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

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.

corbyn would be an electoral disaster, im fairl sure. but what are the chances of say andy burnham being elected pm and putting forward a program of legislation that pursues progressive aims, bolsters public services, protects the environment, etc? it's zero obviously.

A friend of a friend went off on her Facebook wall - I'd actually been not looking into Corbyn's policies just because there didn't seem any reason to considering his opposition, but he was aghast at "renationalising railways, getting the Bank of England to print money for infrastructure projects, closer ties to Russia, closer ties to known terrorist groups* and a general soft response to terrorism in general, higher taxes for the rich (who he seems to define as anyone on more than £50k) etc" and I thought oh good, I'm fine with all of that.

*IE he once described Hamas and Hezbollah as "our friends" in a specific context.

The main reason he was a hate figure in the late eighties and early nineties was his willingness to meet with Sinn Fein to look at political solutions to the NI situation prior to the ceasefire being announced.

if he wins the leadership - he won't - we'll be in for the kind of spectacular media vilification that only those of us old enough to remember politics in the 80s will have seen before. the current smear campaign will look like nothing.

xp Which the government of the time was up to back then, also do you remember several Northern Irish actors made bank throughout that time by dubbing their voices over SF/IRA figures because Thatcher had banned their real voices? As a London newbie I found that really, really bizarre.

NV, why do you think he won't win? Shenanigans?

in the end i suspect the "anybody but Corbyn" campaign will have enough strength to stop him. and failing that, shenanigans.

on a lighter note, here's some footage of the government's Sinn Fein voice ban

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6UhXivPyw4

I'm old enough to remember the donkey jacket. I suppose the difference now is that "national institutions" like The Graun + the beeb will also be chipping in with the right wing press.

Yvette Cooper: “So tell me what you think is more radical. Bringing back clause IV, spending billions of pounds we haven’t got switching control of some power stations from a group of white middle-aged men in an energy company to a group of white middle-aged men in Whitehall, as Jeremy wants? Or extending SureStart, giving mothers the power and confidence to transform their own lives and transform their children’s lives for years to come?

shocking fake-feminism here

looooooool omg

IKR? I don't doubt she is actually a feminist but that statement is a bullshit remix of identity politics.

Corbyn's female support is c. 60 per cent of his total because women are worse off under austerity policies than men.

I was listening to Burnham trying to play it cool earlier and project his own brand of "radicalism" with added "economic credibility". Doing it without slagging off Corbyn was his trick, not much of a trick when you sound just as hollow + fucking desperate as the others

This > "corbyn would be an electoral disaster, im fairl sure. but what are the chances of say andy burnham being elected pm and putting forward a program of legislation that pursues progressive aims, bolsters public services, protects the environment, etc? it's zero obviously."

Except I'm not really sure that he would be any more of an electoral disaster than anyone else currently aiming for the job.

i used to work for SureStart, i'll try and explain why Yvette Cooper is a liar and a hypocrite later

welp

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/13/guardian-view-labour-leadership-choice-yvette-cooper-jeremy-corbyn

also, i joined the labour party

winning over tory voters vs winning over people who didn't bother/couldn't bring themselves to vote

/:

Idk how you can expect a country to vote for you if you are struggling to command much more than 15% of your own party's backing. Cooper might be the safest pair of hands as PM but her inability to put forward any kind of case being leader is damning.