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

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

lol too soon?

Actually Tom's kind of right, neck and neck puts it closer than actually was but still far closer than seats returned ever implied.

Lib Dems lost votes in 97, and took the majority of their increased votes from Labour in the two other Blair elections.

This "Corbyn can't win an election" stuff is getting out of hand, but it also seems like the only thing they can throw at him.

I don't recall it being anything like this with Ed, and I may be misremembering, but I think he was quite obviously not an election-winner from day one.

People are always reacting against what just happened, I guess. But I think that Corbyn would have stuck out in 2010 just as much as he does today.

The anti rhetoric seems to be going towards he will cause mass inflation with his money printing leftism, rather than he will never get elected at the moment.

Didn't see it at the time (I rarely bother to look at threads I haven't already got bookmarked), but the quote that Matt DC posted a week ago is spot-on.

A question: there are various mentions of £3.88 (instead of £3) upthread - why is this?

Also, various people have talked about getting spammed by Labour since signing up. I rounded it up to £5 when I signed up last week and got one acknowledgement e-mail and text message. I've heard nothing since. I've half been expecting them to phone up to quiz me to see if I'm from the SWP or Daily Telegraph.

They might have rolled back in the light of the complaints but i was getting five or six e-mails a day at one point and am still having to block various accounts three years after leaving.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/05/andy-burnham-renationalise-railways-labour-leadership

Corbyn pushing Burnham to the left a bit.

http://i.imgur.com/KplrnlW.png

I'm incredibly sceptical about polls, and YouGov polls in particular, but the gender balance here is interesting.

multiple x-posts

iI'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)

― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, 29 July 2015 08:59 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry, Andrew, very slow to respond - yes, it was partly a Dune thing, but also that the notion of parties going through a conscious rebuilding process, where they don't necessarily expect to be 'competitive' (god, where'd i get that from? the cricket i suspect) for some years, surely isn't a realistic option. parties will jostle for public view and must do so continuously. You hope that they have enough structural intelligence to do that in a way that involves distinguishing themselves from the opposition, while staying relevant (another bad word), rather than trying to win exactly the same arguments in exactly the same way ('managerial competence') over the same small terroirs of swing public opinion. But clearly they don't and haven't.

Separately, Matt DC's point about ownership/rental seems crucial. Question though, as I'm totally ignorant of this sort of thing: ownership represents a huge one-off transfer of wealth to a part of the population that isn't going to age out - or die out - before their children require places to live, so you'd expect rental/ownership levels to become more equal, as you say. However, at some point, that wealth will be transferred to a segment of the population (obviously leaving a significant number still f'ed). Is your point that by this stage, because the original valuation of property was so obscenely unconnected with, well, anything really, that it will have significantly devalued and therefore realising that 'wealth' will result in generational loss? But wouldn't that be accompanied by a drop in property prices? Or is my question ill-founded?

Also, that Burnham thing being spun as renationalisation - letting public bid on expiry of contracts doesn't exactly feel quite what it's been painted as in the mainstream media.

I was just hearing more of the same sour griping on the radio about entryism, left-wingers, saboteurs, one-issue mischief makers, a party isn't a bus etc. I forgot who it was but he was incredulous that someone joining Labour to vote for Corbyn said they wouldn't vote for Kendall if she was the leader, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Given that Corbyn is probably going to piss this contest I was wondering how can they steal this result off him? Are they just going to lose a load of his votes or declare him a void runner?

I didn't realise quite what an awful state the labour party was in until I joined

They barred Ken Loach from voting as an entryist.

I'm still not convinced Corbyn will win but he'll come close enough and be so far ahead on first preferences whoever does will look ridiculous.

whoever wins will be ridiculous. since this election started these middle class Tory lite fucks have demonstrated exactly why they'll never let the party go and who their real enemy is, and i've never seen them more energized than fighting to keep socialism out

https://orderorder.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-12-at-18-48-26.png?w=540&h=134

sorry this is making me irrationally radge and i wd like to apologize for classist slurs

Fucking Guardian: a) this fake story at all and b) "Guardian has been told by sources present that the meeting raised more questions than it answered, and at least three of the camps are in touch with each other to discuss their concerns about the running of the contest." Sadly the source's X-ray goggles failed at that point and we may never know which three camps those were.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/11/labour-leadership-campaign-teams-reassure-them-integrity-ballot

All we need is Tony threatening to set fire to himself if Corbyn wins to get a proper 75% landslide.

Blair has bigger concerns to worry about. The Chilcot report could drop at any time over the next few years and I'd rather have someone with clean hands and principles leading Labour when it does, because *that* will be the saving of the party.

I am (probably naively) hanging on to the possibility of a Corbyn victory, putting faith in betting markets and polls is fraught with disappointment but the indications are that he is a real contender. I don't know shit about about the type of subterfuge that will be employed against him or the voting system but I still live in hope.

Thinking about Ken Loach getting blocked as an entryist, it reminded me of a 90's interview with him. He said something like "it took me five years to see through Wilson but I had Blair's number after five minutes"

if the labour party are heading for annihilation, then these blairite scumbags and their empty politics of fear are as big a reason as anything. they're literally just saying "the name of our party isn't the tories" - that's all they have. total scum and as bad as anything in government right now.

the flailing desperation of it is v reminiscent of the us republicans or something...

it's bizarre.

idk if they don't sabotage themselves more with each more desperate step tho?

sure they make themselves look more and more like what they are, but you get the feeling they'd break the party up rather than allow it to fall into the hands of dangerous lefties anyway

Oh I've no doubt about that

can understand loach not being given a vote

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/27/ken-loach-labour-failed-left-new-party

there is a surreal - or more properly: nonsensical - element to the leadership debate in that, other than corbyn, the candidates want to commit themselves to as little as possible. to utterly hide their ideas and avoid playing their hand - they'll make their policy announcements once they're elected and have done enough market research in key marginal to know what their positions should be. they don't stand for anything, other than electability and vehement opposition to corbyn.

Couldn't care less about Ken Loach not getting a vote tbh.