How Much is a Corbyn?

MS1950

antrobus wrote: »

I was simply pointing out why Mark Steele was obviously denied a vote. I don't know about anybody else.

Perhaps Labour actually are validating applications against their canvass returns. For example;

Mr Bradshaw told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “In my own constituency, which is probably the best organised Labour party in the country, we have been through all of the new registered supporters and we have cross-referenced them with our voting records. Consistently, 10 per cent of the new registered supporters have always said they had been strongly against Labour, they had never voted Labour, they had always voted for another party."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11808308/Pro-Jeremy-Corbyn-unions-block-Harriet-Harmans-bid-to-weed-out-anti-Labour-infiltrators.html

I suggest you actually look at the accounts in the links I posted (and there are many similar ones) before you 'perhaps' too much.

We're not talking about people who “have always said they had been strongly against Labour, they had never voted Labour, they had always voted for another party” but people who have always voted labour, including, as I posted, people who are already full members of the party (and some who have even been candidates) being rejected.

Additionally 'canvass returns' are not people 'known' to have voted for other parties but people who may have said to Labour canvassers they were intending to vote for another party.

We all know that the pre-election opinion polls were badly wrong – to a large extent because at the last moment many voters changed their minds. And, as all candidates acknowledge, Labour needs to win over people who may have voted for other parties or none.

Excluding them by claiming you 'know' how they voted seems a sure fire way to drive them away for good.

Bridgeton_Boy

It seems to me that its only the media luvies and Red Tories in the Labour Party that have a problem with Corbyn. Whether you agree with him or not at least he is offering something different from Labour to the Tories. Take for instance Scotland does Labour honestly think a Milliband clone like Cooper / Burnham would win voters back. The most honest comment I heard from a voter in the election was that she did not leave Labour but Labour left her. Labour was suppose to represent the normal working person but since Blair they have become a shadow of the movement Hardie , Shinwell, Maxton , Bevan worked so hard to bring a better life for people in the UK. We are now like the US were all the main parties are all basically the same ( run by business and lobyists). I hope Corbyn wins and at least we will get a proper debate between the parties in the UK.

antrobus

MS1950 wrote: »

I suggest you actually look at the accounts in the links I posted (and there are many similar ones) before you 'perhaps' too much....

Like I said, I don't know about anybody else. It's not as if I have some sort of inside track on what the Party machine is up to these days. It's not my bl00dy fault if you don't like what they're up to; I was only trying to be helpful by suggesting what they might be doing.:)

bap98189

Generali wrote: »

In The City for a while, a million pounds was known as a 'Bernie'.

The reason?

Bernie Ecclestone gave the Labour party a million squids and shortly afterwards Tony Blair announced a temporary exemption of F1 (run by Bernie Ecclestone) from the laws about sports advertising tobacco.

A Bernie was in fact zero pounds. Ecclestone got the law changes he wanted, and then a few weeks later Blair had to give him the money back. Bernie Ecclestone is one very shrewd businessman.

Shakethedisease

antrobus wrote: »

How do you tell the difference between someone who has 'changed their mind' and an entryist, or someone who is just trying to take the p*ss? Do you get them to sit a polygraph?

You can't. But people can and do change their minds over what party they support. That's what 'floating voters' are. Labour implemented this new system. And they seemed happy enough with it at the time. I think we all know that there wouldn't be much of a fuss over 'entryists' if Burnham or Cooper were leading the field at the moment.

It's not a purge, it's an application of Chapter 2, Clause 1, Section 4(B) of the Labour Party Rule Book. The Labour Party have always been hot on that one, both party members and even MPs have been thrown out of the party for contravening that rule. (Think Militant, of nothing else.)

That may have applied to full Labour party members in the past. However, as above. The criteria for registering support for the Labour party has changed. They opened up the system to 'registered supporters' for £3 a pop. There's nothing in the FAQ to say you can never have supported or voted for another party at some point in your electoral history.

Sign up as a Member or Supporter to help choose the new Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party!....
....Want to have your say in who Labour's next leader is?...

Labour supporters who are on the UK electoral register can sign up to be a Registered Supporter.
Register as a supporter for as little as £3.

http://www.labour.org.uk/w/labour-party-supporters


If they thought that this was going to cause significant problems, they shouldn't have implemented it. It was because they thought they Unions had too much of a 'say' after Ed Miliband's election wasn't it ? Boy how it looks like that one has backfired. :eek:

antrobus

Shakethedisease wrote: »

...That may have applied to full Labour party members in the past. However, as above. The criteria for registering support for the Labour party has changed. They opened up the system to 'registered supporters' for £3 a pop. There's nothing in the FAQ to say you can never have supported or voted for another party at some point in your electoral history....

Whatever you think, and whatever it doesn't say in the FAQs, the Labour Party has always tended to the view that you are either 100% with us or you are against us. That's the way the machine thinks.

Shakethedisease wrote: »

...If they thought that this was going to cause significant problems, they shouldn't have implemented it. It was because they thought they Unions had too much of a 'say' after Ed Miliband's election wasn't it ? Boy how it looks like that one has backfired.

Of course it's a bl00dy stupid idea.

ruggedtoast

MS1950 wrote: »

But most of those mentioned in the Channel 4 article I posted haven't breached those (or any other) rules:

http://www.channel4.com/news/labour-supporters-purged-from-leadership-vote

And many of the people posting on this twitter feed are already full members (and some have even been candidates) - but have been rejected:

https://twitter.com/gracecoles1?refsrc=email&s=11

There are many similar accounts all over social media at the moment.

I suspect virtually everyone who was rejected will be let in on appeal. The process for which will complete just after the ballots have closed and whatever faceless neo liberal candidate Tony Blair and Gordon Brown approve of has been appointed.

I doubt many people will bother by that point.

cells

martinsurrey wrote: »

a few dams? China would be annoyed but not out of the fight.

I think people vastly overestimate conventional weapons, or vastly underestimate nuclear.

Chinas ICBM's have a range of 6k KM and carry a 3000kg bomb.

The nuke they carry has a yield of 3,300,000,000 kg of TNT

To replace 1 nuke with conventional weapons you would be looking at firing about 1.1 MILLION conventional warhead ICBM's.

A modern strike jet can carry about 12,000kg of weapons (so lets assume they are pure explosives), that means you would need 250,000 fully loaded strike aircraft to replace a single nuke.

To put this into perspective, the Blitz on London totalled about 20,000 tonnes of high explosives dropped, which is about 1/165th of a single low yield nuke.

Nukes are about making sure that no one wants to fight you, as you can, without huge amounts of infrastructure, or man power lay waste to their entire nation.

If you understand the truly terrifying nature of nuclear warfare, you wouldn't try and compare it to conventional, there is nothing known to man to replace the destructive threat of 200 nukes (which is what China could put down on Japan if it needed to, and what the UK holds).

Yes I already noted if your aim is to carpet bomb and kill eberyone no conventional weapon can match a nuke. But there is no possible reason the UK could want to exterminate a nation. Even in the world wars the aim was not to kill every german it was to defeate its army and war machine.

China could nuke the UK and kill 60 million living here. But I suspect the UK forces without nukes could in retaliation kill in excess of 10 million Chinese and cause in excess of $10 trillion in economic damages to china

What could be worth more than $10 trillion that she can get by exterminating another nation?

Shakethedisease

Johann Lament MSP ‏@wee_things 2 hrs2 hours ago Labour in enviable position of having so many supporters that we must limit who can & cant vote. Other parties look on in awe

Many a true word said in (sarcastic) jest.

So glad the SNP didn't take this approach with 1000's of recently ex-Labour supporters who signed up after the ref. How more stupid can Labour possibly get over the next few weeks ? There are a lot of really angry people out there about this. Not necessarily about themselves being 'purged', more at the apparent attempt to 'rig' this leadership election somehow.

I also see Channel 4 news has just done a number on Corbyn re ISIS. Engage 100% full-on demonisation mode. And John ( I managed to lose Labour 40 seats in Scotland by being out of touch ) McTernan putting the boot in too...

cells

antrobus wrote: »

How so?

I'm not quite sure whether you are being deliberately obtuse or not, but whatever delivery system you use for getting your bomb to the target can be used to deliver either a conventional or a nuclear payload. I'm not quite sure how you can conclude that it is 'obviously' cheaper and effective to launch 1,000 missiles with conventional warheads at a target, when just one nuclear missile might achieve the same result.



And as pointed out before, Japan does not possess the capability to precision bomb targets in China.

I said it would be cheaper and more effective to use nukes if the aim is large area damage but I simply dont believe an advanced economy would resort to such damage

and as I keep saying you don't need nukes to do large area damage. Attacking big dams will do very large area damage. A dam once burst in china and killed osomething like 100,000 people which is on a scale comparable to the atomic bombings of japan. Its so devastating that even in a war its 'illegal' to attack dams now. Well how can that be illegal but not nukes? the answer is that those who had nukes wrote the rules which basically said our large area damage weapons are ok but your large area damage weapons (normal weapons attacking dams) is not ok