The Jeremy Corbyn thread

Iggle Piggle said:

Yeah Izzard. WAFC. Only raised a £1 million for Charity running marathons like a champagne swigging Tory.

If only he sneered at other people with left leaning views from behind a keyboard instead. Wouldn't the world be a better place?

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cunning fergus said:

Of course I have, you'll be asking me how much I earn next........

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cunning fergus said:

So what?

It's alright for him to have the time to swan off round the world running marathons, I bear him no grudge about that

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cunning fergus said:

So what?

It's alright for him to have the time to swan off round the world running marathons, I bear him no grudge about that, however the evidence is that he does not comprehend what's in the political interests of the working class in this country, which is why his free market capitalist message was roundly rejected in traditional working class constutiencies.

His message is much more popular in the richer Tory heartlands of Brighton and that's the point about the current schism in the Labour Party........no doubt he will be indulged by the PLP where the pro EU sentiment is the orthodox position.

It was rejected remember.

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Iggle Piggle said:

The tone of your post suggests otherwise. You appear to have grudges against anyone thats bought a pot of Humous from Waitrose.

Blair once made a speech about Dennis Skinner. The 2 don't have the same political views but Dennis 'knew the difference between a labour and a Tory government' and he is right - That's why the likes of me vote labour.

Under Jezza the party is a laughing stock, the trident example posted earlier being a prime example. You might get rid of us pesky centrist Labour types but whose going to vote Labour in? You are going to need more than You, london Irish and Ernest to win a general election.

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drew said:

Perhaps you could explain how being in opposition helps the working class?

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drew said:

Perhaps you could explain how being in opposition helps the working class?

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Stato said:

No my next question would be have you also voted Conservative?

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cunning fergus said:

It's a measure of how far the centre ground has shifted that those advocating relatively basic socialist policies are set out as having political beliefs aligned to Joseph Stalin.

Controlling the labour market and re-nationalising state assets should be core labour policies, they are not because of Tony Blair, and cannot be introduced all the while we are in the EU.

Privatisation and free unfettered markets are meat and drink to Tory ideology which is why you in voting labour are taking a big Tory shit on the working class and history of the labour movement.

There is no 3rd way here........I know what side of the argument I am on, if you want to soothe your guilt by quoting some trite social democratic neo liberal sound bite knock yourself out.

You are still on the side of Goldman Sachs.

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synavm said:

Is it as simple as classing a part of the Labour Party as being free market capitalists that do not hold the interests of the working class? Last year, Labour were pushing a manifesto that included a ban on zero hour contracts, rent controls, reduced social mobility and a freeze on energy prices. All of those were interventionalist policies designed to directly help the working class. What I'd also put to you is a Liberal approach to the economy can be good for the working class, as it frees up capital and creates jobs. Much of the Labour Party understands that it is possible to combine ethics with capitalism and sometimes market forces are more effective than statism. As a former Labour member, my firm belief is and was, we need to achieve equality of opportunity in this country to make the system work, currently we don't have it and it should be a priority to work towards it.

The left can throw around all of the name tags that they hear in their echo chambers around all they want - Neo-Liberal, Zionist, Blairite, Tory-Lites, but fact is we want a fairer society just the same as them. No one holds a monopoly on principle and there is no one right way of doing things, the sooner the left realises that, the sooner they'll start getting things done.

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cunning fergus said:

It's a measure of how far the centre ground has shifted that those advocating relatively basic socialist policies are set out as having political beliefs aligned to Joseph Stalin.

Controlling the labour market and re-nationalising state assets should be core labour policies, they are not because of Tony Blair, and cannot be introduced all the while we are in the EU.

Privatisation and free unfettered markets are meat and drink to Tory ideology which is why you in voting labour are taking a big Tory shit on the working class and history of the labour movement.

There is no 3rd way here........I know what side of the argument I am on, if you want to soothe your guilt by quoting some trite social democratic neo liberal sound bite knock yourself out.

You are still on the side of Goldman Sachs.

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Machiavelli said:

This from one of our best social and political commentators, in the spirit of Priestley and Orwell:

There’s a fetid cloud of acrimony over Labour – it’s the reek of death
John Harris

Has there ever been a stranger political occasion than Tuesday night’s marathon meeting of Labour’s national executive committee? In an abridged version, the events of those six hours may one day make a good play, awash not just with division and bitterness, but plenty of bathos – from the moment when “the office took a delivery of four crates of sandwiches”, to the aftermath when, in tribute to her leader’s solidarity with the downtrodden, a jubilant member of Jeremy Corbyn’s Westminster team tweeted a picture of two bottles of House of Commons champagne, with the simple caption, “Sweet”. Inside an hour, she had deleted it. Funny, that.


Three decisions taken that night speak volumes about the party’s grim predicament. Whatever the whys and wherefores of that botched “coup”, there is something undeniably odd about a party leader who would apparently struggle to get the support of 51 MPs and MEPs, and the need for a vote to let him on the ballot paper regardless. Stranger still are the new rules on who exactly can vote (which rule out people who have joined in the last six months, while apparently leaving open the possibility than they can resign their memberships, re-register as “supporters”, and then pay £25 to participate). Finally, perhaps the most striking decision of all: the imposition of a kind of internal martial law, whereby “all normal party meetings at CLP and branch level shall be suspended until the completion of the leadership election”.

This is drastic stuff – the party effectively putting its daily operations into suspended animation - and the explanation is obvious enough. There is a fetid cloud of acrimony and spite hanging over Labour, and no end of reports of hateful behaviour dating back to long before this crisis; some of it clearly the preserve of lone inadequates, but other aspects reflective of the old political calculation whereby adversaries are best beaten by making their lives so unpleasant that they simply give up.

Rosie Winterton, the Labour chief whip, has made formal representations to prominent Corbyn allies about the abuse and harassment of MPs. We all know about the brick put through the window of Angela Eagle’s constituency office. Eagle has also had to cancel a forthcoming meeting in Luton after “threatening” phone calls. According to a party member who said she felt “threatened” and ended up in tears, a meeting of the Bristol West constituency party last Thursday saw a hardcore of Corbyn supporters “shouting and screaming” not just at the local MP who had resigned her shadow ministerial post, but “the chair, and anyone with an opposing view, as if they were shouting at Cameron on a protest march”.

In Brighton, the pro-Corbyn group Momentum organised a rally just prior to the local Labour party’s annual meeting last Saturday. There was then a massed walk from one to other, where serving party officers were all summarily replaced by Corbynites. The edges of the meeting were reportedly characterised by what one insider described as “a real nastiness”, manifested in the caretaker of the building being spat at, while two Corbyn supporters later claimed to have been called “scum” and threatened with violence.

Meanwhile, confirming that social media is probably the worst thing that ever happened to the political left, it is full of the hateful discourse in which criticism is tantamount to treachery, and misogyny and antisemitism are never far away. The people responsible are apparently unconcerned about the fact that grinding the Labour party into dust on platforms provided by mega-earning capitalists suggests a certain kind of abject collaboration, but there we are.

Clearly, there are elements from all wings of the party prone to horrible behaviour. But let’s not mess about: right now, the lion’s share of the noise is coming from people who evidently see what they’re doing as part of the defence of their embattled leader. Whether particular elements of the party – Momentum, chiefly – have authorised any of this is hardly the point: of course they haven’t, and many of their people are appalled. But there is also a sense that awful stuff is being tacitly tolerated, as the seriousness of what is happening is either underestimated or completely ignored.


If you doubt this, listen to the Radio 4 interview given by Johanna Baxter, an NEC member from Scotland, describing the meeting and the atmosphere surrounding it. She sounded nervous and close to tears, and with good reason: if you’d had your mobile phone number posted online, and if women colleagues had described rape and death threats, you would be too. For these reasons she urged that the decision on Corbyn be put to a secret ballot – a proposal the leader opposed. “I acknowledge Jeremy has consistently spoken against bullying behaviour and I applaud him for that,” she said. “But when it came to the vote to prevent colleagues taking an extremely difficult decision that would determine the future of our party, he voted against the single thing that he could have done to protect those colleagues.”


Underneath all this, it pains me to say, is a politics that lays claim to high humanitarian ideals, while either practising or tolerating the opposite. It is far too macho, privileging the kind of gobby men who accuse their colleagues of being “****ing useless”, and worse, and neglecting the ways in which less privileged voices might be brought into the conversation. It also represents the outer edge of one of the strands of support for Corbyn that may yet prove to be its downfall: the politics of puritanism, whereby no compromise can ever be brooked, and to even question the leader’s bona fides is to ally oneself with “Blairites”, “warmongers”, and worse.

Just to be clear: the Labour party’s collective ethics have hardly taken this terrible turn after a long spell of loveliness. Down the years, most elements of the left have fallen for the idea that so long as the ends embody this or that lofty principle, the means can be as unpleasant as need be. In that sense, driving people away from meetings and traducing them on Twitter is surely on the same moral spectrum as things that happened in the Blair and Brown years: the fixing of selections, pressuring conference delegates into reading out pre-written speeches, the attempted destruction of people’s careers via “briefing”.


So, though it hardly excuses any of the awfulness, the party is perhaps reaping its own whirlwind: when an organisation’s moral centre implodes (and here, it’s worth the obligatory mention of Iraq), anything goes.

All of which adds to the reek of death, and the sense that this collapse into acrimony is of a piece with Labour’s estrangement from its traditional working-class base, the increasing dominance of a metropolitan hardcore, and the clear impression of unstoppable decline. Corbyn might be bereft of responses to all this, but neither Eagle nor Owen Smith have so far come up with any convincing answers, beyond either the former’s appeal to a hackneyed Labour identity which no longer chimes with the real world (“I’m a strong Labour woman”), or the latter’s reheated version of tax-and-spend social democracy.

At this rate one or both of them will lose, and God only knows what Labour will turn into: a dystopia of intolerance, in all likelihood, from which anyone with any self-respect will walk away.

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Bold Seagull said:

You think you have it all worked out but it is so much more complex than you present. The working classes deserted Labour through the 70's and 80's. In 1966 69% of manual workers voted Labour, but by '87 that was 45%. From 1945 to 1960 60% of skilled manual workers voted Labour only for that vote to be shredded to 34% by the mid 80's. The biggest return to Labour of the working class vote since the '60's was 1997 when they returned in their droves, but it was brief, however it wasn't 1997 or Blair that lost their vote - that had been going in the previous decades.

New Labour was a response to the fact Labour had already been deserted, a slow decline of its vote over the previous 25 years, and a desperation at ending 18 years of Tory rule. To say the abandonment of Labour was from 1997 is simply just ignoring history.

It left Labour sustained by your loathsome middle classes, but there is no quick fix for getting the working classes back. They are not just going to look at a Jeremy Corbyn, or a sudden programme of re-nationalisation and return in their droves. You seem to think the referendum vote by the working classes was to enable this social political revolution, a bringing down of capitalism - again, no evidence that is the case. Not every working class person is sat waiting for the next great socialist manifesto to appear.

Labour has been confused, conflicted for 50 years. As I've said numerous times, this comes of the electorate continually returning Tory governments. Do they align themselves more to the centre or stick with their core belief in socialism. You are putting huge stead in the working classes buying into the that (which as said they didn't do through the '80s), and if they are to do that, Labour is going to need someone more convincing than Corbyn. They are going to need a Alexis Tsipras type figure, and that is not going to be easy to find.

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Bold Seagull said:

You think you have it all worked out but it is so much more complex than you present. The working classes deserted Labour through the 70's and 80's. In 1966 69% of manual workers voted Labour, but by '87 that was 45%. From 1945 to 1960 60% of skilled manual workers voted Labour only for that vote to be shredded to 34% by the mid 80's. The biggest return to Labour of the working class vote since the '60's was 1997 when they returned in their droves, but it was brief, however it wasn't 1997 or Blair that lost their vote - that had been going in the previous decades.

New Labour was a response to the fact Labour had already been deserted, a slow decline of its vote over the previous 25 years, and a desperation at ending 18 years of Tory rule. To say the abandonment of Labour was from 1997 is simply just ignoring history.

It left Labour sustained by your loathsome middle classes, but there is no quick fix for getting the working classes back. They are not just going to look at a Jeremy Corbyn, or a sudden programme of re-nationalisation and return in their droves. You seem to think the referendum vote by the working classes was to enable this social political revolution, a bringing down of capitalism - again, no evidence that is the case. Not every working class person is sat waiting for the next great socialist manifesto to appear.

Labour has been confused, conflicted for 50 years. As I've said numerous times, this comes of the electorate continually returning Tory governments. Do they align themselves more to the centre or stick with their core belief in socialism. You are putting huge stead in the working classes buying into the that (which as said they didn't do through the '80s), and if they are to do that, Labour is going to need someone more convincing than Corbyn. They are going to need a Alexis Tsipras type figure, and that is not going to be easy to find.

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cunning fergus said:

There is no 3rd way here........I know what side of the argument I am on, if you want to soothe your guilt by quoting some trite social democratic neo liberal sound bite knock yourself out.

You are still on the side of Goldman Sachs.

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Titanic said:

[tweet]753882700470165504[/tweet]

Back of the net!

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