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“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.” Buffet’s saying has been one which many in finance have had cause to ponder in recent years. Turned round, it applies to political parties: “a toxic reputation takes 5 minutes to develop, 20 years to shake off.” Consider how long it’s taken the Tories to get past (if they have) the “nasty party” tag. From its development in the 1980s, it was 18 years before the Tories won a majority. Labour’s infiltration by Militant started in the mid-1970s. 1985: Kinnock’s Conference speech; 1997: Blair’s New Dawn.
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Policy announcment number one from Boris outside of Brexit to win over non metropolitan notherners. Take the £13.4 billion overseas budget. Strip out everything that doesnt serve a wider strategic/economic/diplomatic aim and divert the rest of it to social care, education etc.
I had a look at the 7 seats where Lib Dem came second to Labour in 2017 to see what happened. All are in England, and voted reman by between 64%-76%
Sheffield Hallam, Leads North West, Cambridge, Bermondsey and old Southwick, Vauxhall, Manchester Withington, Hornsey and wood Green.
I ad thought there might be big increases for the Lib Dems, even if they did not take them. Partly I thought that the Lib Dem revock policy might be popular, second the assumed unpopularity of Corbyn would be shared here.
But: to my surprises no, the Lib Dem vote when down in some and the increase in the Lib Dme vote was smaller than national increase in all bar one.
Any thought?
Could it be)
a) That the Lib Dem party did not put resources in to these? as the focuses was on Tory seats?
b) Perhaps Lab put a lot of effort in to keep them?
c) Some 'one off' factors in each one?
d) something else?
just spend it on uni fees, apologise to young people for Osborne screwing them and watch the numbers change.
If the Brexit Party hadn’t split the vote, we’d have lost my old seat in West Hull and John Prescott’s in East Hull. Ed Miliband would have been defeated, as would Yvette Cooper and many more in Labour heartlands where working class voters have stuck with us from the steam age to the era of the internet.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7793245/Either-ditch-Momentum-cult-Labour-cult-says-ALAN-JOHNSON.html
Interestingly I see Corbyn released a video with the slogan "Our Time Will Come".
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/15/i-own-this-disaster-john-mcdonnell-tries-to-shield-corbyn-rebecca-long-bailey
Wasn't that the motto of the Provisional IRA? (Tiocfaidh ár lá)
I suppose he no longer even has to hide it now.
https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1206126669616107521
Now, if you wanted to make aid more hard-headed like China which has bought half of Africa and created jobs for Africans, that is a different story.
Also the 11 billion NI subsidies must be looking very tempting now that he no longer needs DUP votes.
"the Tories made 18 glorious summers of Labour’s Winter of Discontent" was top drawer.
You start the tax at the starting rate for basic rate but its low. One or two % on the basic rate for life, rather than nine percent over £25k as it is now with very little realistic chance of the debt ever being cleared.
Compare and contrast with Boris, who got the tone just right with his wavering over the ballot paper stuff and also talking about those that didn't vote for him / Tories.
Anyone wanting to help revive the Labour brand is going to have to wade through this shit up to their chin first.
No you tw@t, it was you, it was your hard left politics, you nasty bunch of cult member bullying your own MPs and unwilling to canvas for those that isn't 100% onboard with the project.
Take money from the Third World and give it to the British middle class.
It has its points. But probably more the kind of thing you promise to do before an election, rather than just after having won one.
In 1997 50% of C2s voted for Blair and New Labour, in 2019 by contrast Corbyn Labour won just 30% of C2s.
Labour's rating amongst upper middle class ABs though is unchanged, it was 31% in 1997 and 31% last Thursday
https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1997
https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/how-britain-voted-and-why-my-2019-general-election-post-vote-poll/
Here's a couple of tips - NHS, education, economy, social care. It's basic stuff.
Labour has been fixated on the top 10% and the bottom 10%. Time to think about the other 80%.
a) is really hard with globalization, rise of China, rise of ML / AI and will be the issue for the next 20 years, especially when middle class jobs starting going.
Strip away the WASPI, broadband, etc. rubbish and stick with a couple of pragmatic things like railways and investing in the NHS and Labour would have walked it with a sane leader.
The problem is that Corbyn arguing for some moderate policies didn't make them look moderate. If a leader like Starmer or Nandy had argued for railway nationalisation when the franchises expire, nobody would have batted an eyelid.
Labour needs pragmatic policy, not ideological policy. They also need a patriotic leader and somebody out of London.
It's Dan Jarvis, Lisa Nandy or at a stretch perhaps Stephen Kinnock. They can all work and build sensible cabinets that can argue for these policies.
They only have to look less crap than Johnson, which should be easy because he's a buffoon (and most Labour voters who went to him I think did so because he just looked less crap than Corbyn) and they need to look like a sensible, pragmatic alternative Government and they will have a good chance at the very least, making progress in 2024.
Or they can take the RLB and double down with Momentum and ideological policies and spend 10 more years in opposition.
Those of us that actually want the Tories out and a moderate, pragmatic Labour Government, really need to join the party and vote against the Corbynite.
It doesn't mean a century of Tory rule, even if many "Labour supporters" are actually Tory voters now. It probably is the time to get behind some kind of TIG/ChangeUK organisation and let unpopular Corbyn and the SWP have the corpse; there are 5 years to go until next GE, so its a better time to restart than the ham fisted attempts to set up a new organisation whilst trying to overturn a democratic vote
To be blunt, Ireland used to be an economic basket case but now the south is more prosperous than the north (although very uneven) and any additional costs of reunification will surely be borne by generous aid from Europe and America.
Boris cannot politically afford to take money out of Northern Ireland. Quite the reverse: he might need to invest even more.
"The one thing which all good leaders have is courage."
I'm not sure I agree. Blair was fundamentally a coward, except over Iraq. He spent his whole time as leader in exaggerated fear of the reactions of the Mail and the Sun. Even the Iraq war, justified or not, was essentially him cowering to the Americans to beat up a much weaker country.
The thing which all successful leaders need is judgement. If they don't have that, luck will substitute. Blair had the latter in abundance. His judgement was patchy. The last politician we had with both luck and judgement was ousted almost thirty years ago when both failed her.
Only one criterion matters to them: which candidate is the most ideologically pure? That'll decide the next leader.
Certainly the Tories will be eternally grateful to Corbyn for organizing their most effective ever, get out the vote.
The foreign aid budget diktat that we pay 0.7% of GDP was simply noblesse oblige from Cameron and Clegg, a hangover of headier days when Britain had an Empire.
Its bollocks.
As for taking money from the Third World, they do well enough without us. China has been bankrolling projects faster than we ever can and don't attach all the moral cant that goes with it.
So yes, lets fund our own future and invest in our own kids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgKeTJwyzRE
I am saying they take the railways back into public ownership - and that's it.
They can argue that on pragmatic grounds, without being seen as anti-business. That policy was fine, it just came in the baggage of all the other rubbish.
British taxpayers' money should be spent on the many worthy causes in the UK. If some want to do something about poverty in the Third World, there are dozens of good charities. This is not an area where the Government needs to intervene.
But if I was Labour I would be focusing on the fighting the future battles, not the past. We can argue was privatisation of utilities good or not, but we are where we are.
The big future battle is that the world is rapidly evolving, China are going to become the world power, the Far East more important than ever, globalization, rise of ML / AI technologies, and all this will impact not just the current "left behind" but increasingly loads of people in what are deemed professional careers.
It's no use us cutting our emissions if the developing world is developing with our money and building coal power plants.
Second do not underestimate Boris, he may act like a buffoon but behind him are some seriously smart people and more importantly they play to win, sometime too aggressively. 3 months ago all the so called intelligent commentators thought Boris was a busted flush, losing in Parliament, being accused of dodgy prorogation's, 21 rebels being sacked (terrible move apparently) and being accused of being a far right nationalist. Now with a splash of Cummings he is master of his own party, the Government of his choice and Country broadly behind him if a little sceptical. The last thing the Labour party should do is just dis him as a buffon.
As a nation we manage to be racist even about charitable giving - see recent fuss about the RNLI spending money overseas. I can't see "let's take all the money we spend on overseas aid snd give it to the NHS" going down badly with the electorate.
Brexit Party 24
Con 21
Lab 21
LD 19
Green 9
I met Boris a couple of times (briefly) professionally when he was Mayor of London and he has a mind like a bacon-slicer. It really comes across when he is interested in soemthing. His big disadvantage in governing is a total disinterest in policy detail when he isn't, but that's not a fatal one, as Reagan showed.
There is a big discussion to be has about how we can improve rail services, nationalisation is not some kind of silver bullet, but it should be part of the discussion, yes.
If you want all these things back you have to stump up.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2015.png#/media/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2015.png
And that's assuming the Tories don't recover in Scotland and gain 10-12 seats there.
This is pretty seismic. It's not just one or two.
It makes it even harder for the opposition.
The BXP didn't win, which could have given them REAL momentum. Labour did, which made them think they were doing well and the Tory showing in third place was strong enough to show a potential revival was on the cards from a low point.
Labour are in a huge fucking bind, I honestly can't plot a way back for them for at least three cycles.
https://youtu.be/vdxqWHVTjk8?t=354
BERLIN (AP) - Climate activist Greta Thunberg and Germany's national railway company created a tweetstorm Sunday after she posted a photo of herself sitting on the floor of a train surrounded by lots of bags.
The image has drawn plenty of comment online about the performance of German railways
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-7794471/Going-home-Thunberg-stuck-floor-crowded-German-train.html
It was just about the most crucial political issue of the moment, and apparently he didn't have a clue.
Neurological degeneration since you met him, or what?
Better graph from Wikipedia, train use in the UK under private and government ownership.By Absolutelypuremilk, following on from a previous version by Tompw - {{The data comes from:
ATOC's 2008 publication Billion Passenger Railway for 1830 to 2001
The UK Office of Rail Regulation (ORR), specifically Passenger journeys by sector - table for 2002 onwards. The plotted data is the sum of the "Total franchised passenger journeys" and "Non franchised" columns
From 1984-2014, the point plotted at a given year is actually the financial year, or the last three quarters of the calendar year given and the first quarter of the calendar year afterwards. So, the point at "1985" is the year from April 1985 to March 1986.}}, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
Thirteen long years later we only won as a coalition and even that had required labour to set fire to the furniture and defecate on the carpet.
Talking about rough sleepers or food banks or zero hour contracts is irrelevant to most people.
Fair enough as a plea that he's not actually suffering from dementia - but as evidence of razor-sharp intelligence ... ?
They'll find it hard to tell the truth: that they and Corbyn failed.
It means accepting their argument didn't persuade reasonable people.
Cling to myths about the influence of plutocrats and the ignorance of the masses, brainwashed by a media that was always out to get them, and suddenly it's not their fault. And their arguments haven't been fairly rejected.
With a priori thinking there's always a zealot willing to try and change the facts to fit their 'reality'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4uIC0AwD68
A surprising large number of people are unaware, or at least pretend not to notice, just how fraudulent Johnson is.