advertisement


Labour Leader: Keir Starmer III

Status
Not open for further replies.
maxflinn said:
I think it’s worth remembering that Corbyn won the Labour leadership in a landslide. A large majority of Labour members voted for him (twice!) because his vision was one they bought into. But then he was sabotaged by Labour MPs who belong in the Conservative party and a bought media. This isn’t representative democracy and those who voted for Corbyn both times were cheated.

He’s not perfect, but his failings were not the reason he failed. They would have just been the quirks of a PM, and his policies which were hugely popular would have been beneficial to those who voted for him, and the UK as a whole.


It didn’t happen because of corruption. And a spineless, oligarch-owned media. These are the failings people ought to be worried about, as they’ll continue obstructing democracy, thus further empowering the corrupters to the detriment of the wider public.
Click to expand...

The voters in Hartlepool being interviewed by C4 news didn't get your memo Max. Your projection of what they should be worried about and what they actually seemed to worry didn't seem close, these are Kipper Tories. You could try suggesting Labour needed to be 'more Corbyn' to them, but I would recommend you kept socially distant for the response. You keep confusing Labour activists with potential voters.
 
SteveS1 said:
The voters in Hartlepool being interviewed by C4 news didn't get your memo Max, your projection of what they should want to be worried about. You could try suggesting Labour needed to be 'more Corbyn' to them, but I would recommend you kept socially distant for the response. You keep confusing Labour activists with potential voters.
Click to expand...
Another Brexit safari, is it?

Of course you're not going to sell Labour to the voters of Hartlepool by invoking Corbyn's name. But that's precisely Max's point: despite being the first politician in decades to offer policies that would change things for the better, they didn't cut through because Corbyn was ruthlessly attacked in the most vicious smear campaign I have ever witnessed. What happened in the last five years was an act of historic wickedness and its consequences will be as far reaching as the consequences of the miner's strike. I don't see any way back for the UK in the foreseeable future.

As for the Labour MPs who sabotaged the party from within and colluded with the smear campaign, I have no words. They might have won, but we have all lost. May they rot in Hell.
 
It really is the moderates’ turn to suggest what to do in places like Hartlepool. Not seeing much beyond the insistence that “Labour activists are completely different from voters for some reason”.
 
Seanm said:
It really is the moderates’ turn to suggest what to do in places like Hartlepool. Not seeing much beyond the insistence that “Labour activists are completely different from voters for some reason”.
Click to expand...

Hartlepool is just another symptom of systemic failure. A failed town with the highest unemployment anywhere in the UK and little to focus its mind beyond resentment and xenophobia. Hence the dominance of UKIP and even worse. Far easier to blame the Asian shopkeeper than read and understand Das Kapital. Labour just can’t compete there. It is now a Trump town, and I fear more of the north will go this way. They’ll hate ‘fancy lawyer’ Starmer just as much as they hated ‘Islington Labour’ Corbyn. The Tories just need to stick a Nigel-clone there with all the rose-tinted revisionist pomp of Spitfires and WWII air-raid sirens and it’s another red wall seat gone. Nothing moderate about any of this. This is the far-right gaining control using the tried and tested tools of their history. The Tories have a clear game plan established by Bannon, Trump etc, and none of the opposition parties (outside of the SNP) have a clue how to counter it. It terrifies me. I don’t see an answer to it with the tools we have available. The only way out is to install a proper democracy, but there is absolutely no appetite for that amongst those with the power to do it. The whole thing needs a good hard fdisk.
 
droodzilla said:
Another Brexit safari, is it?

Of course you're not going to sell Labour to the voters of Hartlepool by invoking Corbyn's name. But that's precisely Max's point: despite being the first politician in decades to offer policies that would change things for the better, they didn't cut through because Corbyn was ruthlessly attacked in the most vicious smear campaign I have ever witnessed. What happened in the last five years was an act of historic wickedness and its consequences will be as far reaching as the consequences of the miner's strike. I don't see any way back for the UK in the foreseeable future.

As for the Labour MPs who sabotaged the party from within and colluded with the smear campaign, I have no words. They might have won, but we have all lost. May they rot in Hell.
Click to expand...

OK great vent, meanwhile you either chase these voters knowing where they are now, or you start trying to appeal to voters more receptive to the agenda you would prefer. If your target is anyone who isn't or has never been a Tory, Liberal, Right Wing Labour voter, or worse any type of 'sensible', it's a small well from which you are hoping to draw enough support to actually do something with.
 
The core problem is that being ‘a Tory’ is a pretty narrow thing. Not being a Tory is simply huge and encompasses everything from the academic far-left/liberal to the almost UKIP/conservative. These extremes simply can not fit in a single party. I am an entirely different thing to Gillian Duffy (or the maybe unfair stereotype she represents), yet Labour seem to want to pitch to us both as one. In reality we just have entirely different priorities and belong in different parties. ‘Not Tory’ is not a sufficient rallying call.
 
SteveS1 said:
OK great vent, meanwhile you either chase these voters knowing where they are now, or you start trying to appeal to voters more receptive to the agenda you would prefer. If your target is anyone who isn't or has never been a Tory, Liberal, Right Wing Labour voter, or worse any type of 'sensible', it's a small well from which you are hoping to draw enough support to actually do something with.
Click to expand...
Straw man. The policies of the 2017 manifesto poll consistently well. Hell, even the Tories are nicking some of them - or pretending too. Meanwhile Labour is going out of its way to disown everything that led to the reversal of its historic decline in 2017. Fools.

Labour's only idea seems to be to appeal to socially conservative older voters in Hartlepool and elsewhere. But guess what? Labour will never win on that territory because the Tories will always gleefully crank up the racism and the authoritarianism. It's better to stop feeding the monster now and focus on building a new electoral coalition.

The Conservative Party recognises the new political reality and is transforming before our eyes to capitalise on it. Labour is stuck in the past and seems incapable of adapting. It's tragic.
 
I hope Labour get absolutely bashed to a pulp in the upcoming elections.
I shall certainly be taking great pleasure is voting against them for the first time in over 35 years.

Labour must be destroyed, and I will enjoy taking my revenge at the ballot box.
 
I shall certainly be voting against them. A waste of my time, but maybe I’ll help save the Green mayoral candidate’s deposit or whatever. Not sure if I can be arsed voting in the locals. Might write exactly that on the ballot.
 
I was intending to stay at home for these elections, but our daughter is standing in our constituency. It's OK, though, she's not a Labour candidate, so you can lay off the three-minute hate bit.
 
Joe Hutch said:
I was intending to stay at home for these elections, but our daughter is standing in our constituency. It's OK, though, she's not a Labour candidate, so you can lay off the three-minute hate bit.
Click to expand...

We live in politically strange times for the main parties. I am borderline on support for labour with the other parties not even being close to supportable. A reasonable independent (they are often nutters) would seem to be in the best position to get my vote which is unusual. If there isn't one I will likely draw a box on the ballot, label it none of the above and tick it.

A good independent candidate usually stands effectively zero chance against against modest candidates standing under the banner of labour or the conservatives. Are times changing?
 
Joe Hutch said:
I was intending to stay at home for these elections, but our daughter is standing in our constituency. It's OK, though, she's not a Labour candidate, so you can lay off the three-minute hate bit.
Click to expand...

Is she a Tory? We all love them on this thread.
 
Joe Hutch said:
My nephew's also standing for election up North somewhere. He's the Green Party candidate.
Click to expand...

I think my voting strategy for the foreseeable future is to vote Green. I realise it totally futile and I’ll never see representation for my vote under this failed system, but it will help save some decent folk’s deposit and maybe encourage them to keep on fighting. It has to be worth the effort of turning out.
 
I think the Green Party can achieve a lot at local level, because people can see quick results from their actions. At national level, in the absence of PR, it can only really a pressure group, as part of the wider environmental agenda.
 
Having lived in Germany I guess I have a rather different view of the Greens (and PR) and what those working with other political systems admired about ours prior to it's increasing break down a decade or two ago. For those considering voting Green would you do so if there was a significant chance the Green candidate would be elected? That is, would you trust them to govern competently in the best interests of yourself and the constituency? I think you will find that Caroline Lucas is far from representative of a typical Green candidate if you go and talk to them.
 
h.g. said:
Having lived in Germany I guess I have a rather different view of the Greens (and PR) and what those working with other political systems admired about ours prior to it's increasing break down a decade or two ago. For those considering voting Green would you do so if there was a significant chance the Green candidate would be elected? That is, would you trust them to govern competently in the best interests of yourself and the constituency? I think you will find that Caroline Lucas is far from representative of a typical Green candidate if you go and talk to them.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately it is true that at a local level the Greens are less than inspiring. However, if I am voting on policies such as education and public services in general, I’m not sure who else to vote for?
 
h.g. said:
For those considering voting Green would you do so if there was a significant chance the Green candidate would be elected? That is, would you trust them to govern competently in the best interests of yourself and the constituency? I think you will find that Caroline Lucas is far from representative of a typical Green candidate if you go and talk to them.
Click to expand...

Under PR I can’t ever see the Green Party as being anything more than environmental and humanitarian voices/advocates in a multi-party coalition or other structure. They will never get a mandate for absolute power, but the beauty of PR is no one does - it removes the prospect of the cyclic Conservative and Labour five year dictatorships that have brought so much lasting damage to this country over the past decades and centuries.

I would certainly vote Green. Having their voice in the mix can’t possibly be anything but a good thing compared to the endless wrong-headedness of the two backward-looking authoritarian dinosaurs. How much policy they would be able to introduce, change or block would have to be seen, but I really can’t see a negative to introducing a functional democracy where viewpoints such as mine were actually counted and represented.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.


advertisement


Back
Top