Possible. Might also be that the coming leadership campaign is so brutal than anyone on the not-Corbyn side will feel no choice.
Jeremy Corbyn - Not Not Labour Party(?), not a Communist (BBC)
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
I certainly don't envisage a cordial debate... and I fully suspect the trident handgrenade to be lobbed into the middle of the fight by Theresa May around about conference season
Wait, wanting MPs to actually vote on a Welfare Bill is hard left now? Is that how far British politics has fallen?
Wait, wanting MPs to actually vote on a Welfare Bill is hard left now? Is that how far British politics has fallen?
I mean that you are not interested in winning elections, rather that posturing is more important to you.
investing in people can never be out of date. Of course if you buy into the trickle down economics mumbo jumbo it will seem so.
You did not answer him.
"If the Labour Party had selected David instead of Ed Milliband, we'd probably have a Labour government right now, and would still be in the EU." Discuss.
I read this comment in the FT yesterday and thought it was an interesting proposition.
Its obviously impossible to know, really. But as far as Corbyn is concerned, the whole problem can clearly be traced very directly back to the leadership election reforms brought in by Ed. Ed specifically said he wanted to turn the party into a movement. A classic example of needing to be careful what you wish for. So at the very least we can say if David had been leader of Labour, if he had failed, we probably wouldnt have had the conditions in the following leadership election from which Corbyn could prevail. So it is not a stretch to say the whole Labour Civil War would never have happened, because the hard left would never have got a foothold. Those kinds of members may have drifted away, Labour may have lost a lot of support, but it would at least be a coherent entity.
That is as far as I think I would go though. Im not sure about the whole "Red Ed" thing, I dont think he was that far to the left of his brother - so as to make them unelectable, where his brother may have got them back after 5 years. Would David have offered a real alternative to austerity? If Ed didnt, and people think Ed was too far to the left, then probably not. And if he hadnt, maybe people would have voted Tory anyway. If the Tories had won, they would still have offered a referendum - it was UKIP that forced that issue, not Labour. Maybe a united and functioning Labour Party could have changed the course of that vote but I doubt it. I dont think David would have solved the problem of the Scottish Labour implosion, or disaffection among Northern Labour voters. So it may still be in terminal decline.
So in summary, my best guess is Labour would still have had a fairly major crisis on its hand in terms of connecting with core voters, and we would still have a Tory government. It would probably not be run by Corbyn and would therefore not have that particular issue to contend with, but with Scotland abandoning it and many Englishworking class voters feeling it didnt speak to them about immigration, it would arguably be on the same track, just not so far along it. Maybe that would be worse, maybe this civil war, damaging as it is, can resolve issues that might have taken many years to work through, and lead to a more viable party, or parties, more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.
I read this comment in the FT yesterday and thought it was an interesting proposition.
Its obviously impossible to know, really. But as far as Corbyn is concerned, the whole problem can clearly be traced very directly back to the leadership election reforms brought in by Ed. Ed specifically said he wanted to turn the party into a movement. A classic example of needing to be careful what you wish for. So at the very least we can say if David had been leader of Labour, if he had failed, we probably wouldnt have had the conditions in the following leadership election from which Corbyn could prevail. So it is not a stretch to say the whole Labour Civil War would never have happened, because the hard left would never have got a foothold. Those kinds of members may have drifted away, Labour may have lost a lot of support, but it would at least be a coherent entity.
That is as far as I think I would go though. Im not sure about the whole "Red Ed" thing, I dont think he was that far to the left of his brother - so as to make them unelectable, where his brother may have got them back after 5 years. Would David have offered a real alternative to austerity? If Ed didnt, and people think Ed was too far to the left, then probably not. And if he hadnt, maybe people would have voted Tory anyway. If the Tories had won, they would still have offered a referendum - it was UKIP that forced that issue, not Labour. Maybe a united and functioning Labour Party could have changed the course of that vote but I doubt it. I dont think David would have solved the problem of the Scottish Labour implosion, or disaffection among Northern Labour voters. So it may still be in terminal decline.
So in summary, my best guess is Labour would still have had a fairly major crisis on its hand in terms of connecting with core voters, and we would still have a Tory government. It would probably not be run by Corbyn and would therefore not have that particular issue to contend with, but with Scotland abandoning it and many Englishworking class voters feeling it didnt speak to them about immigration, it would arguably be on the same track, just not so far along it. Maybe that would be worse, maybe this civil war, damaging as it is, can resolve issues that might have taken many years to work through, and lead to a more viable party, or parties, more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.
Posturing = having principles and sticking to them.
He made a rhetorical point, no?
And? They're still members. They've still paid. If you create a system which allows this; it's up to the MP's to at least follow that system. Instead of simply throwing their toys out of the pram once that membership doesn't conform to their own viewpoint.
And how is this going to happen? Murdoch and co are happy with the Tories right now; there's no reason whatsoever for them to jump ship to a sinking Labour party, even with someone other than Corbyn in charge. This is the long-term problem with Labour courting big media figures - those figures are always going to jump back to the Tories when the Tory party are doing well, and for the foreseeable future the Tories look like they'll be successful.
Wow i didnt think id see such an obvious admission from someone thinking Labours decline has all been the fault of the economic crisis. A decent leader and those votes will just magic back right
Corbyn isnt hard left either. I keep seeing this far left nonsense, what official policies are far/hard left?
I think it can happen with a negligible probability, but all I wanted to point out was that the sandwich smear was meaningless without the press being completely onside and splashing it everywhere without irony.
re-nationalising the rail industry was his first official policy... how much more left wing do you want (gulags for balirites?)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...y-to-renationalise-the-railways-10509504.html
How, though? In what world is any major media outlet that's currently Tory going to switch to Labour?
Challenging austerity, fighting against crippling welfare reform and opposing trident renewal are hardly 'hard left', if that were the case much of Europe would be putting hammers and sickles on their flags.
The trouble is, Labour went so far to the right under Blair that any attempt to shift leftwards is seen as shifting to the far left.
That's also why Corbyn didn't want to remain in the EU - parts of his fiscal planning would be illegal, or extremely difficult under EU regulation.
And also an overwhelmingly popular policy. If the point is that Jeremy's 'far left' politics make him unelectable it's an odd example to pick.
I thought that was a valid question.
58% of the population favour nationalising the railway, and for good reason - we have some of the worst private rail operators in Europe.
Would you categorise 58% of people in the UK as 'hard left' ?
no - but unlike myself I'd suggest 58% of people dont work in the rail sector and dont understand just what an absolute clusterfek that would be
Wow i didnt think id see such an obvious admission from someone thinking Labours decline has all been the fault of the economic crisis. A decent leader and those votes will just magic back right
Corbyn isnt hard left either. I keep seeing this far left nonsense, what official policies are far/hard left?
Indeed.
I still remember what Corbyn propogates as being Normal Labour values.[/QUOTE]
Wow i didnt think id see such an obvious admission from someone thinking Labours decline has all been the fault of the economic crisis. A decent leader and those votes will just magic back right
Corbyn isnt hard left either. I keep seeing this far left nonsense, what official policies are far/hard left?
I don't think those are the only factors but I do think that politics is a shallow business essentially and those factors are more important to most people that make up the electorate.
Most people don't care about ideology one jot and they don't have lists of which way certain Labour MPs voted on one issue or another.
Or perhaps amongst the 58% are regular rail users such as myself that have to endure awful, unreliable services while paying an extortionate premium. Privatisation of the railways has failed miserably and commuters across all political spectrums are first to feel the effects of it.
Regardless, it quashes the idea that it's a far left ideal.
Next - what's another far left ideal Comrade Corbyn wishes to impose on us?
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the original point you made.
Bad policy or good policy, hard left or no, it's clearly an issue that the public and Corbyn agree on.
I would be in favour of renationalisation of the railways if it was feasible, is it?
renationalisation of private enterprise is not left wing... tell me what is?
58% of people might want to bring back hanging - it does not make it any less right wing
They might not care about the detail and i agree the electorate can be swayed by shallow arguments but there's a long list of lessons the Labour party has to learn beyond just replacing the leader and going back to New Labour.
New Labour lost a lot of voters well before the economc crisis or Ed and Corbyn. Those lost voters may never come back and if thats the case the only hope will be to gain votes from a popular grass routes campaign.
Sadiq Khan has suggested TFL take control of the shambolic southern rail services. TFL themselves have run a relatively stellar services in and around London.
No reason why it can't be feasible, or at the very least why it shouldnt be given a go considering how awful the current private contractors are.
If Jezza wants to be taken seriously that doesn't really cut it as an answer though.
They need an uptick in the polls, the new leader to please Murdoch personally, and May to say something good about human rights
you can rentaionalise anything - but id expect safety to be fecked, productivity to be fecked, prices to rise dramatically (unless increased direct subsidy was done instead) - but most of all I suspect most people calling for re-nationalisation don't remember why British rail was commonly called British fail
The whole appeal of privatisation is to provide competition, which in theory should offer us better service for much better value. Except what we've got instead is the worst rail service in Europe at the most expensive prices, so its clearly failed. In which case reversing that decision isn't a hard left one, but rather a pragmatic one.
Ffs rail nationalisation is not hard/far left.
It just shows if you keep repeating something in the press it gets picked up as truth. Corbyn has yet to introduce any hard left policy at all but hey lets just carry on pretending as it fits a narrative.
It just shows if you keep repeating something in the press it gets picked up as truth. Corbyn has yet to introduce any hard left policy at all but hey lets just carry on pretending as it fits a narrative.
The current system is failing miserably so let's change it? Seems pretty reasonable to me. From what I understand he supports Khan's call of TFL taking over South eastern rail services.
we also have infrastructure dating back 100 years that we have to try and repair / replace whilst still using it - we have a freight network with pinch points that wont allow shipping containers to pass because they were developed before shipping containers - and to widen it we have to reconstruct motorways, knock down schools etc - frankly whoever owns it that wont change but I know how much better things are now than they were and I know that the only way to make it better is to pay a lot more money to fund the improvements... my experience around the world of working on large infra schemes that have private control as opposed to government funding is that they are a lot more efficient
I didn't say that. The point CM made was that Corbyn's 'hard left' politics would destroy the relevance of the party and be 'suicide'. Then you picked up on it with an example of a radical left wing idea, apparently, that actually polls well with the electorate and suggests that it's not really that radical at all. Surely left wing/right wing ideals have to be relative to the electorate no?
In fact a lot of 'hard left' ideas poll well with the electorate, and Theresa May (!) has suggested another 'radical' left wing idea of putting employees on the boards of companies.
Public lack of faith in Corbyn is nothing to do with his policies, but in perceptions of his competence and leadership abilities, if you want rid of him focus on that.
See, I believe that to be a false hope. Time will tell.
The idea that Corbyn is hard left is through his history of behaviour within the Labour party, being an acolyte of Tony Benn and ally in his many attempts to drag the party to the hard left, through his history in Labour fringe elements like the Campaign group and LRC, and through close associations with groups that had Communist Party and SWP figures as officials.
This thing people are coming out with - "what policies of his do you disagree with?" - well, it would be helpful if he had some well established. Even someone that was on the economic advisory panel until recently has been saying over the past week that the "anti-austerity" line is just that, a line to sell, there are no actual policies.
And the idea that being for Trident renewal is anti-Labour is utterly absurd - not only was the Labour party the one to authorise Britain becoming a nuclear state, Unite literally the other day voted to be in favour of renewal. It is the mainstream view.
This thing people are coming out with - "what policies of his do you disagree with?" - well, it would be helpful if he had some well established. Even someone that was on the economic advisory panel until recently has been saying over the past week that the "anti-austerity" line is just that, a line to sell, there are no actual policies.
And the idea that being for Trident renewal is anti-Labour is utterly absurd - not only was the Labour party the one to authorise Britain becoming a nuclear state, Unite literally the other day voted to be in favour of renewal. It is the mainstream view.