19force8
For the avoidance of faith
You only get busy after they arrive.George too busy with twins on the way.
And I don't think George will have too many sleepless nights.
Jeremy Corbyn's time is up
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And I don't think George will have too many sleepless nights.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Round here, Momentum could be referred to as "previously-messianic", even though (as you said in the post previous to this) they can't name a deserving alternative for their zealous affections.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
The problem with scum like Danczuk being that Corbyn not only has to make sure that he's treated fairly, but that he's seen to be treated fairly. That means being scrupulous about processes that you can bet Danczuk will be examining under a microscope.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Like an untreated dose of the clap.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Mr Moose
What the hell are we supposed to tell the kids?
Yes NO ONE will lead them to glorious victory
All hail NO ONE
Cometh the hour.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
no man has blinded meYes NO ONE will lead them to glorious victory
All hail NO ONE
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Mr Moose
What the hell are we supposed to tell the kids?
...cometh Tim Farron, all down your trouser leg.
He'd pop his cork before he got near a real live leg.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
I'd have Tom Hardy in his James Delaney role .Big old boots up on the Front Bench, bit of bone dust , smoke and African magik, just staring at May and the Cabinet before beckoning the Deputy Leader, " Watson, I have a use for you" .
Oh God, mind bleach....cometh Tim Farron, all down your trouser leg.
Dom Traynor
Tino Pai
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I should hope so.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
There's a piece here by John Harris about Labour's irrelevance, more than that, deep irrelevance:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/31/labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn-tom-Watson
At one level I could repeat the standard criticisms of this king of writing, particularly that it neglects to even acknowledge the role of the Blairites in moving the party away from the working class - and it neglects to explore the kamikaze attacks on the party by its own MPs and shadow cabinet over the last 18 months. But it is right about the way the party has fallen out of national political debate, ceased to be relevant to people's lives, at a time when the tories should have been in crisis. But most of all, for me it highlights how there's absolutely no sense of, ahem, momentum. Nothing is shaping up in the party to change things, from left or right. Doesn't seem to be anything in play designed to either make the party more effective or relevant. Utterly stuck. I've long bewailed the failure of the Corbynites to get anything moving, using the massive influx of new members, but that's all over now anyway. Labour won't disappear as Harris hints, it's a national party in a first past the post system, but it seems unable to move.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/31/labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn-tom-Watson
At one level I could repeat the standard criticisms of this king of writing, particularly that it neglects to even acknowledge the role of the Blairites in moving the party away from the working class - and it neglects to explore the kamikaze attacks on the party by its own MPs and shadow cabinet over the last 18 months. But it is right about the way the party has fallen out of national political debate, ceased to be relevant to people's lives, at a time when the tories should have been in crisis. But most of all, for me it highlights how there's absolutely no sense of, ahem, momentum. Nothing is shaping up in the party to change things, from left or right. Doesn't seem to be anything in play designed to either make the party more effective or relevant. Utterly stuck. I've long bewailed the failure of the Corbynites to get anything moving, using the massive influx of new members, but that's all over now anyway. Labour won't disappear as Harris hints, it's a national party in a first past the post system, but it seems unable to move.
mikey mikey
Active Member
Dom Traynor
Tino Pai
So what though?Corbyn is a massive drag on Labour and therefore the only chance of getting rid of the Tories now
Agreed
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Well, in practice, he is a drag on the party, I agree - though I suspect I'm agreeing with you from a different political position. But then the party has also been a drag on his leadership - the coups and briefings ensured he never had a chance, nor, more to the point did the attempt to restore the party to a social democratic position. But equally, more so in fact, I blame the Corbynites for never building that project, engaging with people. It was always going to be difficult, to change direction, to get people feeling they had a connection with the party - but it was never going to happen if they didn't actually do it. But all that adds up to, well, nothing. There's no realistic prospect of any kind of even semi successful political project emerging from the ruins. A united social democratic party would have more chance - even a united fucking Blairite party would have more chance in the polls than what there is now - but neither of those things is going to happen - so removing Corbyn does nothing.
mikey mikey
Active Member
I must say that I despise the PLP for their determination to change the Labour Party into the UUK equivilent of the Democrats. In fact, I am losing all sympathy for, if not empathy with, my fellow Labour supporters. Fuck it. Go crowbar in Dan Javis or some other "non-Corbynite" and watch the front bench of the opposition fill up with the likes of Rachel "tougher on benefis than the Tories" Reeves and Hillary "bomber" Benn. The only hope now is the SNP and a Scottish address.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
My guess is that if Corbyn hadn't found his way onto the ballot paper and Burnham or Cooper had won they'd be a couple of points higher in the polls, almost entirely on the grounds of being a more united party (than now), but still out of the game. They'd also have 100,000 + less members. Labour councils would still be cutting jobs and services and we'd all be equally depressed.
While I often find myself... frustrated by the same issue, I think it's worth bearing in mind that this is happening for structural reasons rather than a mass failure on the part of the Corbynites. It was just never going to happen. The monolith of the party & establishment was too strong, and the organisation of the labour left too weak - and all the while they've been trying to deal with the biggest political challenges the party has faced since the war.
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Well, I sort of agree - and you must be right because that's exactly what's happened. But I still wonder what the fuck the Corbynites thought the job in hand was - 'say social democratic things and watch the voters flood back'? And yes, okay, it goes back to the circumstances under which he was elected - totally unexpected and without any serious plans, structures or policies. The extent to which the Blairite takeover was organised can at times be over-exaggerated, but it really did have a plan, money and a longstanding body of work to draw on from the eurocommunists through to the business friendly think tanks. But still, and I'm left with a 'but still...', all those new members... all the money that came with them... the possibility of something happening. Corbynism isn't even to my political taste, but it's been galling watching it getting precisely nowhere.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Vinegar stroke - but organic balsamic.Crikey, we could create a whole thread out of this fella.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
How did you not type orgasmic balsamic ?
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Hit the post.
I think the thing is that to achieve that (and I'm not sure how much social democracy really is or was the aim of Corbynists) requires a political logic that must today surely point away from the Labour Party - needing a view of what is necessary for rebuilding a foundation for that politics that is antagonistic to the needs/demands of parliamentarism and of Labourism. Arguably it even points beyond social democracy itself, but that aside, I think it would have been pretty much impossible for a movement in the orbit of Labour to make that shift. Their politics exhausted itself decades ago and its roots have withered away.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
That's it really. My paradoxical posts on this thread have been variants on 'loads of people joined, wanted to do social democracy but even within their own logic, they've failed'. But I'm not into electoral politics and the real lost moment I saw in Corbynism was a brief time when the expanded membership could have looked outwards, engaged with communities - and in doing that started to unravel the assumptions and communication channels of labourism, along with breaching the structures of the party itself. Fwiw, even that wouldn't have been in line with my anti-system politics, but it would have been interesting. It was probably an unrealistic notion that a largely middle class membership could get back into working class communities - a membership also that hasn't discovered that social democracy isn't there to be had any more. But even after saying all that it's disappointing that they've done nothing at all, give or take fighting what has become a pointless struggle to plot some route or other through the arcane systems of CLPs and rulebooks (and haven't, as far as I can tell, achieved much through that pathway either)/
There has been some CLP action - the left slate took all the officer positions in our local CLP a few weeks ago, and I think that's happened elsewhere - but that's indicative only of how hollow the CLPs are as much as anything. In fact where there's important stuff - selection of PPCs for example - what organising they can do isn't enough, as there's more than just a few crusty time servers arranged against them.
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