Labour Party leadership election 2015

[Cassius]

As for Corbyn, yes, he's a crank.

So? Gladstone was a crank. Didn't stop him from becoming PM.

That was a long time ago. I can't see him becoming PM in this day and age. Mind you, the same could be said for most if not all of the PM's who served during that era.

[Cassius]

[Cassius]

Talk now of Harman being urged to call off the election. Good Lord.

[Cassius]

We had a similar contest here in France, the PS primary leading to the Presidential race of 2012. Concerns of entryism were expressed as well at the time, as you could pay 2€, sign a "vaguely left-wing values charter" and vote. The press were all "right-wing and/or extreme-left supporters will sign up en masse to skew the vote !!!1!1!".

In the end, it seems the people who actually voted were in fact pretty close to the PS line, no real trace of entryism or skewing could be found. I must admit that at the time I had paid those bloody 2€ to vote for Montebourg in the first round, just to show the other candidates that there were a few of us who still expected some vaguely left-wing things from them. Deception and disappointment ensued. No need to say I didn't bother choosing between Aubry and Hollande in the runoff.

And that was with quite a portion of the population confessing hard-left stances, in comparison to the UK. So that's that for your concerns of skewing. And remember that Tories love their money. 3£ can be invested and speculated... or bet, it seems, by the looks of this forum.

What, you don't love money too?

[Cassius]

You know, there is the possibility that we haven't seen the last of Ed. John Howard's first spell as Liberal leader (1985-1989) was widely seen as a disaster and the man himself as inept, unpopular and awkward.

The difference being that Howard was an experienced and highly capable politician whose first attempt to become Prime Minister was derailed by a combination of the deranged 'Joh for Canberra' campaign and by Andrew Peacock. Ed Miliband may be a nice man, but he was hardly an experienced politician, and he certainly wasn't very capable.

Maybe this is all for another thread but I've always found the culture of state and private schools in the UK very strange. To hear people talk about, you would think that there must be a huge number of students going to private schools. But it's really no higher than it is in the US where it's never really talked about. Also, it's my understanding that basically every Conservative MP went to a private school which is mind boggling considering how small the pool is. Among the Republicans in Congress, I would guess most of them went to public (government run) schools.

This hasn't been true for a very long time. Indeed, there was an more than a bit of fuss about Cameron being the first public school boy to lead the Conservative Party since the sixties.

[Cassius]

Who's our Jimmy Carter?

https://medium.com/@davidbutler100/jeremy-corbyn-labour-s-george-mcgovern-60b52a98bbfc

Harold Wilson and he died in 1995.

Surely that's a bit uncharitable to Wilson?

If anything it's a bit uncharitable to Carter.

[Cassius]

Christ, a Blair and Clegg coalition? I mean, why even bother at that point? Even if it were theoretically possible.

Well 2015 been's the first election year I've actually followed (General Elections are the only ones that count IMO) and it's going to be pretty crap if we have Labour getting crushed at the may election losing their Shadow Chancellor and Foreign Secretary, and then going on to elect someone who is going to be the worse leader since well ever.  

Tony Blair resigns and is replaced by:

Gordon Brown who is more to the left of Blair... who goes on to lose... who is then replaced by:

Ed Miliband who is more to the left of Brown... who goes on to lose... who is then replaced by:

Jeremy Corbyn who is more to the left of Miliband... who goes on to...

You can guess the rest I think

Obviously Brown was only very moderately more to the left of Blair but he was a more traditional tax and spend Labour right winger than "Third Way" Blair ever was.

It's funny I've noticed the same folk who are entirely equivocal about Scotland's results, and warn how terribly complex it is, are to be found wheeling out this tripe in the next breath.

"Brown was a milimetre to the left of Blair, clearly another rejection of the Left! Not New Labour!"

If you don't think Miliband's (and Balls') in many cases timid opposition to the Tories disappointed and disillusioned any left-wingers I'm not sure what to say. But you're right, "we'll cut, but nicer" was a great rallying cry for the Left and SNP & the Greens surge took no strength from that.

Tell me, was Blair winning elections and leading in the polls for Labour at the time of his departure? Before the financial crash, remember.

No, the Conservatives were racking up leads of 5-10 points (and occasionally more) in the opinion polls, and winning back large numbers of councils from the Labour party.

[Cassius]

I was responding to the statement that the 60s was a better decade than the current one (which seems to have now been retracted, in fairness).

That the Wilson government fixed some of those things towards the end of the 60s is irrelevant to that claim.

Anyway, social policy aside, look at any decent metric of welfare and obviously people are better off now. Leftist radical nostalgia for poverty is annoying. I guess if you like poverty supporting Corbyn makes sense though.

There are some long term happiness studies showing that the 60s were the decade when most of Western Europe reached the level where higher material wealth stopped making us happier. Since then material progress has not made the average person feel better.

When you are poor increased material wealth makes you feel a lot better, but this effect decrease when you reach higher levels and at some point more stuff and better living conditions stop adding to most peoples feeling of satisfaction with life.

The nostalgia is also not completely unfounded: Society was a lot more safe and sustainable back then. Local communities functioned better, crime was lower, unemployment lower, outsourcing unheard of etc. Farming was closer to being organic, traffic congestion lower etc. At the same time it was a culturally much more vibrant and exciting era than today.

So as a decade it had an adequate level of material wealth for most people, was culturally interesting and a lot of social and economic changes since then have simply not benefitted ordinary people.

^ This, more or less exactly. Not to mention the fact that the people did actually have some kind of an influence and a choice at the moment, you know, democratically speaking. That's all over now, of course.

There also no immigrants/non-whites. You really can't deal with English 1960s nostalgia without the racial aspect. It is buried beneath every single one of those points. Democracy was real before the foreigners corrupted it, there was less traffic before all the immigrants came, housing was nicer and now look at East London etc

There had already been some quite significant immigration from former British colonies by the 1960's. For example, London already had a sizeable population of West Indian origin by that point.

[Cassius]

Labour's strongest seats aren't in university areas, they are depressed urban areas, not all of which are full of ethnic minorities (Indeed many are the opposite, see Tyne and Wear).

Britain is not America. Britain's voting patterns are different to America. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I've actually lived in the UK the last three years so am fairly familiar. The depressed urban areas are where you hear complaints about immigration. As you do in the marginals.

The point I was making though was not about immigration per se, but that in my experience almost every time someone in the UK has brought up nostalgia for the 1950s or 60s, it has almost invariably had a racial tinge to it. Maybe there is some genuine Bennite nostalgia, but I would be shocked if most people even remember who he was. The "ideal" of the past has generally been used as a dog whistle.

Thing about Benn in the sixties is that he wasn't really the hard-left figure he became during the seventies and is generally known as being today. He was a technocrat with a somewhat unhealthy obsession with technology. More to the point, Labour wasn't particularly leftist during the sixties anyway; Harold Wilson came from the centre-left of the party, but was surrounded in cabinet by people from the right; Brown, Callaghan, Crosland and Jenkins (although of course these men differed). The government of 1964-70 certainly presided over some fairly radical social changes, like the decriminalisation of abortion and homosexuality, but these were achieved largely through private members bills and the efforts of Jenkins; the attitude of the party to them was decidedly mixed. Likewise, on economic policy, the government continue to remain well within the bounds of the post war consensus (which wasn't the great social democratic ideal that some like to romanticise it as having been).

Basically, the 'Bennites' have never controlled the Labour party and have never been able to use it to implement their flagship policies. The idea held by some Corbynites that they're 'reclaiming their party' is not really true, because they never controlled it in the first place (at least fully).

[Cassius]

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gO-5JEhRas4

[Cassius]

Cooper and Tristram Hunt also leaving Shadow Cabinet.

Didn't he say that Corbyn deserved the party's full support? If so his departure from the shadow cabinet doesn't exactly look like a show of support.

[Cassius]

FFS we have a racist as our community secretary

Racism against white people is certainly a pressing problem in Britain.

Haven't you got any police officers to be filming?