57.1 %
4.8 %
28.6 %
9.5 %
Youngian wrote: ↑Tue Sep 28, 2021 9:33 pm Feels like one last big hurrah.I wish it did. Taking the high point of this stuff last time as about 1981, 4 years later there were still lots of people holding office for Labour, let alone among the membership, who seriously thought obeying the law on setting rates should be optional for a party of government.
Oblomov wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 10:03 am Forgive my ignorance but why is independent MP Jeremy Bernard Corbyn gatecrashing a Labour party conference?Can you imagine the absolute business everyone would make out of it if he was barred? He'd be right outside with a megaphone, being enthusiastically relayed by every prick in the universe. Better to let him in and hope he stays in the background. At least that way his attempts to play the martyr are slightly undermined, not that it really matters to his fan club or the Tories.
Oblomov wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 10:03 am Forgive my ignorance but why is independent MP Jeremy Bernard Corbyn gatecrashing a Labour party conference?It's part of his seemingly endless greatest hits tour:
Crabcakes wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 11:58 amGood piece, comments BTL are dire. Particular lowlight is this one:Oblomov wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 10:03 am Forgive my ignorance but why is independent MP Jeremy Bernard Corbyn gatecrashing a Labour party conference?It's part of his seemingly endless greatest hits tour:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... -time-warp
Corbyn is still very well loved by many even today, because he made politics relevant to the millions excluded from the Thatcher/Blair policy bundle; the poor, the young, the precariat, those who will never have a change of a secure job or a secure home, those concerned about our future on the planet, the many who see the dance between the three main establishment parties as being totally irrelevant except perhaps as a beauty contest for ugly people. His electoral cohort may be a bit too scruffy and disreputable for our Mr Crace, but there are a lot of them and as things go on getting worse there will probably be more. A Labour party which lurches sharply rightwards continues to leave them out in the cold.If only England were ready for St. Jeremy and his jam eh?
In 2017 Labour was forecast to lose 50-100 seats. Instead they picked up 30, to the dismay of their own right wing. But there were a further 30 Tory seats that changed from "safe" to "extremely marginal". It seems entirely reasonable to suggest that if it had not been for the wrecking campaign, orchestrated collapse of the shadow cabinet, chicken coup, constant briefing against their own party to hostile media and deliberate attempts to throw the election, enough of them would have fallen to enable a Labour government.
2017 came close enough to frighten the money, so between then and 2019 the internal wrecking campaign intensified, the number of anti-Labour media hit pieces doubled and just to give the coup de grace the party hobbled itself with a nonsensical brexit policy, the chief architect of which now leads the party. Nice work.
Baron Mandelson said he ran the wrecking campaign not because he disliked Corbyn's policies but because he saw them as "not feasible". Now Mandelson has been accused of many things, but seldom of stupidity, so his words deserve careful attention. Not feasible how exactly? They seemed to have enough electoral support in 2017 and they were costed out better than the Tory equivalents.
Okay, just as a thought-experiment, imagine Labour under Corbyn had won in 2017. Then what? In a word, catastrophe! The most ferocious sabotage from the media, the financiers, the civil service, the military, the spooks and last but not least his own MPs. A coup would have been a real possibility, possibly with the support of the USA, dismayed at a radical change in UK foreign policy. One of the generals said he would remove Corbyn "by fair means or foul". If you think we are a nation that doesn't "do" coups, remember there were two half-assed attempts against Wilson.
In other words, we would have seen the pretence of democracy unmasked for what it is, a pretence, as an elected government was prevented from carrying out its mandate. The fact is the limits on what democracy is allowed to achieve and to change are very much narrower than many of us think. In 2017 we had quite a narrow escape.
So it is quite understandable that under Starmer, Labour is scrambling frantically to once again become respectable and harmless in the eyes of the Establishment. They may have gone rather far in that direction, with the membership being attacked more fiercely than the Tories, but in a way it makes sense.
The only problem, of course, is that while Corbyn and Corbynism may have been decisively defeated, the huge injustices in British society, the anger at them and the aching hunger among millions of people for a real change have not gone away. The forces which fuelled the Corbynite insurrection inside Labour are, if anything, more powerful than ever. If they are not allowed an outlet through conventional politics, where will they find expression? Because they are not going to go away.
Crabcakes wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:10 pm 2017: we would have won it all if not for people in Labour scuppering Jeremy's campaign. It definitely wasn't anything to do with people holding their nose and voting for Corbyn's Labour to try and stop May and her godawful brexit vision,It's the Corbynite equivalent of The Big Lie.
2019: even though Jeremy had complete control of the party so should have had all the votes from 2017 and more because he's *so* fabulous, this time the mainstream media wrecked it by somehow making the people who don't listen to the mainstream media anyway who voted for him in 2017 because he's a breath of fresh air suddenly not vote for him for some reason. It definitely wasn't the fact he spent the 2 years from 2017-2019 taking credit for loaned votes, fucked his campaign into a ditch with absurd ideological and/or petty choices about where funding should be squandered, and his sole policy was "I'll do assorted stuff better than Boris because socialism - would you like a free broad bean? Sorry, I mean broadband."
Also, I see Schroedinger's Corbyn puts in another appearance - simultaneously so powerful he terrifies generals and media barons when not elected, but so weak that if he were elected with a majority he wouldn't be able to do a thing. Says a lot when you're so desperate for him to be a martyr you dream up assassination attempts by Mi6 and the CIA.
The only danger Corbyn has ever posed is to people in desperate need of a labour government, because of his unswerving dedication to making Labour as unappealing as possible to anyone outside of a band of cranks narrower than a sheet of a4 side on.
- By davidjay