ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Possibly something like "it's like kristallnacht, I tells ye!!".
Jeremy Corbyn's time is up
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Possibly something like "it's like kristallnacht, I tells ye!!".
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Labour is now opposed to austerity and LG cuts. I completely agree with you about some right-wing Labour attacks on the welfare state (still get annoyed at the Rachel Reeves speechand do not support her views at all). The illegal budgets is a tricky one which happened in the 80s and did not end well.
"Illegal" budgets weren't always illegal. As local authority spending was governed by rates, local authorities could "go to the people" if they wished to set a budget outside of the current rate take, and often residents of the authority would vote in a rate rise because they could be fairly sure that the increased take would get spent on necessary services. The centralisation of LA spending, and the Poll Tax/Community Charge/Council Tax, meant that any illegal budget can only be funded through local authority reserves, and the NEC ruling forbidding councils from setting an illegal budget basically put the last nail in the coffin of councils using their reserves to relieve pressure on services/provide adequate services to their residents.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I'm not convinced that not setting a budget would mean a "massive" loss of either Councillors or support. In some local authorities, the service cuts have already bitten so deep that what's left of the budget is merely keeping a corpse on life-support. Here in Lambeth there's been a noticeable across-the-board effect on services, as Lambeth have attempted to re-negotiate any contract that their legal dept has said has scope. This means we've seen the residualisation of adult social services, and the paring down of child services (with all the consequences that has for child safety issues); the shrinking of street-cleansing and refuse collection; the near-extinction of highways maintenance; the loss of more than 55% of the borough's independent welfare and housing advice provision - well, I'm sure you take my point. In some ways we're so far gone that acts of resistance by Councillors would actually garner support. Sadly, here in Lambeth we have 59 Labour Councillors, about 40 of whom are either members of Progress and/the Fabian Society, or who are vocal and visible supporters of the "moderate"/maquis tendency, so the scope for acts of resistance is small. In conversation with one cabinet member, he told me plainly that he would NEVER do such a thing, because of "the risks of losing power". When you're dealing with that sort of stupidity and lack of care for the people you're supposed to represent, then those people are fucked.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
An argument whose threadbareness was already revealed at the 2010 election, where "we'll do austerity with a kinder face" was kicked in the face.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Same experience here with the Progressites and their fellow-travellers. Lying, venal, neoliberally-inclined cockwipes, the lot of them.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
If the DCLG sent in it's own people to set and administrate the budget, then one thing would be discovered in short order - that such a budget would damage services. Don't you think that's a story worth telling - that a govt dept couldn't manage any better than a local authority?
I lived through that (and Lambeth's supposed "looney left" years), and on any metric, the last 7 years have been worse than anything Lambeth's Lib-Dem/Tory coalition managed. Fitchett's fuckwads may have been corrupt, but they knew which side their bread was buttered. This current wunch of Progress bankers and their fellow-travellers are worse. They're cynically overseeing the destruction of communities in Lambeth in order to establish a fresh income stream by becoming a private landlord.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Basingstoke and Deane Borough Councillor arrested on suspicion of theft perhaps they had lost something in terms of reputation.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Roman candles
gosub
~#
I think it was to do with a dependency on the nomination papers
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
A physical or psychological dependency?
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
You mean they'd been rolled up to do coke with?
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Illuminating stuff from James Roberts (he was a pollster for New Labour) in the observer today.
Labours formally and deliberately turned its back on the interests of the working class a long time before Jeremy and the gang.
Labours formally and deliberately turned its back on the interests of the working class a long time before Jeremy and the gang.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Link?Illuminating stuff from James Roberts (he was a pollster for New Labour) in the observer today.
Labours formally and deliberately turned its back on the interests of the working class a long time before Jeremy and the gang.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
Illuminating stuff from James Roberts (he was a pollster for New Labour) in the observer today.
Labours formally and deliberately turned its back on the interests of the working class a long time before Jeremy and the gang.
At what point would you say Labour turned their back on the interests of the working class? Blair? Kinnock? Earlier?
fiannanahalba
Feel the Love
MacDonald.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Erm, yeah don't know what happened there. The most illuminating section of this relates to new labour pollsters surveying "less well off" labour voters
Working-class desertion of Labour started before Corbyn
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
An essential component of the Blair/new labour project was the explicit and visible rejection of the interests of the working class.
It's arguable that previous labour leaders and administrations did little or nothing to advance those interests but they were definitely required to give the impression that they were.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
1975 would be a good call.
Facing a collapse of confidence in Sterling, Chancellor Denis Healy chose to adopt a monetarist critique of the previous tory administration's 'loose money' policy and accept cuts to public expenditure as a precondition for the IMF loan that bailed the Wilson administration.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
That late?
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
1914, when the labour party joined the libs and tories in voting war credits
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
That's true, it's also the case that the Callaghan government attacked public sector pay and oversaw spiralling unemployment. My point however is that New Labour didn't merely adopt policies that run counter to the interests of the working class. Other Labour Governments routinely did that as well. The adoption of them for Blair and his friends was a policy objective in itself.
ferrelhadley
There is no love between us anymore.
TUSC, the best placed of the "Left of Labour", got about 36000 votes last election.
For a party that abandoned the working class 40 years earlier, Labour managed over 9 million votes.
Corbyn, perhaps the weakest person ever to lead the party managed to get 100 000s to join for his "liberal"\"social democratic" <boooo> politics.
I know its a shock to all the pompous intellectuals round here, but perhaps the apparently thunderously stupid oiks who make up the working class, vote Labour, vote Tory, vote UKIP and so on are the people best placed to judge who has and who has not abandoned them? Why are the "working class" not queuing up to vote for you? Why are they not queuing round the blocks at Russel Group unis for the "Marxism and its Relevance to Workers Class Struggle in a Post Modernist Shade of Pale" type events?
Is it possible that the stupid oiks are not as stupid as you think?
Is it possible many of them see that democracy in a heterogeneous society is a really difficult thing to get right. You have to simultaneously do enough to please wildly differing groups of people who do not fit into three neat little 19th century boxes, while not so agitating the oppositions supporters in enough numbers that they come out in greater force on polling day, and on top of that doing so amidst a complex mix of other parties and their agendas and appeals as well as their potential to be coalition partners and the set of electoral headaches that brings?
Nah thats too much like subtlety and thinking. The official line is "Labour abandoned the working class in 1914 and everyone except the pound shop revolutionaries has been too stupid to work it out. "
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
The fact that, in the last GE, the proportion of the social 'class' D/E electorate that declined to vote, (46%), was more than twice the size that voted Labour, (22%), lends some weight to the notion of abandonment.
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Whichever version of the Labour Party can manage to encourage better turnout because a Labour vote has some chance of improving stuff locally, would have a chance.
Don't see that happening any time soon though
skyscraper101
0891 50 50 50
Manchester Gorton Labour MP Gerald Kaufman died today. Another by election to follow. His lead was very solid in 2015.
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