What now for Labour? (Part 2)

First topic message reminder :

Phil Hornby wrote:I feel that Corbyn is sincere, polite, interesting and likeable - so are my neighbours but, like them, he isn't electable as Prime Minister.

In which case, why should we pay some phoney twicer to be something else?

Finland has only ever had neighbouring Russia to worry about. We've got a Tory government and a flightless bird Labour Party.

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/economy/jeremy-corbyn-says-uk-should-seek-economic-inspiration-in-finland/ar-BBvAjbQ?li=BBoPMmp&ocid=iehp

A battle of two visions

by David Wearing

"Two fundamentally opposing visions are in conflict. The first seeks to market the Parliamentary Labour Party to majority public opinion, the press and big business as competent managers of the status quo. Here, the role of party members is to pay their fees, act as the doorstep infantry at election time, ratify predetermined policy decisions, and occasionally select a new party leader from a list pre-vetted by their elders and betters.

The second vision is one that sets the party a harder task: to win power in order to substantively change the country (as it did after World War Two). This involves turning Labour into a social movement, with a mass membership playing an active day-to-day role in communities across the country, winning the battle for hearts and minds on the ground, countering the inevitable attacks from those with a vested interest in the Thatcher-Blair-Cameron settlement, and shaping party policy from the bottom up.

The Labour establishment, horrified by this second approach, is determined to strangle it in its crib. Hence the retreat into ‘red scare’ conspiracy theories and witch-hunts. Hence raising the registered supporters’ fee from £3 to £25, which will disproportionately affect Corbyn supporters, who are more likely to be working class. Hence the shameless disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of fee-paying members, which an appeal court judge has upheld."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/12/labour-party-appeal-leadership-election-decision-nec-corbyn-owen-smith

QUOTE
"....the ....disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of fee-paying members, which an appeal court judge has upheld."

This simple statement of fact seems to have put conspiracy-theorists' imaginations into overdrive. Some are even speculating that the unrelenting wave of hostility towards Jeremy Corbyn ever since his election to the Labour Leadership has its origins far deeper than the usual political Punch-and-Judy between opposing parties. Blame is being laid at the door of MI5, which has probable form in such matters since it was reported to be spying upon, and briefing against, previous Labour PM Harold Wilson in the 1970s. An allegation variously denied.

But then they would deny that sort of thing anyway, wouldn't they?

This whole thing has made me sick to my stomach - I really (perhaps naively) believed that the Labour party remained a force for good, despite the wrong turns (in my opinion) taken by the Blair government, and I really believed that Labour party members were the heart of the party - more fool me.

I'm seriously reconsidering my options politically - with this decision I begin to feel the party has betrayed me and the thousands like me who had hope that a Labour opposition then a Labour government would help us to create a fairer and more equal society

boatlady wrote:This whole thing has made me sick to my stomach - I really (perhaps naively) believed that the Labour party remained a force for good, despite the wrong turns (in my opinion) taken by the Blair government, and I really believed that Labour party members were the heart of the party - more fool me.

I'm seriously reconsidering my options politically - with this decision I begin to feel the party has betrayed me and the thousands like me who had hope that a Labour opposition then a Labour government would help us to create a fairer and more equal society

No - the careerists have betrayed us all - but, then, they always have and always will. I walked away in disgust under Blair, and it was a mistake. If you don't fight you can never win. Let cowards flinch and traitors sneer - the real Party has work to do!!

You're right - it's till all to fight for, but I do feel so betrayed

"....the ....disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of fee-paying members, which an appeal court judge has upheld."

- a judge who just happens to be very close to Tony Blair; and has been for over 20yrs.

I suppose the reality is that after the Referendum, in which 'Getting our democracy back' was shouted loud and clear we now will have one party leader who none of the members had the opportunity to vote for, it being decided by MP's only and another party which has taken away votes from some of it's members just because of the date they joined..........

Would the Labour party refuse to allow people to join and paid their fees (Party Election Funds) in a run up to a General Election?

Perhaps the National Executive should ban all donations for the 8 months before an election?

Incidentally, regulars on Cutting Edge might find blogs in "The Spectator" also worth a glance.  Its Coffee House section gets pretty lively.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/

Well, it is pretty evident that the members of the Labour Party are not the Establishment, and that Murdoch and the BBC can lie about them at will.

boatlady wrote:You're right - it's till all to fight for, but I do feel so betrayed

I can understand why Boatlady. Although I am witnessing the blood-letting and threatened split as an ex-member, it is little less painful for me for that. Although the Green Party has grown considerably in membership and vote share since 2010, it is still a fringe party with 4% support. In my opinion, only the Labour Party can presently engage and mobilise the working class. Only the Labour Party can possibly beat the Tories in 2020 under First Past the Post, and only in my view if Corbyn (assuming his victory in the leadership election) changes his mind and goes for an electoral pact on #PR. Right now, a united Labour Party is crucial to enable the change to an electoral system and constitution that will never again permit a party to govern with the support of only 24% of the electorate. Labour could split into as many parties as it likes once we have #PR but must not do so before it if we are to avoid a Tory hegemony in a rumpUK without Scotland.

Labour, Progress??, Green Party, TUSC, SWP, ILP etc could all thrive and get representation under a proportional electoral system and all constitute different 'semi-watertight' compartments of the centre / left. Right now, if Labour hits an iceberg, the left as a whole will sink electorally just as surely as the Titanic.

I think it would do us all good to stop reading the newspapers and go regularly to Mr Corbyn's meetings. The numbers and the enthusiasm give a real sense of the shift of opinion against the crooks and liars; if we have confidence we can win hands down, though it may be a rather bloody process at first as the careerists set up their traitor party.

Corbyn has been electable all along.......most people when they are actually given a chance to hear his ideas / policies find very little to disagree with; but for some reason the powers that be, and the press, have been determined to prevent him being fairly heard, and consistently quote and present what he says out of context.

The establishment are frightened of Corbyn because he is genuine/honest about creating a fairer more balanced society that provides opportunities for all, and isn't set up to inhibit and hinder a person's opportunities because of their class or background. The establishment don't like the idea of more equality, fairer pay structures, etc.......the loony right wing neo-liberal extremists who have governed us for decades are happy shovelling most of the wealth into the hands of a top few %......they are determined Corbyn isn't going to come along and ruin their greed fest just so the plebs further down the ladder are given a fairer deal.

He failed to come out the gate with a plan for his leadership, sort of like Blair in Iraq, consistently failed to be inclusive, often ignoring or undermining his own shadow cabinet and stymied the party policy forum through which members can propose policy.


This is a comment in reply to me on Facebook about Jeremy Corbyn - I was under the impression that the more senior members of the CLP were more or less supporting him but clearly the notion that he is not a 'leader' still continues to have currency.



I do wish someone could explain this to me - seems to me the poor man didn't have a hope of 'leading' the herd of cats that seems to be the PLP (in my experience it needs to work both ways) but will be held responsible for the fact that the majority of the PLP in spite of the clearly expressed will of the membership decided from day one to defy the elected leader and take every possible opportunity to criticise him in the media.
 


My understanding of democracy is that we the electorate elect a representative to deal on our behalf with various complex matters - we elect them on the basis of promises they make and if they fail to keep those promises we will not elect them again. I voted for Corbyn and he has done more or less exactly what I wanted him to do - and it seems several other people also wanted him to do the same. He has performed against a great deal of difficulty - biased reporting in the media, extreme hostility from his own team - and in a period in history where great events have unfolded (the EU referendum). I'm still  happy with his performance, but I wish I understood the 'leadership' thing.

It's another way of saying 'what pleases Murdoch', I think.

Chas Peeps wrote:-
In my opinion, only the Labour Party can presently engage and mobilise the working class.

That’s so true. A Labour government is the only vehicle for creating a more equal and just society. However, that hasn’t resonated with communities across the country at the last two general elections, and from 2010 until 2015 Labour did not offer the anti-austerity opposition that people needed to protect their homes and services. Maybe that’s why the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn on the scene has attracted massive audiences and a trebling of party membership; he offers hope of something different.

Labour’s strategy in recent years of trying to pitch its message at the 'mythical median voter' has failed. Between 1997 and 2005, four million voters deserted Labour while the ‘moderate’ Blair government was in power. Party membership declined, the number of Labour MPs elected has fallen in every election since 1997, and Labour has been decimated in Scotland because voters found a nationalist centre-left alternative.

The Labour Party has always been a coalition of socialists and social democrats; Tony Benn once said that it “wasn’t a socialist party, but a party with socialists in it”. The problem if peace ever breaks out in the party is how to reunite the two demographic halves of the Labour-voting electorate, what the writer and broadcaster Paul Mason calls “the city salariat and the small town working class”.

The first thing must be to oppose austerity, full stop. It’s a stupid policy; whoever heard of an unemployed man paying off his debts? Austerity was shown not to work in the 1930s, but Cameron and Osborne used it as a cover for their ideological determination to shrink the state. The second priority is to build hundreds of thousands of homes for social ownership or social rent, and to fix social rents to incomes, not market rates.

It’s not the fault of immigrants that successive governments have failed to build enough houses, and it’s not their fault if wages are depressed, they don’t tell greedy employers what to pay. Public sector pay fell in real terms under Osborne, and average private sector pay did not recover its 2008 level until the month of the referendum, eight years later. Professor John Van Reenen has said that pointing a finger at foreigners as the cause of labour market problems is the ‘lump of labour fallacy’ in action – the false idea that there are only a fixed number of jobs to go around. So wage restraint must be ended and anti-union laws repealed, and maybe then working class people might be less inclined to blame immigrants for their problems.

But first Labour must end its civil war. As a matter of principle, I wouldn’t vote for anyone who opposed Jeremy Corbyn after the massive mandate he was given less than a year ago; I think the party needs a rule change so that a leader cannot be challenged for three years after being elected. But in any case, Owen Smith strikes me as a weak, slippery opportunist. Two of last year’s defeated candidates, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, had much more credibility than Smith. The odds are that Corbyn will win again, but will Labour MPs then accept the will of the members or will they carry on plotting? In the meantime, the Tories will continue with their dastardly policies with no effective opposition. It’s all very sad.

In this scenario, there are no winners - either the PLP must knuckle down under a leader they don't like (much as I have often done in my working life) and get on with their job of being an opposition with a view eventually to forming a Labour government or Corbyn must stand down, leaving the party in the hands of a weak, slippery opportunist who I believe would very quickly revert to business as usual, watering down the opposition until they are in fact the enablers for the Tory policies, in the process bleeding the Labour party of the thousands of new members who have joined in the hope of some proper socialist opposition and a proper socialist government.

The PLP don't look like knuckling down and Corbyn doesn't look like standing down - as you say, Ivan - very sad

Are these just extracts from a conspiracy theory by Paul Mason, or part of a credible account of the turmoil in the Labour Party? You decide.......  

The sound of Blairite silence

“With Owen Smith it is never clear where, on the road from BBC Wales, via Pfizer, via the years as a special adviser in Belfast surrounded by all those nice members of MI5, via losing Blaenau Gwent to an independent because he was too identified with Blair......at what point did Owen become converted to Jeremy Lite left radical socialism?

Normally, if a Labour figure stood up and, from thin air, plucked a £200bn spending pledge based on a wealth tax, ‘The Sun’, ‘The Mail’ and ‘The Telegraph’ would have reporters going through his bin-bags.”

For the whole blog:-
https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/the-sound-of-blairite-silence-aed2ef726c8a

His Father carefully called himself 'Dai', took Ton-y-pandy to be the whole of 'Wales' and went in for a nice left line on Labour history while doing very well for himself as a well-paid professional, so it's in the blood - rather like what I am doing now, assuming that because better-paid workers often crawl and creep, there are somehow two different sorts of worker. The question is, do we live on a wage or on dividends? If we live on wages capitalism is still a mug's game.

In today's Guardian, John Thrace recalls the Parliamentary EDM of 21 May 2004 signed by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnel,

"Early day motion 1255

PIGEON BOMBS
Session: 2003-04
Date tabled: 21.05.2004
Primary sponsor: Banks, Tony

That this House is appalled, but barely surprised, at the revelations in M15 files regarding the bizarre and inhumane proposals to use pigeons as flying bombs; recognises the important and live-saving role of carrier pigeons in two world wars and wonders at the lack of gratitude towards these gentle creatures; and believes that humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and looks forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out thus giving nature the opportunity to start again."

I can't disagree with a word of those sentiments.

The really appalling thing is that the rebel Labour mps, and even Sadiq Khan, who are backing Owen Smith are all actually so dumb and out of touch that they appear to genuinely believe Owen would win more votes than Corbyn in a general election. Just exactly how stupid are the Labour mps we elect? It's all very very very depressing.

(Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and BFF Owen Smith form crypto-Tory Blair tribute group)

sickchip wrote:The really appalling thing is that the rebel Labour mps, and even Sadiq Khan, who are backing Owen Smith are all actually so dumb and out of touch that they appear to genuinely believe Owen would win more votes than Corbyn in a general election. Just exactly how stupid are the Labour mps we elect? It's all very very very depressing.

Without wishing to be too contemptuous, I think the majority of MPs equate 'success' with their own careers, and a victory that displeased the Establishment would not be a proper victory - just as a victory for them that did nothing serious for us would be a very real defeat.    It is going to be a messy process, but we have to be rid of these puffed-up gasbags if we are to achieve anything worth getting.

The really appalling thing is that the rebel Labour mps, and even Sadiq Khan, who are backing Owen Smith are all actually so dumb and out of touch that they appear to genuinely believe Owen would win more votes than Corbyn in a general election. Just exactly how stupid are the Labour mps we elect? It's all very very very depressing.

The only other reason for their actions is that they are fully behind the Tory neo-liberal politics that is on the side of the few % at the top and in favour of treating the minions like fodder to make a few people perpetually richer; and that they endorse welfare cuts, weakening of unions, reducing workers rights and access to legal aid, etc etc.

So, in conclusion: the PLP and Sadiq Khan are either really stupid, or a bunch of bastards as bad as the Tories.

This letter from a Twitter user might help to explain why Jeremy Corbyn has the support of so many Labour members:-


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CokZNVAXgAEQ8qj.jpg

There it is. How often do we need to be told? Jeremy Corbyn presents the most honest and believable politician since John Smith and people like Attlee and his post-war cabinet.

No wonder other politicians want to see him buried! Their comfortable existence at our expense is under serious threat.

And the struggle is getting really nasty

Now the Olympics are over, it’s back to the regular sport of attacking Jeremy Corbyn……..  

Jeremy Corbyn fends off Branson's attack over 'ram-packed' Virgin train

From an article by Peter Walker:-

Jeremy Corbyn was drawn into an extraordinary row with Virgin Trains after the rail operator disputed the Labour leader’s filmed account of having to sit on the floor of a “ram-packed” train, releasing CCTV images of him walking past free seats beforehand and sitting down shortly after the film was shot. Yannis Mendez, who filmed the original video, added that some of the seemingly empty seats shown in the first Virgin Trains image had bags and coats on them, so were not free.

The Corbyn team’s account was supported by a woman who said she sat on the floor next to the Labour leader, having sent a social media photo of herself and her daughter with him. Ellen – who asked to not be named in full – told ‘The Guardian’ that Corbyn had seemingly gone through the entire standard-class section of the train but had not been able to find a seat. She said she had similarly been unable to find seats. “He’s not lying. When I saw him he was in coach A, right at the front. He hadn’t managed to find a seat in the whole of the train. I was sat on the floor, there was no space for me to get a seat. There were people in every space between every carriage. It was totally overcrowded. They were full of bags and full of people.”

Another woman, Keren Harrison, tweeted a photo of herself with Corbyn on the train, saying there was only a seat for him about 45 minutes into the three-hour trip “when staff started shuffling people around”. This process appeared to involve Virgin staff directing other passengers sitting in corridors to reserved seats which had not been occupied.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/23/jeremy-corbyn-virgin-trains-disputes-claim-over-lack-of-seats

Fleet Street has always referred to August as The Silly Season and this traingate storm-in-a-styrene-teacup is typical, but at the same time it cunningly distracts the attention away from other more important matters such as, Human Rights Act WILL be scrapped and replaced with a British Bill of Rights, says Justice Secretary Liz Truss

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3753290/Human-Rights-Act-scrapped-replaced-British-Bill-Rights-says-Justice-Secretary-Liz-Truss.html#ixzz4IEuBRoX7

And a more incompetent individual to put in charge of it you would struggle to find

Indeed, boatlady. PM Theresa May has made several intriguing choices of Cabinet colleague.

These are testing times.

Clearly now the Olympics are over it's time for the media to focus and run down Corbyn........

Anything to take the attention off what the government is doing or the value of the pound.......

Mr Corbyn represents the possibility of re-opening the fight for democracy and socialism.   No wonder the tories, their newspapers and their BBC scream and lie about him like Goebbels about the Jews!

What mess? An unrepresentative gang nobody wants, and who are getting fewer and fewer votes need cleaning out so we can get on with what the Party was founded for, so let's get on and do it.

If you look at the number of CLP's that have declared for Corbyn as opposed to his rival, it might tend to suggest that a significant part of the Labour supporting electorate actually wants socialism as promoted by Corbyn and are suspicious of the carefully tailored alternative promoted by Mr Smith, presumably with the backing of the 172 PLP members who rebelled. I gather Mr Smith's CLP tends to support Corbyn, as does Angela Eagle's - not really a small hard Left group.

Some very boring and generally politically conservative individuals (myself included) strongly support Mr Corbyn, the elected leader of the party.

At what point should be considered that the representatives no longer present those who elected them?........Should the voter have to put up with some one who they feel is no longer representing their views or wishes?.....Do they have to wait for the next general election or imprisonment or death of the sitting representative or should they have the right of recall?.......
It seems that Parliamentary Labour Party have the right of recall (Vote of no confidence or stalking horse challenger back by a few MP's) but the voter, the employer of MP's, has no recourse to get rid of an MP other than at a general election and more often than not if it looks like the MP will be deselected as a candidate they state that they will stand down at the next election but not before thereby collecting they parliamentary pay and perks......

i would say that not all the Labour party members will be voting for Mr Corbyn. plus given the fact that the Labour party had some 9 million votes i think i would call it a rather small group myself. you have every right to support who you like. as do I.

But in my union branch at work with a rather large membership Corbyn is just about everyone number one joke. maybe you should come and meet them. then you can tell them they are all wrong.

astradt1 wrote:At what point should be considered that the representatives no longer present those who elected them?........Should the voter have to put up with some one who they feel is no longer representing their views or wishes?.....Do they have to wait for the next general election or imprisonment or death of the sitting representative or should they have the right of recall?.......
It seems that Parliamentary Labour Party have the right of recall (Vote of no confidence or stalking horse challenger back by a few MP's) but the voter, the employer of MP's, has no recourse to get rid of an MP other than at a general election and more often than not if it looks like the MP will be deselected as a candidate they state that they will stand down at the next election but not before thereby collecting they parliamentary pay and perks......

well they are the rules and i did not make them or set them up. not sure the other parties will agree to change the rules of elections for Mr Corbyn myself