legaldinho wrote:legaldinho wrote:monkey wrote:I think you're too pessimistic about the Labour Party. Ed Milliband would have looked out for the little guy. There's plenty others of his ilk there. And I really think the tide is turning away from the same old neoliberal policies. If they take charge now with a decent leader with the support of the majority of the country, they can make some huge changes for the better.
Miliband got destroyed at the general. By the media. The core vote didn't turn out. Young people didn't turn out. As Peter hitchens said, Jezza is the only politician who actually speaks to the core voter. If the grassroots can deliver, he can win.
This idea of moderating labour policies only for the media to trounce it and the average guy to ask "what's the point" is suicidal in the extreme. You've bought the lie hook line and sinker
Proud of this post from June 2016. Recent articles suggest this was seumas Milne's and others strategy all along: don't cooperate, shed core voters and new voters,only to be trounced by the media anyway. Sometimes I think i should make something of myself. I personally don't know many people who are as consistently right about things as me.
Childintime wrote:legaldinho wrote:legaldinho wrote:monkey wrote:I think you're too pessimistic about the Labour Party. Ed Milliband would have looked out for the little guy. There's plenty others of his ilk there. And I really think the tide is turning away from the same old neoliberal policies. If they take charge now with a decent leader with the support of the majority of the country, they can make some huge changes for the better.
Miliband got destroyed at the general. By the media. The core vote didn't turn out. Young people didn't turn out. As Peter hitchens said, Jezza is the only politician who actually speaks to the core voter. If the grassroots can deliver, he can win.
This idea of moderating labour policies only for the media to trounce it and the average guy to ask "what's the point" is suicidal in the extreme. You've bought the lie hook line and sinker
Proud of this post from June 2016. Recent articles suggest this was seumas Milne's and others strategy all along: don't cooperate, shed core voters and new voters,only to be trounced by the media anyway. Sometimes I think i should make something of myself. I personally don't know many people who are as consistently right about things as me.
Hello.
Escape wrote:For clarity, monkey, a few of us here have had benefits stopped immediately following grossly unfair sanctions. My mum's Carer's Allowance had to be reinstated after Atos took it away, even though she was 65 at the time. My sister's hospital was closed a few years ago, taking its first-rate head-injury and burns care with it.
Like the master who prefers to beat his slaves on the quiet, the Tories' evils are largely under the public's radar. And so in Corbyn we saw a flawed man of genuine conviction, because unlike Miliband — who was in favour of Atos at worst, and in favour of retaining sanctions at best — he listened to Ken Loach. He's listened to the affected. Smith would've ignored those helpless voters (also the homeless, the poor, and so on) and handed May her majority in one weak chop.
Humanitarianism's now exclusively left-wing in this country, so his lot can jog on.
If Corbyn had gone after Brexit, the PLP would have put forward 5 candidates and the most left-wing one would have won. Who would that have been? Would they have been any good? Would they have been legit or an Owen Smith, badly-disguised, wolf in sheeps clothing? Would they have managed to straddle left-wing policy directions (which I was, am and will remain in favour of) with a more centrist appeal? If they had would that have caused an earlier rift in the Tories? May moved right and became UKIP because she had to but also because she felt that the centre was already won.monkey wrote:Yeah there's pros and cons to Corbyn electorally, and I was completely wrong about that, because I thought that the pros were so minute as to be irrelevant, when they were actually quite substantial. It's for the birds to try and weigh that up against the pros and cons of another hypothetical Labour leader taking hypothetical positions in an hypothetically different campaign. How would Owen Smith have gone over? Or Yvette Cooper? Who knows?
Labour have got a left-wing policy platform that is way more credible than anything on the right. It's something to build on and there should be another chance very soon. Hopefully the Tory Brexit chaos will ruin any rebranding attempts a new leader will make and Labour can form a genuinely progressive government.
The problem then is whether you can actually implement these policies nowadays without the economy imploding. The market would presumably shit itself, after all.Vela wrote:As an outsider, Corbyn looks like a man who has found his moment. The UK will be lucky if he seizes it. You need him and his policies, dearly.
Good job I didn't do that then.Yossarian wrote:There were too many reports of early incompetence that were coming from non-media sources for that to be entirely dismissed as just 'doing politics differently'.
JonB wrote:I'm not convinced by this idea that Corbyn spent 2 years doing nothing then suddenly put in a good election campaign. His inexperience in leadership certainly showed to begin with, but not surprisingly he improved as time went on. Other than that it was a case of introducing a different kind of politics to the one kind we're so used to now, which people (egged on by the media) took for incompetence. It's the same people complaining about how all politicians are the same and just lie or never answer questions that were often the first to dismiss Corbyn for not doing the thing that other politicians would have done in a certain situation. That he had a better than expected election campaign isn't to do with a sudden shift, it's to do with sticking to his guns and starting to reap the benefits among people who really are sick of politics as usual.
I also think the idea of straddling left-wing policy with centrist appeal is problematic, as they just aren't compatible anymore. Centrist appeal means keeping things broadly as they are, while an actual progressive left movement means making substantial changes. The only hope for Labour is the far more difficult but much more meaningful task of bringing the centre to the left, or changing what centrist appeal is. I don't know that that's possible either, but there's some momentum there now.
I think it's possible to say with a good degree of certainty that none of the leadership candidates we saw in the last couple of years would have engaged the people that Corbyn engaged and won over the New Labour voters who have since gone back to the Tories. That's far more a case of wishful thinking than viewing Corbyn as electable.
JonB wrote:The problem then is whether you can actually implement these policies nowadays without the economy imploding. The market would presumably shit itself, after all.Vela wrote:As an outsider, Corbyn looks like a man who has found his moment. The UK will be lucky if he seizes it. You need him and his policies, dearly.
monkey wrote:Corbyn's improvement was so drastic it can't just be put down to standard improvement in a job. The PLP have left him alone since the second leadership contest and he's still been woeful.
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Of course, but it's a different world now to the one where Keynesian policies were seen as acceptable. The likes of Clinton in the US and Hollande in France came into power with big ideas, only to be told they couldn't do it without the economy tanking. They soon fell into neoliberal orthodoxy. I'm not sure that any individual national government actually wields the power anymore.Vela wrote:The economy is currently predicated on austerity at all costs, bugger the consequences. Corbyn's spending is basically Keynesian, innit? Spend in times of crisis, provide important services at a loss because they are necessary and the private system is experiencing market failure. It's the alternative to tax cuts for the rich and palace refurbs over NHS investment. A simple choice. Torynomics is a perversion of capitalism. Fuck it off into the bin.The problem then is whether you can actually implement these policies nowadays without the economy imploding. The market would presumably shit itself, after all.As an outsider, Corbyn looks like a man who has found his moment. The UK will be lucky if he seizes it. You need him and his policies, dearly.
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