[Tubby Isaacs]

If I were the best prime minister we never had, I'd be tweeting out an actual costed plan. Jez is still doing the Glastonbury act (when he'd just run on keeping out lots of the people who might want to work in this service of his).

Couple of people do raise the "fine, but how do you fund it?". Never fear, the fan club below the line have all the answers like MMT and blah blah HS2 blah test and trace blah Trident and Richard Branson. None of these solutions seem to involve people like us paying more tax for it.

I've defended Jez on the Guardian a few times by saying "sure, the tax stuff was fantasy, but free social care was good and popular and Starmer should keep that". I was a bit optimistic on that one.

https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comm ... o-stack-up

Short read- a good (though smaller than Blair-Brown) rise in NHS spending, But the extra care provision is hazy. Free personal care like in Scotland, though this is something like a quarter only of residential care costs. The rest of it would be capped (amount not clear, though presume it wouldn't be high or else we'd have heard about it) so very definitely isn't free at all. whatever Jez says now.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Any chance you could remind your followers who the politicians were that achieved the 2009 level of funding for education, Jez? Only a lot of your followers seem to have a very low opinion of them, and you could set them straight.

[Crabcakes]

This is Corbyn in his element, though - non-stop complaining* followed by super-broad, non-specific, non-costed or planned statements on what is needed so that should anything come in later he can claim it was something he'd been suggesting for years, but if there are elements he doesn't like he can claim it isn't what he meant.

His entire career is essentially sitting back and demanding other people "do better" in a vague, superior way, then huffing when they don't (or do, if it's a way he doesn't approve of).

*Justified complaints, sure - but then when he had the chance to do something and take those responsible to task he chose "kinder, gentler politics" and was utterly ineffective. Almost like he didn't really want to have to actually *do* anything, because that would have been really haaaaaaard...

[Tubby Isaacs]

And here he comes.

If only he'd been the leader sometime recently, eh? Plus of course it would be insane for Labour now to back something it hasn't modelled at all when it's not even clear what we're being asked to fund. You'd think he were just trying to promote dissent.

[Crabcakes]

And here he comes.

If only he'd been the leader sometime recently, eh? Plus of course it would be insane for Labour now to back something it hasn't modelled at all when it's not even clear what we're being asked to fund. You'd think he were just trying to promote dissent.

Also, in 2021 *assets* of 5m is in no way the super rich. Someone could own a few cafes or a business that needs warehouse space and stock investment and be running on razor thin margins after mortgages/wages etc and be classed as "super rich" by this criteria. His usual poverty porn - unless you're wearing rags you can't be poor, unless you look like you fell out of a Hovis advert you can't be working class, and you can't experience racism or bigotry if you're white and middle class.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I assume you'd know the mortgage off the value of the assets, wouldn't you?

I don't really get why you'd not just tax income from the assets and profits you make when you dispose of them. I don't get what the virtue of taxing assets in their own right is.

[Tubby Isaacs]

My word. Arrogant Lisa Nandy thinks she can come to Islington and campaign for a Labour candidate against an independent! That's incredible! Only somebody mad and deluded would think that!

He knows that people generally vote for parties, right? Or does he think Laura Pidcock losing meant she was useless.

[Crabcakes]

This is the other reason Jez won’t risk it - if he doesn’t win, the myth is busted. He’s not been their MP for 40 years because he’s Corbyn. He’s been their MP for 40 years because he’s been the Labour candidate. For the same reason he’s never had the courage of his convictions to leave before - despite decades of relentless whining - he won’t now.

[Boiler]

I would however strike a note of caution here and mention but two words:

Douglas Carswell.

[Crabcakes]

I would however strike a note of caution here and mention but two words:

Douglas Carswell.

Well yes, but Carswell won pre-brexit in a coastal town heaving with racist Essex arseholes (and believe me I know - I lived the first 20 years of my life just down the road) who have Jaywick - the dumping ground for everyone - just down the road to help seal the deal and make the local population even more resentful and bitter. He managed 1 term before losing too.

Corbyn is in a increasingly middle-class and well off area of London. He dropped nearly 10 percentage points in 2019 already. To win he needs to carry 50% of the previous Labour vote and hope none of the supporters of the Lib Dems decide it might be nice to see one of the reasons we have Johnson’s hard brexit out of parliament.

Just because he’s been there a long time doesn’t mean they’re “his” votes. Ask Dennis Skinner.

[Boiler]

I would however strike a note of caution here and mention but two words:

Douglas Carswell.

Well yes, but Carswell won pre-brexit in a coastal town heaving with racist Essex arseholes (and believe me I know - I lived the first 20 years of my life just down the road) who have Jaywick - the dumping ground for everyone - just down the road to help seal the deal and make the local population even more resentful and bitter. He managed 1 term before losing too.

Corbyn is in a increasingly middle-class and well off area of London. He dropped nearly 10 percentage points in 2019 already. To win he needs to carry 50% of the previous Labour vote and hope none of the supporters of the Lib Dems decide it might be nice to see one of the reasons we have Johnson’s hard brexit out of parliament.

Just because he’s been there a long time doesn’t mean they’re “his” votes. Ask Dennis Skinner.

"Increasingly middle-class and well off"; that group can include socialists too, you know? The sort of people who'd be affluent enough to ride out the sort of policies that JC supports and yes, Guardianistas. I'd venture to suggest that this very forum has members who'd fit your description even though they wouldn't support JC, *ever*.

Skinner lost his seat because of Brexit and nothing more, I'd say. Labour were traitors to the cause and that cost him. Inspired by the latest BigClive video on YooToob, the stink of Brexit will hang over Labour like a busted selenium rectifier.

[Abernathy]

Bless little Tommy, though. He clearly loves his daddy lots and lots, and is fiercely protective of him against all those nasty MSM and Labour centrist people who are unfairly attacking him. Unfortunately, he’s doing it to the point of irrationality.

A chip off the old block, indeed.

[Crabcakes]

"Increasingly middle-class and well off"; that group can include socialists too, you know? The sort of people who'd be affluent enough to ride out the sort of policies that JC supports and yes, Guardianistas. I'd venture to suggest that this very forum has members who'd fit your description even though they wouldn't support JC, *ever*.

I'm certain it does - but I'd also hope they're well informed, reasonable socialists who aren't willing to vote for an antisemite-defending old duffer who helped bring in the worst right-wing govt. this country has ever seen because of his own hubris. I wasn't making the point that middle class people won't be socialists. I was making the point that the sort of locked-in vote from a union blue-collar worker that Corbyn might have been able to count on more or less for the sole reason that he's Jeremy Corbyn in 1983 is nowadays probably more or less nonexistent in his manor.

If he stands as an independent, he's taking a gamble that Corbynistas outweigh well informed left-wing voters who saw right through brexit and pleaded with him to make some effort to oppose it. He assumed votes in 2017 were votes for him and not votes against Brexit/May, and that's why he gave Johnson his election in 2019 and we all know how that turned out. Now he might have to make that gamble again in a smaller scale - do people in Islington vote Labour, or vote Corbyn? Big gamble.

[Cyclist]

One of the reasons Labour bombed in GE2019 was Corbyn/Corbynites takink the votes that had been loaned to them in GE 2017 for granted. I believe Corbyn J is stupid enough to assume voters in his constituency who continually voted for the Labour candidate were actually voting for Corbyn J, and so will take all of those votes for granted, do the barest minimum of campaigning he thinks he can get away with, and crash and burn spectacularly.

If he doesn't do enough to be re-admitted to the Labour fold, that is - even then, there are no guarantees.

[Abernathy]

If he stands as an independent, he's taking a gamble that Corbynistas outweigh well informed left-wing voters who saw right through brexit and pleaded with him to make some effort to oppose it. He assumed votes in 2017 were votes for him and not votes against Brexit/May, and that's why he gave Johnson his election in 2019 and we all know how that turned out. Now he might have to make that gamble again in a smaller scale - do people in Islington vote Labour, or vote Corbyn? Big gamble.

I’d venture that he is also gambling that the sort of nihilistic bitter resentment of the current Labour leadership by hard-core Corbynists - largely personified by the kind of twatbasket that thinks it’s hilarious to refer to Keir Starmer as “Keith” - you know the type, also exists in sufficient numbers amongst the burghers of Islington North to ensure that those votes are heading Jez’s way. If he is, he may be in for a rude awakening.

[Boiler]

If he is, he may be in for a rude awakening.

As indeed may the Labour Party. After all, didn't Labour take the "Red Wall" for granted?

[Crabcakes]

If he is, he may be in for a rude awakening.

As indeed may the Labour Party. After all, didn't Labour take the "Red Wall" for granted?

The elephant in the room here though is that the leader who took the red wall for granted, assumed those votes were always safe because they were “decent working class people”, and who didn’t bother to listen or engage was one J. Corbyn…

[Boiler]

If he is, he may be in for a rude awakening.

As indeed may the Labour Party. After all, didn't Labour take the "Red Wall" for granted?

The elephant in the room here though is that the leader who took the red wall for granted, assumed those votes were always safe because they were “decent working class people”, and who didn’t bother to listen or engage was one J. Corbyn…

But if Labour had adopted the approach that Corbyn apparently wanted, which was to support Brexit (and not appease its Home Counties middle-class Remainer element), would those Red Wall seats have been lost?

I am sadly of the belief that whilst Starmer remains in post, the "Red Wall" seats will not return to Labour as he's seen as "the Brexit Traitor" by them.

[Andy McDandy]

He could have danced through the streets of the north, waving a banner saying "Brexit days are here again" while "Working class hero" played on a boombox and he'd still be shafted.

English working class people don't, for the most part, feel solidarity with the oppressed of Nicaragua. They don't care if he grows his own jam or knits his own jumpers. They don't really care much about working class solidarity, and certainly don't feel as if a guy from the leafy suburbs of north London represents them. While they may think all manner of things about climate change or social injustice, they see people protesting and wonder where they find the time.

Above all, they want to be rich. Or at least to have a bit of cash to splash. They saw in Corbyn someone who had the luxury they didn't have. And, crucially, a wimp.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

I think the wimp part is very important.