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

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

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGK3_2LW0AArIiS.jpg

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

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
https://mobile.twitter.com/rupephoto/status/623789573471105024

misread that url as 'rudephoto' and was kind of disappointed after clicking through

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/im-more-convinced-ever-jeremy-corbyn-going-win

At one contest there were just 25 ballots: nine for Jeremy Corbyn, eight for Andy Burnham, four for Yvette Cooper, and one simply reading “Fuck Kendall”.

On David Cameron: "The most facile, superficial prime minister there's ever been. He just shoots from the hip. He is false. He makes one-off commitments and cannot deliver."

On Boris Johnson: "His is a joke... a public school upper class twit. He plays well in London because they like a cheeky chappie. Can you present Boris Johnson in Preston, in Burnley, in Manchester? No, they just think he's an arsehole."

On why Tony Blair went into Iraq: "...because he fell in love with George Bush".

Any chance of Lord Sewel running for the Labour leadership?

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/28/labour-candidates-attack-predictable-out-of-touch-election-campaign

A devastatingly frank attack on “Labour’s narrow, predictable and out of touch” 2015 election campaign is to be launched on Tuesday by seven of the party’s candidates who failed to win critical swing seats in England in May.

In a joint open letter to the party, they say: “From thousands of doorstep conversations we all heard repeatedly our former leadership was not taken seriously while our purpose and policies failed to resonate with voters.”

The campaign, the authors claim, addressed only “the needy and greedy”, leaving the rest ignored. The party had nothing to say on welfare, business creation or immigration, “sounding as if it was on the side of those that don’t work”.

Surprised Rowenna Davis signed this.

It turns out she is one of the coordinators behind the Blue Labour movement so not a surprise after all.

Ha ha, you all lost, now piss off out of the Labour Party.

at least they have values! horrible, horrible values.

I wonder whether people will still be saying that on the doorstep in five years' time when in-work benefits have been obliterated? I wouldn't be remotely surprised if Labour try to fight 2015's election over again in 2020, but it's probably not that sensible given that these are the exact voters the Tories are targeting.

http://www.newstatesman.com/helen-lewis/2015/07/echo-chamber-social-media-luring-left-cosy-delusion-and-dangerous-insularity

Haven't heard the term "virtue-signalling" before, and I'm sad I have now come across it.

Didn't get past the first paragraph tbh.

She is being melodramatic but ok ;-)