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Should Corbyn remain as Labour leader?


Sugar Ape
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Should Corbyn remain as Labour leader?  

218 members have voted

  1. 1. Should Corbyn remain as Labour leader?



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Yes, he should stay but he needs to give himself a shake and realise he needs to lead, he needs to be the leader.

 

He should start by withdrawing the whip from all the treacherous Blairites and dissenters who've done nothing but ignore the overwhelming wishes of the vast majority of party members by actively attempting to undermine Corbyn at every attempt.

 

If Corbyn wishes to ever retake the Labour Party back to where it belongs, a caring socialist party, then he should cut away the tumour and sack these fuckers. Let's see some by-elections, get rid of the rotten apples.

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He's shite. I'd like to go for a pint with him but he seems almost disinterested in his own party. Looks like he'd rather be down Camden eating yams and playing the tambourine, meanwhile the planet is going to shit.

So shite and disinterested he's the only leader consistently publishing policy documents for the public to read so they can see what he stands for. This is a lazy opinion, Mark, but if you've bought into this nonsense you've written then what can be expected of the zombies glued to the mainstream media.

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He's shite. I'd like to go for a pint with him but he seems almost disinterested in his own party. Looks like he'd rather be down Camden eating yams and playing the tambourine, meanwhile the planet is going to shit.

I think Corbyn looks uncomfortable, not disinterested.

 

Not a natural leader. The clock is ticking, he needs to grasp the nettle. Hope he does.

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I think Corbyn looks uncomfortable, not disinterested.

Not a natural leader. The clock is ticking, he needs to grasp the nettle. Hope he does.

It's sad as he's a genuine politician but he's 67, I think it's too late for him to suddenly turn into Nye Bevan and start hating the Tories with a passion

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He was never going to be able. In exactly the same way he was never going to stop Scots voting SNP. Both sets of people have had decades of the Labour Party not giving a single solitary fuck about them.

 

Which is why I'm not even voting on this poll because frankly, it doesn't even matter any more.

 

Labour have lost Scotland completely and that in itself has had a huge impact on their ability to mount any kind of challenge at a general election.  What yesterday showed for anybody who can take their head out of the sand for long enough to look at it honestly is that for all the love there may be for Jezza amongst the more cerebral of Labour party members, here in the North West of England Labor have almost completely lost their traditional white working class voters too.

 

That awful Gillian Duffy woman is representative of those people and they're increasingly obsessed with immigrants as being the root of all evil.  I see this and hear it every single day of my life.  Those people aren't talking about the banking crisis, or New Labour dropping the unions and getting into bed with big business as being reasons why they abandoned the party, they don't engage with those issues at anything other than the most superficial level.

 

They blame things on what they see every day when they open their curtains and round here that's not fatcat bankers, it's brown faces.  If it wasn't for the fact that Oldham had the same sitting Labour MP for over 40 years and then had the sense to appoint the then-current leader of the council as their candidate for the by-election, UKIP would have made huge gains here in the last 2 years and as it is they beat the Tories into third place.  Ironically the only reason Labour kept a decent majority here is that 1) people genuinely loathe the Tories still and 2) the vast majority of those immigrants actually vote Labour.

 

If anybody doubts what I'm saying there, all I can say is that I live here.  I'm not making lazy generalisations, I am watching this tear my town and seemingly now my country apart.  Maybe it's different where you live.

 

This seems to be Blair's true legacy; that the pool of what were 'traditional Labour voters' are now a cohort of people that no single party is ever going to be able to represent again because for every Orwell, there is a Duffy.  The society where those two ends of the spectrum would have found enough commonality to unite against anything appears to be dead.

 

Frankly, Labour could appoint Ken Livingstone, Nick Griffin or Barney the fucking dinosaur as leader and it will make no difference whatsoever because the issue isn't the figurehead, it's the actual policies and the fact that with no Scottish MPs to bolster the numbers, a party is not going to be able to appeal to a significant enough number of the resolutely non-Tory voters to win because the spread of opinion is too wide to be covered by a single all-encompassing party.

 

A Labour party that is both unwilling to be in thrall to big business and yet also willing to shit on migrant workers isn't realistic in any way, nor is it something I would ever want to see since it would betray what are supposedly the core values of the party, yet somehow people seem to still be failing to notice that this is exactly what an increasing proportion of those 'traditional Labour voters' would require it to be before they would consider putting their X in the box.

 

I honestly believe that the Labour party as a significant political entity is dead.  It just doesn't have the sense to stop breathing and lie down.

 

For God's sake don't think I take any pleasure in that because I don't.  It makes me feel heartsick to the point that even typing this post is painful.  It's how I see it though.

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Guest Numero Veinticinco

No. He failed spectacularly and shouldn't remain. He is very unlikely to win an election, which means years of Boris Johnson.

 

His politics are closer to mine than most people but what's the point?

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So shite and disinterested he's the only leader consistently publishing policy documents for the public to read so they can see what he stands for. This is a lazy opinion, Mark, but if you've bought into this nonsense you've written then what can be expected of the zombies glued to the mainstream media.

It's not lazy at all, I went to see him in Bootle a few weeks ago, he speaks with passion and he's an intelligent and principled man. But he's clearly uninterested in getting to grips with the system in which he unfortunately has to function in order to get things done. He's a rebel, he's always been a rebel, good for him, but rebels can't lead.
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I put this in the other thread but it's better placed here:

 

We need to build a new left. Labour means nothing today

 

Labour was the right party and the right word for the 20th century – or at least part of it. But now it truly seems a spent force. We need an invigorated left alliance

Jeanette Winterson, The Guardian

 

‘7am and woken up to UKIP England. Never cried for my country before. But it isn’t my country anymore. Now we have to build a new Left’

 

This is what I tweeted this morning. And in someone’s reply were the words “nothing left”, which is where we are. The left has nothing and is nothing. Corbyn was the wrong kind of protest vote. Labour – the word itself – is outdated. Labour was the right word and the right party for the 20th century – until the Thatcher-Reagan takeover. The Blair years disguised the problems of the left because Blair was persuasive and charismatic, and there was plenty of money flying around. Cue the Iraq war – and the left rightly started to wonder what a Labour government stood for, when its comrade in arms was George W Bush.

 

Then came 2008 and the global crash, and Labour’s failure of response in any direction except to prop up late capitalism against the interests of ordinary people.

 

At the last election, Ed Miliband refused to work with the progressive Scottish National Party, and failed to understand why his party no longer spoke to working people with no work. The result was depressing but not surprising.

 

What did surprise me was that Cameron and Osborne would risk the first full-power Tory government in decades on a gamble with an unelected cartoon character from a time-warp. Nigel Farage is ridiculous. But he has won. There was no need for this referendum. What we needed was a firm cross-party consensus explaining why the EU is not the problem facing Britain. And as the party in power, the Tories could have faced down their own Eurosceptics and the darker side of the right. If the left had been anything like a serious opposition, the Tories would not have had the luxury of infighting, or this testosterone-fuelled fight to the death with Ukip – a party with just one MP.

 

Now we face the vision of Boris Johnson as prime minister and that mediocre nonentity Gove as chancellor. I don’t know what happens to Farage and his flag-wavers. But they’ll be wanting plenty of seats at the new table.

 

Meanwhile Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are hailing Brexit as a triumph for democracy.

 

So what can we do?

 

I am an optimist by nature. I believe in solutions. We need solutions to the absolute failure of the neoliberal Project Few, whereby capitalism has been hijacked to serve the rich, where investing for the long term has been replaced by short-term profiteering, and where globalisation has been allowed to wreck local economies in the name of free trade.

 

Too many people in Britain face no future at all – no security at work, no certainty of a home, diminishing access to education and resources, not even a library to sit in on a rainy day. Certainly this is political failure – of the right and the left, but none of this will change because immigrants are going home or because we scrap all those annoying EU directives on workers’ rights and employers responsibilities.

 

Brexit is a vote for change – and if the left can accept that, then change can happen, starting today, here in the UK, and working together across the world, as Varoufakis has proposed with Diem 25, a movement for equality and social justice that stands against the baleful rise of the extreme right.

 

What I’d like is for the Women’s Equality Party to remake itself as the Equality Party. It’s a relevant name, a powerful name, and naming matters. I’d like to drop Labour and New Labour as words that don’t mean anything anymore. If you still needed proof of that after the last election, Brexit just gave it to you.

 

The word Conservative means what it means, and what it will always mean. The left is by nature progressive. It changes. Change is what we need now, and an invigorated left, with a strong economic argument and some real solutions for what the world of work is going to look like in the future. The world of work isn’t going to be heavy industry, labour-intensive agriculture, office jobs, careers for life. The middle class is feeling the hit as much as the working class. The old story is told. It’s history.

 

I am a writer and I understand the power of the stories we tell. Everything starts as a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Every political movement begins as a counter-narrative to an existing narrative.

 

The media is mainly run by the rich and the right-wing. They are telling their stories their way, and as Brexit shows, their narrative is working. It’s the immigrants, it’s the EU, it’s the feckless unemployed. It’s welfare, it’s climate control, it’s (what’s left) of the unions.

 

If we’re living in a post-facts world – let’s have better stories. Inequality is not a law of nature, like gravity. We make it up as we go along. The world does not have to be run for the benefit of the Murdochs, the Koch brothers, the offshore trusts and the tax havens. The left can tell it better and do it better. But only if we come together.

 

A long time ago, when I was 16 and living in a Mini in Accrington – a working-class town in an area that is today losing its libraries to the pack of lies that is Osborne’s austerity – I realised that I needed to read myself as a fiction as well as a fact. The facts weren’t looking good for me – I had nothing and I was nothing. And I thought that if I understood myself as a story I might do better, because if I am the story I can change the story.

 

To change the way we are telling the story of our country, the story of our world, does need more than facts. The facts aren’t working – that much is for sure. Young people, people who are left out by politics, want to hear a new story. The Brexiters latched on to that with spectacular and disastrous results.

 

It reads to me like Labour, as a party, is finished. The creative forces that make up the left are far from finished. We can find a narrative that unites us, not one that divides us. We can find a left alliance for the 21st century.

 

Equality Party, anyone?

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He's been as ineffectual as I expected however... 

 

I don't think so, right now, the next few months are going to be hugely significant for the country and potentially very unstable. Another round of navel gazing from Labour isn't going to help. We could be four months out from a general election. The mood in the country could be very different if the post Brexit environment (both politically and economically) does not go well. The tories have tied themselves to brexit and there could very well be significant consequences for them with an electorate rather less positive about the consequences of brexit and a looming recession.

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I just want a party that defends workers and human rights to the hilt and with passion. We are not fucking cattle, we are not property of our employers. The erosion of rights and services over the last few decades enabled by a partisan media has been outrageous. The only thing going forward is technology everything else seems to be regressing to shite. Politicians and the media need to start being held accountable for dishonesty with serious repercussions. Theres no democratic choice if all arguments are based on lies or half truths, theres no democratic choice with how our votes match seats. It's time for major political reform and it won't happen because the partisan media won't stir up the great unwashed enough for them to be arsed because the media like the position of power they have now. 

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He is obviously a man of principle, but his time as leader has been somewhat lacklustre. He had one job, to keep Britain in the EU, and that failure will probably be the straw that breaks the camel's back for his critics in the party. He never looked like his heart was in it, and asked to rate his enthusiasm for the EU, he gave it 7 and a half out of 10. I mean, really. Is it any surprise that such leadership failed to carry a majority of natural Labour voters? Would anyone be inspired by this?

 

There is clearly a massive disconnect between what Labour MPs believe and what working class Labour voters believe; there has to be considerable scepticism that Corbyn is the man to bridge that gap, even if he has more in common with the traditional Labour supporter than the rest of his party.

 

I don't even think it matters that much whether Corbyn stays or not. I don't see the Labour Party in its current incarnation surviving in the long term. Thursday's referendum result has been cataclysmic for the political landscape.

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He's not a leader in the sense that he can't really lead as it stands. There's a fractious element to his party that aren't even interested in the party they're meant to represent. People like Jess Phillips for instance, who's modus operandi is to create division and just be an ultra feminist. She speaks out about Corbyn non stop and does everything in her power to undermine him at every opportunity and there are more like her. He needs to crush them.

 

His principles are excellent but he didn't have his finger on the pulse with the immigration issue and i don't think he's got his finger on the pulse with the nuclear issue either. But then again there were very few labour mp's that did as far as the immigration issue is concerned. John Mann being one but i'd hate for him to be leader. 

 

I like Corbyn, i hope he stays. The labour party need to bridge the gap between their two biggest sections of support though, the traditional working class and the liberal left wing.

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There is such a huge opportunity on the cards to walk all over what is a totally shambolic Conservative party at the moment.

 

If the salesmen of the Labour party were to get on board with the policy of Corbyn they could genuinely rout them all over the place.

 

If the Labour party cannot summon up the competence or compromise to take advantage of the situation then the damage and evil that is brought about by the country lurching to the right will be on their heads. They cannot wash their hands of their failure.

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Corbyn will never ever reunite the two factions you talk about Boss. Whether you like it or not a good leader has to compromise on his beliefs if he's going to get into power.

 

He simply will not do that. I agree with Monty that the opposition as a whole is a fucking disgrace right now, and that's not just down to Corbyn of course. Look at all the shit the Tories have gone through recently, IDS resigning, defeats on bills in the House of Lords etc... And they still poll above Labour regularly. Any half competent leader should be handing them their arse.

 

Labour members voted for the principles the man represents in my opinion without realising that the actual man isn't a good enough politician to sell them to the general public like he needs to. That's how I feel about it at least.

 

I think we've got a unique opportunity here if he is replaced by someone like Jarvis. If Jarivs had been elected leader ten years ago he would have carried on with the same old neoliberal agenda. If he's elected leader now he's got a motivated and principled membership who would take him to task for any extreme decisions and help influence the policy and direction of the party.

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