Labour leadership

[two sheds]

I heard that the South West labour party has come out in favour of Corbyn. Wouldn't surprise me - it would be the only way labour could take seats from tories down here in the next election - siphon off some disaffected liberal democrats. Still pretty unlikely though unfortunately.

 

[marty21]

From the man who masterminded Scottish Labour's election campaign.

quite a thing to have on your political CV

 

[marty21]

Labour have no identity at the moment other than, we're not as bad as the Tories - the other main stream candidates just offer more of the same - Corbyn seems to be striking a chord with disaffected Labour voters

At least with the Tories, you know what you are going to get, they are going to cover you in a shower of shit, you expect it, you aren't surprised by it - with Labour it seems at the moment that the shit will be less smelly, but that's the only difference.

 

[butchersapron]

I heard that the South West labour party has come out in favour of Corbyn. Wouldn't surprise me - it would be the only way labour could take seats from tories down here in the next election - siphon off some disaffected liberal democrats. Still pretty unlikely though unfortunately.

There's no such membership grouping or way to come out for him is there? Just a party ran for labour in the SW?

 

[weltweit]

Radio says all £3.00 voters will be carefully vetted to ensure no non labour supporters sneak into affect the Labour leadership voting process.

 

[butchersapron]

Radio says all £3.00 voters will be carefully vetted to ensure no non labour supporters sneak into affect the Labour leadership voting process.

I wonder if anyone else has noticed this?

 

[marty21]

Radio says all £3.00 voters will be carefully vetted to ensure no non labour supporters sneak into affect the Labour leadership voting process.

in other works, to ensure that no Corbyn supporters sneak in to affect the Labour leadership voting process

 

[Zabo]

CWU backing Corbyn too now.

Yeah! Let's have a Purge Party!

“There is a virus within the party – Jeremy Corbyn is the antidote,” Ward said as he said that Corbyn offered the chance to fight back against Blairites such as Peter Mandelson." Dave Ward CWU.

Bring it on! I'll be happy to make Mandy a cake with his famous words in the very best icing: "I'm intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich." Ummuna can have the crumbs.

Yours, ever the optimist.

 

[butchersapron]

Best one yet, from Michael White:

Corbyn is like ISIS

Anti-Nato, basically anti-Europe despite this week’s belated statement(remember, he’s a politician too), pro-Hamas, in favour of renationalising all sorts of things he doesn’t have the money to buy, let alone invest in: the list of tried and tested, failed Labour policies is a long one. On top of which, he’s old enough to be Greece’s Alexis Tsipras’s dad.

I know there are good ideas in there, too, and that his lack of spin, his candour (sort of) and informality (etc) make a refreshing change from the timid incrementalism of the post-Blair Labour world. But running a party, let alone a government dealing with other governments, is a disciplined business. It’s got to hang together, which is not easy, as the Cameron government often shows.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t so? Yes. A cooperative world with sound green policies, global peace and no more poverty, would also be lovely. We’ve actually done pretty well in the last few centuries, despite their periodic horrors, centuries in which unlovely things like markets and capitalism, tempered by humane social interventions, brilliant science and the rule of law, have overwhelmed the primitive, impoverished authoritarianism of the past.

The modern battle is never permanently won. Reactionary fundamentalism of many varieties is in view: anti-science, anti-internationalist, anti-women, anti-reason. Isis is just the most lurid manifestation of the flight from modernity among those it either has not yet touched or (in many countries like Britain) feel left behind by the hi-tech digital world it is creating.

 

[YouSir]

Best one yet, from Michael White:

Corbyn is like ISIS

I like it, it's all going a bit Lord of the Rings. Would the unions be the rings of power then? Duped into helping Corbyn unleash the 'forces of DARKNESS'?

 

[Zabo]

White

"The response so far has been disappointingly timid, leaving the field open to Syriza, Spain’s Podemos and – perhaps – to sharp-suited reactionaries like Nigel Farage or romantic beardies who wear sandals and socks to the office. They don’t have the answers either, but their failures would open the road to the forces of real darkness"

Let's hope the first part of the darkness takes place at The G when all the lights get turned off.

 

[frogwoman]

Meanwhile the same paper prints fawning eulogies of 'highly valued' ISIS commanders who appeared on newsnight once and gave other jihadis advice

 

[Rob Ray]

The response so far has been disappointingly timid

Does White even read his own paper, which has been running at least a couple of attack pieces on a daily basis? It's hard to see how the Blairites could be more hysterically aggressive short of physical violence, tbh. If anything that's part of their problem, if they stopped hectoring everyone for being too stupid to do what they want for five minutes and played the "we're listening, let's have a debate" card they could spend a month turning Corbyn from everyone's favourite fiery rebel into a crushing mush of unflattering compromises.

 

[DotCommunist]

romantic beardies who wear sandals and socks to the office

you're rocking the the little fash tash (thankyou belushi) White. But yeah this is just that cunt once again orating from on high.

 

[Pickman's model]

Does White even read his own paper, which has been running at least a couple of attack pieces on a daily basis? It's hard to see how the Blairites could be more hysterically aggressive short of physical violence, tbh. If anything that's part of their problem, if they stopped hectoring everyone for being too stupid to do what they want for five minutes and played the "we're listening, let's have a debate" card they could spend a month turning Corbyn from everyone's favourite fiery rebel into a crushing mush of unflattering compromises.

they didn't get where they are today by careful consideration of the issue and thoughtful responses to difficult situations.

 

[nino_savatte]

Michael White lives in the same area as me. I always feel tempted to give the cunt a piece of my mind when I see him. I reckon he lives in one of the posh riverside properties.

 

[Favelado]

What the fuck does he know about Podemos? He thinks they're a response to PSOE's timidity? Fucking bullshit. In any case, you can hardly complain that the left is too timid and then slag off radicalism. Incoherent dogshit.

 

[rekil]

This is spooky. I checked the twitter machine this morning before getting the bus and was dismayed to see that Michael White was replying to someone who had chipped into that beef I had with him, so it gave me an idea for a blues tune - mainly just "Woke up this mornin', guardian hack, in my mentions" over and over. Then I come home and see that the first line of that White piece is... "I woke this morning after a good night’s sleep". Can he see into my brain?

(as you were)

 

[Kaka Tim]

White is a grade a poltical ligger - always ready to pen articles excusing disgraced mps, argue they need higher wages and go on about just how hard done by they are. In return he gets to schmooze at their bars and parties. And gets paid by the guardian for his sycophantic, westminster bubble-tastic drivel.

 

[two sheds]

There's no such membership grouping or way to come out for him is there? Just a party ran for labour in the SW?

Fair point. The person who told me may have been referring to South East Cornwall Labour Party. They’re linked to Cornish Labour Party. https://labourcornwall.wordpress.com/, but I’m not sure whether they're anything more than a Facebook page.

A couple of other regions haven’t decided the look of it, and a couple haven’t updated their pages since before the election so they may not have noticed the leadership election yet.


Red Labour – Cornwall has come out in pro Corbyn though so he’s as good as in No. 10 already.

 

[03gills]

I still don't think he will win. There are three right side candidates vs him. If they combine into one against JC somehow they have more votes. Am I right on this?

Labour uses AV (instant-runoff voting) for it's internal leadership election. I won't go into too much detail, but the basic premise is to prevent someone from winning an election on less than 50% of the vote simply because of a split opposition (the 'spoiler effect')

So, If a majority of the Labour party really don't want him as leader, then yes, AV should in theory allow one of the others to win.

It got a lot of shit in the 2011 referendum, but it's actually a bloody clever way to elect a single winner.

 

[JTG]

Labour uses AV (instant-runoff voting) for it's internal leadership election. I won't go into too much detail, but the basic premise is to prevent someone from winning an election on less than 50% of the vote simply because of a split opposition (the 'spoiler effect')

So, If a majority of the Labour party really don't want him as leader, then yes, AV should in theory allow one of the others to win.

It got a lot of shit in the 2011 referendum, but it's actually a bloody clever way to elect a single winner.

OTOH, if the polls are right and Corbyn has 40%+ of the first preference vote, he'll only need a tiny number of transfers to him to get him past the winning post

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

Serious question: If Corbyn wins, how and when might the security services start to undermine him, assuming it aint already happening? (given at the very least that he is anti trident and no friend of NATO type stuff)

MI5, CIA et al have their creatures all over the place, fingers in many pies. I think it's naive to not give consideration to this question, though I am less confident of what the answer may be and am interested in qualified speculation from people with some knowledge of the field.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

One labour supporter, not massively to the left, said what they like about Corbyn is that he talks politics like an engineer talks engineering.

I've been watching some of his talks around the country, and that's just what he does: Talks and talks and talks politics, because that's what he is and that's what he does.

No flannel. Not over or under detailed (though he clearly knows massive detail) Not over or under exciting. Few rhetorical flourishes (though I know he is capable of them), no false attempts to be funny or "with it". Hardly any jargon or soundbites.

Just interesting, confident and accessible, quietly expert but not show-offy.

he is the antithesis of the dumbed down stuff slopped out to us by the establishment political/media nexus. That's another reason why they just don't get him, It's like trying to load a Playstation game onto a megadrive or something, this then translates into their echo-chamber edict that he is somehow "unacceptable".

His critics rarely discuss his actual analysis, because it tends to be very soundly constructed.

 

[gosub]

Serious question: If Corbyn wins, how and when might the security services start to undermine him, assuming it aint already happening? (given at the very least that he is anti trident and no friend of NATO type stuff)

MI5, CIA et al have their creatures all over the place, fingers in many pies. I think it's naive to not give consideration to this question, though I am less confident of what the answer may be and am interested in qualified speculation from people with some knowledge of the field.

on one level, on another he's the forlorn hope for keeping the UK together.

 

[Rob Ray]

Serious question: If Corbyn wins, how and when might the security services start to undermine him, assuming it aint already happening? (given at the very least that he is anti trident and no friend of NATO type stuff)

MI5, CIA et al have their creatures all over the place, fingers in many pies. I think it's naive to not give consideration to this question, though I am less confident of what the answer may be and am interested in qualified speculation from people with some knowledge of the field.

For all that GCHQ et al are a paranoid bunch, I doubt they're bothering to do much more than monitor him and his associates atm. He'd only be of much interest if he was getting anywhere near Number 10, which even if he wins the leadership contest won't happen (unless he bucks the habit of a lifetime by being utterly ruthless to head off the certainty of a Blairite coup long before 2020). All they really need to do is wait until his own side does him in.

 

[redsquirrel]

Best one yet, from Michael White:

Corbyn is like ISIS

God the man is such a cunt, I'd love to wrap a cricket bat around his face.

 

[butchersapron]

As I've said before, the Greens here took significantly more votes off the lib dems than we did from Labour, so without the Greens standing the Lib Dems would have won by a bigger margin.

Totalling up the council wards, Greens had 13% vs 7% in the GE, and Labour were almost neck and neck with Lib Dems, but in the GE the lib dems won by 6.8%. So we took almost all of that winning percentage off the Lib Dems at council level, but couldn't do it in the GE probably due to the personal vote for the MP.

So you're talking shit.

That's exactly my point you prat, that you took the lost never-to-return lib-dem votes who would otherwise have voted labour, thereby putting the lib-dems out of the seat and labour in. That's why you shouldn't be voting in the labour leadership election - you're a member of a rival party seeking to damage to the labour party. Did you really think i was claiming that you took your rise in votes from labour, whose vote went up by 9%?

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

I guess socialists in The Green Party (and others) could be churlish and tribalist about Corbyn success, but that to me is not the nature of socialism. Pluralism is quite a natural instinct for many, along with loyalty to socialism itself.

Also, The Green Party is likely to suffer if Corbyn wins, so it's not in a tribal interest for him to do so, so the good wishes of GP socialists should be taken as non duplicitous in that way.

As I said, I aint paying the £3, but if Corbyn wins and the party shapes well in response, I will see it as far less of a rival organisation.

All this probably goes even more so for members of other left parties. The ethics of them agreeing to that declaration is interesting in each case because (correct me if I'm wrong) some of them call for Labour votes where they aint standing (i.e nearly everywhere) That's the attitude of the Morning Star communists, and SWP contingent of TUSC isnt it? Less so for Left Unity? Dunno about SP and others.

 

[chilango]

Yet more illusions in Labour. *sighs*