent election results proved me correct beyond any question except by the most myopic of Corbynites.
I am criticized for quoting a writer who compared the Corbynites electoral “appeal” to “ electoral Ebola.” Perhaps I should instead have quoted those numerous commentators who called the Corbynites “ Tory enablers” and “useful idiots”. Because Corbyn and his apologists are responsible for the next five long years of Tory misrule.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that you wanted the Tories to win when you kept attacking Labour's leader DURING THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN, when you knew nobody the PLP would have accepted as a replacement for him could possibly have established any personal popularity OR offered a compelling program for change, when you knew nothing mattered more than stopping Boris from winning and that the only way to do that was to finally get all-out behind Labour and the leader who had done nothing to deserve your hatred-and when you knew it was too late to change leaders before polling day. You cared more about demonizing Corbyn-you still won't stop falsely accusing him of abetting anti-Jewish bigotry within the party even though you know perfectly well there was no major incidence of that and no increase in it during tenure as leader-there was simply a more balanced policy on the Israel/Palestine issue-even you have admitted that it's not AS to call out the Israeli government for the treatment it has inflicted on ordinary Palestinians-and Corbyn had proved his implacable opposition to all forms of bigotry by decades of anti-bigotry activism.
You've failed to address the fact that none of the people who stood against Corbyn for the leadership in either election-Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham in the first vote, Owen Smith in the second-had anything more to offer. You've also failed to address the fact that the last two elections in which Labour stood on a Blairite manifest0, as you'd prefer, and with thoroughly bland, passionless leaders-2010 and 2015-Labour did worse then in either campaign in which Corbyn led it in, or that the bad showing this time, while Corbyn and his campaign did make mistakes-as all Corbyn supporters have acknowledged-had as much to do with the Labour Right forcing Corbyn to anger the Labour heartlands with the second referendum pledge, the relentless sabotage carried out by the PLP, and the toxic mendacity of the AS smear as with any policy pledge the party offered. You clearly care about nothing but forcing the party back to Blairism-and pushing Labour back to Blairism-or to the right of Blairism, as David Miliband, your true hero, would have done-would be exactly the same as keeping the Tories in power forever, because that would make any Labour victory meaningless even if it did happen-as the 2010 and 2015 elections and the utter failures of Change UK and Jo Swinson this year prove.
Face facts:
Jeremy Corbyn will not lead Labour in the next election. Whoever does lead Labour in that next election, even if it is RLB, will not lead in exact same way-they won't need to change the policies, since most of them, especially the nationalization pledges and the spending increases, were not unpopular and since Labour wouldn't be Labour if it did renounce those and went back to running as a tight-budget on social needs/sky's the limit on the war budget party again.
It's simple, nicky-when the election is started, you're supposed to stop attacking the leader and trying to force the leader out. Nobody here treated Mulcair in 2015 the way you and the PLP treated Corbyn in the 2017 and 2019 elections. Why could you not agree that, once the elections were called, the time for doing damage was over?
And here's a future question: How can you possibly imagine Labour winning any future election if the hundreds of thousands of energetic, idealistic young people Corbyn brought into the party are driven away? You know full well nobody to their right will come in to replace them if the party goes Blairite again, and you know full well that Labour has no chance of recovering in the heartlands if it chooses a pro-austerity, anti-worker Remainer as leader.
Jeremy Corbyn will not lead Labour in the next election. Whoever does lead Labour in that next election, even if it is RLB, will not lead in exact same way-they won't need to change the policies, since most of them, especially the nationalization pledges and the spending increases, were not unpopular and since Labour wouldn't be Labour if it did renounce those and went back to running as a tight-budget on social needs/sky's the limit on the war budget party again.
Didn't even Boris Johnson promise to somewhat dial back austerity and spend money on infrastructure, especially in the so-called Red Wall that crumbled on election night?
Keir Starmer admits that there was no good reason for him to push for Labour to go all-out Remain and that the election settled the EU issue once and for all.
https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/uk-election-result-blew-away-123933986.html
omit
RLB seems to be tanking.
Poor reception in MP's hustings.
Unison endorsed Starmer.
Phillips has more MPs backing her than RLB
Starmer has many more
Rumours that McLusky will abandon her for Barry Gardiner.
General derision after she gave Corbyn 10 out of 10 as leader.
RLB seems to be tanking.
Poor reception in MP's hustings.
Unison endorsed Starmer.
Phillips has more MPs backing her than RLB
Starmer has many more
Rumours that McLusky will abandon her for Barry Gardiner.
General derision after she gave Corbyn 10 out of 10 as leader.
You need to set this to music, I have just the right piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq2kv-QQhIE
Luv it Prince!
the narrator even looks like Corbyn
https://www.thecanary.co/opinion/2020/01/08/a-message-to-anyone-thinking...
A message to anyone thinking of voting for Keir Starmer in the Labour leadership race
Keir Starmer announced his intention to run in the Labour leadership contest on 4 January. But there’s a message that anyone thinking of voting for Starmer needs to read before supporting him.
Keir was DPP when revelations were published about the first known modern ‘spycop’, Mark Kennedy. Kennedy infiltrated environmental and anticapitalist groups between 2003 and 2009. In 2011, a trial of environmental activists accused of plotting to break into Ratcliffe power station collapsed after it emerged that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had covered up vital evidence. This evidence consisted of recordings Kennedy had made of planning meetings. Starmer was present in court the day the case was thrown out.
20 people already prosecuted from the same action had their convictions overturned. And a further 29 people convicted of blocking a train carrying coal to Drax power station also had convictions quashed due to Kennedy’s involvement.
The CPS ordered an investigation into what had happened. Interviewed about the ensuing report in 2011, Starmer said:
If Sir Christopher Rose had found systemic problems, then I would quite accept perhaps a retrospective look at all the cases. But he didn’t, he found individual failings.
Utter bullshit
But it was systematic. In 2015, the Guardian reported that 83 people could have been wrongfully convicted after evidence of spycop involvement was withheld. And details of exactly how systematic it was are still coming out. On 6 January, the Guardian published details of the case of an 81-year-old man trying to get a conviction overturned for an anti-apartheid protest in 1972. Following revelations from the Undercover Policing Inquiry, he discovered that the person he was convicted alongside was actually an undercover police officer.
Meanwhile, the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance claims:
If the other 150 or so officers have similar tallies [as Kennedy], it means about 7,000 wrongful convictions are being left to stand. Even if we conservatively estimate just one false conviction per officer per year of service, it adds up to about 600. It may well be that spycops are responsible for the biggest nobbling of the judicial system in English history.
So Starmer’s suggestion that Kennedy’s actions were not systematic is bullshit.
What’s less clear is how much Starmer knew and how much he covered up. But those of us involved in the Undercover Policing Inquiry are not convinced of his innocence. As one core participant said, the scandal:
wasn’t just the police. Released papers showed the Crown Prosecution Service had been deeply involved – they knew about the plan before the arrests, they worked with the police to withhold evidence from the defence and the courts.
Is there any good reason to have the Labour Party be led by a person who abetted the infiltration of left activist groups? It's not really possible to arrest leftists and still be able to do anything progressive if you get into power, after all.
A car crash intervies shows exactly why Jess Phillips is unfit to be Labour leader-she STILL hasn't accepted that the EU issue is settled and that it's time to move on already. We already know that if Labour stands as a centrist Remain party at the next election, the Tories are certain to hold every seat they just gained in Wales, the North, the North East and the Midlands, but she doesn't care.
https://www.thecanary.co/opinion/2020/01/06/a-car-crash-interview-shows-...
There's also the basic contradiction in Phillips Extreme Right Labour stance: she is under the delusion that it's possible to "speak truth to power" and defend austerity capitalism at the same time. She is also under the delusion that capitalism is somehow more likely to be feminist-despite the fact that it was capitalism which invented workplace sexual harassment-than socialism.
Emily Thornbury: For Labour & Israel...
We Need To Get On Our Knees and Ask For Forgiveness
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-need-to-get-on-our-hands-and-knees-an...
"If I was leader...driving antisemitism out of Labour would be my most urgent and immediate priority..."
https://twitter.com/Qudsn_en/status/1214256435917393925
Drive the Zionists out first - there's far more of them too.
RLB seems to be tanking.
Poor reception in MP's hustings.
Unison endorsed Starmer.
Phillips has more MPs backing her than RLB
Starmer has many more
Rumours that McLusky will abandon her for Barry Gardiner.
General derision after she gave Corbyn 10 out of 10 as leader.
You need to set this to music, I have just the right piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq2kv-QQhIE
I was thinking more along the lines of Beat poetry
As Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer tried to destroy an innocent man's life by insisting the man be prosecued for a harmless bad joke about airports on Twitter: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jul/29/paul-chambers-twitter-joke-a...
You're right Ken, this is disturbing.
You should look however at a fuller picture of Starmer’s legal career. He has consistently promoted progressive causes ( with a couple exceptions like this one):
- representing unions
- representing demonstators
- promoting victim’s rights
- taking Blair to court to challenge the legal basis for the Iraq invasion
- opposing Bair on a wide range of civil liberties issues
-defending the McDonalds Libel trial and appeal.
Unlike RLB, whom I suspect you favour, Starmer has a long history of impressive accomplishments. Apart from ideology the Corbynites’ major failing is that the electorate did not believe they had the simple competence to run the country. Starmer looks like he can repair that deficit.
That being said, I have a soft spot for Jess Phillips who has always been steadfast and clear-eyed about the curse of Corbynism.
One of Starmer’s chief attractions is the fury with which the Corbynites are attacking him. Just look at Twitter to see how deranged their attacks are. They are panicking over losing control of the party they have driven into the ditch. Starmer must be doing something right.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. nicky is a closetted Liberal who actually hates socialism and all its manifestations, however vehemently he denies it. He might as well have "Liberal" tattooed on his forehead. All of his posts should be read in that light. In particular, his posts on the Labour leadership should be read as grotesque examples of concern trolling.
And Michael, you are obviously a closeted Conservative, having so asiduously promoted Corbyn and Corbynism, the single greatest assets the Conservative Party has ever had.
You might as well have "Conservative" tattooed on your forehead.
I think it's only fair that if someone like Starmer or Phillips win leadership, he receive the same treatment, and level of support, from the left of the party that Corbyn received from the right.
And Michael, you are obviously a closeted Conservative, having so asiduously promoted Corbyn and Corbynism, the single greatest assets the Conservative Party has ever had.
You might as well have "Conservative" tattooed on your forehead.
This is the same false logic that supporters of the Iraq war used in 2002/3. They claimed that those who opposed the war were "objectively pro-Saddam". nicky is a loser without a rhetorical leg to stand on.
Regarding the popularity of "Corbynism" (which is a phony word if ever there was one), an article in Jacobin starts out with this.
In the aftermath of the general election, Jeremy Corbyn met with widespread ridicule for saying that the party had “won the argument” in policy terms. After such a crushing defeat, the line went, how could a Labour leader credibly claim that his policies were popular?
Less than a month on, however, the situation has changed. Polling released in the aftermath of the election showed that key pillars of Labour’s policy platform were extremely popular. Support for nationalization of rail, energy, and water had grown massively — even since the 2017 general election. This backed up evidence from the campaign, which found large majorities in favor of things like taxing the rich and giving workers a share of companies. Even the Telegraph had to admit that Corbyn’s platform had substantial appeal.
And Michael, you are obviously a closeted Conservative, having so asiduously promoted Corbyn and Corbynism, the single greatest assets the Conservative Party has ever had.
You might as well have "Conservative" tattooed on your forehead.
And there is no such thing as "Corbynism"-there are simply the democratic socialist values the majority of the party who twice elected Corbyn leader supported and continue to support, and which you oppose. Instead of socialism-the only humane values system possible-you support "social democracy"-a term which no longer means anything at all, since it no longer involves disagreeing with the Tories. There are no meaningful differences between Tony Blair and Boris Johnson on the issues.
At some point, nicky, you are going to have to accept that the Corbyn phenomenon was not illegitimate, and neither was Corbyn's election as leader. You're also going to have to explain how you can exempt the PLP and the "Four Years' Hate" it subjected Corbyn to from any responsibility for the Labour defeat, since much of the reason for the man's decline in popularity was due to the fact that the PLP never treated him with the respect he was entitled to as leader- a lack of respect with almost certainly cost Labour the 2017 election.
Corbyn made mistakes. He admits that. His campaign made mistakes. The people who ran it admit that. But you can't put it solely on that and exempt the implacable enemies he faced in his own parliamentary caucus. The 2019 result is as much on them as anyone else, especially since they had known since 2019 that they were never going to cause him to stand down before the next election and thus knew there was no justification for their continued attacks on their own leader.
As to Jess Phillips, here are the questions she will have to answer to win the leadership-and I'd like to hear your answers to these too:
I think it's only fair that if someone like Starmer or Phillips win leadership, he receive the same treatment, and level of support, from the left of the party that Corbyn received from the right.
It certainly goes without saying that neither will have any right to even ask the hundreds of thousands of people who joined the party in the Corbyn years to support them as leader, given that all either of them did was to sabotage Corbyn and try to expel his supporters from the party.
Labour will have no chance of ever winning another election if it anathemizes everything and everyone associated with Corbyn's tenure as leader. And the truth is that the voters aren't demanding that those ideas and those people be anathemized.
You still are in denial over what a disaster Corbyn was, aren’t you Ken.
As for your complaints about less than servile loyalty from those who questioned Corbyn, you seem to forget that Corbyn himself voted against the Blair/Brown governments more than 400 times, far more than any other MP.
Meanwhile here is an interesting assessment of some of the contenders:
This tells us that the devastating scale of Labour’s losses in the December election has been a salutary shock to at least some of the party. The calamity inflicted by Corbynism’s deadly combination of ideological zealotry, toxic factionalism and rank amateurism commends professionalism, pleasantness and credibility to any members who are fed up with losing and would prefer not to be doomed to another decade in opposition. I have heard of a lot of examples of Labour activists who voted for Mr Corbyn in the last two leadership contests and who now intend to back Mr Starmer. He has also been blessed by his rivals. In Rebecca Long Bailey, the hard left has a candidate who appears unsure whether she truly wants to be the torchbearer for continuity Corbynism. She has given Mr Corbyn “10 out of 10” for leadership, prompting mirthful wonderment about how she would have ranked him had he won the election rather than crush Labour’s parliamentary representation down to the lowest level since 1935. The more revealing dimension of her candidacy is the bitter divisions within the hard left about whether she ought to be their representative and her hesitancy about taking on the role of heir to Corbyn for which she has long been groomed and promoted. “Rebecca is quite shy,” says a not unsympathetic Labour MP. “If you bump into her in a corridor, she never says hello unless you say hello first. I get the impression that she’s struggled to make herself do it.”
The presence of Jess Phillips as a competitor is probably a net positive for Mr Starmer and it could suit him if the Birmingham MP gathers enough nominations to get into the contest proper. He does not have to be absolutely brutal with the party about its desperate plight when the unflinching Ms Phillips is there to be the blunt truth-teller of the contest. Anti-Corbynite people are joining or rejoining the party in order to support her. Their second or third preferences are likely in large part to go to him
