The noises from the PB intelligentsia about Oldham sound so similar to the comments that were made about the Liberals and SLAB in GE2015.
People just refused to believe that the Liberals could be hurt badly in the SW and that SLAB could be left with less than 15 to 20 seats (with a few exceptions). I think perhaps people are refusing to focus on the noises coming out of the constituencies. Because they have a very familiar ring.
In the SW, the LIberal which were so surely going to hang onto lots of seats lost the lot.
In Scotland, SLAB who were so surely going to hang onto at least a dozen seats probably 20, managed to keep one.
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
I'd agree with much of that. Where I'd stop is the Asian vote, of which UKIP will get virtually none. That will be a significant blocker for them and is the sole reason why I'd still have Labour as favourite, though by less than the bookies currently do: probably somewhere around 4/6 .
What's apparent amid this Labour ridiculousness is that Corbyn's allies (and possibly JC himself) hate the modern Labour party more than their opponents ever will.
Seamus Milne? I suspect he'd be glad to see the party ripped to bits.
It's sad.
The Kinnock and then the Blair, Brown, Prescott, Cook, Mandelson, Beckett era showed a lot of backbone in crushing the lunatic tendency - only now do I fully respect how ferociously well they saw them off. Sadly, the current generation don't seem to have the gravitas or the collective power to hit back. It's a legacy of the Blairite/Brownite battles - the two sides were too busy fighting one another over spurious policy difference (when the differences were only really ever personal) to notice the rise of the SWP lot.
It's funny what a couple of defeats can do to the psyche. That coupled with the mass retirements of the Blair generation has left a vacuum. Into it have walked the Corbynites, the SWP and Stop the War lot; basically the crazy fuckers.
I'd suggest Labour need Ed Balls and David Miliband back. And those two need build an alliance and crush the leftis against. And not just crush them, but make them go start a new party - a mirror of UKIP.
Otherwise God help the party if this carries on.
From what I've read, you're right about the first five in your list but Beckett was apparently a careerist happy to go along with the prevailing mood of the party. She was very ambivalent about taking on the left in the early- / mid-80s. Don't be too surprised if she ends up back on the front bench. Indeed, were Benn to resign, she might be his replacement.
I'd agree with you on the rest of the points but I wonder whether there's the heft in the rest of the Labour Party, outside the PLP, to take on the left any more. If, say, Balls were to return, he'd have to immediately set himself up as the king-across-the-sea and act on that: setting up his rival shadow shadow cabinet (as someone put it earlier today), and ignoring the whip as he saw fit. I'm not sure he has it in him to do that; he's too much of a Labour loyalist.
DM, by contrast, won't come back and it might be best if he didn't; he's too out of step with the membership now.
Other than Benn, Beckett is the only other plausible alternative I can see being able to fulfil the Michael Howard role of caretaker 'unity' candidate, ie enough links to the left and loyalty to Corbyn to keep most of the left on board, but also not quite as insane as the present leadership and acceptable enough to party moderates
Trans-Pennine Tunnel - story specially released for by election? But how far is the M62 close to maximum capacity. it always seems busy when I have used it recently.
There was a speech by Osborne the other day announcing that the Birmingham - Crewe part of HS2 would be opened 6 years early and that Crewe station would be totally rebuilt.
Is that the proposal where the entire Crewe station gets moved a couple of miles south, outside the town? If so, I'm not sure I like it.
As for the Trans-Pennine Tunnel: the article says they haven't even done a CBR analysis. Just reopen the Woodhead railway line to trains and force the drivers onto motorail trains.
The thing about these out of town "parkway" stations is that you can spend almost as long getting to them as you do travelling on the train you catch from them!
The noises from the PB intelligentsia about Oldham sound so similar to the comments that were made about the Liberals and SLAB in GE2015.
People just refused to believe that the Liberals could be hurt badly in the SW and that SLAB could be left with less than 15 to 20 seats (with a few exceptions). I think perhaps people are refusing to focus on the noises coming out of the constituencies. Because they have a very familiar ring.
In the SW, the LIberal which were so surely going to hang onto lots of seats lost the lot.
In Scotland, SLAB who were so surely going to hang onto at least a dozen seats probably 20, managed to keep one.
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
I'd agree with much of that. Where I'd stop is the Asian vote, of which UKIP will get virtually none. That will be a significant blocker for them and is the sole reason why I'd still have Labour as favourite, though by less than the bookies currently do: probably somewhere around 4/6 .
I heard alot of noise about how the asian vote was going to come out and save Anas Sawar;
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
I could believe that.
I know two people living in Oldham West one of whom is a life-long labour voter and the other told me that she had consistently voted Labour for over 30 years. Neither will be voting for Labour whilst Corbyn is in charge. I asked who they would vote for instead and they both said that they would probably not bother voting. Neither can stomach UKIP.
The noises from the PB intelligentsia about Oldham sound so similar to the comments that were made about the Liberals and SLAB in GE2015.
People just refused to believe that the Liberals could be hurt badly in the SW and that SLAB could be left with less than 15 to 20 seats (with a few exceptions). I think perhaps people are refusing to focus on the noises coming out of the constituencies. Because they have a very familiar ring.
In the SW, the LIberal which were so surely going to hang onto lots of seats lost the lot.
In Scotland, SLAB who were so surely going to hang onto at least a dozen seats probably 20, managed to keep one.
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
That's a very good argument. I think you may well be right.
Music to my wallet at 5/1 but I'm not that hopeful at the moment.
Agence France-Presse @AFP 2m2 minutes ago #BREAKING Putin says Turkey shot down Russian warplane to protect IS oil trade
Putin's deliberately baiting the Turks into doing something stupid.
Or he's got some lovely intel he's about to deploy. Russian spooks are very good.
"ISIS is a reality and we have to accept that we cannot eradicate a well-organized and popular establishment such as the Islamic State; therefore I urge my western colleagues to revise their mindset about Islamic political currents, put aside their cynical mentalité and thwart Vladimir Putin's plans to crush Syrian Islamist revolutionaries,” - Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization, 24 Nov http://tinyurl.com/gqzloj9
Turkey openly supports ISIS.
We're going to bomb Turkey then?
Turkey does not openly support ISIS. US planes are using Turkish bases to fly missions against ISIS. ISIS were behind a recent suicide bombing in the Turkish town of Suruc.
Turkey is openly fighting a war against its own separatists.
So they're bombing their own people?
Suruc was IS targeting the same Kurdish separatists you speak of.
C4 News reporting big applause for Hilary Benn at PLP meeting tonight, a muted reception for Corbyn, one MP reported to have said 'Corbyn gave a vacuous student rant, Benn a tour de force, had it been a boxing match it would have been stopped in Round 1'. Margaret Beckett also reportedly said she was concerned about the lack of direction from the leadership and she nominated Corbyn!
Stop pimping for Benn, he's politically dead no matter how much applause Danzcuk gives him.
Far from politically dead in 2 years time I expect him to be leading the Labour Party
What's apparent amid this Labour ridiculousness is that Corbyn's allies (and possibly JC himself) hate the modern Labour party more than their opponents ever will.
Seamus Milne? I suspect he'd be glad to see the party ripped to bits.
It's sad.
It's funny what a couple of defeats can do to the psyche. That coupled with the mass retirements of the Blair generation has left a vacuum. Into it have walked the Corbynites, the SWP and Stop the War lot; basically the crazy fuckers.
I'd suggest Labour need Ed Balls and David Miliband back. And those two need build an alliance and crush the leftis against. And not just crush them, but make them go start a new party - a mirror of UKIP.
Otherwise God help the party if this carries on.
From what I've read, you're right about the first five in your list but Beckett was apparently a careerist happy to go along with the prevailing mood of the party. She was very ambivalent about taking on the left in the early- / mid-80s. Don't be too surprised if she ends up back on the front bench. Indeed, were Benn to resign, she might be his replacement.
I'd agree with you on the rest of the points but I wonder whether there's the heft in the rest of the Labour Party, outside the PLP, to take on the left any more. If, say, Balls were to return, he'd have to immediately set himself up as the king-across-the-sea and act on that: setting up his rival shadow shadow cabinet (as someone put it earlier today), and ignoring the whip as he saw fit. I'm not sure he has it in him to do that; he's too much of a Labour loyalist.
DM, by contrast, won't come back and it might be best if he didn't; he's too out of step with the membership now.
Other than Benn, Beckett is the only other plausible alternative I can see being able to fulfil the Michael Howard role of caretaker 'unity' candidate, ie enough links to the left and loyalty to Corbyn to keep most of the left on board, but also not quite as insane as the present leadership and acceptable enough to party moderates
Why are you so obsessed with Howard?
This is 2015 and it's the Labour party, you are trying to compare two completely different worlds and arbitrarily concluding that history must always repeat itself verbatim.
At best when history repeats itself, it's like a farce not verbatim.
The noises from the PB intelligentsia about Oldham sound so similar to the comments that were made about the Liberals and SLAB in GE2015.
People just refused to believe that the Liberals could be hurt badly in the SW and that SLAB could be left with less than 15 to 20 seats (with a few exceptions). I think perhaps people are refusing to focus on the noises coming out of the constituencies. Because they have a very familiar ring.
In the SW, the LIberal which were so surely going to hang onto lots of seats lost the lot.
In Scotland, SLAB who were so surely going to hang onto at least a dozen seats probably 20, managed to keep one.
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
I'd agree with much of that. Where I'd stop is the Asian vote, of which UKIP will get virtually none. That will be a significant blocker for them and is the sole reason why I'd still have Labour as favourite, though by less than the bookies currently do: probably somewhere around 4/6 .
How many voter have vanished off the Oldham West and Royton? You are of course right about Labour getting most out of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim vote (we need to break this down "Asian" vote isn't accurate any more). But it is a little "cleaner" these days.
I think FWIW that Labour will probably hold Oldham, more comfortably than we might assume - a lot of the toing and froing over Syria will pass most voters by - but down on the GE. It will not bode well for the future for Labour but it will be a win and therefore banked by Corbyn et al. Even if some former Labour voters desert Labour, I'm not sure how many will cross over to UKIP rather than stay at home. Plus the Labour candidate seems broadly sensible and not a loon so easy for Labour voters who don't like Corbyn to ignore him and vote for their local man.
It would be more fun if it were otherwise.
OTOH if UKIP do win perhaps the lesson to be learnt is to keep Farage well away. He's been largely invisible in this election. Or is it that we can't see him behind all those Labour MPs stabbing each other in the back?
If UKIP do win then Farage will have 2 MPs who can fall out with him, and each other. Nigel will look increasingly like yesterdays man.
But I expect Labour to win. Turnout about 35% overall, but likely that the turnout will be high for British Asians and very few will be kippers. Many both white and Asian are anti-bombing. I also expect that the Tory vote will go down by just a bit and the LDs will hold their deposit.
A NoJam PB contest would be fun, even if it postpones the much awaited AV thread.
Listen, that's a good article, Alastair, but having skimmed the first dozen comments or so & then gone back to the later comments FPT, it looks as though every thread header now needs a synopsis "The story so far".
I'm busy elsewhere for at least parts of every day. I can't keep up with all these events!
Trans-Pennine Tunnel - story specially released for by election? But how far is the M62 close to maximum capacity. it always seems busy when I have used it recently.
There was a speech by Osborne the other day announcing that the Birmingham - Crewe part of HS2 would be opened 6 years early and that Crewe station would be totally rebuilt.
Is that the proposal where the entire Crewe station gets moved a couple of miles south, outside the town? If so, I'm not sure I like it.
As for the Trans-Pennine Tunnel: the article says they haven't even done a CBR analysis. Just reopen the Woodhead railway line to trains and force the drivers onto motorail trains.
The thing about these out of town "parkway" stations is that you can spend almost as long getting to them as you do travelling on the train you catch from them!
C4 News reporting big applause for Hilary Benn at PLP meeting tonight, a muted reception for Corbyn, one MP reported to have said 'Corbyn gave a vacuous student rant, Benn a tour de force, had it been a boxing match it would have been stopped in Round 1'. Margaret Beckett also reportedly said she was concerned about the lack of direction from the leadership and she nominated Corbyn!
Stop pimping for Benn, he's politically dead no matter how much applause Danzcuk gives him.
Far from politically dead in 2 years time I expect him to be leading the Labour Party
And how is he going to win a leadership election to become leader in 2 years? The party will never vote for someone who so blatantly disagrees with Corbyn.
The noises from the PB intelligentsia about Oldham sound so similar to the comments that were made about the Liberals and SLAB in GE2015.
People just refused to believe that the Liberals could be hurt badly in the SW and that SLAB could be left with less than 15 to 20 seats (with a few exceptions). I think perhaps people are refusing to focus on the noises coming out of the constituencies. Because they have a very familiar ring.
In the SW, the LIberal which were so surely going to hang onto lots of seats lost the lot.
In Scotland, SLAB who were so surely going to hang onto at least a dozen seats probably 20, managed to keep one.
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
I'd agree with much of that. Where I'd stop is the Asian vote, of which UKIP will get virtually none. That will be a significant blocker for them and is the sole reason why I'd still have Labour as favourite, though by less than the bookies currently do: probably somewhere around 4/6 .
To follow up on that comment, in some ways, a narrow win off the back of a block ethnic minority vote might be the worst of all outcomes for Labour. The response would be "a win is a win; nothing to see here; move along", which would be entirely wrong. The reasons for the near loss would be ignored, as would the reasons for actual win (which are not replicable in most seats in the country). The fact of the scale of the swing and the surge for UKIP would be likewise brushed under the carpet. By contrast, an outright defeat would be much harder to forget, not least because there'd be another UKIP MP in the Commons.
I have to say, before I take my dog out in the monsoon, that the debate on PB is excellent as ever. Balanced, knowledgeable and good-humoured. I wish I had the time to come here more often.
I reckon David Herdson could write a better Kreminology of the Labour years than the sycophantic Andrew Rawnsley ever could. And I have a copy of Servants of the People here in my office.
I wish the Labour party well and although I am enjoying the current bloodsport on offer as much as the next punter, I hope Corbyn doesn't lead them to terminal demise - British democracy is great because it is balanced. I don't think a one-party hegemony would do any of us any good...
The noises from the PB intelligentsia about Oldham sound so similar to the comments that were made about the Liberals and SLAB in GE2015.
People just refused to believe that the Liberals could be hurt badly in the SW and that SLAB could be left with less than 15 to 20 seats (with a few exceptions). I think perhaps people are refusing to focus on the noises coming out of the constituencies. Because they have a very familiar ring.
In the SW, the LIberal which were so surely going to hang onto lots of seats lost the lot.
In Scotland, SLAB who were so surely going to hang onto at least a dozen seats probably 20, managed to keep one.
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
That's a very good argument. I think you may well be right.
Music to my wallet at 5/1 but I'm not that hopeful at the moment.
What's apparent amid this Labour ridiculousness is that Corbyn's allies (and possibly JC himself) hate the modern Labour party more than their opponents ever will.
Seamus Milne? I suspect he'd be glad to see the party ripped to bits.
It's sad.
It's funny what a couple of defeats can do to the psyche. That coupled with the mass retirements of the Blair generation has left a vacuum. Into it have walked the Corbynites, the SWP and Stop the War lot; basically the crazy fuckers.
I'd suggest Labour need Ed Balls and David Miliband back. And those two need build an alliance and crush the leftis against. And not just crush them, but make them go start a new party - a mirror of UKIP.
Otherwise God help the party if this carries on.
From what I've read, you're right about the first five in your list but Beckett was apparently a careerist happy to go along with the prevailing mood of the party. She was very ambivalent about taking on the left in the early- / mid-80s. Don't be too surprised if she ends up back on the front bench. Indeed, were Benn to resign, she might be his replacement.
I'd agree with you on the rest of the points but I wonder whether there's the heft in the rest of the Labour Party, outside the PLP, to take on the left any more. If, say, Balls were to return, he'd have to immediately set himself up as the king-across-the-sea and act on that: setting up his rival shadow shadow cabinet (as someone put it earlier today), and ignoring the whip as he saw fit. I'm not sure he has it in him to do that; he's too much of a Labour loyalist.
DM, by contrast, won't come back and it might be best if he didn't; he's too out of step with the membership now.
Other than Benn, Beckett is the only other plausible alternative I can see being able to fulfil the Michael Howard role of caretaker 'unity' candidate, ie enough links to the left and loy
Why are you so obsessed with Howard?
This is 2015 and it's the Labour party, you are trying to compare two completely different worlds and arbitrarily concluding that history must always repeat itself verbatim.
At best when history repeats itself, it's like a farce not verbatim.
History often repeats itself, the Tories replaced a three term election winner with the Chancellor who ultimately lost office, then replaced him with a political geek who was crushed then an ideological former backbench rebel who was then ousted by his MPs despite winning 60% of members votes after a poor performance in a by-election and lacklustre leadership and replaced him with an experienced member of the Shadow Cabinet, sound familiar?
Turnout will be much lower than that. This is a rare December by-election just months after the GE.
If turnout is low, Labour will win. December or not, people may turn out anyway. In the Oldham East election - in early January - turnout was 48%, so it can be done.
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Trans-Pennine Tunnel - story specially released for by election? But how far is the M62 close to maximum capacity. it always seems busy when I have used it recently.
There was a speech by Osborne the other day announcing that the Birmingham - Crewe part of HS2 would be opened 6 years early and that Crewe station would be totally rebuilt.
Is that the proposal where the entire Crewe station gets moved a couple of miles south, outside the town? If so, I'm not sure I like it.
As for the Trans-Pennine Tunnel: the article says they haven't even done a CBR analysis. Just reopen the Woodhead railway line to trains and force the drivers onto motorail trains.
The thing about these out of town "parkway" stations is that you can spend almost as long getting to them as you do travelling on the train you catch from them!
'park' is the key word.
PS Doctors strike called off
PPS - the extra length of line being opened early (scheduled anyway) is 43 miles long. The station is supposed to be a 5 billion super hub station - a gateway to the northern powerhouse. Next stop Wigan!
The noises from the PB intelligentsia about Oldham sound so similar to the comments that were made about the Liberals and SLAB in GE2015.
People just refused to believe that the Liberals could be hurt badly in the SW and that SLAB could be left with less than 15 to 20 seats (with a few exceptions). I think perhaps people are refusing to focus on the noises coming out of the constituencies. Because they have a very familiar ring.
In the SW, the LIberal which were so surely going to hang onto lots of seats lost the lot.
In Scotland, SLAB who were so surely going to hang onto at least a dozen seats probably 20, managed to keep one.
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
I'd agree with much of that. Where I'd stop is the Asian vote, of which UKIP will get virtually none. That will be a significant blocker for them and is the sole reason why I'd still have Labour as favourite, though by less than the bookies currently do: probably somewhere around 4/6 .
I heard alot of noise about how the asian vote was going to come out and save Anas Sawar;
Labour got tonked in Glasgow Central.
The SNP is not UKIP though. Different perceptions and different noises being made on immigration.
Tyson Fury and Andy Murray make it by the wire and were not going to be on the list until the weekends result. Now, they are probably the favourites (IMO, somehow Ennis still is the bookies favourite). Ennis looks terrible value, I'm very unsure that Athletics is more than a niche sport despite all the coverage that the BBC gives it.
Fury has to be the value now as he can be had at 6s. Shame for anyone who got on Murray at 8s after GB won the semi-final.
The noises from the PB intelligentsia about Oldham sound so similar to the comments that were made about the Liberals and SLAB in GE2015.
People just refused to believe that the Liberals could be hurt badly in the SW and that SLAB could be left with less than 15 to 20 seats (with a few exceptions). I think perhaps people are refusing to focus on the noises coming out of the constituencies. Because they have a very familiar ring.
In the SW, the LIberal which were so surely going to hang onto lots of seats lost the lot.
In Scotland, SLAB who were so surely going to hang onto at least a dozen seats probably 20, managed to keep one.
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
I'd agree with much of that. Where I'd stop is the Asian vote, of which UKIP will get virtually none. That will be a significant blocker for them and is the sole reason why I'd still have Labour as favourite, though by less than the bookies currently do: probably somewhere around 4/6 .
To follow up on that comment, in some ways, a narrow win off the back of a block ethnic minority vote might be the worst of all outcomes for Labour. The response would be "a win is a win; nothing to see here; move along", which would be entirely wrong. The reasons for the near loss would be ignored, as would the reasons for actual win (which are not replicable in most seats in the country). The fact of the scale of the swing and the surge for UKIP would be likewise brushed under the carpet. By contrast, an outright defeat would be much harder to forget, not least because there'd be another UKIP MP in the Commons.
The problem is that the UKIP vote will rise by 10% no matter how good or badly Labour does by Tory tactical voting, so if Labour is still at the same vote share it will be a 5% swing to UKIP, if we apply that it would look as if Labour weakened even if it didn't lose a single vote.
To avoid this it's better to look at the Labour vote share, not the swing. Personally I set the bar to 50%, if it's 55% or more then Benn will have to resign instead of Corbyn.
Agence France-Presse @AFP 2m2 minutes ago #BREAKING Putin says Turkey shot down Russian warplane to protect IS oil trade
Putin's deliberately baiting the Turks into doing something stupid.
Or he's got some lovely intel he's about to deploy. Russian spooks are very good.
"ISIS is a reality and we have to accept that we cannot eradicate a well-organized and popular establishment such as the Islamic State; therefore I urge my western colleagues to revise their mindset about Islamic political currents, put aside their cynical mentalité and thwart Vladimir Putin's plans to crush Syrian Islamist revolutionaries,” - Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization, 24 Nov http://tinyurl.com/gqzloj9
Turkey openly supports ISIS.
We're going to bomb Turkey then?
Turkey does not openly support ISIS. US planes are using Turkish bases to fly missions against ISIS. ISIS were behind a recent suicide bombing in the Turkish town of Suruc.
Turkey is openly fighting a war against its own separatists.
So they're bombing their own people?
Suruc was IS targeting the same Kurdish separatists you speak of.
What's apparent amid this Labour ridiculousness is that Corbyn's allies (and possibly JC himself) hate the modern Labour party more than their opponents ever will.
Seamus Milne? I suspect he'd be glad to see the party ripped to bits.
It's sad.
The Kinnock and then the Blair, Brown, Prescott, Cook, Mandelson, Beckett era showed a lot of backbone in crushing the lunatic tendency - only now do I fully respect how ferociously well they saw them off. Sadly, the current generation don't seem to have the gravitas or the collective power to hit back. It's a legacy of the Blairite/Brownite battles - the two sides were too busy fighting one another over spurious policy difference (when the differences were only really ever personal) to notice the rise of the SWP lot.
It's funny what a couple of defeats can do to the psyche. That coupled with the mass retirements of the Blair generation has left a vacuum. Into it have walked the Corbynites, the SWP and Stop the War lot; basically the crazy fuckers.
I'd suggest Labour need Ed Balls and David Miliband back. And those two need build an alliance and crush the leftis against. And not just crush them, but make them go start a new party - a mirror of UKIP.
Otherwise God help the party if this carries on.
What allowed the lunatic tendency back in was Labour struggling in May 2015 to come up with a moderately plausible economic offering to the voters in the age of no money. The lunatic tendency don't do plausible. It's magic money tree all the way. No limits on borrowing and taxing the rich with gusto.
I think the electorate dismissed Ed Miliband as a leader from the off and - again - the left wing of the Labour party is to blame for this. McCluskey and co tried to be clever by putting a placeman in and it blew up in their faces. GE2015 was there for Labour's taking - Miliband proved a turn off to the SNP* and to Middle England and that was that.
Yes. And they've done it again. They need to sort out their leadership elections.
EdM was voted in on the union vote and Jezza was voted in on the membership vote. As a result there was an issue of legitimacy from the start.
For EdM it was a gift to the press and the Cons; for Jezza it is a gift (!) to the PLP and, we are seeing, the shadow cabinet.
As a very first step to recovery, Lab need to structure a method of leadership election which produces a leader who is unequivocally legitimate.
I don't know how to put this. But does anyone in Labour think that there might be a problem with having a core vote dependant on the Muslim vote at a time when there is significant concern about (a) immigration from the Middle East; (b) integration of such communities and the effects on social cohesion; and (c) the risk of terrorism from groups who are loosely associated with Islam (in their own minds, at least).
The Labour MO is, it seems to me, to stitch together a coalition from various different groups. But such groups can act like magnets - repelling others rather than attracting them. Those who are broadly liberal may find themselves repulsed by Labour's cosying up to the most backward and repressive aspects of Islam, for instance.
There's been a lot of talk in the past of the Republican reliance on a the white male vote being a losing strategy and of the Tories needing to reach out to ethnic minority voters. But doesn't Labour risk making a similar mistake: relying on votes from one particular religious minority and the one currently most associated - in the loosest sense - with problems of a particularly difficult kind to address?
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Strike suspended until Jan 13th. Any Contract that results from the discussions will go to a ballot of Junior Doctors. With a 98% mandate for strike and 99.5% for industrial action there are going to have to be major changes if it is going to be acceptable.
C4 News reporting big applause for Hilary Benn at PLP meeting tonight, a muted reception for Corbyn, one MP reported to have said 'Corbyn gave a vacuous student rant, Benn a tour de force, had it been a boxing match it would have been stopped in Round 1'. Margaret Beckett also reportedly said she was concerned about the lack of direction from the leadership and she nominated Corbyn!
Stop pimping for Benn, he's politically dead no matter how much applause Danzcuk gives him.
Far from politically dead in 2 years time I expect him to be leading the Labour Party
And how is he going to win a leadership election to become leader in 2 years? The party will never vote for someone who so blatantly disagrees with Corbyn.
He will be nominated unopposed as Michael Howard was
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
But how far is the M62 close to maximum capacity. it always seems busy when I have used it recently.
The M62 has been a nightmare for years. The section around the Bradford Spur has always been something of a car park. When I was on contract in Leeds in the mid 90s I used to aim to arrive at the office no later than 7:30am and leave at 4pm because that section of the motorway took nearly as long as the rest of my journey.
These days it is the M60 roadworks between the M61 interchange and the M66 interchange that back up for miles on to the M62. If I am coming back from Yorkshire then I go through Oldham and the A627 and go on to the M60 clockwise.
The noises from the PB intelligentsia about Oldham sound so similar to the comments that were made about the Liberals and SLAB in GE2015.
People just refused to believe that the Liberals could be hurt badly in the SW and that SLAB could be left with less than 15 to 20 seats (with a few exceptions). I think perhaps people are refusing to focus on the noises coming out of the constituencies. Because they have a very familiar ring.
In the SW, the LIberal which were so surely going to hang onto lots of seats lost the lot.
In Scotland, SLAB who were so surely going to hang onto at least a dozen seats probably 20, managed to keep one.
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
I'd agree with much of that. Where I'd stop is the Asian vote, of which UKIP will get virtually none. That will be a significant blocker for them and is the sole reason why I'd still have Labour as favourite, though by less than the bookies currently do: probably somewhere around 4/6 .
To follow up on that comment, in some ways, a narrow win off the back of a block ethnic minority vote might be the worst of all outcomes for Labour. The response would be "a win is a win; nothing to see here; move along", which would be entirely wrong. The reasons for the near loss would be ignored, as would the reasons for actual win (which are not replicable in most seats in the country). The fact of the scale of the swing and the surge for UKIP would be likewise brushed under the carpet. By contrast, an outright defeat would be much harder to forget, not least because there'd be another UKIP MP in the Commons.
The problem is that the UKIP vote will rise by 10% no matter how good or badly Labour does by Tory tactical voting, so if Labour is still at the same vote share it will be a 5% swing to UKIP, if we apply that it would look as if Labour weakened even if it didn't lose a single vote.
To avoid this it's better to look at the Labour vote share, not the swing. Personally I set the bar to 50%, if it's 55% or more then Benn will have to resign instead of Corbyn.
If Labour win 55% of the vote I will eat Lord Ashdown's hat.
What's apparent amid this Labour ridiculousness is that Corbyn's allies (and possibly JC himself) hate the modern Labour party more than their opponents ever will.
Seamus Milne? I suspect he'd be glad to see the party ripped to bits.
It's sad.
It's funny what a couple of defeats can do to the psyche. That coupled with the mass retirements of the Blair generation has left a vacuum. Into it have walked the Corbynites, the SWP and Stop the War lot; basically the crazy fuckers.
I'd suggest Labour need Ed Balls and David Miliband back. And those two need build an alliance and crush the leftis against. And not just crush them, but make them go start a new party - a mirror of UKIP.
Otherwise God help the party if this carries on.
DM, by contrast, won't come back and it might be best if he didn't; he's too out of step with the membership now.
Other than Benn, Beckett is the only other plausible alternative I can see being able to fulfil the Michael Howard role of caretaker 'unity' candidate, ie enough links to the left and loy
Why are you so obsessed with Howard?
This is 2015 and it's the Labour party, you are trying to compare two completely different worlds and arbitrarily concluding that history must always repeat itself verbatim.
At best when history repeats itself, it's like a farce not verbatim.
History often repeats itself, the Tories replaced a three term election winner with the Chancellor who ultimately lost office, then replaced him with a political geek who was crushed then an ideological former backbench rebel who was then ousted by his MPs despite winning 60% of members votes after a poor performance in a by-election and lacklustre leadership and replaced him with an experienced member of the Shadow Cabinet, sound familiar?
Thankfully history rarely repeats itself and this is no exception. Your whole timeline is deviating widely from the start, John Major was only Chancellor for a few months and got the leadership from the MP's in a wild contest, Brown was effectively heading the domestic affairs of Labour for 13 years before he became PM without opposition.
You are forgetting the different worlds and circumstances of Tory 1990 vs 2015 Labour.
If history has to absolutely repeat itself under all circumstances then WW3 will start when Germany, headed by a mustachioed leader, invades France.
Trans-Pennine Tunnel - story specially released for by election? But how far is the M62 close to maximum capacity. it always seems busy when I have used it recently.
This is one of those occasions when the straightforward explanation is the right one - the Trans-Pennine Tunnel Study goes back some way before the death of Michael Meacher. The timing of this announcement has ore to do with the Autumn Statement than anything else.
The M62 over the Pennines is, as you say, pretty rammed and close to capacity (over capacity at some peak times) - second only to the north west of the M60 in the north.
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
There are examples of doctors strikes around the world at various times.
One of the interesting results of this is the bizarre empirical outcome that has been found wherever it has occurred. The Death Rate falls**.
**There are of course understandable and explainable reasons for this - but it's interesting, nonetheless.
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
You know that if the strike had gone ahead there would have been people itching to pin a death onto it solely to get back at the NHS which they despise.
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
I agree. We need the "Like" button back that OGH had on here about 3 incarnations ago (was it Disqus? Or the one before it?)
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
You know that if the strike had gone ahead there would have been people itching to pin a death onto it solely to get back at the NHS which they despise.
I know you feel passionately about this but you are coming across like a total dick.
Agence France-Presse @AFP 2m2 minutes ago #BREAKING Putin says Turkey shot down Russian warplane to protect IS oil trade
Putin's deliberately baiting the Turks into doing something stupid.
Or he's got some lovely intel he's about to deploy. Russian spooks are very good.
"ISIS is a reality and we have to accept that we cannot eradicate a well-organized and popular establishment such as the Islamic State; therefore I urge my western colleagues to revise their mindset about Islamic political currents, put aside their cynical mentalité and thwart Vladimir Putin's plans to crush Syrian Islamist revolutionaries,” - Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization, 24 Nov http://tinyurl.com/gqzloj9
Turkey openly supports ISIS.
We're going to bomb Turkey then?
Turkey does not openly support ISIS. US planes are using Turkish bases to fly missions against ISIS. ISIS were behind a recent suicide bombing in the Turkish town of Suruc.
Turkey is openly fighting a war against its own separatists.
So they're bombing their own people?
Suruc was IS targeting the same Kurdish separatists you speak of.
They won't be doing that any more, not unless they want to go back to the 16th century (and not in the way Erdogan intends).
Oh, you silly conspiracy theorist you.
Erdogan does not want to go back to the 16th, or any other century. He's not backwards, although it does suits your pro-Putin agenda to spout such utter rubbish.
You really are a silly sausage. And it's no wonder, given the 'sources' you often use. Alex Jones, ffs ...
Agence France-Presse @AFP 2m2 minutes ago #BREAKING Putin says Turkey shot down Russian warplane to protect IS oil trade
Putin's deliberately baiting the Turks into doing something stupid.
They already did something stupid like arming and funding IS, flooding Europe with refugees from a war they have promoted and then illegally shooting down an unarmed Russian plane in Syrian airspace. The proper response to the Turkish action would have been to declare war, Erdogan thought wrong that the rest of NATO would support his heinous crime and now he must suffer the consequences. The EU might reward his antics, the Americans might turn a blind eye to the bombing of Kurds whilst US Special Forces were embedded but he shouldn't expect the same cowardice from the Russian leadership.
Odd the extent to which some people will go to excuse the actions of certain nations, even when such actions so obviously harm the national interest of this country. On an unrelated note I see Paddy Ashdown has criticised certain Tory party members of being far too close to certain rich Arabs.
Hmm Looks like laying Wayne Rooney was a good move for SPOTY; backing Vardy less so.
Vardy seems a clear omission.
Sinfield and Bronze are bizarre and ridiculous. Bronze is almost understandable given the desperation to include women but anyone who knows about women's football would think Kim Little would be a much better choice. Unfortunately the BBC is only engaged in English women's football, with no English language coverage of Scotland at all.
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
There are examples of doctors strikes around the world at various times.
One of the interesting results of this is the bizarre empirical outcome that has been found wherever it has occurred. The Death Rate falls**.
**There are of course understandable and explainable reasons for this - but it's interesting, nonetheless.
"There are if course understandable reasons for this" - go on? I'm not saying I disbelieve you, I just can't think what they are. Is it to do with operations etc in which, say, 20% of people die, being postponed, and the delay only killing 10% of people? I like counter-intuitives like this...
Agence France-Presse @AFP 2m2 minutes ago #BREAKING Putin says Turkey shot down Russian warplane to protect IS oil trade
Putin's deliberately baiting the Turks into doing something stupid.
They already did something stupid like arming and funding IS, flooding Europe with refugees from a war they have promoted and then illegally shooting down an unarmed Russian plane in Syrian airspace. The proper response to the Turkish action would have been to declare war, Erdogan thought wrong that the rest of NATO would support his heinous crime and now he must suffer the consequences. The EU might reward his antics, the Americans might turn a blind eye to the bombing of Kurds whilst US Special Forces were embedded but he shouldn't expect the same cowardice from the Russian leadership.
Odd the extent to which some people will go to excuse the actions of certain nations, even when such actions so obviously harm the national interest of this country. On an unrelated note I see Paddy Ashdown has criticised certain Tory party members of being far too close to certain rich Arabs.
Sounds like he's trying to backtrack a little by using the 70000 ground troops argument and the time constraints:
"You are right to seek what you have described as a broad consensus in Parliament for the extension of military action into Syria. However, having spoken to many colleagues over the weekend, I don't believe you are yet in a position to reach such a consensus."
"Firstly, unlike in Iraq where there is a clarity of purpose and action by government led ground forces, it remains uncertain what the ground strategy in Syria would be and whether there is a coherent and capable ground force that could capitalise on the strategic advantage air strikes would give them."
"Secondly, it is clear that military action needs to be part of a wider strategy, including ongoing political negotiations aimed at securing a lasting peace, and a comprehensive reconstruction plan in Syria. We also need a coordinated humanitarian effort to address the refugee crisis the war in Syria has created."
"It is incumbent upon you as the Prime Minister to listen and engage with colleagues and to answer the legitimate questions I have raised on their behalf."
"I do not believe you have given proper time to build consensus. As Jeremy Corbyn has made clear, parliament needs more time to make a considered decision on whether air strikes can take place. Only then can MPs from all parties confidently articulate that decision to their constituents and the British people."
What's apparent amid this Labour ridiculousness is that Corbyn's allies (and possibly JC himself) hate the modern Labour party more than their opponents ever will.
Seamus Milne? I suspect he'd be glad to see the party ripped to bits.
It's sad.
It's funny what a couple of defeats can do to the psyche. That coupled with the mass retirements of the Blair generation has left a vacuum. Into it have walked the Corbynites, the SWP and Stop the War lot; basically the crazy fuckers.
I'd suggest Labour need Ed Balls and David Miliband back. And those two need build an alliance and crush the leftis against. And not just crush them, but make them go start a new party - a mirror of UKIP.
Otherwise God help the party if this carries on.
DM, by contrast, won't come back and it might be best if he didn't; he's too out of step with the membership now.
Other than Benn, Beckett is the only other plausible alternative I can see being able to fulfil the Michael Howard role of caretaker 'unity' candidate, ie enough links to the left and loy
Why are you so obsessed with Howard?
This is 2015 and it's the Labour party, you are trying to compare two completely different worlds and arbitrarily concluding that history must always repeat itself verbatim.
At best when history repeats itself, it's like a farce not verbatim.
History often repeats itself, the Tories replaced a three term election winner with the Chancellor who ultimately lost office, then replaced him with a
Thankfully history rarely repeats itself and this is no exception. Your whole timeline is deviating widely from the start, John Major was only Chancellor for a few months and got the leadership from the MP's in a wild contest, Brown was effectively heading the domestic affairs of Labour for 13 years before he became PM without opposition.
You are forgetting the different worlds and circumstances of Tory 1990 vs 2015 Labour.
If history has to absolutely repeat itself under all circumstances then WW3 will start when Germany, headed by a mustachioed leader, invades France.
So what, they were both Chancellor when they became PM and had Blair had the guts to replace Brown that replacement may well have become PM instead. The circumstances of Tory 1990 are akin to Labour 2007 NOT Labour 2015, the parallel to Labour 2015 is Tory 2001.
As for your last sentence, unlikely, but I would not rule anything out given the present rise of populist parties in the EU and the terrorist attacks in France but nonetheless the paralells between the Tories from 1990-2001 and Labour from 2007-2015 are extraordinary!
Hmm Looks like laying Wayne Rooney was a good move for SPOTY; backing Vardy less so.
Vardy seems a clear omission.
Sinfield and Bronze are bizarre and ridiculous. Bronze is almost understandable given the desperation to include women but anyone who knows about women's football would think Kim Little would be a much better choice. Unfortunately the BBC is only engaged in English women's football, with no English language coverage of Scotland at all.
Sinfield is a bit odd, could have gone for Zac Hardaker as he was the Rugby League Man of Steel and part of the treble team.
Sinfield is more a lifetime achievement type thingy.
I can see the argument for a UKIP win and had a little dabble two weeks ago.
Labour can lose isolated by-elections as Bradford proved in 2011, but I'm not yet convinced that we are where Scotland has reached.
The closeness of the referendum was the point where the dam broke for Labour and the SNP.
I'm not sure we are there yet with an English equivalent but Corbyn is a good start.
For all that, I wouldn't be too surprised to see Labour and UKIP within touching distance of each other around the 40% mark.
Yes and no. The dam broke well before then in Scotland. The GE was just the final domino (mixing metaphors). The SNP showed what it was capable of as early as 2007 when it won the Holyrood election in what was previously a Labour stronghold. From there, they then won again - on a much bigger scale - in 2011, won the 2012 local elections and the 2014 Euros. Certainly, few would have predicted the utter yellowwash of 2015 but there were more than enough indicators to suggest that there was no reason why the SNP couldn't win most seats at a GE too.
UKIP is, of course, a long way from where the SNP were in 2007 never mind 2015, but then they don't need to be. Not yet.
Hammond just said he is confident the Government has got the numbers. Surely must mean a Wednesday one day debate and vote. Hammond in real trouble if wrong
Agence France-Presse @AFP 2m2 minutes ago #BREAKING Putin says Turkey shot down Russian warplane to protect IS oil trade
Putin's deliberately baiting the Turks into doing something stupid.
They already did something stupid like arming and funding IS, flooding Europe with refugees from a war they have promoted and then illegally shooting down an unarmed Russian plane in Syrian airspace. The proper response to the Turkish action would have been to declare war, Erdogan thought wrong that the rest of NATO would support his heinous crime and now he must suffer the consequences. The EU might reward his antics, the Americans might turn a blind eye to the bombing of Kurds whilst US Special Forces were embedded but he shouldn't expect the same cowardice from the Russian leadership.
Odd the extent to which some people will go to excuse the actions of certain nations, even when such actions so obviously harm the national interest of this country. On an unrelated note I see Paddy Ashdown has criticised certain Tory party members of being far too close to certain rich Arabs.
Yes Bob, I'm sure you're right. Really. Obviously. You are such a student of the region that you know what you're talking about. For instance, it's obviously wrong that Turkey's been trying to help up to two million refugees for four years, and has instead been 'flooding Europe' with them as a concerted, evil campaign. And of course, Russian airplanes should be able to fly wherever they like, even out of warzones. Why, they can come over London whilst armed as far as you're concerned! (*)
It's odd the extent to which some people will go to excuse the actions of Russia, even when such actions so obviously harm the national interest of this country ...
What's apparent amid this Labour ridiculousness is that Corbyn's allies (and possibly JC himself) hate the modern Labour party more than their opponents ever will.
Seamus Milne? I suspect he'd be glad to see the party ripped to bits.
It's sad.
Otherwise God help the party if this carries on.
DM, by contrast, won't come back and it might be best if he didn't; he's too out of step with the membership now.
Other than Benn, Beckett is the only other plausible alternative I can see being able to fulfil the Michael Howard role of caretaker 'unity' candidate, ie enough links to the left and loy
Why are you so obsessed with Howard?
This is 2015 and it's the Labour party, you are trying to compare two completely different worlds and arbitrarily concluding that history must always repeat itself verbatim.
At best when history repeats itself, it's like a farce not verbatim.
History often repeats itself, the Tories replaced a three term election winner with the Chancellor who ultimately lost office, then replaced him with a
Thankfully history rarely repeats itself and this is no exception. Your whole timeline is deviating widely from the start, John Major was only Chancellor for a few months and got the leadership from the MP's in a wild contest, Brown was effectively heading the domestic affairs of Labour for 13 years before he became PM without opposition.
You are forgetting the different worlds and circumstances of Tory 1990 vs 2015 Labour.
If history has to absolutely repeat itself under all circumstances then WW3 will start when Germany, headed by a mustachioed leader, invades France.
So what, they were both Chancellor when they became PM and had Blair had the guts to replace Brown that replacement may well have become PM instead. The circumstances of Tory 1990 are akin to Labour 2007 NOT Labour 2015, the parallel to Labour 2015 is Tory 2001.
As for your last sentence, unlikely, but I would not rule anything out given the present rise of populist parties in the EU and the terrorist attacks in France but nonetheless the paralells between the Tories from 1990-2001 and Labour from 2007-2015 are extraordinary!
There are none, Major won in 1992, Brown lost in 2010.
You are probably as much stuck back in time as this guy, although it's more probable that you are stuck in a time loop:
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
There are examples of doctors strikes around the world at various times.
One of the interesting results of this is the bizarre empirical outcome that has been found wherever it has occurred. The Death Rate falls**.
**There are of course understandable and explainable reasons for this - but it's interesting, nonetheless.
"There are if course understandable reasons for this" - go on? I'm not saying I disbelieve you, I just can't think what they are. Is it to do with operations etc in which, say, 20% of people die, being postponed, and the delay only killing 10% of people? I like counter-intuitives like this...
That's pretty much it. Treatment has an effective death rate which, short term is higher than the untreated death rate within the short period. (But of course much lower than the eventual long term death rate of untreated conditions). Plus doctors make mistakes but this is, hopefully, quite tiny.
I'm off to Vienna next week. Do any here know the city - and could you make any recommendations if so?
Thanks
Heeresgeschichtes Museum. Lots of interesting stuff from the Austro-Ottoman wars and from Austria-Hungary in general, including the uniform Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand was wearing when he was shot, and the car he was in. Plus some interesting Skodas. Also, try a brewpub called Siebensternbräu.
Hammond just said he is confident the Government has got the numbers. Surely must mean a Wednesday one day debate and vote. Hammond in real trouble if wrong
Hard to see any circumstance in which he could be wrong if it is true 100+ Labour MPs are voting for.
I can see the argument for a UKIP win and had a little dabble two weeks ago.
Labour can lose isolated by-elections as Bradford proved in 2011, but I'm not yet convinced that we are where Scotland has reached.
The closeness of the referendum was the point where the dam broke for Labour and the SNP.
I'm not sure we are there yet with an English equivalent but Corbyn is a good start.
For all that, I wouldn't be too surprised to see Labour and UKIP within touching distance of each other around the 40% mark.
Yes and no. The dam broke well before then in Scotland. The GE was just the final domino (mixing metaphors). The SNP showed what it was capable of as early as 2007 when it won the Holyrood election in what was previously a Labour stronghold. From there, they then won again - on a much bigger scale - in 2011, won the 2012 local elections and the 2014 Euros. Certainly, few would have predicted the utter yellowwash of 2015 but there were more than enough indicators to suggest that there was no reason why the SNP couldn't win most seats at a GE too.
UKIP is, of course, a long way from where the SNP were in 2007 never mind 2015, but then they don't need to be. Not yet.
It's possible UKIP could have been marginalised for good if Labour had selected a moderate leader in September. Instead they've given the party a new lease of life.
Hmm Looks like laying Wayne Rooney was a good move for SPOTY; backing Vardy less so.
Vardy seems a clear omission.
Sinfield and Bronze are bizarre and ridiculous. Bronze is almost understandable given the desperation to include women but anyone who knows about women's football would think Kim Little would be a much better choice. Unfortunately the BBC is only engaged in English women's football, with no English language coverage of Scotland at all.
If you want a woman then the omission of Helen Glover is even more strange. She has won 4 world championships since the last Olympics and is in fact unbeaten in every race she's taken part in.
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
You know that if the strike had gone ahead there would have been people itching to pin a death onto it solely to get back at the NHS which they despise.
I know no such thing. I do know that the only person who made heartless comments about it was you, so desperate have you been to pin blame on whose whom you claim "despise" the NHS.
I do know that when doctors go on strike patients do die if they don't get treatment on time. I know this not because I despise the NHS (I am currently dependant on it, more than I would like but that's ill health for you) but because this is what happened to my own father, a doctor, the last time there was a doctors' strike. And when I pointed this out to you the last time you made your vile insinuations you scuttled off - unlike others on here like Dr Sox, who at least had the decency and courtesy to engage with the arguments - until you popped up again this evening.
What's apparent amid this Labour ridiculousness is that Corbyn's allies (and possibly JC himself) hate the modern Labour party more than their opponents ever will.
Seamus Milne? I suspect he'd be glad to see the party ripped to bits.
It's sad.
Otherwise God help the party if this carries on.
DM, by contrast, won't come back and it might be best if he didn't; he's too out of step with the membership now.
Other than Benn, Beckett is the only other plausible alternative I can see being able to fulfil the Michael Howard role of caretaker 'unity' candidate, ie enough links to the left and loy
Why are you so obsessed with Howard?
This is 2015 and it's the Labour party, you are trying to compare two completely different worlds and arbitrarily concluding that history must always repeat itself verbatim.
At best when history repeats itself, it's like a farce not verbatim.
History often repeats itself, the Tories replaced a three term election winner with the Chancellor who ultimately lost office, then replaced him with a
Thankfully history rarely repeats itself and this is no exception. Your whole timeline is deviating widely from the start, John Major was only Chancellor for a few months and got the leadership from the MP's in a wild contest, Brown was effectively heading the domestic affairs of Labour for 13 years before he became PM without opposition.
You are forgetting the different worlds and circumstances of Tory 1990 vs 2015 Labour.
If history has to absolutely repeat itself under all circumstances then WW3 will start when Germany, headed by a mustachioed leader, invades France.
So what, they were both Chancellor when they became PM and ha
As for your last sentence, unlikely, but I would not rule anything out given the present rise of populist parties in the EU and the terrorist attacks in France but nonetheless the paralells between the Tories from 1990-2001 and Labour from 2007-2015 are extraordinary!
There are none, Major won in 1992, Brown lost in 2010.
You are probably as much stuck back in time as this guy, although it's more probable that you are stuck in a time loop:
That was the only exception and the only reason for that was that Major did not face Blair until 1997, in 1992 he only faced Kinnock, in 2010 Brown had to face his Blair, Cameron straight away, had he faced the Tory Kinnock, David Davis, in 2007 Brown may have won.
Hammond just said he is confident the Government has got the numbers. Surely must mean a Wednesday one day debate and vote. Hammond in real trouble if wrong
Hard to see any circumstance in which he could be wrong if it is true 100+ Labour MPs are voting for.
Head of NATO has just urged UK to join the coalition against ISIS.
Agence France-Presse @AFP 2m2 minutes ago #BREAKING Putin says Turkey shot down Russian warplane to protect IS oil trade
Putin's deliberately baiting the Turks into doing something stupid.
Or he's got some lovely intel he's about to deploy. Russian spooks are very good.
"ISIS is a reality and we have to accept that we cannot eradicate a well-organized and popular establishment such as the Islamic State; therefore I urge my western colleagues to revise their mindset about Islamic political currents, put aside their cynical mentalité and thwart Vladimir Putin's plans to crush Syrian Islamist revolutionaries,” - Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization, 24 Nov http://tinyurl.com/gqzloj9
Turkey openly supports ISIS.
We're going to bomb Turkey then?
Turkey does not openly support ISIS. US planes are using Turkish bases to fly missions against ISIS. ISIS were behind a recent suicide bombing in the Turkish town of Suruc.
Turkey is openly fighting a war against its own separatists.
So they're bombing their own people?
Suruc was IS targeting the same Kurdish separatists you speak of.
It looks as though IS also did the Diyarbakır and Ankara bombings.
That's the awful thing about the Syrian civil war: it's filled with some large and many small groups (and even the Kurdish Peshmergas have only recently been put under unified control), and most of these groups have fought each other, and alongside each other, at various times as the strategic and tactical ground changes.
(start obvious point) it's a real mess (/end obvious point)
In fact, is it likely that IS actually have little control of their allied terrorist groups? For security, they say: "do something in France", and the people go and do it. But IS at home have little idea when or how it will happen?
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
I agree. We need the "Like" button back that OGH had on here about 3 incarnations ago (was it Disqus? Or the one before it?)
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
It is hard enough to get the Health Service to do things when everyone is at work. When a bunch of them walk out....
And here's another one knocking the NHS probably because it's publicly funded and they cannot stand their taxes going towards it. Compared with other systems the NHS is exceptionally efficient. It's becoming less by the day. But no numbers and statistics mean nothing when put against dogma. There were no data or evidence to support Lansley's changes but they happened nonetheless.
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
There are examples of doctors strikes around the world at various times.
One of the interesting results of this is the bizarre empirical outcome that has been found wherever it has occurred. The Death Rate falls**.
**There are of course understandable and explainable reasons for this - but it's interesting, nonetheless.
"There are if course understandable reasons for this" - go on? I'm not saying I disbelieve you, I just can't think what they are. Is it to do with operations etc in which, say, 20% of people die, being postponed, and the delay only killing 10% of people? I like counter-intuitives like this...
Quite apart from that, which probably does contribute, look at the accident rates in hospitals (falls, wrong medication, false site operations etc...) and add the nosocomial infections.
In 2002 in the US, 1.7 million nosocomial infections led to just shy of 100k deaths - i.e. c300 per day.
PS Alternative definition of a hospital - a place where you go to get sick.
But they never crushed them and they never say them off.
Through explusions and intimidation, they did silence them to a great degree. But this itself was at some cost when they were faced with Galloway and Livingston embarrassing them.
However, it was only ever silencing. They never really went away and most of them just stayed schtum and waited their chance to "get their party back".
The assumption that the Notting Hill sect every did anything but take over the leadership is a false one. All they achieved was the same as multiculturalism ever achieved - silence without the underlying opinions ever changing.
What's the SNP position on multiculturalism and immigration?
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
There are examples of doctors strikes around the world at various times.
One of the interesting results of this is the bizarre empirical outcome that has been found wherever it has occurred. The Death Rate falls**.
**There are of course understandable and explainable reasons for this - but it's interesting, nonetheless.
Is it causation rather than correlation? Also what happens to the death rate later? There must be a time lag effect.
I think FWIW that Labour will probably hold Oldham, more comfortably than we might assume - a lot of the toing and froing over Syria will pass most voters by - but down on the GE. It will not bode well for the future for Labour but it will be a win and therefore banked by Corbyn et al. Even if some former Labour voters desert Labour, I'm not sure how many will cross over to UKIP rather than stay at home. Plus the Labour candidate seems broadly sensible and not a loon so easy for Labour voters who don't like Corbyn to ignore him and vote for their local man.
It would be more fun if it were otherwise.
OTOH if UKIP do win perhaps the lesson to be learnt is to keep Farage well away. He's been largely invisible in this election. Or is it that we can't see him behind all those Labour MPs stabbing each other in the back?
I'm off to Vienna next week. Do any here know the city - and could you make any recommendations if so?
Thanks
Heeresgeschichtes Museum. Lots of interesting stuff from the Austro-Ottoman wars and from Austria-Hungary in general, including the uniform Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand was wearing when he was shot, and the car he was in. Plus some interesting Skodas. Also, try a brewpub called Siebensternbräu.
Many thanks for that John. Can check out the car registration plate - once read that in one of those great coincidences it was A 11-11-18 - the date of the Armistice that ended the war...
Junior doctors' strikes suspended. Will be difficult news for those of you looking forward to "heartless striking doctors killed my mother" type headlines. Will have to await seeing the concessions that Hunt has made.
Really, F....Off! No-one was looking forward to that. No-one. Me in particular. Some of us on here are real patients seeing real doctors with real medical problems who were worried that our health would be compromised by a strike. We don't give a toss about headlines.
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
You know that if the strike had gone ahead there would have been people itching to pin a death onto it solely to get back at the NHS which they despise.
I know no such thing. I do know that the only person who made heartless comments about it was you, so desperate have you been to pin blame on whose whom you claim "despise" the NHS.
I do know that when doctors go on strike patients do die if they don't get treatment on time. I know this not because I despise the NHS (I am currently dependant on it, more than I would like but that's ill health for you) but because this is what happened to my own father, a doctor, the last time there was a doctors' strike. And when I pointed this out to you the last time you made your vile insinuations you scuttled off - unlike others on here like Dr Sox, who at least had the decency and courtesy to engage with the arguments - until you popped up again this evening.
Patients die all the time despite doctors best efforts. If there had been a strike there would have been people rushing to get the headlines out, and solely to run down the NHS. As has been pointed out the evidence is that during periods of strike there are fewer deaths than expected.
Hmm Looks like laying Wayne Rooney was a good move for SPOTY; backing Vardy less so.
Vardy seems a clear omission.
Sinfield and Bronze are bizarre and ridiculous. Bronze is almost understandable given the desperation to include women but anyone who knows about women's football would think Kim Little would be a much better choice. Unfortunately the BBC is only engaged in English women's football, with no English language coverage of Scotland at all.
If you want a woman then the omission of Helen Glover is even more strange. She has won 4 world championships since the last Olympics and is in fact unbeaten in every race she's taken part in.
The problem for Rowing is that it still is nowhere near the profile needed to get anyone on the shortlist in an non-Olympic year.
One positive of this years list is that there's no token para-athlete. The attempts to equate para-sport with non-para is ridiculous tokenism of the worst kind. Especially when Britain is playing para-sports at a different level from every nation on earth - and not based on talent.
I don't know how to put this. But does anyone in Labour think that there might be a problem with having a core vote dependant on the Muslim vote at a time when there is significant concern about (a) immigration from the Middle East; (b) integration of such communities and the effects on social cohesion; and (c) the risk of terrorism from groups who are loosely associated with Islam (in their own minds, at least).
It's already a toxic association for Labour and will only get worse with a leadership perceived to be soft on terrorism and a bit too fond of terrorists and despots.
The dependence on the muslim vote will grow until it will determine policy and behaviour.
Well, with Labour going for a free vote, I'm sure Cameron will win the day on Wednesday but we were told last week and over the weekend he wanted an "emphatic" victory - presumably that doesn't mean under 10 but what does it mean ? 50, 100, 200 ?
How many Conservatives (is it a free vote for tme as well ?) will choose not to support the Prime Minister - we hear numbers from 10-20 mentioned but I imagine the Conservative Whips will be keen to minimise that figure.
Labour's woes seem anxious to persist - in effect, the takeover of the Party by the membership (almost democracy there) has marginalised large parts of the Shadow Cabinet and Parliamentary Party but said groupings need to ask themselves the searching questions.
No one expects defeated parties to change or have a Damascene revelation as to what went wrong overnight - politics doesn't work that way. Political parties are like supertankers and take time to change direction. The other problem is adaptability to the changed reality - there really is no poit fighting yesterday's war or even today's but to be thinking about tomorrow's.
Labour should be putting together its concept of 2020s Britain and it may look quite different from 2010s Britian which in turn differed from 2000s Britain. That's the thing - today's solutions may not solve tomorrow's problems but conceptualising both future problem and solution isn't easy but in Oppostion you have time to think about it.
I don't know how to put this. But does anyone in Labour think that there might be a problem with having a core vote dependant on the Muslim vote at a time when there is significant concern about (a) immigration from the Middle East; (b) integration of such communities and the effects on social cohesion; and (c) the risk of terrorism from groups who are loosely associated with Islam (in their own minds, at least).
It's already a toxic association for Labour and will only get worse with a leadership perceived to be soft on terrorism and a bit too fond of terrorists and despots.
The dependence on the muslim vote will grow until it will determine policy and behaviour.
The end game for multiculturalism can only be allowing communities to dictate all aspects of life in their community, including Sharia Law as an example.
Labour must be closing in on this, I'm sure their segregated meetings are calling for it already.
Comments
Labour got tonked in Glasgow Central.
----- But Becket was a 'caravanist'.
I know two people living in Oldham West one of whom is a life-long labour voter and the other told me that she had consistently voted Labour for over 30 years. Neither will be voting for Labour whilst Corbyn is in charge. I asked who they would vote for instead and they both said that they would probably not bother voting. Neither can stomach UKIP.
Suruc was IS targeting the same Kurdish separatists you speak of.
This is 2015 and it's the Labour party, you are trying to compare two completely different worlds and arbitrarily concluding that history must always repeat itself verbatim.
At best when history repeats itself, it's like a farce not verbatim.
But I expect Labour to win. Turnout about 35% overall, but likely that the turnout will be high for British Asians and very few will be kippers. Many both white and Asian are anti-bombing. I also expect that the Tory vote will go down by just a bit and the LDs will hold their deposit.
A NoJam PB contest would be fun, even if it postpones the much awaited AV thread.
I'm busy elsewhere for at least parts of every day. I can't keep up with all these events!
PS Doctors strike called off
The party will never vote for someone who so blatantly disagrees with Corbyn.
Thanks
I reckon David Herdson could write a better Kreminology of the Labour years than the sycophantic Andrew Rawnsley ever could. And I have a copy of Servants of the People here in my office.
I wish the Labour party well and although I am enjoying the current bloodsport on offer as much as the next punter, I hope Corbyn doesn't lead them to terminal demise - British democracy is great because it is balanced. I don't think a one-party hegemony would do any
of us any good...
Good night!
Next stop Wigan!
Shortlist is out.
Tyson Fury and Andy Murray make it by the wire and were not going to be on the list until the weekends result. Now, they are probably the favourites (IMO, somehow Ennis still is the bookies favourite). Ennis looks terrible value, I'm very unsure that Athletics is more than a niche sport despite all the coverage that the BBC gives it.
Fury has to be the value now as he can be had at 6s. Shame for anyone who got on Murray at 8s after GB won the semi-final.
To avoid this it's better to look at the Labour vote share, not the swing.
Personally I set the bar to 50%, if it's 55% or more then Benn will have to resign instead of Corbyn.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/24/l-todd-wood-will-reckless-turkey-draw-nato-war-rus/
They won't be doing that any more, not unless they want to go back to the 16th century (and not in the way Erdogan intends).
EdM was voted in on the union vote and Jezza was voted in on the membership vote. As a result there was an issue of legitimacy from the start.
For EdM it was a gift to the press and the Cons; for Jezza it is a gift (!) to the PLP and, we are seeing, the shadow cabinet.
As a very first step to recovery, Lab need to structure a method of leadership election which produces a leader who is unequivocally legitimate.
@PolhomeEditor: David Winnick says Labour MPs voting for war are facing a "shakedown" from Momentum, which is a "party within a party".
The Labour MO is, it seems to me, to stitch together a coalition from various different groups. But such groups can act like magnets - repelling others rather than attracting them. Those who are broadly liberal may find themselves repulsed by Labour's cosying up to the most backward and repressive aspects of Islam, for instance.
There's been a lot of talk in the past of the Republican reliance on a the white male vote being a losing strategy and of the Tories needing to reach out to ethnic minority voters. But doesn't Labour risk making a similar mistake: relying on votes from one particular religious minority and the one currently most associated - in the loosest sense - with problems of a particularly difficult kind to address?
http://www.almasdarnews.com/article/developing-story-syrian-government-and-armed-opposition-to-discuss-political-settlement-in-homs-city/
Labour can lose isolated by-elections as Bradford proved in 2011, but I'm not yet convinced that we are where Scotland has reached.
The closeness of the referendum was the point where the dam broke for Labour and the SNP.
I'm not sure we are there yet with an English equivalent but Corbyn is a good start.
For all that, I wouldn't be too surprised to see Labour and UKIP within touching distance of each other around the 40% mark.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/30/tom-watson-tells-david-ca_n_8683084.html?1448911867&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067
And some of us have real experience of what happens when doctors go on strike. Bad headlines is the least of it.
These days it is the M60 roadworks between the M61 interchange and the M66 interchange that back up for miles on to the M62. If I am coming back from Yorkshire then I go through Oldham and the A627 and go on to the M60 clockwise.
I hate the M62 almost as much as the M6 J8 - J10
That’s not encouragement, that’s intimidation bordering on abuse.
Your whole timeline is deviating widely from the start, John Major was only Chancellor for a few months and got the leadership from the MP's in a wild contest, Brown was effectively heading the domestic affairs of Labour for 13 years before he became PM without opposition.
You are forgetting the different worlds and circumstances of Tory 1990 vs 2015 Labour.
If history has to absolutely repeat itself under all circumstances then WW3 will start when Germany, headed by a mustachioed leader, invades France.
The M62 over the Pennines is, as you say, pretty rammed and close to capacity (over capacity at some peak times) - second only to the north west of the M60 in the north.
One of the interesting results of this is the bizarre empirical outcome that has been found wherever it has occurred. The Death Rate falls**.
**There are of course understandable and explainable reasons for this - but it's interesting, nonetheless.
It is hard enough to get the Health Service to do things when everyone is at work. When a bunch of them walk out....
https://twitter.com/BritainEIects/status/671382669494755328
Erdogan does not want to go back to the 16th, or any other century. He's not backwards, although it does suits your pro-Putin agenda to spout such utter rubbish.
You really are a silly sausage. And it's no wonder, given the 'sources' you often use. Alex Jones, ffs ...
Odd the extent to which some people will go to excuse the actions of certain nations, even when such actions so obviously harm the national interest of this country. On an unrelated note I see Paddy Ashdown has criticised certain Tory party members of being far too close to certain rich Arabs.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/11/here-we-are-again-on-the-way-to-war-and-all-anyone-can-talk-about-is-the-labour-whip-.html
(See beginning of thread for info)
It's a spoof.
http://fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/academic/pdf/13/9780198736110.pdf
Sinfield and Bronze are bizarre and ridiculous. Bronze is almost understandable given the desperation to include women but anyone who knows about women's football would think Kim Little would be a much better choice. Unfortunately the BBC is only engaged in English women's football, with no English language coverage of Scotland at all.
"You are right to seek what you have described as a broad consensus in Parliament for the extension of military action into Syria. However, having spoken to many colleagues over the weekend, I don't believe you are yet in a position to reach such a consensus."
"Firstly, unlike in Iraq where there is a clarity of purpose and action by government led ground forces, it remains uncertain what the ground strategy in Syria would be and whether there is a coherent and capable ground force that could capitalise on the strategic advantage air strikes would give them."
"Secondly, it is clear that military action needs to be part of a wider strategy, including ongoing political negotiations aimed at securing a lasting peace, and a comprehensive reconstruction plan in Syria. We also need a coordinated humanitarian effort to address the refugee crisis the war in Syria has created."
"It is incumbent upon you as the Prime Minister to listen and engage with colleagues and to answer the legitimate questions I have raised on their behalf."
"I do not believe you have given proper time to build consensus. As Jeremy Corbyn has made clear, parliament needs more time to make a considered decision on whether air strikes can take place. Only then can MPs from all parties confidently articulate that decision to their constituents and the British people."
As for your last sentence, unlikely, but I would not rule anything out given the present rise of populist parties in the EU and the terrorist attacks in France but nonetheless the paralells between the Tories from 1990-2001 and Labour from 2007-2015 are extraordinary!
Sinfield is more a lifetime achievement type thingy.
UKIP is, of course, a long way from where the SNP were in 2007 never mind 2015, but then they don't need to be. Not yet.
It's odd the extent to which some people will go to excuse the actions of Russia, even when such actions so obviously harm the national interest of this country ...
(*) hyperbole to match yours
You are probably as much stuck back in time as this guy, although it's more probable that you are stuck in a time loop:
http://news.yahoo.com/russian-deserter-found-hiding-forest-over-10-years-143436177.html
I do know that when doctors go on strike patients do die if they don't get treatment on time. I know this not because I despise the NHS (I am currently dependant on it, more than I would like but that's ill health for you) but because this is what happened to my own father, a doctor, the last time there was a doctors' strike. And when I pointed this out to you the last time you made your vile insinuations you scuttled off - unlike others on here like Dr Sox, who at least had the decency and courtesy to engage with the arguments - until you popped up again this evening.
That's the awful thing about the Syrian civil war: it's filled with some large and many small groups (and even the Kurdish Peshmergas have only recently been put under unified control), and most of these groups have fought each other, and alongside each other, at various times as the strategic and tactical ground changes.
(start obvious point) it's a real mess (/end obvious point)
In fact, is it likely that IS actually have little control of their allied terrorist groups? For security, they say: "do something in France", and the people go and do it. But IS at home have little idea when or how it will happen?
In 2002 in the US, 1.7 million nosocomial infections led to just shy of 100k deaths - i.e. c300 per day.
PS Alternative definition of a hospital - a place where you go to get sick.
https://twitter.com/SkyNewsBreak/status/671418200102432769
Is Cameron hoping that Thursday's headlines won't be good for a Labour hold?
One positive of this years list is that there's no token para-athlete. The attempts to equate para-sport with non-para is ridiculous tokenism of the worst kind. Especially when Britain is playing para-sports at a different level from every nation on earth - and not based on talent.
The dependence on the muslim vote will grow until it will determine policy and behaviour.
Well, with Labour going for a free vote, I'm sure Cameron will win the day on Wednesday but we were told last week and over the weekend he wanted an "emphatic" victory - presumably that doesn't mean under 10 but what does it mean ? 50, 100, 200 ?
How many Conservatives (is it a free vote for tme as well ?) will choose not to support the Prime Minister - we hear numbers from 10-20 mentioned but I imagine the Conservative Whips will be keen to minimise that figure.
Labour's woes seem anxious to persist - in effect, the takeover of the Party by the membership (almost democracy there) has marginalised large parts of the Shadow Cabinet and Parliamentary Party but said groupings need to ask themselves the searching questions.
No one expects defeated parties to change or have a Damascene revelation as to what went wrong overnight - politics doesn't work that way. Political parties are like supertankers and take time to change direction. The other problem is adaptability to the changed reality - there really is no poit fighting yesterday's war or even today's but to be thinking about tomorrow's.
Labour should be putting together its concept of 2020s Britain and it may look quite different from 2010s Britian which in turn differed from 2000s Britain. That's the thing - today's solutions may not solve tomorrow's problems but conceptualising both future problem and solution isn't easy but in Oppostion you have time to think about it.
Labour must be closing in on this, I'm sure their segregated meetings are calling for it already.