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has there ever been a lamer labour leader than ed miliband?

Balbi said:
Now he's fucked a 12 - 15 point lead. A mix of declaring his difference by accepting everything the Tories are doing, and promising continuation and Falkirk.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jul/15/tories-labour-ukip-guardian-icm-poll

Pranny.
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I don't know about that. This poll has Labour on an 11 point lead, this one 7 points. There might be some methodological thing going on here.

If Labour lose this election then they're the most incompetent political party in history. This govt should've been dead the moment we slipped back into recession and the "half the deficit" target the Tories campaigned on went out the window.

Also the union stuff is going to be tricky. The opt-in and the end to disaffiliation is a very radical change in the way the relationship happens, yet McCluskey's going along with it, which suggests to be there might be some detail or technicality that means it isn't actually opt-in, or that there's some other way Miliband hopes to keep recieving those millions whilst appeasing the Tories and Blairites pushing for full disaffiliation. But whatever happens it doesn't matter - no compromise that Miliband tries to push through will actually be accepted by the Blairites, there's literally nothing he can do.
 
butchersapron said:
The other polls over the last few days: two have an 11 point labout lead and two and 8% lead. Why have you chosen to believe the Guardian rather than thinking that it's an outlier?
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Beat me to it you utter gobshite. :mad:

And yeah, this looks like an outlier, but what's interesting is the Guardian giving it so much prominence. I don't remember then giving this much prominence to the polls a while back that had Labour ona 15 point lead.

The Guardian's really going all out attack on Ed Miliband at the moment. Full Blairism.
 
Delroy Booth said:
Beat me to it you utter gobshite. :mad:

And yeah, this looks like an outlier, but what's interesting is the Guardian giving it so much prominence. I don't remember then giving this much prominence to the polls a while back that had Labour ona 15 point lead.

The Guardian's really going all out attack on Ed Miliband at the moment. Full Blairsim.
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They certainly went full on lib-dem surge in 2010 - i remember Jullian pissface and his dishonest interpretation/reporting of polling figures in april being given full volume prominence.
 
butchersapron said:
The other polls over the last few days: two have an 11 point labour lead and two and 8% lead. Why have you chosen to believe the Guardian rather than thinking that it's an outlier?
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Because I personally reckon by stepping on the austerity train, they've fucked any support they had as an alternative.

Graun had them at 12% in February. It's been a rough old few months.
 
Balbi said:
Because I personally reckon by stepping on the austerity train, they've fucked any support they had as an alternative.

Graun had them at 12% in February. It's been a rough old few months.
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Why are you going with one poll as against multiple polls? What's your basis? My reason for not doing so is that there are a lot of polls saying very different.
 
Because the gap's been narrowing for the last five months, the creep back after the 2012 budget disaster finally went out of the consciousness. The Tories are just waiting for a minor market and house price pickup, helped by the revised figures on the economy.

Labour could fuck this up, and the Tories are more than willing to leave them to it.
 
Balbi said:
Because the gap's been narrowing for the last five months, the creep back after the 2012 budget disaster finally went out of the consciousness. The Tories are just waiting for a minor market and house price pickup, helped by the revised figures on the economy.

Labour could fuck this up, and the Tories are more than willing to leave them to it.
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The polls don't back that up do they - at worst a tiny drop in the labour lead - and not enough to mean that a labour majority is not - by far - the most likely result. Is there somewhere where they train you all to panic when the guardian wants you to? You know labour only needs 35% to have a majority, and the tories need 40%? What is this!!
 
A slow but steady drop in the Labour lead is what it is. From consistent double digit, down to around 8%. Of the 29 polls in the last month, only 5 have a double digit lead. The month before, it was consistently 10% or above. A It's really not going to take that much more, given the interesting style of competence demonstrated by Labour, to take out that 8%.

And it's not panic. It's just resignation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
 
Balbi said:
A slow but steady drop in the Labour lead is what it is. From consistent double digit, down to around 8%. Of the 29 polls in the last month, only 5 have a double digit lead. It's really not going to take that much more, given the interesting style of competence demonstrated by Labour, to take out that 8%.
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Why? They don't need a double digit lead anyway. They don't even need a lead full stop. There were 5 double digit leads in the previous month. It's taken 3 years to bring it down by a couple of points - why do you think 8% will just evaporate over an even shorter period - and is it an 8% lead or equal what you are now going with?
 
Balbi said:
Because the gap's been narrowing for the last five months
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Only very slightly though. From a 10-12 point average to an 7-10 point average lead - ie still more than enough to guarentee a Labour victory with a big majority.

I think a lot of this stuff about Miliband's poll lead is wishful thinking on behalf a load of Blairite's who want to put about the notion that the only way that Labour can win is to get into an arms race with the Tories and UKIP competing over who can be the most reactionary and cruel towards the unemployed, muslims and immigrants. There were people in the Labour party I know, Labour Left people, who were convinced Miliband was bound to lose at a time when he was polling consistenly 10 points ahead of the Tories because they live their lives in the Labour bubble and believe everything their political opponents in the party tell them. They get told that Miliband's lead is too little, too soft, and take it as implicit that this must be the case.

Another thing is that the Blairites have engineered a controversy in the party over Falkirk, one that needn't have happened, which I think has made Labour look more divided and that has damaged the party's poll ratings temporarily, but that's fine, that works in their favour, every time a poll comes out that shows Labour doing badly they can argue for "we should've had David Miliband" and to attack the unions. That's why even when Labour's had a commanding lead over the last 2 years they were still saying "ah but it's a soft lead, ah but Miliband's not personally liked" it's all factional fighting.
 
butchersapron said:
You know labour only needs 35% to have a majority, and the tories need 40%? What is this!!
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What's the most astonishing is that there's intelligent Labour party people who know this who still think the only way to win is go further to the right, that if they don't they're going to lose. I think they've really accepted the premise of New Labour - that you can only win by matching the Tories right-wing policies and trying to win over the right-wing press to get those southern marginals - even though they don't agree with it. It's just part of their thinking, they're just used to it, it's all they ever hear. 1983 over and over and over.
 
Tory shit-smearing politics on benefits, economy and now the NHS is gaining traction with people imho. Milliband is too weak to counter with any convincing performance regardless of any internal labour politics. He doesn't have any fire in his belly which is what people need to see to be convinced he is a "leader" and the labour party "electable". Or if he does he needs to show it or he's toast and the countrys fucked next election. I reckon we're fucked anyhows.
 
The people who gave labour 3 victories are still around. There is no massive legitimacy gap such as the tories had 1997-2005. There is no mass overturning of perceptions required. He doesn't need fire in his belly to convince people. Conditions are doing that for him. Which is why he has space to not do the shit he has done.
 
if the polls are correct he could have a 2015 victory just by not being the other cunts.

Obviously he's not going to go FULL COMMUNISM but he can't even bring himself to condemn cuts or support any strike? Surely he has room to play 'not the tories' a little more convincingly? Pointless wankers.
 
butchersapron said:
The people who gave labour 3 victories are still around. There is no massive legitimacy gap such as the tories had 1997-2005. There is no mass overturning of perceptions required. He doesn't need fire in his belly to convince people. Conditions are doing that for him. Which is why he has space to not do the shit he has done.
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Doesn't mean that they should be taken for granted though, he still needs to work harder for their vote, I'm not convinced he is. I also think we are now starting to see the Lynton Crosby effect in Tory tactics i.e. fight dirty(er) and smear labour and their record at every oppertunity, Hunts performance yesterday had this written all over it.

Not sure conditions are convincing people, Tory's seem to me to be starting to be successful at shifting the blame for them onto Labour. I don't see/hear any convincing counter arguements coming back at them very much so far, only isolated commentry and articles. I don't get the feeling that there is a coherent Labour Strategy to pin the tories down yet. I may be wrong, just my impression.
 
Who shouldn't be taken for granted though? There are 25%+ leads across the north. Who else do you mean? Swing voters? In that case then how do you appeal to them give their demonstrated favourite is cameron/blair type social liberalism (for them) allied with neo-liberalism with a socially conservative program (for everyone else). What there is is multi-year extended labour leads and little or no evidence that this is disintegrating.
 
Smangus said:
Tory shit-smearing politics on benefits, economy and now the NHS is gaining traction with people imho. Milliband is too weak to counter with any convincing performance regardless of any internal labour politics. He doesn't have any fire in his belly which is what people need to see to be convinced he is a "leader" and the labour party "electable". Or if he does he needs to show it or he's toast and the countrys fucked next election. I reckon we're fucked anyhows.
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yes, all this is the poison Lynton Crosby is pouring over the body politic(though of course many politicians support it) he did it in Aus, introduce a controversial unpleasant but populist policy, even though it won't save much, keep flagging it up(with a compliant media) and ensuring the opposition has to frequently respond, result, a race to the bottom.
 
butchersapron said:
Look up! That in no way means that this will do anything to help the tories win the GE. It didn't before. It failed.
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I sincerely hope not , but I think the sudden Tory willingness to smear big time a traditional labour strength (NHS) is a big sign of their hopefully misguided newfound confidence. We are going to see a lot more of this shit in the next couple of years.
 
Smangus said:
I sincerely hope not , but I think the sudden Tory willingness to smear big time a traditional labour strength (NHS) is a big sign of their hopefully misguided newfound confidence.
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The Lansley healthcare reforms were shambolic and unpopular, and yet to fully play out, and I think that the Labour lead over the last 2 years is in part down to public fear about what the Tories are going to do with the NHS. The Tory strategy pre-election of showing how much they love the NHS has been abandoned and they're just trying to denigrate the NHS instead. It could totally backfire, it might actually convince the general public you can't trust the Tories with the NHS .

Smangus said:
We are going to see a lot more of this shit in the next couple of years.
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No doubt about that, last few months they've been going at it full steam away. A lot of the stuff they're doing now (attacking Unite, attacking Ed Miliband personally, immigration stuff, pr campaign against the NHS etc) I suspect they'd probably planned on using at the General Election, but seeing as they're on course to lose heavily with UKIP snapping at their heals, they're going to for broke now. I think it's a sign the general election campaign in this country is actually starting a year or two before the election, more like the USA where they have campaigns that last ages.
 
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