The New Leader of the Labour Party

[Creator Supreme]

18 minutes ago, Jairzinho said:

Those 16 should be reselected.

The same should happen to the 18 who have backed Murray for deputy!

[Brownie]

I’m all in on the Starmer-Rayner partnership at this point.

[moof]

 

ok, Clive. I’m listening 

[Bjornebye]

 

 

 

[Strontium]

[Denny Crane]

With the focus rightly on Labour due to the size of the defeat but this is an interesting piece. Maybe the seats the Tory party won in old Labour areas will stop the Singapore model being implemented. But with the likes of Raab, Javid, Fox, Mogg and the rest all having the ear of Johnson it is hard to see it as anything other than a race to the bottom. 

 

It wasn’t just the Labour party that took a beating in last month’s general election. So too, but much less remarked, did right-libertarianism.

The Tories won on policies that repudiated many of their professed beliefs: a higher minimum wage; increased public spending; and the manpower planning that is a points-based immigration policy. And the manifesto (pdf) promise to “ensure that there is a proper balance between the rights of individuals, our vital national security and effective government” should also alarm libertarians. John Harris quotes an anonymous minister as saying that the libertarianism of Britannia Unchained is “all off the agenda” and that “some of the things we’ve celebrated have led us astray.”

Tories are not out of step with public opinion here. If anything, it is even more antipathetic to right-libertarianism than are Tories. Most voters support higher income taxes on the rich, a wealth tax, and nationalizing the railways, for example. Rick was right months ago to say:

British voters don’t share the free-marketers’ vision…The important thing to understand about right-wing libertarianism is that it is a very eccentric viewpoint. It looks mainstream because it has a number of well-funded think-tanks pushing its agenda and its adherents are over-represented in politics and the media. The public, though, have never swallowed it.

 A bit of me sympathizes with right-libertarians here. I suspect that one reason for public antipathy to free markets is that people under-appreciate the virtue of spontaneous order – that emergent processes can sometimes deliver better outcomes than state direction.

Nevertheless, all this raises a question: why are we not seeing more opposition to Johnsonian Toryism from right-libertarians?

You might think its because right-libertarianism has morphed into support for Brexit. Whilst I don’t wish to deny there is some link between the two, many Brexiter MPs have failed a basic test of libertarianism. In 2018 the likes of Bridgen, Cash, Duncan-Smith, Rees-Mogg and Francois all voted against legalizing cannabis.

One possibility is that they regard him as the lesser of two evils – they are supporting him with a heavy heart.

 

A second possibility has been described by Tyler Cowen. Intelligent right-libs have realized that free markets are not the panacea they thought and have shifted their priorities towards improving state capacity. Examples of this might – in different ways – be Dominic Cummings or Sam Bowman.

Perhaps relatedly, right-libertarianism has lost its material constituency. It once appealed to people by offering tax cuts. Today, however, many of the sort of businessmen who in the 80s wanted lower taxes now want other things, such as better infrastructure.

If these are respectable reasons for the decline of right-libertarianism, I suspect there are less reputable ones.

One is that we have lost the cast of mind which underpins right-libertarianism – that of an awareness of the limits of one’s knowledge. We need freedom, thought Hayek, because we cannot fully understand or predict society:

Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseeable and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known....And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. (Law Legislation and Liberty Vol I, p56-57.)

We live, however, in an age of narcissistic blowhards who are overconfident about everything. This is a climate which undervalues freedom.

Worse still, I suspect that some right-libertarians were never really sincere anyway. They professed a love of freedom only as a stick with which to beat the old Soviet Union. Liberty was only ever a poor second to shilling for the rich. And their antipathy to Gordon Brown was founded not upon a rightful distaste for the authoritarian streak in his thinking but upon simple tribalism. Maybe Corey Robin was right:

The priority of conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of power.

This isn't just a UK phenomenon, illustrated by Paul Staines: some (not all) US libertarians found it easy to throw in their lot with Trump. 

Whatever the reason for the demise of right-libertarianism, however, there is perhaps another lesson to be taken from it – that you cannot nowadays achieve much political change via thinktanks alone.

 

https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2020/01/the-strange-death-of-libertarian-england.html

[Bjornebye]

I’m with Chomsky on this. 

[Red Phoenix]

Bazza's gonna run and he's gonna fucking storm it. He's gonna get our lad Clive and do this to him to start his campaign off :

 

[Red Phoenix]

6 hours ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

 

That's probably a book on UFO's that, he's doing his bit to wake the masses up from an early age. Image quality looks mad though, like it's from 1970 or something.

[Jenson]

16 hours ago, Sugar Ape said:

People supporting RLB presumably. 
 

In other news...

 

 

 

I like Gardiner and if he was going for deputy leader, I would probably vote for him. As it is, it's Starmer & Raynor for me too.

[Red Phoenix]

I think Starmer seems about as radical as beans on toast. At least with years of Corbyn people have been woken up to the state of the country quite a lot, Labour manifestos have been good and they've been shifted back to the left so Starmer will have to go along with some of it. I don't get the impression that he's really bothered though and is more of a centrist that won't change much if he's ever PM.

[skend04]

5 minutes ago, Red Phoenix said:

I think Starmer seems about as radical as beans on toast. At least with years of Corbyn people have been woken up to the state of the country quite a lot, Labour manifestos have been good and they've been shifted back to the left so Starmer will have to go along with some of it. I don't get the impression that he's really bothered though and is more of a centrist that won't change much if he's ever PM.

Yeah, people have woken up and voted for the people who foisted austerity upon them. Corbyn and the left have done a great job there.

[Babb'sBurstNad]

I'll take whoever can win and is less of a bastard than the current government.

[SasaS]

30 minutes ago, Red Phoenix said:

I think Starmer seems about as radical as beans on toast. At least with years of Corbyn people have been woken up to the state of the country quite a lot, Labour manifestos have been good and they've been shifted back to the left so Starmer will have to go along with some of it. I don't get the impression that he's really bothered though and is more of a centrist that won't change much if he's ever PM.

On the other hand, beans on toast would be seen as radical in many, if not most other countries.

[Captain Turdseye]

Kier Starmer is gonna ban hats. 

[Babb'sBurstNad]

4 minutes ago, Captain Turdseye said:

Kier Starmer is gonna ban hats. 

[Dr Nowt]

7 minutes ago, SasaS said:

On the other hand, beans on toast would be seen as radical in many, if not most other countries.

Citizens of Pitcairn Island, for example, said it’s the most nauseating, depraved thing they’ve ever heard of.

[SasaS]

1 minute ago, Lizzie Birdsworths Wrinkled Chopper said:

Citizens of Pitcairn Island, for example, said it’s the most nauseating, depraved thing they’ve ever heard of.

 

And they should know, considering what goes on there.

[Numero Veinticinco]

12 hours ago, Brownie said:

I’m all in on the Starmer-Rayner partnership at this point.

Fuck it. Let's 'aveee it

[Dr Nowt]

32 minutes ago, SasaS said:

 

And they should know, considering what goes on there.

 

[Red Phoenix]

41 minutes ago, skend04 said:

Yeah, people have woken up and voted for the people who foisted austerity upon them. Corbyn and the left have done a great job there.

 

Loads of people have been woken up to the state of our so called democracy after years of Corbyn bashing by the media and that's not going to be put back in its bottle any time soon. That's as important as anything else because it's obvious that our media and electoral system needs changing and Corbyn didn't get any type of fair run at things, he was attacked near constantly since before he even became leader. With a balanced media he could've been elected. And with policies put forward in the elections with Corbyn as leader some of the ideas are probably a lot more mainstream now. Labour Party is further to the left as well.

 

I wasn't referring to the people that voted Tory either because they want their Brexit and/or believed so much of the propaganda against Corbyn, and of course Corbyn didn't do well enough on the EU for you so no good thing can be said about him. If young people voted only the country would be almost completely red. Even though others still need to be supported by the party and votes need to be won back, it's the younger voters that are the future and a lot of them have been inspired by Corbyn for good reason.

 

You can tell how good Corbyn would have been just from how much the media system almost broke down during elections, even the BBC have been exposed. And the Tories are even hoping to change the voting system by the looks of it in fear of the red wave that's on its way in the years to come. Corbyn had some obvious flaws but he's helped change the outlook of a lot of people and restored hope for actual change instead of the same old shit, Labour need to make sure that's not taken away in the years to come and built on instead of being dismantled.

[Dougie Do'ins]

10 hours ago, Bjornebye said:

 

 

 

She been taking math lessons from Diane Abbott ?

[Denny Crane]

How are they going to pay for it. 

 

 

 

[Red Phoenix]

Think it's cool that this MP has done this, would be glad if more did the same too :

 

 

I don't think I'd agree with quite a bit about Lewis being leader and don't think he'll make it anyway, but he's definitely keeping some important subjects being discussed with electoral reform being one of the main ones. Actually maybe he's not that bad, the NATO thing winds me up more than it should I guess, but once they support that thing it calls into question the rest of their entire foreign policy outlook.

[Bjornebye]

2 hours ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

She been taking math lessons from Diane Abbott ?

The more I see her and hear her voice the more I want to pull out some Mortal Kombat moves on the fucking brummie bitch. 

 

I'm thinking Raiden shit