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On May 7th LAB failed to win Bedford, where I live by 1097 votes. Last night the local branch nominated Corbyn. Bonkers.
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Perhaps these backers have the right idea. Re-engage these people in politics by presenting real alternatives, rather than shades of neo-liberalism wearing different coloured rosettes.
None of the other 3 candidates give the impression of being election-winners, let's face it. Corbyn will at least provide robust opposition and banish the LibLabCon meme.
What would you expect from the Government? What do you think would be its top priorities?
We're not in the 1970s or 80s, the world has changed so much and our politics hasn't caught up. The gap between the very richest and the rest just keeps on widening. We're far too dependent on the finance industry and rising house prices, there desperately needs to be a rebalancing in favour of ordinary working people.
But, the Tories have just made the situation so much worse with their changes to tax credits. Some people earning around or less than the median wage are finding that they'll be A THOUSAND POUNDS worse off than before because of the budget.
What are Labour offering? A shuffle of the deckchairs, or real change that people can believe in and get behind...
Is he looking for a replication of the kind of radicalism of 1945? Would those utilities that had been publicly owned at one time or another, but now were in the private sector. Would we expect legislation to bring them back into public ownership?
Would he expect to see an incomes policy in which commodity prices and wages were set by the state? Wages councils?
What about the 'market' in general? Which areas of commerce should prices be set? What would the top rate of tax be? Abolition of VAT? How would you close the deficit?
Here is a list of privatisations by the way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_privatizations#United_Kingdom
A theory - The left wing element of the Labour party has felt disenfranchised since the creation of the New Labour project, - Jeremy Corbyn is the first real ‘socialist’ as far as they are concerned, that’s been in a position to retake control of the party for two decades.
Right now for them it’s let’s party like it 1999, how they do 2020 is the least of their concerns.
With the disclaimer that I don't really have insight into Corbyn's actual thoughts on this...
I believe the top priority of a Corbyn-led Government will be to seek to find ways to reverse the trend of wealth inequality (I know the graph is U.S., I couldn't find an up-to-date UK one, but I'm sure the trend is much the same)
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/files/2014/10/Saez-Fig-1.jpg
I don't hear the other candidates talking about extreme wealth. I also don't hear them convincingly opposing austerity, despite the fact that most eminent economists think it's damaging to our economy: http://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion.
Jeremy Corbyn has been active in seeking an end to conflicts through multilateral negotiation (with regard to the IRA, he was ahead of his time!), and that will continue under a Corbyn-led Government.
All this assumes that Labour have held together under Corbyn's leadership. I believe that will be the case, and I know Jeremy does too: https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/621741288728195072
The left, including Corbyn, were loyal to Labour under Blair and I hope that loyalty would be reciprocated should the members and supporters decide that a new direction is needed and select Corbyn as leader.
As OGH says, they need to pick a woman.
I also think they should change their name.
OK, I'm nuts.
http://handandmouse.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/wheres-british-bernie-sanders_18.html
Not that I'm claiming to have had any bearing on the way the leadership race has panned out, but hopefully forestalling any thoughts that I'm only expressing support for JC because I've backed him on Betfair!
He is such a nice guy, has no airs or graces, (I've met him), and what is not publicized is how much he has helped others.
The clock begins to tick as soon as you come back from the meeting with the Queen.
So what laws/policies should a Corbyn Government introduce? Which ones do you think it should abolish?
Now I'm no pedant, I'm barely functionally literate, yet I just squirm how so many people get it wrong so often, and usually on Facebook.
Who is going to play Attlee to Corbyn's Lansbury, and who is going to be the latter day Bevin who wields the knife?
Corbyn is not the answer to Labour's problems.
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/622150455733395456/photo/1
Capitalism has never been stronger.
The vision is reducing wealth inequality*. The policies will be developed, in consultation with experts in their fields, to move in that direction. I'm not all-seeing and I'm not going to try and pre-empt them. Some will involve international co-operation. Everything has to be assessed for feasibility, and sone things the left would like to do might turn out not to be feasible.
Broadly, I anticipate much tougher measures on corporate tax avoidance, stronger oversight of the finance industry, review of property taxes, and higher top rates of income taxes. I'm sure there are other more innovative ideas that could be envisaged to augment or replace some of these.
*Its not the only vision, but for the purposes of this post I'll stick to this one.
Social democratic but anti bureaucracy - support the universal credit but argue for the removal of most tax reliefs and a simpler tax system all round. Maybe hypothecate national insurance for NHS.
Support electoral reform and Lords reform but on a gradualist basis.
Liberal on political constitutional issues like freedom of speech but lose the metropolitan culture war obsessions as a priority.
Hammer the Tories from a meritocratic standpoint - constantly bring up issues of privelige holding back working and middle class people, paint them as the roadblock to entrepreneurship and social mobility
On that ticket you attract Lib Dems without alienating the core vote
Anecdotally, "they're all the same" continued to be a commonly-held view on the doorsteps earlier this year. Corbyn would turn that around.
Question is: do they care?
If Corbyn wins, then he could easily take Labour well below 200 MPs. How many more potential front benchers and even future leaders would that leave outside parliament? It took Labour 14 years to recover from Foot's General Election; it took the Tories 13 to regain power after 1997 and 18 to win outright. If Labour were to have fewer than 200 MPs fifteen years after they lost power - which is what it would be at the end of the next parliament - we could be looking at them being out of power for a quarter of a century.
But the point is that the SNP landslide has cost Labour 1.5% in terms of GB support and this is already reflected in the polls. Had it not been for Scotland Labour would have managed 32.7% in May rather than 31.2% - and the Tory GB lead would have been 5%. Applying the same effect to current polls Labour is 4 - 12 % behind - despite what has happened in Scotland. Without the SNP effect I imagine the polls would be showing Labour 2.5% to 10.5% behind.
Re -LibDem local election successes. I strongly suspect that this reflects local campaigning and circumstances rather than any underlying changes in support. I doubt that Labour put much effort at all into the Kingston ward for example. When it comes to Parliamentary elections I would be surprised if Farron's election makes much short-term difference. Labour will still be able to remind non-Tory voters that the Libdems cannot be trusted to not put the the Tories into office - people are going to remember that for a good 20 years or so - effectively a generation.
I think that the breath-of-fresh-air factor can obscure the "will he win" issue. It may lead to the (delusional?) view that a campaign fought under the Corbyn banner will pick up a lot of non-voters and protest-voters, in which case supporters will pay little attention to opinion polls they will regard as inherently flawed. In fact the last election makes it a rather flimsy argument to use opinion polls to support one of the "sensible" or "pragmatic" candidates as a potential election-winner: it's quite possibly a correct view that will not receive a fair hearing.
There may also be people who feel that reinvigorating the party and shaking up politics is more important than outright victory: or rather, that it is such an exciting prospect, they simply don't stop to think seriously about the electoral prospects.
It's an open question whether they'll care more seriously in a month's time. By that time the novelty might have worn off.
'Equality' is a chimera. Indeed it is a lie, a misuse of words to justify a bogus prospectus. Only extremely thick and stupid people think like Jeremy Corbyn.
I was referring to the golfer, not the fat, ugly guy from the Labour Party who needs to ditch the Clark Kent glasses.
Anecdote alert: the most reactionary fb friends of my girlfriend are thrilled to bits with Corbyn. The same ones crowing about how Cons we're going to lose big in 2015.
Tory maj. Nailed on in 2020
Do you know what happens if every country tries to run a surplus at the same time?
Which one of those is Lizzy?
The enthusiastic one in the front.
But you cannot ignore the kind of deficit we currently have. It is not sustainable. You have to broadly spend what you take in.
If you want to spend more, you must take in more. Fiscal responsibility is not running a 10% budget deficit for a sustained period of time.
There would be people getting the service for nothing, since not everyone pays NI. Admittedly this is not a fatal flaw in such a system, but it does mean the impression of paying for a service specifically is basically illusory. The transparency would work less well than you think, I suspect: if I pay £500 of NHS tax what does that really mean? On the one hand I'm in some sense paying for the bills of those that don't pay, on the other hand there will be higher-earning people paying thousands more than me. It is likely that most people would, on net, be being subsidised by the higher payers, so our sense of the size of the bills would likely be too small. But I can see the appeal of this aspect of the idea.
It's not clear to me why an automatically rising "health tax" is any better than just taking the funds out of the government's central pot. For one thing, it's desirable for tax levels to be set with with some regards to the efficiency of the tax. For another, it's very difficult to target a precise revenue figure: if it was basically a tax on wages, as NI is, then pay and unemployment figures are rather unpredictable.
The word "equality" is so problematic. It can evoke a kind of 'Harrison Bergeron' vision where no form of achievement is possible and there's no hope of bettering oneself. That there's presently a bit of a left-wing backlash against the "aspiration" rhetoric of some candidates probably feeds into that perception.
I certainly don't desire that vision of the future, and I'm quite sure Jeremy Corbyn doesn't either. It's a horrifying prospect, and I think I understand why you react so strongly to it.
"Reducing inequality" doesn't mean seeking absolute equality of outcome. It's about improving the quality of life of people in the middle and at the bottom, and it's about broadening the life chances of them and their children. That may mean limiting, to some extent, the wealth that can be accumulated by those at the very top.
"Aspiration" is a good thing, and it should be cherished. It should also be available to all. At present, people's 'station in life' is still largely determined by the postcode they were born into. Democratic socialism is about getting rid of barriers to achievement, not abolishing achievement!
CON 41.0 Lab 31.6 UKIP 14.1 LD 8.2 Grn 4.2
Grammar schools: historically, there's a lot of truth in what you're saying. My concern is that the children who don't get in (pass the 11-plus, or however it might be decided) end up 'on the scrapheap', so to speak. I'd rather have forward-looking comprehensives that cater for all types of aptitudes, rather than just focus on the academics.
- M. H. Thatcher, speech to the Conservative Party Conference (14 October, 1977)
A month is a long time in politics, and is easily long enough (even for Labour Party members (who (by definition) are intrinsically stupid)) to realise that voting for Corbyn would be catastrophically nang-squeeblious.
63 - Corbyn
61 - Burnham
53 - Cooper
10 - Kendall
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/which-clps-are-nominating-who-labour-leadership-contest
I think for many Labour party members the message is clear: If you don't want Corbyn, you've got to vote for Burnham.
At the same time, I'm not sure whether the Anyone But Corbyn campaign has gained that much traction...
I tweeted (humorously, mischievously and/or provocatively) to say "No, that's not the royals doing a Nazi salute in 1933. The angle of the arm is too high. Desperate smear attempt by the Sun." to which someone replied "Hahahaha this guys been on that strong Mary Jane".
Does that mean he's annoyed and that I therefore successfully trolled him by pretending to be outraged?
abourlist.org/2015/07/what-do-clp-nominations-actually-tell-us-about-the-final-results/
My take remains that this is a race between Burnham and Corbyn - Cooper and Kendall are just making up the numbers. In the end, I'd be surprised if Corbyn wins. It's possible but unlikely. If he won, he would probably tack to the right but not sufficiently so to reach voters in the center. It seems that a lot of his support comes from the anti-austerity voting bloc - trade unionists, Occupy, etc. They seem to think that you can run deficits forever - as if it were some gift that keeps on giving...
Personally, I agree with Corbyn on many foreign policy issues although I'm not a Labour voter. I do think that he would be a stronger candidate for Labour than Kendall. Quite frankly, I don't see Kendall as "Tory-lite" but I think she's a liberal (with a social conscience) that would be more at home in the LDP. She would expose Labour on the left without necessarily bringing in more voters on the right...
http://labourlist.org/2015/07/what-do-clp-nominations-actually-tell-us-about-the-final-results/
I have to say that Miliband wasn't much of a leader but he never struck me as particularly left wing - or particularly any kind of wing come to that. It was his lack of political definition that always put me off him. I can't really imagine that lots of people got into the polling booth and thought 'I'd like to vote Labour, but maybe they are a bit too left wing this time.'
The thesis that extreme political views put people off a candidate sounds reasonable as an idea, but I can't see much evidence of it. Thatcher's views were extreme by any way of looking at it, but she won often enough. Ken Livingstone was elected as mayor of London. Jeremy Corbyn's vote in his own seat has always been respectable. And breaking up the UK has to be a pretty extreme policy but the SNP have got plenty of people to back it.
It could well be that the whole 'people won't vote for the extreme left' trope is something that political anoraks believe but isn't actually true. After all, according to all the pundits we were going to have a hung parliament.
I am not a Labour Party member, but my advice to them would be to ignore the candidates' position on the spectrum and pick the one who looks best on telly.