Should Corbyn remain as Labour leader?

[Spy Bee]

Angela Eagle's CLP voted to support the leader and asked her to do so. They're fuming.

And now she's positioning herself as a potential leader. Stroll on!

[Red Phoenix]

It might not turn out bad at all if this is accurate :

 

Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have warned he will impose mandatory reselection of MPs and a string of other moves to give party members more control if he successfully defeats the Commons ‘coup’ against him.

 

HuffPost UK has been told that a string of radical measures are being planned if Corbyn is re-elected, including recall by-elections and a new ‘lock’ giving the rank and file membership  a veto over any future leadership elections.

 

Senior Labour sources say that a fresh election victory would give him the mandate to draft an even more ‘socialist’ policy programme, but more importantly would allow him to transform party democracy.

 

Labour MPs voted overwhelmingly for a vote of ‘no confidence’ in their party leader, and letters requesting a leadership contest were expected to be submitted to the party general secretary Iain McNicol in coming days.

 

But furious pro-Corbyn figures in the party say that plotting MPs will “have sleepless nights” if they fail in their bid to topple him.

 

Private polling done by trade unions shows that support among their individual members for Corbyn is as strong as it was when he won his landslide in September 2015, and in some unions is even stronger.

 

“We will offer the most radical leadership reform package ever,” said one insider. “Reselection, recall, a lock on leadership elections that only members can remove. We will bring it.”

 

 

The rest is here : http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeremy-corbyn-mandatory-reselection-of-labour-mps-leadership-contest_uk_5772b097e4b0d257114a9487?6otzfjqa2mwh4cxr

[Spy Bee]

Sky News keep mentioning that the Pro Remain Protest tonight is bigger than the Corbyn one yesterday - as if that is a relevant comparison. 

[Brownie]

I await the inevitable comments about this speculation.

[magicrat]

 

It might not turn out bad at all if this is accurate :

 

Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have warned he will impose mandatory reselection of MPs and a string of other moves to give party members more control if he successfully defeats the Commons ‘coup’ against him.

 

HuffPost UK has been told that a string of radical measures are being planned if Corbyn is re-elected, including recall by-elections and a new ‘lock’ giving the rank and file membership  a veto over any future leadership elections.

 

Senior Labour sources say that a fresh election victory would give him the mandate to draft an even more ‘socialist’ policy programme, but more importantly would allow him to transform party democracy.

 

Labour MPs voted overwhelmingly for a vote of ‘no confidence’ in their party leader, and letters requesting a leadership contest were expected to be submitted to the party general secretary Iain McNicol in coming days.

 

But furious pro-Corbyn figures in the party say that plotting MPs will “have sleepless nights” if they fail in their bid to topple him.

 

Private polling done by trade unions shows that support among their individual members for Corbyn is as strong as it was when he won his landslide in September 2015, and in some unions is even stronger.

 

“We will offer the most radical leadership reform package ever,” said one insider. “Reselection, recall, a lock on leadership elections that only members can remove. We will bring it.”

 

 

The rest is here : http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeremy-corbyn-mandatory-reselection-of-labour-mps-leadership-contest_uk_5772b097e4b0d257114a9487?6otzfjqa2mwh4cxr

 

 

Tories will be jizzing themselves at the thought

What about accountabilty to the wider electorate ?

[Anubis]

The remain protest affects London as a whole, Conservative, Labour and all other parties. Which is obvious. But when there's an agenda to push...

[Biscao]

This has nothing to do with the electorate. For hardcore lefties moderates are worse than tories.

[Red Phoenix]

Tories will be jizzing themselves at the thought

What about accountabilty to the wider electorate ?

 

Why would the tories be jizzing themselves, and how is what was posted there less accountable than the system currently in place?

[Gnasher]

One for the the labour party

 

 

https://youtu.be/5_H-LY4Jb2M

 

The fucking traitors do not deserve a tune that good.

[Brownie]

This has nothing to do with the electorate. For hardcore lefties moderates are worse than tories.

Would you describe anyone on here as being hardcore left? Is Corbyn hardcore left?

[magicrat]

Why would the tories be jizzing themselves, and how is what was posted there less accountable than the system currently in place?

So you suggest members should effectively have a choke chain on every Labour MP yet its the public that votes them into office as their representative in parliament. T 

[Denny Crane]

George Eaton ‏@georgeeaton

Still no agreed candidate. Dan Jarvis now canvassing, MPs tell me. Yvette also keen.

[Spy Bee]

http://www.thecanary.co/2016/06/27/tony-blairs-crony-elite-want-to-snatch-labour-back-from-the-working-class/

 

Click the link, I'm not fucking formatting all that!

 

Tony Blair’s crony elite want to snatch Labour back from the working class

 

The latest coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn within the Labour Party is being led by an elitist Blairite network who have always seen his sudden rise to leadership as a threat to their waning control of the party.

An investigation by The Canary reveals that the organisers of the campaign are part of a pro-Blair ‘old guard.’

In the run-up to the Labour leadership elections in September 2015, they had tried to re-model the party along the lines of a pro-war, pro-corporate vision linked to the US Democrat Party’s neoconservative wing.

But Jeremy Corbyn’s victory completely scuppered their plans.

15 shadow secretaries of state and nine shadow ministers who have resigned from Corbyn’s opposition cabinet all have affiliations to, or are involved with, the Fabian Society – the London think-tank affiliated with the Labour Party.

The Fabian Society was a major force in establishing the intellectual basis of New Labour under Blair’s premiership and has remained closely aligned to Blair’s supporters in the party. It was also the main force attempting to re-impose a Blairite vision on the party before Corbyn’s surprise leadership victory.

Conor McGinn and Hilary Benn

According to Sky News political correspondent Sophy Ridge, the flurry of resignations from Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet have been “choreographed” largely by one man: Conor McGinn, Labour MP for St Helens North.

She said:

He’s ringing shadow cabinet members and ministers, organising the timings and co-ordinating the resignations to try to cause maximum impact. This is significant because he’s one of Jeremy Corbyn’s Whips – tasked with ensuring party discipline.

McGinn, however, belongs to a wider network of Blairite Labour politicians who had opposed Corbyn’s leadership of the party from the beginning. He was involved with the Fabian Society at a senior leadership level during its role in attempting to ‘re-found’ the party under a Blairite pro-war, pro-corporate blueprint.

In May, McGinn told PoliticsHome.com that Blair’s government was the most “transformative government in the last 100 years of British political history,” and described himself as a pro-interventionist.

McGinn had formally joined the pro-EU cross-party campaign, Britain Stronger In Europe, as a “political champion”, alongside Hilary Benn.

Over the weekend, Jeremy Corbyn sacked Benn from his position as Shadow Foreign Secretary. On Sunday, The Observer reported that Benn had contacted fellow MPs over the weekend to discuss the prospect of an anti-Corbyn coup.

Sky News’ confirmation that this process was being coordinated by one of Corbyn’s own whips, Conor McGinn, suggests that McGinn and Benn had worked together to orchestrate the sudden resignations.

McGinn did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Blair brigade’s last straw

The failed Britain Stronger In Europe campaign has been run by executive director Will Straw, the son of Jack Straw, who served as Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary under former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

On Monday Straw, via Britain Stronger in Europe, called for Jeremy Corbyn to resign.

Will Straw’s #Remain campaign group was funded significantly by longtime Labour Party donor and Blairite billionaire Lord Sainsbury, Tony Blair’s close friend.

Straw is among a network of longtime Blairite stalwarts trying to ‘re-found’ the Labour Party – a project demolished by Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide victory in the Labour leadership elections in September 2015.

Although Straw the son has publicly distanced himself from his father’s support for the 2003 Iraq War, he isreportedly a defender of the war in private. Current Labour Party leader Corbyn said in May that he stood by his promise to call for a war crimes investigation into Tony Blair.

Since 2009, company records unearthed by this author for a previous investigation show that Will Straw has been a Director of Left Foot Forward Ltd., which owns and publishes the self-styled “independent” and “non-aligned” political blog of the same name. His co-director at the company is Marcus Alexander Roberts, a former field director for the leadership campaign of Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband.

As documented in that investigation, under the previous editorship of pundit James Bloodworth, the self-styled “No. 1 left-wing blog” in Britain had virtually made its mission to lampoon Corbyn’s leadership at every opportunity, jettisoning even an ounce of balance.

Straw’s bio on the Left Foot Forward website does not mention his role on the company’s board of directors.

Straw’s co-director at Left Foot Forward Ltd., Marcus Roberts, is simultaneously director of Zentrum Consulting Ltd., which describes itself as a “political consultancy.” Roberts previously spent time in the US working on the Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama presidential campaigns.

Roberts later became campaign manager for Sadiq Khan’s successful mayoral campaign.

Yet precisely during the Labour Party’s contract with Zentrum, from 2011 to 2015, Marcus Roberts was simultaneously Deputy General Secretary of the Fabian Society, where he ran policy research on how to reconstitute Labour – including work by his friend and co-director Will Straw.

Within that period, from 2012 to 2013, Conor McGinn – who is reportedly choreographing the resignations in the Labour shadow cabinet – was a colleague of Roberts, as Vice Chair of the Young Fabians, a subsidiary within the Fabian Society.

Zentrum: Blairite attempt to hijack Labour from itself

In 2011, the Labour Party had also hired Marcus Robert’s consultancy outfit, Zentrum, to run the ‘re-founding Labour’ campaign at the behest of Lord Peter Hain, another Cabinet minister under Blair.

Effectively, then, the Fabian Society had been hijacked into a Blairite ‘re-founding’ Labour process under Roberts’ leadership.

According to Dan Hodges, citing “senior party officials,” Zentrum was “being used to effectively bypass the party.”

“Someone is refounding Labour,” concluded Hodges. “But who?”

Through Zentrum Consultancy Ltd., the increasingly unpopular Blairite network inside the party was attempting to maintain its influence, rather than engaging with the breadth and depth of the party itself.

At the time, Marcus Roberts’ Zentrum was co-managed by Frank Spring, a US-based political campaign consultant. Spring is a Political Partner at the Truman National Security Project, a think-tank made-up of pro-Democrat Party policy wonks. In 2006, the Los Angeles Times described the Truman Project as a movement of “fledgling neocons of the left:

This new crop of liberal hawks calls for expanding the existing war against terrorism, beefing up the military and promoting democracy around the globe. They want, in essence, to return to the beliefs that originally brought the neocons to prominence, the beliefs that motivated old-fashioned Cold War liberals such as Democratic Sen. Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader obviously threw a huge spanner in the works for the entire Blairite effort to ‘refound Labour’ along the pro-war, pro-corporate model of the Democrat Party’s neocon hawks.

In response to requests via Twitter to clarify whether he had any knowledge of his former Fabian colleague Conor McGinn’s role in the Labour coup attempt, Marcus Roberts declined to address the question, but said:

You’ll have to ask MPs what they’re doing. Me: I vote Liz last year! 

Roberts admitted that he had previously voted for staunch Blairite Liz Kendall, who was among those facingcrushing defeat from the Corbyn leadership campaign.

[Carvalho Diablo]

George Eaton ‏@georgeeaton

Still no agreed candidate. Dan Jarvis now canvassing, MPs tell me. Yvette also keen.

 

That would be the same Yvette Cooper who Corbyn annihilated at the last party leader election, all of 5 minutes ago ?

[Jairzinho]

Cuntageddon.

[Denny Crane]

That would be the same Yvette Cooper who Corbyn annihilated at the last party leader election, all of 5 minutes ago ?

I assumed it was Mrs Balls.

[Bobby Hundreds]

cant be arsed.

[old skool tom]

The fella was was voted in by registered members and now the blairites are jumping ship.Ive reached the age were I think all those who oppose old Labour should create their own party and let JC and his left wingers run the party as it was meant to be run,by the workers for the workers.

Atleast then I will be able too vote for a party whos values I truly beleive in (even though it will probably never win an election)

 

Ive reached the age now were I accept Tory rule will always dominate power but atleast I can sleep at night knowing I voted for traditional Labour and not the New Labour shite that is half hearted socialist views just for the sake of having a long 'career' in politics.

[Anubis]

What we need is someone we can all shout THE KING IN THE NORTH at, while fucking off the Midlands, the South, and Westminster.

[magicrat]

So we come full circle pondering on whether we would rather have a traditional Labour party or ditch principles in order to have some chance of defeating the Tories, I'm afraid getting these cunts out of power is paramount imo

[Red Phoenix]

So you suggest members should effectively have a choke chain on every Labour MP yet its the public that votes them into office as their representative in parliament.

 

The public would still have final say wouldn't they? Because their votes (on their own MP's) would determine anything like a by-election.

 

edit : sorry I got the post mixed up and said voters would determine recall, have edited.

[Gnasher]

I assumed it was Mrs Balls.

 

Mrs Ed Balls, Yevett Copper, wife of Eddy Balls, fucking jokerman.

 

https://youtu.be/1XSvsFgvWr0

 

Cunt don't really deserve a song as good as this.

[magicrat]

The public would still have final say wouldn't they? Because their votes (on their own MP's) would determine whether or not something like a recall took place.

 

It will turn MP's into robots. Tow the party line or you're out, shit scared to express an opinion that doesn't conform to the party doctrine

What's happening now is not ideal but its not surprising after the events that saw hoards of new members signing up in to elect Corbyn, a politician that for decades had been out of sync with the majority of his parliamentary colleagues that are now expected to back him

[Strontium]

I really don't believe it's Corbyn's views that are counting against him - indeed, he wouldn't have got near the position he occupies if not for his views - so much as his general lack of leadership skills.

[RoboRiise]

Well, it looks like Corbyn will be leaving so surely you must be far more confident in Labour winning in 2020 with his replacement?

 

How does it look like he'll be leaving?

 

I haven't seen any news for about two hours but last I heard he's lost a vote of confidence from the PLP which we both know counts for nothing in the grand scheme of things, not least because he and Len McCluskey pointed it out quite plainly after the vote.  Even if a leadership contest is forced he's already said that he will stand.  He will then presumably be elected by the same Labour party members who made it abundantly clear that they don't give a fuck what the PLP think when they elected him in the last leadership election and all that will have happened is that we'll be a few weeks closer to the election with the same guy steering the ship.

 

The Labour party is a democratic organisation and it's going to elect its leader according to its democratic processes.  I wouldn't want it to do anything else.  After it does that (or if it accepts that it's already done it and decides that for the reasons I gave above, going through the same process when everybody knows what the outcome will be nothing but a waste of time) we will have an election and the electorate will tell the party whether it trusts it to form a government.

 

I'm not at all confident of Labour winning in 2020 with or without Corbyn, I thought I'd been clear about that.  I would be more confident yes, partly because the people who have to work for him are telling me they don't trust him to lead them and partly because we all seem to agree that the press are very influential and I have said from day one that they will crucify him in a general election campaign.

 

With each passing day, my faith in the British public's desire to avoid taking it up the hoop diminishes.  Labour managed to loose 26 seats in 2015 after five years of Tory austerity and ended up with 99 fewer seats than the Tories.  It would take a swing of almost unimaginable proportions to see them win an actual majority.  Looking at the map of how people voted in the referendum, we saw a bock of'in' votes in London, a block in Scotland and a big ring of 'out' votes all around them.  Looking at a map of the voting in the general election, there's more than a passing correlation with the Labour/Conservative split there, especially if you agree that since we have to hope UKIP are going to be somewhat of an irrelevance now we've voted in favour of the only policy that they ever had, their votes are more likely to transfer to the Tories than Labour.

 

It's abundantly clear that immigration is increasingly a key issue for white working class people in that ring of'out' voting and white working class people, especially in the North are supposed to be amongst Labour's traditional power base, yet I'm not sensing any move towards actually confronting that reality and without doing so, I don't see where the increase in votes is coming from.  I don't even see how Labour could confront it if they had the will to do it to be honest because simply saying 'you're wrong and we know better' is not a strategy that usually has much success against people who are not really going to be engaging with a debate about the issues from an intellectual stance. I know full well that immigration isn't the reason that the communities those people live in are suffering but I have not one clue how to go about making them see that.

 

What other options are there for Labour having at least a seat at the table afteran election?  A coalition with a resurgent Lib Dem party?  Excuse me whilst I clean this pint of coffee off my monitor.  A coalition with the SNP?  Hmmm, can't really see that one working out considering that the right wing press used the prospect of it as a stick with which to beat Labour in the last general election and that goes double if they do push for a second independence referendum - how do you form a coalition with a partner whose first act will be to attempt to leave it permanently?.  Really not seeing a third option though, they can't just make more MPs appear out of thin air they have to come from the 650 constituencies that we have.

 

I know that 170 Labour MPs, each of whom know far more about the specific demographics of their constituencies and the issues that are going to win and lose votes there than I do, would have more confidence in their electoral performance with a different leader.  That is what they have told us today.  They haven't even specifically rejected Corbyn's policies, the message is morethat he isn't the man to enact them by virtue of a lack of genuine leadership qualities.  They work with the guy, I don't.  I also know that they aren't all raving Blairite shills by a long chalk and I'm just not arrogant enough to sit here saying that I know better than them when they deal with those communities and with him as a leader day in and day out and understand them better than I ever will.

 

In some ways I'm in a worse place to judge what may or may not happen in other areas than many simply because my own constituency is so atypical.  I know we will send Jim McMahon back to London whenever the election happens, there's no question about it whatsoever but it has relatively little to do with national Labour party policy.  The Asian community here traditionally votes Labour and the local Labour party is extremely well organised and good at getting the votes delivered and Jim McMahon is very popular locally as a former council leader.

 

The fact we're going to return a Labour MP doesn't tell me anything worth knowing though because simply keeping this consituency and even all the other ones Labour already have will achieve nothing, assuming that what we're calling achivement here is a Labour government.

 

I can't get my head round the idea that a Labour government with a leader more centrist than Corbyn would be worse for me and people like me than a Tory government led by Boris Johnson, or Theresa May, or God forbid Jeremy Hunt.  I can't see how that works at all.

 

I'm going to be totally honest here, you and some others who have posted in this thread are undoubtedly more politically aware than I am.  I make no apologies for it.  If you feel that with your insight you can say hand on heart that Labour's best chance of winning an election is with Corbyn leading the party I'm no more equipped to argue it in greater detail with you than I have above than I'm equipped to argue it with serving Labour MPs who seemingly have a different opinion.  That's the primary reason I keep trying to avoid commenting on this thread.

 

All I know is that it feels like I'm staring into the abyss at the moment.  Like Paul mentioned earlier, I remember the Militant days too and my enduring memory of them is that it was a period when the Labour party was considered about as electable as a party headed by Gary Glitter and cat bin woman.  If anything the prevailing mood in the country seems to be even less inclined towards a truly left wing solution now than it was then, which is hardly surprising considering the amount of change society has seen in the intervening years.  My confidence levels are so low no matter who is running the show that I'd take what I can get right now.

 

(And apologies - my spacebar is fucked and I'm sure to have missed some somewhere but I can't face going back through that to correct them...)

 

I will say that politics is largely about compromise and unless we envisage a dictatorship in the near future, that is what's desperately needed here.