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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » What Corbyn’s constituencies tell us about the class of 2020
One of the odder features of the Labour leadership election is that the nominations of constituency parties are firstly made and secondly reported. It’s odd because these are almost entirely meaningless given that they play no role in the process.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-says-decision-to-hand-3m-grant-to-kids-company-days-before-charitys-collapse-was-the-right-thing-to-do-10445493.html
What is a "yogi" in this context? Presumably a pun on the Merle Haggard song...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharishi_Mahesh_Yogi
"This week’s decision by a senior Wiltshire police officer to position himself outside the late Ted Heath’s home and solicit allegations of abuse against the former prime minister served as a bizarre piece of theatre by an arm of the establishment increasingly given to such things. And increasingly ill-advisedly so. Until that moment in the evolution of British policing, many will not have realised that you could just stand in front of someone’s house and wonder authoritatively aloud whether they might have been a nonce."
Actually lots of interesting things in the article, well worth a read IMO.
However, as the Tory experience showed, after they lost the 2005 election too their membership elected the centrist Cameron even having elected IDS the previous election, eventually after being out of power long enough even activists will hold their noses for a centrist candidate, hence Blair became leader after 4 election defeats for Labour, Cameron after 3 defeats for the Tories. However, 2 election defeats is not enough for the base yet to concede defeat, with the '1 more heave strategy' still enough to see them elect a leader more to their tastes.
One thing Labour do have going for them is Cameron will not be there in 2020, if he was, as Blair was still in 2005 for the Tories, I think it would be a matter of limiting the damage. Yet without him at the helm they may still have a chance
With Labour, they are not just choosing Corbyn over a mild Blairite in Kendall, but over the party's Brownite middle in Burnham and Cooper. And doing so enthusiastically.
The police have gone mad and the media has lost its head. There’s no establishment cover-up and someone has to say so":
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4520917.ece
Miliband also brought in an overall left leaning intake, we've already seen a large number of them rebel on the welfare bill and the new MPs make up nearly a third of Corbyn's nominations.
In conclusion, Miliband has certainly left his stamp on the party. Labour need Corbyn to lose to bring it back the other way.
As far as a large chunk of the usually-pragmatic grassroots are concerned, it's the leadership who have moved away from us, not us who have moved to the left.
And that is just unsecured debt, mainly credit cards. Mortgages are a whole other story.
George Osborne's "long term economic plan" is founded on record government debt, record household debt and a housing bubble.
We need to get used to the idea that our standard of living isn't remotely sustainable, we spend far more than we make, to use that tired old cliché "the world does not owe us a living". Every time we raise taxes on business, or add regulations, or follow any sort of anti business policies recently espoused by Miliband, Corbyn et al, businesses that are thinking of investing in the UK, will invest somewhere else, their jobs will be created in another country, their taxes will be paid in another country.
The only way this doesn't end badly for this country is to increase (dramatically) productivity, which means much better education in the long term (which Labour in government made worse, and in opposition vote against at every turn) and in the short term means cutting out any dead wood, and making our businesses lean and efficient in the way our international competitors are, which Labour also vote again, and their paymasters in the unions try and stymie at every turn.
Its not the magic money tree that is the problem, its the sense of entitlement to a standard of living we are not earning that is the problem.
Well, yes. Because the guilty and innocent want to deny. Note that: the innocent.
Remember the McAlpine mess? If Newsnight had done that smear-report a year later, after McAlpine's death, he would not have been alive to so vociferously counter it. An innocent man's memory would have been sullied. Worse, it would have hidden the real perpetrators.
An accusation is just that: an accusation. As a society we seem to have progressed to a position where an accusation means guilt, and denials are ignored (because the guilty would deny).
You need only look at the Kids Co fiasco to demonstrate what a superficial society we've become, attention seekers dazzling politicians whilst purporting to care for "ve kids" and making good money from hard pressed taxpayers. Long serving civil servants have proven to be far wiser than naive politicians.
I'm desperate for Corbyn to win for many reasons, first of all because it will jettison those ghastly identikit apparatchiks in the Labour Party and mostly because I want to see the govt show some humility when dealing with the opposition. I don't like Corbyn's politics but plenty clearly do, let's show some respect for each other.
It's time people grew up and became less tribal, I'm grateful for Corbyn, perhaps he's right after all.
An interesting thread Mr Herdson, cheers. – Quite agree that a Corbyn victory could, and probably would, dramatically transform the PLP, and by extension shift Labour far more to the left than it presently sits. However, having witnessed the convulsions Labour are experiencing and have done throughout the entire leadership campaign, shifting left is probably the least of their worries.
Corbyn will ensure entrenched Tory rule and, with the Tories, will enable the SNP to win its independence referendum. He will be the most destructive figure left-wing politics in this country has ever produced, cheered on by the deluded, the wicked and the stupid beyond hope. With his election Labour will finally and totally have abandoned the poor and the disadvantaged. But as long as a few people feel that little bit better about themselves, who cares, eh?
Greg Baum, chief sports writer on the Sydney Morning Herald: Miaow.
http://www.smh.com.au/sport/cricket/the-ashes/ashes-2015-its-our-way-and-now-the-highway-20150807-giuhtj.html
At last a kipper that I agree with.
PM Corbyn is a possibility; and only marginally less so than PM Burnham IMHO.
Having her as leader would lance many of the PR problems the party has.
I'm lucky. His election will make no material difference to my life. The Tories look after people like me.
You are being either very thick or wilfully ignorant by completely ignoring the actual facts on the ground here.
What is really worrying is the stage we are at in the electoral cycle. At this point, having just been brutally hammered in an election by an unpopular government for being too left-wing, Labour should have worked out that moving further left would be pure self-indulgence and instead be looking to return to power in at least the medium term by electing somebody voters will listen to. Given that they have the recent example of Iain Duncan Smith to ponder, they have no excuse to be moving left, yet on these very threads we have seen people who are demonstrably sane and decent talking about doing just that.
The damage they are doing to Labour's political credibility is immense. Is there any sign of hope for Labour that anyone can see?
https://twitter.com/bobscartoons/status/629731877138599936/photo/1
Holding the party together, a task made easier by a blank sheet of paper and leaving a party that was set up to move left.
In 2001, apparently Tory MPs voted tactically to prevent Portillo being on the ballot paper put to party members. It was nearly a Clarke vs Portillo contest, with IDS eliminated.
"By a single vote Portillo was eliminated from the contest. It later transpired that he had been the victim of tactical voting.[citation needed]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_(UK)_leadership_election,_2001
Mr. Jessop, very good point on Lord McAlpine.
Mr. Observer, it's that kind of shilly-shallying fence-sitting that puts people off lefties
On-topic, saw a piece on the news (forget which channel) which thrust the camera into the faces of some Corbynites. One woman, when asked about his electability, said that it wasn't about that.
....
Really? Are you sure, madwoman?
So I am wondering if they will shrug and say, 'yeah, whatever, Miliband's fault for being naff, Corbyn will win us them back given another year' even if they lose every seat they hold. The only one that might make a difference in that case is defeat in the London mayoral election - and if Jowell is the candidate, surely Corbyn's supporters would take that as proof Labour isn't left wing enough?
Dan Hodges sometimes argued Ed Miliband's greatest service to Labour would be to move it well to the left. That way, when Labour lost it would be abundantly clear why and it would move to the centre again. Otherwise, the Labour left would pretend that it was because people wanted a 'real alternative' and demand a swing to the far left. With hindsight, that was another thing he was (annoyingly) prescient on.
One thing EdM did manage as leader was to keep the party together for 5 years.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CL0kDItUkAA3eZI.jpg
That's right up there with U-571. (In fairness I should point out that the director claims that the trailer gives a misleading impression of how the film portrays the subject, but you do have to wonder who put the trailer together then.)
There's a really important point being obscured that a lot of gay men could do with learning. Gay rights, by and large, were not initially fought for by professional "respectable" men like me (who now have largely taken over the campaign groups like Stonewall). They were fought for by the screaming queens, the trannies, all the people who didn't and couldn't fit into polite society. If Hollywood is pretending otherwise, it's a really serious historical mistake.
Jesus was about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable - not the other way round!
I find it difficult to watch supposedly historical films, especially those that try to pass themselves off as documentaries. I spend most of my time grumbling about the way they distort the past or otherwise mislead people. Most annoying of all is the time I then have to spend unravelling the misconceptions (genuine conversation with a Year 8 re the Princes in the Tower after that appalling mini-series The White Queen two years ago: 'but sir, it was Margaret Beaufort who did it, why isn't she on the list of suspects'?).
I can see why this would be particularly annoying from your point of view. But I think the best thing that can be done is to note the error and ensure it is loudly and publicly rebutted as the person you highlight is doing. This is simply because screenwriters consider themselves artists and get tetchy if told they have a duty to be historically accurate, saying that it would 'compromise their integrity.'
Of course, if he could do it he would claim vindication, just as the hapless IDS did, leading to the immortal Telegraph headline 'Tories should not confuse relief with joy' (spoofed by Paul Merton - 'should not confuse IDS with leadership').
It's fascinating. In early 1950s we spent a third of our income on food, now it's 12%. And of course, rationing, no fridges or white bread. When rationing finally ended - sales of brown bread fell to almost zero within three weeks.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05nc7ph/back-in-time-for-dinner-1-1950s
OK, I was first to say Ed Miliband Will Never Be Prime Minister. I am now going on record to say that Labour will lose seats at the next General Election. Even accounting for the drop to 600 MPs. "Nominal holds" will be no such thing.
I am not yet prepared to say they will fall below 200 MPs. I'll let you know when I am....
(And this is a hubris-free zone. Just reading the runes...)
That's a direct reduction in their standard of living in order to fund us living above our means.
There's more of an argument to borrow for infrastructure investment, but current spending: we should recognise it for what it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_local_elections,_2012
Labour did well in that cycle and were polling well at the time in the wake of the Omnishambles budget (the April 2012 ICM, for example, had the Conservatives on 33, Labour on 41).
Unless polling changes very sharply in the next few months, it looks more likely than not that Labour will be losing seats in 2016. Not the best start for the new leader, whoever he or she might be.
I find it quite amusing how "the left" of the Labour Party still spit blood about the SDP "traitors" in the 80s, whilst simultaneously wishing that their presumed equivalents today would just "f*** off to the Tories where they belong".
The Tories, at present, are the best vehicle for achieving what I want for this country. That's a purely practical assessment, and should that cease to be the case then I will no longer support them. I would be very happy with an Orange Book/Cameroon government without the right or the left of that grouping - but it's not possible.
http://labourlist.org/2015/08/how-do-you-remove-a-labour-leader/
Of course that's not to say it couldn't happen - merely that it's very hard, as those who wanted to remove Miliband, Brown and to a lesser extent Blair found out.
These were not just people who didn't vote Tory or Labour or Lib Dem. They didn't vote Green or UKIP either. So if they didn't protest vote last time, why should they next time?
Some might argue that only the combination of the passion of a protest vote with the meaningfulness of a party of government will bring them out. Ignoring the inherent contradiction there, which the Lib Dems amply demonstrated the consequences of from 2010-5, even if it does tap into the 35% of voters who didn't turn out in 2001, 2005, 2010 and 2015 (many of whom may not even be registered by 2020), there's nothing to say it won't push votes out at the other end: trading those who want a party of protest for those who want a party of government.
PM Corbyn is not a possibility unless the Conservatives do something incomprehensibly stupid.
There is one minor blessing though for those annoyed by such things. These films/TV series/novels tend to have a short shelf-life. So although we have to unravel the misconceptions, at least we don't have to spend umpteen years doing it.
More damaging are some of the grave errors that made their way onto the History GCSE syllabus in the 1970s - for example, that people in the Middle Ages believed in the flat-earth theory and didn't believe in a heliocentric universe is taught as fact on the SHP syllabus, which was mostly invented by Washington Irving and other anti-Catholic writers in the 1820s. But again, they are now finally being corrected in one of the happier side-effects of the new exam system.
I too would go for Corbyn. The rest willl go down to inglorious defeat because they aren't up to it.
Corbyn will too but at least he has a few unfashionable ideas that deserve exploring. For example his unwillingness to countenance Israels behaviour in the simpering way most other politicians do.
A strong and powerful voice from within the UK could actually make a difference. The Middle East is the most dangerous part of the world and has at its heart one of the great unresolved injustices. Someone in the West needs to speak up for the Palestinian cause
That alone makes the £3 ticket price good value
You are so right, but the tragedy is that most of our politicians either do not understand what you are saying or are just closing their minds and hoping it will go away.
Civilisations and their riches rise and fall, and globalisation means that ours is still falling. Unless we start to try and lead in technology (and for that our education needs a 100% change) we will continue on the downward slope.
It is only now that the huge economic damage done by G Brown in regard to tax credits and irresponsible regulation of the economy is really coming home to roost.
Declaring he had abolished boom and bust, showed his insular and island mentality at a time when the economic order of the world was changing quickly. Brown used his 1970s-1980s mindset to deal with a 21st century economy and he failed disastrously in such a way that his legacy may damage generations to come.
not too many Heathites around at the moment.