Thanks for getting back to me, there are a few points in my thinking I’d like to try and clarify
I don't agree with this. I agree that politics has shifted away from the left but that is not why Brexit occurred. We are here because a leader of the Tory party wasn't in a strong enough position to come up with any other way to deal decisively with ongoing friction with eurosceptics in his party or deal with the threat from UKIP.
The ‘where we are now’ I was on about was not just Brexit, but the whole right wing attack on pay and conditions and public services. Yes, Brexit is not the product of austerity alone, but I feel that the right wing ideology has provided a breeding ground for the permissive loathing of others that characterises Brexit. It provides a scapegoat for people to blame for the position that austerity has put them in.
That's not what I meant. I think the Manifesto from 2017 is sound, it just needs a better, more electorate-friendly vehicle to sell it; Blair / Campbell were the master of the sell, hence why I chose him as a name as a good vehicle, if not the ideal source of policies. Cameron tried to be, it worked in comparison to Brown but not as well, so I didn't use him as an example. A Blairite party's policies will fail - we've seen that with Change UK. They failed because not only because their policies are a bit, er, 'beige' but also, Chuka, who had some reputation before all of this of being politically savvy has frankly lost a lot of his political clout with the Electorate who now see him as a bit of a chancer, chasing the shiny football to further his career and only possessing the negative facets of Blair.
However, if you're also suggesting that the LP manifesto from 2017 occupies the centre-ground and likely to fail and needs more left-wing policies to win it, we'll have to differ on that.
No, not suggesting more left wing policies, not sure what they might be to be honest. The only additions I’d like to see to the manifesto is a full blooded commitment to Remain and a full frontal attack on Leave. I’ll settle for the first.
OK. I'm not going to call out names here but I have seen almost that stated by a couple of (OK, supposed) LP members on this thread.
Yes, I’ve seen that too, but they’re obviously not happy with the changes Corbyn had brought about. They’re entitled to their opinions.
No matter how utterly wrong they are!
This is the bit that fascinates me. As an outside observer (and possibly not the only one of the Electorate who sees it this way) it seems almost that the LP is over-democratized (I could post the Monty Python 'Constitutional Peasant' sketch here, but won't); at some point in a Government's tenure, decisive action will be required and the LP often appears unable to come up with such a thing in anything resembling a useful timescale. It doesn't need a dictator running things their way but looking at the evidence of how they've done things in opposition (this whole AS debacle, approach to Brexit) all you see / hear from the outside is about how everything is dealt with some labyrinthine, arcane and archaic process of involving innumerable party bodies which takes ages to deliver a result. That doesn't look good from the perspective of how a possible future Government would deal with a national crisis; the Electorate need assurance that the Government of the day will keep them safe and don't give two hoots about a 2/3rds majority in the case of this or a simple majority in the National Executive in the case of that...
Yes, I’ve been involved with political parties and my trade union for some time, and the processes are labyrinthine, but I prefer that to delegating power to men in nicely ironed shirts and expensive suits. I feel another reason why we are where we are is that we put too much trust in well dressed lizards. Perhaps we need to be prepared to take more responsibility for decision making ourselves. I like the idea of citizen assemblies. They’d be hard work, and possibly a bit slow, but they would be far more democratic and a real step forward in actually taking back control.
So where are we? A conservative party taking us to hell in a handbasket, a Lib-Dem party who you see as 'Tory-lite' but a unequivocal position to stop the hell in a handbasket thing and a Labour party who are probably the best for the UK but are a bit 'Schrodingers cat' WRT hell and handbasket but are seemingly unelectable.
As I’ve said somewhere else, where we are now is where we’re faced with a choice between Johnson, Swinson, Corbyn, or a minority party. All are legitimate choices, but if you want to get rid of austerity, creeping privatisation, poor public services, and a likely right wing coalition headed by a tousle haired PM who’s a proven liar and a charlatan, there’s only one choice.
The first step is to get rid of the Tories. If Corbyn turns out to be as bad as some people say, at least we’ll have achieved the primary, and oh so essential, objective
If I wasn't depressed about it before I wrote this reply, I am now.
Four pints of Summer Lightning will cure that!
