Not happy with the decision?

[Sad-Rovers]

unsolicited PMS?

My lass gets that every month.

Thanks for the tips on trolling!
I've taken them on board.

Don't be modest, you are the expert after all.

[Copps is Magic]

Am I the only one who doesn't get these PMs off Rigo?

[MachoMadness]

Obviously don't bring enough to the table Copps lad.

[Sad-Rovers]

Am I the only one who doesn't get these PMs off Rigo?

You're missing NOWT.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Wes.

Got it. So, W was a gullible dick who was played for a fool and called it wrong in that story, whilst the boring grizzled old heads called it right. But you have no lessons to learn this time round.

Is that about right.


Oh aye, and, Colombo style (ask somebody old to explain the reference); just one more thing.

You are accusing the PLP members of "desperately trying to cling onto their jobs". Forgive me if I don't understand the New Politics, but in the old version, MPs "clung onto their jobs" by getting re-elected, ideally in sufficient numbers to form a Govt.

So you're accusing them, nay, SNEERING at them, for acting in a way which makes it more likely that they'll be re-elected.

What's your ideal Labour Party? One in which MPs DON'T get re-elected? Or if I've ready you wrong, what the f**k are you on about?

[RobTheRover]

I agree with you, Copps.  I think Corbyn has something quite intangible; an honesty that has been bereft of mainstream politicians for some time.  What he is inspiring isn't "politics" as we've come to know it over the past 20 or 30 years.  Its a movement for change.  It is bringing together those sick of the phoney war that happens at PMQs, sick of the defenceless being victimised by the state, sick of an austerity that is a political choice rather than a financial necessity.  This is why the Labour Party has seen hundreds of thousands of members join in the past 6 months.  People are seeing sense in what Corbyn says (when the right wing media allow it to be heard).  The establishment is scared.  The PLP fears its gravy train will be derailed.  Corbyn might not be the man to take this to its logical conclusion but he certainly is the man who is getting the ball rolling.

BobG thinks you're dim.

He may have a point.

[RobTheRover]

Am I the only one who doesn't get these PMs off Rigo?

Yes

[Sad-Rovers]

You can get away with it when you're so handsome though.

[mushRTID]

I don't get them. Are they dirty jokes?

[Copps is Magic]

I wonder when these numbers stop becoming insignificant in the eyes of some?

[i_ateallthepies]

I don't get them. Are they dirty jokes?

No mush, just a joke.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Well, the membership is now up to, what? About 1% of the electorate?

Maybe these are the people that are being convinced by Corbyn's showing at PMQ? You did say that he's converting loads of people with his approach to leadership.

[Sammy Chung was King]

Labour haven't the time to regain the votes lost, in the time that is left.

What, in four years?

Not long enough, they would need somebody who unites all the factions now. The contenders, none of them can do that, i predict a few leaders coming and going for labour in that time. They will try different one's hoping to find the solution, which i don't think they will, unfortunately!.

[Copps is Magic]

Well, the membership is now up to, what? About 1% of the electorate?

Maybe these are the people that are being convinced by Corbyn's showing at PMQ? You did say that he's converting loads of people with his approach to leadership.

What relevance does % of electorate have? Did the Tories not win only 37% of the electoral vote and take power in this country?

You have to consider these things relative to past membership numbers. They are currently at record highs for the labour party and I read someone report it is now the biggest left-wing social democratic party by membership in Western Europe. Not bad for a party that it is on its knees according to some.

I don't get why it is a bad thing. It means more people politically engaged, more people campaigning for the party, more people sharing the party on social media, it means higher attendances at local meetings, it means more money for the party.

[Mr1Croft]

Wes.

Got it. So, W was a gullible dick who was played for a fool and called it wrong in that story, whilst the boring grizzled old heads called it right. But you have no lessons to learn this time round.

Is that about right.


Oh aye, and, Colombo style (ask somebody old to explain the reference); just one more thing.

You are accusing the PLP members of "desperately trying to cling onto their jobs". Forgive me if I don't understand the New Politics, but in the old version, MPs "clung onto their jobs" by getting re-elected, ideally in sufficient numbers to form a Govt.

So you're accusing them, nay, SNEERING at them, for acting in a way which makes it more likely that they'll be re-elected.

What's your ideal Labour Party? One in which MPs DON'T get re-elected? Or if I've ready you wrong, what the f**k are you on about?

Forgive me if I'm wrong here BST, but it reads to me that you are implying that YOUR ideal Labour Party would be one where the Labour Party seeks power and electoral success regardless of whether it sticks by its traditional and socialist roots or abandons them in the name of Power.

I'd like to think the Lib Dems are absolute proof that gaining power by trading away the values and roots of your party has devastating consequences.

[tommy toes]

I'm a retired professional with a degree so don't think I'm particularly dim.
I'm with Copps all the way and have paid my £25 specifically to vote for Corbyn.
What BST and Bob G etc seem to be missing is that the Tories have the centre of politics sewn up. That was made obvious at the last election.
Labour will never gain power again as a centrist party so a move to the left with policies that attract people, offered by an honorable man with impeccable credentials is the best solution. Shame the PLP jobsworths can't see that.
Corbyn  has motivated hundreds of thousands of mainly young people to become political and will continue to do so given the chance. It's a gradual growing force that won't go away unless he's voted out (unlikely) but if he is Labour is f**ked good and proper.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Croft

Yes, you ARE wrong and you've got to the core of the left-wing mythology. Read this post thoroughly because I'm going to set out precisely where my philosophy is, and why I am in despair at where Labour is going.

The Left ALWAYS convinces itself that anyone and everyone who accepts positions anywhere to the right of them is, by definition, an unprincipled traitor to the cause.

It's always been thus. That's what I was alluding to last night in the comment about the insult of choice in the 1980s being "ideologically unsound".

Here's where that leads to. It leads to a situation where the last Labour Govt brought in working tax credits, spent a fortune on a new school building programme, massively increased funding to the NHS and led the world in the response to the Great Crash, blunting what could have been a re-run of the Great Depression by active Govt borrowing and spending, and yet the idle insult from the Left is that they were Red Tories. We "might as well have had a Tory Govt" because "there was no difference between Labour and the Tories."

There are two types of people who trot out those lines. One is the genuine hard left types who don't want Labour to blunt the worst effects of Capitalism. They WANT the worst effects so that people will hurt and kick against it. And I hate those people with a vengeance. They are the zealots who genuinely want the poorest and weakest to be put through hell to be radicalised. The second type are just useful idiots. Woolly headed thinkers who parrot those lines because they sound deep and thoughtful, but who never actually think about the genuine successes of the last Labour Govt.

Now, I said you were wrong when you trotted out that idle trope that effectively conflated pragmatism with having no moral compass whatsoever. And here's why.

My stance and, I think, the stance of the vast majority of the PLP is that Labour's position should be to be as radical as possible whilst still being electable. There is then a genuine, adult debate to be had about where that point is. I was way to the left of Blair on this issue, but equally I'm some way to the right of Corbyn. That doesn't make me someone who has no moral standpoint, no ideology and no principles. It comes from f**king well thinking HARD on the issue for years, and learning from where we went wrong both in 1983 and in 1997.

If you want a binary "us pure: them unprincipled" division, then you utterly misunderstand politics. But I fear that is where Labour is headed, having seen the vitriol that the recently arrived members seem to have for the longer standing party members.

 If you're serious about contributing to this discussion, leave idle, thoughtless playground quips like the one you posted at the door and actually engage with the arguments of those who disagree with you. Otherwise, for all your good intentions, you WILL destroy this party.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Copps

What relevance does % of the electorate have?

I'm not sure there's any point in us discussing this any further. You are convinced that a Labour Party with a membership of 1% of the electorate is, by definition, a success. I'm equally convinced that a Labour Party that convinced itself that it is right and that the country will see that it is right is on the same treadmill that made it unelectable a generation ago.

You will win this battle. I'm sure of that. But I'm equally sure that you WILL lose the war. Because you are committing the mistake that the optimistic idealist always does. You extrapolate the particular into the general. And you close your eyes and ears to contrary evidence.

I'll say it again. I was that person a generation ago. And I, and a few hundred thousand like me, we're responsible for 18 years of Tory rule.

But I know you won't listen to that because this time it's different.

It always is...

[The Red Baron]

Interesting thoughts here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-contest-opposition-support-poll-theresa-may-owen-smith-a7148561.html

To me, Corbyn is a symptom of the radical change that is happening in politics at the moment. Labour in its traditional form probably can't hold together as we move inexorably towards multi party politics. The contradictions within the Tory party have been postponed by the Brexit vote and the "coronation" of Theresa May, but they will resurface, I have no doubt.

From the point of view of the Left, Albie is surely right in that the future lies in forming alliances amongst the anti-Tory opposition. As are those who advocate a move to PR.

In reality, whoever is the leader of the Labour Party, their chances of forming a majority government are somewhere between slim and none. The sooner they recognise this the better.

[MachoMadness]

Now we're getting somewhere BST.

Elsewhere on this board, you've stated that how things appear to be are more important than they actually are. Yet now you state that there's a false narrative (I agree with you on this by the way) surrounding New Labour policies. Now, you (correctly) state that New Labour did a lot to ease the impacts of the 2008 crash.

To the population at large, Blair and Brown's Labour are responsible for the deregulation of the banks and the high deficit that the Tories have turned into the bogeyman for the past decade. Again, it doesn't matter what they ACTUALLY did to the electorate at large - what matters is what they APPEARED to do - or not do - and now there simply is no room for centrist Labour. May's Tories - despite promising to be as right wing as Cameron's mob - said all the right things to sew up the centre. Lib Dems will mop up a few more with their anti-Brexit stance. Why would centrist Labour be any more appealing to the electorate that blames them for Iraq and the economic crash and any point in the next generation than Corbyn's more radical ideas?

Also, you keep trotting out the "things will be different" line, while failing to realise that things ARE different now. Not just in an abstract mood-of-the-nation sense, but in a practical sense in there are dozens less Labour seats due to Scotland and imminent boundary changes.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Macho

I think you have missed my central point. In fact I think this is core to the problem.

When I was talking about the inanity of "people" conflating the last Labour Govt with the Tories, I wasn't talking about the general electorate. I was talking about our flood of new Labour Party members. I can excuse a lack of sophistication in the general electorate because most people don't think about politics that deeply. But I'm not accepting it in Labour Party members. Because the first pre-requisite for getting involved in politics should be to bloody well THINK about issues, not trot out trite memes that sound clever but are actually devoid of any content. If members of the party are unable or unwilling to engage in serious discussion about the party's past, how the hell can they make a meaningful contribution to its future? If one joins in with the trope that "Brown and Blair were responsible for the deregulation of the banks and the crash" then  one is complicit in encouraging a myth to go down as reality.

Why would a Labour Party member do that? Why not challenge the myth instead of parroting it?

That's the first problem with your post.

Then you flip it round 180 degrees and conflate what a section of the Left believe (about Iraq) with the belief of "the electorate". You need to get out of your bubble. For good or ill, the majority of the electorate don't really give a damn about Iraq. It's something that agitates a section of the Left and essentially no-one else. Not in terms of choosing who to vote for. (And before the condemnations start, that is a value-free comment. It's a judgement of fact, not of morality.)

That's the second problem.

The third one is really bizarre. You say, probably correctly, that the electorate blames Labour for overspending. And you conclude that the response has to be for Labour to move leftwards. I'm REALLY struggling to see how that one ties up as a logical approach.

For what it's worth, I agree pretty much entirely with McDonnell's economic policy. But then it's little different from that of Ed Balls. Both were and are absolutely correct to oppose Austerity and to call for a move to current balance and capital investment. I fail to see how the Corbyn-McDonnell axis is doing anything on that score that couldn't and wouldn't be done by anyone to the left of Chukka Umanna. And if the current leadership are going to continue with the old policy, shouldn't they be vigorously arguing that the old policy was correct?

To be honest, your post, set as a justification for the necessity of a break with the past is an intellectual muddle. I'm feeling Occam's Razor coming out here. It's much more easily explicable as the post of someone who decides their conclusion and swueezes badly-fitting arguments into that framework.

And then your final paragraph. I'll repeat. It is ALWAYS different. In 1983, we had Great Depression economic conditions. We had the VERY real threat of nuclear war. And a unilateralist Labour Party with a very left wing manifesto was hammered in the election. It's not good enough to simply ASSUME that the current conditions are ripe for a left-ist Labour platform. I'll repeat ad nauseum. Labour ONLY wins when it acts as a big umbrella over the Left. It cannot and will not be anything more than a protest party if it indulges itself in its comfort zone. And it is THAT fact that makes me so f**king angry when Labour Party members ignorantly or deliberately misrepresent the party's recent past, and assumes that anyone to the right of Corbyn is a traitor.

[MachoMadness]

Lurching to the left on economic policy isn't why I think Corbyn could have had wide appeal. Simply being different to the previous Labour government is what was required. The electorate doesn't give a shit about the minutiae of economic policy, but I think they would give a shit about an anti-establishment outsider who has been on the right side of history time and time again when the government hasn't and who is one of the few Labour MPs who isn't burdened with those negative New Labour myths.

I don't understand why feeling that Labour as a central party are an irrelevance at best, tainted at worst is a hard concept to grasp. There just isn't room for them in the middle.

Also, I'd say the electorate at large do care about Iraq - did then and do now. I've never met a single person who was positive about our troops being over there for as long as they were, on the grounds that they were there on and I don't just hang around in liberal echo chambers like you seem to imply. That stink is on New Labour and will be for a long time whether you think it should be or not.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Macho

Your postings are thoroughly depressing in that you are showing EXACTLY the blinkered mindset that I keep talking about.

Where have I EVER said that Labour should be "centrist"? You are simply not listening to what I say. You are projecting an impression of what you WANT me to be saying, because that strengthens your belief that you are correct.

What I have been saying consistently is that, in the current electoral system, Labour should be a broad church, not a narrow faction. The fact that you interpret that as meaning that Labour should be centrist speaks depressing volumes. It the puerile binary approach to this issue which is deeply, deeply divisive and troubling. But it's one that I am seeing every single day in this discussion, all over the Internet.

If you're not with Corbyn, you're a Blairite/centrist/Red Tory/careerist/warmonger/Judas.  That's not political debate. It is from the "f**k off, I'm right and you're f**king wrong" playground.

We need better than this Macho or we are f**ked, no matter how many members sign up.

[albie]

Setting aside the bickering on here for a minute, how many remember ex Labour MP Chris Mullin and his book "A Very British Coup", written in 1982 and dramatised in 1988;
A Very British Coup - All 4

I strongly recommend having a butchers at this series, cracking political drama.

Still, it couldn't happen now I expect, could it?

[Akinfenwa]

Because of FPTP, in this country the two major parties absolutely need the centre vote in order to win a general election. I don't like it but that's what we've got, and the membership needs to accept it (and channel their desire for change into pushing for PR).

As the centre-left alternative in what is effectively a two party system, Labour needs to carry a broad appeal across the left AND also with floating voters in the centre. It's a difficult balancing act, there's no doubt about that, but a competent, focused leader who isn't divisive could achieve it.

This is why Corbyn is not the man to lead the party as he has none of those qualities. I can't help but like the guy and I personally agree with many of his views, but he does not even come close to carrying a broad appeal across the range of voters needed to lead this party to victory at an election. He is incapable of delivering a coherent message that resonates with, or represents, the masses outside a relatively narrow subset of people the left, and he is unwilling to compromise ideologically even when his views are totally at odds with those of the voters that he must win over.

Sure, the bloke is worshipped within his membership bubble. Great. But what use is that to anyone if he alienates everyone else in the electorate? All that does is give the Conservatives an open goal, they won't have to fight very hard to keep the floating vote and can get away with a lot more shit (such as appointing frigging BoZo as Foreign Secretary). This is why a united opposition, even if they are not strong enough to win outright is better than no opposition like we have now.

It's no surprise then that I will be voting for Smith. I have no particular attachment to him, but contrary some belief amongst the party membership he's not some 'undercover Blairite' and he seems like the sort of chap who possesses the basic abilities you'd expect from any parliamentarian worth their salt, like flexibility, willingness to co-operate and compromise.

Who knows? He could turn out to be crap, but I'll take my f**king chances because someone like Corbyn, leading one of two major parties in this system is guaranteed to fail. And at least Smith will actually have the common decency to sling his hook if he's crap.

[wilts rover]

Owen Smith - the former Head of Public Relations at the asset-stripping and somewhat ethically questionable pharmacutical giant Pfizer - this is the man you trust to end austerity and save the NHS? This is what Labour has come to has it?

Clement Atlee wont be turning in his grave - he will be digging it deeper.

[albie]

Just as a counterweight to the argument that Labour needs to move to the right to secure power, the following analysis gives some food for thought;
Should the Labour Party move to the Left or to the Right to win power? The Spine says Right, but the Brain should think a bit harder. ~ Ripped-off Britons

Sometimes the received wisdom needs to be challenged by a new appraisel, particularly when the system and old alliances are in a state of change.

[The Red Baron]

Owen Smith - the former Head of Public Relations at the asset-stripping and somewhat ethically questionable pharmacutical giant Pfizer - this is the man you trust to end austerity and save the NHS? This is what Labour has come to has it?

Clement Atlee wont be turning in his grave - he will be digging it deeper.

A lobbyist? Oh, joy!

[BillyStubbsTears]

TRB.

No, not a lobbyist. But that's the meme that Monentum is pushing.

Actual facts are pretty much irrelevant in this game, it seems.

[wilts rover]

TRB.

No, not a lobbyist. But that's the meme that Monentum is pushing.

Actual facts are pretty much irrelevant in this game, it seems.

Well if the Head of Policy and Goverment Relations at Pfizer and Government Policy at Amgen isn't trying to persuade national goverments to amend their policies to benefit his company - what is be doing?

Although what he actually did at Amgen is a little unclear - as you say Billy actual facts being irrelevant eh!

But, in an embarrassing U-turn, he was recently forced to correct his CV online. The Pontypridd MP had claimed to be “a director and member of the UK and Ireland board of Amgen”, a major pharmaceutical company based in the US. He has amended his website so it reads: “a director and member of the UK and Ireland team of Amgen”.

Smith worked at Amgen before he was elected in 2010. Questions about his CV began after the Guardian approached Amgen about its tax status.

In response to queries about the company’s tax affairs, Amgen said: “Owen Smith’s position at Amgen did not give him any involvement or influence on the topics raised here – he was an employee in the UK for 18 months and was not an officer of the company or board member.”


http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/22/owen-smith-pledge-equal-representation-of-women-in-labour
http://www.leftfutures.org/2016/07/what-does-owen-smith-believe/