Go on then, who do you reckon will win? The Labour Leadership contest, that is...

Cooper is probably the smartest and most capable. I don't know whether they will go with someone more overtly chummy as a reaction to Miliband, though. Fear it might be Burnham.

Would it be Umunna? For the obvious parallells with Obama, plus he seems quite normal which is what the media seem to want nowadays.

I did see Liz Kendall getting interviewed, she seemed nice enough but not exactly dynamic.

I hope it's not Umunna, if only because it'll mean not having to put up with 'Papa Oom Mow Mow' playing in my head on an endless loop every time i look at the news.

...

the silver lining if it's Umunna will be the entire "funny foreign name" brigade being EXPOSED

Burnham's logo from the last leadership campaign was pretty neat:

http://i921.photobucket.com/albums/ad53/razzlewis/Andy4Leader/afl.png

I wonder if he'll start talking about 'aspirational socialism' again this time

https://flic.kr/p/8vUGef

standing up for social justice and key stage 2 geometry

Burnham Baloons

the silver lining if it's Umunna will be the entire "funny foreign name" brigade being EXPOSED

― lex pretend

^^^

Torn on this because he is my MP, and I think he does do good work, especially locally.

But on a pragmatic level 1) I think as a 1-term MP he lacks the experience to actually *do* anything with the unholy mess that is the Labour Party right now. And more conceptually 2) he is as much of an aspirational "hard working families" Growth Zombie that is just going to dish out the expected jargon and fail to grasp the actual failures let alone do anything about them.

(But I suppose that same Point 2 criticism could be applied to almost ANYONE within the Labour Party structure at the moment.)

that guardian article he wrote at the weekend was so terrible that it simultaneously introduced me to umunna and destroyed all faith.

expected jargon doesn't even cover it

the silver lining if it's Umunna will be the entire "funny foreign name" brigade being EXPOSED

― lex pretend, Wednesday, May 13, 2015 12:04 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It'll indeed be the first time an MP's name has been the subject of a cheap pun.

xp still at least he's not the picket-crossing John-Lewis-aspirational shopper Tristram Hunt

Umunna comes across as a huge Blairish phony irl, especially when you have the misfortune to see him address two v different audiences on consecutive days, and there's barely anything between his pro-business "we are all capitalists now" sympathies and actual Tories

I don't know much about Liz Kendall, what's her deal?

I was really impressed by Stella Creasy making her name in her first time by really taking on the payday loan industry and its heavyweight lobbying...

Burnham seems like a decent type but really so uncharismatic. E-Mili at least made an impression with his geeky weirdness, Burnham is just like...you forget he's there when he's talking

Obviously I'm hoping for DIANE really

It'll indeed be the first time an MP's name has been the subject of a cheap pun.

You have to be pretending not to understand the difference here, right?

This poll feels premature given that there are surely at least a couple of names yet to be thrown into the ring (and Tristram Hunt appears to have taken his name out of it). But if anyone can outline the ideological differences, assuming there are any here, between this lot then I'd be very impressed.

Yvette Cooper is the only one who seems like anything more than competently managerial but I'm not sure she'd win. God though, when you imagine the shit that will be thrown at her from the word go...

they're already raking shit up about umunna - apparently he called people "trash" on some big-spender social network, when asking for advice on where to go out in the west end - i mean unless that's a lie.

I don't know much about Liz Kendall, what's her deal?

Liz Kendall is probably the most Blairite of them all (WARNING DAILY MAIL, BUT...):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3075228/Labour-leadership-battle-begins-Blairite-Liz-Kendall-launches-bid-saying-party-appeal-Conservative-voters-risk-survival.html

http://news.sky.com/story/1482546/what-you-need-to-know-about-liz-kendall

Has said there is a role for the private sector in the NHS and that "what matters is what works".

Her comments were seen as a challenge to the position of then Labour leader Ed Miliband and Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham, a likely rival for the leadership, who accused the Government of privatising the health service.

Has called for the party to reach out to the aspirational middle classes, arguing it did not do enough to appeal to Conservative supporters.

_______________________________________

Has admitted she loves rap music, listening to Eminem and Dr Dre, who is her favourite artist.

Her other half is the tall comedian Greg Davies.

I heard someone say "spear Chuka" for the first time today.

they're already raking shit up about umunna - apparently he called people "trash" on some big-spender social network, when asking for advice on where to go out in the west end - i mean unless that's a lie.

that was referred to in this FACT piece tackling the really big issue ie his uk garage past:

http://www.factmag.com/2015/05/12/chuka-umunna-mp-used-to-be-a-uk-garage-dj/

Chuka does actually DJ (or at least used to? He still blogs about tracks he loves in his newsletters/social media/local press, which is quite cute) so it's not entirely impossible he was talking about the nightclub, Trash?

X-post sorry iPhone!

Has admitted she loves rap music

admitted

ffs

guilty pleasures ranging from eminem to dismantling the nhs

He attracted the ire of the Daily Mail in 2013 for comments made in 2006 on a social networking site bemoaning the lack of “decent” clubs in London, suggesting the West End establishments were “full of trash and C-list wannabes, while other places that should know better opt for the cheesy vibe.”

i mean to be honest i'd be more trusting of a politician who was willing to show solidarity with the common man/woman by casually dismissing swathes of people based on perceived inferiority of their cultural choices, better than some plastic everyman who's barely conscious of the misanthropy driving their policies.

You have to be pretending not to understand the difference here, right?

Yeah, soz it was a crumby joke, not intended the way it came across, so my apologies.

Chuka does actually DJ (or at least used to? He still blogs about tracks he loves in his newsletters/social media/local press, which is quite cute) so it's not entirely impossible he was talking about the nightclub, Trash?

― The Hauntology of Celebrity (Branwell with an N), Wednesday, May 13, 2015 11:17 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He was involved in the garage scene, I think.

oh nickb already said that.

He's the first prospective leader/PM who is young enough for bullshit posts made a decade ago to come back and haunt him. They'll all be like that in a few years.

I'm sure we all remember the vociferous response pieces by Quentin Letts and Liz Jones defending the West End's vibrant diverse club scene at the time - no need to google.

To be fair if that's the worst thing he's written on social media in his lifetime, he's doing well.

not really bullshit - imagine going to a club in the west end

xpost otm

This poll feels premature

It *is* premature, on purpose: It looks like there wont be a winner until october, but I thought it useful to start some discussion away from the ongoing new politics thread.

What's the case against Burnham - Mid-staffs fuck up, possibly socially conservative (roman catholic), bit bland, actually political class (no unwestminster job ever that I can see), basically Miliband as a slightly more convincing man of the people? Still suspect he might do best with some of the voters they need back tbh.

articles and early pitches have been making Umunna seem truly awful, but think anyway it might be a shit idea to have a London leader. Interesting to hear he's a good constituency MP - that's something.

aiui Cooper's smartest/most competent here, just not hugely inspiring - again, that political class stuff is so fucking depressing/part of the problem - PPE/think tanks/research & advise etc

can't lie, think I'd get on with hunt, would happily read his civil war book or the one about engels or the one about victorian cities. He absolutely should not lead the labour party.

Don't know anything about Kendall apart from the Blairite noises as she launched, so fuck that.

I don't get the sense that any of these people have talked to enough lapsed Labour voters (new or old) to really understand what needs to be done. And if they have, they've talked to voters primarily in their constituencies, and given they're still in a job that's an unrepresentative sample.

I thought Hunt's article in the Guardian the other day gave a pretty perceptive summary of why Labour are in trouble, but no convincing answer to what they can do to get out of it, agree that he should definitely not be leader

I normally feel a politician's name should not matter, but he's called Tristram.

He may be willing to change it to Gideon if that helps?

I can't actually name a convincing candidate - not even sure what they'd have to do - get grassroots, paying-attn-to-people reform of the party properly underway while carrying the public/media side convincingly?

Ben Bradshaw

Bradshaw might not be a terrible choice but the talk of him "trebling his majority in 2015" overlooks the fact that it went from about 900 to 2700. Exeter isn't a safe seat by any means.

@djlogansama 4h4 hours ago
If Chuka Umunna gets in I'm on voting Green Party next time round. He doesn't like MCs. Left Garage for Deep House when crews came around.

he'll be dreading the mail getting hold of that

Dreading the K-Punk thinkpiece more like.

Love the implication that Ed Miliband and Natalie Bennett were caning More Fire Crew and Pay-As-You-Go.

tough on grime...

that tweet is a bit like an irl version of one of those unfunny weird twitter things where Joe Biden has strong opinions about the Wu Tang Clan or similar

Disappointed that all I'm hearing about is appealing to "aspirational voters"...I want at least one candidate to run on a platform of greater inter-generational balance and reform.

i don't know, i find it quite bracing to be told that i don't have any aspirations, i'd been wondering what was up with me

Sweepstakes on how long it takes before there are more candidates for the Labour leadership than there are LibDem MPs.

Be interesting to see what the membership swell will do to the election, with this one to be fought on true OMOV. It was 22,000 new members last time I looked, and all the ones on my timelines were doing it for "romantic left" reasons, not to encourage the party to re-embrace Blairism. Admittedly there's no romantic left candidate this time, but if one crops up – Tom Watson, for example – then they could find themselves surging up.

Also, Umunna, sadly, would be exactly the wrong candidate to woo back the Ukippers. Laura Kuenssberg sort of skirted round this on Newsnight on Tuesday, alluding to the possibility that he might be considered "too metropolitan" for those voters. Come on, it's not racist to say it – what you mean is he might be "too black" for those voters. Which is very sad.

think I've said this before but lol at Tom being on the romantic left in 2015

Chuka does actually DJ (or at least used to? He still blogs about tracks he loves in his newsletters/social media/local press, which is quite cute) so it's not entirely impossible he was talking about the nightclub, Trash?

Logan Sama said on Twitter that he wouldn't vote for Umunna because he ditched garage for deep house when MC crews started appearing on the scene

He wasn't talking about the nightclub, Trash. He was slagging off the punters of Chinawhite etc on asmallworld.

Laura Kuenssberg sort of skirted round this on Newsnight on Tuesday, alluding to the possibility that he might be considered "too metropolitan" for those voters. Come on, it's not racist to say it – what you mean is he might be "too black" for those voters. Which is very sad.

― Unsettled defender (ithappens), Thursday, 14 May 2015 13:22 (1 hour ago)

newsnight journalist describing ukip voters as racist would provide about a week's worth of press hysteria

voters don't generally seem to know a lot about the backgrounds of senior politicians but absent his ethnicity, ummuna is still a bit too london for a lot of provincial labour types.....private school, lawyer, luxe lifestyle etc.....he didn't go down the ppe/special adviser route probably because he didn't have good enough grades

lammy might appeal to some of those people because he is a relatively rare instance of a working class politician who made it into the gilded circle through hard work

in any case wrt ukip.....something like 10% of people who fled the liberal democrats voted for them; apart from the lapsed social-right conservatives, their electorate is such an incoherent category of resentful people, confused people, morons, basic nihilists etc that it is so difficult for any other party to appeal to them en masse

Chuka has withdrawn. I wonder what the story is there

My guess is that he thinks that Labour have zero chance of winning next time and would rather wait for more favourable conditions. The lure of potentially being the first black Prime Minister must be enormous but better to wait five years than rush into it and be chewed up and spat out.

What changed in four days though? That was just as true on Monday.

Wonder if the Sunday papers have something awkward.

maybe first real soundings told him he just wasn't getting 35 MPs.

Actually his stated reason might be true: he is seemingly upset (can't think why) that the tabs doorstepped his mum, his girlfriend's mum, and his girlfriend's 102-year-old nan.

Garagegate

If true that is both understandable and astonishingly naive.

Running for Mayor?

Chuka/Khan, etc.

“We need something so dynamic, so fresh, so strong that we need a born leader. None of the current contenders are natural born leaders, but it is clear that Keir is. I suspect he is from the left of the party, but it’s not about left and right; it’s about leadership.” Bernard said the online support for Starmer has been “overwhelming”.

He said: “It went crazy last night on Facebook after we launched – 180 or so joined in a matter of hours, which I didn’t expect.

Starmer / Khan on a human rights ticket would be fun, though i can't think of anything more doomed to ignominious failure.

Surely you can't stand for the leadership when you've been in Parliament for literally a week?

you can under the "ah fuck it, give him a go" clause

When you've been the DPP, you probably can. He's my MP, so it would be good if he concentrated on that role for now, right?

Surely you can't stand for the leadership when you've been in Parliament for literally a week?

― Matt DC, Friday, May 15, 2015 1:15 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Too Right! I nominate Bootsy Collins.

Chuka Umunna shows how the media is robbing us of ‘normal’ politicians
Owen Jones

seems like dogshit, if not the sunday newspaper then because of a tacit agreement to support whichever other candidate in return for a choice shadow cabinet post

Owen Jones, contempo normo

though fairly risible in any case that the early bookmakers' favourite was a 36 yr old with no meaningful experience of the so-called 'real world' and a single parliament of courting the press and talking the same shit, though with more grace than most of the other platititudinous dorks manage

keir starmer though a lawyer of some distinction and (doubtless reassuringly to the pr people) vaguely alpha in persona should not be taken for a civil libs type, any dpp is likely to be an authoritarian personality shithead and he is no different

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2012/mar/07/keir-starmer-guidelines-protester-prosecution

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jul/29/paul-chambers-twitter-joke-airport

Rachel Reeves has confirmed that she's backing Burnham, and that he has asked her to conduct an "investigation into Labour's economic record".

Burnham has also demanded Cameron secure a two year ban on EU migrants getting state support and promise an in/out referendum in 2016.

@KayBurley I've always liked Andy Burnham
9:59am - 17 May 15

Tories when it comes to slashing the benefits bill, Rachel Reeves, the new shadow work and pensions secretary, has insisted in her first interview since winning promotion in Ed Miliband's frontbench reshuffle.

The 34-year-old Reeves, who is seen by many as a possible future party leader, said that under Labour the long-term unemployed would not be able to "linger on benefits" for long periods but would have to take up a guaranteed job offer or lose their state support.

Adopting a firm party line on welfare, the former Bank of England economist stressed that a key part of her task would be to explode the "myth" that Labour is soft on benefit costs, and to prove instead that it will be both tough and fair.

Labour left looking strong.

Why vote for these cocks when you could vote Tory?

is there going to be a token left candidate this time? John McDonnell, Diane Abbott again?

Burnham said: “The country has voted now for a European referendum and under my leadership the Labour party will not be a grudging presence on that stage. We will now embrace it. It should be brought forward to 2016.

The country has also voted for £12bn of further welfare cuts so presumably by Burnham's logic his Labour Party isn't going to quibble with that either?

Thing is at this stage of the game there's basically zero risk in saying you favour a referendum given that Cameron is virtually certain to be bounced into holding one in this Parliament whether he likes it or not. Especially given Osborne's initial attempts to renegotiate Britain's membership last week were met with "will you just fuck off? We're trying to deal with Greece here".

Labour manifesto was that they would be at least as hard as the Tories on welfare cuts, I remember Rachel Reeves saying it on television.

The thing to remember is that the Labour Party of 96 onwards does not want to be an alternative to the Torder, they want to be competition for them. It's an important distinction.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Cooper celebrates in traditional style - is there anyone left on the left at all?

Labour must reset relationship with business, Yvette Cooper to say

has this always always been a thing? I notice it more and more, around the election especially - reporting some politicial is to say a thing rather than has said a thing.

It's when virtually the entire text is given to the press in advance, happens for most of Osborne's statements now.

and still the blair crew shit on about the lack of 'modernisers' on the ballot.

is there a particular benefit to fully briefing the press before a statement is actually made beyond appearing even more like a transparent operator?

It means the media don't always have to be there, getting in the way with their booms and cameras and teams of reporters and so on.

If the media aren't there, why does the politician need to be there?

that's some schroedinger's shit right there

I mean, fuck closing down a nursery school for one day so you can give some shitty speech about british values, just send out a press release.

.. when you can just shut down a nursery school full stop right?

http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/221337/slide_221337_883255_original.jpg

Both of them are aware who's doing who a favour there.

If the media aren't there, why does the politician need to be there?

can't they just use tumblr?

bc the westminster bubble sustains itself via pantomime

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/voters-dont-actually-care-about-labours-attitude-to-aspiration-poll-finds-10266729.html

Lol.

40% polled basically adhering to received 'wisdom' unchanged from 40 years ago (linking Labour with economic disarray). Suggesting absolutely nothing has been learned in that time.

Meanwhile net migration approaches a ten year high - probably to be blamed on the coalition preventing a real 'crackdown' now feasible.

It makes minimal difference anyway, the guff about aspiration isn't really aimed at voters, it's about trying to placate the RW press (and in doing so trying to calm the noise around those first three objections).

Umunna has officially endorsed Kendall.

Andy Burnham's 2010 campaign logo vs Andy Burnham's 2015 campaign logo

http://i921.photobucket.com/albums/ad53/razzlewis/Andy4Leader/afl.png https://36.media.tumblr.com/e67cc519634c47be61f3c9a5b6f7d707/tumblr_noc6e5cFiZ1uu6dvho1_500.jpg

2015 logo trying to be a little bit too clever for its own good imo, bring back the triangles

Second one emphasising how body odour is actually the heart of Labour

first one looking a bit Constructivist for today's go-ahead Labour Zero

if we're equating labour with manual toil then body odour kind of IS the heart of Labour tbf

it's weird, the images on his campaign's twitter feed seem to be going out of their way to avoid any hint of having been carefully or thoughtfully designed:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CFJ8WvfXIAAttTl.jpg:large

it's perfect, all the emphasis on contemporaneity and chummy ordinariness, none of them unappealing policies or ideas

yeah, it seems intentionally made to look like an amateurish facebook macro, but it's an odd contrast with the flashy look of his last campaign

2015 will be all about reconnecting with the people i guess

i was listening to this Liz Kendall profile on R4 last week and there was this "She used to love Public Enemy when she was a student and does like rap music" element which seemed very forced and made her seem even more of a robotic Blairite rather than whatever the desired effect was meant to be.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/91/Splazsh_cover.jpg/220px-Splazsh_cover.jpg

http://www.tshirtpod.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Hex-Illuminati.jpg

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0263/1575/products/sbr050-moon-duo-mazes_c455b43d-f2bc-4a5a-9096-cf2b2dd02c48_1024x1024.jpeg?v=1398720065

Andy Needs your support

that capital N is pissing me off

i was listening to this Liz Kendall profile on R4 last week and there was this "She used to love Public Enemy when she was a student and does like rap music" element which seemed very forced and made her seem even more of a robotic Blairite rather than whatever the desired effect was meant to be.

The Mirror had her admitting to liking hip hop :/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32927139

Is the only reason the unions are backing Burham because everyone else is somehow, mysteriously, worse or is there more to it than that?

is male, still affects non-RP accent

For better or worse the last leadership contest at least felt like a contest between different approaches and beliefs. In terms of policy and approach the difference between this lot is extremely minimal.

I don't really see how anyone could have come through the last seven or so years and not concluded that the state and business are interdependent but it would be refreshing for at least one candidate to admit that perhaps "business" and "wealth creators" aren't actually monoliths that should be treated as all brilliant or all evil depending on whether or not your name is Ed Miliband. The very question of whether or not you're "pro-business" or not is reductive to the point of being moronic.

yeah even "stakeholders" was better than what we have now

still think that developing the idea of businesses as part of a democratic system and therefore being subject to a level of democratic control wd be a less threatening way of selling the public on the notion that capital shdn't perhaps be allowed to just do whatever the fuck it wants

but, y'know, why bother, clearly what Labour needs to do is allow wealth creators to run the country as they see fit and play up to anti-chav and anti-immigrant prejudice as much as possible

You can achieve anything, as long as you're white.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/29/liz-kendall-will-back-white-working-class-young

She praised one primary school for having an “aspirations week”, saying such programmes were needed to “teach girls and boys, particularly from white working class communities, about the chances in life they may not even know exist – like being an engineer, a chemist and even leader of the Labour party”.

Kendall also mentioned the need to help white working-class communities, during a journalists’ gathering in Westminster last week, when she said Labour would still “be doing the best for kids, particularly in white-working class communities” in 2020.

"Aspiration is not the preserve of those who shop at John Lewis. Aspiration is universal; it is felt by Asda and Aldi shoppers too."

what does this mean

shops as signifiers of class smdh

Labour party is in a mess trying to appeal to middle class Tories and racist Kippers and anti-austerity Scots all at the same time.

depressing that a putative labour leader would rather trot out nonsense non-signifiers than actually say the word "class"

aspiration means never having to say you're working class

what's horrible/stupid about the aspiration mantra is the way it ignores inequality, ignores corporate responsibility and ignores environmental fragility in the name of a soulless acquisitiveness, an ever expanding frontier of prosperity built on nothing and oblivious to the damage it leaves in its wake

This thing they call aspiration, do they just mean that feeling of wanting a payrise then wondering how easily you spend it all if you get one?

aspiration to shop at Asda instead of Lidl, with dreams of John Lewis and their excellent warranties on electrical goods.

what's horrible/stupid about the aspiration mantra is the way it ignores inequality, ignores corporate responsibility and ignores environmental fragility in the name of a soulless acquisitiveness, an ever expanding frontier of prosperity built on nothing and oblivious to the damage it leaves in its wake

and the way it positions selfishness as a positive. aspiration for YOU and YOUR self-enclosed family unit to be richer and higher up the ladder and fuck everyone else

and so conformist. that infographic of life milestones that was going round the other week haunts me and this feels like part & parcel of that mindset

yes - it's utterly contemptuous of the voters it pretends to flatter

And yet people feel good assuming they deserve to be more well off than others.

"Labour party is in a mess trying to appeal to middle class Tories and racist Kippers and anti-austerity Scots all at the same time."

Nah this is inaccurate and unfair I think.

They don't appear to give a shit about anti-austerity Scots.

True - but they do somehow have to get those 40 seats back

In any broadly representative democracy, as long as every citizen has the vote, there will always be demand and pressure for redistribution of wealth, because votes are distributed more evenly than wealth. The Tories have recognised this for as long as I've been alive, and with a brief period of aberration (say from about 1997-2005 or so) they've been largely adept at dealing with it.

The politics of aspiration are largely about offsetting that pressure. People with money are, by and large, going to vote one way or the other according to their levels of security, fear, intelligence and empathy, but 'aspiration' in the post-Thatcherite sense isn't really about addressing them. It's about convincing enough of the people without much money that they are more likely to be able to help themselves than any left-of-centre government is going to help them. A lot of those people will vote Tory, enough of the rest will just decide there's no point and not bother to vote at all, or take their vote to UKIP or whoever. Either way the pressure is off the Tories. It's an elephant trap that Labour have fallen into time and time again and just repeatedly honking 'aspiration!' and 'John Lewis' like a load of flapping fairground puppet heads isn't really going to address that.

It's also why I'm sceptical of people who assume that the Did Not Vote contingent is a broadly left-leaning mass that could be harnessed by a party with some actual social-democratic policies.

The thing that none of these cocks will address is that not once did Blair go into a General Election promising to cut spending, in fact it was usually the complete opposite. If they accept the myth of Labour overspending pre-2008, then that necessarily means distancing themselves from Blair, not moving closer to him. Blair himself appears to have nothing to say on the issue of austerity as far as I can tell.

'Aspiration' is particularly meaningless in this context because there's ample evidence that enough voters don't trust Labour to run any kind of economy, aspirational or otherwise.

Right, that's Liz Kendall off the list: Don't need another leader with foot in gob syndrome.

(the other being Cameron, btw)

Also the logical endpoint of the politics of aspiration is the sort of the enormous credit bubble that helped break the UK economy in 2007-08, since the main driver of achieving material aspiration is borrowing today against tomorrow's imagined income, and credit booms are generally a symptom of inequality. If you really want to address Labour economic mismanagement, you need to start with aspiration. Suspect most of them are too stupid to realise this.

xxxp will likely be a lot less than 40 seats by 2020 tbf

Mark are you a paid-up member of the Labour Party? If so, what are the factors that will actually influence your vote?

I follow some Andy4Leader type ppl on twitter and am now getting this stuff retweeted into my feed around 700 times a day

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGK3_2LW0AArIiS.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGLABRqWUAArTfI.jpg

mature political discourse is the best thing about living in a democracy

'every person, every family, every business – whoever they are, wherever they come from, my Labour Party will exist to help them all get off' - Andy Burnham, 29 May 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHGyokI6fMU

twenty twee positions on which one might stand

full marks obv

Hello, person who asked me a question upthread, answer to q1 is no.

Blimey, Jeremy Corbyn!

does Corbyn have any chance at all of getting on the ballot? I remember that Abbott only just managed in 2010

didn't Ed Miliband provide her with the final nomination she required?

David Miliband nominated her IIRC.

Corbyn in:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/15/labour-leftwinger-jeremy-corbyn-wins-place-on-ballot-for-leadership

great, now the party can have a proper debate with the guy they patronisingly and begrudgingly had to be begged to invite in at the last second

wd like to remind all Luddites, Trots and ne'er-do-wells that you can become a registered supporter of the Party for 3 quid, and this gives you a vote in the leadership election

New list:

Andy Burnham
Yvette Cooper
Jeremy Corbyn
Tristram Hunt
Liz Kendall
Chuka Umunna

https://twitter.com/JohnMannMP/status/610403164714627072

So to demonstrate our desire never to win again, Islington's Jeremy Corbyn is now a Labour leadership candidate.

Mann majority - 8k
Corbyn majority - 21k

ohmygod he made me post a Tweet

Annoying "eeeh I'm reet Northern me" blowhards like John Mann can only be a good thing, well done, Jeremy!

Because it's a Friday afternoon and it's sunny outside I had nothing better to do than watch the first half of the leadership "debate", which basically amounted to a string of platitudes punctuated by someone occasionally patronising Jeremy Corbyn.

Liz Kendall really is odious.

...and looks like a really gormless supply teacher.

Poll of general public and Labour party members in Standard yesterday with both sets of responders giving Tony Blair massive lead on previous leader they want the new leader to most resemble.

Probably not a coincidence I dreamt I was graffitiing FUCKING TORY SCUM and GREEDY BASTARDS this morning, and woke up really really angry.

Obi Wan Corbyn
https://mobile.twitter.com/rupephoto/status/623789573471105024

misread that url as 'rudephoto' and was kind of disappointed after clicking through

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/im-more-convinced-ever-jeremy-corbyn-going-win

At one contest there were just 25 ballots: nine for Jeremy Corbyn, eight for Andy Burnham, four for Yvette Cooper, and one simply reading “Fuck Kendall”.

On David Cameron: "The most facile, superficial prime minister there's ever been. He just shoots from the hip. He is false. He makes one-off commitments and cannot deliver."

On Boris Johnson: "His is a joke... a public school upper class twit. He plays well in London because they like a cheeky chappie. Can you present Boris Johnson in Preston, in Burnley, in Manchester? No, they just think he's an arsehole."

On why Tony Blair went into Iraq: "...because he fell in love with George Bush".

Any chance of Lord Sewel running for the Labour leadership?

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/28/labour-candidates-attack-predictable-out-of-touch-election-campaign

A devastatingly frank attack on “Labour’s narrow, predictable and out of touch” 2015 election campaign is to be launched on Tuesday by seven of the party’s candidates who failed to win critical swing seats in England in May.

In a joint open letter to the party, they say: “From thousands of doorstep conversations we all heard repeatedly our former leadership was not taken seriously while our purpose and policies failed to resonate with voters.”

The campaign, the authors claim, addressed only “the needy and greedy”, leaving the rest ignored. The party had nothing to say on welfare, business creation or immigration, “sounding as if it was on the side of those that don’t work”.

Surprised Rowenna Davis signed this.

It turns out she is one of the coordinators behind the Blue Labour movement so not a surprise after all.

Ha ha, you all lost, now piss off out of the Labour Party.

at least they have values! horrible, horrible values.

I wonder whether people will still be saying that on the doorstep in five years' time when in-work benefits have been obliterated? I wouldn't be remotely surprised if Labour try to fight 2015's election over again in 2020, but it's probably not that sensible given that these are the exact voters the Tories are targeting.

http://www.newstatesman.com/helen-lewis/2015/07/echo-chamber-social-media-luring-left-cosy-delusion-and-dangerous-insularity

Haven't heard the term "virtue-signalling" before, and I'm sad I have now come across it.

Didn't get past the first paragraph tbh.

She is being melodramatic but ok ;-)

lots of theorising about the practice of voting for who you most agree with

https://www.byline.com/column/11/article/209

This is good, until the last couple of paragraphs at least.

It takes epic levels of stupidity to turn 150,000 new activists, paying money to join your party inspired by one of the leadership candidates, into some sort of crisis because they're the wrong sort of leftie. There is not a party in the world that wouldn't be cheering. It also takes an astounding lack of political antennae to be blind to the fact that, by acting with such naked hostility towards them, you precipitate a split whatever the result.

All this shows a profound lack of understanding about how the political landscape is shaped by all parties, not just the one governing. See how UKIP have defined the European debate. Observe how a young SNP MPs speech can go viral. A vigorous opposition that articulates a clear alternative, can be infinitely more useful that an "electable" one that rolls over on every issue. An effective opposition is an integral part of our democracy and has been sadly absent. We need someone to drag the landscape to the left or, at least, halt its inexorable Thatcherite slide to the right.

To not understand that, is to give free rein to Tories to shape the narrative of the next five years, then win anyway. Just like they did last time, by seeding the idea that a global financial crisis was down to Labour's spending. Not speaking out against that, or not doing it soon enough and vocally enough, is how you end up carving bullshit into headstones a month before the election. If you lack substance, you are de facto reduced to gimmicks.

All this is not to say that I don't think Corbyn is electable. There is a deliberate conflation of "electability" not being someone's primary or striking quality, with them being unelectable. The real question is, I think, why would anyone vote for someone whose only purported virtue is "electability" when they explicitly state they will follow the same destructive, divisive, degrading economic policies?

that last paragraph is hard to parse but on the whole OTM.

What's also gestured at but not explicitly stated there is - if Burnham/Cooper/Kendall are so attractive to the electorate, then why aren't thousands of people paying their £3.88 and signing up to vote for them?

wish i could put into words my feelings re this chaos in the same manner as matt dc did in his post cos that totally hits my groove.

thank you MDC.

and yeah, this whole thing re "people signing up to vote for the left = bunch of nutters" is just seriously messed up, and rather depressing.

Matt's posts on here have been consistently good and he doesn't round down like everyone else. But tbh some of his posts are making me want to actually pay the £3.88.

This is an excellent and pragmatic take on the whole thing https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/what-hope-for-labour-and-left-election-80s-and-‘aspiration’

Hmm you may have to copy and paste the link

That's really fucking good.

think it's very good on blair's finance capital project. There's a retrospective inevitability to the theory - John Smith is entirely absent - and leads to statements like this, which seems to me an entirely bogus view of how political landscapes form and parties develop:

But the key thing to remember here is that the overall lesson of all this history is that there are no quick fixes. It would have taken 20 years to rebuild the Labour movement after the defeats of '83/'84 (’83 election, miners’ strike). But 20 years is only a fraction of most people’s lifetimes these days, and if we’d gone that route instead of hoping that one more election victory, one more set of compromises with Murdoch, would sort everything out for us, then Labour might not be in the disastrous state it’s in today.

Hmm.. That just happens to be the paragraph I quoted when I shared it on FB. I'm really not old enough or educated enough to remember the nuances of eighties UK politics, so the essay was quite eye-opening in that respect. Fizzles, could you expand a bit if you have time?

I'll speculate that he means this isn't Dune, that there isn't any long term in Modern Politics - though that may of course be news for campaigners for marriage equality, Scottish independence, or indeed the Lib Dems.

(the paragraph is also modified by one that points out that it took 14 years of flailing to get back to power anyway)

If Corbyn were willing to argue for a change to our antiquated voting system, to work openly with the Greens, Lib Dems, SNP and Plaid Cymru, to tell people the truth that it might well take ten years to build a movement that would really be able to change things, then he might really be able to make things happen. Unfortunately that doesn’t look very likely - it seems more likely he would just do what Labour did in ’83, and go to the country on a radical manifesto which the papers would destroy, and which people would understand intuitively he could not deliver on anyway (cf Greece), because you can’t deliver a radical programme when you haven’t spent years building up support for it in communities up and down the country. That’s not because he’s a bad guy. But I haven’t seen any evidence that he has the kind of strategic imagination necessary to break the deadlock for the left in England.

Also Corbyn has v few people currently in Parliament that are willing to work with him full stop, or people that have any of that kind of long-term strategy.

i think that's being taken into account though. he's saying that the only way this will work is by convincing people to start thinking in the long-term, which is almost impossible considering the post-Blair climate of thinking which appears to concentrate almost entirely on winning subsequent elections.

Also the number of people willing to work with him will be a function of how close the leadership election turns out to be.

nah, it will be a function of how committed to being right wing shitheels his fellow MPs are. i think the answer's "quite committed".

to work openly with the...Lib Dems

lol which one?

The policy I associate most with 'aspiration', which the article fails to pick up on, is the 1979 Tory flagship Right To Buy. As Heseltine said at the time, "There is in this country a deeply ingrained desire for home ownership. The Government believe that this spirit should be fostered. It reflects the wishes of the people, ensures the wide spread of wealth through society, encourages a personal desire to improve and modernize one's own home, enables parents to accrue wealth for their children and stimulates the attitudes of independence and self-reliance that are the bedrock of a free society." That, to me, is one of the neatest summaries of what Kendall, Burnham, Cooper et al *think* they're saying when they blindly spout 'aspiration'.

And it's a fair point to say that fundamentally changed the game in a lot of 80s traditional Labour communities. The beneficiaries of the policy were, at heart, the core Labour vote and whereas they might not have swung wildly to Conservative voting (in fact, in Scotland the vote coalesced around Labour to the point Malcolm Rifkind was the sole Tory MP in an election winning party) it began the thought slide that maybe they weren't all that bad. And that slide allowed the recent move we've seen to a jump in working class communities from left-ish to UKIP which the article identifies; perhaps this should have come as that much of a surprise really though as they're the actual people who might feel that their job could be taken by an immigrant, that the family housed in their street for free don't deserve to be there, that they can't get in to see the doctor because it's just too busy. This is perhaps the very nature of the problem - that the hypothesising over what *should* be done is by people with no real connection to the circumstances of the working class voters. So they romanticise that they're not racists (see also the Blackshirt's targeting of mining communities such as Grimethorpe, as also noted by George Orwell), that they're not sexist, that they're not homophobes, that they are 'we' and so are opposed to the 'not we' by default. In Scotland, the Gordon McMaster scandal should have dispelled all that - instead Helen Liddell got made Scottish Secretary.

The sad truth is that in my experience the overwhelming voting trend in the working class was to vote Labour *because*. No, or very little, thought went into it and similarly little was shared politically with the party. But your dad had voted that way, and maybe your granddad had; the caveat there because despite what people kid themselves Lab and Con voting was largely neck and neck in Scotland until Blair, although the seats won failed to reflect that once the 60s started.

My only real complaint with the article is the continued use of "Tory press". In Scotland at least the so called Labour press was just as bad, I remember the strikers at Timex and Jockey both being called scum on the front pages of the Maxwell-owned Daily Record.

I also think another potential factor is the rise of personality politics. Michael Foot was perpetually being portrayed as scruffy, and that photo of him at the funeral did huge amounts of damage. Kinnock tried to ride the personality wave, but just looked like a tit during the 'expulsion of the Militants' speech and will ultimately be remembered for falling over on the beach, having a slightly fruity wife, and being photoshopped into a lightbulb (which he still claimed was the only thing that lost him the 92 election as late as Alastair Campbell's memoirs).

Its a good piece, puts a lot of the history together in one place, neatly. Ultimtely its pointing to an English Syriza/Podemos type of coalition.

No Lib Dems tho', we are Britishes. xp

The new intake of Labour MPs seems markedly different to the last few - a lot of them rebelled on child tax credit cuts and that group seemed to be where a lot of the Corbyn nominations were coming from. Any Corbyn shadow cabinet could end up being quite youthful (but also potentially containing a new leader/future PM). Fresh faces are sorely needed because they're getting into real landfill territory right now.

If you forget 1979, during my lifetime a sitting government has only been ejected after a house price crash, which I think explains the timidity, short-sightedness and destructive nature of housing policy for virtually the whole of that time. I think we're heading towards a generational watershed here though, if only because home ownership rates have been trending downwards quite quickly for some time. The closer we get to 50:50 owner-occupied vs rental, the closer we get to a sea-change in voter attitudes.

I was wrong about the Rifkind thing there, it was just a collapse of seats to 10.

I think we're heading towards a generational watershed here though, if only because home ownership rates have been trending downwards quite quickly for some time. The closer we get to 50:50 owner-occupied vs rental, the closer we get to a sea-change in voter attitudes.

Yeah def. A big part of what papers like the Mail jump-off from is housing prices, and they drill down from there.

just finished reading aldo's post. good stuff, man.

Yes, although nearly FP'd for giving me terrible Helen Liddell flashbacks..

Lab and Con voting was largely neck and neck in Scotland until Blair, although the seats won failed to reflect that once the 60s started.

Depends on your definition of neck and neck. Labour's lead over the Tories has only dropped below 5% once in General Elections since 1959, and there were double digit leads before Blair, it was 18% in 1987.

The LibDems must have eaten into that quite a bit during the Blair years?

more like drunk into it

lol too soon?

Actually Tom's kind of right, neck and neck puts it closer than actually was but still far closer than seats returned ever implied.

Lib Dems lost votes in 97, and took the majority of their increased votes from Labour in the two other Blair elections.

This "Corbyn can't win an election" stuff is getting out of hand, but it also seems like the only thing they can throw at him.

I don't recall it being anything like this with Ed, and I may be misremembering, but I think he was quite obviously not an election-winner from day one.

People are always reacting against what just happened, I guess. But I think that Corbyn would have stuck out in 2010 just as much as he does today.

The anti rhetoric seems to be going towards he will cause mass inflation with his money printing leftism, rather than he will never get elected at the moment.

Didn't see it at the time (I rarely bother to look at threads I haven't already got bookmarked), but the quote that Matt DC posted a week ago is spot-on.

A question: there are various mentions of £3.88 (instead of £3) upthread - why is this?

Also, various people have talked about getting spammed by Labour since signing up. I rounded it up to £5 when I signed up last week and got one acknowledgement e-mail and text message. I've heard nothing since. I've half been expecting them to phone up to quiz me to see if I'm from the SWP or Daily Telegraph.

They might have rolled back in the light of the complaints but i was getting five or six e-mails a day at one point and am still having to block various accounts three years after leaving.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/05/andy-burnham-renationalise-railways-labour-leadership

Corbyn pushing Burnham to the left a bit.

http://i.imgur.com/KplrnlW.png

I'm incredibly sceptical about polls, and YouGov polls in particular, but the gender balance here is interesting.

multiple x-posts

iI'll speculate that he means this isn't Dune, that there isn't any long term in Modern Politics - though that may of course be news for campaigners for marriage equality, Scottish independence, or indeed the Lib Dems.

(the paragraph is also modified by one that points out that it took 14 years of flailing to get back to power anyway)

― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, 29 July 2015 08:59 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry, Andrew, very slow to respond - yes, it was partly a Dune thing, but also that the notion of parties going through a conscious rebuilding process, where they don't necessarily expect to be 'competitive' (god, where'd i get that from? the cricket i suspect) for some years, surely isn't a realistic option. parties will jostle for public view and must do so continuously. You hope that they have enough structural intelligence to do that in a way that involves distinguishing themselves from the opposition, while staying relevant (another bad word), rather than trying to win exactly the same arguments in exactly the same way ('managerial competence') over the same small terroirs of swing public opinion. But clearly they don't and haven't.

Separately, Matt DC's point about ownership/rental seems crucial. Question though, as I'm totally ignorant of this sort of thing: ownership represents a huge one-off transfer of wealth to a part of the population that isn't going to age out - or die out - before their children require places to live, so you'd expect rental/ownership levels to become more equal, as you say. However, at some point, that wealth will be transferred to a segment of the population (obviously leaving a significant number still f'ed). Is your point that by this stage, because the original valuation of property was so obscenely unconnected with, well, anything really, that it will have significantly devalued and therefore realising that 'wealth' will result in generational loss? But wouldn't that be accompanied by a drop in property prices? Or is my question ill-founded?

Also, that Burnham thing being spun as renationalisation - letting public bid on expiry of contracts doesn't exactly feel quite what it's been painted as in the mainstream media.

I was just hearing more of the same sour griping on the radio about entryism, left-wingers, saboteurs, one-issue mischief makers, a party isn't a bus etc. I forgot who it was but he was incredulous that someone joining Labour to vote for Corbyn said they wouldn't vote for Kendall if she was the leader, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Given that Corbyn is probably going to piss this contest I was wondering how can they steal this result off him? Are they just going to lose a load of his votes or declare him a void runner?

I didn't realise quite what an awful state the labour party was in until I joined

They barred Ken Loach from voting as an entryist.

I'm still not convinced Corbyn will win but he'll come close enough and be so far ahead on first preferences whoever does will look ridiculous.

whoever wins will be ridiculous. since this election started these middle class Tory lite fucks have demonstrated exactly why they'll never let the party go and who their real enemy is, and i've never seen them more energized than fighting to keep socialism out

https://orderorder.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-12-at-18-48-26.png?w=540&h=134

sorry this is making me irrationally radge and i wd like to apologize for classist slurs

Fucking Guardian: a) this fake story at all and b) "Guardian has been told by sources present that the meeting raised more questions than it answered, and at least three of the camps are in touch with each other to discuss their concerns about the running of the contest." Sadly the source's X-ray goggles failed at that point and we may never know which three camps those were.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/11/labour-leadership-campaign-teams-reassure-them-integrity-ballot

All we need is Tony threatening to set fire to himself if Corbyn wins to get a proper 75% landslide.

Blair has bigger concerns to worry about. The Chilcot report could drop at any time over the next few years and I'd rather have someone with clean hands and principles leading Labour when it does, because *that* will be the saving of the party.

I am (probably naively) hanging on to the possibility of a Corbyn victory, putting faith in betting markets and polls is fraught with disappointment but the indications are that he is a real contender. I don't know shit about about the type of subterfuge that will be employed against him or the voting system but I still live in hope.

Thinking about Ken Loach getting blocked as an entryist, it reminded me of a 90's interview with him. He said something like "it took me five years to see through Wilson but I had Blair's number after five minutes"

if the labour party are heading for annihilation, then these blairite scumbags and their empty politics of fear are as big a reason as anything. they're literally just saying "the name of our party isn't the tories" - that's all they have. total scum and as bad as anything in government right now.

the flailing desperation of it is v reminiscent of the us republicans or something...

it's bizarre.

idk if they don't sabotage themselves more with each more desperate step tho?

sure they make themselves look more and more like what they are, but you get the feeling they'd break the party up rather than allow it to fall into the hands of dangerous lefties anyway

Oh I've no doubt about that

can understand loach not being given a vote

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/27/ken-loach-labour-failed-left-new-party

there is a surreal - or more properly: nonsensical - element to the leadership debate in that, other than corbyn, the candidates want to commit themselves to as little as possible. to utterly hide their ideas and avoid playing their hand - they'll make their policy announcements once they're elected and have done enough market research in key marginal to know what their positions should be. they don't stand for anything, other than electability and vehement opposition to corbyn.

Couldn't care less about Ken Loach not getting a vote tbh.

corbyn would be an electoral disaster, im fairl sure. but what are the chances of say andy burnham being elected pm and putting forward a program of legislation that pursues progressive aims, bolsters public services, protects the environment, etc? it's zero obviously.

A friend of a friend went off on her Facebook wall - I'd actually been not looking into Corbyn's policies just because there didn't seem any reason to considering his opposition, but he was aghast at "renationalising railways, getting the Bank of England to print money for infrastructure projects, closer ties to Russia, closer ties to known terrorist groups* and a general soft response to terrorism in general, higher taxes for the rich (who he seems to define as anyone on more than £50k) etc" and I thought oh good, I'm fine with all of that.

*IE he once described Hamas and Hezbollah as "our friends" in a specific context.

The main reason he was a hate figure in the late eighties and early nineties was his willingness to meet with Sinn Fein to look at political solutions to the NI situation prior to the ceasefire being announced.

if he wins the leadership - he won't - we'll be in for the kind of spectacular media vilification that only those of us old enough to remember politics in the 80s will have seen before. the current smear campaign will look like nothing.

xp Which the government of the time was up to back then, also do you remember several Northern Irish actors made bank throughout that time by dubbing their voices over SF/IRA figures because Thatcher had banned their real voices? As a London newbie I found that really, really bizarre.

NV, why do you think he won't win? Shenanigans?

in the end i suspect the "anybody but Corbyn" campaign will have enough strength to stop him. and failing that, shenanigans.

on a lighter note, here's some footage of the government's Sinn Fein voice ban

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6UhXivPyw4

I'm old enough to remember the donkey jacket. I suppose the difference now is that "national institutions" like The Graun + the beeb will also be chipping in with the right wing press.

Yvette Cooper: “So tell me what you think is more radical. Bringing back clause IV, spending billions of pounds we haven’t got switching control of some power stations from a group of white middle-aged men in an energy company to a group of white middle-aged men in Whitehall, as Jeremy wants? Or extending SureStart, giving mothers the power and confidence to transform their own lives and transform their children’s lives for years to come?

shocking fake-feminism here

looooooool omg

IKR? I don't doubt she is actually a feminist but that statement is a bullshit remix of identity politics.

Corbyn's female support is c. 60 per cent of his total because women are worse off under austerity policies than men.

I was listening to Burnham trying to play it cool earlier and project his own brand of "radicalism" with added "economic credibility". Doing it without slagging off Corbyn was his trick, not much of a trick when you sound just as hollow + fucking desperate as the others

This > "corbyn would be an electoral disaster, im fairl sure. but what are the chances of say andy burnham being elected pm and putting forward a program of legislation that pursues progressive aims, bolsters public services, protects the environment, etc? it's zero obviously."

Except I'm not really sure that he would be any more of an electoral disaster than anyone else currently aiming for the job.

i used to work for SureStart, i'll try and explain why Yvette Cooper is a liar and a hypocrite later

welp

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/13/guardian-view-labour-leadership-choice-yvette-cooper-jeremy-corbyn

also, i joined the labour party

winning over tory voters vs winning over people who didn't bother/couldn't bring themselves to vote

/:

Idk how you can expect a country to vote for you if you are struggling to command much more than 15% of your own party's backing. Cooper might be the safest pair of hands as PM but her inability to put forward any kind of case being leader is damning.

called Blair a war criminal on his Facebook appeal last night, unhelpful but v satisfying

the Graun is fucking farcical isn't it? "we must harness all these newly energised supporters by telling them we're ignoring their vision for the Party and spinning harder on Blairism"

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/left-winger-jeremy-corbyn-is-first-choice-for-londoners-a2633546.html

Moreover, he is more popular with the better-off ABC1 social classes, among both younger and older people, and those who voted Ukip or Liberal Democrat at the general election.

More lolz @ Mirror going for Burnham.

"among both younger and older people"?

middle aged middle england vs jeremy corbyn

Half suspect the Guardian going for Cooper is down to them knowing she is the least likely of the serious candidates to win so they can continue their campaign against Labour without dropping a stitch when Burnham gets in.

is Cooper unlikely? i haven't been checking polls but i think i half-assumed she would end up being the default "stop the lefty" candidate. what a flatulent status quo bore of a leader Burnham wd make

Except I'm not really sure that he would be any more of an electoral disaster than anyone else currently aiming for the job.

It may be wishful thinking but I think Corbyn is electable. I read an article last week by Ken Livingstone in the Evening Standard where he said the same (and he mentioned that he supported Healey over Foot because he didn't believe Foot was electable, despite agreeing with him on policy).

But the thing that worries me is what will happen once the Daily Mail etc. (if Corbyn becomes leader) start hammering in earnest that he 'supports terrorism'. It has the potential to drive significant numbers of people away (not his supporters but the middle-ground 'backing our troops' people, for whom 'support' of the IRA is a red flag; I know he didn't support the IRA outright, but I believe in a recent interview he stopped short of an explicit condemnation of their bombing campaigns -- he needs to be careful).

Well sometime before 2020 we may well have Sinn Fein in power in Dublin, so..

xxp, she's 13/2 (Burham is 4/1) and a lot of the polling suggests she's a fair way behind him on first preferences. I don't know how many Corbyn supporters are going to actively favour her for a second preference.

ShariVari, what makes you say that the Guardian are campaigning against Labour (I don't know if they are or not - and if they are, why are they against Labour, and who or what are they favouring instead - the Lib Dems?)

Was discussing Corbyn with left-leaning friend but he was worried about the policy of leaving NATO being a step too far even for him, while broadly agreeing with Corbyn's other policies. I don't think I've actually come across anything stating what Corbyn's actual policies are, though. Lots of articles from his opponents claiming all sorts of things of course.

Corbyn has said he would like the UK to leave NATO, but that's not the same as it being a policy, much like he said he would like to abolish the monarchy but wouldn't actually pursue it if he won. I kinda agree with my friend that a policy of the UK leaving NATO is not going to win him many votes tbh.

Well sometime before 2020 we may well have Sinn Fein in power in Dublin, so..

I guess there comes a point where most people are too young to remember the IRA bombings in a vivid way (or, if they're older, they've forgotten and/or it's not a live issue for them). Still not sure, though, if it could be a powerful weapon against him (and, to a lesser extent, support of Palestinian paramilitary groups, and a 'soft' atttitude to Putin). These are all things that are seriously at odds with the mainstream view that people get bombarded with.

Corbyn has said he would like the UK to leave NATO, but that's not the same as it being a policy

Without being too conspiratorial, I don't think this is something Corbyn (or anyone in government) would be allowed to pursue. It would be explained to him behind the scenes that it's not an option.

ShariVari, what makes you say that the Guardian are campaigning against Labour (I don't know if they are or not - and if they are, why are they against Labour, and who or what are they favouring instead - the Lib Dems?)

They backed the Lib Dems in 2010 and went out of their way to undermine / attack Miliband throughout his leadership. It certainly looks like a lot of their editorial team are Lib Dems at heart.

Corbyn has said he would like the UK to leave NATO, but that's not the same as it being a policy, much like he said he would like to abolish the monarchy but wouldn't actually pursue it if he won.

Indeed, he'll only be leader of the Labour Party, not Tsar of all the Russias, furthermore a leader uninterested in the Presidential style garbage we've been served up with for the last couple of decades.

Corbyn has said he would like the UK to leave NATO, but that's not the same as it being a policy, much like he said he would like to abolish the monarchy but wouldn't actually pursue it if he won. I kinda agree with my friend that a policy of the UK leaving NATO is not going to win him many votes tbh.

i think this is a sorta weird angle on his feelings about nato, which are that he thinks nato is outmoded & probably should have been replaced at the end of the cold war. like he'd be agitating for a modernised nato equivalent, or affiliation with a body with a similar mandate, moreso than just bailing on nato, afaict.

Yes, that's kinda what I was expecting, that this whole "he wants to leave NATO! he's crazy!" thing is probably not based on much other than taking comments out of context

I suppose it's too much to ask for my fellow journalists not to turn out-of-context comments about NATO etc into headlines when there are no policies remotely like that in the Corbyn offer. Also, in my FB universe, I am on the point of delivering a steaming cup of STFU to a certain politician's son, using useful facts about Corbyn eg. 'will never be in a position to be rumbled taking cash for questions'.

I don't think I've actually come across anything stating what Corbyn's actual policies are, though.

There's stuff here, including this.

ha one of his policies is to introduce a 30C maximum working temperature, that's it I'm sold

protects the environment, etc? it's zero obviously."

Except I'm not really sure that he would be any more of an electoral disaster than anyone else currently aiming for the job.

― djh

he's not even been elected yet and the press/cybertories are seriously playing up supposed links to the ira, hamas, hezbollah, radical islamists.

and given how much a pasting "red ed" got for his centrist platform - with some mild redistributive measures - how is a bona fide old labour socialist going to be portrayed in print?

Coogan is calling Corbyn a "laughable oddity" in the graun, pretty fucking rich coming from a pathetic old cokehead/lothario sleaze who nobody finds funny any more.

Coogan is still funny obv

Fuck him tho

is he pals with burnham irl? similar backgrounds: both labourite, working-class, catholic, from lancashire.

^^^I think that has to have something to do with it.

they both elicit a kind of if I hand one bullet i'd line them up and make it count type of response in me. I hate mediocre comedians and vapid professional politicians equally.

I am seriously projecting here because I am a miserable old bastard, ignore me :P

So is Coogan.

Coogan is still funny obv

About as funny as Rob Brydon.

there's no need for that kind of abuse

he's not even been elected yet and the press/cybertories are seriously playing up supposed links to the ira, hamas, hezbollah, radical islamists.

and given how much a pasting "red ed" got for his centrist platform - with some mild redistributive measures - how is a bona fide old labour socialist going to be portrayed in print?

― corbyn's gallus (jim in glasgow), Friday, August 14, 2015 1:28 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like there's a kind of zen submission to this as well, though; strategising everything through the lens of what the tory press will make of it yields so much ground, & sort of proceeds according to the idea that any of it is measured, ie that their critique of JC would be comparable to that of ed but amplified in proportion to the degree to which JC's liberalism (w/e) is greater. & i think it's more likely that everyone will just get the exact same bullshit with words swapped around. it's like republican superlatives attached to obama, it's just free association, it can't really be meaningfully addressed i don't think.

Corbyn is doing a good job of playing "just the policies, ma'am" at the moment, but that is largely because he's speaking to an audience that mostly won't be swayed by media black ops. if he were to become leader of the Party - he won't - then he and his people might have to do something to address the ongoing character assassination from the Tory press (that's all of the press, basically) because they will throw everything at him as long as he's there

- he won't -
If you are that certain there is a fortune to be made on the betting exchanges, the other worthless fuckers are 4/1, 8/1 + 125/1, how come none of the shrewdies are jumping on this yet?

merely innoculating my own expectations against the counter-revolution

it is so weird looking at the first post in this thread and realising that it is from only 3 months ago. did anyone put a bet on Corbyn winning when the bookmakers were still giving odds of 200/1 or whatever it was?

Why do you say he won't? If he wins 50% of the vote, which is looking pretty likely, how can he not? You said up throat that the PLP will pull out all the stops - but the latest stop being pulled out is that, ahem, Gordon Brown is going to make a speech - or resort to shenanigans but the PLP couldn't run a menodge. They are fucking this up so badly, it's breathtaking.

Xposts.

Up throat!

i've just explained why i keep saying it - hope is dangerous

I've checked and this thread was started two days after Dan Jarvis ruled himself out, which feels like a lifetime ago. I'd forgotten that people were talking up Tristram Hunt

However, in the Survation poll, in which people were shown short video clips of the candidates, Corbyn scored the highest for seeming in touch with ordinary people at 57%, trustworthy at 40%, intelligent at 79%, and most likely to fare the best in a television debate against David Cameron at 33%. Burnham scored highest for seeming tough at 43%, and Kendall for seeming normal at 69%.

Seeming normal but not actually being normal.

i've yet to witness either.

Has anyone here been phoned up by Labour HQ yet to verify their credentials?

I am not into shaming people but Kendall has this permanent mean spirited scowl which I would say say she wasn't born with, it is a type of institutional "roughness" like as an electrician, when I did 6 years of house bashing, I became institutionally rough.

Kendall's ex-other half IE the tall comedian Greg Davies says on twitter that he is recording an album with Billy Bragg, is this true?

https://twitter.com/gdavies/status/631557179036835840?lang=en

It's true: twitter really does say that

Well, that swings it!

IIRC, the couple split up well before the beginning of the contest.

NOT A GOOD LOOK: crediting one of your manifesto's proposals to billy bragg

hey, he's a senior Lib Dem figure

i actually googled that. i was struck by a sudden fear you were serious.

never forget, never forgive

so, shenanigans

Failed shenanigans by all accounts, but who in these days thinks "Let's do what Peter Mandelson thinks!"?

my grandad, who was a pretty mild-tempered man who didn't often talk about politics, once said that the first thing the Labour government shd've done in 1964 was had the remaining Tory MPs shot, pour discourager les autres. feel much the same way about 9 tenths of the PLP right now.

the "seeming normal" thing is actually hilarious. like it's just accepted politicians are replicants who will only score a 5 or 6 out of 10 on their ability to walk among humans

Over the past few days two different strategies have emerged, which have been dubbed the "Free French” and the "Maquis” strategies.
The Free French strategy involves effectively withdrawing all support from Corbyn. MPs will not serve in his shadow cabinet, they will not observe the whip, they will not be bound by any sense of collective responsibility to the official party line. Those advocating that strategy are being compared to De Gaulle and those French forces that retreated into exile in Britain, then returned to the French continent on D-Day to liberate their homeland.

The Maquis strategy involves “staying behind enemy lines and fighting”, according to one MP. Existing members of the shadow cabinet will organise slates, and stand for election in the shadow cabinet elections Corbyn has pledged to reintroduce. From here they will oppose Corbyn’s more radical policy initiatives and start to construct an independent base from within the PLP and the wider Labour party, which they will use to strike out against him when they judge the time is right.

A lot of attention has been focused over the past 48 hours on the announcement that Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt that they are setting up a “resistance cell” called the “Common Good Group”. Although technically this would make them members of the Free French army, not the Maquis.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11805916/Labour-MPs-are-now-preparing-to-go-underground-to-resist-the-Corbyn-regime.html

It all depends on who has the best dub plates.

ts:
http://cdn.discogs.com/UPLZWG3_zvM1X631s2bpKZkwOYE=/fit-in/300x300/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb()/discogs-images/R-6465176-1419892885-9734.jpeg.jpg
vs

http://cdn.discogs.com/xRc0oU6Fi9mY9jME8xPcuSEL4vg=/fit-in/300x300/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb()/discogs-images/R-383596-1291887630.jpeg.jpg

Liz Kendall finds supporter:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/17/david-miliband-electing-jeremy-corbyn-risks-one-party-tory-state

Miliband in favour of two-party Tory state etc.

Weird timing to be backing the 150/1 outsider unless he thinks the leadership contest isn't going to be over when the votes are counted. I'd have thought that whatever marginal influence he has is just going to draw votes away from Burnham and Cooper.

think we have to assume at this stage that these idiots really believe in the invisible difference of their preferred advocate of neoliberalism

'draw votes away' doesn't matter that much in the leadership election though - Kendall/Cooper/Burnham/Corbyn and Cooper/Kendall/Burnham/Corbyn are both effective for the ABC crowd.

All this talk about offering policies that are 'financially viable' makes me reach for my

https://img1.etsystatic.com/017/0/6337680/il_570xN.498770417_ki4l.jpg

shirt.

it's like there's a contest to see who can react to corbyn's popularity in the stupidest, most self-defeating way

it's like a perfect distillation of the european-wide disconnect between elites and rank-and-file

"no, THIS is what you should think"

'draw votes away' doesn't matter that much in the leadership election though - Kendall/Cooper/Burnham/Corbyn and Cooper/Kendall/Burnham/Corbyn are both effective for the ABC crowd.

This is true to some extent but if the best case ABC scenario is Corbyn winning around 45% of the vote and losing on second preferences, for the next leader to have any credibility I think they need to be pulling in something around the upper twenties. I'd have thought picking one of the candidates to rally behind would make more sense than a doomed attempt to make Kendall happen even if it didn't materially affect the outcome when the preferences are tallied.

for the next leader to have any credibility

They won't.

Yes, I almost typed "(lol)" after writing that but I guess they have to try. The party is probably doomed either way.

I just had a phone call from a man working for Yvette Cooper's campaign asking me if I'd decided who to vote for yet, I told him that I'd already voted and put Corbyn as my first preference. then he asked me who I'd put as my second preference and I told him that I voted for Cooper as my second preference, and he thanked me for the second preference, but I kind of got the impression he thought I was just pretending to have put Cooper as my second preference because I was embarrassed? I was telling the truth, though. anyway, the whole thing was awkward.

I was kind of worried he was going to shout at me when I told him that I'd voted for Corbyn

four teenagers on channel 4 news right now, each repping for one of the leadership contenders, Kendall supporter giving some amazing side-eye to the Corbyn supporter

was funny to each of them trotting out their candidate's sound bites

cathy newman is terrible

Channel 4 News is terrible.

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/gordon-brown-and-power.html

decent piece that identifies some of the glaring deficiencies in new Labour thinking

was funny to each of them trotting out their candidate's sound bites

I know, right? I think the Cooper supporter actually did the 'no good Keynesian would ever call for it' bit from her speech the other day word-for-word

xp also a reminder that, for all that Blair is the greater evil, it was Brown that came up with "hard working families" as the only unit of political merit.

'British jobs for British workers', another of his greatest hits.

He was also responsible for the "Hits Greatest Stiffs" album title. True, dat..

lol

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11808589/Yvette-Cooper-Andy-Burnham-is-too-similar-to-Jeremy-Corbyn-and-must-step-aside.html

URL says it all.

that sort of comic instinct deserves a place in the spotlight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZsYvkTw4Rg

work to be proud of, newsnight

Terry Dicks may have been an awful racist bigot, but at least he wouldn't have put up with crap like this:

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/main-topics/general-news/tory-mp-shelbrooke-vows-to-wear-onesie-for-commons-vote-1-6373367

jeez, didn't realise that Dicks is still alive

Purges be happenin'..

Show trials next.

Peter Mandelson as judge and executioner.

Aug 21 1940 - Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky fatally wounded by Stalinist agent in exile.

Never forget..

Owen Hatherley was rejected as an entryist despite, in his words, never having "been a member of anything other than the NUJ and Crohn's & Colitis Society".

They also managed to block someone who stood for election for them in May.

maybe i'm secluded in my world of entryist people but it does seem that naebdy's getting in

That stable door is well bolted, for sure.

Any journalists looking into rejections, does anyone know?

Some guy on twitter is building a DB to get some numbers etc.

Owen Jones & George Monbiot seem to be involved with that too, at least in terms of publicising it.

Yeah looks like it will be reported on..

Yeah, just spotted mention of the guy with the database. Going to pass this info on.

http://labouroflatte.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/purge-away.html

http://i.imgur.com/JRDwEap.jpg?1

You too could be called a star by the compliance unit.

pay £3 for full stasi privileges

they're handling this more clumsily than metallica faced illegal downloading

Blair-Iraq levels of mishandling imo

wau

the lack of foresight to allow just anyone to put in a few quid online and then be able to vote in the leadership election, compounded by the heavy-handed and incompetent policing of said campaign really beggars belief.

incredible stuff

xp am i right in thinking that format was one of ed miliband's gestures to the left, making labour a party of the people again etc etc? and what a disaster for the plp that it actually worked

I think it was a gesture to the right - there was a panic a few years ago about the influence of unions over the leadership (lol) so they ditched the electoral college and went to one member one vote with union members having to opt in rather than being counted automatically.

Yeah, it was an attempt to placate the right by limiting the power of the unions in the choosing of a leader... blown up in their faces hilariously.

As someone suggested upthread it is deffo a timely period to re-watch Bleasdale's GBH and it has aged very well.

JeremyCorbyn4Leader ‏@Corbyn4Leader 9 mins9 minutes ago

Just a reminder that if you've been rejected as a member, affiliated or reg supporter,please email i✧✧✧@jeremyforlab✧✧✧.c✧✧ with the details

The Stalinist bot that runs ILX has blocked that email! :-)

have those voting received their ballot emails yet? i haven't.

lol.

To go back to the thread's initial question, the only person in Labour who looks anything like a winner from this colossal clusterfuck is Chris Mullin, cos A Very British Coup is getting some hustle.

Incidentally, I like to imagine the Compliance Unit calling people 'Star' in Jamaican patois

disagree, Corbyn has played this far better than i expected so far, whatever the outcome

Chris Mullin is a fucking idiot.

:-/ u ok hun?

Corbyn has played this far better than i expected so far, whatever the outcome

I agree. He has done very well. I like that he hasn't got involved in personal sniping with his critics and opponents. But this Iraq war apology thing is a mis-step in my opinion. Not that people mocking him on Twitter for it can hurt him, but such an 'official apology', if enacted, would be the kind of empty gesture or feelgood PR move that I was impressed that he seemed to want to get away from.

kinda want to mail a list of people to that labour address. gerry adams, david cameron, jan moir, john terry.

xp

the apology for the war is part of distancing himself and, if he's leader, the Labour party from the soon-to-be-very-discredited-indeed Blair administration. it might just be for show but it's also a neat reminder that some of his fellow candidates are nicely implicated in that bullshit.

i kinda think it looks bad though, he clearly wasn't responsible. i don't think people are associating it with him.

the apology for the war is part of distancing himself and, if he's leader, the Labour party from the soon-to-be-very-discredited-indeed Blair administration. it might just be for show but it's also a neat reminder that some of his fellow candidates are nicely implicated in that bullshit.

I see what you mean. But needs to be handled carefully so it doesn't seem too sentimental and feelgoody. But do you see Corbyn being able (if he became PM) to extricate Britain from (or lessen) its participation in such wars in the future? Presumably that is what he would want.

i don't see any public appetite for foreign adventures so i don't think it would be hard to refuse any invitations that didn't come through the UN. it's not like we rode into Iraq on a wave of popular jingoism in the first place.

True. There's Islamic State, though. Not sure how that's going to end up. Incidentally, haven't heard much about the main military side of that recently (only the beheading of that archaeologist the other day; and the recent Turkish air attacks).

I think the idea of the apology is fucking sweet, but then I read it as an exercise in rubbing these New Labour cunts noses in it, and I am all about that.

Next step, arrest warrants for Blair, Jack Straw etc etc.

I think the idea of the apology is fucking sweet ... Next step, arrest warrants for Blair, Jack Straw etc etc.

Yes, I'm changing my mind now. Better move than I thought.

I got the email for me to vote a couple of days ago - I think as a 'supporter' I don't get a mail ballot? Was surprised I wasn't rejected tbh - was a member of SSP and various Marxist groups. Never a member of the CP though, which might make the difference.

got mine, it's okay!

i like how everyone's writing these columns about how they're disappointed this nominee for the leadership of a party 5 years away from power at best does not have a committed set of policies that he'd be ready to enact tomorrow

looks like the incident when my brother was tricked&misrepresented into standing as a conservative candidate in a local election (which is obviously the single most hilarious thing that i have ever known to happen) may well prevent him from voting in this

it does seem hard to justify the vague criteria of supporting another political party at any time. they have happily accepted defecting MPs before, allegedly want to win tory votes, but then don't want to let them have a say in anything once they arrive

Xp explain? Hahaha

Yes, this sounds amazing.

They've apparently blocked over 3000 people and there was speculation that they were only 20% of the way through the vetting process a few days ago. It looks like anyone recorded as telling canvassers they weren't voting Labour in May is being automatically struck off the list in some areas. You don't necessarily have to have said you were voting for someone else. In Rochdale, for example, anyone not wishing to vote for the racist clown who holds that seat but who still wants to be part of the Labour party is out - currently 25% of the people who applied to vote.

The papers were hinting that the blocking and vetting is being carried out deliberately in a ridiculous way so that it will inevitably lead to a challenge in the courts or elsewhere, enabling the party apparatchiks to declare the leadership contest void.

xp as you might imagine it's a slightly convoluted story and my favourite thing about it is that however he has tried to explain it the story still makes no sense whatsoever. anyway, I'm by the sea in somerset waiting for a lift to arrive so I'll offer a totally unenligtening overview: he works in a two-person business in a small rural town, and it was relatively early on when he was still on best behaviour, finding his feet, trying to placate his let's say unpredictable boss, and doing his best to make polite conversation with the various local people who would just wander into his office to complain about sheep prices/the government/outsiders, or try to get him to join the rotary club etc.

at the end of a working day one of his boss's associates ('friends' seems like a push for this sort of small town sustained mutual acknowledgement) arrives a little anxious and explains that he's in a tight spot wrt organizing the upcoming local election as he's short of a candidate or two, just a formality you understand, need to make up the numbers but oh, wait a minute, here's a crazy idea, could you do me a big favour and just fill out a form? i happen to have brought one with me. thank you so much. do you have a preference for political party? that's fine I'll just put you down as an independent. you're a life-saver, ok, got to run!

my brother is already quite embarrassed by this turn of events and resolves to forget about it but clearly keeps a vague eye on local news before very coyly telling me a couple of months later "i think i might have stood for election as a conservative" which was naturally the most amazing thing i had ever heard. googled a bit and could only find a few scattered bits of copypasta but they all had him down as a tory, getting about 300 votes for his ward. he remains supremely mortified but I'm sure great political careers have been built on less

That is an amazing story.

i always knew he was an entryist

that's brilliant

the unseemliness of the vetting procedure beggars belief - basically anybody who can be identified as ever having bad-mouthed the party or any of its members, however corrupt, useless or off-message. my radge is gradually turning into amusement as Corbyn's campaign continues undamaged, but the sheer stupid dishonesty and lack of acknowledgement of the Labour party's history as a coalition of leftish interest groups and sub-parties is shocking, whether that lack of acknowledgement is thru ignorance, willful denial or desperate carpetbagging.

i can't think of anybody who's opposed Corbyn publicly who hasn't made themself look like a crook, an idiot or a stooge.

This a very amusing story, but you know the Labour Party did the same thing to my father in the early 70s. He was supposed to be a paper candidate but the story who had won every election for the previous century dropped dead of a heart attack on the eve of the election and my Dad's 300 votes got him elected to the County Council. He ended up serving two terms, the second of which he won in his own right.

So the moral of both stories is, be careful what forms you fill in!

haha wow, how common is this? an interesting insight into hiw much bluff and bluster is required to keep the decorum of local democracy in tact

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3207363/Prime-Minister-Corbyn-1-000-days-destroyed-Britain-brilliant-imagining-Corbyn-premiership-reveals-Tories-gloat-Labour-s-woe-careful-wish-for.html

Swiftian

The "Sorted by best" comment section is interesting, basically "what a load of tripe"

ha, is this the same guy?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2394872/Thriller-How-commit-perfect-murder-paper-Author-David-Thomas-reveals-secrets-writing-best-selling-thriller.html

1-000-days-destroyed-Britain-brilliant-imagining

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/25/labour-leadership-andy-burnham-yvette-cooper-liz-kendall-want-extra-voter-checks

it's as though no one can believe that anyone in their right mind is voting Corbyn because they genuinely agree with him and believe in his values.

good comment on guardian article:

The entire frame of the Corbyn debate has - I was going to say: has become weird - but it's been weird from the start.

There's all this anticipated chin-rubbing umming and ahhing about whether he'd be able to win an election now: when he hasn't even won the party leadership yet and the next election is years away.

There's all this pretend-worried concern about whether he'd be able to convince the party to agree with his policies: when he keeps on saying that he's stating his own views, and invites debate.

People don't seem to get that Corbyn is miles away from the school of politics whereby someone takes a definite position, and then suffers political execution if they don't manage to implement it: because for some unstated reason, if someone fails to convince their party/Parliament to approve a policy, that makes their political credibility nil and they have to resign.

The result of this way of doing things is a complete absence of real debate in a whipped-to-death Parliament (sometimes, though I'm generally anti-Lords, their chamber is the only one to bring any rationality to bear on a question). The supposed benefit is some weirdly-British fetish for "strong", "stable" government.

And this is precisely why people are attracted to Corbyn.

If you're attracted by Corbyn's ideas, but disagree with him on some things (e.g. NATO or Trident): join the party and argue with him!

it's as though no one can believe that anyone in their right mind is voting Corbyn because they genuinely agree with him and believe in his values.

it's as though no one can believe anyone would genuinely want to join the Labour Party to support the Labour Party

Just over 3,000 have been excluded for being supporters of other parties, including 1,900 Greens and 400 Tories.

This concept of excluding people who previously supported other parties is stupid too. If they don't believe people can genuinely switch from Green or Tory to Labour then they can't win an election regardless of who's in charge. Winning an election relies on those people switching to Labour!

While I agree that no aspect of this is smart on any level, there is in fairness a distinction between "I voted Green" and "I am a fully paid up Member of the Green Party".

I'm not sure how either is relevant in deciding who can join the labour party and/or vote for its leader. this is a good chance for the labour party to gain a crop of motivated and engaged members

Especially when you consider that three out of the four candidates began the campaign by explicitly saying they need to win back those people, especially the fucking Tories.

lol, they banned Mark Serwotka from voting. Presumably as the leader of a union with 250,000 members he doesn't share Labour values.

I'm very interested to hear about the former Tory whose £75k donation to Yvette Cooper is A-OK and has presumably been allowed to vote, while a Labour voter who complained the immigration mug wasn't for her and not as nice as the Greens' mug has been rejected.

BONUS: looks like The Patriarchy and all who sail in him are really cross about the very idea of having to act to stop the harassment of of ladies in public.

corbyn's proposal seems to be suggesting the patriarchy don't have to act because he wants to put women in separate trains to relieve men of the burden of not harassing women.

like if you want a trainwreck of arbitrary responses based on prefabricated allegiances - just dive into this lake of souls right here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/womenonlycarriages?src=tren

Looks like The Patriarchy can't be bothered to read the Corbyn proposals, either. Where you'll find Corbyn isn't convinced a women's carriage is the answer because there should be zero tolerance of harassers everywhere in public, but enough women have suggested it that it seems only fair to open up a discussion. Awaiting the Dan Hodges opinion piece with bated breath and glendajacksonfacepalm.gif

Dunno if you mean me but I read the proposals this morning. Seems a lot of People Who Aren't In The Patriarchy Because They Are Women are against it too.

The fact he added in a "of course I'm just shooting the shit here and I'll talk to women about my proposals" seems to exonerate him in the eyes of many - a golden ticket of a free pass based on the fact people badly want him to be labour leader, I suppose.

I like Corbyn's "confuse 'em" approach. The papers will lead with anything he says, so as soon as he wants to change the subject he only has to say something like "I think we should attempt a landing on Mars within 20 years" and everyone falls over each other to have an opinion on it and he scoots away like Muttley

this seems to be the biggest noise he's made. typically.

a lot of the rest of what he said was more interesting and strident tbh

I'm not fond of a women only carriage because it might have unintended consequences eg. 'you got hassled, why weren't you in the women's carriage?' victim-blaming BS. Men just need to stop imposing themselves on women in public. My stance has always been 'I'm not doing anything wrong going about my daily business, the man who wolf-whistles or nudges my tits ought to be the one forced to curtail his behaviour'. Government has a role to play in ending sexual harassment.

i don't see how this is saying that "the patriarchy don't have to act", it's one line among several paragraphs about how the patriarchy do have to act. there's not necessarily an opposition between wanting to wipe out patriarchy and having some ameliorative measures while it's still around.

You do seem to be falling foul of conrad's comments from yesterday, LG.

i don't think i am at all - i pointed out how arbitrary all the responses to this are.

Unless there's an overwhelming consensus one way or another then commenting on social media responses is usually a waste of time, you can slice the usual mix of entrenched positions, kneejerk responses, insightful observations, illiterate morons etc to illustrate whatever point you want.

that wasn't what i was doing either.

Well you're saying "corbyn's proposal seems to be suggesting ... he wants to put women in separate trains", when his document says the opposite - he'd rather not do this, but it's been suggested, so discussion should happen. And you seem to consider the idea that we note the context of this to be a dodge that people are only considering because they already support him.

So if I've got those wrong, sorry about that, but I'm not sure what you're saying (unless it's standard ILX cynicism that Corbyn shouldn't have tried to have a grown-up thought in public).

we?

is there someone with you

'we' as in comrades, as in 'our friends, hamas' ;-)

fair - say instead "the idea that the context of this should be noted"

you could read like a handful of the last few posts instead of ilx sensible chieftain summarising the thread for me and it'd be quite clear i myself said the context was missed.

that doesn't change the fact that it is quite weird for a male politician to tout quite a bad idea and defend it with "oh some women told me this" and "btw i dunno if this is even right but hey let's talk about it" and not be met with total derision.

i support corbyn but for that to be met itt with a comment that's anti some strawmen who are attacking the comments of another man on sexual harassment against women, a man who's actually running against two women for a position of power, well it does seem pretty confused.

i mean maybe corbyn should be silent about this and let yvette cooper and liz kendall speak?

Ghost of Thatcher or nothing imo.

it is quite weird for a male politician to tout quite a bad idea and defend it with "oh some women told me this" and "btw i dunno if this is even right but hey let's talk about it" and not be met with total derision

Don't agree with this at all. Why would it merit total derision given it's obviously not a bad idea to the women who suggested it to Corbyn. Men are often called on to raise these issues because women feel they themselves are too readily dismissed (by men) and a wider women-only spaces discussion should occur which this could encourage.

I'm not really with 'no men' spaces on public transport as a thing (plus perhaps Overground-style unicarriages likely to increase on short distance services anyway) but the derision for even suggesting it is ridic.

Men are often called on to raise these issues because women feel they themselves are too readily dismissed (by men)

by who?

i mean maybe corbyn should be silent about this and let yvette cooper and liz kendall speak?

lol

Even if they privately agree they won't mention it for fear of upsetting some disgruntled Tory voter in Derby.

i'm maybe being particularly dense but i can't at all discern what you're getting at lg. for one thing plenty of women think it's not such a bad idea.

It's also an idea that already exists in other cities

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/26/labour-leadership-election-party-to-check-voting-history-of-new-supporters

But it is understood that people will not be automatically excluded based on how the canvass data says they have voted in the past. It is more likely that a new supporter found to have voted Conservative, Green, Liberal Democrat or for another party would be telephoned by party HQ to check whether they have just changed their political persuasion or are in fact an infiltrator.

check how, exactly?

'Are you voting for Corbyn or for one of the three Labour candidates?'

what % of the electorate gets canvassed? I never have been. I've never lived anywhere that isn't a pretty rock solid Labour seat though - I guess it's more likely if you live in a marginal?

Repeat after me: "Margaret Thatcher was a terrible thing to happen"

That'll sort out the Tory infiltrators

what % of the electorate gets canvassed?

i had never been canvassed until this Labour seat since 1945 looked like it would go SNP in May which of course it did.

this is the most astonishingly desperate example of elitist, clubby behavior that i can ever remember seeing in british or american politics. you need a hunter s. thompson to tell a story this craven and stupid.

One day we'll look back at this and laugh.

These are the salad days.

It will get much worse.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNz_t8bWUAAIAJ3.jpg:large

"Corbyn's bid to turn Britain into Zimbawe" ftw!

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/01/labour-jeremy-corbyn-chuka-umunna?CMP=share_btn_tw

chuka umunna hoping that nobody's kept july and august's newspapers

There's a lot of awkward shuffling going on right now. Should be fun.

how very modernised of him

Craven as it is, he's demonstrated more savvy here than I assumed he was capable of

on one hand sure, but on the other hand when even yr Blairism is a negotiable position of convenience...can't roll my eyes high enough

Well either he himself sees Blairism to be a sham or he's conscious of the fact that most of the electorate do.

Either way between this and the resistance thing with Hunt, he's doing a pretty good job keeping himself relevant whilst hedging hard

I think you are giving him way too much credit, he is just doing what any bland party functionary does when their position becomes under threat - slither into another position and see if they can further themselves from it.

Probably and true enough but at this stage he's slithered more effectively than most other Blairites.

Well, for all that some seem to be considering splitting off like the SDP did, difference was that "Gang of four" were well-known and nobody knows this bunch.

Remind me how that SDP thing worked out for all concerned, must have been some success story for people to be considering it again.

OK, they got people keen for a bit, they had some initial success, but then faded out.

A bit like Badfinger if they were four other blokes also in the Beatles, with the hits they had on their own, and if they subsequently merged with the Rolling Stones.

Oh, and the four who formed the gang all got knighted in the end.

Polly Toynbee came out of with barely a scratch on her.

out of where?

The SDP.

how fair should we be to barely disguised Tories?

Conveyor/Show Trials/Execution sounds pretty fair to me.

A bit of their own medicine.

https://mytiarascrooked.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/tumblr_inline_mhd2xf1ym61r71zdp.gif

Jeremy Corbyn scored an overwhelming lead over his rivals during the Sky News Labour debate, according to an unofficial poll of viewers using Sky Pulse.

The numbers are hilarious:

Jeremy Corbyn 80.7%
Liz Kendall 8.5%
Yvette Cooper 6.1%
Andy Burnham 4.7%.

Some good news for Kendall at last!

We all know David Aaranovitch is a massive cunt but he was reaching the heights on Newsnight last night. Complete, utter failure to engage with anything anybody says. The usual bored jaded nonsense.

Burnham has really tanked this campaign hasn't he? Guessing there'll be a big flow of voters from Burnham to Cooper. Corbyn will win, but the result will be a lot closer than people expect.

He spent a lot of time talking up the common ground he shared with Corbyn and there was that bollocks about "harnessing this energy" and then he disagreed with all Corbyn's policies apart from on Rail nationalisation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXXJ3NrjplY&sns=em

That's what a future PM looks like.

I got an email from John Prescott which started:

Hello comrade! (We can still say that can't we?)

I'm going to break the habit of a lifetime and be brief.

That's what a future PM looks like

nooooooooooooooooooo

She is edgy, with it and post totty #resistanceIsFutile

http://thequietus.com/articles/18714-jeremy-corbyn-labour-election-rally-policies

An interesting read, even if I don't agree with everything it says

(which is more or less what the tweet linking to it said) (by someone off here, I believe)

i disagree where it calls Harriet Harman a man

A penny for Carmody's thoughts on this one :-)

funny how 3 candidates with barely perceptible political differences haven't been able to organise themselves to present a united front against the evil Trot

Its been great as long as Liz Kendall doesn't win whatever the outcome

The distinctions as far as I can tell are that Burnham is prepared to sidle up to him slightly, whereupon Cooper will go full Donald Sutherland and demand that Burnham be punished for it.

And Liz Kendall's a Tory.

Burnham basically going in whichever direction the prevailing wind seemed to be going in has knackered his campaign really, can't see him coming ahead of Cooper.

Pretty sure Kendall has conceded defeat already.

Part of me worries/wonders if Cooper is actually right about the risibly named 'People's QE' but that's for another day. Expect Osborne and Cameron to spend a lot of time telling Corbyn how wrong headed his own party thinks his economic policies are.

Yeah, Kendall has switched over to "we must support whoever wins" - meanwhile a man in a George Osborne mask has started getting the boot in:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/09/george-osborne-labour-generations-work-unravelled

When tories talk about Labour's "Good old days", they don't usually mean anything more recent than 20 years ago, now it seems Kinnock, Blair, Brown and Miliband were "all right really"...

"Burnham is prepared to sidle up to him slightly"

He is actually beyond parody. I was listening to a not very hilarious comedy show on R4 and they did a short impression of each candidate and his sounded even more so than the others, just a straight recording of him talking leadership. I think he will come out of this looking the biggest tool which is saying something considering the competition.

The thing I have enjoyed most about this campaign has been the moments where Blairite tossers who are dealing with their own unexpected irrelevance are reduced to making bluffing statements through gritted teeth about how great it is that the party is having this dialogue etc...

The distinctions as far as I can tell are that Burnham is prepared to sidle up to him slightly, whereupon Cooper will go full Donald Sutherland and demand that Burnham be punished for it.

― Andrew Farrell, Thursday, September 10, 2015 6:24 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't understand this post - could you expand, AF?

Sorry - it's a reference to this picture:

https://jonathanjanz.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/sutherland.jpg

(which I am very probably misusing - I haven't seen the film!)

A longer version would probably be that in so far as the Blairite policy is to stay one inch to the left of the Tories (and so be dragged along in their wake), it's not surprising that as soon as Andy Burnham moves an inch further to the left, Cooper demands that this be punished:

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/08/cooper-vs-burnham-a-panicked-desperate-stunt-straight-out-of-the-ed-balls-playbook/

Ah, ty

In that image from Invasion of the Body Snatchers Donald Sutherland is emitting an alien scream, indicating that he too is now a pod person

That moment terrified me as a child, even more so than the chilling Salem's Lot tvm and the Thatcher Gov combined.

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I'm kind of annoyed that the BBC are saying that Corbyn was "cheered by fans" rather than by supporters.

Still waiting for Hubert Humphrey to announced the winner.

tomorrow morn?

"ladies and gentlemen... i present to you the next president of the United States.... Hubert... Horatio.... HORNBLOWER!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dTJTD01n4

i know it's early Saturday morning but the 4 candidate's supporters that Five Live rounded up this morning for a chat are a good reminder of why it's probly best to just ignore parliamentary politics and go and commune with nature for the rest of yr life instead

i feel a little sticky, a little sad

handy to remember that any pleasure in today will be based on the discomfiture of a complacent middle class rather than much real prospect of genuine radicalization tho

also weird sensation sometimes hearing people express ideas that you're sympathetic to pitched back at you as articles of faith rather than explorations of tactics. meme leftism will do most of the newspapers' job for them

basically if the vicar on Gogglebox is behind you you need to reassess, pronto

If the vicar from gogglebox is behind me I usually start walking a little faster

Mike Gapes
‏@MikeGapes

Thought for the day. Parliament may have rejected Assisted Suicide yesterday. But Labour will restore it for political parties today.

oh that Mike Gapes

Gapes né Giggler

why would u not have gone with fields o' fat henry there tom

HE'S READY

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/files/2012/05/stalin.n.jpg

Looks like Corbyn has won on first preferences.

remind me what the point of a Deputy is again

Liz trying not to cry

Xp, to take over when Corbyn gets the axe in six months.

i'm sure Tom will keep lightweight social democracy warm for the faithful

hate it when our friends become "successful"

NV is right this is an awful day for the UK left

Get on w/this I've got to fuck off watch Chelsea

Douglas Carswell MP
‏@DouglasCarswell

Labour MPs seeking exile are welcome in UKIP

Every day is an awful day for the UK left.

oof

Tom edging closer to "hard working families" by the second

it's an awful day for the Green Party, lol

god, political parties are the nadir of human culture

they're approximately 700,000x more obnoxious than say football allegiances yh

well, somebody has spoken

COOPER LOOOOOOL

will someone keep quiet I want to know how much Liz got

Burnham 19%
Cooper 17%
Corbyn 59.5%
Kendall DNF

Corbyn won with a bigger percentage than Blair.

I for one welcome our bearded socialist overlord

Won't matter because they are 3 quid supporters

xp

Kendall/Rowling for the 2018 contest

Not before a few SHOW TRIALS first! #thePeopleHaveSpoken

where's the boos? where's the stony-faced Mike Gapes's storming out the back?

Harriet loving this!

Thanks for your weak shit in the welfare bill Harriet

countdown to best ever newspaper smear campaign in 5

https://mobile.twitter.com/jreedmp/status/642649854624309248

This is like the time Defoe pulled a transfer request out of his sock as West Ham were relegated.

Ed should've been first on the thank you list

sly hint that Tom isn't that passionate about actual socialism or anything

can't believe Burnham is too fucked off to fake smile, surely he knew how this was going down?

@jreedmp If you don’t stand for what Jeremy stands for, we want you out anyway.

#myComrade

nice kendall zing

He is saying 'socialism' too many times GET HIM!

lol rubbing it in to the dicks that nominated him for the lulz

First mistake - asking the media to be reasonable

was gonna say - that's not the most appalling levels of abuse, son

Luke ‏@KopiteLuke1892

Andy Burnham looks like a waxwork Lesbian

picturing Burnham going full Frank Booth once he gets home tonite

CORBYN EMOJI

oh god this beardy maniac is gonna go head to head with the gutter press isn't he?

he can win that one! yeah!

:/

They are not as powerful these days are they? he seems better equipped to deal with a smear campaihn than Foot was.

campaign

BBC news ticker helpfully reminding me he's a "Left-winger"

capitalisation of Left makes it look like the Evening Standard ffs

clapping dropped off rapidly when he mentioned doing something about vast disparities of wealth

right, that's over, who've we all got

rotherham at home for us. probably a gimme but you never quite know

away at Bolton, shd be a 3 pointer but the Tao's not gonna left me laugh that much in one day

Will you be writing to ask for your £3 back, NV?

it's an awful day for the Green Party, lol

Not as much as for the SNP!

Speech ends.

So he's got a big mandate. Of course because of the mess that is Labour he gets six months - if he gets votes in May he'll get longer.

Happy to hear the language of anti-austerity, "social cleansing", someone whom the media hates for a while.

At least different conversations can be had. It might a window that shuts quick but what else can you expect from the political elites that rule over us?

xp = the SNP was just about nationalism or was it that + anti-austerity etc. notion will be now tested.

xp

idgi

http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/jeremy-corbyns-victory-party-leads/4231

BBC talking about "entryism at all levels" despite the scale and sweep of the victory. Who is this awful interviewer?

was thinking a while ago if the entire SWP snuck in that wd still be less people than Liz Kendall's turnout

At least she doesn't have to pretend she likes Public Enemy any more, it is hard enough pretending that you aren't a tory f/t.

i'm not sure the press realises that no one under the age of 30 recognises the 70s/80s loony left stereotype, and the more hysterically they paint corbyn as a mad old dinosaur the wider the gap between that portrayal and the affable, likeable old man talking about equality that voters will see on their tv screens will be

under 30s are probably not a key electoral battleground tho?

OTM. Michael Fallon's 'he presents a danger to your family' comments yesterday were the sort of hysterical nonsense we may as well get used to.

Also noticed Andrew Marr pressing Tom Watson hard on NATO/ Trident, so the danger-to-our-security angle seems to be a goer with right wing arseholes.

Syriza and Podemos were built partly around engaging younger people and getting their vote. You can't win an election solely on this but there are a lot of votes out there to be won (as well as winning the Green votes back and some of Scotland, which none of the other candidates gave a shit about).

The tactic from Conservative HQ is to present this as a danger to the country. Depends where the country is at - housing bubble bursts? Another recession? - in a couple of years to hear that stuff as anything more than a sideline.

I hear good noises re: Corbyn doing less of PMQs (frankly he shouldn't do any but idk what the Parliamentary rules are on this) and less media like appearing on Andrew Marr.

i agree motivating as many young voters as possible is a good thing to do, but I'm not sure if anybody knows whether this makes much impact on the electoral system as it exists now. maybe if the media dismisses this threat it will ultimately help Corbyn.

the peacenik friend-of-terrorism line of attack is gonna be the default for a while, i guess, and yeah i don't know that defence sways anybody's vote but the kind of feebs who are never gonna be Labour supporters anyway. it may serve as a baseline "can't trust this fantasist on any other issue" argument tho.

the strongest part of Corbyn's leadership campaign was the way he side-swerved the media agenda. as leader this is going to be a lot harder but i'm hopeful he can stick to it. his most important job at the moment is to restructure the party to be more aligned to the range of grass roots activism he's tapped into. this is way more important right now than fudging up any kind of proto-manifesto for 2020. whether he leads the Labour party into the next election or not the most useful thing he can do in the next five years is try to bring the party back into the hands of the people who care about it.

i saw a bit of Tom's interview this morning and tbh as far as supporting Corbyn's agenda goes i still don't trust him one iota, hopefully this is true of Corbyn's people too

Ultimately I see Corbyn overall as a transitional figure. More about normalizing (lol) 'extremist' language and getting more people engaged on trying to change things, with Westminster not even being the only way to do so - watch how he has been attacked by all the liberal cunts for attending a rally as his first action ("not the way a leader should behave" = he is not hanging around renting out quotes for you lot).

xxp

yeah and if nothing else happens i'm glad this torch has been shone into the cockroach holes of Blue Labour and their ilk so we can see exactly what they are

Tom Watson is a useful of idiot - he and Corbyn may not agree on Trident but he could use him to talk about redistributing the ownership of the press. xp

i can see what Tom's practical role is likely to be, it's the point where he decides it's safe to get the knife in that worries me

As in this piece which contains the hilarious line:

The Guardian [...] are likely to offer impartial coverage.

honestly don't believe Corbyn is going to push much on any defence issues (bar spending commitments maybe) in the near future tbh

Didn't even reach the end of this but wot a laugh:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/13/women-politics-power-labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn

The cuts -- as has been reported time and again -- has disproportionately affected women. This was not in the mind of Harman or the other leaderships candidates when providing feeble leadership on the welfare bill.

it's the height of lame and patronising identity politics to act like gender is in fact more significant than somebody's political views. if it was thatcher running against corbyn should we just vote for her to end the boys club?

not saying it's not a problem but corbyn is so wildly different to the other candidates that it's v hard to say people are voting for him because of his gender.

xp the weird thing is that she brings that up, but then doesn't say anything about Corbyn, Cooper and Kendall's respective stances on austerity

Would a female chancellor have opted to let the axe fall hardest elsewhere? Or understood better that growth also comes from investment not just in roads and rail but in social infrastructure too, for instance, raising the wages of those in social care and offering free childcare? Nobody knows if a female-dominated cabinet would have opted for a very different agenda, but it’s more than time we found out.

like, it seems clear that Kendall at least would not have opted for 'a very different agenda'

sad lols at this https://twitter.com/YvetteForLabour/status/641663276791791616

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/if-its-truly-progressive-labour-will-have-voted-in-a-female-leader--regardless-of-her-policies-10496237.html

tbf i think there are complex arguments to be explored here but maybe Burnham vs Cooper wd tell us more than any of the right wingers vs Corbyn

The thing is, gender is a factor, but not in the simplistic ways that that piece suggests.

Women in positions of power in male bastions are treated harder and harsher for transgressions or stepping outside rules than men behaving in the same way. Behaviour that is seen as "rebellious" and therefore cool or a sign of "integrity" in a man will be seen as dangerous or unstable in women. (Look at the way Diane Abbott gets treated!)

So it *is* actually a gender issue that women in positions of power in the Labour party are more Centrist (where Centrist means moving to the right in a party that was moving to the right). They *have* to conform to those modes to get those positions of power in the first place! While it is *not* a gender issue that voters have gone for the rogue, maverick leftie in a field full of centrists and stealth tories, it *is* a gender issue that a woman displaying the same flagrant disregard would never be afforded a platform the way that Corbyn was, in the first place.

But an argument that subtle and complicated will never fly somewhere like Comment Is Free. (I don't even expect it will fly far on ILX, either.)

x-post, to the Guardian discussion.

otm

well, even the idea of corbyn becoming leader seemed impossible a few months ago. as per the top of this thread. and corbyn is being painted as dangerous and unstable almost constantly. also.. almost everyone in a position of power in the labour party is more centrist - almost everyone in a position of power in politics is more centrist, corbyn has come out of nowhere.

i'm not disagreeing with you really - apart from that it seems quite hard to split the issue of gender from the politician and the things they say and do. politics in the uk at the moment is a game where everyone debases themselves and competes for a pretty vile middleground. or at least it has been.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/if-its-truly-progressive-labour-will-have-voted-in-a-female-leader--regardless-of-her-policies-10496237.html

― suffeeciant attreebution (aldo), Sunday, September 13, 2015 12:16 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the independent seems to have kind have thrown this woman under the bus by giving her article a clickbait-y headline that doesn't really reflect what she's written

the 'it's a disgrace Labour hasn't elected a woman!' line is only really objectionable when coming from petulant Blairites, don't recall these people vigorously supporting Diane Abbott in 2010 funnily enough

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2015/09/whos-jeremy-corbyns-shadow-cabinet

Sorry wrong link: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2015/09/labour-chooses-white-man-leader

Apols in advance for linking to the New Statesman twice.

the helpless tears of Blairites are sustaining the fuck out of me at the moment

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/if-its-truly-progressive-labour-will-have-voted-in-a-female-leader--regardless-of-her-policies-10496237.html

― suffeeciant attreebution (aldo), Sunday, September 13, 2015 12:16 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the independent seems to have kind have thrown this woman under the bus by giving her article a clickbait-y headline that doesn't really reflect what she's written

Broadly agree, except the headline is actually the last sentence of the article.

Some pundits on Ivan Yates' Sunday morning show over here calling Corbyn "unelectable" right now

the helpless tears of Blairites are sustaining the fuck out of me at the moment

― bellendery hooks (Noodle Vague), Sunday, September 13, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can't wait for the Iraq apology in Corbyn's conference speech.

(xp to aldo) oops, I only skimmed it- headline is fair enough then. (though I wonder if that last line was what it took to get the piece published?)

that NS thing is just straightforward trolling for clicks, surely

No worries, and I think you're right about the editorial pressure. Which is probably even worse because the conversation would probably start "you're a woman, so this I what we want you to think/say".

further to Branwell's points - there is a long-standing notion amongst a swathe of Old Labour, Trade Unionist blokes of a certain stripe that women will always be the movement's enemy within because their wages don't support the family, they work for "pin money" and are therefore always gonna be less radical and more compliant to their employers' demands.

you'd think this was some 1950s shit but i still hear versions of this kind of argument in the workplace and the pub today, which considering the socioeconomic facts in 2015 is just...

Can't remember if I've said this before on this thread but I wonder if in a few years' time the notion of "centrism" or "moderation" as a super-word to be claimed by all parties with pretensions to power will feel like a relic of a strange and outmoded past

Branwell makes VERY valid points about the structural sexism faced by female politicians and is totally right about the way they are punished for not being centrist, but there's no way I could have supported Yvette Cooper because she was ESA's midwife and allowed Atos its foot in the door.

However, while I am on board with the idea that there is structural sexism in Labour, I'm finding the post-result hissyfits on the part of certain peers a little galling. A certain liberal commentariat feminist who I haven't been friends with for 18 years is simultaneously decrying entrenched Labour sexism on Twitter while dismissing women who support Corbyn as 'groupies' and 'fembots'. YE GADS THE IRONING.

the gender issue is not about opting for corbyn over cooper or kendall, it's comparing the surge of support for corbyn when he was nominated as token lefty to diane abbott's lack of support in precisely the same role 5 years earlier. funnily enough none of the so-called feminist pieces bemoaning the boys' club this week have mentioned that

Lex, you've got one guess as to the person I'm referencing! Who did make a valid comment about the optics of Corbyn kind-of hijacking the refugee demo speaker's platform while a bunch of female BME activists and/or refugees didn't get to speak.

Diane Abbott is cool by me, but 2010's leadership contest was a very different proposition to this one (and to be honest, Corbyn didn't think his result was going to be any different to hers until after the second reading of the welfare bill).

it seems pretty hard to compare two different political climates and two quite different politicians, just on the basis that they are both left leaning. that campaign had two v high profile candidates and labour would have thought both had a strong chance of becoming pm - this one is after a disastrous election with a view to changing the party - with all of that said, 4/5 months ago nobody could have predicted corbyn - it's a time of flux.

xpost agree with suzy

xp i haven't really seen a huge amount of the reaction but link me up, blairite tears are sure to entertain me

i'm not saying the response to abbott vs the response to corbyn is evidence of racism or sexism but that any feminist angle on this subject should surely discuss it. again though, people's defences go up SO MUCH the minute you bring these subjects up

Be interesting to see whether Abbott would've won had she stood now. Corbyn was (and will be) given a hard time on who he 'associated' with. Guess Diane would have to deal with questions on her vote for the bombing of Libya..

I don't think the person I'm talking about is a Blairite as such, but even though her work with refugee issues is v. good, she was silent in the face of Atos, student fees, and a bunch of other things that left-leaning people have been trying to fight against for the past five years.

I was thinking of how she was frozen out of the London mayoral contest when I mentioned her, so I don't think she would have been treated better now. It's hard to point to "it''s gender" with her because white feminists ignore her because "it's race" but that goes doubly to show that some positions are available or even lauded for white men when those positions are just not available to people who are not men and / or white. But because one cannot untangle the two things in the argument neither gets assigned the blame.

ppl were surprised by how well Ed Miliband did in the 2010 leadership election after his brother had been the front-runner for so long iirc, and he won by pitching himself to ppl who wanted a shift to the left and rejection of New Labour in the same way that Corbyn did. re: Burnham's failure to win as this year's 'soft left' candidate: I guess after watching Miliband's awkward contorting of positions and eventual failure in the election ppl thought they might as well just roll the dice on an actual leftie? (Burnham intentionally distancing himself from the unions also seems like a colossal error in judgement in retrospect)

which is to say that I think Abbott would have been in with a chance of winning had she stood for the leadership this time around, as would any half competent left winger, I think there is a much more visceral hatred of her in the right wing press compared to Corbyn though

Left-wing white women with any principles tend to end up in the Green Party, because their party policy actively promotes women. But my personal observations indicate the Greens have some rather glaring omissions on race.

would the unions have been as willing to back Abbott as they were with Corbyn? Unite endorsing him seemed to be the moment when it first looked like this could be something more than a token challenge. (I think I read somewhere that Len McCluskey had favoured backing Burnham but was outvoted/bounced into supporting Corbyn by Burnham's fear of seeming too close to the unions?)

Corbyn's low-key, verging-on-dull personal style seems to have benefited him, made him almost like a blank slate that large numbers of idealistic people can project on, which is easier as a white man?

Even though he didn't make a big, big deal about it, Ed Miliband won 2010 as the 'no fingerprints on Iraq' candidate - it really was that simple.

Coming third in the Mayor's contest was a great result for Diane Abbott considering Labour grandees wanted Tessa Jowell. Sadiq Khan had the London brief in Ed Miliband's cabinet, so that was a pretty big advantage for him. At least (and at fucking last) one of the winners yesterday was BME.

Not sure Abbott ever really recovered from her decision to send her son to a public school, though in this interview with the Mirror from 2010 I think she makes a good case for the matter being a bit more complicated, culturally and socially, than I'd previously considered:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/diane-abbott-i-sent-my-son-to-private-230293

I also find her chumming around with Portillo a little hard to take

That's not even the half of it - a lot of BME parents I know want their kids at their area's best state schools but don't get offered places, and don't decide to go private until then. She lives in the catchment for the very good Stoke Newington School and despite it being the closest to them and her first choice, her son was not offered a place there. Part of me thinks 'why on Earth would a great area school with an MP in the catchment not take the MP's children?' but I do realise that these things are done by lottery to avoid the appearance of favouritism.

Throughout history women do draw far stronger and more vitriolic popular vilification for their crimes than men do. Jiang Qing is a case, she was politically irrelevant during the anti-rightist campaigns, and when nearly a fifth of the population was wiped out by her husband's policies but received a disproportionate amount of popular hate after his death. There is probably a reasonable argument that he used her as a lightning rod during the cultural revolution, knowing how popular misogyny would draw away the heat from him. Not she was in any way a defensible human being.

Regarding Branwell's first post, that's presumably one of the factors explaining why it's only Corbyn and Burnham that made a commitment to a 50% female cabinet.

Men who hire women are seen as "progressive". Women who hire other women are seen as "biased" and "playing favourites". You literally cannot win, no matter what choices you make as a woman.

(Also, when was the last time you saw a white male middle class politician of ANY stripe being problematised on that level for their choice of schools for their kids? It has happened, and recently, though I can't remember who - I just remember it ring so rare as to be notable. Unlike the scrutiny applied to Abbott, which has gone on and on and on.)

Not sure Abbott ever really recovered from her decision to send her son to a public school, though in this interview with the Mirror from 2010 I think she makes a good case for the matter being a bit more complicated, culturally and socially, than I'd previously considered:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/diane-abbott-i-sent-my-son-to-private-230293
I also find her chumming around with Portillo a little hard to take

Indeed, not to mention getting paid to be the smiling good-natured patsy to a pair of right-wing wankers on This Week, can't see Corbyn doing that. While we're at it, I live in Corbyn's constituency and he is universally liked and respected, I know people who live in Diane Abbott's constituency and none of them have a good word to say about her... they still vote for her of course.

Um, what is Corbyn's stance on Europe / Brexit because this is some slippery doubletalk I don't really quite get from my MP?

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1snes8j

Is this a "you can't fire me; I quit" or is he trying to say Corbyn is a Eurosceptic or Corbyn is willing to work with Eurosceptics, or Corbyn doesn't want Cameron renegotiating the UK staying in the EU with creepy abridgements or... can someone please translate this from Parliamentese to English?

oddly enough there was a sunday times in the pub this afternoon; their two-page corbyn "report" was basically one paragraph of throwing shit at him after another in the hope that any smear would stick, and one of those was that one of the reasons he divorced his second wife was that he insisted on sending his kids to a ~failing comprehensive rather than a grammar school

that piece in general was kind of extraordinary in its desperation