As you say, we don't know how as PM Corbyn would react in similar circumstances to those that Brown was responding to in 2008/9. If the revenue stops coming then he will inevitably look at cuts.
Supposition is supposition, but you seem to rely heavily on it for your argument. So let's deal in facts instead: 1. Public service spending goes up under Labour governments and down under tory ones. 2. Jeremy Corbyn cannot win a general election therefore the tories will stay in power.
My argument isn't an ideological one, it is simply that we need to save public services and only a Labour government can do that and it needs to happen asap. Picky’s ‘coups and revolutions’ aren’t going to help.
The false premise I was referring to was that a non Corbyn Labour government would be elected on 'an austerity platform'.
It’s pointless to say that change will ‘come as quickly as we make it happen’, when the electorate - particularly Labour's core voters - are still increasingly rejecting socialism. It’s also pointless to say that Labour would have become electable if the whole party had been behind Corbyn (like he got behind previous leaders I suppose). Have you actually spoken to many voters? They just don’t want him.
Well clearly I'm not interested in electing any kind of government regardless of their policies, I'm interested in electing a Labour government whose policy is to support public services and that’s what I’ve been discussing for pages.
I admire your optimism about the prospect of ‘real change’ sometime in the future, but there's no reasonable logic in dismissing the only viable way of securing essential public services for this and however many generations it takes as 'not strategically beneficial'.
So that's your position then - neo-liberalism is "inevitable" even under a government elected on a social democratic platform. Cutting services less than the tories = protecting/securing public services and we should just trust you that a future labour government will invest in services instead of cutting them, although you're clear labour will cut services if the private sector is not doing well. Logically there is no line past which Labour could go at which point you would no longer say to vote Labour, as long as the Tories were going further.
Since you don't think social democracy is achievable there's no point in continuing this conversation - we have totally different aims, so it's hardly surprising that we can't even comprehend each other's strategy as workable. I think neo-liberalism is the wrong direction, and that if we want to go in the right direction, there's no value in continuing to go in the wrong direction whether that's faster or slower. If you think neo-liberalism is the only direction we can go, it makes sense to try to go that way more slowly. Don't see it as protecting let alone securing public services though, if as you say Labour will cut them as soon as the private sector goes wrong. Personally I look at recent, living memory history and see things being done in a different way, meaning it's possible to go in a different direction, and that's where we should head.
before we finish though, I'd just like to respond to this:
andrew hertford said:
So let's deal in facts instead: 1. Public service spending goes up under Labour governments and down under tory ones. 2. Jeremy Corbyn cannot win a general election therefore the tories will stay in power.
from IFS study:
https://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn43.pdf
TME = Total Managed Expenditure, which is all government spending.
Blue line is government spending in real terms, which you can see increases under the tory governments in the 50s and 60s, and decreases under the labour government around 77/78, before increasing again under Thatcher's tory govt, aside from the mid/late 80s, then increasing under Major's Tory govt, before decrease in the final year of that govt and no increase in the first few years under labour.
So let's deal in facts. Tory goverments have increased spending, labour governments have decreased spending. The Blair/Brown govt increased spending by less than the average increase over the whole of the previous 60 odd years but by a lot more than the tory govts of the 80s/90s did. Less than the tory govts of the 50s/60s did though.
As for Corbyn being unable to win a general election that is not a fact, it is supposition. I may happen to agree with you that he's not going to win, but it's not fact and never can be, even when he loses in 2020 that doesn't mean he could never have won (although I know you think he couldn't). We can't know what would have happened if Labour had presented a united front rather than a split party following Corbyn's election in 2015 but it could have been very different. I know and speak to many more people who don't vote than people who do vote and initially largely very favourable of Corbyn - partly because of policy, partly because he is not the same scummy politician type as many other MPs, but by now they see him as unelectable, a split party is never attractive and so they won't vote at all. People I know who do vote mostly vote labour/green/tusc and they all like corbyn and his policies, many have gone back from green/tusc to labour as a result, people I know who vote tory/liberal would never vote labour anyway. The UKIP voters I know some like policies like social housing, railway nationalisation etc. and could be won back by a social democratic labour party, the others would never vote labour anyway.
