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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Nick Palmer on What next if Corbyn sweeps the board?
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Nick Palmer on What next if Corbyn sweeps the board?
First, the YouGov poll is just one poll, which as we know could be quite wrong. But it fits with CLP nominations, widespread anecdotal evidence and the implications of the increase in membership. This article, for the sake of argument, will assume that the poll is correct. What happens next?
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Betting PostFPT:
F1: put a tiny sum on Vettel, and even less on Raikkonen [to equalise profit] on them to win each way at 17 and 29 respectively [Ladbrokes]. That's top 2.
In the races so far, Mercedes have a surprisingly low three occasions of 1-2 finishes. Vettel has been 2nd three times (thirteen races so far). Monza should be better for Ferrari, and they were basically a match for Red Bull at Spa, so they should be directly behind Mercedes in case anything goes wrong.
My main concern is that Vettel's been rubbish at wheel-to-wheel stuff at the start. Against that, Mercedes have started a bit ropily too.
Anyway, tiny sums, do at your own risk, etc and so forth. Won't count in my weekly records, of course. Unless I also tip it in the weekend articles.
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The EU should fine Ireland $13bn and then leave it up to them whether they ask Apple to reimburse them.
"If Labour wins"
NP, you actually really seriously considering that?
If the EU's prepared to do this to Ireland's economy, (which it merely doesn;t care about), imagine what it would have done to the City (which it mightily detests).
What's more, I don't see that they would be any less stuffed if by some miracle Owen Smith were to pull victory from the jaws of defeat. The Corbynistas and their fellow travellers are still going to be there, and angry. They might even split off themselves, achieving similar effects to those Nick describes for SDP Mk II. And Smith has not exactly dazzled us with the brilliance of his debating, campaigning, leadership, policy development, or organisational skills. He might even be worse than Corbyn.
Those sane Labour MPs and party members who don't drift off in disgust and frustration will just have to lie low for a few years, until something else turns up.
Edit: More positively, at least they have Sadiq Khan, and potentially other Labour mayors coming along, to act as a rallying-point.
The option(s) ignored by Nick are that Corbyn stays, Labour is annihilated in 2020, and the remnant of MPs merge with LibDems.
As the reduction in seats mean that many MPs are going to be up for reselection in a newly created constituency I don't think an MP can keep suitable invisible to remain safe...
The bit of comedy 'if Labour wins' was a nice touch...
I'd also take issue with the assertion that "dramatic change comes a little less quickly and cleanly than one might expect". I'd phrase it as "dramatic change comes a little less often or cleanly than the commentariat expects". But I'd add the rider that when dramatic change does come, like buses it comes in groups. The logic says that Labour and SDP2 would both be damaged by a split but then the logic also says that Labour will be damaged by re-electing Corbyn.
I don't know whether Nick really is blind to the scale of the trouble that Labour's in or whether he's just not admitting it but Corbyn and the PLP cannot cohabit for another three years if he carries on as he has done. Something has to go, whether it be him, his way of working, or them. I do expect a split of some nature if Corbyn stays to 2020 but at the moment, I'd say it's more likely to be half-a-dozen than a hundred MPs and end in irrelevance. I wouldn't rule out the hundred-scenario though.
There is another point that Nick touches on. Waiting until 2020 will probably not just mean accepting Corbyn, his policies, a very changed membership and a successor leader from the left, it's likely to mean changed rules and central personnel as well. If you are on the Progress wing and looking at 2030 before getting a sniff of power, do you really see your future as being in Labour?
What it ignores is that the majority of the PLP simply disagree with Jezza on critical policy issues. It will be difficult for a refilled cabinet to get on with the job when, for example, they disagree with the Leader (and the Leader disagrees with Labour Party policy) on eg. Trident, some of the barmier nationalisations, the armed forces, etc, etc, etc.
What you describe indeed will likely be the case but Lab will remain a dysfunctional and hugely ineffective opposition. The tragedy is not that Jezza doesn't see that, but that he doesn't seem to care.
Oh and of course a Jezza-led Lab will be destroyed in 2020.
Far better for him to split together with his leftist MPs, they all form a new left party, hold elections if they want to do the honourable thing, and do a UKIP. ie bide their time until the country is ready for a hard left government.
That would be the honourable thing to do.
They resigned expressing no confidence in Corbyn, many with different and detailed tales of how disfunctional things were. They voted no confidence in Corbyn. Yet to have a fully staffed shadow government many of them will need to go back - and if not them then other MPs who voted no confidence.
How do they handle John Humphries? "Yes shadow minister what you've just said is interesting. But you resigned having no confidence in your leader. Now you sit here saying not only do you have confidence in him but voters should as well. What changed?"
Politically this was why I thought the resignations would finish Him. And why even now it probably will still finish Him. His team have no confidence in him. Who would vote for a government where the ministers don't trust the PM?
Nick is not wrong
There's some interesting detail (which I was unable to find elsewhere) of what they think are their key advantages in the comments section here:
http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/2016/08/11/dont-worry-british-nuclear-doesnt-have-all-its-eggs-in-one-basket/
It may not prove successful, but it represents a far smaller gamble, with a far greater potential upside, than does Hinckley, IMO.
None very likely, so win or lose represents the likely outcomes.
Indeed it is hard to see anything that they have done right IMHO.
Also, I'm not sure how the solar plant makes a molten salt nuclear reactor proven.
You can't spend 10 months saying how awful he is and then do a complete flipflop and say that you will serve under him.
We have seen that the policy-making systems under Corbyn are not fit for purpose. We have seen that bullying and violence are seemingly embedded into the thinking of his supporters.
How can anyone with any moral compass sign up to that?
To eeek: MPs with an interest in 40% of a new constituency are considered by Labour to be sitting MPs with the advantages related to that. So the cases where two MPs collide are those constituencies where two MPs both have more than 40% of the new patch. I don't have an exact analysis (indeed we can't until we see the recommendations), but it's likely to be a small number.
To the people who ask derisively if I'm serious that Labour could win: the article doesn't express a view and isn't about that. But it's unwise to assume anything for certain in politics.
To IanB2: yes, FPTP sucks in the modern world. A fair reflection of the modern range of opinion desperately needs PR.
To Topping: I think you overestimate the degree to which the divisions are policy-driven. Sure, there's Trident, but Corbyn has essentially said MPs must vote as they think fit on that, and on other issues like NATO and the monarchy he's deferred to the balance of opinion against change. On austerity, conversely, most Labour MPs now seem basically to accept the left's position that it was excessive before and is certainly not appropriate now. MPs are worried about winning, not about the fine points of the potential manifesto.
To David H: I think there will be some effort from both sides to bridge the gap, but it doesn't take very much for discontented marriages to muddle on - basically that neither side goes out of its way to start a new fight.
Apple Statement:
At its root, the Commission’s case is not about how much Apple pays in taxes. It is about which government collects the money
http://reaction.life/?p=788?ts
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=leaflets&subName=display&leafletId=89
"In politics, as in the rest of life, dramatic change comes a little less quickly and cleanly than one might expect."
Nick Palmer
Miliband to loony left ... in the blink of an eye.
Nick answered the question though so it may not be that much of an issue...
Just pointing out that many on the left see Trotskyism as "counter-revolutionary"!
viz.
If we wish to liberate our world from imperialist exploitation and oppression, we must first rid our movement of all pro-imperialist, social-democratic ideology, not least the r-r-revolutionary garbage of Trotskyism.
Yes - it was a very quiet summer politically.
I have no confidence in the leader. What is the excuse why they now have confidence? His mandate? Which will have changed how?
For me this is what makes this whole fandango so absurd - it truly is anti-politics. Jezbollah keep insisting everything has changed. But human psychology hasn't. The way people get political information and make decisions hasn't. The electoral system hasn't. Nor is it really new politics - Traingate demonstrates that Team Corbyn participate in the old politics (spin) but are utterly shit at it.
They went after him too heavy, too soon. Jamie Reed resigned within minutes of Corbyn being elected leader and ever since then there have been numerous Labour MP's briefing against him in the media. All this has served to do is to provide Corbyn with the perfect defence in their eyes of his adoring supporters.
He was never given a chance and has been attacked and undermined by the majority of the PLP who seem more interested in attacking their own leader than attacking the government. Of course polling figures for both Corbyn and Labour are going to be poor if the PLP has declared war on its own leader. These are the things that most Corbyn supporters will say.
However, if the PLP rebels believe their own hype, that Corbyn is unelectable, then the better way to have approached it would have been to show tepid support and loyalty to him and let the polling figures tell their own story. If Labour had been polling 27% at the moment and there had been no Parliamentary revolt, then Corbyn would be losing his supporters in large enough numbers to allow a challenger to depose him.
Every step of the way, every attack and criticism that has been instigated by his own MP's, has bolstered Corbyn's support amongst the more recently joining members and there are a lot more of them than there are pre 2015 members.
"They could reasonably hope not to have Lib Dem opposition" eh? I wonder where that comes from.
The original SDP was set up with the encouragement of the leadership of the Liberal Party. So far, I have seen no sign that the leadership of the Lib Dems is encouraging the rudderless Labour MPs to form a separate party.
If they take a step back and look dispassionately at the current state of Labour, and then at what the Lib Dems stand for, and decide that at heart they identify with the Lib Dems, that is another matter entirely. I think that, in that case, they would be welcome.
But not if they keep their authoritarian Labour characteristics. In that case they would feel much more at home in the party of Mrs May. Or Corbinite Labour, of course.
Not that that would have any particularly interesting long-term implications - you would expect Labour to hold most by-elections while in opposition, even when riding low in the polls.
I still think they should split, if you have no faith whatsoever in the leader or the direction the party is going in then you should do something. There is nothing stopping the party splitting and then maybe merging again further down the line when Corbyn and his Momentum nutters have buggered off. If they don't leave then you position this new party in the centre left ground that Corbyn's Labour has surrendered and kill Corbyn's party off.
It should have been clear to him that he was the likely winner last September and he should have been better prepared. But he wasn't.
He took days and days to bring together a Shadow Cabinet - appointing people he had never spoken to in the past, giving Angela Eagle a special title when it became clear that he hadn't appointed a woman to a senior position and so forth.
That set the tone and things went downhill from there.
As a serial rebel, he was never going to be able to inspire others to be loyal to him when it was clear he was never loyal to anyone in the past.
This was further highlighted with the big split over supporting military action against ISIS. He was upstaged by Hilary Benn and that diminished him further.
If he had made a confident start, perhaps things might not have got so bad, so quickly. But he failed his first test as leader and the rest is history.
@RobD
Where the PLP rebels have been absurdly stupid was in using Brexit rather than eg poor local election results in 2017 as the trigger for mass resignations and a challenge. Corbyn's lukewarm ambivalent support for the EU was far more in tune with the nation than Smith's rabid Europhilia. It was moronic to launch a coup claiming "we are more in tune with the nation because the nation just rejected what we wanted".
Apple deserves to gets hurt by this, both financially and in PR terms. Sadly, I doubt they will be.
If the government of Ireland was siding against Apple you may have a point.
It's not a price comparison. The point is that should we proceed with Hinckley, we commit now to spending the many billions, with no guarantee that it will be running in time to replace the obsolete existing reactors. The money for Moltex is not for a commercial reactor, but to give them some chance to prove the tech.
If they eventually build them, the plants will be much smaller, so the individual risk is an order of magnitude less.
The solar plant proves the large scale use of molten salt as a heat store/heat exchanger. It's been running for several years now.
As far as the running costs are concerned, if their claims are correct, then they are plausible. It's a big 'if', but no bigger than the Hinckley 'if' - and a lot cheaper.
Again, if it works, it will dispose of a great deal of our high level nuclear waste.
This is the point that Jezbollah either have failed to comprehend or are wilfully ignoring. They simply expect that the Radiance of Corbyn will be enough to convert all the doubters once the traitors in the party and the media stop misrepresenting Him. Its laughable.
Should other countries adjust their rules in accordance with Commission Diktat they will claim a section of the allegedly misallocated money.
I wonder how much Ireland would get to keep given that eg the UK sales, if the same per pop,. would be around 13x bigger?
PClipp - you might be right that the prospects of an SDP Mk II are even slimmer than I thought. If it merely introduced a new split between different kinds of centrist, it would really be counter-productive.
Rochdale Pioneer: the reality is that the rebel MPs wanted a change in leadership and thought the letter of no confidence was the way to achieve it. It didn't, so it's a dead letter.
Most MPs are perfectly capable of saying "that was then, this is now", or, more explicitly "I felt that in the chaotic situation we had in the spring I couldn't have confidence in the leader, but now that he has a fresh mandate from the party I think we should respect that and I'm glad to serve as Shadow X Minister", and decline to elaborate further. Every practising politician has said far more awkward things than that. As for the Tories throwing it at candidates, I can't see them bothering - "Four years ago you said...but three years ago you said..." - far too arcane to interest voters.
BudG: I agree. Passive, lukewarm cooperation in the first year would have been far more sensible from their viewpoint, ideally using the time to develop an interesting and coherent alternative, which with all due respect to Smith I don't think has really been done yet.
Without PB, I'd never have noticed Labour's little local difficulties.
What is noticeable about the YouGov poll is how many Labour members recognise Corbyn is incompetent and is not going to win in 2020 - including many of those who will vote for him. Throw in another twelve months of dire opinion poll ratings, PR cock-ups, further revelations about JC's views and friends, and lack of engagement with the PLP and anyone else who does not agree with him, and a new leadership challenge may occur - especially as it is clear that Corbyn's closest advisers (McDonnell, Milne etc) are spoiling for a fight. And if it is not next year it will almost certainly be in 2018.
This one is going to run and run. And either just before the next GE or just after it the hard left will lose definitively.
Apple is being a little economical with its use of collect. If they want to frame it that way, then the choice is between a European government collecting tax now, and a hypothetical future when Apple might or might not return the cash to the US (& if it doesn't, then pay no tax at all).
In contrast, I though that the commission put its arguments pretty well (irrespective of whether or not one agrees with them):
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm
Oh, and cheers, Mr Dancer.
A question for those who have looked into this more deeply: how secret was this deal? Was it common knowledge?
Nick - thanks for your response. Can I refer you to Ann Widdecombe's description of Mad Frankie Howerd as having "something of the night about him" - it was referred to continually and plagued his time as leader. "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" was answered "ewww no". And these MPs will have your dead letter hung round their necks like a Widdiquote. They'll be a laughing stock. And they know it...
No doubt but I'm sure there's something that will float to the top of their "to do list" that might persuade them to see matters differently. Going back to 1979 I seem to recall (somebody correct me if I'm wrong) at around the time of the no confidence vote that did for Callaghan the then Labour govt promising piping (the then new) N Sea gas to N Ireland to benefit Ulster folk, and Welsh slate miners getting better compensation for a lung disease which apparently brought P Cymru into the govt lobby. If they really want to pull the stops out on this one (and I suspect they will given Clegg held it all to ransom once before) there is plenty of ammo, not least the prospect of "PM Corbyn".
Anyway, I thought it was going to happen at the end of 2018 unless there was something that actively stopped it? I thought that was the effect of the Lib Dems last time rather than stopping it dead (presumably they, like the rest of us, not forecasting May 2015's outcome). Or maybe I'm mistaken there?
If it avoids a split, I can see plenty grabbing ankle no matter how undignified.