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There are only two realistic outcomes to Labour’s leadership election. The first, and by far the more likely, is that Jeremy Corbyn wins, either outright or on transfers.
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They should merge NIC and Income tax.
That and survive the Europe question and I'd be pretty happy.
Corbyn
Kendall
Burnham
Cooper
If you want to radically reform the country, the priority surely must be to get the third term. Change takes time, and even if you succeed in reforms, they can all too easily be reversed if they are not fully bedded-in. So I don't think it's a choice between remodelling the country and getting a third term: you need the third term to remodel the country.
Of course that doesn't mean that the government should be reckless in spending political capital; like Maggie in her prime, governments should take on the right battles, and be careful not to give too much ammunition to opponents, especially on non-core issues.
I do think focusing too much on this what if scenario would be a mistake, but I do think the point that Cameron remains under-rated is fair enough. If he retains control and plays his cards right, he could really set things up well for his successor.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jeremy-corbyn-can-lead-labour-6296552
'Old Corbyn's flag is brightest white,
It screams surrender as of right -
Not to you or me be aware,
But to commies everywhere.
Don't let the coward's banner float;
Go and grab the middle class vote.
Make the numpty comrades sneer,
And stay in power for many a year.'
(hat tip Leon Rosselson and Crocodile Dundee)
- Get a proper renegotiation out of the EU, or otherwise recommend leaving
- Get rid of the licence fee and install some proper balance at the BBC
- Reform our council house system, so the state no longer subsidises below market rents for the non-poor
- Combined employee NI and income tax
- Get rid of employers NI
- Build a hell of a lot more housing
- Make all benefits contributory
"Corbyn snubs Queen" etc etc
As I've said all along Corbyn's economic policies won't even get heard by the public - the press will mount a 100% full scale assault on Corbyn on the following subjects:
Monarchy
NATO
Trident
Speaking to IRA straight after Brighton bomb
Hamas
Hezbollah
I've attempted to answer your Cabinet question on the previous thread on the previous thread
(Satire site of course).
That's not to say that a Labour win in 2020 is likely right now, since they would need to demonstrate some kind of ability to hold a piss-up in a brewery at some point. But I'm just bemused by this view that the public have enthusiastically endorsed Tory ideology and that the party can look forward to years of dominance, when from my perspective the public merely decided in May that the Tories were the marginally less disgusting pile of manure to step in.
He's making a bid to lead Labour
He's seen as a loser
I doubt he's a muser
He sure as hell ain't no vote saver
One may as well say that Stanley Baldwin was underrated. No he wasn't, he just took over control of the government, and eventually No 10, after Labour oversaw a great depression, and after nearly a decade his legacy was a whistle in the wind as it was overturned by all his opponents from Churchill to Attlee. The difference being that the magnitude of the current depression was overrated in prospect because modern central banks in most countries avoided a persistent financial crisis and modern treasuries adopted Keynesian stimulus while their countries devalued relative to resource producers. So the political damage for ushering in the recession wasn't matched by a significant long-run impact on growth.
While the NHS and pensions remain untouched, Britain's long-term fiscal direction is fundamentally worsening. Those aren't even on the agenda of committed mainstream Conservatives like those on PB - and what is indeed on the agenda involves a lot more people losing out than the soft stuff of the last three years. Observe how quickly the twelve billion pounds of welfare cuts has returned to vagueness not specifics - This is not a topic Osborne feels he can discuss in detail and then win. The same Pareto-inefficiency is true of negotiations over the EU and Scotland or abolishing the BBC in effect, none of which is win-win, while migration is intrinsically tied to the EU; it's not really asylum seekers but living beside Poles, Romanians and Muslims that gets some people angry, so try stop that without Brexit.
I happily admit that most governments think they have far more of a mandate from the electorate than they actually do, but that is the same for all governments, including the previous 4 Labour governments.
However, the legal measure is seats won based on votes, not 'real votes'.
Someone bring back Blair vs Cameron, circa 2006.
My point is that, for someone who was so grudging that they waited until the last minute to decide they were going Tory, it's not going to take much for them to decide in future they don't want to vote for them. They're not someone who can be relied on to definitely vote Tory for the next one or two elections as some people seem to be bizarrely suggesting when they project more wins for the Tories as in the bag.
People recognise that our population cannot increase indefinitely and want a sustainable settlement for the country. [Without population density rising to the point that living standards inevitably decrease]
Those who voted Tory in 2015 may have decided in 2011 - but those who said they were going to vote Labour were less likely to vote.
I hazard that the stupidity of Corbynomics and CorbynForPol will have already turned the soft Tory 2015 voters into hard Tory 2020 voters...
You've made me think about my question a bit more. I guess I should be asking the following:
- When did the Privy Council become merely a ceremonial thing with little role in governance?
- When did collective decision making by cabinet and cabinet responsibility become a thing?
"Mulcair pledges NDP will decriminalize pot 'the minute we form government'
The NDP has supported decriminalizing marijuana for decades"
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ndp-mulcair-marijuana-decriminalization-1.3199532
"What did the 1990s ever do for Britain? Sandwiched between the Thatcherite battleground of the 1980s and the conflicts of the new millennium, it can be hard to recall the point of them.
This was the decade dominated by Sir John Major and his Tory government’s slow walk to electoral annihilation: a time of rows over Europe and over traffic cones, of a political promise to restore Victorian values and then a rash of Westminster sex scandals. It was the decade of New Labour’s gilded rise: lucky to have the busted Tories for an opponent and so obsessed with getting power that they arrived with little clue how to use it. They settled on spin: the politics of the 1990s were ill-tempered and intellectually sparse. Yet these developments, Alwyn Turner argues compellingly, were not the point of Britain’s fin de siècle. What mattered
was happening elsewhere."
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21584958-how-margaret-thatchers-economic-liberalism-was-followed-social-liberalism-nice-change
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/#/politics/market/1.118739910
And cheers Mr Herdson, plenty of food for thought in your article – Personally I do not see Cameron taking the radical option as it’s not in his nature IMHO, also given the turmoil surrounding UK, be it China’s economic problems, the EU’s ongoing difficulties or the present fractured nature of home grown political parties, then a ‘steady as she goes’ policy whilst entrenching the changes introduced during the last parliament is much the wisest option.
I think Dave is inherently fairly cautious, but Osborne is perhaps less so, and it is a wafer thin majority and a Euroref to come.
Boldness and big ideas are always internally divisive, but serve to unite the opposition, so no half baked ones please.
>But if Corbyn doesn't run a proper whipping operation (and he is on record as being against whips), then party management will disintegrate and thus the political landscape is radically transformed.
There's a thouight.
The Brighton Green Party as a model for Corbynite Labour.
But isn't Corbynite some kind of explosive or perhaps implosive?
Yes , but only if they can dig something up on Corbyn to make him resign
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/matt/
Good piece, Mr. Herdson. Must be said that "What do you do now you dominate the political landscape?" isn't the worst problem for a politician to have.
If No were to win the EU referendum, would the Conservatives see that as a failure, or would they own it, and enthusiastically endorse the No vote in 2020?
The monarchy and NATO are popular, Hamas, Hezbollah and the chatting to people associated with those who attempted to kill the British government a few weeks early very much are not.
Trident's more contentious, but I believe most people are for it.
This poisonous atmosphere might keep many Labour MPs (who are hardly the most independently minded group) in check.
It'll be the politics of poison; albeit a very different form from the one Labour has practised in the past.
However, the reds are, a I've said many time, sheep-like in loyalty. We'll see whether a Corbyn leadership [presumed] will actually be a step too far for the party that went along with Brown and Miliband.
However, Dow, Nasdaq plunge 3% (531 points) into correction, says CNBC. But is it simply a correction - the DOW was still falling and the end of the session, which is unusual - or the start of a new China induced recession?
This problem is no doubt why many MPs are already planning to try to put together sizeable alternative groupings in the PLP that can draw on safety in numbers when they want to vote against the whip. Of course the real "fun" starts when Corbyn starts introducing his "internal party democracy" to determine party policy - that will create even more trouble with the leadership insisting MPs will have to vote with the membership, and MPs saying that their first responsibility is to their electorate with a duty to be vaguely consistent with the manifesto upon which they were elected.
Cameron may actually have to brief others in the Labour Party on condition that they keep their leader out of the loop...!
I've seen it before when I was a student having gone to meetings of the sort of groups who are now backing Corbyn. In many cases they're not bad people but have a huge delusion that their particular political obsession is secretly shared (or will be if they hear about it) by some mythical mass of people. Anyone pointing out that this might be a teensy bit of a silly way to approach politics is seen as undermining the cause so you get a feedback loop where more extreme positions get affirmed and moderates are told to sod off. It's possibly the stupidest way you could run a mass political party, but great fun for small protesty ones as you get to be really passionate and swept up in the fact that everyone agrees with you. It pains me to say it but Cameron and Osborne could fart on Prince Charles' balls on the Buckingham Palace balcony every day of this parliament and still walk an election against Corbyn.
As for NATO, it has transmogrified since 1991 into an expansionist aggressive force from its original purpose of defending Western Europe against the Soviet threat. Corbyn has some very sensible views about the consequences of the current Drang nach Osten, a long-standing imperial German policy later adopted by the Third Reich and subsequently by the EU/NATO.
Good luck selling that dross to the electorate.
Also many of the people who do grumble never vote.
They assimilate and share much of a common culture
Whilst there are things on my Parly Bucket List that I'd love to see happen, I'd happily sacrifice most of them to keep Labour out, and the Tories popular enough to win in GE2020 and possibly in GE2025.
The union dues/strike thresholds is already on the cards, the BBC in their sights too - I hope the TVLF will be abolished, and I will object most strongly at any attempts to roll it into general taxation. Merging NICS and IC the big one I'd really like - along with a simplification of the whole tax system.
I'd like to see State boarding schools for those kids who'd really benefit from a change of home environment, and big push on foster caring rather than group homes. Ditto removing mental health issues from prisons into other institutions. I think we really threw the baby out with the bathwater under Care in the Community.
It's ridiculous having a race in Azerbaijan but not Italy. Of course, it could just be a shot across the circuit's bows, but this has been trailed for a while (likewise losing Spa).
Right now, Singapore and Monaco [ironically, the latter's the most 'classic' circuit] are bloody horrendous. Russia seemed a bit boring last year, and India was thankfully dropped.
Losing Monza would be ridiculous. There, Spa, Silverstone, Interlagos ought to have special treatment to keep them on the calendar. Monaco paying no race fee may reflect the lack of racing which occurs, but it isn't on.
The idea of a government making changes to our main broadcaster so that it is more sympathetic to the ruling party is worryingly dangerous.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0035G8GPW?keywords=austerity britain&qid=1440229807&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1