Go on then, who do you reckon will win? The Labour Leadership contest, that is...

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Andy Needs your support

that capital N is pissing me off

i was listening to this Liz Kendall profile on R4 last week and there was this "She used to love Public Enemy when she was a student and does like rap music" element which seemed very forced and made her seem even more of a robotic Blairite rather than whatever the desired effect was meant to be.

The Mirror had her admitting to liking hip hop :/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32927139

Is the only reason the unions are backing Burham because everyone else is somehow, mysteriously, worse or is there more to it than that?

is male, still affects non-RP accent

For better or worse the last leadership contest at least felt like a contest between different approaches and beliefs. In terms of policy and approach the difference between this lot is extremely minimal.

I don't really see how anyone could have come through the last seven or so years and not concluded that the state and business are interdependent but it would be refreshing for at least one candidate to admit that perhaps "business" and "wealth creators" aren't actually monoliths that should be treated as all brilliant or all evil depending on whether or not your name is Ed Miliband. The very question of whether or not you're "pro-business" or not is reductive to the point of being moronic.

yeah even "stakeholders" was better than what we have now

still think that developing the idea of businesses as part of a democratic system and therefore being subject to a level of democratic control wd be a less threatening way of selling the public on the notion that capital shdn't perhaps be allowed to just do whatever the fuck it wants

but, y'know, why bother, clearly what Labour needs to do is allow wealth creators to run the country as they see fit and play up to anti-chav and anti-immigrant prejudice as much as possible

You can achieve anything, as long as you're white.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/29/liz-kendall-will-back-white-working-class-young

She praised one primary school for having an “aspirations week”, saying such programmes were needed to “teach girls and boys, particularly from white working class communities, about the chances in life they may not even know exist – like being an engineer, a chemist and even leader of the Labour party”.

Kendall also mentioned the need to help white working-class communities, during a journalists’ gathering in Westminster last week, when she said Labour would still “be doing the best for kids, particularly in white-working class communities” in 2020.

"Aspiration is not the preserve of those who shop at John Lewis. Aspiration is universal; it is felt by Asda and Aldi shoppers too."

what does this mean

shops as signifiers of class smdh

Labour party is in a mess trying to appeal to middle class Tories and racist Kippers and anti-austerity Scots all at the same time.

depressing that a putative labour leader would rather trot out nonsense non-signifiers than actually say the word "class"

aspiration means never having to say you're working class

what's horrible/stupid about the aspiration mantra is the way it ignores inequality, ignores corporate responsibility and ignores environmental fragility in the name of a soulless acquisitiveness, an ever expanding frontier of prosperity built on nothing and oblivious to the damage it leaves in its wake

This thing they call aspiration, do they just mean that feeling of wanting a payrise then wondering how easily you spend it all if you get one?

aspiration to shop at Asda instead of Lidl, with dreams of John Lewis and their excellent warranties on electrical goods.

what's horrible/stupid about the aspiration mantra is the way it ignores inequality, ignores corporate responsibility and ignores environmental fragility in the name of a soulless acquisitiveness, an ever expanding frontier of prosperity built on nothing and oblivious to the damage it leaves in its wake

and the way it positions selfishness as a positive. aspiration for YOU and YOUR self-enclosed family unit to be richer and higher up the ladder and fuck everyone else

and so conformist. that infographic of life milestones that was going round the other week haunts me and this feels like part & parcel of that mindset

yes - it's utterly contemptuous of the voters it pretends to flatter

And yet people feel good assuming they deserve to be more well off than others.

"Labour party is in a mess trying to appeal to middle class Tories and racist Kippers and anti-austerity Scots all at the same time."

Nah this is inaccurate and unfair I think.

They don't appear to give a shit about anti-austerity Scots.

True - but they do somehow have to get those 40 seats back

In any broadly representative democracy, as long as every citizen has the vote, there will always be demand and pressure for redistribution of wealth, because votes are distributed more evenly than wealth. The Tories have recognised this for as long as I've been alive, and with a brief period of aberration (say from about 1997-2005 or so) they've been largely adept at dealing with it.

The politics of aspiration are largely about offsetting that pressure. People with money are, by and large, going to vote one way or the other according to their levels of security, fear, intelligence and empathy, but 'aspiration' in the post-Thatcherite sense isn't really about addressing them. It's about convincing enough of the people without much money that they are more likely to be able to help themselves than any left-of-centre government is going to help them. A lot of those people will vote Tory, enough of the rest will just decide there's no point and not bother to vote at all, or take their vote to UKIP or whoever. Either way the pressure is off the Tories. It's an elephant trap that Labour have fallen into time and time again and just repeatedly honking 'aspiration!' and 'John Lewis' like a load of flapping fairground puppet heads isn't really going to address that.

It's also why I'm sceptical of people who assume that the Did Not Vote contingent is a broadly left-leaning mass that could be harnessed by a party with some actual social-democratic policies.

The thing that none of these cocks will address is that not once did Blair go into a General Election promising to cut spending, in fact it was usually the complete opposite. If they accept the myth of Labour overspending pre-2008, then that necessarily means distancing themselves from Blair, not moving closer to him. Blair himself appears to have nothing to say on the issue of austerity as far as I can tell.

'Aspiration' is particularly meaningless in this context because there's ample evidence that enough voters don't trust Labour to run any kind of economy, aspirational or otherwise.

Right, that's Liz Kendall off the list: Don't need another leader with foot in gob syndrome.

(the other being Cameron, btw)

Also the logical endpoint of the politics of aspiration is the sort of the enormous credit bubble that helped break the UK economy in 2007-08, since the main driver of achieving material aspiration is borrowing today against tomorrow's imagined income, and credit booms are generally a symptom of inequality. If you really want to address Labour economic mismanagement, you need to start with aspiration. Suspect most of them are too stupid to realise this.

xxxp will likely be a lot less than 40 seats by 2020 tbf

Mark are you a paid-up member of the Labour Party? If so, what are the factors that will actually influence your vote?

I follow some Andy4Leader type ppl on twitter and am now getting this stuff retweeted into my feed around 700 times a day

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mature political discourse is the best thing about living in a democracy

'every person, every family, every business – whoever they are, wherever they come from, my Labour Party will exist to help them all get off' - Andy Burnham, 29 May 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHGyokI6fMU

twenty twee positions on which one might stand

full marks obv

Hello, person who asked me a question upthread, answer to q1 is no.

Blimey, Jeremy Corbyn!

does Corbyn have any chance at all of getting on the ballot? I remember that Abbott only just managed in 2010

didn't Ed Miliband provide her with the final nomination she required?

David Miliband nominated her IIRC.

Corbyn in:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/15/labour-leftwinger-jeremy-corbyn-wins-place-on-ballot-for-leadership

great, now the party can have a proper debate with the guy they patronisingly and begrudgingly had to be begged to invite in at the last second

wd like to remind all Luddites, Trots and ne'er-do-wells that you can become a registered supporter of the Party for 3 quid, and this gives you a vote in the leadership election

New list:

Andy Burnham
Yvette Cooper
Jeremy Corbyn
Tristram Hunt
Liz Kendall
Chuka Umunna

https://twitter.com/JohnMannMP/status/610403164714627072

So to demonstrate our desire never to win again, Islington's Jeremy Corbyn is now a Labour leadership candidate.

Mann majority - 8k
Corbyn majority - 21k

ohmygod he made me post a Tweet

Annoying "eeeh I'm reet Northern me" blowhards like John Mann can only be a good thing, well done, Jeremy!

Because it's a Friday afternoon and it's sunny outside I had nothing better to do than watch the first half of the leadership "debate", which basically amounted to a string of platitudes punctuated by someone occasionally patronising Jeremy Corbyn.

Liz Kendall really is odious.

...and looks like a really gormless supply teacher.

Poll of general public and Labour party members in Standard yesterday with both sets of responders giving Tony Blair massive lead on previous leader they want the new leader to most resemble.

Probably not a coincidence I dreamt I was graffitiing FUCKING TORY SCUM and GREEDY BASTARDS this morning, and woke up really really angry.

Obi Wan Corbyn
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