UK Labour leadership

nicky wrote:

So far, 75 CLPs have nominated candidates to be leader of the Labour Party.

 

Keir Starmer: 44

Rebecca Long-Bailey: 18

Lisa Nandy: 10

Emily Thornberry: 3

Starmer seems to be the only candidate that can unite Labour.

JKR wrote:

nicky wrote:

And he could answer to devastating effect:

1. Uhm no, the only reason the Conservatives won the last two elections was that the vast majority of voters did not want Corbyn to be PM. For the good of the Labour Party and the country we were justified in trying to replace him. It is a tragedy for our party and our country that we did not succeed.

2. Umh no, most political analysts believe no such thing. They believe that the overwhelming cause of our defeat was Corbyn and not our Brexit policy.

Recent opinion polls have shown that Labour's historically bad election loss was caused by Corbyn's very deep unpopularity and not by Brexit.

Not in the seats in the North.  Labour carried them in 2017, so if it were Corbyn's unpopularity, that would have been reflected in those results.

True or not, that's moving the goalposts.

josh wrote:

True or not, that's moving the goalposts.

Corbyn's approval ratings were consistently very low since 2016.

Fair questions for consideration:

1) What is included in the term "Corbynism"?  When someone says "Corbynism" must be stopped, what ALL is that person insisting be stopped-the personality traits of Corbyn himself(there's a proble with a leader being gentle and empathetic)?  The ideas associated with the Corbyn movement-ideas supported by most Labour members and supporters btw?  "Momentum" as an organization?  And which things are meant to replace those traits-would the alternative be simply a better-articulated socialist vision?  Would it be the restoration of the idea that the party has to be led by an arrogant, dismissive elite?  The idea that the party should become harsh and judgmental towards people on benefits, towards immigrants and refugees?  Towards anyone who isn't a bitter, middle-aged home owner?

2) Did Corbyn look weak out of actual weakness, or due to the way his opponents in the party, especially the PLP treated him-refusing to accept that his victories in the leadership elections were legitimate, refusing to accept him as leader? Refusing to accept that his victory by a larger majority in the second leadership election-a majority which would have been massive larger had not 100,000 Labour members or supporters been suspended, expelled or simply barred from voting in the second leadership contest on spurious accusations from a party disciplinary apparatus then firmly under the control of Corbyn's right-wing enemies in the party bureaucracy?  Staging a coordinated series announcements, at the start of the 2017 campaign, of sitting Labour MPs announcing they were standing down for re-election in the hopes of forcing Corbyn to resign-when the election had already been called and there was no workable way of putting a new leader in place to replace him, and when there was no possible way anyone imposed as leader could ever have united the party and led it anywhere even close to victory? Continuously falsely accusing the man of supporting terrorists and abetting antisemitism in the party when he'd done no such thing and when there was no significant increase in the expression of anti-Jewish prejudice with Labour at any point during his tenure as leader?  Did the PLP not abrogate its responsibilities to the party by not, after the 2016 leadership re-vote, finally just saying "ok, that's settled.  We accept that this is who our leader is, and because what matters is winning the election so we'll stop trying to force the guy out and focus our energies solely on attacking the Tories and what they do"?  Would Corbyn have looked weak at all if the PLP hadn't treated him as they did?   Is it in any way fair or just to assign sole responsibility for the 2019 result to Corbyn and no one else, while exempting those who devoted his entire tenure as leader to undermining him from any responsibility for that result?   

3) If Labour ends up with a leader who was part of the endless fight to depose its last leader, how can that leader-whoever that leader ends up being-possibly gain the support and trust of the majority of paid Labour members and supporters who still want the party who fight for what it fought for in the Corbyn era?  Is there any possible way for that leader to do that if she or he doesn't admit that Corbyn was treated with excessive harshness, disloyalty and disrespect by the party and that the policies Corbyn's era has been about are the policies most Labour people more or less support?  Is there any chance of the next Labour leader achieving any sort of electoral victory if that leader goes to war against Corbyn's supporters and against the idea that Labour should be a radical, transformative party?  Does not the next Labour leader, whoever it is, have an obligation to treat the ideas of the Corbyn era with respect and accept that those in the party who support those ideas have a legitimate place in the party and a legitimate right to have a say as to the party's direction?
 

Also, remember what the key phrase of Boris' campaign was-the phrase he insisted on repeating over and over again in any encounter with the media, even if it had nothing to do with why he was being interviewed..."Get Brexit Done".

It's not Corbyn's fault that Boris had a resonant phrase to use there-and there's no way that that phrase would have been rendered ineffective by the party doing what the Starmerites-yes, I just came up with that- demanded and going all-out Remain.  Going all-out Remain, especially combined with a pledge that the Labour leader and all Labour ministers and MPs would have been ordered to campaign for Remain-would only have made the losses in the heartlands worse, while creating no opportunities at all for gains in any other parts of the UK.

JKR wrote:

josh wrote:

True or not, that's moving the goalposts.

Corbyn's approval ratings were consistently very low since 2016.

Almost entirely due to the fact that the PLP spent four years colluding with right-wing UK media to slander and demonize the man. 

Corbyn never did or said anything as leader which deserved hostility from the voters.

He was MADE unpopular due to an endless series of lies and slanders flung his way, such as the indefensible claim that he had caused a massive increase in AS in the party when everyone knew no such thing had happened and that criticism of the Israeli government or dissent against Zionism as an ideology are never equivalent to bigotry against people who are Jewish. 

It could only have been tragic and cowardly to reward the smear campaign by replacing Corbyn with someone who was antisocialist enough to be approved of by the PLP and the media.  Nobody the anti-Corbyn cabal would have approved of would have stood for anything significantly different than the Tories or done anything significantly non-Tory if they had been elected, which was unlikely since none of the people the PLP would have wanted instead of Corbyn could ever have gained any personal popularity.  No "Labour moderate" would have been seen by the as relevant to the needs of the UK in this era or could ever possibly have connected with the youth of Britain, a demographic which is overwhelmingly socialist.

And Ken, you continue in the delusion that Corbyn’s unpopularity had nothing to do with him. It was only manufactured by his enemies.

no, it was his incoherence, inarticlateness, flirtation with terrorists and anti-semites, economic ignorance, lack of personal accomplishments, lack of education, and subservience to a narrow sect within the Labour Party. Sure the MSM was no friend of Corbyn but you have to admit he gave them plenty to work with.

McClusky and Lavery have come out with a universally ridiculed report that Labour’s defeat was due entirely to factors unrelated to Corbyn himself. Hopefully Labour will understand, unlike them and you, where the true fault lies. The CLP results so far reflect some sober insight in this regard

So far, 219 CLPs have nominated candidates to be leader of the Labour Party: Keir Starmer: 128 Rebecca Long-Bailey: 57 Lisa Nandy: 25 Emily Thornberry: 9

nicky wrote:

So Aristotle, just how did Corbyn’s leadership end up promoting any of the progressive causes you catalogue and claim I oppose?

by ensuring the election of a right wing government that will undermine all of those causes.

All of those causes were overshadowed in the election by the desire to "get Brexit done," which Boris promised to do after the country had already voted for Brexit and so many Remainers refused to accept that result. Played right into the hands of right-wingers who claim that the left are a bunch of elites who don't care about the people. That's why Boris hammered home on that one point relentlessly. If you look at the opinion polling leading up to 2019, the terminal slide in support for the Labour Party began when Labour started pushing for a second referendum, in response do defections from MPs who accused him of enabling Brexit. How many of those MPs went on to be elected?

nicky wrote:

This column says it all

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/01/labour-hierarchy-should-be-full-of-shame-but-they-just-sound-smug

What the hell does the guy want?  Is Corbyn supposed to apologize for ever standing for the leadership?  Are the people who voted for him supposed to recant like medieval heretics facing the flame?

The plain and simple facts were that, in the 2015 and 2016 leadership races, none of the candidates who stood against Corbyn had anymore to offer.  Yvette Cooper was "continuity Blair", and thus doomed to defeat at a time when the electorate no longer supported Blairism; Liz Kendall, though a decent person, was standing on policies to the RIGHT of Blair-for all practical purposes choosing Kendall as leader would have been voting to have Labour simply merge with the Tories and be done with it; Andy Burnham was an incompetent bumbler who had no distinctive policies to offer.

In 2016, Owen Smith would have been no improvement at all over Corbyn-if he got no crowds at his hustings-the man actually had to ask permission to speak at Corbyn rallies to be able to have any audience at all-spoke with no passion or conviction, and had been a parliamentary lobbyist for Pfizer, a job that would only be given to someone with no socialist or even "social democratic" convictions at all.

Corbyn stood for the leadership to bring socialist policies back into the party- a party which, at the time he stood for the leadership, no longer stood for anything distinguisable from Toryism and which included numerous people arguing for the party to move even further right on immigration and spending policy.  Why didn't the PLP accept that Corbyn's victory meant that the party had to reconnect with socialist values and pledge to Corbyn and his supporters that, if he did stand down, the party would still go in a strongly socialist direction and that people wouldn't be punished simply for having supported him in the leadership vote?

Why did the PLP have to be so bloodyminded about treating the Corbyn phenomenon as if it were completely illegitimate and as if it had no valid place within the party at all?  

Why could they never take what happened in those leadership votes as a sign that they needed to be open to real change within the party-that they had to find a way with engaging with the majority of the party who wanted real change, who wanted Labour to support a real alternative to the status quo?  

Why could they say nothing but "We reject all of this.  We won't listen.  We won't change.  We'll just fight to erase everything to the left of our comfort zone"?

Can you not see the problem with the PLP's bloodmindedness, with its insistence on focusing solely on attacking its own leader rather than fighting against the Tories?

And again, how is Labour going to win if everyone who had even the remotest connection to Corbyn-including the hundreds of thousands of people that he brought into the party-are either silenced or suspended or driven away?  Nobody's going to cheer the party for persecuting and silencing the left, and there are no policies to the right of Corbyn's that would even be worth implementing, especially the "socially conservative" policies-which I assume mean policies that involve judging and punishing people simply for being on benefits-were implemented.

What Labour needs is a positive radical message-there's no difference between Labour with non-radical policies and the Tories-that is delivered in a compelling way.  It doesn't need "the great cleansing fire" and it doesn't need to become a socialist-free zone like you want it to be.  It doesn't need a leader who says "we were wrong for ever deviating from the middle of the road".

nicky wrote:

This column says it all

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/01/labour-hierarchy-should-be-full-of-shame-but-they-just-sound-smug

The Guardian trashes Corbyn and the Labour left.  Film at 11.

nicky wrote:

Labour Leadership Candidates Net Approval Ratings (All Voters):

Keir Starmer: +5

Lisa Nandy: -1

Emily Thornberry: -11

Rebecca Long-Bailey: -16

For Reference:

Boris Johnson: -8

Jeremy Corbyn: -46

So far, 231 CLPs have nominated candidates to be leader of the Labour Party.

Keir Starmer: 138
Rebecca Long-Bailey: 58
Lisa Nandy: 26
Emily Thornberry: 9

10 out of 12 for Starmer today. He's been killing it all weekend. Not sure if his lead is even bigger among the membership or he's just been lucky with the CLPs for a couple of days.

Looks like Starmer could actually quickly bring Labour back from the dead! It's hard to believe that Boris won a huge majority with just a -8 rating. It's also hard to believe that Long-Bailey is already way behind Boris. To top it off, Corbyn's -46 is the most horrid approval rating I can remember ever seeing. I find it inconceivable that with that kind of horrid rating Corbyn was allowed to lead Labour into an election that was inevitably their worst in almost a century. 

Ken Burch wrote:

JKR wrote:

nicky wrote:

Labour Leadership Candidates Net Approval Ratings (All Voters):

Keir Starmer: +5

Lisa Nandy: -1

Emily Thornberry: -11

Rebecca Long-Bailey: -16

For Reference:

Boris Johnson: -8

Jeremy Corbyn: -46

So far, 231 CLPs have nominated candidates to be leader of the Labour Party.

Keir Starmer: 138
Rebecca Long-Bailey: 58
Lisa Nandy: 26
Emily Thornberry: 9

10 out of 12 for Starmer today. He's been killing it all weekend. Not sure if his lead is even bigger among the membership or he's just been lucky with the CLPs for a couple of days.

Looks like Starmer could actually quickly bring Labour back from the dead! It's hard to believe that Boris won a huge majority with just a -8 rating. It's also hard to believe that Long-Bailey is already way behind Boris. To top it off, Corbyn's -46 is the most horrid approval rating I can remember ever seeing. I find it inconceivable that with that kind of horrid rating Corbyn was allowed to lead Labour into an election that was inevitably their worst in almost a century. 

It wouldn't be worth having something that called itself a "Labour government' if it did what you and nicky want and lowered the party to not disagreeing with the Tories anymore.  The electorate doesn't want Labour to blur the differences again-if that was wanted, the LibDems and Change UK would have killed it in this election rather than taking less than 12% of the vote between them.

If I wanted Labour not to disagree with the Tories I wouldn't care that Labour lost the election by a huge margin after campaigning with a very unpopular leader. If I did not want Labour to disagree with the Tories I wouldn't care that the Conservatives decimated Labour in the election. I think Labour is infinitely better than the Tories but being much better does not matter if Labour can't form a government. Labour is much bigger than any particular leader or faction. I simply think that Labour should always be led by a leader with at least normal approval ratings.

Also, it's truly unbecoming for Starmer supporters to gloat or to adapt a "let's get those bastards" tone about this contest.  Long-Bailey isn't guilty of anything and hasn't done anything to deserve humiliation in the leadership contest, and her popularity ratings aren't all that bad-they're much higher than Corbyn.

BTW, you do realize that a Labour leadership candidate who had nothing the right-wing media could attack her or him on would have to be a candidate who stood for nothing and cared about nothing, right?  That it's impossible to be invulnerable to attack and not be a useless cypher?

nicky wrote:

Ken, did you really mean to say that RLB’s approval ratings aren’t that bad? Minus 16? Worse than anyone listed except of course Corbyn.

To say they are not that bad is as delusional as rating Corbyn 10 out of 10 as leader.

You endlessly harp on Starmer not being loyal to Corbyn because he voted non- confidence in him and therefore should be eliminated as a leadership prospect.

Well,so did 80% of Labour MPs. The people who saw Corbyn close up for decades and knew first hand how incompetent he was and knew how disastrous his leadership would be. 

Their vote of non-confidence was not disloyalty to Corbyn but loyalty to the best interests of the Labour Party. 

 

It was disloyalty in that Corbyn had done nothing to deserve it-he'd made no major mistakes, and they all knew he was right to apologize on behalf of the party for the Iraq War.  It was also disloyalty because they had no alternative figure waiting in the wings who'd have done any better.  It simply wasn't true that just removing him would have made a massive difference if whoever they replaced him started with no popularity-and thus could never have achieved any-and if their intent, as it was, was simply to go back to where the party was headed on the issues under Harriet Harman-to basically just endorsing the Tory manifesto and leaving it at "it's enough that we'll be more 'caring' about the misery that inflicts".

None of the people who stood against Corbyn for the leadership had been anti-austerity.  What difference would there be between the Tories and Labour if it was led by somebody who voted, by abstaining on Cameron's cuts, to abandon the poor?

BTW, the PLP's idea of a dream Labour leader had been David Miliband, a man who was for all practical purposes a Tory, a leader who wouldn't have won the active support of any significant number of people under 55, a figure who was totally out of touch with the country when he stood for the leadership.

Why should we trust the judgment of anybody in a left-of-center party who wants that party's leader to be as right-of-center as possible, even when they knew that Labour had just lost the 2010 election for no longer having any real differences with the Tories?

It matters that somebody seeking the leadership now tried to force out the last leader.  It goes to several questions:

1) If elected, does that leader have any right to expect, or even ask, for the loyalty of those who backed the previous leader?  This is not a trivial question-most of those currently in the party supported Corbyn-it was only the PLP that was obsessed with driving him out-and most of those people have every reason to be angry that the PLP sabotaged the leader they supported, and since Labour will have no chance of winning if it tells those who backed that leader to go to hell.   Starmer will have some work to do on that-Nandy, whose entire leadership campaign is about erasing socialism from the party-switching it to "modernizing social democracy", which we all now know means nothing but standing on the Tory manifesto-will have an enormous task to get to unity, especially if she does what you want and goes "great cleansing fire" on the Left.

In 1992, the LibDems and the remnants of the SDP took about 24% of the vote between them.  In 2019, the LibDems and Change UK, the modern equivalent to the SDP, took less than 12% of the vote between them.  We can assume that the LibDem vote in the next election won't go much below that no matter what.  This means Labour has nothing to gain by appealing to "the centre ground", and that, for all practical purposes, the "centre ground" no longer exists.

The next leader will have to bring turnout up-voter turnout was down 1% in this election-mainly among young people who probably stayed away due to demoralization caused by relentless media insistence that Labour had no chance.  Whoever wins next time has to engage those voters-and nobody who gets elected as the "I renounce Corbyn and all his works" candidate can ever be capable of doing that.  

Starmer vastly preferred over Corbynite. See p. 6

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2020-02/february_2020_political_monitor_060220.pdf

nicky wrote:

Your image link didn't come through there.  To post images, you need to use the "image" icon(the one that looks like a little mountain range)and paste an image link in there.

More:  https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4555-the-case-against-keir-starmer

Starmer’s campaign video touts his respect for human rights and civil liberties, foregrounding his opposition to the Iraq war and the NSA presence at Menwith Hill. It cites his Guardian op-ed, published in 2003, which dismantles Blair’s use of resolution 1441 as a pretext for invading and suggests that the government’s official justification lacks ‘credibility’. Yet when the SNP proposed an investigation into Blair’s apparent lying in the run up to the war – bolstered by findings from the Chilcot report – Sir Keir voted against it. He also voted for Trident in 2016, and worked tirelessly to secure Labour’s support for the Investigatory Power Bill, which expanded state surveillance and authorised the bulk collection of digital communications. As DPP, Sir Keir tempered his love of liberty by fast-tracking the extradition of Julian Assange (a process now making its way through the courts). He flouted legal precedents by advising Swedish lawyers not to question Assange in Britain: a decision that prolonged the latter’s legal purgatory, denied closure to his accusers in Sweden, and sealed his fate before a US show trial. Leaked emails from August 2012 show that, when the Swedish legal team expressed hesitancy about keeping Assange’s case open, Sir Keir’s office replied: ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet’.

Sound judgement on resolution 1441, then; but a demonstrable conviction that people who expose war crimes should face prosecution, while people who perpetrate them should not. These aren’t the only groups that Sir Keir has been particularly keen to quash over the course of his career. As head of the Crown Prosecution Service, he altered legal guidelines so that those improperly claiming benefits could be charged under the Fraud Act, which carries a maximum sentence of ten years (Emily Thornberry argued it should be increased to fourteen). Sir Keir also removed the financial threshold for such cases, allowing the government to waste endless resources arresting and incarcerating people who had claimed minimal amounts of money. ‘It is vital that we take a tough stance on this type of fraud’, he said, ‘and I am determined to see a clampdown on those who flout the system’. Never mind that fraud was estimated to account for only 0.7% of the welfare budget; that the dizzyingly complex bureaucracy instated by the Tories increased the likelihood of accidentally over-claiming; and that no ‘tough stance’ was taken on the £12 billion lost annually to corporate tax avoidance. This hostility to scroungers evidently stayed in place until 2015, when Sir Keir decided to abstain on the Tory Welfare Bill: a series of drastic cuts to social spending that disproportionately affected women, children and the disabled.

Despite his beneficence towards poll tax protesters, the barrister has generally erred on the side of ‘law and order’, reserving a particular antipathy for left-wing activists. He drew up rules that gave police officers more power to arrest demonstrators, in an attempt to crack down on ‘significant disruption’ after the 2010 student protests. Officers were encouraged to arrest those ‘equipped with clothes or masks to prevent identification, items that could be considered body protection, or an item that can be used as a weapon’. Appended to these instructions was a warning: ‘criminals bent on disruption and disorder…will not get an easy ride’. As commentators noted at the time, the vagueness of these guidelines equipped police with the authority to jail anyone wearing a scarf (since it could be used to ‘prevent identification’) or carrying a placard (which has on various occasions been classified as ‘weapon’), while the ban on body protection criminalised attempts to defend oneself from police violence. Sir Keir’s stern treatment of protesters tallied with his response to the London riots, when he stressed the necessity of rapid sentencing, and made a personal appearance in court to praise the judges who were handing down harsh penalties. His predecessor as DPP meanwhile reflected that the punishments marked a ‘collective loss of proportion’, and an abnegation of ‘humanity or justice’.

Why I Just Quit the Labour Party

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/why-i-just-quit-labo...

"I quit the Labour Party to protest the party's illegal mishandling of my private data, and because it is using its complaints system to conduct a political purge of members who support Palestinian rights."

Like the NDP, bad case of terminal lobby-cancer. Like a fish, rots from the head down. Pity Jeremy C didn't do the necessary surgery. UK Labour clearly no place for any sort of progressive now except the in-name-only wishy-washies. All hail Sir K!

And again you really need to let it go with the nastiness towards Corbyn himself.   He doesn't deserve your abuse-and quite frankly, there's no reason to assume Labour would have done any better with any of the people who stood against him for the leadership.  None of those people ever demonstrated any personal popularity or had any worthwhile policy ideas.

I'll grant you that they didn't have his "associations"-but that's mainly because none of them, at any point in her or his career, ever actually stood for anything at all.  Labour would have no significant support from anybody under 50 with those people as leaders-the term "young Labour moderate" is an oxymoron-and none of them would have had any greater support with older voters than Corbyn demonstrated.  

Especially not Owen Smith...the man who literally had no crowds at his hustings in the 2016 leadership contest.  If you get no crowds when you stand for the leadership, what the hell chance are you ever going to have to win anybody's support after that? 

You've never had anything to say to any of those points-or to the fact that the Corbyn phenomenon was never about Corbyn as an individual, it was the Labour rank-and-file, plus those who would have BEEN in the Labour rank and file had Blair and Kinnock not spent the previous twenty years making anybody remotely like them totally unwelcome in the party-standing up, from below, and demanding that Labour start standing for something again.   Why are you still unwilling to engage with that reality?  Why do you still seem to think that some greater good would have come of Labour refusing to accept that reality and choosing a right-wing status quo leader like any of the people who ran against Corbyn?

And if you aren't a Blairite, why do you refuse to acknowledge that Labour has to stay at least pretty damn close to the policies it stood on in 2017 and 2019 to have any reason to exist-that moving to the right of those policies inevitably means dragging the party all the way back to 1997-style policies in an era when 1997-policies are totally irrelevant to where the UK is today?

You said that up thread in this very discussion...you said Blair and Brown knew what it takes to win.   I'll find the exact post later.

And it's not about "Corbynite nostrums"...which is just another way of saying clearly expressed socialist convictions.  None of this is about personal adoration of Corbyn.  Why do you keep acting as if this was a personality cult rather than a mass movement of people driven by a sincere and coherent set of shared convictions.   It was never about keeping Corbyn in the leadership for the sake of keeping him personally in the job-it was about trying to stop the PLP-the only part of the whole party who wanted Labour to be sharply to the right of Corbyn's policies-from erasing the ideas the majority of the party support FROM the party.  And they would have erased everything had Owen Smith won the leadership vote-we both know he'd have kept no radical policies at all and that, having voted to abstain on Cameron's cuts, he wouldn't offer any humane,  empathetic policies for the poor.  You can't vote for cuts in the social wage-there is no difference between abstaining on cuts and voting FOR cuts-and still have any right to claim to care about the poor, let alone be anywhere close to being on the side of the poor.  And the stupid thing is, abstaining on Cameron's cuts was never going to gain Labour votes, because everyone who wants life made harder for the poor is totally right wing on every other issue-there's no such thing as a poorbasher with humane values.

I don't think Labour should keep things EXACTLY the same.

I've posted several critiques of how the 2019 campaign was run.  If I thought things should be kept the same, I wouldn't have done that.

It's just that I reject that Corbyn and those aligned with him bear exclusively responsibility for the defeat and that the only possible choice the PLP had the whole time was to act as though Corbyn had no right to have won the leadership and had an obligation to simply turn the party back over to them as though he was trespassing on their private property.

I don't believe you can hold the PLP blameless for that defeat when they spent four years slandering and sabotaging that guy.   You've yet to explain why they SHOULD be held blameless, especially since they never came up with any possible alternative leader who'd have done better-remember, in 2010, THEIR idea of a great leader was David Miliband, Ed's reactionary twin brother, who would have moved Labour to the right of Tony Blair, thus driving even MORE people away without bringing anybody new in.

BTW, I'd like to point out that your "it's all Corbyn's fault" argument contradicts itself when you bring in the "Corbyn's nostrums" thing:

Up until now, you've argued that the problem was just Corbyn himself.  That statement is an admission that the voters weren't against the ideas associated with the Corbyn phenomenon.   If it's that, than you've admitted that the party doesn't need to move to the right of the Corbyn policies.   Now, with the "nostrums" thing, you're outing yourself as an advocate for going all the way back to the outdated and now-useless 1997 policies.  Can't have it both ways-any move to the right inevitably ends  in Blairism-and you've justified Corbyn's refusal to resign as leader by admitting that you wanted to erase everything he and the majority of the party wanted.

BTW, despite your insulting implications, neither I nor anybody has ever worshipped Corbyn-there's a difference between believing the man is infallible, which nobody does, and believing that he's a simply a good, decent, if obviously fallible person who's done nothing to deserve the relentless, poisonous abuse his opponents, including yourself, continue to inflict on him.   Corbyn was bullied by his own MPs, and there's no good reason for Labour's rank-and-file ever to forgive the bullies for that, especially since there was no chance that bullying was ever going to lead to Labour having a leader who'd have done better in 2019.   I've asked you over and over why the PLP didn't engage those Corbyn stood with and try to work with them, commit to them that if Corbyn left-he was never in love with BEING the leader and never expected to win the leadership when he stood for it-that his departure would not be their cue to erase socialism from the party again.   Why couldn't the PLP just accept that the party HAD to move to the left after 2015 and that the party needed to restore internal party democracy, so that there was some way of the socialist majority in the party fighting for what it wanted other than having to launch a leadership campaign?  Why couldn't the PLP let go of the arrogant idea that it was Labour's aristocracy, that it WAS the party in a way nobody else was?  

Corbyn was not an egomaniac-there's nothing less egomaniacal than subjecting yourself to what the PLP did to him since 2015.  He was just trying to keep the majority of the party whose ideas he supports from being silenced and driven away.   Would you not agree that the PLP, if it really wanted him out, should have treated the majority whose ideas he supported with respect, should have accepted that the party was that majority's as much as theirs.  Had that been done, Corbyn probably would have gone earlier.  As it was, the PLP left him with no choice but to try and stay on.  It was never reasonable to expect him to go when his presence as leader was the only protection from erasure and punishment the socialist majority in the party had.

Why couldn't the PLP be reasonalble in any of this?  Why couldn't the PLP in any way bend?  Why couldn't it admit that Labour NEEDS the hundreds of thousands of new people Corbyn brought in and that whatever happened, it was going to have to treat those people and what they stand for with respect?

Why did the PLP have to be about nothing but toxic rigidity in this?