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

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 ;-)

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?