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

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 ;-)

lots of theorising about the practice of voting for who you most agree with

https://www.byline.com/column/11/article/209

This is good, until the last couple of paragraphs at least.

It takes epic levels of stupidity to turn 150,000 new activists, paying money to join your party inspired by one of the leadership candidates, into some sort of crisis because they're the wrong sort of leftie. There is not a party in the world that wouldn't be cheering. It also takes an astounding lack of political antennae to be blind to the fact that, by acting with such naked hostility towards them, you precipitate a split whatever the result.

All this shows a profound lack of understanding about how the political landscape is shaped by all parties, not just the one governing. See how UKIP have defined the European debate. Observe how a young SNP MPs speech can go viral. A vigorous opposition that articulates a clear alternative, can be infinitely more useful that an "electable" one that rolls over on every issue. An effective opposition is an integral part of our democracy and has been sadly absent. We need someone to drag the landscape to the left or, at least, halt its inexorable Thatcherite slide to the right.

To not understand that, is to give free rein to Tories to shape the narrative of the next five years, then win anyway. Just like they did last time, by seeding the idea that a global financial crisis was down to Labour's spending. Not speaking out against that, or not doing it soon enough and vocally enough, is how you end up carving bullshit into headstones a month before the election. If you lack substance, you are de facto reduced to gimmicks.

All this is not to say that I don't think Corbyn is electable. There is a deliberate conflation of "electability" not being someone's primary or striking quality, with them being unelectable. The real question is, I think, why would anyone vote for someone whose only purported virtue is "electability" when they explicitly state they will follow the same destructive, divisive, degrading economic policies?

that last paragraph is hard to parse but on the whole OTM.

What's also gestured at but not explicitly stated there is - if Burnham/Cooper/Kendall are so attractive to the electorate, then why aren't thousands of people paying their £3.88 and signing up to vote for them?

wish i could put into words my feelings re this chaos in the same manner as matt dc did in his post cos that totally hits my groove.

thank you MDC.

and yeah, this whole thing re "people signing up to vote for the left = bunch of nutters" is just seriously messed up, and rather depressing.

Matt's posts on here have been consistently good and he doesn't round down like everyone else. But tbh some of his posts are making me want to actually pay the £3.88.

This is an excellent and pragmatic take on the whole thing https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/what-hope-for-labour-and-left-election-80s-and-‘aspiration’

Hmm you may have to copy and paste the link

That's really fucking good.

think it's very good on blair's finance capital project. There's a retrospective inevitability to the theory - John Smith is entirely absent - and leads to statements like this, which seems to me an entirely bogus view of how political landscapes form and parties develop:

But the key thing to remember here is that the overall lesson of all this history is that there are no quick fixes. It would have taken 20 years to rebuild the Labour movement after the defeats of '83/'84 (’83 election, miners’ strike). But 20 years is only a fraction of most people’s lifetimes these days, and if we’d gone that route instead of hoping that one more election victory, one more set of compromises with Murdoch, would sort everything out for us, then Labour might not be in the disastrous state it’s in today.

Hmm.. That just happens to be the paragraph I quoted when I shared it on FB. I'm really not old enough or educated enough to remember the nuances of eighties UK politics, so the essay was quite eye-opening in that respect. Fizzles, could you expand a bit if you have time?

I'll speculate that he means this isn't Dune, that there isn't any long term in Modern Politics - though that may of course be news for campaigners for marriage equality, Scottish independence, or indeed the Lib Dems.

(the paragraph is also modified by one that points out that it took 14 years of flailing to get back to power anyway)

If Corbyn were willing to argue for a change to our antiquated voting system, to work openly with the Greens, Lib Dems, SNP and Plaid Cymru, to tell people the truth that it might well take ten years to build a movement that would really be able to change things, then he might really be able to make things happen. Unfortunately that doesn’t look very likely - it seems more likely he would just do what Labour did in ’83, and go to the country on a radical manifesto which the papers would destroy, and which people would understand intuitively he could not deliver on anyway (cf Greece), because you can’t deliver a radical programme when you haven’t spent years building up support for it in communities up and down the country. That’s not because he’s a bad guy. But I haven’t seen any evidence that he has the kind of strategic imagination necessary to break the deadlock for the left in England.

Also Corbyn has v few people currently in Parliament that are willing to work with him full stop, or people that have any of that kind of long-term strategy.

i think that's being taken into account though. he's saying that the only way this will work is by convincing people to start thinking in the long-term, which is almost impossible considering the post-Blair climate of thinking which appears to concentrate almost entirely on winning subsequent elections.

Also the number of people willing to work with him will be a function of how close the leadership election turns out to be.

nah, it will be a function of how committed to being right wing shitheels his fellow MPs are. i think the answer's "quite committed".

to work openly with the...Lib Dems

lol which one?

The policy I associate most with 'aspiration', which the article fails to pick up on, is the 1979 Tory flagship Right To Buy. As Heseltine said at the time, "There is in this country a deeply ingrained desire for home ownership. The Government believe that this spirit should be fostered. It reflects the wishes of the people, ensures the wide spread of wealth through society, encourages a personal desire to improve and modernize one's own home, enables parents to accrue wealth for their children and stimulates the attitudes of independence and self-reliance that are the bedrock of a free society." That, to me, is one of the neatest summaries of what Kendall, Burnham, Cooper et al *think* they're saying when they blindly spout 'aspiration'.

And it's a fair point to say that fundamentally changed the game in a lot of 80s traditional Labour communities. The beneficiaries of the policy were, at heart, the core Labour vote and whereas they might not have swung wildly to Conservative voting (in fact, in Scotland the vote coalesced around Labour to the point Malcolm Rifkind was the sole Tory MP in an election winning party) it began the thought slide that maybe they weren't all that bad. And that slide allowed the recent move we've seen to a jump in working class communities from left-ish to UKIP which the article identifies; perhaps this should have come as that much of a surprise really though as they're the actual people who might feel that their job could be taken by an immigrant, that the family housed in their street for free don't deserve to be there, that they can't get in to see the doctor because it's just too busy. This is perhaps the very nature of the problem - that the hypothesising over what *should* be done is by people with no real connection to the circumstances of the working class voters. So they romanticise that they're not racists (see also the Blackshirt's targeting of mining communities such as Grimethorpe, as also noted by George Orwell), that they're not sexist, that they're not homophobes, that they are 'we' and so are opposed to the 'not we' by default. In Scotland, the Gordon McMaster scandal should have dispelled all that - instead Helen Liddell got made Scottish Secretary.

The sad truth is that in my experience the overwhelming voting trend in the working class was to vote Labour *because*. No, or very little, thought went into it and similarly little was shared politically with the party. But your dad had voted that way, and maybe your granddad had; the caveat there because despite what people kid themselves Lab and Con voting was largely neck and neck in Scotland until Blair, although the seats won failed to reflect that once the 60s started.

My only real complaint with the article is the continued use of "Tory press". In Scotland at least the so called Labour press was just as bad, I remember the strikers at Timex and Jockey both being called scum on the front pages of the Maxwell-owned Daily Record.

I also think another potential factor is the rise of personality politics. Michael Foot was perpetually being portrayed as scruffy, and that photo of him at the funeral did huge amounts of damage. Kinnock tried to ride the personality wave, but just looked like a tit during the 'expulsion of the Militants' speech and will ultimately be remembered for falling over on the beach, having a slightly fruity wife, and being photoshopped into a lightbulb (which he still claimed was the only thing that lost him the 92 election as late as Alastair Campbell's memoirs).

Its a good piece, puts a lot of the history together in one place, neatly. Ultimtely its pointing to an English Syriza/Podemos type of coalition.

No Lib Dems tho', we are Britishes. xp

The new intake of Labour MPs seems markedly different to the last few - a lot of them rebelled on child tax credit cuts and that group seemed to be where a lot of the Corbyn nominations were coming from. Any Corbyn shadow cabinet could end up being quite youthful (but also potentially containing a new leader/future PM). Fresh faces are sorely needed because they're getting into real landfill territory right now.

If you forget 1979, during my lifetime a sitting government has only been ejected after a house price crash, which I think explains the timidity, short-sightedness and destructive nature of housing policy for virtually the whole of that time. I think we're heading towards a generational watershed here though, if only because home ownership rates have been trending downwards quite quickly for some time. The closer we get to 50:50 owner-occupied vs rental, the closer we get to a sea-change in voter attitudes.

I was wrong about the Rifkind thing there, it was just a collapse of seats to 10.

I think we're heading towards a generational watershed here though, if only because home ownership rates have been trending downwards quite quickly for some time. The closer we get to 50:50 owner-occupied vs rental, the closer we get to a sea-change in voter attitudes.

Yeah def. A big part of what papers like the Mail jump-off from is housing prices, and they drill down from there.

just finished reading aldo's post. good stuff, man.

Yes, although nearly FP'd for giving me terrible Helen Liddell flashbacks..

Lab and Con voting was largely neck and neck in Scotland until Blair, although the seats won failed to reflect that once the 60s started.

Depends on your definition of neck and neck. Labour's lead over the Tories has only dropped below 5% once in General Elections since 1959, and there were double digit leads before Blair, it was 18% in 1987.

The LibDems must have eaten into that quite a bit during the Blair years?

more like drunk into it