United Kingdom 2

nicky wrote:

You just called me a Tory, Ken.

I have never called you anything worse than that

You've repeatedly implied that I saw Corbyn was some sort of messiah and that everyone who supported the guy was doing so out of some sort of irrational hero-worship.  And you keep using the term "Corbynite" which is associated with the absurd claim that supporters of the ideas associated with Corbyn- again, it was about ideas, not any one person- were a sect.

And I didn't say you WERE a Tory- to be precise, I said that, in supporting Starmer's pointless insistencewon moving Labour sharply to the right- a strategy that can never win Labour a general election, as the 2010, 2015 May 6th local & Hartlepool results proved and as even the Batley result SUPPORTING Toryism- the comment was about political views, not you as a person.  That's all The Third Way ever was- Harold Macmillan Toryism with trendy designer suits.

Again, please stop using the term "Corbynite".  It is a slur.  What happened in 2015 was never about adulation of a person-it was about ideas- Corbyn was elected simply because 50% of the paid Labour membership wanted a complete break with austerity and war.  

There was practical justification for a clean break- the 2010 and 2015 results had proved Labour could never win as a centrist party again.

There is no good reason to keep attacking Corbyn as a person- he is simply a human being- OR to treat what Labour's policies were as leader as if they were alien to what Labour's values are.

There was never worship of Corbyn- there was never any such ideology as "Corbynism".  There were simply those who want Labour to be different than the Tories, and those who opposed him because they wanted the party to keep being indistinguishable from the Tories.

The term "Corbynism" has no reason to exist.  There was no cult and there was no bloody sect.  It was just good, honest, level-headed people who were sick of the country's official opposition refusing to OPPOSE.  It was just people who think that Labour only has a reason to exist if it is wants a clearly different future for the UK.

There is no justification to treat anything like that as nefarious.

I'll tell you what, nicky- I'll stop saying you're a Tory if you'll admit there is no such thing as "Corbynism" and that what Corbyn stood for as leader was not illegitimate or alien to what Labour is about as a party- and if you'll admit that there is no good reason for Starmer ever to spent the last year and a half perpetuating the AS Smear and doing indefensible things like having his totally Gentile-controlled disciplinary bodies suspend and expel Jewish Labour Party members for antisemitism- a prejudice it is impossible for a Jewish person to be guilty of.

And I'd like to ask you this about the AS Smear:

When Corbyn was leader, the Jewish Chronicle ran an article claiming that, if elected, Corbyn would launch a campaign to drive Jews out of the UK as the Stalinist leader Gomulka did in Poland in the late 1960s.  Simon Heffer, supposedly a respectable columnist, wrote a column in which he actually accused Corbyn of wanting to "reopen Auschwitz".

I know you dislike Corbyn, but would you not agree that any person with any level of human decency would have to agree that Corbyn did nothing whatsoever to deserve anything even remotely like that, and that claims like that pretty much vindicate his contention that the incidence of AS in the Labour Party was "exaggerated for political gain"?  

Can you possibly, in any universe, defend the issuance of despicable, demagogic lies like the claims Heffer and the Chronicle made there?

JKR wrote:

Maybe Labour's illness is terminal and it's time for the left in the U.K. to create a new party much in the way the left transformed the CCF into the NDP?

It might be time for that.  It doesn't look as though Starmer is trying to get Labour elected, for one thing- if he cared about that, he'd only attack the Tories and stop treating Corbyn supporters-Labour can't win a general election without their votes- as if they are the enemy and as if they not only have no right to have any real say in what the party stands for, but essentially no right to be in the party at all.

If Starmer is going to move the party further right, he can't still claim that there's any good reason to try and get it elected.

Why can't you accept that what happened was simply that most of the party wanted a clear break with the Third Way, because the 2010/15 results proved it couldn't ever win again as a Third Way party?  That it wasn't alien to Labour but reflects the party true core values?

It's not as it Corbyn-the only candidate proposing any meaningful change, didn't win in a landslide, even among fully paid Labour members-he got as many votes in that group as all the right-wing candidates took .

Also, why do you persist on seeing this as hero-worship of Corbyn, when it was actually about sincere commitment to a set of positive, transformational ideas?

And what, of any of the ideas Corbyn was associated with, do you actually find intolerable?  It's not as though there's any way to run water, electric and the rails without putting them into public ownership, without ceasing to run them solely for private profit.

Ken, I was unaware that anyone accused Corbynof applauding the Holocaust or whatever. I suspect because it never got any play because it is so ridicuolus. If it was said i certainly think it is ndefensible.

you repeatedly ask me why I do not accept that Corbyn won th3 leadership fair and square. I have no doubt he had majority backing in the Labour Party at the time, although man6 of the MPs who gave him a complimentary nomination bitterly regret it.

May I ask you whether you accept thatStarmer won the leadership fair and square with a large majority of Labour Party members realizing what a tragic mistakethey made in choosing Corbyn.

And yes, I recognize that the word "Corbynism" exists...the right-wing press repeat it endlessly...but there was never a sectarian ideology that could be described by that term.  The policies Corbyn advocated were never sectarian...they obviously weren't Trotskyist- Corbyn supports mass mobilization, not antidemocratic sectarian takeover tactics, in many respects his support for things like popular assemblies and democratizing the workplace- things people like nicky oppose- place him closer to libertarian socialism than anything else- and he has never encouraged confrontation or intimidation tactics against anyone.

It was never insidious or sectarian to say that Labour needed to break from the cynical, dismissive antisocialist elitism of the Blair/Brown era- it was actually sound pragmatic politics; the 2010 and 2015 elections had proved that Third Way politics was no longer a basis for electing Labour governments.

And I've asked this numerous times:  why does anyone think it was in any way reasonable to expect Corbyn to just stand aside as leader, at any point, without the PLP and the party bureaucracy promising there'd be no purge of his supporters and no massive swing to the right of his policies?  Why would anyone ever have thought it was valid to EXPECT him to do that, especially since the indefensibly vicious and antidemocratic behavior of Starmer as leader has vindicated all the fears he would have had that his supporters, a large group of good, decent people whose only real crime was having a vision of a better world and defending it under withering and nasty attack, would not only be purged but SLANDERED with false accusations that they were a hotbed of a form of bigotry virtually none of them had ever come close to holding?

I WANT Labour to win the next election.  But it CAN'T win it if Starmer drags the party back to Blairism as he now seems committed to doing.  NO one under 45 will vote Labour if it goes back to Blairism- there's no such thing in the UK as any significant number of young prowar, pro-austerity antisocialist centrists- and the overwhelming majority of bitter, spiteful, cynical, idealism-hating "we don't like peace campaigners 'round here" types are never going to vote anything but Tory, Farage, or BNP.  People like the kind of people Starmer is trying to appease with his right-wing nastiness have never agreed with anything Labour stands for and would never vote Labour- and he's not going to make people in the North who deserted the party solely over Starmer's pointless push to make the party go Remain- a position that will always outrage the vast majority of Red Wall voters- are not going to be won back by a purge of young socialists or making a fetish of the flag OR acting as though AS is the most prevalent prejudice in the UK when it's actually the least-held, or that AS is the only form of prejudice that matters.

The reason Labour almost lost in Batley & Old Spen was that Keir refused to speak out against Islamophobia, and refused to denounce the Labour staffer who slandered Muslim voters by claiming, with no justification at all, that they OPPOSE the idea of fighting AS.  THAT is why Galloway, a reactionary opportunist who had no previous connection to the constituency, took 20 percent of the vote.  If Galloway hadn't run, it goes without saying that that vote would have been cast for essentially any party OTHER than Labour, and the fact that it is is all Keir's fault.

If Keir wants to win, he needs to admit that the Left isn't the enemy, needs to stop pushing the party to the right- again, the 2010/15 results prove that the voters don't want Labour to be anywhere close to the Blair zone- and he needs to stop treating idealism and passionate commitment to social change as if those concepts are reprehensible.  They aren't, and they aren't hated.  And the voters now care solely about what Labour will stand FOR- not how much longer Keir carries on his pointless, unjustified vendetta against his predecessor.  Keir hates Corbyn...you hate Corbyn...but it's time to move on and admit that Corbyn isn't the point.

Labour is not going to be rewarded at the polls by moving right and returning to antidemocratic elitism.

A left-wing view of developments in the Labour Party:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/04/labour-batley-and-spen-byelection-keir-starmer

Detective Sgt Nick Bailey has announced not another word on Novichok and the Skripal Case

http://johnhelmer.net/detective-sgt-nick-bailey-has-announced-not-anothe...

"Following a 74-minute podcast published on June 25, and then a 51-minute podcast on June 30, in which Bailey provided surprise evidence that he had not been poisoned by Novichok at all, he announced last Friday, July 1, that his tongue is tied, lips sealed. There is more evidence in what Bailey said in the two broadcasts, which directly contradicts the official British narrative of a Russian assassination attempt using a nerve agent..."

nicky wrote:

Oh Ken, you have no sense of irony do you?
 

It is doubtful than there was any coordinated plot by the Cons, Mi5, the KGB successor and the CIA to install Corbyn. 
 

What is absolutely clear is that the enemies of the Labour Party were delighted that Labour chose such an unelectable nonentity. Greater damage could not have been done to the Labour Party were there such a plot.

In fact, you will remember that there was much evidence that many Conservative members temporarily joined Labour to vote for Corbyn as leader and thereby cripple Labour's prospects.

In the meantime, you have not answered my question to you:

May I ask you whether you accept that Starmer won the leadership fair and square with a large majority of Labour Party members realizing what a tragic mistake they made in choosing Corbyn.

 

Starmer didn't run by arguing that Corbyn should never have been leader, OR by arguing that Corbyn's victories in the leadership contest didn't count.   On policy and party governance, he ran as "continuity Corbyn".  Also, in case you've somehow forgotten this, half of his votes in the leadership contest came from people who had voted for Corbyn- THOSE people weren't agreeing with the idea that their votes had been a tragic mistake.

And for the record, I never REFUSED to accept that Starmer had been elected.  He obviously was-though his margin of victory was narrower than either of Corbyn's, which means there is no justification for acting as though Starmer's victory counted and neither of Corbyn's did- by pledging never to move the party to the right of the 2017 manifesto and pledging to expand internal democracy-both of which he has betrayed.

I have never argued that Corbyn himself should be restored to the leadership, and you know it.

All I've said is that Starmer has no mandate to erase the policies the majority of the party put in place under Corbyn- none of which are unpopular- and no reason to be obsessed with driving Corbyn's supporters- people who have just as much right to be in the party as Starmer- and no justification for the heartless ugliness he has displayed as leader.

The only other thing I've said- and election results under Starmer bear me out on this- is that Labour has nothing to gain from treating Corbyn's election as leader as something that was a disgrace and as if the policies associated with it have no place in the party.   Labour cannot win if voter turnout is massively lower at the next election at the last, and it cannot win if Labour support and involvement among people under 45 largely vanishes and if voter turnout among people in general who identify as "Left" vanishes.   What happened in Hartlepool, in most of the 6th May locals except for Wales and Preston(the only two places where Labour didn't totally abandon socialism, egalitarianism and idealism) proves that Labour cannot win a general election as a party of bitter, dismissive over-45 cynics.

Labour can only win if it is going to be the party of sweeping, transformational change- if it is the party that gets as close as possible to rejecting military intervention in other countries- if it is categorically and permanently anti-austerity.  

That's what the lesson of the 2010 and 2015 campaigns, the lesson you keep refusing to acknowledge, teaches:  Labour can't go back to being a party that treats dreams as rubbish, that defers to the wealthy and the State Department and the Forces and the police, and win.  Corbyn was chosen as leader in '15 NOT out of any sort of hero-worship, but because more of the Labour rank-and-file than all the other leadership candidates combined agreed with the vision of the party his campaign proposed.

It's not as if, were it not for some outside anti-Labour plot, most of the party would have been perfectly content with the right-wing failures Burnham or Cooper or Kendall- or as if anything but a tiny, dying right-wing minority thought that Owen Smith, the man who got NO CROWDS at any of his leadership rallies and therefore could never at any time have gained personal popularity.

Corbyn's never coming back- but Labour cannot win if his massive number of supporters are permanently driven away.  Nobody to their right is ever going to come in to replace them, let alone outnumber them.

And it is clear that Labour cannot win the next election, or any future election, by reducing its message to "it's enough to just get THEM out!".  There isn't anybody who'd swing away from the Tories, but only if they were promised that nothing the Tories have done since 2010 would be changed.  

Labour cannot win without the young, and it can't GET their votes if it says "to hell with dreams, and 'we don't like peace campaigners round here'".  

I think you'd have to concede that Starmer can't treat Corbyn's supporters as he has and still do anything radical or even progressive if he ever somehow DOES get into power.

A couple of questions:
1) What do you actually WANT Labour to stand for.  You know it can't ever lower itself to the essentially Tory 1997 policies again, and that none of those policies would do anybody but the wealthy in the UK any good- do you think Labour needs to be fundamentally different than the Tories on the issues at all?  

2) How do you imagine that Labour can win without a massive turnout of voters under 45, when voters over 45 are never going to vote anything but Tory or Farage again?

3) Who would you rather have seen as leader in 2015?  You've always refused to answer that question, and Starmer's dismal poll ratings do totally discredit the "Labour would be TWENTY POINTS AHEAD WITH ANY OTHER LEADER!" canard.  

4) Why can't you admit that there is no reason to stop obsessing on and vilifying Corbyn?  It's not as if the man was evil, and it's not as if Labour can't gain any votes by treating him like the Church treated Galileo.  Seriously...why can't you move on on that?  

With great confidence in its liklihood and with great sadness at the thought, here is the prediction I make for what Starmer will have done to Labour by the next GE, if he is still leader by then:

If Starmer completely anathemizes everything even vaguely related to what the party stood for under Corbyn-and moves massively to the right on policy- i.e., becomes Tory, as Blair did- AND if Starmer accompanies this change by making the party just as internally authoritarian and antidemocratic as it was under Blair, you will see this result:

Just as the overwhelming majority of Labour voters in Scotland switched their allegiance, likely permanently, to the SNP in 2015-because Labour's Westminster leadership in that era refused to allow Scottish Labour to adopt the kind of policies an anti-austerity, pro-egalitarianism electorate wanted and refused to allow Scottish Labour to control its own internal governance or even choose its own candidates based on its own needs and convictions- There is an excellent chance that the vast majority of voters under 45, and the vast majority of people who believe that politics SHOULD be about working from below for structural, radical change- will switch their support, as a bloc, to the Greens.  The Greens more than doubled their support in the last local election and it is likely that that trend will only continue.

Through everything he has done, Keir has made it impossible for anyone to argue that there is any reason for any voter undfer 45- there is no such thing as any large group of centrist, militarist, police-worshipping voters under 45- to continue to support Labour.

There is nothing he can do now to GET any significant number of voters in that age group to give their votes to Labour.

And if those people aren't voting Labour now, they will never start voting Labour when they get any older- assuming the party can survive without them, which the 2010 and 2015 results strongly suggest it can't.

This isn't about Corbyn.  It isn't about sectarianism.  It is about whether the current official opposition party of the United Kingdom can survive for any significant length of time in this century.

It damn sure can't survive if it pitches its appeal solely to voters who are closing in on death.

BTW, when Starmer was elected, I actually started a positive thread about him- I was simply offering constructive suggestions that would have helped him unify the party and hold the support of the young, while creating his own distinct identity at the same time.  Why was your response to that thread just to piss on everything I was saying and to continue to attack Corbyn when the man wasn't leader anymore and therefore there was no good reason to keep attacking him?

Why didn't you just engage what I posted there?

It's hardly as if Starmer's refusal to be the sort of leader he was elected to be- a unifying but still clearly socialist-and therefore left-wing- leader has done the party any good in or at the polls.

re: #1223

And some enthusiasts among their favoured political party's respective fandoms, quite deliberately close their eyes to their 'team's all too obvious demerits and  openly opine the best strategies to fool the rest of the citizenry into getting them elected. It's a further sign of a deep political corruption in western bourgeois politics and akin to watching livestock cheering on the meat farmers. Of course it all becomes easier when you have no 'skin in the game.'

Jess Phillips, the face of the new, far-right British Labour Party, the one that cares about nothing but what reactionaries who'd never vote anything but Tory support, spreads a transphobic lie on social media:  Jess Phillips MP Helps Spread a Transphobic Conspiracy Theory | by Gemma Stone | An Injustice! (aninjusticemag.com)

nicky wrote:

Not great but on the mend and still way better than you know who:

Mike Smithson

@MSmithsonPB

·

8h

For the first time in months Johnson drops below Starmer in the latest

@OpiniumResearch

approval ratings Johnson Net -8 Starmer Net -7

 

It's time for the war against Corbyn's supporters to end.  Whatever shortcomings he may have had, nothing justifies driving away tens of thousands of people whose only crime was rejecting the idea that war, greed and austerity things Labour HAS to embrace as permanent facts of life.

Starmer has not only alienated the Left-half the Left members of the party voted for him in the leadership race- but he has now alienated Muslim voters- without whom Labour cannot win, just as it cannot win if it drives everyone who identifies as a socialist out of the party-leaving behind only those who don't care about creating a decent life for working class people and who don't disagree with the Tories on the idea that the poor should be shamed and blamed for their own condition.  He has also lost the party the support of many if not most voters of colour, and Labour can't win if THEY stay away from the polls.  Now, for some bizarre reason, he has alienated voters of Irish descent in the UK(there are about 500,000) and needlessly stirred up tensions in Northern Ireland by coming out against Irish reunification and doing so over the weekend of the "Marching Season" in N.I.- a weekend in which fanatical, bigoted "Pro-British" Ulster Unionists hold pointless, arrogant, marches in support of the Protestant victory in the Battle of the Boyne in the late 17th Century.

He's not only not gaining any new support for the party by telling the Left to go to hell, he is not gaining any new support by letting his party's senior advisors falsely accuse Muslim voters of not opposing antisemitism, he is not gaining any new voters by making it clear to Muslims or other voters of colour that he considers antisemitism, a form of bigotry that's been virtually extinct in the UK for decades and one that all the groups he has alienated Labour from oppose just as much as he does, is the ONLY form of bigotry he cares about and the only one he will allow Labour to speak up against.

By the next election, Labour won't be supporting nationalization of water, electric or the rails(in other words, its position on utilities will be identical to the Tories) it won't be in any sense antiwar (in other words, it's foreign policy will be identical to the Tories) it won't be anti-austerity(it will support balanced budgets and therefore be identical to the Tories on poverty and all other domestic issues) and it will lower itself once again to pledging to keep Thatcher's antiworker laws on the books-and those won't be a separate party from the Tories on anything.

The result of all of this is that, by the next election, no one who currently votes Labour will have any valid reason for continuing to do so-as a centre party, Labour will not be distinguishable from the Tories- it will have abandoned its long-standing core value that the party should be a place where the voice of the party membership actually matters- and there is a good chance that the party will die out.

Why do you want that, nicky?

Why do you want the UK to be a country where no change from the status quo- no aspect of which can be humanized in any way at all- is possible?

And why do you keep lashing out at Corbyn when you've got no good reason to do so?

He's not coming back...and as I've repeatedly pointed out, the 2010 and 2015 results prove that Labour will never win another election on the kind of policies you'd have it stand on-policies that are not in any sense different from the Tories at all, because there is no difference between anything Jess Phillips or Tom Mulcair supports and what Boris Johnson or whoever succeeds him supports.

Are you EVER going to move on from your utterly pointless obsession with Corbyn?
From blaming him for everything that happened on his watch, including the endless sabotage his right-wing MPs inflicted on him, including Starmer's bloodyminded revival of the already-settled issue of Brexit when there was no decent reason to bring that back and no chance that the allout Remain(and therefore allout anti-worker) position could ever have produced a Labour victory?

Why can't you admit that it's enough that Corbyn stood aside over a year and a half ago?

Why can't you admit that there is no chance Starmer's war against Corbyn's supporters can ever win any increase in support for the party?

And why can't you admit that the votes Labour needs to win are to be found in the groups Starmer has gone out of his way to alienate and distance the party from- that there is no chance Labour could ever get the votes of people who hate those groups-who hate not only leftists, but all people of colour and apparently the Irish as well?

What is the point of trying to win the votes of people who would never vote Labour and never did in the past?

I only pointed out that Starmer's numbers have started to improve.

Ken, I am beginning to think that you actually believe that Corbyn was not a huge electoral liability for Labour. Do you actually believe that?
 

You may even disagree with me that Labour's route back to power involves establishing substantial distance from Corbyn, the architect of the worst Labour defeat since the '30s.

It is no coincidence that Labour made up substantial ground in the Batley by-election by running a candidate who opposed Corbyn's leadership

nicky wrote:

I only pointed out that Starmer's numbers have started to improve.

Ken, I am beginning to think that you actually believe that Corbyn was not a huge electoral liability for Labour. Do you actually believe that?
 

You may even disagree with me that Labour's route back to power involves establishing substantial distance from Corbyn, the architect of the worst Labour defeat since the '30s.

It is no coincidence that Labour made up substantial ground in the Batley by-election by running a candidate who opposed Corbyn's leadership

 

Here is my point:

If substanstial differences needed to be established, they were established by electing someone else as leader- there never needed to be a purge of everyone associated with Corbyn and the policies- none of which were unpopular and all of which Starmer pledged to keep- didn't need to be abandoned- and the May 6th and Hartlepool results prove that Labour can't gain votes by moving to the right on policy and treating those who elected him leader- a number which included 50% of paid party members in 2015 AND an increased majority of the Labour selectorate overall- as the enemy.

The fact that Starmer has a personal approval rating that is one percent LESS negative than Boris is hardly a ringing endorsement of the year or relentless, unjustified nastiness Starmer has inflicted.

Yes, Corbyn did not lead Labour to victory in 2019-though even you would have to concede he did better than any of the militarist austerity freaks who stood against him in 2015 and in the unnecessary, unjustified second leadership race in 2016 would have done- and yes, Labour lost solidly in 2019 and Corbyn was leader-though that cannot be blamed entirely or even mainly on him; the sabateurs and the spreaders of the completely unjustified AS Smear had a lot to do with it, as did Starmer's inconprehensible and reactionary decision to push for Labour to go allout Remain-including his insistence on fighting for a second referendum before the election when he KNEW there were never going to be the votes for it in parliament and when he KNEW that oushing for the second referendum could only guarantee a wipeout in the Labour heartlands, with no gains for the party anywhere else under any leader, no matter when the next election was held- all played major roles in causing the defeat.

Yes, Corbyn did not win- no one denies the obvious.

But for the love of god, he hasn't been leader for a year and a half now and, unlike you, most of the British electorate are NOT obsessed with turning Labour into the party it would have been if Corbyn had never been leader- a party that was no longer distinguishable from the Tories- as has been repeatedly proved, Toryism and Blairism are only different on a handful of trivial side issues that make no difference in anyone's lives- and a party that, as the 2010 and 2015 elections proved, was never going to be electable on the policies YOU want it to revert to.

There is no reason for you to keep demanding that everyone agree Corbyn should never have been leader, so stop demanding that.  Supporting him was not the equivalent of a medieval heresy and he and his supporters NEVER deserved the five years of unrelenting misery, vilification and sabotage those of you on the far right of whatever "social democracy" even means anymore- essentially, it means nothing but the delusion that austerity capitalism can somehow be made humane without asking the wealthy to pay anymore taxes- inflicted on them.

Also, in case you've forgotten, Labour's vote share fell in Batley & Old Spen from the last elections in which Corbyn led it- so no, the candidate who narrowly held it did not make gains at all.  She simply held onto just enough of the Labour vote to just barely scrape through.

Sigh...

It is very simple Ken.

1. Corbyn did worse that any Labour leader since 1930.

2. He was simply REVILED by the public

3. No other leader, particularly one more moderate than him, could possibly have done worse.

4. Labour cannot win an election unless it puts substantial distance between itself and Corbyn.

What Lies Beyond Labour's Red Wall?

https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/what-lies-beyond-labours-r...

"...Red wallers denounce the class composition of the Parliamentary Labour Party. And on this it is manifest the party has a real problem. Between 1945 and 2017 its proporition of working class MPs declined from 42 percent to 1.5 percent. Uncompromisingly stated, red wall voters want their MPs to be working class. Aware of this though she must be, Mattinson is a leading player in a team that shows no intention of changing the composition of the PLP."

 Like the NDP, a completely uninspiring circle-jerk. Mushy, middlin mediocrity not nearly up to the critical historical challenges of the time. And so now deservedly irrelevant, probably permanently.

josh wrote:

From the article above:

In this respect it’s clear to be seen from Mattinson’s research that Labour’s change of Brexit policy in 2019 was for them the consummation of that disregard.

The biggest difference between 2017 and 2019 was establishment Labour forcing the party to call for a new vote.  Even more so than the smear campaign against Corbyn.  

And Starmer took the lead on that, never caring how much damage he was doing to the party by not only pushing for a second referendum position, but then refusing to be satisfied with a pledge of a second referendum after the next election- which he knew full was as far as any Labour could go- but insisting on pushing to try and get a second referendum BEFORE the next election when everyone already knew there were never under any circumstances going to be enough votes for a second referendum in that parliament and that there was no point in trying to get something through that could never get parliamentary approval.

After doing all that, after guaranteeing that Labour would lose the next election in an equally large landslide with either Corbyn or any possible replacement for Corbyn in the leadership-including himself-  Starmer, once he'd deliberately caused the 2019 Labour defeat, then abandoned his Remain position entirely- proving, in abandoning it, that he had never pushed for the unattainable second referendum for any other reason than to destroy his own party's chances of winning the election WHENEVER it was going to be held.

So, no, it has never been true that the 2019 result was either all Corbyn's fault OR that that result proves that no one other than a right-winger, er I mean "moderate"-as if there's a difference between a Labour moderate and a Thatcherite now- can ever be allowed to lead the Labour Party- the wishes of its grassroots membership be damned.

1) Most of the constituencies Labour held going into 2019 had voted Leave- ANY swing towards Remain was going to cause massive losses in Labour's already-held seats.

2) If you lose dozens of seats you already have, that, by itself, makes it impossible for you to win a general election- it isn't possible to lose dozens of seats you already hold and not only gain enough seats elsewhere to hold your ground, but to win enough more to come anywhere close to defeating the party you are trying to defeat.

Points 1 and 2 prove that a hardline, right-wing Remain policy of the sort you and the essentially Tory Keir Starmer demanded was always going to guarantee an even larger Labour lead than actually occurred.

3) There was no way for Labour to fight an election on a clear Remain policy without also abandoning anything remotely socialist or even "social democratic" in its platform- Labour would have had to reduce itself to Blair-style quasi-Toryism to abide by EU rules and reducing Labour to quasi-Tory centrism would have made a Labour victory impossible because the voters would have concluded that a Labour victory, since the party would have to reduce itself-as your hero Starmer is reducing it now- to something close to the utter futility of the 1976-79 policies- would be meaningless.  

Why was it so important to you that Labour adopt a policy that would guarantee it would have done even worse in 2019(or at any later time, since no Red Wall Leave voter was ever going to forgive the party for abandoning it by adopting a position on the EU that couldn't benefit anyone but multimillionaires in London and the Home Counties?

Why are you extending your irrational hatred of Corbyn the vilification of essentially everything and everyone remotely associated with him?  Do you really think that Labour lost because it had a leader who generated enthusiasm among the young?  Do you really think that the defeat was the result of the party offering people a sense that electing it could actually make a different future possible?  Have you actually come to the point where you hate HOPE?  

It's not as though the party would have done any better but treating the young like dirt and treating the PLP as if THEY-the only sector of the party that actually wants Labour to reduce itself to bland, militaristic centrism again- are the only voices that should matter? 

It was that sort of a party that produced Ramsay MacDonald- the reactionary who singlehandedly caused Labour's humiliating defeat in 1931.

It was that sort of a party that frittered away the chance of a longterm realignment in UK politics in the 1940s by placing an absurdly high emphasis on austerity and dreariness.

It was that sort of a party that pissed away the Wilson landslide of 1966 by once again, and for no reason, abandoning most of the program it was elected on for useless measures like incomes policy and cuts.

And it was that sort of a party that guaranteed the rise of Margaret Thatcher by agreeing, again for no valid reason-Denis Healey later admitted he was wrong to do it- to a completely unnecessary IMF bailout and essentially starting Thatcherism three years before Thatcher herself got in.

And it is the sense that Starmer wants to reduce Labour to being that sort of a party now- a bland, dreary centrist mess of useless nothingness- that is the main reason Labour is losing to the Tories now.

Understand this about me- 

I do not want Corbyn back as leader.

There is no chance he would ever TRY to become leader again.

But Labour cannot win if the people who supported him as a leadership candidate and who still support the policies associated with that era- policies which were all popular in the polls and which Keir promised never to move to the right of, and especially not SHARPLY to the right of- are made unwelcome and if the things they stand for-things the majority of the rank-and-file still support, btw- are treated as anathema.

If Labour pledges itself to balanced budgets and to continuing to treat people on benefits as if they are scum- and that's what it sounds like Keir is wanting to make it do- it will no longer be Labour.  You can't claim to care about the poor AND treat them as though they can't be trusted to actually need the benefits they are on

If Labour pledges to keep spending at Tory levels- which, again, it sounds like Keir wants it to do, even thouh the voters are not demanding that- it can't do anything Labour at all in power.

If Labour pledges not to nationalize water, electric, and the rails, it is agreeing to continue to run all of those services on purely Thatcherite lines.  It is impossible run utilities on Labour values and still keep them in private sector, profit-driven ownership.

And if Labour goes back anywhere close to Blair's discredited "humanitarian" intervention policies, it will lose the young forever without adding the votes of anyone else from any other age group- there IS no broadbased support for any further UK military intervention anywhere, and especially not for barbaric, imperialistic ideas like bombing Iran and Syria and doing "regime change" on either state.  We already know, based on Iraq, that it is impossible for the use of UK military force or any military force from "The West" to create any positive change anywhere in the non-European world.   There is no possible use of Western military force in any non-European country that can ever be out of any non-reactionary, non-fascistic intent.  

As to Corbyn himself, the voters are not demanding that Keir make a nasty, arrogant show of treating him and his supporters as a medieval heresy to be crushed.  It's the PLP who are insistent on that and NO ONE ELSE.  

Let it go already.

If Labour goes into the next election with all of the Corbyn policies revoked, and bland, tightfisted centrist policies put in its place, NO ONE who didn't vote for it before is going to vote for it, because no one would think there'd be any point in replacing one Tory party with another Tory party- and nobody there thinks there's difference between centrism and Toryism.  That's something you and Keir and the PLP believe, but no one out in reality does.

Ken, like you (apparently), and the huge majority of Labour MPs, I would dearly like never to hear anything about Corbyn again. Would that we never heard anything about him in the first place.

I am not "obsessed" by him as you claim over and over in your cutting and pasting of your thoroughly discredited excuses for him.

I referred to him only in response to the dubious claim posted above that Brexit was chiefly responsible for Lanour's debacle. This poll and several others place the major blame on Corbyn himself.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/general-election-result-jeremy-corbyn-brexit-labour-boris-johnson-a9246046.html

You should stop trying to whitewash him. Your state of denial is very similar to Trump's delusion that he really won the election.

As it says in the classics, "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

That is why Labour must have an objective view of the damage Corbyn did to the party and not absolve him, as you do, by deceit and myth.

nicky wrote:

Ken, like you (apparently), and the huge majority of Labour MPs, I would dearly like never to hear anything about Corbyn again. Would that we never heard anything about him in the first place.

I am not "obsessed" by him as you claim over and over in your cutting and pasting of your thoroughly discredited excuses for him.

I referred to him only in response to the dubious claim posted above that Brexit was chiefly responsible for Lanour's debacle. This poll and several others place the major blame on Corbyn himself.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/general-election-result-jeremy-corbyn-brexit-labour-boris-johnson-a9246046.html

You should stop trying to whitewash him. Your state of denial is very similar to Trump's delusion that he really won the election.

As it says in the classics, "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

That is why Labour must have an objective view of the damage Corbyn did to the party and not absolve him, as you do, by deceit and myth.

Nothing I'm saying is about personally absolving Corbyn of anything- what I'm saying is that a clear distinction needs to be made between whether Corbyn was an flawless or exemplary leader-something neither I nor anyone else ever claims, btw- on the one hand, or whether Labour MUST renounce everyone and everything associated with his time as leader- including not only Corbyn himself- he distanced the party enough from himself by standing down as leader,  so the question of the rest of the party's relationship to Corbyn asa person has already been put to rest- but the policies and values his supporters stand for and those supporters themselves.

My argument is that all that needed to be done was for Corbyn to stand down after the 2019 result- he could not have stood down before that election, because he had an obligation to protect his supporters from anything remotely like the brutal and unjustified purge they've been subjected to under Starmer and to protect the policies that most of the party supjor ports from being abandoned, as Starmeris abandoning all major differences with the Tories now.  Corbyn, largely due to the smears and lies, became personally disliked-none of the policies associated with his  era were or are disliked and there are no policies to the right of Corbyn's, whatever you can say about him as a person, other than becoming Tory- any objective observer would agree that Blair's policies are indistinguishable from the Tories.

So, because the policies themselves aren't unpopular, and because Labour was doomed to never rise above the 32% vote share Ed Miliband led them to on a centrist platform in 2015, or the pathetic 29% the party took under Gordon Brown- it is clear that Labour wilk be doomed to perpetual, eternal defeat if if does go well to the right of the 2017 manifesto.

And because Labour has been stagnant in the polls throughout the time of Keir's vindictive and pointless purge of Corbyn supporters, we know that Labour cannot win the next election if Starmer doesn't stop purging them and doesn't accept that he needs to treat them as partners deserving respect within the Labour coalition.

We already know that the Labour can never make itself popular again by becoming a socialism-free zone or a socialist-free zone, so, whatever anyone thinks about Corbyn- btw, you don't really think it's intolerable for anyone in that party simply to not DESPISE the man, do you?- why keep banging on about "distancing" when all the "distancing" is achieving is the distancing of Labour from any possible chance of victory?

If Labour goes back to Blairism, it will vanish.  The polls prove that, and they prove that the voters don't want Labour to ever again be a party that's just barely not Tory.  If they did, Starmer would HAVE that "twenty  point lead".

You should want Labour to win- and you should accept the fact that it can't ever win again if it makes young left activists, BAME voters and the Irish unwelcome.  Labour must find a new radical  identity, or it will die- for it can never win by doing what YOU want and reducing its message to "it's enough to have US running the status quo; it's enough to have the party of the welfare state and the NHS being the ones to kill the welfare state and the NHS".

'It's the Labour Party that did this to me!' Marc Wadsworth (and vid)

https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1418721761584164864

"It's the Labour Party that did this to me' Marc Wadsworth says of the racist institution that ejected him on false grounds without due process. Jewish Chronicle has been forced to pay damages and apologise for smearing pro-Palestine activist, by the British High Court."

A malevolent and powerful Zionist lobby and a  weak propitiating social democrat leadership  is a deadly combination. NDP, Green pro-Palestine activists beware - you too can be thrown under the bus if political expediency and Zionist pressure requires it.

How many illegal wars did Blair take part in and support?  And how many did Corbyn?

How many neo-Thatcherite policies did Blair support?  And how many did Corbyn?

It's no trick to get elected if you run as a Tory.