Should Corbyn remain as Labour leader?

[Strontium]

Corbyn has finally gone full Farage.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/07/jeremy-corbyn-wholesale-eu-immigration-has-destroyed-conditions-british

 

Jeremy Corbyn: "wholesale" EU immigration has destroyed conditions for British workers

 

Mass immigration from the European Union has been used to "destroy" the conditions of British workers, Jeremy Corbyn said today.

 

The Labour leader was pressed on his party's attitude to immigration on the Andrew Marr programme. He reiterated his belief that Britain should leave the Single Market, claiming that "the single market is dependent on membership of the EU . . . the two things are inextricably linked."

 

Corbyn said that Labour would argue for "tarriff-free trade access" instead. However, other countries which enjoy this kind of deal, such as Norway, do so by accepting the "four freedoms" of the single market, which include freedom of movement for people. Labour MP Chuka Umunna has led a parliamentary attempt to keep Britain in the single market, arguing that 66 per cent of Labour members want to stay. The SNP's Nicola Sturgeon said that "Labour's failure to stand up for common sense on single market will make them as culpable as Tories for Brexit disaster".

 

Laying out the case for leaving the single market, Corbyn used language we have rarely heard from him - blaming immigration for harming the lives of British workers.

 

The Labour leader said that after leaving the EU, there would still be European workers in Britain and vice versa. He added: "What there wouldn't be is the wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions, particularly in the construction industry."

[cloggypop]

I'd compare being a socialist to being a scouser. You're ok as long as you behave yourself, you're dressed smartly, and you keep yourself to yourself.

 

As soon as you pop your head above the parapet, or turn up in jeans and a t-shirt you're the scum of the earth!

Wool behaviour

[Rico1304]

Corbyn has finally gone full Farage.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/07/jeremy-corbyn-wholesale-eu-immigration-has-destroyed-conditions-british

 

 

Cross over between people calling leavers racist & in the Corbyn cult?

[Strontium]

Maybe it's just to distract from Labour backtracking on their tuition fee policy. Again.

[Gnasher]

Maybe it's just to distract from Labour backtracking on their tuition fee policy. Again.

You write a post like that yet belong to a party which contains Nick Clegg you mad bastard

[cloggypop]

He'll be voting for Vince Cable soon enough. Vince Cable.

[Strontium]

You say that like Vince Cable isn't infinitely more credible than anyone on the Labour benches.

[cloggypop]

Oh

 

https://twitter.com/EL4JC/status/888487320260931584/video/1

[Em City]

Oh

 

https://twitter.com/EL4JC/status/888487320260931584/video/1

You obviously hate freedom.

[moof]

You say that like Vince Cable isn't infinitely more credible than anyone on the Labour benches.

 

Hahahahahahaha.

 

Define 'credible'

[cloggypop]

You obviously hate freedom.

I'm not keen on Vince Cable like.

 

Sounds like an outdated internet connection.

[razor]

Vince Cable sounds like the name of a red spandex trouser-wearing Hair Metal singer from the 80s.

[Anubis]

Vince Cable. In one article.

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/01/royal-mail-privatisation-taxpayer-loser

 

 

Tuesday 1 April 2014 19.16 BST

 

 

Thatcher would have screamed, "What! Flogging off her majesty's mail, cheap and to a bunch of spivs?" She always refused to sell Royal Mail. Her latterday apostle on Earth, Margaret Hodge, said as much on Tuesday. As the public accounts committee chairman, she savaged the business secretary, Vince Cable, for last winter's sale of Royal Mail. He had promised: "There is no way we will sell Royal Mail on the cheap." He sold it on the cheap. Hodge called him "clueless".

 

 

There was always something odd about last October's Royal Mail privatisation. Both Michael Heseltine and Peter Mandelson had tried it and failed. Driven by the Treasury's need for cash, Cable seemed rushed and nervy. The ground was rolled with a massive relief of pension liabilities, a 30% rise in stamp prices, and post offices detached from the business.

 

 

A chief executive was hired, and by May last year the business engineered a 60% surge in profit. It was clearly being gold-plated. So why was it sold as tin? Cable chose Lazards, Goldman Sachs and five other banks to advise on the sale. As anyone who has witnessed these events will attest, they are carnivals of cash.

 

 

Privatisation fees alone totalled £12.7m, according to the National Audit Office report. Since the banks advising on price are also placing shares with clients, Chinese walls are put in place to separate "sellers from buyers" within offices. But is this really possible in the City of London, where Chinese walls are most likely made of rice paper? Don't commissions and fees have money dripping from meeting rooms and wine bars, as bankers and lawyers sniff out the nearest and deepest trough?

 

 

The banks recommended an asking price as low as 330p a share. They said the big institutions whom Cable was eager to favour "would not pay more". Desperate to press ahead, Cable accepted the price, even as every commentator at the time expressed surprise at what seemed a clear undervaluation of the company. Part three of the NAO report shows how analysts across the City, and even within the "advising" group of banks, were predicting a higher value. Panmure Gordon estimated a £1bn undervaluation (which proved conservative). Even when early market signals confirmed this and officials pondered stalling the sale and raising the price, Lazards and the others advised strongly against. Cable took their advice at face value.

 

 

The ideal in "book-building" a stock of potential investors in advance of a sale is to see it two times oversubscribed. The Royal Mail offer was 24 times oversubscribed. The 330p price soared 38% to 455p within hours. More than £750m drained into the pockets of speculators. Never can the British taxpayer have been ripped off so soundly in so short a time.

 

 

Within weeks of the sale, Goldman Sachs's own analysts were predicting a price of 610p, almost twice what the "advisers" had been advising. The government had been shockingly ill-advised. As the price went up past 600p, Cable kept dismissing it as "irrational exuberance, froth, speculation". He indicated everyone should wait until the price came down. It is now 562p. Worse, he had allocated bundles of shares to 16 City institutions on a "gentleman's agreement" that they would hold them as "a core of high-quality investors who would be there in good times and bad". Within weeks, over half this stake had been sold, and to precisely "the hedge funds and other speculators" that Cable had pledged to keep out. Just four of the 16 are still big shareholders.

 

 

Cable was massively naive. On Tuesday he protested that he was merely showing caution against "risk of failure". I can hear the City laughing. As the head of the NAO, Amyas Morse, points out, had Cable been prudent when warned of an undervalued sale, he would have held back 49% of shares for the Treasury, as opposed to just 30%. Indeed, he might have held out for postponement and upped the price. As it is, he valued Royal Mail at £3.3bn – it should have been nearer £5.5bn.

 

 

His advisers treated his desire to sell fast as an excuse to sell cheap. Hodge's charge that his department "had no clue what it was doing" is hard to contest. Had a certain Vince Cable been on the opposition bench, we can imagine his sarcastic fury.

 

 

The reality is that ministers make dreadful bankers. Ever since Labour's Tony Blair fell in love with the City, they have been in thrall to an industry that saw continued privatisation as a chance for big killings. Even so, it remains astonishing that ministers can take advice from firms that, however high their Chinese walls, have an institutional conflict of interest.

 

 

Cable was spending millions on advice from firms such as Goldmans and Barclays that have been widely accused of unethical practices and corporate greed. This was not cautious but reckless. As the NAO's Morse said on Tuesday: "The price was borne by the taxpayer."

 

 

This saga is not about privatisation as such. The disposal of Britain's "other empire", the postwar nationalised sector, came too late to save many great British industries. Government brought close to death the companies that once made ships, planes, trains, cars, computers, gas, water, electricity and telecommunications. Access to private capital, management and competition has revived some. Others, notably in the social services and security, have been a disaster.

 

 

The Royal Mail was always a strong candidate for sale to the private sector, as indicated in the 2010 Hooper report. What was questionable was the privatisation of the privatisation. Millions of pounds swilled round Whitehall, drenching consultants with fees and fooling ministers into gullible decisions that have meant a gigantic loss of money to the taxpayer.

 

 

There must be a better way of selling off the family silver than Cable's way. Why can the Treasury not find independent advice? Why are the same banks allowed to act, at least in appearance, as sellers and buyers? Why is there no other way of market-testing or auction? Were such a stink to have emerged in local government or the private sector, we can hear the scathing comments from the Treasury bench. When the smell is in their own backyard, they are strangely silent.

 

 

Jenkins is wrong when he says Cable was massively naive. He wasn't. He was massively complicit.

[Strontium]

They published that article on the right day, at least.

[Chairman Meow]

Corbyn has finally gone full Farage.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/07/jeremy-corbyn-wholesale-eu-immigration-has-destroyed-conditions-british

 

 

At the risk of being accused of being in a cult, in the article he's quoted as saying:

 

"What there wouldn't be is the wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions, particularly in the construction industry." 

 

I don't agree with him on us leaving the single market, but the article is most definitely picking out the bits they want to try and fit it around what they want to say. Yes, there is obviously the implication in what he said that the immigration has damaged it, but he has not said what the headline claims he said. 

 

This is the biggest problem with most media at the moment on every side of the argument, twisted quotes, headlines that don't actually reflect the content etc.

 

No one seems to do straight reporting these days, everything has to be hyperbole, over the top headlines and opinion pieces presented as fact rather than opinion, all while trying to boil complex issues down to a one line solution or a left versus right thing. 

[razor]

They published that article on the right day, at least.

 

Good spot, but on other dates Cable was also criticised by the Business Select Committee, the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee.

[Scooby Dudek]

Tories taking the moral high ground about misleading/bribing the electorate. 

They really have no shame and the hypocrisy is wonderful. Obviously all backed up by the independent Tory backing media 

[Anny Road]

He is bang on.

Workers need to be protected. With my mortgage I can't compete with 6 Romanians sharing digs earning 6 quid an hour and sending 4 of that home.

[stringvest]

Cable has no credibility and there is a strong suspicion of corruption that will forever be associated with him. He is the Lib Dems personified.

[Scooby Dudek]

This is from a poll from 01st June;

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-polls-latest-theresa-may-lead-labour-halved-eight-points-conservatives-jeremy-corbyn-a7767351.html

 

Prime Minister Theresa May's lead over the opposition Labour Party has almost halved to eight points in the space of a week, an opinion poll from Panelbase showed on Thursday.

With a week to go before the general election, the poll showed the Conservatives' share of the vote had fallen by four percentage points since last week to 44 percent, while Labour's had increased by three points to 36 percent.

 

 

 

He mentioned the whole debt on 02nd June;

 

But Corbyn has now vowed to deal with the “massive debt” of these university leavers. 

Speaking to the NME, the aspiring Prime Minister said: “Yes, there is a block of those that currently have a massive debt, and I’m looking at ways that we could reduce that, ameliorate that, lengthen the period of paying it off, or some other means of reducing that debt burden.” 

 

 

 

He does not state that he is going to clear every ones debt in the article, in fact he says ;

 

 

However, the Islington North candidate admitted he’s not sure how he would fund such a scheme - in 2013 alone, almost 496,000 people started full-time undergraduate courses in the UK. 

“I don’t have the simple answer for it yet - I don’t think anybody would expect me to, because this election was called unexpectedly; we had two weeks to prepare all this - but I’m very well aware of that problem,” he said. 

 

Perfectly clear to me, already catching in the polls. Confirming tuition fees will be ended and the dream in the future would be to eliminate all historical debt.

 

 

It is a non story but obviously that is not the agenda

[Jockey]

He is bang on.

Workers need to be protected. With my mortgage I can't compete with 6 Romanians sharing digs earning 6 quid an hour and sending 4 of that home.

 

You are right. But the answer isn't banning Romanians it is making sure that people don't get paid £6 an hour! 

 

This race to the bottom the Tories have managed to normalise is far more damaging than anything else they have managed since 2010.

[skend04]

Labour drinking the Tory Koolade? Leaving the EU and ensuring a deal that is as close to the Single Market deal we have now is impossible. Ergo the manifesto is undeliverable as we simply won't have the finances for it. But then again they probably know that 52% of the electorate are fucking stupid and won't pick up on the inconsistencies.

[TheBitch]

Edit: wrong thread

[stringvest]

Labour drinking the Tory Koolade? Leaving the EU and ensuring a deal that is as close to the Single Market deal we have now is impossible. Ergo the manifesto is undeliverable as we simply won't have the finances for it. But then again they probably know that 52% of the electorate are fucking stupid and won't pick up on the inconsistencies.

 

 

we absolutely do have the finances for it.  

[VladimirIlyich]

You are right. But the answer isn't banning Romanians it is making sure that people don't get paid £6 an hour!

 

This race to the bottom the Tories have managed to normalise is far more damaging than anything else they have managed since 2010.

Yes. It's as simple as guaranteeing all workers the same wages. This means that the most suitable candidates should selected. Been done before and causes the fewer of problems.