An Evening With... Jeremy Corbyn

TrickyTree83

westernpromise wrote: »

The brick through her window was actually through a communal stairwell window in the block she shares with five other companies. The outside is already vandalised with non political graffiti

So that's all right, then.

we have a political party beloved of a group of people the youngest of whom is 52, versus a zeitgeist gaining momentum among people the oldest of whom is early 40s.

Once they grow up, however, they tend to grow out of voting Labour. Voting to rob other people looks like a great idea until you become one of the robb-ees rather than being a robb-er. And the younger you are the less likely you are to vote.

The thing is, once Khorbiyn wins again, the PLP has nowhere much to go. It has now been established that as long as he doesn't resign, Khorbiyn's on the ballot. There is no reason to assume he'll resign when he loses at the GE. Foot quit because he had caused a catastrophe, but Kinnochio waited till he had lost two, Broon wasn't even going to resign as PM initially and only did so because he'd already been PM. So this gentlemanly practice of quitting when you lose a GE really dates back only as far as Ted Miliband last year! And if Khorbiyn's on the ballot then he'll win again, because he's the kind of nutter the nutty members vote for.

The 170 sensible MPs will either be deselected and replaced by Stepford clones, or they will quit politics. Yvette Cooper could probably get quite a good job in an economic consultancy somewhere (husband Eddie Balls losing his seat may well have been a blessing in disguise, because he was the first into the jobs market with a lookalike New Labour CV). Why would she waste her time in this Labour Party?

Labour loses about 20 seats to the boundary changes anyway which takes them down to 210 or so. Under Yeremiy's glorious leadership, probably 60 more will lose their seats and those MPs left will be either deadbeats or barking loonies. So that's 2025 in the bag as well.

The only way for the PLP to head this off is to split now so they at least get some Short money to fund a new party. They're going to lose in 2020 and 2025 anyway but maybe they can become the come-home party for disaffected Labouroids in 2030, although they'll struggle to come up with a credible leader; they would be in effect where the Liberals were in about 1974.

The model for what they need to do is what Cameron did vis-a-vis UKIP. He essentially used the rise of UKIP as a way to detoxify the Conservative party. All its most obnoxious elements - the sexists, the racists, the homophobes, the fiddlers - were all on that wing anyway, so by getting the likes of Neil Hamilton to leave the Tories and join UKIP, he has made sure that they're out of his party. And he then went out of his way to distance his party from UKIP by insulting them at every opportunity. UKIPpers' foaming hatred of Cameron made it impossible for Labour to claim that Con = UKIP.

As a result you simply don't get those kind of scandals any more. And as the only criticism that even Blair found to make of the Tories was "sleaze" - the hypocrisy of which is staggering today - that left Labour with nothing to say. The pitch for election from the party that wrecked the economy again was that they would do a better job of fixing it!

So a split Labour Party, where you had Loony Labour and Legacy Labour, looks like the best bet, with Legacy insulting Loony at every turn to drive home the message that these nutters are nothing to do with Legacy.

Of course you'd then have four leftist parties splitting the vote, but it's a start.

Agree with this, the Conservatives at the moment appear to me as Centre-Right, having shed the more extreme elements. That's a vote winning strategy when you're appealing to a rob-ee as WP put it.

Labour needs to be Centre-Left to be appealing to any swing voters. Going further out to the Left isn't going to make rob-ee's vote for you because it's likely JC's Labour are going to take even more from them.

westernpromise

TrickyTree83 wrote: »

Agree with this, the Conservatives at the moment appear to me as Centre-Right, having shed the more extreme elements. That's a vote winning strategy when you're appealing to a rob-ee as WP put it.

Labour needs to be Centre-Left to be appealing to any swing voters. Going further out to the Left isn't going to make rob-ee's vote for you because it's likely JC's Labour are going to take even more from them.

Yes, as you go harder left you do gain some votes, but you gain them in seats you already hold and you then lose votes in seats you need to win. Labour needs to win seats like Worcester which are currently on something like Con 49%, Lab 31%. With Corbyn and his thugs in charge they are going backwards in those places, not forwards.

Corbyn will do worse than Foot. I would be selling Labour at 150 seats or so as a bet were it not that there could easily be two Labour parties by 2020.

Edit: that is probably the only way David Miliband would be back in with a shout. He would never get a winnable seat in Khorbiyn's Loony Labour party but he could get one in Legacy Labour, I would think.

[Deleted User]

westernpromise wrote: »

Yes, as you go harder left you do gain some votes, but you gain them in seats you already hold and you then lose votes in seats you need to win. Labour needs to win seats like Worcester which are currently on something like Con 49%, Lab 31%. With Corbyn and his thugs in charge they are going backwards in those places, not forwards.

Corbyn will do worse than Foot. I would be selling Labour at 150 seats or so as a bet were it not that there could easily be two Labour parties by 2020.

Edit: that is probably the only way David Miliband would be back in with a shout. He would never get a winnable seat in Khorbiyn's Loony Labour party but he could get one in Legacy Labour, I would think.

I agree with much of what you say. If it is the case that the Dear Leader wins the Leadership vote by a mile, the celebrations in the Corbyn camp will indeed be most impressive.

The fact that the celebrations will be just as loud, if not louder, in the other parties will be completely lost on those who believe that political purity is far, far more important than the ability to win an election.

Still, once the leadership contest is out of the way, there will be nowhere for the leadership, and the supporters on here, to hide, and they can be called out on how they expect to win enough seats to win an election.

To win, Labour need to win 100+ and not lose any they hold. Even if the party does not formally split, any deselected MP has to stand again to secure a severance payment and some will probably stand just to say "get it up yie" to their former comrades. They might win some from the LibDems but they are probably as low as they can go. There's no sign of any red tide in Scotland. Boundary changes will probably make it harder too. Labour has a mountain to climb.

So, where are the roughly 100 Conservative seats to go directly to Labour? Labour HAS TO DO THAT - as taking seats from the other parties won't lay a glove on the Conservative majority.

If they expect to take Conservative seats by going further left (such as today's story about increasing taxes to pay for higher than 1% public sector pay rises) they are even more delusional than I thought. :cool:

WR

Fella

Surprised the OP likes Corbyn.

Corbyn has benefitted massively from the housing boom & his Islington pad is worth well over half a mil. In addition he has a gold-plated public sector pension worth £50K a year. In short he fits exactly the profile the OP usually rants loudest about.

westernpromise

Wild_Rover wrote: »

I agree with much of what you say. If it is the case that the Dear Leader wins the Leadership vote by a mile, the celebrations in the Corbyn camp will indeed be most impressive.

The fact that the celebrations will be just as loud, if not louder, in the other parties will be completely lost on those who believe that political purity is far, far more important than the ability to win an election.

Still, once the leadership contest is out of the way, there will be nowhere for the leadership, and the supporters on here, to hide, and they can be called out on how they expect to win enough seats to win an election.

To win, Labour need to win 100+ and not lose any they hold. Even if the party does not formally split, any deselected MP has to stand again to secure a severance payment and some will probably stand just to say "get it up yie" to their former comrades. They might win some from the LibDems but they are probably as low as they can go. There's no sign of any red tide in Scotland. Boundary changes will probably make it harder too. Labour has a mountain to climb.

So, where are the roughly 100 Conservative seats to go directly to Labour? Labour HAS TO DO THAT - as taking seats from the other parties won't lay a glove on the Conservative majority.

If they expect to take Conservative seats by going further left (such as today's story about increasing taxes to pay for higher than 1% public sector pay rises) they are even more delusional than I thought. :cool:

WR

Strictly, it would only need to be 50 Conservative seats because they'd then be down 50 and tied with Labour who'd be up 50. But that's not a majority and as you say, there's no prospect of winning any back in Scotland, nor are there big numbers to win one anywhere else. So practically speaking they've got to win places like my example of Worcester. To do that they need to turn English Tory seats into Labour seats more successfully than Blair did (because Blair still had Scotland and didn't need to to drive as deep into Tory territory as Corbyn must).

I think Corbyn would see it as a win to go down to 70 or 80 seats, as long as they are all held by Trots like himself. He sees no point in centre left government - everyone left of himself is a right-winger indistinguishable from any other right-winger - so his goal might be to establish a higher water mark for Communist MPs than the peak of 2 we saw in 1945. If so then Labour has abandoned any ambition to govern, which means the political climate will move steadily to the right for 20 years as it did from 1979 to 1997.

The next Labourish government will thus be in around 2030 or 2035 and to achieve that will probably be able to be no further left than the 2010-15 Coalition was (I actually thought we were then rather well governed).

Sounds good.

sann420

bobbymotors wrote: »

Oh dear....

No one who is opposed to austerity (otherwise known as 'living within your means') can ever answer it:

Where is the money going to come from?

It is a simple fact of life...never ever borrow money to buy a depreciating asset. So...get a mortgage, avoid HP, don't buy holidays on your credit card, if you run out of money on saturday and don't get paid till monday? - stay in.

So, can anyone tell me the answer? Where's the money coming from?

The money is going to come from NOT WASTING IT ON INVADING AND BOMBING BANANA REPUBLICS THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY FROM BRITAIN FOR NO GOOD REASON.

westernpromise

sann420 wrote: »

The money is going to come from NOT WASTING IT ON INVADING AND BOMBING BANANA REPUBLICS THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY FROM BRITAIN FOR NO GOOD REASON.

The Tories will be coming after this nonsense without pity between now and 2020.

[Deleted User]

I know what you mean, Westernpromise....... I still think it's a bit odd that some of the posters here think that the Dear Leader is a great guy, but none have yet said how they can get to the level of wins against a more centrist Conservative party that they need to have a chance of forming a government.

The left hate it when folk say this, but the UK electorate is no longer interested in the juvenile 'class war, politics of envy and tax the rich till they bleed' nonsense so beloved of the brothers and sisters on the picket lines.

I was brought up in a family of Labour voters and I was in trade unions for over 30 years. Mrs Wild Rover, I think, has been voting Labour or LibDem for years and there's no way either of us could bring ourselves to vote for Corbyn.

Corbyn does a great job of rallying the loyal, but he can't even convince his own party that he could be a PM; how in the name of sanity does he think he is going to convince me to vote for him, let alone convince Conservative voters to do so?

The UK needs a robust and challenging opposition. The Labour Party led by Corbyn isn't providing it, and led by Corbyn, it can't. If it is to be properly held to account, the party in government must fear that there is a chance they could lose power next time round. Does anyone really think that the Conservatives think that's likely?

WR

westernpromise

The Corbynistas have either failed to understand the task they face, or they don't care because they think ideological purity is the most important thing, and don't intend to try to win elections anyway. But the electoral maths really are daunting. As Corbyn no longer has Blair's advantage of having 50-odd Scottish seats in the bag, that means he'll have to win a majority of seats in England and Wales, something not even Blair managed to do.

To get an idea of what sort of seat that means, here are the 40th to 50th most vulnerable Conservative seats from 2015, and the majority:

Keighley 5,597
Montgomeryshire 5,805
Warrington South 5,820
Berwick-upon-Tweed 5,903
Northampton South 6,022
Erewash 6,091
Brecon and Radnorshire 6,092
Crewe and Nantwich 6,238
Hendon 6,255
Dudley South 6,266
Yeovil 6,324

Are Corbyn's policies going to overturn majorities like those and convert the people of Nantwich to tax and spend socialism, where they get the tax and others get the spend?

To put it more sharply still, suppose it was the other way round and the Tories had to overturn 6,000-vote Labour majorities. This gives an idea of how far into Labour territory they'd need to penetrate to do so: they would need to be winning seats like Bassetlaw (Lab Maj 6,308), West Bromwich West (6,369), Bradford East (6,126) and Birmingham Selly Oak (6,067). It doesn't sound likely.

All of those are seats where the winner's on about 48% and the runner-up on 31%. So Labour needs a 9% direct Con to Lab swing from the 2015 result to win those seats. Yet since 2015 Labour has actually gone backwards by about a net 4% - having been 6% behind last year they are now 14% behind. So they need a 13% swing from where they are now, which is simply impossible.

It is often said that we need a strong opposition but I actually disagree. The 1979-87 Tories were most effective when opposed by Foot and Kinnock and least effective when opposed by Blair. Labour fell apart in power when opposed by Cameron; likewise Callaghan fell apart when opposed by Thatcher. The flipside of having an effective opposition is having an ineffective government as a result, possibly for years, that spends all its time reacting to newspaper headlines and opinion polls. I see little risk in 20 years of Tory rule because the headbangers have all been bundled off to UKIP and because to get elected at all any alternative government would have to be much the same.

The imponderable is whether Labour now splits. The MPs and the voters are centre left and the party membership is hard left, so it seems clear that this schism will get formalised at Westminster at some point. Labour is still bitter about the SDP thing 35 years ago but that's because Labour was at 50% in the polls and the SDP ended that. It felt like the SDP cost the party power. It doesn't feel like a similar split today would cost Labour power because they're polling half what the SDP was. I reckon we will soon have two Labour parties with one of them possibly led by David Miliband.

JACKBLACK

ruggedtoast wrote: »

And Mrs RT is just grateful I'm not a member of the Libdems any more. Vince Cable has a lot to say and you always miss the last train.

From the LibDems to the hard left - WOW. Quite a conversion! Lucky Labour Party ;-)