The Chairman Mao resembling, Monarchy hating, threat to Britain, Labour Party thread

[chrisp65]

 

[OutByEaster?]

19 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I think you have the sides the wrong way round. One of Owen Smith and Jeremy Corbyn is opposed to Brexit, and it isn't Jeremy Corbyn. 

One of those is opposed to the way in which the country is currently run and it's not Owen Smith. I meant opposition to the Tory party, not to Brexit.

 

[HanoiVillan]

But since Brexit is, by a massive distance, the most important issue facing the country, that's what matters. To be honest, renationalising the railways is really quite small beer in comparison. 

I guess we need to leave it. We're not going to budge. 

[OutByEaster?]

You're right, Brexit is a huge and immediate issue and as a single issue it's probably the most important - but I think it is to some degree not one that the Labour party can currently do much with - we're not going to get the Brexit that silly people voted for in the referendum, we're going to get Remain with a Brexit badge on it in all the ways that count. The worst of both worlds, social exit, market remain. Corbyn is arguing to try to keep as much of the social legislation as we can, but it's very difficult when we have a party with a mandate from a referendum, the backing of the mainstream media and a very definite agenda - any sort of success is unlikely and made a lot more unlikely by the very deliberate interference of those elements of the Labour party that share the same agenda.

 

[darrenm]

I'm genuinely shocked by the positions of some of the posters on here whose opinions I've always respected.

[blandy]

7 hours ago, darrenm said:

I'm genuinely shocked by the positions of some of the posters on here whose opinions I've always respected.

Me too. I guess it's kind of a reflection of what's happened with the MPs too. Or party members. That's why, after all, there's a massive split in the labour party.

I'm also amazed that this owner Smith character has somehow got to the point of challenging for the leadership. He seems even worse than corbyn.

[Seat68]

I am and have always been a labour supporter, well a labour voter, I stopped being a vocal supporter following the welfare reform vote, it angered me greatly. When Corbyn was voted in as leader a lot of friends said well you must be happy, I said no as I couldn't judge him, and I still can't. I have said before that I believe in democracy and as elected leader he should be allowed to lead. That said, and this is in zero ways an endorsement of Owen, the shitweasel, but Corbyn seems entirely happy being in opposition and being a thorn in the side of the government. I don't think Labour will win a GE under his leadership, and neither do I see him standing down when this happens. I think some of the labour electorate want Blairite policies, they want the watered down version of labour that won Labour  elections. They dont want Corbyns politics but want his everyman persona. It will be interesting to see what happens post leadership election. 

Also, only dicks sit on train floors, you are taking up the space of 3 people. 

[chrisp65]

At a recent hustings for the Labour Leadership Owen Smith made reference to immigration, understanding people’s concerns about immigration and in particular the number of Syrian refugees and middle eastern refugees.
He gave an anecdotal example of the school in the Rhondda where his wife works being ‘under pressure’ from the influx of middle eastern refugees. 
So, Plaid Cymru did a little fact finding. At the time of the anecdote, the total number of refugees in Wales, adult and child, male and female, was 78. Of the 78, the number resident in the Rhondda was zero.
But yeah, know your audience. Talk up the pressure of immigration if that’s what the crowd wants.
As an update, the new figures released yesterday show a spike in the number of refugees settled in all of Wales. It’s now risen to 134. Still none at Owen Smith’s wife’s school though.
 

[peterms]

4 hours ago, Seat68 said:

Corbyn seems entirely happy being in opposition and being a thorn in the side of the government.

I think it's more that he and others like him see no point in being in office without implementing policies which are significantly different from what the tories would do.  It follows from this that the main aim is to articulate an alternative and build support for it.  The line the LP pursued for some years after 2010 in relation to austerity was not to oppose it, not the false narrative about public debt and deficits being the problem.  That's an example of doing exactly the wrong thing, and it allowed Osborne's narrative to run unchecked, with enormous damage to the economy and the country.  Part of the excitement people feel about Corbyn is perhaps down to a sense of enormous relief that at last someone is actually opposing this shite.

Making the alternative argument is a tough thing to do when the information channels most people rely on are so controlled by the mainstream narrative.  Progress will be slow.  But it's important to distinguish that approach, from being content to be in perpetual opposition, which is the false claim made by those MPs who think the personal prospect of ministerial office, black cars and red boxes for themselves, followed by a nice little earner on a few company boards, is more important than seeking lasting social change.

[peterms]

33 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

At a recent hustings for the Labour Leadership Owen Smith made reference to immigration, understanding people’s concerns about immigration and in particular the number of Syrian refugees and middle eastern refugees.
He gave an anecdotal example of the school in the Rhondda where his wife works being ‘under pressure’ from the influx of middle eastern refugees. 
So, Plaid Cymru did a little fact finding. At the time of the anecdote, the total number of refugees in Wales, adult and child, male and female, was 78. Of the 78, the number resident in the Rhondda was zero.
But yeah, know your audience. Talk up the pressure of immigration if that’s what the crowd wants.
As an update, the new figures released yesterday show a spike in the number of refugees settled in all of Wales. It’s now risen to 134. Still none at Owen Smith’s wife’s school though.
 

Little bit on that in the New Statesperson:

Quote

calling for an “honest” discussion on immigration, Smith noted that his wife is a school teacher and that schools in their local area are under pressure from “significant numbers into South Wales of people fleeing the Middle East”. In fact, a grand total of 78 people have been resettled in the whole of Wales under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme. In the local authority encompassing Smith’s constituency of Pontypridd, the total number is zero.

I like the link with his call for an "honest discussion".  If I were trying to give a non-English speaker an example of behaviour that we might use the phrase "beneath contempt" to describe, this might be a good one to use.

[Xann]

He's basically a pacifist socialist attempting to lead a country whose media is mostly owned offshore for tax reasons, is a World leader in banking and hiding the spoils of the wealthy, with a sizeable war industry that's important to the economy, jobs and diplomatic relations.

He wants to put the machine that's been serving the wealthy and privileged into reverse, and the W&P are trying to stop him via the media they control.

Many in his party don't fancy allying themselves with him. They see the abuse he receives and don't fancy their chances against the establishment. They will settle for having a crack at a little bit of power again.

I know Corbyn's not perfect and quite woolly in many respects, but he means well (I think anyway) and the lens through which he is perceived is grossly distorted.

It's also not going to be clear how to deal with problems above. They're well entrenched and the psychopaths pulling the strings command way too much power.

It's well broken here anyway, I have no problem letting him have a crack.

Might even vote for him

[blandy]

8 minutes ago, peterms said:

Part of the excitement people feel about Corbyn is perhaps down to a sense of enormous relief that at last someone is actually opposing this shite.

There's some of that for sure. And some of it is just in the timing and the tories failing - because in 2010 they said the'd get rid of the defecit in 5 years and they implemented austerity. People put up with that for a while, but are now massively hacked off with it, and have forgotten, to an extent, the tory vclaim that it was all Labour's fault.

So now an opposition to "austerity" catches favour.

Trouble is, for Labour that May and Hammond will get rid of Osborne's idiotic policies and do something less mad. Kind of shooting MacDonnell's fox, at least partly. The second problem is around incompetence (again). Corbyn and JMcD got in some expert, Left leaning economic gurus to help them formulate plans and policies, and then pissed them off with their amateur behaviour, their lack of consultation, and daft individual sound bites.

It's all very well saying we oppose austerity - who could argue with that, but to quote one of those advisors to McDonnell "  

Quote

the Labour party has nothing to say. There is no plan. That’s not good enough. It’s time it got one. "

Once again, it's not their ideas, it's their competence. Nobbers.

[chrisp65]

56 minutes ago, peterms said:

Little bit on that in the New Statesperson:

I like the link with his call for an "honest discussion".  If I were trying to give a non-English speaker an example of behaviour that we might use the phrase "beneath contempt" to describe, this might be a good one to use.

Ah, good find peterms, I didn't have anywhere I could quote or reference it from and that ties up pretty damn closely. I'd got it from a researcher / policy wonk what I knows. I was worried herr blandy was going to cane me for a lack of evidential quoting or some such 'fact' based nonesense.

 

 

[blandy]

2 hours ago, Xann said:

I know Corbyn's not perfect and quite woolly in many respects, but he means well (I think anyway) and the lens through which he is perceived is grossly distorted.

It's also not going to be clear how to deal with problems above.

Very true.

I don't completely share your analysis of the country as being under the control of banks and warmongers (I paraphrase), but there's a clear element of imbalance and unfairness that he's undoubtedly tapped into, in a way that others can't, or if they could they aren't really listened to (e.g. Greens). It's to his credit that he's been able to do that, and also that it's attracted many people who were turned off from politics by the "they're all the same" thing.

It's all true that the tories and their media chums have absolutely gone for him, in the first instance because him being slaughtered means no opposition for the tories and a free ride, and in the second case, because were he ever to get in, the media barons would not get an easy ride at all.

My issue with him is that he actually has quite a good hand to play - the nation having realised that austerity was wrong, the injustices of bedroom taxes, tax cuts for the rich, letting off Google from taxes, offshore tax havens, the economy not doing as promised, immigration not as promised, doctors strikes, lords defeats, arsing up the referendum, a split tory party....

And what's he done. Er, nothing. Got nowhere. Lost the support of previously supportive MPs, appointed people who he's then had to remove, largely ignored the media, made a number of rickets...

Just no effing clue how to lead, how to persuade the undecided or mildly unsympathetic. Failed to present a coherent or credible alternative. Picked fights where he could only lose, focused on things he likes rather than things to benefit Labour's chances of getting in next time.

I don't want to keep repeating variations on a point, so I'm gonna leave this thread for a while (till his next mess), but the bloke's just not up to the job he's got. He's like Graham Taylor the second time - lots of people like him, and doing the right thing by his principles, but ultimately unable to achieve the task given to him. GT, to his eternal credit, walked.

 

[Xann]

They don't point the camera at him when he's preaching the stuff they don't want you to hear.

Having been on a march with fecking thousands of people, then looking at the BBC's coverage making it look like a modest turnout.

Then the riot outside Downing St which the Beeb sheepishly admitted might have happened the next day.

It's a fix.

When Russia Today are showing stuff the BBC are ignoring, it's pretty obvious this country's fooked.

[blandy]

11 minutes ago, Xann said:

They don't point the camera at him when he's preaching the stuff they don't want you to hear.

Sometimes, sure. He's certainly got a challenge with the media.

But there are ways to work round that, if true. There are, for example, times when the Cameras are pointed at him - whether that be PMQs for example, or other events where cameras are there. He could write articles for Newspapers, as leaders have done for decades. He could go on TV programmes - the ones they do that I never watch like Sunday Morning bollitics, or Questions Time, or Newsnight, or Sky Bollitics telly or whatever.

Getting his mate to film him sat on the floor of a far from packed train outside rush hour while espousing the problems of packed trains and  then posting it on arseface or twitter to his followers is all well and good to a point, but it's not "reaching out" to the wider country  -a lot of whom (including me) agree with nationalising the trains again. Sorry, I said I was going

 

[Xann]

Not a user of Twitter, and the only political thing on my FB is Green, but enough of my friends pin stuff that show he's a very busy guy day to day. Getting out there.

Don't see it on telly mind.

[HanoiVillan]

2 hours ago, blandy said:

Very true.

I don't completely share your analysis of the country as being under the control of banks and warmongers (I paraphrase), but there's a clear element of imbalance and unfairness that he's undoubtedly tapped into, in a way that others can't, or if they could they aren't really listened to (e.g. Greens). It's to his credit that he's been able to do that, and also that it's attracted many people who were turned off from politics by the "they're all the same" thing.

It's all true that the tories and their media chums have absolutely gone for him, in the first instance because him being slaughtered means no opposition for the tories and a free ride, and in the second case, because were he ever to get in, the media barons would not get an easy ride at all.

My issue with him is that he actually has quite a good hand to play - the nation having realised that austerity was wrong, the injustices of bedroom taxes, tax cuts for the rich, letting off Google from taxes, offshore tax havens, the economy not doing as promised, immigration not as promised, doctors strikes, lords defeats, arsing up the referendum, a split tory party....

And what's he done. Er, nothing. Got nowhere. Lost the support of previously supportive MPs, appointed people who he's then had to remove, largely ignored the media, made a number of rickets...

Just no effing clue how to lead, how to persuade the undecided or mildly unsympathetic. Failed to present a coherent or credible alternative. Picked fights where he could only lose, focused on things he likes rather than things to benefit Labour's chances of getting in next time.

I don't want to keep repeating variations on a point, so I'm gonna leave this thread for a while (till his next mess), but the bloke's just not up to the job he's got. He's like Graham Taylor the second time - lots of people like him, and doing the right thing by his principles, but ultimately unable to achieve the task given to him. GT, to his eternal credit, walked.

Ohmygod THIS. All of it. Don't think I've ever agreed with a post as much as this one, right here. 

2 hours ago, Xann said:

They don't point the camera at him when he's preaching the stuff they don't want you to hear.

This has more than a grain of truth to it, but it's also a two-way street. He avoids giving interviews to media outlets, is frequently rude to journalists trying to ask him questions, and then is surprised when they haven't got much time for him. Yes the media in this country are rubbish, and of course they're only asking him questions in the hope he'll blunder, but it's just something a political party leader has to deal with. If you don't sit at the table, you can't complain when you don't win the hand, and sadly he doesn't have enough Facebook friends to win a general election. 

Edited August 26, 2016 by HanoiVillan

[dAVe80]

For Twitter users, #LabourPurgeSongs has been pretty amusing, regarding members being suspended and expelled (mostly for being Corbyn supporters) over the past couple of days, 

[blandy]

18 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

I was worried herr blandy was going to cane me for a lack of evidential quoting or some such 'fact' based nonesense.

. Charmed, I'm sure.

I do hope my complete agreement with you on the "merits" of Owen Smith hasn't caused further distress and alarm.