The New Leader of the Labour Party

[SasaS]

It's the right wing of the party. As in left wing of the Tory party are not leftist. If they have a left wing that is. I guess they do. 

[Megadrive Man]

4 hours ago, Rico1304 said:

Absolutely, he’s the last person Labour should be listening to when it comes to winning elections. 

If the next Labour leader has to jump in to bed with the s*n, start selling off the nhs, introduce tuition fees and get involved in a war to get in to power then whats the fucking point?

 

I'd much rather wait for the tories to hang themselves, however long it takes. Lets see how they cope with an incompetent leader having to deal with a Brexit clusterfuck and pissing off the rest of the union.  

[The Guest]

They are right wing.  They deregulated the banks.  They kept the same top rate of tax and made the tax system less progressive than the previous Tory government.  They increased indirect taxes.  They introduced tuition fees and top up fees into higher education.  The absolute shenanigans that went on with the NHS while they were in power was not centrist.  It’s like you’ve all got Stockholm syndrome.  I’d expect a centrist party to do left and right things like nationalising rail or utilities because they aren’t working as a private industry but let them stay private if they were.  Nothing a centrist ever suggests is left, it’s always right.  They may talk shit about things like mental health because there’s actually no way to quantify things like that.

 

The worst thing about them is that they’ve enabled this Tory party to go as right as they want because there was no consequence for them if they got voted out.  The majority of the country couldn’t tell the difference between the labour and the tories for so long that they now only see the difference as the attitude to immigration.

[Megadrive Man]

Labour went too far left too quickly. They tried to run before they could walk. If they'd already been in power successfully for 4 or 5 years then their 2019 manifesto might have seemed more realistic. They should have picked 3 key pledges, renationalise railways, Waspi pensions and green industrial revolution is what I would have picked and tried to hammer them all home.  

[Rico1304]

I hadn’t remembered Starmer was the lawyer who worked pro bono in the McLibel case. Maybe that’s why I had a good opinion of him right from the start.  

[Tony Moanero]

10 minutes ago, MegadriveMan said:

Labour went too far left too quickly. They tried to run before they could walk. If they'd already been in power successfully for 4 or 5 years then their 2019 manifesto might have seemed more realistic. They should have picked 3 key pledges, renationalise railways, Waspi pensions and green industrial revolution is what I would have picked and tried to hammer them all home.  

Social security? Universal Credit is an

absolute joke.

[Megadrive Man]

8 hours ago, Manny said:

Thornberry would be a disaster. No way. Anyway - been thinking about this a fair bit recently and I think Labour's fundamental problem is that "class" hasn't died, but it has in the minds of the people who Labour need to vote for them.

 

I recently was on Twitter looking at some of the hellscape timelines of gammon rejoicing in Brexit being unfettered and delighting in the demise of Labour. A lot of it seems to be the tribalisation of politics - treating the election like it's a football match, which the FPTP system is ripe for - but a lot of it is the fact that they just don't see Labour as on their side. Labour was formed as a party to help the disenfranchised, the poor, those with least etc. - but the problem is now that many of the people who still fall into that category don't feel like they are - home ownership, cars, holidays, whatever, they just don't see themselves as helpless. The Tory "aspiration" messaging taps into that.

 

Labour still attracts people who want to champion the underdog - but who's the underdog now if the British white working class don't think of themselves as the underdog? Minorities. And there's the problem - Labour reflects those causes, which further pushes the white working class and their traditional values away from the party, because they view the Labour party as supporting immigrants and LGBT causes they aren't arsed about at best and actively hate at worst. It's part of the reason why the split in this election has moved from left to right and more to big city / small town and high education / low education.

 

One of the gammon timeline I looked at was incensed at Eddie Izzard campaigning in a marginal seat, showing a picture of that next to soot-faced miners of the past and saying the Labour party has changed and I realised - this is the problem for the party. They're viewed as the party of the other; all the Tories have to do is position themselves as a party not for the other and they're instantly more attractive. I read this Twitter summary shortly after the election and it sums it up quite neatly, I think.

 

So I don't have a solution, just a diagnosis. Labour has lost swathes of it's core support, basically, and I've no idea how it can win them back without changing to be more socially right wing whilst still economically left wing (which I'd hate). Maybe Brexit will go so south that voters will have nowhere else to turn in 2024, but I'm skeptical even of that. With the media sewn up and social media a cesspit of disinformation that it just makes people trust their instinct even more than they would have done, I can't see any accountability being held to this government of hypercunts unless it's from the other front bench. They have to get this right I feel.

This is a really good diagnosis. Labour face a massive uphill struggle to win back their working class heartlands. 

[Rico1304]

20 minutes ago, MegadriveMan said:

If the next Labour leader has to jump in to bed with the s*n, start selling off the nhs, introduce tuition fees and get involved in a war to get in to power then whats the fucking point?

 

I'd much rather wait for the tories to hang themselves, however long it takes. Lets see how they cope with an incompetent leader having to deal with a Brexit clusterfuck and pissing off the rest of the union.  

Did you vote for them? 

[Megadrive Man]

Just now, Tony Moanero said:

Social security? Universal Credit is an

absolute joke.

Yeah that's very true. That should have been a priority. 

[sir roger]

I agree that there were far too many planks to the manifesto but I wouldn't think Megadrive's 3 choices would have had any effect on the election.

[Megadrive Man]

3 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

Did you vote for them? 

No, I wasn't old enough, but if its a new labour choice at the next election then I won't be voting for them.

[Megadrive Man]

2 minutes ago, sir roger said:

I agree that there were far too many planks to the manifesto but I wouldn't Megadrive's 3 choices would have had any effect on the election.

No. Brexit was an insurmountable object for Labour. 

[Jairzinho]

1 hour ago, Sugar Ape said:

I wouldn’t describe them as right wing, no. They may be further to the right than Corbyn or McDonnell or whoever but that doesn’t make them right wing, and calling them the right wing of the Labour Party makes them sound like something they’re not imo. I think broadly they’re centre left with the exception maybe of a few oddities.
 

It’s a moot point anyway because no way anyone like Phillips or Cooper is winning this election. 

What SaS said.

[Rico1304]

If this guy gets the job...

 

 

[Dr Arthur De Sabre]

10 hours ago, Rico1304 said:

If the Iraq war hadn’t happened would you consider a TB government a success, and would you be happy to live in a country run on his values? 

Forget the Iraq war, what is his legacy? What benefit do children For the lower end of the financial scale now have from the new labour government? What do those from the top end have? What do those from the top end have, as a legacy of Thatcherism? If Blair and co had had the foresight to push for PR after the first 2 years of power, they could have engendered change that would have lasted, constitutional change that would have seen a fairer electoral system, with less chance of these decade long swings between the 2 main parties.

i benefited from the Blair government, but it was a short term boom for a lot of us who are now middle aged, those who come after us are fucked.

and by right wing. 
would I be happy to live in a country run on his values? On his values, no. Live in a country run by him, yes, but I was also happy to get to fuck, as there were no long lasting changes, it was all temporary, and as soon as they lost power, what happened? They bailed and it was all pulled apart.

you know instead of going off to be a fucking peace envoy, he could have stuck around and defended his record, and fought against austerity, but he had made his wedge and fucked off.

10 hours ago, Sugar Ape said:

What right wing of the party? If there even is a right wing, rather than just calling centrists right wing, it’s someone like Yvette Cooper who won’t stand a chance of getting elected anyway. 
 

There is no ‘right wing’ candidate that has a hope in hell of getting elected. It’s not as if IDS or Gove are running for Labour leader is it? All the candidates will be different flavours of left wing and whichever one is most electable as PM, in my opinion, is likely to get my vote. 
 

The reason the Tories make changes that last generations is because they are in power for generations. Blair is the only Labour leader that’s won an election in fifty years, by the time the next election comes about. Unless we get into power then whatever you view as the fundamentals of socialism won’t matter as you will never get a chance to implement them. 

The right wing of the party are those who are socially liberal, but fiscally to the right, it is not left centrism, it is right centrism, they put the benefit of big business and electability ahead of social welfare. Jess Phillips is not too far removed from Chukka Umunna, could quite easily be an LD, if she gets leadership, she will get massive fi a coal backing, as they no she will put business first as a classic blairite.

[Stickman]

Guess a week is a long time in politics. ….Shame some of these articles didn't come out earlier but I guess we know why they didn't

 

Accusing Bernie Sanders of antisemitism? That's a new low Kate Aronoff

The allegations should be called for what they are: politiking in service of politicians who will put more Jews in danger

 

 

 

Bernie Sanders – son of Dorothy and Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders, who emigrated from Poland in 1921 to escape antisemitism, and whose family that remained in Poland was slaughtered in the Holocaust – is not antisemitic. But some are trying to convince you that he is.

The conservative Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe published a story accusing the Sanders campaign of being the “most antisemitic in decades”. Worth noting is that Lowe expressed gratitude several months back for her grandfather’s service to the Chetniks, a nationalist armed front which collaborated with the Nazis and delivered thousands of Jews to them in service of building an ethnically homogenous Greater Serbia. She also posed for a picture with Milo Yiannopoulos, who once sent $14.88 on PayPal to a Jewish journalist, a reference to Nazi slogans.

For Lowe and others on the right that have jumped on this bandwagon, though, details don’t really matter. Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist, simply belongs to an opposing political camp with opposing values. Like the attacks against Corbyn abroad and Ilhan Omar at home, those now being lobbed at Sanders aren’t about defeating antisemitism so much as using it as a narrative device to undermine a worldview that offends them. Sanders’s solidarity with Palestinians suffering under occupation is not an affront to Jews but to the right’s propaganda that looking out for their best interest means a blanket, unquestioning support for whatever the Israeli government happens to be doing, which at the moment includes maintaining a brutal apartheid state.

 

This all stands in wild contrasts to Sanders’s actual views on antisemitism. As the Vermont Senator himself explained a recent essay for Jewish Currents entitled How to Fight Anti-Semitism, we now live in one of the most dangerous periods Jews have faced in recent memory, from the deadly shootings like the one at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue last year to a wave of of far-right energy in Europe that waxes nostalgic for the continent’s fascist past.

“Opposing antisemitism is a core value of progressivism,” Sanders writes. “So it’s very troubling to me that we are also seeing accusations of antisemitism used as a cynical political weapon against progressives. One of the most dangerous things Donald Trump has done is to divide Americans by using false allegations of antisemitism, mostly regarding the US–Israel relationship. We should be very clear that it is not antisemitic to criticize the policies of the Israeli government.” He goes onto lay out how a Sanders administration will confront antisemitism at home and abroad: immediately appointing a special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, rejoining the United Nations Human Rights Council and “helping to shape an international human rights agenda that combats all forms of bigotry and discrimination”, among other measures.

That the Sanders campaign is somehow abetting antisemitism seems absurd on its face, but more outlandish blows have landed. As I wrote last week, antisemitism itself has been a reliable tool of a right looking to ward off the left, and anti-socialism has often peddled in antisemitic tropes. Accusations coming from rightwing pundits and politicians now follow proudly in this tradition, albeit with feigned concern for Jews now used to defend against policies they disagree with. Just last week, Trump called a room of Jews “brutal killers, not nice people at all” before selling an executive order to criminalize campus protests as a defense of the Jewish people. Trump and his xenophobic allies abroad are undoubtedly bad for the Jews, and so are smear campaigns that play into their hands.

Before they snowball into something worse, the right’s allegations of antisemitism against the left – and the first Jew within striking distance of the White House, at that – should be called out for what they are: cynical politiking in service of politicians who will put more Jews in danger.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/18/the-rights-accusations-of-antisemitism-against-sanders-are-cynical-and-dangerous

 

 

 

 

 

[Red Phoenix]

About the article above :
 

 

Reminds me of this too :

 

 

 

[Red Phoenix]

So let's hope the shitty smear campaign gets ripped up to fucking shreds in the US, about time the bastards failed even though it's too late for this country.

 

Look at this crap for instance :

 

 

If there's one good thing that's come out of all of this it's that the US are now well prepared for what's coming after what happened here. It has the potential to backfire spectacularly too because if it's outed over there the public over here might start working out that what happened with Labour was a sham as well. Good if so, it at least stops right wingers from pulling this shit every time they don't like a Labour leader.

[aRdja]

 

I’m interested to know how Clive Lewis (black) or Keir Starmer (remainer) could help Labour win back these seats?

[Strontium]

You think people voted for these MPs because they were white?!

[aRdja]

The biggest driver behind those wanting Brexit is they’re against immigrants and free movements, and I don’t think the best way to persuade them to now vote for the party is for the members to select the son of a West Indian immigrant as the leader of the party. 

[moof]

20 hours ago, skend04 said:

When you've been the forum's chief banger of drums for Corbyn I guess you've certainly got the experience to say who is going wrong and where.

 

The cheek of it!

I was wrong, I thought people could concentrate on the policies and getting rid of the tories and I thought the manifesto could excite people into believing better things were possible. I hold my hands up.
 

You’re out here slagging off labour members who fought for their principles and you’ve got cunts like Rico back slapping you for it. 
 

Well done. You must feel so superior 

[Numero Veinticinco]

5 minutes ago, moof said:

I was wrong, I thought people could concentrate on the policies and getting rid of the tories and I thought the manifesto could excite people into believing better things were possible. I hold my hands up.
 

You’re out here slagging off labour members who fought for their principles and you’ve got cunts like Rico back slapping you for it. 
 

Well done. You must feel so superior 

Rico is way better on ignore, mate. 

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

I don't think that Corbyn is willing to get involved in discussions with the media about his successor... 

 

 

[moof]

7 minutes ago, Numero Veinticinco said:

Rico is way better on ignore, mate. 

Appreciate the advice, brother, but I’m a glutton for punishment.