Corbyn's days (very) numbered?

[Henri McPhee]

I just think Corbyn is an extreme liberal who is unable to provide an effective opposition to the monstrous and dangerous, cuts and closures, and threats to the NHS, Tory Party policies. Many people are concerned by uncontrolled immigration which is unmanageable by local authorities. The NHS is not safe in his hands either. Corbyn needs practical business sense instead of this 'judicious use of the printing press' economics.

I don't like the way several leading Labour Party hypocrites say in public that they believe in comprehensive schools and then it is discovered later on that they send their own children to selective and private schools.That Labour leader of 'Liberty woman, who provides deafening silence about the evils of bugging, has just been found to have applied to Eton for one of her sons. She could be a plant for MI5.

The Labour Party has to win seats like Worcester and Cleethorpes and Nuneaton and Bolton if it has any hope of winning an election in the future. I can't quite see how that is going to happen, even if the Blairite liberals regain power.

 

[Tolls]

The Tories are going to win anyway. I think that should be the starting point when deciding what the best strategy should be. Forget the next election. Maybe even the one after that.

I get the impression everyone has given up on the next election by now.
As well as the one after that.

If the comparisons to Foot bear out (and Corbyn is no Foot) then we're also talking the one after that.

As for the SNP, Scotland barely has a right. Its two parties are Labour and the SNP. That's what happens with FPTP.

In the UK in general it is Labour and the Tories. Split Labour and you will not see the left taking power for decades until one of those lefty parties (probably the most centre left one) becomes dominant.

 

[JihadJane]

I just think Corbyn is an extreme liberal who is unable to provide an effective opposition to the monstrous and dangerous, cuts and closures, and threats to the NHS, Tory Party policies. Many people are concerned by uncontrolled immigration which is unmanageable by local authorities. The NHS is not safe in his hands either. Corbyn needs practical business sense instead of this 'judicious use of the printing press' economics.

I don't like the way several leading Labour Party hypocrites say in public that they believe in comprehensive schools and then it is discovered later on that they send their own children to selective and private schools.That Labour leader of 'Liberty woman, who provides deafening silence about the evils of bugging, has just been found to have applied to Eton for one of her sons. She could be a plant for MI5.

The Labour Party has to win seats like Worcester and Cleethorpes and Nuneaton and Bolton if it has any hope of winning an election in the future. I can't quite see how that is going to happen, even if the Blairite liberals regain power.

What's an "extreme liberal"?

Interesting article here, written by a conservative journalist, on how Corbyn fits into the UK's previously moribund political landscape:

'Goodbye New Labour: Victorious Corbyn consigns Blairism to history'

Breaking the old model

As he explicitly set out in his hugely important speech this afternoon, Corbyn has broken from the consensus politics of the last quarter of a century. From the rise of Tony Blair in 1994 until the general election of 2015, there was – to use Corbyn’s potent phrase from Liverpool today – a "political stitch up" between the main political parties.

There was an unspoken agreement between Tories and Labour that they would only work within very constrained parameters. The Cameron Conservative Party and the Blairite Labour Party both advocated near identical spending and taxation targets. They both supported the marketisation of the public sector. They both agreed the same neoliberal economic model.

In foreign policy terms, both main parties accepted British subordination to the United States of America, and therefore a neoconservative doctrine of armed intervention in order to advance the interests of the West in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Nobody can claim that these twin doctrines - neoliberalism at home and neoconservatism abroad - were successful. They led to debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, as well as the banking crash of 2008. But anyone who challenged these two orthodoxies was politically marginalised.

This afternoon, Corbyn became the first leader of a mainstream political party to directly challenge this paradigm, with his assertion that "the old model is broken and we’re in a new era". Corbyn deserves almost unlimited credit for offering an alternative.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

As for the SNP, Scotland barely has a right. Its two parties are Labour and the SNP. That's what happens with FPTP.

I don't think that's true to be honest but even if it is now it wasn't the case not all that long ago.

Scotland used to be pretty conservative. So did the SNP. There's a lot of people in Scotland who would have grown up naturally to the right of many issues but over time that landscape has changed.

Look at a map of Scotland in the 1959 election or 64. Looks a lot like Middle England.

And the SNP started life on the right as well.

They changed. Staked out some ground. Found some issues and principles and slowly worked to bring the electorate to them. Ten years ago we were talking about how Labour would always dominate in Scotland till the end of time. Now we are talking about how they can win more than a couple of seats.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

This is the bit that confuses me. What was missing from the Left-leaning message that the Labour Party had at the last election (and got them soundly walloped) ?

It wasn't particularly left-leaning as far as many were concerned. It didn't sound all that much different to what the Tories were saying to many. And it was delivered by a wet-fish Oxbridge/LSE, establishment, stuffed-suit with all the credibility of Farage opening a drop-in centre for asylum seekers and all the capacity to make real change of a soggy dog biscuit floating in a water bowl.

It was the epitome of the problem.

 

[a_unique_person]

It certainly looks like it. After he sacked Hilary Benn his Shadow Cabinet are queueing up to resign. live updates

I wonder who'll be next, given Labour's election system? A Blairite 'suit' wouldn't go down well with the punters but maybe vote-fatigue will kick in.

Maybe Benn himself? He made quite a pitch for it a while back.

When you say days and numbered, were you thinking in the several hundreds.

 

[Tolls]

[The SNP] changed. Staked out some ground. Found some issues and principles and slowly worked to bring the electorate to them. Ten years ago we were talking about how Labour would always dominate in Scotland till the end of time. Now we are talking about how they can win more than a couple of seats.

Which implies a bloody long time without an opposition.

Note that during that time there was at least an opposition in Westminster, even if you don't think it was all that left wing. What you are suggesting (a complete restructuring of the left until someone comes out on top) will leave no opposition...for decades.

 

[asydhouse]

Which implies a bloody long time without an opposition.

Note that during that time there was at least an opposition in Westminster, even if you don't think it was all that left wing. What you are suggesting (a complete restructuring of the left until someone comes out on top) will leave no opposition...for decades.

Oh for Pete's sake. That's more unrealistic than Corbyn winning a general election in May!

The PLP well and truly poisoned the well over the past year. You are just doing the same.

 

[Tolls]

If the left splits then, unless the voting methods in the country change, until a new single party or electoral alliance emerges then how do you think a left leaning government will be formed?

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Which implies a bloody long time without an opposition.

Note that during that time there was at least an opposition in Westminster, even if you don't think it was all that left wing. What you are suggesting (a complete restructuring of the left until someone comes out on top) will leave no opposition...for decades.

Well that really depends what you mean by opposition. You seem to assume opposition has to be capable of winning an election but UKIP as one example has shown that doesn't have to be the case.

I believe people are looking for alernative ideas and alternative visions not slightly different versions of the same thing.

At the minute it seems like we are discussing offering bacon as an alternative to beef and wondering the vegans don't jump on board with the idea.

 

[ceptimus]

What happens if the right splits? The Tories have already split to form the UKIP party. UKIP has taken Tory seats at local government and European government level, but so far not significantly at national level.

Once the Brexit terms become clearer we may see further right splits.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

If the left splits then,

Sorry but the left IS split. That's what the entire thread has been about. The question is what to do next given that. The options are fairly limited - either one side subsumes the other or they learn how to co-operate either jointly or independently.

 

[Tolls]

Until one chunk of the Labour Party gives up on the other chunk it isn't actually split.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Until one chunk of the Labour Party gives up on the other chunk it isn't actually split.

Its split in so much as there are two camps with different values, different desires, different methods and different measures of success. The question is whether that split can be managed while maintaining a single party.

I guess you could say that in Scotland the left split into the SNP and Labour and the latter's incompetence gave the other the upper hand. It's also worth bearing in mind that in 2015 the two major stories were the SNP taking 40 of Labours seats and the Tories decimating the LDs.

When there are or were credible third choice left-ish parties things were closer than they are now. And Clegg decided to throw away that option and put his hat in with the Tories.

 

[Garrison]

And now your telling me what I think, and we're done.

To be clear, you are now the sole person on my ignore list.

So After a good nights sleep realized this was unnecessary, so removed from ignore list.

As to 'Tax the rich'. I personally want to see the rich paying their fair share, which is to say rather more than they are now. Unlike Corby though I wouldn't claim this will raise anything like enough money to address everything on the to do list, (NHS, student loans, infrastructure, pensions, etc.). Lots of middle and working class people are going to wind up paying more tax as well. Now either Corbyn doesn't realize this, in which case he's an idiot, or he knows full well and is misleading his supporters with an emotional appeal promising to target a group of people they don't like, much like 'build a wall'.

 

[The Don]

So After a good nights sleep realized this was unnecessary, so removed from ignore list.

As to 'Tax the rich'. I personally want to see the rich paying their fair share, which is to say rather more than they are now. Unlike Corby though I wouldn't claim this will raise anything like enough money to address everything on the to do list, (NHS, student loans, infrastructure, pensions, etc.). Lots of middle and working class people are going to wind up paying more tax as well. Now either Corbyn doesn't realize this, in which case he's an idiot, or he knows full well and is misleading his supporters with an emotional appeal promising to target a group of people they don't like, much like 'build a wall'.

My personal (very biased and probably unfair) view is that he's an old class-warrior who views everyone richer than himself (something that he underestimates significantly) as a Scrooge McDuck ready for plucking and that there will be money a-plenty. Of course the middle classes will end up paying but from his perspective they are on the wrong side of the class war divide in any case.

 

[Garrison]

My personal (very biased and probably unfair) view is that he's an old class-warrior who views everyone richer than himself (something that he underestimates significantly) as a Scrooge McDuck ready for plucking and that there will be money a-plenty. Of course the middle classes will end up paying but from his perspective they are on the wrong side of the class war divide in any case.

That is rather what I'm afraid of, and without a fair chunk of those middle class voters being persuaded to vote Labour there is no chance of gaining power. As much as some deride him now Tony Blair understood this with complete clarity; you need power to help the disadvantaged and you can't get that power if you scare off middle-class voters.

 

[jimbob]

New Labour improved the country.

Sure Start was very successful in tackling child poverty.
Blair made the mistake of having a successful humanitarian military intervention in Sierra Leone, which made him think that Iraq was a good idea.

Compare what the country would have been like under the Tories in the of the early 2000's.

It's simplistic to attack New Labour on that.

Gordon Brown was unsuitable to be PM - he didn't seem to like making decisions, and as soon as I heard that he'd changed his mind about calling a general election, I knew he'd loose it later.

New Labour also did buy too much into the Tory economic dogma, but nowhere near as much as the Tories.

 

[Garrison]

New Labour improved the country.

Sure Start was very successful in tackling child poverty.
Blair made the mistake of having a successful humanitarian military intervention in Sierra Leone, which made him think that Iraq was a good idea.

And there was the misleading example of the Kurdish region after the First Gulf War.

Compare what the country would have been like under the Tories in the of the early 2000's.

It's simplistic to attack New Labour on that.

There's a tendency by some to assume that because Blair won with such large margins the party could have been more socialist and just gotten smaller majorities. I don't think they really appreciate the volatility of the electorate.

Gordon Brown was unsuitable to be PM - he didn't seem to like making decisions, and as soon as I heard that he'd changed his mind about calling a general election, I knew he'd loose it later.

Jim Callaghan comes to mind, there was one clear moment to go to the country and win and they both let it pass.

New Labour also did buy too much into the Tory economic dogma, but nowhere near as much as the Tories.

Part of the problem there lay in the need to attract those middle class voters who saw themselves a benefitting from that dogma.

 

[Aber]

New Labour also did buy too much into the Tory economic dogma, but nowhere near as much as the Tories.

Once the Soviet Union collapsed it became difficult to claim that socialism was a successful system anywhere - remember the 'End of History'?