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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Echoes of History: Hilary Benn and Michael Foot
How to draw the sting from Hilary Benn’s brilliant wind-up speech in the Commons debate on Syria air strikes? That was the problem facing Labour and SNP opponents of the military action who were on the wrong end of the 179 majority.
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As Mr Meeks keeps on saying (*), any MP who wants to take over from Corbyn has to talk to, and appeal to, the members. Not many of the centrists appear to be trying to do so.
On the other hand, the 'members' are not appearing particularly conciliatory towards centrist MPs (or even centrist members)
(*) I think that's right.
(in the Joshua fight 18 months down the line)
If you re-read my post I said "large numbers". Since when does a large number equal all?
"Comrades, our own Parliamentary Party don't know our full potential! They will do everything possible to test us; but they will only test their own embarrassment. We will leave our MPs behind, we will pass through the Conservative patrols, past their sonar nets, and lay off their largest constituency, and listen to their chortling and tittering... while we conduct
AusteritySyria debates! Then, and when we are finished, the only sound they will hear is our laughter, while we sail to Brighton, where the sun is warm, and so is the... Comradeship."A great day, Comrades. We sail into history!"
Would have been interesting to see a by-election yesterday down the East/NE coast with a slightly different working class demographic.
Foot's contains more verbal parantheses than a PB.com argument.
Of course, it wouldn't be a problem if Corbyn and McDonnell were not, in fact, terrorist sympathisers.
The only thing embarrassing is he should have said terrorist supporter.
The insinuation is that Cameron is some of warmonger, making partisan calculation on matters of life and death, which is unmitigated, 100%, grade-A garbage. Or, if he is, so is Obama. And so is François Hollande.
Heaven preserve us from Labour, if they think like that. Sensible people will understand wanting to damage, and eventually destroy, ISIS is not only justified in self-defence, but the only moral course of action. That of course doesn't automatically make the specific policy of changing the rules of engagement to include ISIS-held territory in Syria the right thing to do, but it does automatically make it a moral thing to do for those who reasonably believe it is, on balance, likely to help.
Those who don't believe that should propose some alternative, and one less fatuous than 'negotiate a comprehensive political settlement in Syria'. In particular, I cannot myself see any logic whatsoever in opposing the UK's involvment in ISIS-held Syria, whilst supporting it in Iraq, and supporting the policy of the French, and supporting the UN resolution, which seems to be the position of many of those who opposed this week's government motion.
Of course that doesn't make it any less accurate, and as it happens the furore won't have done any long-term harm. In fact, it won't have made any difference, because irrespective of anything Cameron says, an appreciation of what people like Corbyn, McDonnell, Livingstone, and Seamas Milne believe will slowly and inevitably seep into the consciousness of voters. We're only part-way there so far, of course.
I don't really have the same level of offense about it Labour showed and Don obviously shares with them (unsurprisingly, being a Labour man). It's politics. Right or left, people slander by inference (even though Corbyn and McDonnell have made comments seeming to support terrorists, appearing to conflate anyone else who opposed action as doing the same, though that has since been stated not to have been the point, would be such a slander) all the time, and I don't see much point in getting angry about it whichever side does it, though it should be called out when it happens. But it doesn't make Cameron or Thatcher or whoever, any more shameless or nakedly partisan than any other PM who has misrepresented, or appeared to misrepresent, an opponent, or suggested, lightly or otherwise, that their opponents were not just wrong, but morally wrong in some fashion.
Show me a government or opposition that doesn't engage in such behaviour - it's political behaviour, not partisan behaviour, so as long as it is kept in perspective while being criticised (that is to say, not pretending it is unusual for any political leader in government or opposition to be sh*tty to their opponents), calling it out is fine, without getting carried away.
Maybe the PM chose the wrong words, but the fact that a big story to come from the debate was that Labour were denying being terrorist sympathisers only gave legs to the idea. The Corbynite tendency really don't like it when someone calls them out for who they really are.
The BBC have a piccie of one of the cracks in the Firth Bridge:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-35001277
Difficult ...
You write that as though its a bad thing.......
Meanwhile, Corbyn has shared a train with Osborne to Manchester to spend all of 2 minutes and 6 seconds in public with his new MP......
Miliband obtained a higher Con-Lab swing in eight by-elections 2010-2015, including the first of that parliament, Oldham East...
Raqqa itself of course will be a much tougher problem, but we could restrict ourselves to the Deir Al'ziz oilfield and be more effective than we otherwise would have been doing nothing (The alternate position).
Tactical support for the kurds is something else we can do that is politically "easy".
Blowing the snot out of oil I'd suggest is alot more effective than trying to locate and stop the money trails resulting from Da'esh oil. An almost impossible task seeing as the oil is being bought by every Mohamed, Shayan and even Jacob in the region wanting to make a fast buck.
Must disagree with the article.
Corbyn has been pictured cheerfully standing by a poster of Lenin. McDonnell read from the little red book at the dispatch box. Abbott has claimed Mao did more good than bad. Livingstone has said Blair's foreign policy absolved the 7/7 bombers of their crime.
Also Caroline effing Lucas telling Nawaz all about the middle east. Dear God.
Unlikely. I've regularly taken more chuckles from a single Matt cartoon than from a lifetime of Steve Bell ones.
Maybe that's true of other parties too now that postal voting is so easily available. A few years ago I asked for a postal vote out of necessity, and subsequently I have been sent reminders enabling me to reactivate it.
They don't actually use AWS very much. The vast bulk of streaming comes from boxes that sit actually at ISPs, usually in local cable offices or close to DSLAMs. They have a box stuffed with Hard Disk Drives that contain tens of terabytes of TVs and movies. Thus, the video streams just have to travel (mostly) the end of your DSL line or cable connection. Netflix pays the cable and telecoms companies "rent" so they can put the boxes in their buildings. When they push out a new series (say the utterly outstanding Jessica Jones) they simply have one connection from their central servers (probably on AWS) to the local cable or telco office.
I find it very ummm, 'sad' to see tories following Corbyn into the No lobby on this - Corbyn himself being pushed in there by the likes of Ken Livingstone.
If it's oil, and it's in their territory, it should be a target.
But tackling their income is only part of the problem. If you look at what they did to Tikrit, taking any other city is going to be very painful for the attacking forces. It's believed ISIS left between five and ten thousand IEDs in the city, with buildings wired to blow.
And the make-up of the force that took the city shows how we will have to work with a range of groups: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-v-micallef/lessons-from-the-second-b_b_7049430.html
Or, looking down the other end of the telescope, the unwillingness of Labour's leaders to support national military endeavours even though it is to their own disadvantage. They can't bring themselves to support our armed forces even when they are being used to fight ISIL, an entity that would otherwise embody everything the Left despises. If only they weren't Muslims, eh? In their great book of excuses, is there anything that the Corbynistas will call out homophobic misogynistic religious-intolerant inhuman psychopath scum for, if they also happen to be Muslims?
Matt is brilliant.
However, it's also worth remembering that Foot won in 1980 in no small part because Callaghan pre-empted the change to the leadership election rules. Corbyn, by contrast, was elected after - and perhaps because of - the rule change (yes, in the end the party membership backed him too but I wonder if that would have been the case had not the three-quidders started the ball rolling). Even if Corbyn is forced out, Benn is still stuck with having to negotiate the same electorate.
There has to be a small chance it will never fully reopen, even with weight limits.
http://elxn-data.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/be-yourself-on-your-best-day.html
Only if they keep up their subscription after the special introductory offer.
A lovely word for a lovely problem
''division into two mutually exclusive, opposed, or contradictory groups''
I gave Brind a few fair goes at the beginning but I just can't be arsed looking any more.
Why would I? Job jobbed already.
I must say I thought there was a second bridge open by now but its a year away. The article suggests its going to replace the original; I know its 50 years old but it ought to last longer than that surely.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-35006404
Momentum members shared leaflets calling for “a vote of no confidence in Chuka Umunna”, activists sought signatures for a petiton “against Chuka” and one member demanded to know from the chief Momentum organiser: “What are you going to do about Umunna?”
http://www.conservativehome.com/leftwatch/2015/12/my-evening-with-mcdonnell-and-momentum-and-yes-its-all-about-deselections.html