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Election night 2019 / aftermath II

Perhaps you could explain what would have been worse than Johnson getting an unassailable majority and a the UK heading for a hard Brexit?

Stephen

I didn't expect you to agree, nobody did when I argued for a VoNC from the moment BJ was elected. The position in the polls was a lot healthier for Labour back then. It's not Labour's job to keep the Tories in Government, that's for the Lib Dems...
 
That was all very much an internal Labour thing, the Lib Dems, SNP, Greens etc all opposed Labour’s war. As such you really can’t pin it on the centre/social democratic mindset. Basically the Labour Party is a mess. Unlike the Tories, who are clearly only in it for themselves and their paymasters, Labour try to be ideological, but fail as they can never make up their minds WTF they actually stand for! The LDs, SNP and Greens are all far more coherent.

Seanm and you are both right in your own ways, Tony. Labour is at a massive crunch point. Blair has been pontificating on about how if Labour fails to de-Left themselves, and become a moderate centre Party, they are doomed. He's wrong.

Blair and his ites are the reason I stopped voting for Labour in 2010. They were almost the equivalent of the Tory Party, despite bringing in the minimum wage. Blair also took us to war because of the WMDs living in his head.

What I want to know is what the Labour Party are going to do about their former voters who are racists. Trying to win them back is the last thing they should do.

Labour needs to create a new Party, which will appeal to Remainers like myself. There are more than enough Remainers in the UK to outnumber Brexiteers. The trouble is Corbyn decided not to side with them, because he is a Brexiteer, and Labour split the Remain vote instead of going with the numbers.

Seanm has said how Labour is fractured. These issues need to be resolved. I will never vote for the Party again If they lurch to the right. A simplified, more manageable, list of policies is needed. Oh yeah, and a new leader.

Ironically enough I used to think McDonnell would make a great leader. He's eloquent, can argue well, and is obviously a bright man. It also helps that he is Stalinist/Marxist/Guevaraist/Jong-unist and ETist. :cool:

Jack
 
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Doesn't this mean immigration increases relative poverty? That's defined as living at under 60% of median earnings..

To a small degree on a small number of people, I guess. Although immigrants also grow the overall size of the economy so there are also offsetting effects in the aggregate.
 
I will never vote for the Party again If they lurch to the right. A simplified, more manageable, list of policies is needed. Oh yeah, and a new leader.

I’d argue Labour’s right was a really ugly right. It is the authoritarianism of Blunkett, Straw, Clark, it is the war-mongering and fawning to hard-right Republicans of Blair, the bigoted small-minded UKIP-grade xenophobia of Hoey and Stewart, the anti-Semitism that was left unchallenged for so long, and the hundreds of thousands of gammons that eventually voted for either Johnson or Farage. It is a very different ‘right’ than the open, liberal small-business and free-market-friendly views of the LDs, SNP, Scandinavian progressives etc. The Labour Party actually seem to embrace the very worst of the both left and the the right whilst avoiding the centre almost entirely. They are just not a coherent decent vision at present, and it will take a heck of a good leader to kick the party back into a usable shape.

PS Yes, obviously they are better than Johnson’s ERG Tories, that party is just a bunch of blatant crooks and liars, but Labour really are piss-poor at present IMHO. Both parties are clearly unfit for purpose and would be rejected were there actually a credible electoral system to do so.
 
I’d argue Labour’s right was a really ugly right. It is the authoritarianism of Blunkett, Straw, Clark, it is the war-mongering and fawning to hard-right Republicans of Blair, the bigoted small-minded UKIP-grade xenophobia of Hoey and Stewart, the anti-Semitism that was left unchallenged for so long, and the hundreds of thousands of gammons that eventually voted for either Johnson or Farage. It is a very different ‘right’ than the open, liberal small-business and free-market-friendly views of the LDs, SNP, Scandinavian progressives etc. The Labour Party actually seem to embrace the very worst of the both left and the the right whilst avoiding the centre almost entirely.

The Blair governments did *lots* of good things and never did anything as utterly wrong-headed and cruel as the Libdems did with Austerity. E.g. Blair lifted children out of poverty, the LidDems increased child poverty.

The LibDems score a big point for their opposition to Iraq but that's about it.
 
The Blair governments did *lots* of good things and never did anything as utterly wrong-headed and cruel as the Libdems did with Austerity. Blair lifted children out of poverty, the LidDems increased child poverty.

I do largely agree with that, but the nature of coalition politics is that the junior party can only restrain the larger one somewhat, they couldn’t force through policy that is directly against the Tory ethos. They did very well to lift low-earners out of tax, which certainly helped millions of folk at the bottom.

PS For clarity I do feel the coalition was a mistake. Whilst they clearly prevented some of the pure evil Tories do to the poor, it was not enough, and they should have brought the government down once Osborne’s economic idiocy was evident IMO.
 
One of the worst thing the LibDems did was to support the growth of academy schools. The removal from LEA control has seen the use of draconian and cummulative (i.e. miss 3 homeworks/forget PE kit etc) isolation policies for kids that would be illegal in any youth offender institution. Well behaved kids who report bullying are threatened with isolation when the bullies lie about what they did. There's a current legal challenge based on child suicides but the goverment has been dragging it out.
 
Well, that's one way of looking at it, although I don't quite get it. But what's staring you in the face is a clear pattern of steep decline over an extended period. I'm sure there are demographics factors but the political dimension needs to be acknowledged, and not just laid at Corbyn's feet.

Blair's approach to the north amounted to neglect. It was ameliorated slightly by spending on public services and public sector jobs. But you can only do that in government. The coalition government turned the taps off. This is the biggest tragedy of the New Labour era: that its achievements were so easily reversed the moment they were out of government.

So it's not surprising that Labour continued to take the blame for decline after 2010, especially given that they supported austerity in opposition. The Brexit policy finished Labour off, but it was a coup de grace, not the interruption of a successful political or electoral strategy.
The majorities reduced under Blair/Brown but they were still pretty thumping to be fair. Brexit has changed everything. The flip side of your argument is that everything that's gone wrong under Corbyn always seems to get traced back to Tony Blair, especially by those to the left of him.

Ultimately you can use all the sophistry at your disposal but looking at your comments/predictions prior to the election you don't seem to know anymore than the rest of us.

Corbyn needs to suck it up & bugger off to his allotment. I am sick of the sight of him.
 
The Labour moment currently includes antiwar activists supporting a party committed to renewing Trident, antiracist activists supporting a party that still fudges issues of immigration, straight-up Marxists supporting a party which at its most radical is proposing pretty mild social democratic reforms, barely adequate to the task of keeping capitalism on its feet. The "ideological purity" thing is all in the heads of Labour right wingers, and it's dangerous: lots of them (especially in the press) were so traumatised by the idea that people might think them Wolfie Smith types, student activists, ideological puritans that they felt compelled to demonstrate their pragmatism by cheerleading for obviously disastrous wars.
Well my point was not aimed at the right of the party. I get that it's supposedly a broad Church but the left has spent the last 4-5 piling onto the right of the party, pouring vitriol over TB at every opportunity so I couldn't care less if they are feeling a little bruised.
 
Absolute fantasist nonsense.
As she says, rather more eloquently than I would and with less expletives:
"Boris Johnson proposed an election at a time of his own choosing, on an issue of his own choosing, and we went along with it – like crackers voting for Christmas. The Liberal Democrats agreed to it because they thought it would work in their favour, and Labour because we imagined we could change the subject. That was a total delusion.

I wrote to the leader’s office warning it would be “an act of catastrophic political folly” to vote for the election, and explained exactly why we should not go along with it. I argued that the single issue of Brexit should not be enough to give Johnson a five-year mandate to enact his agenda on every issue. Instead, I said we should insist on a referendum on his proposed deal, to get the issue of Brexit out of the way before any general election.

When I raised this at the shadow cabinet, and spoke forcefully against an election, some colleagues nodded along, but the loudest voices were pro-leave colleagues insisting that we should vote with Johnson. So we wilfully went into a single-issue election with no clear position on that issue and, as every pollster predicted, we were brutally squeezed by all the other parties with an unequivocal policy on Brexit, all of them sharing a clear strategy to eat into Labour’s base."

Blimey, who are you/what do you do in politics? This is a genuine question i.e. not sarcasm.
 
The majorities reduced under Blair/Brown but they were still pretty thumping to be fair. Brexit has changed everything. The flip side of your argument is that everything that's gone wrong under Corbyn always seems to get traced back to Tony Blair, especially by those to the left of him.

Ultimately you can use all the sophistry at your disposal but looking at your comments/predictions prior to the election you don't seem to know anymore than the rest of us.

Corbyn needs to suck it up & bugger off to his allotment. I am sick of the sight of him.
It's just a theory WTF do I know. It's not even mine. But trying to explain a long term decline by thinking about long term problems requiring long term solutions isn't really sophistry or blame-shifting. Just forget about Blair for a bit.

Have a look at this if you want. Don;t think it mentions Blair:

https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/17/...rn-nightmare-will-take-longer-than-a-weekend/
 
Well my point was not aimed at the right of the party. I get that it's supposedly a broad Church but the left has spent the last 4-5 piling onto the right of the party, pouring vitriol over TB at every opportunity so I couldn't care less if they are feeling a little bruised.
This is literally the opposite of what happened. The left voted right wing figures out of their sinecures and the right spent the next 4 years flinging sh-t, staging coups, organising purges, walking out and telling people not to vote for Labour. No-one really gives a toss about Blair, it's just his fans are constantly shouting "Three election victories!" like Lads on Tour in Berlin singing 1 World Cup and 2 world wars, and we have to remind them about, you know, the war crimes and stuff. I'm happy to never mention the old fool again, as long as others shut up about him.
 
That was all very much an internal Labour thing, the Lib Dems, SNP, Greens etc all opposed Labour’s war. As such you really can’t pin it on the centre/social democratic mindset. Basically the Labour Party is a mess. Unlike the Tories, who are clearly only in it for themselves and their paymasters, Labour try to be ideological, but fail as they can never make up their minds WTF they actually stand for! The LDs, SNP and Greens are all far more coherent.
Yes, meant the Labour right and throbbers in the press like Hitchens, Cohen, Aaranovitch.
 
Matthew,

The LibDems score a big point for their opposition to Iraq but that's about it.

That's the thing that blows my mind. The party that champions the interest of labour here, which goes under the name of the NDP — New Democratic Party — is about as anti-war as they come. Why did UK's Labour support Bush and that pointless, deadly war?

Joe
 
Joe - I think that's a $64k question. Recommend googling "why did tony blair support iraq" and read as many opinions as possible.

I quite like this link that suggests that Blair was simply out of his depth:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/05/tony-blair-iraq-war-chilcot

others will doubtless disagree.

That's reads apologist to me. But, if he was out of his depth, it poses the bigger question of whether he was fit to lead and hold PM office at that time (or indeed any time) "The big Republican boys made me do it" is no defense, nor are variations on that theme.

It's about accountability and taking responsibility, when you lead a powerful nation, and also persuade that nation with lies and subterfuge to go to war on what has proved to be a totally false premise.

He should still feel responsible for the millions of lives his actions have cost and continue to affect globally. He appears to feel nothing.

Try and google or find any sense of regret, remorse or admission of wrongdoing on the part of Blair in the WMD debacle. The still unsolved and therefore suspicious death of David Kelly seems largely forgotten in the vents leading up to the war, and in the Hutton enquirer, Blair failed to take the opportunity to express regret or offer condolences in the events leading up to Kelly's death, or to admit that his actions might have in any way contributed to the tragedy.

Still that poor time in our history did leave us with that wonderful term 'sexed-up document'....
 
It's just a theory WTF do I know. It's not even mine. But trying to explain a long term decline by thinking about long term problems requiring long term solutions isn't really sophistry or blame-shifting. Just forget about Blair for a bit.

Have a look at this if you want. Don;t think it mentions Blair:

https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/17/...rn-nightmare-will-take-longer-than-a-weekend/
A bit rich asking me to forget about Blair when the left keep dragging him into every picture. I honestly think the causes are far more obvious & recent: brexit + Corbyn = defeat.
 
Why are we talking about the past?

Tory on Radio 4 saying how much they’ll spend on amazing things.

No question asked as to where the money is coming from.

No comment when he said the Tories brought in the living wage (they just renamed Labour’s minimum wage) and no real critique of their promise to increase it that will now ‘depend on the economic conditions’.

I assume this’ll be the excuse they’ll use to break all promises apart from tax cuts for the rich. Brexit austerity will be the cover.

Stephen
 
This is literally the opposite of what happened. The left voted right wing figures out of their sinecures and the right spent the next 4 years flinging sh-t, staging coups, organising purges, walking out and telling people not to vote for Labour. No-one really gives a toss about Blair, it's just his fans are constantly shouting "Three election victories!" like Lads on Tour in Berlin singing 1 World Cup and 2 world wars, and we have to remind them about, you know, the war crimes and stuff. I'm happy to never mention the old fool again, as long as others shut up about him.
The MPs didn't think Corbyn was up to the job, he really wasn't. I have mixed feelings about the in-fighting & I really dislike the way certain people talk about Corbyn as some kind of deity. The theory that he was right on everything is nonsense.

The left of the party traced all the woes to B&B as opposed to being grown up & thinking this bloke is out of his depth.

If the company I worked for suddenly promoted me to CEO I wouldn't have a clue.
 


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