[Politics] Next leader of the Labour party

Weststander said:

Len McCluskey’s Unite have chosen RLB and Richard ‘Car Crash’ Burgon as their dream team. No surprise if truth be told.

If you want a strong and very electable Labour duo in 2024, they’re the polar opposite, an awful pairing. Both are hard left leaning, very defensive/blinkered about Corbyn and ‘that manifesto’, charmless, and Burgon’s hopeless when facing straight forward questions in interviews (see a plethora of youtube disaster clips).

Hopefully the membership will be more pragmatic in their final say.

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Jolly Red Giant said:

More than 55% rejected the core Tory offering


So why not vote for policies that will bring about this result?


Lansman isn't a Marxist - nor is he an academic - the best description of Lansman is a 'full-time political spoofer'.


Britain is not a PLC - it is a country - and if you try and run it on a capitalist business model you will end up bankrupting the country (which the Tories/Blairites have done more than once). You cannot divorce the economic from the social and the political - to do so gives control of society to a tiny handful of wealthy propertied men (and they are almost exclusively men) to the detriment of the vast majority of the population.


LP didn't lose millions of voters - but it didn't need to in order for the seats to go Tory.

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Weststander said:

Len McCluskey’s Unite have chosen RLB and Richard ‘Car Crash’ Burgon as their dream team. No surprise if truth be told.

If you want a strong and very electable Labour duo in 2024, they’re the polar opposite, an awful pairing. Both are hard left leaning, very defensive/blinkered about Corbyn and ‘that manifesto’, charmless, and Burgon’s hopeless when facing straight forward questions in interviews (see a plethora of youtube disaster clips).

Hopefully the membership will be more pragmatic in their final say.

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Bry Nylon said:

Agree with all of that. On Newsnight, McCluskey just said one of RLB's strengths was her political analysis.

Is this the same RLB that awarded Jeremy Corbyn "10/10" for Labour's 2019 GE perfomance? And the same RLB, Shadow Business Secretary, who believed that corporations pay tax on turnover rather than profit?

It surely is.

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Weststander said:

More than 2/3 of voters rejected that recent core Labour offering.

In polling most people including myself will always say yes individually to more police, more nurses, higher paid nurses, rebuilt hospitals, etcetera, But we also weighed up whether Corbyn and Momentum, advised by marxist academic Lansman, was good for the UK PLC and whether the total tax and spend mix was credible.

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Garry Nelson's teacher said:

I'm afraid I have to join the 'we're all doomed' club. Burgon has a charisma equivalent to that of a jelly baby and is congenitally incapable of answering a question with anything approaching candour. He is cursed with a mon-tonal drone and will be a turn-off to a rather large proportion of the electorate. McCluskey is just plain sinister and clearly missed a career as an actor specialising in roles as a gangster.
Having lived in Liverpool during the Militant years, I see history being re-created. Derek Hatton for party chair anyone?

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Garry Nelson's teacher said:

I'm afraid I have to join the 'we're all doomed' club. Burgon has a charisma equivalent to that of a jelly baby and is congenitally incapable of answering a question with anything approaching candour. He is cursed with a mon-tonal drone and will be a turn-off to a rather large proportion of the electorate. McCluskey is just plain sinister and clearly missed a career as an actor specialising in roles as a gangster.
Having lived in Liverpool during the Militant years, I see history being re-created. Derek Hatton for party chair anyone?

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Garry Nelson's teacher said:

Having lived in Liverpool during the Militant years, I see history being re-created. Derek Hatton for party chair anyone?

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Jolly Red Giant said:

You mean the Militant years where the socialist council built more homes that the rest of Thatcher's Britain combined - built schools, nurseries and leisure facilities and public parks in working class communities that were being destroyed by Tory policies, that created thousands of jobs, that froze rents for council tenants for five years - those Militant years you are talking about.

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WilburySeagull said:

Trouble is militant supporters and now momentum claim for democracy but then come up with "democratic ballots" that offer a choice of Long Bailey yes or no with no mention of the other candidates as if in their socialist reality the unapproved ones dont exist. More like Soviet or Iranian "democracy" than the real thing.

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Garry Nelson's teacher said:

Thanks for your points. I'm not sure where you get your data from but won't contest it. However, if you could reference it, I'd be obliged. I worked for Liverpool City Council (1978-84) and was a service provider to a great many others who did too. I was also a Labour supporter and still am. My view from the inside track, was that they were deliberately engineering a breakdown in the way the council operated to spark some sort of mass action following intervention by the government. I recall that everything seemed to be a means to an end. This included (and like you I not only remember Kinnock conference speech but was directly involved) the tactic of using the council (and its employees) as some sort of tool. On another level, there was a very scary or at least sinister policy within the council of preferential treatment for those who were 'connected' and the side-lining of those who weren't.
I'm not sure you'll find many LCC staff who would recall this as the council's finest hour. You might also find it quite hard to find huge numbers of Liverpool Labour folk who, living through that, would think of it likewise. As for Hatton, well if you are proud of him in terms of his actions then and his subsequent career, then (as the Scousers say) 'there's nothing down for you'.
This was not democratic socialism in my interpretation of the term, and I would not buy-in to misty eyed memories of it. I think it payed it's part in making us unelectable in the 80s and I'd rather not see it again.
I accept that this is a very specific perspective; but it is authentic.

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Baker lite said:

I’m hoping Wrong-Daily gets the gig, I do like a laugh...

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

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Jolly Red Giant said:

Between 1979 and 1983 the Tory government stole £217million in grants to Liverpool City Council - it was strangling the city financially. The Socialist council was elected on the basis of creating 1,000 council jobs (in a city ravaged by unemployment) coupled with a reversal of the 1,000 job cuts announced by the Liberals, cutting council rents by £2 per week and introducing a minimum wage and a 35-hour week for the council's workforce. The DLP made these promises in their manifesto on the basis that this was the minimum necessary to lift at least a section of the city's population out of poverty. To implement its programme it was necessary to set a budget of £237million - $25m above the limit set by Tory cuts. The DLP decided to launch a campaign among the council workforce and the working class of Liverpool to force the Tories to hand back £25million of the money it had stolen from the council. The campaign generated unprecedented support for the DLP in the city and the following year the DLP significantly increased its support in the council elections.

You say there was a 'deliberate engineering' a breakdown - when the reality is that the Tories were the people engineering the breakdown. If the DLP had implemented the cuts the Tories demanded in 1984 then 5,000 council workers would have lost their jobs and the council rents would have been increased by 170%. This was unacceptable to the DLP so it fought and continued to fight a very successful campaign to force concessions from the Tory government (and it did so in the teeth of opposition from Kinnock and the right-wing leadership of the LP and from the right-wing trade union leaders - particularly at the time NUPE and the NUT).

Over the period that the socialist council ran Liverpool (and at its high point there were only 9 Militant members who were councillors - the rest were left wing activists who were members of other groups or non-aligned socialists) - this is their record -

6,300 families rehoused from tenements, flats and maisonettes
2, 873 tenement flats demolished
1,315 walk-up flats demolished
2,086 flats/maisonettes demolished
4,800 houses and bungalows built
7,400 houses and flats improved
600 houses/bungalows created by ‘top-downing’ 1,315 walk-up flats
25 new Housing Action Areas being developed
6 new nursery classes built and open
17 Community Comprehensive Schools established following a massive re-organisation
£10million spent on school improvements
Five new sports centres, one with a leisure pool attached, built and opened
Two thousand additional jobs provided for in Liverpool City Council Budget
Ten thousand people per year employed on Council’s Capital Programme
Three new parks built
Rents frozen for five years

This is the legacy of the socialist council in Liverpool - a council that was never defeated at the ballot box but was undemocratically removed from office by the House of Lords. As for Derek Hatton - whatever he ultimately did after being removed from office (and he was vilified and scapegoated, losing his job, losing his home, being blacklisted and an attempt to jail him on trumped up charges) - it does not take away from the role that he, Tony Mulhearn, John Hamilton, Tony Byrne, Pauline Lowes, Peter Owens, Bob Lancaster and the other 40 socialist councillors played in Liverpool in the 1980s. Thousands of people in Liverpool have decent homes thanks to these individuals, the DLP (which was shut down by Kinnock) and the working class people who supported them. There legacy is in bricks and mortar - and to say that folk of Liverpool would not regard it as the 'finest hour' is belied by the fact that the socialist council repeatedly won election after election.

You say Liverpool was the reason why LP under Kinnock became unelectable - yet the LP in Liverpool repeatedly bucked the trend in the 1983 and 1987 general election - with big swings to the LP - swings that if they had been replicated country-wide would have seen LP win a landslide - and swings that were built on the back of the campaigning socialist policies in Liverpool.

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Jolly Red Giant said:

Between 1979 and 1983 the Tory government stole £217million in grants to Liverpool City Council - it was strangling the city financially. The Socialist council was elected on the basis of creating 1,000 council jobs (in a city ravaged by unemployment) coupled with a reversal of the 1,000 job cuts announced by the Liberals, cutting council rents by £2 per week and introducing a minimum wage and a 35-hour week for the council's workforce. The DLP made these promises in their manifesto on the basis that this was the minimum necessary to lift at least a section of the city's population out of poverty. To implement its programme it was necessary to set a budget of £237million - $25m above the limit set by Tory cuts. The DLP decided to launch a campaign among the council workforce and the working class of Liverpool to force the Tories to hand back £25million of the money it had stolen from the council. The campaign generated unprecedented support for the DLP in the city and the following year the DLP significantly increased its support in the council elections.

You say there was a 'deliberate engineering' a breakdown - when the reality is that the Tories were the people engineering the breakdown. If the DLP had implemented the cuts the Tories demanded in 1984 then 5,000 council workers would have lost their jobs and the council rents would have been increased by 170%. This was unacceptable to the DLP so it fought and continued to fight a very successful campaign to force concessions from the Tory government (and it did so in the teeth of opposition from Kinnock and the right-wing leadership of the LP and from the right-wing trade union leaders - particularly at the time NUPE and the NUT).

Over the period that the socialist council ran Liverpool (and at its high point there were only 9 Militant members who were councillors - the rest were left wing activists who were members of other groups or non-aligned socialists) - this is their record -

6,300 families rehoused from tenements, flats and maisonettes
2, 873 tenement flats demolished
1,315 walk-up flats demolished
2,086 flats/maisonettes demolished
4,800 houses and bungalows built
7,400 houses and flats improved
600 houses/bungalows created by ‘top-downing’ 1,315 walk-up flats
25 new Housing Action Areas being developed
6 new nursery classes built and open
17 Community Comprehensive Schools established following a massive re-organisation
£10million spent on school improvements
Five new sports centres, one with a leisure pool attached, built and opened
Two thousand additional jobs provided for in Liverpool City Council Budget
Ten thousand people per year employed on Council’s Capital Programme
Three new parks built
Rents frozen for five years

This is the legacy of the socialist council in Liverpool - a council that was never defeated at the ballot box but was undemocratically removed from office by the House of Lords. As for Derek Hatton - whatever he ultimately did after being removed from office (and he was vilified and scapegoated, losing his job, losing his home, being blacklisted and an attempt to jail him on trumped up charges) - it does not take away from the role that he, Tony Mulhearn, John Hamilton, Tony Byrne, Pauline Lowes, Peter Owens, Bob Lancaster and the other 40 socialist councillors played in Liverpool in the 1980s. Thousands of people in Liverpool have decent homes thanks to these individuals, the DLP (which was shut down by Kinnock) and the working class people who supported them. There legacy is in bricks and mortar - and to say that folk of Liverpool would not regard it as the 'finest hour' is belied by the fact that the socialist council repeatedly won election after election.

You say Liverpool was the reason why LP under Kinnock became unelectable - yet the LP in Liverpool repeatedly bucked the trend in the 1983 and 1987 general election - with big swings to the LP - swings that if they had been replicated country-wide would have seen LP win a landslide - and swings that were built on the back of the campaigning socialist policies in Liverpool.

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