Here’s a new thread to continue the discussion of the Labour Party.
So Corbyn was able to win the Labour leadership contest with another ‘mandate.’
He’s looking to seize complete control of Labour and drive out dissenters. Elections for shadow cabinet? That’s been put on the back burner. He won’t rule out deselection, either and we all know it won’t be Corbyn loyalists getting deselected after the new boundaries are established.
Corbyn isn’t interested in governing. He’s only interested in protests and ideological purity. Anyone who dares to disagree is a Blairite or Tory Lite. Unfortunately, without a truly viable opposition, Theresa May’s government will lurch further to the right. No need for the Tories to pretend they care about climate change, the NHS, or gay/lesbian issues.
Corbyn hasn’t asked a single Brexit question in PMQs. May and her cabinet Brexiteer clowns have no clue as to what they want to achieve by leaving the EU and yet Corbyn is more concerned about his CND wet dreams.
If a snap general election is called in 2017, Labour will be crushed. The only hope for the U.K. will be for some sane coalition between reasonable Labour MPs and the Lib Dems to emerge.
Jeremy Corbyn is a disaster. Owen Smith would have been a disaster. Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper would have been disasters. As painful as this all is, Labour needs this chaos in order to force it to decide what the fuck it’s about as a party rather than just the shallow Tory-lite smugness of the post-Blair era it had been coasting on before Corbyn took over.
It’s clear that there’s a real demand for a shift to the left, an anti-austerity platform and some genuine sincerity from its leader amongst the party faithful. It’s also clear - at least to me - that Corbyn is way too far left and is incapable of getting any platform implemented (although he appears at least to be more sincere and genuine than his peers). When Labour finds someone amongst its ranks who is willing to thread the needle between the neo-Reds and the corporatist Blairites and who has both enough charisma and political nous to build intra-party support and enough vision to be able to articulate a way forward, then Labour will be electable.
I have no idea whether such a person exists, however. I had high hopes for Chukka Umunna but his campaign died a sudden and suspicious death. Maybe Andy Burnham, after spending a few years in the wilderness of Manchester, will come back with a better campaign. Who knows?
Corbyn is a bad party leader. He’s complacent, insular, vain and - when it comes to the hard work of developing policy, managing a party or dealing with the media - irretrievably lazy. (Originally this was a five paragraph rant that I’ve cut down for reasons of space, so please don’t think that the brevity of the above compared to the below means I don’t despise Corbyn utterly.)
But he did win an enormous mandate from the membership. And he did that because he is the best available representation of a clear left-wing vision for politics. It’s a vision that the moderates, or centre right, or whatever you want to call them, are struggling to articulate. It’s a deep-seated problem that became evident at least a decade ago - when the SNP started winning in Scotland, when Galloway won in Bethnal Green and Bow and then in Bradford West, even when Ken Livingstone became London Mayor as an Independent. Labour had stopped having anything to say to its core vote, and so it started to lose its core vote. We now have a situation where Rachel Reeves is saying that the response to anti-immigrant violence should be to** cut immigration** - a complete capitulation of principle to the bigots. It’s no wonder people want an alternative to such empty electioneering.
Very much yes to this, except I’m a little pessimistic about the recovery part of this plan. Labour need to win c.100 seats to the win the next election, depending on how boundary changes work out. The 50 lost in Scotland aren’t coming back any time soon (getting 10 back would be a miracle) so most will have to be won in England. It’s possible that Brexit will blow the Tories up - but the ones who benefit from that are UKIP. Failing some sort of catastrophe, Labour are going to:
Fail to win solid Tory seats
Fail to win marginal Tory seats
Lose marginal Labour seats
Lose some solid Labour seats that weren’t that solid after all (as in Scotland 2015)
Turn some solid Labour seats into Labour marginals.
And when they lose like that, they’ll need to win 150 seats in 2025. That shock might be enough to slap sense into both sides, but it’s just as likely to provoke a cycle of blame and conflict.
The next Labour PM is in all probability in school right now, wondering what she’ll do for her GCSE’s next year.
Not from the voting public as a whole, which is why Blair has been the only Labour leader to win a General Election for decades. If the hardcore lefties want to achieve anything, it will be by building a coalition with centrists, and getting something rather than nothing achieved.
Speaking as a Tory voter, on the moderate side of the party, Corbyn is a disaster for the country as a whole as it means there is no effective opposition at the moment, which could lead to May becoming another Thatcher, which is in nobody’s interest. Still, she’s the only tolerable possibility for PM from any party at the moment, and I’ll hopefully be able to keep voting for my moderate Tory MP (Anna Soubry, if anyone cares) and that there’ll be enough of them to keep the worst excesses of the Government in check. Or failing that maybe some sort of centrist party could emerge from Labour MPs who’ve seen the party they’ve built over the last quarter century snatched from beneath them, and moderate Tories who recognise Brexit for the disaster it is.
As I said, Corbyn is way too far to the left of where the public are. But Labour right now are virtually indistinguishable from the Conservatives - they’re too far right for the old Labour ranks, and too namby-pamby to challenge the Tories where their approaches overlap. They need to own the territory to the left of their current position without abandoning the middle ground.
Strangely I’m with you - while I’m virulently opposed to many of May’s policies, of all the recent potential candidates from any party she’s the only one with the competence, experience and gravitas to be PM. I’m slightly relieved that, for the moment, she’s too busy sorting out the mess that is Brexit to stray into Thatcher mode yet, but she’s already hammering away at human rights legislation which is deeply troubling. My current MP appears to be happy to stay on the Labour backbenches (and scandal-free thus far) so I’m not expecting much from him with regard to change.
As a centrist Democrat, political junkie and Anglophile, I certainly hope Labour can get its act together and once again become a plausible alternative to the Conservatives.
Labour is now the largest political party in Western Europe at 550,000 - up 300,00 members since Corbyn was first elected.
Those people don’t seek to be the alternative to the Tories, they seek a way out of this bogus construct of a political paradigm. At east they’re dragging the Tories to the centre - gone are the Etonians with their ideological nonsense dressed as economic policy.
If you remove all the parts of Trump that won’t work for a left-liberal, all you really have left is that he’s abusive as fuck to people, going on late night tirades, and is easily goaded. I find it hard to assign that to Corbin. If anything, he seemed a bit too relaxed.
He may not be the best choice for the leader of the Labour party, since he fucked up badly on Brexit and then let the challenge process harm the party by creating ill will, but that doesn’t make him Trump bad.
I think Elendil’s Heir is referring to the fact that you typed 300,00 and was wondering whether you had misplaced a comma and meant 30,000 or missed a 0 and meant 300,000.
Oh okay, this graph is a little out-of-date, current membership is at 550,000. The rise is entiely since Corbyn’s election, and now exceeds the hundreds of thousands lost in the Blair years:
Corbyn has brought a huge influx of new members with him, and that’s a great thing.
Interestingly, there are signs that these new members may be becoming discontented with Corbyn and his way of doing politics:
After the first flush of enthusiasm, a period of disenchantment when things turned out to be harder than hoped is only natural. But it will be interesting to see if Corbyn can keep the loyalty of the younger, more passionate members as time goes by. When Clive Lewis is being told to fuck off and join the Tories, something is badly amiss.
Corbyn’s response to the naked xenophobia of the Conservative Conference is a bit weird:
First three paragraphs: Tory rhetoric on immigration is bad, divisive and a distraction from real problems.
Second three paragraphs: Immigration is basically a problem and we’d be better at cutting it than the Tories.
In no paragraphs: Immigration is a net positive for our country and we should support it.
There are Tory MPs making that last argument, FFS.
