Jeremy Corbyn's time is up

[killer b]

Bargain basement b, ta.

 

[Pickman's model]

Are we now referring to university as 'college' now? If we're not careful, people will soon be using the American expression 'school' to refer to university. Nevertheless, it would appear that you've also bought into the well-worn trope (much loved by the Right and especially Corbyn's detractors) that Corbyn's supporters are composed mainly of university students. Students will attend rallies outside of term time too. The idea that they only do so during term-time is quite frankly silly.

no surprise shared by treelover, who notoriously despises socialists not to mention students

 

[emanymton]

Christ Andy, are you going for some kind of pound shop Pickman's position or something?

Is that the more up market model?

 

[brogdale]

There's always a bargain-basement brogdale as an alternative

 

[brogdale]

a k-tel killer b

Ah....k tel...dates you old boy!

 

[Pickman's model]

A kiosk killer b

 

[two sheds]

A germ killer b

 

[Pickman's model]

A germ killer b

A boot sale killer b

 

[wtfftw]

Booths bargain buffet b

 

[Brixton Hatter]

Costcutter Corbyn (north London's Nisa nutter) v Sainsburys Smith & the Welsh Waitrose wannabes

 

[Pickman's model]

Costcutter Corbyn (north London's Nisa nutter) v Sainsburys Smith & the Welsh Waitrose wannabes

Shurely Smug Selfridges Smith the Welsh windbag

 

[Cid]

Prada Pickmans and Burlington Arcade B.

 

[Pickman's model]

Prada Pickmans and Burlington Arcade B.

Piccadilly Pickman's I think you'll find

 

[Cid]

Piccadilly Pickman's I think you'll find

Hmm... Yes, that would have made more sense.

 

[treelover]

30 to 40 years of swimming in a neoliberal sea mean that many take it for granted that the basic philosophy of neoliberalism is synonymous with freedom and good moral fibre. When you argue for even the smallest step towards centralisation or wealth redistribution, you are competing with these ingrained assumptions. This was Thatcher's great triumph.

Most of my friends who work in middle management or professional roles have no intent to accumulate wealth or power away from the disenfranchised but they react even to concepts such as rent controls (that affect them not one jot as they are neither tenant nor landlord) as if Stalin himself had come back from the dead. That's because they provide a challenge to the inherent neoliberal narrative of society.

If Ed Milliband could be viewed as a socialist, how does this middle Englander view Corbyn?

The important thing to realise is that none of that is helped by having a Labour leader to the right of Corbyn. In fact, the succession of Kinnock, Blair, Brown and Milliband actually simply reinforced that the neoliberal narrative is the right one and so helped to prevent future Labour governments once the Tories had managed to throw off their socially hard right shackles.

The only way to achieve anything is to accept that maybe Corbyn can't win but is still the best choice anyway. Society changes only once certain ideas take hold and that only happens once the window of acceptable debate is driven towards those ideas. One side chasing the middle ground does nothing but shift the middle ground itself. Only once left-leaning ideas are seen as natural rather than extreme will it be realistic for a left-leaning party to be elected.

This is what some of the wiser Tories have noted, the possibility that a leftwards turning opposition can shift the ground to the left?

Is May responding to this with her 'inequality' agenda?

 

[Puddy_Tat]

This is what some of the wiser Tories have noted, the possibility that a leftwards turning opposition can shift the ground to the left?

Is May responding to this with her 'inequality' agenda?

maybe

although I would be inclined to say 'bullshit' rather than 'agenda'...

 

[Pickman's model]

This is what some of the wiser Tories have noted, the possibility that a leftwards turning opposition can shift the ground to the left?

Is May responding to this with her 'inequality' agenda?

All tories have an inequality agenda

 

[existentialist]

Not going to go down well, accepted, crazy to think a party is going to turn down new members, many experienced in campaigning, etc, do they have a death wish?

I imagine that they're operating from the premise that the Worst Thing Possible would be Corbyn winning a leadership election, and that anything else is preferable...including alienating a huge and otherwise welcome support base.

 

[tangerinedream]

Bargain basement b, ta.

killer b+m

 

[DaveCinzano]

killer b&m

CFY

Bit provincial for them fancy dan clean underpants Lunnoners mind

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I imagine that they're operating from the premise that the Worst Thing Possible would be Corbyn winning a leadership election, and that anything else is preferable...including alienating a huge and otherwise welcome support base.

I think the premise is, 'we have to demonstrate conclusively to these uppity proles via an electoral disaster that they should just let us public school, oxbridge, corporate/bar/PR firm types run things properly and provide a very slightly nicer neoliberally orthodox alternative to Tory dystopian horror'

So they're actually trying to create an electoral disaster 'pour encourager les autres'

 

[The39thStep]

I really don't think it is very perceptive to claim that "The closest historical parallel with this situation lies not in Westminster but in Berlin in 1918..."

And subbing his piece "The party is losing touch with the working class..", Cruddas then appears to endorse the leadership candidate committed to blocking Brexit and insisting on a 2nd ratifying referendum.

Wank.

Yes the historical example is wank but there is no ringing endorsement of Smith, get the feeling that he is holding his hands up in the air in exasperation. Where he gets it right though is a) labours disconnection with what at one time would have been its natural heartland especially over the factors that underpin The Brexit vote and B) the potential for the space to open up for a party or movement that fills that sentiment.
Don't get me wrong there are times when part of me really wants Corbyn to win but that's mainly after a few beers reading the press and Twitter . It's tempting see the latest candidate or the latest offering from the left as being something to back. But at the end if the day it's just what's left . He's a candidate of the left and nothing more. Cruddas analysis ( lack of paragraphs and faulty allusions to 1919 excepted) hits the nail on the head about the gap between Labour and the working class. Perhaps it's the wrong working class for the left ?

 

[Vintage Paw]

My weird email from last week seems to have come to nothing. I've just had my "thanks for registering - you check out, we've taken your money, you'll get your ballot at the end of August" email.

Jeremy might be coming to Stoke this month

 

[free spirit]

Guardian says there were 5,000 people there. Let's assume they were lying and be generous and say there were 15,000. Population of Liverpool is 466,000. Assuming that 15,000 people came and they were all from Liverpool itself rather than its many satellite towns and you've got about 0.3% of the population. Be less generous and you're looking at 0.1-0.2%. A fraction of a fraction.

except you're out by a factor of 10.

That should be 3.3% of the population.

Also, as I've pointed out a few times, this actually is translating into popular support, Labour were leading by 5% on 38% in the last ipso mori poll if you look at the data for all respondents. It's only when the figures are adjusted based on whether they voted at the last election and if they're likely to vote next time that the tories had a 1% lead.

Corbyn is reaching out to significant numbers of people who've been switched off from the political process - if he continues with this labour could reclaim the 10% or so of voters who stopped voting completely due to blair

 

[killer b]

A single poll, before it's been adjusted to make it more representative is almost completely meaningless. It certainly isn't enough for you to wildly extrapolate such an optimistic outlook.

 

[Wilf]

30 to 40 years of swimming in a neoliberal sea mean that many take it for granted that the basic philosophy of neoliberalism is synonymous with freedom and good moral fibre. When you argue for even the smallest step towards centralisation or wealth redistribution, you are competing with these ingrained assumptions. This was Thatcher's great triumph.

Most of my friends who work in middle management or professional roles have no intent to accumulate wealth or power away from the disenfranchised but they react even to concepts such as rent controls (that affect them not one jot as they are neither tenant nor landlord) as if Stalin himself had come back from the dead. That's because they provide a challenge to the inherent neoliberal narrative of society.

If Ed Milliband could be viewed as a socialist, how does this middle Englander view Corbyn?

The important thing to realise is that none of that is helped by having a Labour leader to the right of Corbyn. In fact, the succession of Kinnock, Blair, Brown and Milliband actually simply reinforced that the neoliberal narrative is the right one and so helped to prevent future Labour governments once the Tories had managed to throw off their socially hard right shackles.

The only way to achieve anything is to accept that maybe Corbyn can't win but is still the best choice anyway. Society changes only once certain ideas take hold and that only happens once the window of acceptable debate is driven towards those ideas. One side chasing the middle ground does nothing but shift the middle ground itself. Only once left-leaning ideas are seen as natural rather than extreme will it be realistic for a left-leaning party to be elected.

I agree with this, as obviously do a lot of other posters from the likes. It gets to the dilemma of electoral politics - do you develop policies and a stance aimed simply at winning an election or is there an electoral route to win with what you actually believe in (in this case perhaps a left social democratic position). But if you are going to try and do that - essentially, to win the election after next - it still contains all the contradictions of electoral politics, even more so as you are trying to shift the terms of debate, consensus, what is possible, call it what you like. At one level, there's doing struggle, which is immediate and involves social forces, fighting round issues that affect people in their lives and then there's electoral politics which may overlap, but always has an endpoint of a general election. It also, necessarily, involves all the dispiriting and time consuming stuff of responding to media attacks (much more than this, an active media strategy), a heavy focus on manoeuvres in parliament and the like. It's hard to keep the left position when the polls show it isn't working and your life gets sucked into the Westminster village.

I don't support Labour and so it's not something I really want to happen, but it's seemed to me that one way to start linking the party into actual struggle is to move beyond Westminster, open the party structure up, essentially to think about becoming a 'movement'. And as a social democratic party rather than socialist/transformatory party, there would be plenty of scope for that extending beyond traditional Labour towns, the labour movement - to have a rather fuzzy view of class . That itself is a mechanism/channel of communication to start shifting the consensus or at least to normalise more radical ideas beyond neo-liberalism. Again, I'd rather see people involved in struggle - and class politics full stop - than what would still be jump leads on the chest of social democracy. Ironically, the betrayals of the right, through to the potential departure of most of the Parliamentary party, might make this more likely to happen. I don't think it will happen, so far Corbyn has shown himself still trapped in the mindset of Labourism. He still seems to think the route to the working class is via the unions and Labour Party itself. But he might be left in a position where he has to be a bit more creative.

 

[mauvais]

There's a map of CLP declarations doing the rounds, veracity unknown, in which Owen Smith is currently being beaten by abstentions

Spoiler

 

[Cid]

Worth bearing in mind that CLP nomination meetings are only open to members eligible to vote (pre Jan 12). My CLP (Sheffield Central) is also delegate based, so those voting on nominations will have been elected at the AGMs back in May/June.

 

[killer b]

Yougov have done a poll on which way labour voters would go in the event of a split - which illustrates quite nicely why there won't be a split.

YouGov | But who gets to keep the voters?

 

[YouSir]

Worth bearing in mind that CLP nomination meetings are only open to members eligible to vote (pre Jan 12). My CLP (Sheffield Central) is also delegate based, so those voting on nominations will have been elected at the AGMs back in May/June.

Why did yours end up as a delegate vote? What was the outcome?