BS: Politics: UK Labour leadership election

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: DMcG
Date: 02 Aug 15 - 02:38 AM

Change the system

What system do you know of that has worked, ake? Churchill's quip that Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" has some truth in it.

The most natural form of government seems to be a dictator or tiny elite with everyone else having to do what they are told: after all, that's how just about every company in the world runs, and many countries. And almost every 'parish council' or its equivalent.

It is very easy to campaign for change and almost every contender for every election uses the 'time for change' slogan in some form. Saying exactly what the change should be, though, is a lot more difficult. For example, one might propose in the Internet age everyone is able to vote on every issue. It doesn't take long to see the drawbacks to that, such as the massive influence it would give to some in the media, or how we could find ourselves governed by emotional waves rather than any sort of coherent plan.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: akenaton
Date: 01 Aug 15 - 02:48 PM

Correct GUEST, but there is another alternative.
Change the system......it will have to be done sometime.

The aspirational middle class will further divide society.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: GUEST
Date: 01 Aug 15 - 12:59 PM

Corbyn is principled, yes.

He stands for many things Kier Hardy would have approved of, yes.

His ideas were relevant back when a few million of us were employed in manufacturing industry and the "middle class" was smaller sized.

The "middle class" is very large, very aspirational and very cautious when it comes to someone who doesn't understand that red rosettes and donkeys are from a time when people believed what they were told to believe.

Religion is dying for the same reason. Dogma doesn't cut it with a sophisticated electorate. If anyone hadn't noticed, becoming leader of a party isn't an end in itself, it is a means to getting your hands on the keys to No.10. Considering how many people couldn't trust Miliband, and to be fair, none of the other candidates are even any better than he was, Corbyn could win the party but lose the country.

Labour under Corbyn could well be a long term good thing and put a focus on real issues, but at the expense of not getting power till he steps down for a leader who people could trust with commerce, finance, defence, diplomacy, business.......

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 01 Aug 15 - 08:58 AM

Mr Red, if you're the sort who cheers our soldiers off to war and who "just rejoices" when they knock off a few Argies - this being jingoistic mood that took Michael Foot to crushing defeat in 1983 - you will indeed find Corbyn a great disappointment. Crazy as it is, he would rather talk and negotiate than send troops into battle!

On most of his specifics - Trident, rail ownership, progressive taxation etc - public opinion is on Corbyn's side. But he will have to endure much vilification before he wins the leadership race. In part it comes from the Westminster opportunists who have had Labour in its grip since John Smith died in 1974. And just as damaging, it will come from power-at-any-price "leftish" commentators like John Rentoul and Andrew Rawnsley, who would rather their contacts and buddies were chauffeur-driven ministers than footslogging backbenchers.

Even his fiercest critics can't deny that Corbyn will bring sobriety and maturity to the dispatch box. Puerile grandstanding is just not his style. In the unlikely event that he loses, one thing is certain: the anti-Trident, anti-austerity Greens will see a huge rise in their membership.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 01 Aug 15 - 08:39 AM

I have said it before but can never say it often enough. You don't half talk shite, ake. I suspect you will be dead long before that happens.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: akenaton
Date: 01 Aug 15 - 07:54 AM

Labour is disintegrating, soon they will be a minority party...like the Greens.
They cannot win the next election, so none of the "electable" people want to stand and be associated with failure.

The Labour Party and it's supporters are to blame for losing their vision and their principles.

The electorate has been hoodwinked for years, with   pretend equality and pretend democracy. Now we are ruled by "liberal" fascists.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: DMcG
Date: 31 Jul 15 - 03:22 PM

I'm told even the entire Telegraph readership did this the effect would be tiny. But even so, I suspect there are some Tories who might. Which would be a mistake from their point of view, because things would be much more predictable with any of the other three. It's quite possible Labour disappears under Corbyn. But if so, there will be some other party emerges else since a single party system is problematic for the UK. Or there again, there could be an SNP effect: there's a lot who voted Tory who are not died-in-the-wool Conservatives but thought it the best of poor choices. Given a clear image of an alternative could hurt the Conservative party badly.

No, the Conservative party is much safer with one of the others.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 31 Jul 15 - 02:56 PM

"In the words of a friend of mine -
Whatever you think of the guy's politics, you have to admit it's kind of amusing that the man most hated by the British conservative right (who generally claim to adhere to Christian values) just now is a bearded anti-war activist whose main stated aim is to help the poor and disenfranchised, has a definite downer on bankers and the ultra-wealthy, and whose initials are JC. :-D "

I don't believe he is hated by the Conservative right, he seems the person most likely to ruin the chances of the Labour party at future elections. As such I can imagine that some of the people paying their £3 to get a say in the Labour leadership elections may well be Conservatives hoping to see him win.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: GUEST
Date: 31 Jul 15 - 11:56 AM

Nurse! He's out of bed again!

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 31 Jul 15 - 06:50 AM

Oh.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 31 Jul 15 - 06:47 AM

I am pretty sure that it is a reference to to them conning us Michael. You seem to have misplaced your punny bone... :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 31 Jul 15 - 06:42 AM

Richard -- Purely as a matter of curiosity, and in no truculent spirit [for once] -- what may be the semiotic or emblemological connotation of your insistence in hyphenating the perfectly common and universally comprehensible word "conservative" (and its derivatives) after the first three letters, please? You clearly wish to make some cogent point by it -- but what?

≈M≈

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 31 Jul 15 - 06:39 AM

In the words of a friend of mine -

Whatever you think of the guy's politics, you have to admit it's kind of amusing that the man most hated by the British conservative right (who generally claim to adhere to Christian values) just now is a bearded anti-war activist whose main stated aim is to help the poor and disenfranchised, has a definite downer on bankers and the ultra-wealthy, and whose initials are JC.

:-D

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: GUEST
Date: 31 Jul 15 - 05:57 AM

Some pundits have suggested that to elect Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party would consign the party to another "20 years in the wilderness".
Where do I sign up to vote?

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 06:57 PM

Rats. Not "ass" but "add".

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 06:56 PM

achmelvich, I think you mean "reactionary and backward looking" not "radical". As the remarkable Harry Smith keeps reminding us, the con-servatives are trying to undo the welfare state, dismantle the NHS, and abolish workers' rights. I would ass that they have already dismantled any pretence of equal access to civil or criminal justice.

And they have devalued the word "reform" to make it mean "wreck".

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 05:42 PM

Stanron, the "new radicalism" has to be environmentally based. The old parties have, essentially, 19th century ideologies now deeply corrupted by neo-liberalism. A 21st century party MUST (it has no choice given the state that the earth-system is currently in) put the environment first. The anthropocentrism of the old political ideologies must be ditched in favour of a philosophy that encapsulates the idea that our species can only survive as part of a healthy biosphere. Unfortunately, I don't believe that there's enough time to achieve such a radical shift. The species Homo sapiens is extinct already - we just don't know it yet.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: GUEST,achmelvich
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 03:41 PM

except in recent years the tories have become the new radical party, selling up state assets and challenging the existence of many essential and valued institutions of our society. labour are doing their bit to hang on to the NHS, welfare state, bbc, affordable housing, trade unions and an insistence on equality before the law - but seem to lack the conviction to do so effectively.

if labour do ever form a government they will have a hell of a job to retain a sense of confidence and even security in a much degraded society. i reckon this is partly what is driving the desire to support jeremy corbyn and his desire to a state of affairs that most people are happier with. oddly, his appeal is conservative - but in a good way.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Stanron
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 02:25 PM

I had this idea about politics just the other day. I'd never heard any one else talk about it so I thought it was all my own. Just today on the Parliament channel an interviewer on a book program came up with the same idea so I guess it's going round. A bit like a disease. It goes like this.

Several hundred years ago there were two political parties. The Tories and the Whigs. The Tories represented the establishment, the powers that be. The Whigs stood for constitutional Monarchy, in it's day a radical position, particularly after the Stuarts. Well the Whigs won that one and kept the Tories out of office for something like 45 years. Of course politics then then was not as democratic as it is now. Political will was the will of land owners and not the common man. By the 19th century Whig radicalism had extended to expanding the electorate. Their reform act of 1832 expanded the franchise and got rid of the 'rotten boroughs', the seats that were owned by landed gentry. Just after that they abolished slavery in the empire and secured Catholic emancipation. All very radical stuff.

After this the Whigs kind of declined and eventually morphed into the Liberal party. By the end of the 19th century the Liberals had formed four governments under Gladstone. They were another radical party and in 1906 they introduced the first measures of what would eventually become the Welfare State. By the end of the 1920s they had more or less been replaced by the Labour party as the radical force in British politics. Labour represented, they said, the working man.

So the Whigs were replaced by the Liberals and the Liberals were replaced by Labour. Each time the Tories were the anti radical party, they wished to 'conserve' the status quo, and each time the status quo changed the Tories were the party who wished to keep things as they were, or rather as they had become, rather than as they were.

So now the unpopular bit. It seems to me that Labour have achieved pretty much all they were expected to achieve. The work place is regulated, safe and fair. The safety net of the Wefare State is pretty firmly established and the National Health Sevice is, despite Labour's scare stories, unlikely to be disassembled any time soon.

Are we about to see the rise of a new radicalism, the like of which we cannot imagine? I suspect that if we are, then it wont be the Labour Party that does it. I'm not sure that UKIP fits the bill either. Any offers?

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 12:58 PM

We need to ask if he is particularly left wing. OK, compared to the present government, yes he is, but if we compare him to the leaders between 1945 and Tory B Liar, how does he measure up? As I said on another thread, the refreshing thing is that he seems honest. Hope he stays that way.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 11:47 AM

Anyone other than the totally blinkered knows that neoliberalism has failed and led to greater oppression of the poor by the rich. Creating a New Labour party in the image of the con-servatives will only lead to more of the same. Corbyn is the only person offering anything other than neo-liberalism and oppression and austerity. Already he is speaking to packed rooms. Already he has brought back many many of the young (and some who joined extremist parties in despair stupidity and ignorance) into political activity.

When Corbyn wins, the quislings will rejoin the fold, to save their political careers.

The next battle is to circumnavigate the right-wing media who daily pour out propaganda by the rich for the rich. That will involve the new media and maybe even the dark web. If IS can do it for evil, we can do it for good.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Acorn4
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 10:25 AM

Things polarise during a recession and a left wing candidate might do better than expected.

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 05:01 AM

It seems to me that the assertion that the election of Jeremy Corbyn, as Labour Party leader, would damage Labour's unity, credibility and electability became a self-fulfilling prophecy almost as soon as his candidacy was announced! Oh, how we have allowed ourselves to be brainwashed by the neo-liberals on the right!!

Subject: RE: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: Mr Red
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 04:46 AM

methinks we are heading into Michael Foot territory. Or a Neil Kinnock era.
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

Subject: BS: Polics: UK Labour leadership election
From: DMcG
Date: 30 Jul 15 - 02:05 AM

Dear Other candidate:

If you win but Jeremy gets over 40% of the votes in the first round, in what specific ways would this affect how you lead?


====

The question arose in my mind because I keep hearing the news say that if Jeremy wins he will face an almighty battle to unite the party. I'm not sure that is true, though he will certainly face a battle to unit the Labour MPs. However, if anyone else wins, they may unite the MPs relatively easily, but the battle to unite the party seems as difficult.

My answers: Liz Kendall would answer "Not at all". The others would make soothing noises but would not include anything specific even though the question asks for it.