Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

I would say so, pretty sure living in Scotland during the referendum would have driven me into the Unionist camp.

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/4AFC/production/_84369191_84369186.jpg

This photo is amazing, it manages to capture each candidate so perfectly - incredulity from Cooper, fence-sitting "hmmm, I'm going to look like I think you have a point there" from Burnham, full on vicious contempt from Kendall.

Corbyn 17% ahead on first preference votes

still don't believe Corbyn will win this. if he does, the carnage is gonna be exquisite.

whatever happens, a whole swathe of Labour MPs are going to have on record their complete contempt for the values and aspirations of a sizeable cohort of their own party's members

wd dearly love this to be Ragnarok but I'm sure cowardice and temporizing will prevail

Corbyn already pointing out that maybe what Labour is waiting for is the Chilcot inquiry result.

Corbyn's plan that the leader will have to be confirmed every 12 months gives him a good exit strategy. Could work relatively well: year or two of outright attack while they prep an election-winner for 2020.

I think that's almost exactly what the idea is - he didn't see himself as a potential winner but now he is I find it very doubtful he sees himself as a potential Prime Minister. But this has revealed a massive disconnect between the PLP and the rest of the party, if only to confirm they aren't prepared to sacrifice every principle for the sake of getting into power. A leadership election two or three years down the line would have a markedly different tenor, I think, although there would obviously be at least one Blairite true believer involved, there'd be a wider selection of actual ideas involved.

FWIW I don't think anyone on the ballot looks particularly electable and given the choice between failing with some principles and failing without any, I'd go for the latter every time. The wider public will smell bullshit with the latter approach as well, Labour could adopt every single Tory policy and still not win.

Whichever cockfarmer it was who was whining last week, "we cannot just allow our party, a credible party of government, to be hijacked in this summer of madness" showed a breathtaking lack of self-awareness. a) I think two successive election defeats against a govt as transparently unloved as this one rather proves that you are not a credible party of government, and b) if you move to unseat a popular choice you don't agree with then you are the people doing the hijacking.

All this stuff is usually couched in some bollocks about "meeting the electorate where they are, not where we want them to be", which is nonsense really given that the Tories never really bother with this.

it would be refreshing to have someone treat being the leader of opposition as an important end in itself, rather than as a platform from which to send smoke signals to the electorate

I wonder when one of the losers is gonna crack and start whinging about entryism distorting the election, either from the left or the right

the state of labour at the moment is actually embarrassing. they should have appointed a leader after the general election. this public floundering is ludicrous. they owe it to people to mount some kind of credible opposition, not give the tories a free pass to do whatever until labour are done self-flagellating.

also the whole process is like transparency with a shit in it

hard to mount a credible opposition if your MPs don't really oppose anything the government wants to do

This is the thing, if the public actually wants an eviscerated welfare state, then we should have a Tory government. The idea that Labour might have a duty or responsibility to the millions of people who DON'T want that doesn't seem to resonate with them at all.

they seem to think that the fact a slim majority voted for a different party and their policies means that they must now become that party. like some of them, i don't know what they are because they aren't politicians. there is no belief system left.

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/07/22/tony-blair-is-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-jeremy-corbyn

This is broadly on-the-money. The confusion he highlights re: Andy Burnham was also present in Ed Miliband in a big way, despite the apparently determination of Blairites to view him as a traditional left candidate.

Blair on hand to lend his trademark guidance:

http://i.imgur.com/h7buH9u.jpg

It's also worth pointing out that Blair won three elections in pretty much the most benign economic, political and competitive conditions, and not once did he go into an election pledging to cut public spending.

He was also up against a succession of useless Tory leaders.

... as you say, benign political conditions.

Actually what I mean to say was the most benign economic, political and competitive conditions ever experienced by a British PM. I mean who has ever had it easier?

an inanimate carbon rod would have got elected for labour after 20 years of tory rule. the same will be true for the tories now for a while. the british system is incredibly fucked.

Macmillan possibly? (xp)

I think the fear of the animate carbon rod that was Neil Kinnock is probably formative in a lot of Blairites.

gosh yes that awful man with his socialism and his Welshness

will give Kinnock some credit for adding to the gaiety of nations with this kind of thing:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/03/27/sadiq-khan-eric-pickles-dying_n_5042499.html

(tbh I normally find 'Eric Pickles is fat' jokes to be kind of cheap and crass, but Kinnock writing a letter where he wishes for Pickles to did of a heart attack, Khan tweeting the letter apparently not considering that there could be anything controversial about this and every UK news outlet reporting the story in a completely dead-pan serious fashion was hilarious at just about every level imo)

kinnock's original letter was funny because nowhere did he say "eric pickles will die", he just told khan to invite pickles on the marathon and said it would provoke an election, and our minds make the leap to suggest, oh yes, pickles died because he is unhealthy and it is a marathon = HOW COMEDY WORKS

http://www.visitcardiff.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Barry-Cryer.jpg

agree, Khan having make an embarrassing apology after it gets written up likr this:

Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice minister who is now considering running for Mayor of London, published a letter on Twitter written by Lord Kinnock, the former Labour leader, that suggested Mr Pickles would die if he ran a marathon.

adds another level to the comedy though, I think

is 'HOW COMEDY WORKS' followed by that Barry Cryer picture a meme? if not is should be

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/1/10/McBain_-_Let%27s_Get_Silly.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130813194642

THE MEME BEGINS HERE

and given the choice between failing with some principles and failing without any, I'd go for the latter every time.

Erm....the former?

i'm assuming that was a typo, right?

Hah, yes it was a typo.

or just labour party policy eh eh

better to die on your knees than live on your feet

If the leadership candidates weren't bad enough, the London Mayoral candidates compound the misery.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/24/liz-kendall-lord-falconer-accuses-dismissing-women-labour-leadership-race

is it falling into conspiracy theorist territory to think that this Times piece was given a misleading headline intentionally so that Kendall could take the opportunity to attack Burnham's campaign? the actual quote from Falconer seems totally innocuous...or did he say some more stuff that actually justifies the accusations of sexism?

Kendall believes the comments from Charles Falconer, the shadow lord chancellor, about her and Yvette Cooper – reported in the Times under the headline “Women not tough enough to lead Labour’’ – had sexist undertones.

Falconer was quoted as saying: “Neither Yvette nor Liz can steer the Labour party through the challenging few years ahead when we need a leader who can reach out to all wings of our party and provide unity. As a result, both Liz and Yvette are unlikely to beat Jeremy [Corbyn, the fourth leadership candidate].”

I cannot see who Kendall and Cooper are supposed to appeal to. They are both awful cynics and I'm pretty sure Kendall is a genuinely terrible person. I can't really see who Burnham is supposed to appeal to now either. In spite of his egregious abstention, made worse by his back-pedalling, I don't think he's all that bad. He's not evil. They are all three essentially blatant careerists who lack vision. Kendall and Cooper really are opportunist complainers though.

Ps I'm drunk

The gang of three are all as gratingly awful as each other to me, listening to any of them talk has a thermobaric weapon type effect of drawing the oxygen out of the room. But I suppose Kendall's blatant Toryness + inability to mask her mean spiritedness shades it for me, wouldn't vote for any of them.

find this whole contest so depressing, I like Corbyn, but is there any way that him winning (or even coming a respectable second) would not lead to complete Labour party meltdown and civil war? maybe that would be a good thing thing in the long run, idk, but I can't see any outcome that doesn't involve tory hegemony for the forseeable future. I guess Cooper seems the best chance for the part to not fall apart, Burnham seems useless, Kendall victory surely the death knell for any hope of the Labour part as a vaguely leftist force

Kendall seems so far to the right even a description of "Blairite" looks misleading. Burnham, Cooper and Miliband are / were all pretty much Blairite for the most part, Kendall seems to lack even that wonky moral compass. She's also a terrible communicator. If you want to propose a platform that is out of step with almost everyone in your grass roots party, you need a more convincing sales pitch than whining 'but we lost the last election'.

Burnham seems fairly personable in comparison but i'm not convinced he isn't an idiot .

Cooper is she's extremely capable and intelligent as an individual but either unable or unwilling to give any sense of what she'd do as a leader. I think the idea her game plan is to not say anything controversial and let the others dig their own graves is probably correct. She'd probably make a fairy effective PM but idk whether she'd be a good leader of the opposition.

Corbyn might not be electable but, at this stage, i doubt any of them will be for another two terms so you may as well have someone willing to articulate an alternative platform. He's not as Marxist as the press is keen to make out - most of his ideas are fairly solid-Smith-era Labour, he has been a decent and principled constituency MP for decades and speaks more directly and more honestly than the rest of them put together. His presence in the race, even if he has always known he has no real chance, has been effective in shaming the rest of them.

I think it's very obvious who Kendall is meant to appeal to, her problem is there aren't anywhere near as many of those people in the Labour Party as she thinks there are. Say what you like about 1994 Blair he could at least sell his own policies to his own party.

It's actually quite difficult on the basis of this campaign to understand what Yvette Cooper actually stands for because as far as I can see she hasn't really talked about policy at all. I don't really believe she actually believes a lot of the guff that's coming out right now, but there's close association with Gordon Brown which I suspect is electoral suicide.

Burnham appears to be tacking slightly left in the softest least committal way possible. He also just doesn't appear to be particularly bright. Also I've seen it mentioned that his (entirely laudable) involvement with the Justice for the 96 campaign means that at some point he will need to choose between facing the full wrath of The Sun or alienating much of Liverpool and looking like the world's worst sellout in the process.

Basically, they're all three unelectable, so may as well go for the other unelectable guy who won't triangulate the party into irrelevance.

Perhaps a year of Corbyn in charge might help realign what the Labour party wants to stand for. Then they can replace him with someone who might be more 'electable', but now leading a party with a clearer vision of what it wants to be (and that vision being less like 'the Tories but not in power'). It's not as if they're operating as any kind of opposition as it stands.

Andy Turnham seems wooden and awkward - but I'm not sure where all this 'not very bright' is coming from.