Jeremy Corbyn

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i mean the John Eden type. the spritiual form.
None spiritualer! But yeah, I get what you mean. "Broad church" and all that.

It's a fucking pisser seeing the way the Tories, DUP and UKIP/Brexit Party have worked together over the past four years while Labour has been unable to work properly as a single party, let alone work with other parties. Even those Tory MPs who opposed Brexit and have been critical of Johnson eventually just bit the bullet and pulled together.
 
Last edited:

DannyL

Wild Horses
it's tricky. a labour party somehow has to pull of thr trick of including a Mr Tea, a John Eden, a Danny L, an Oliver Craner, a Sadmanbarty, a Subvert47, a luka....
foreign policy hawks, trade unionists, village hall socialists,small c conservatives, neoliberals, policy wonks, revolutionaries, saints, martyrs, self-professed 'realists', and so on and so forth. how do you pull that trick off?
That's why a split would've made logical sense. I respect the Change UK people who walked out.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
although Corbyn is the greatest Englishman who ever lived, even including the mythical King Arthur, he led a party full of too many weasels and ferrets and they wouldn't submit to a man with a halo. the party needs a leader who is part weassel, part ferret. they won't be led by a saint.
They just needed to be led by someone who wanted to win an election and was prepared to talk to the country as a whole to do so.
 

luka

Well-known member
That's why a split would've made logical sense. I respect the Change UK people who walked out.

splits dont work. the whole point of left and right is that it splits all of humanity in two. on this side of the line or the other.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
None spiritualer! But yeah, I get what you mean. "Broad church" and all that.

It's a fucking pisser seeing the way the Tories, DUP and UKIP/Brexit Party have worked together over the past four years while Labour has been unable to work properly as a single party, let alone work with other parties. Even those Tory MPs who opposed Brexit and have been critical of Johnson eventually just bit the bullet and pulled together.
This stuff has been rolling since the 70s though. I've been watching documentaries on Labour over lockdown and it's remarkable how similar the language used back then is to the stuff that comes up now. Calls for deselection, accusations of lack of loyalty. Same stuff.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
splits dont work. the whole point of left and right is that it splits all of humanity in two. on this side of the line or the other.
I don't know if Left/Right really works anymore tbh. What does Conservative mean in relation to Johnson? What does Left mean in relation to say Chuka Ummuna?
 

luka

Well-known member
we MAY be getting going beyond the line. that's why i started a thread on the end of resistance. but at the moment our politics is still based on the number 2.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I generally don’t vote yeah. I have voted for some good local council people though which have generally been Labour or independents.

But Luka is right about the fragile coalition which the Labour Party is. The Tory’s primary aim is power at any cost which is one reason they do so well out of first past the post.
 

luka

Well-known member
the tories are also riven with infighting though. theyre not immune to it. thats why brexit happened. thats why Theresa May couldnt get anything done. that's why John Major fumed about 'bastards'
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
the tories are also riven with infighting though. theyre not immune to it. thats why brexit happened. thats why Theresa May couldnt get anything done. that's why John Major fumed about 'bastards'
And yet, here they are, with an 80-seat majority. I think the right-wing press have gone so mental in the last few years that the Tories have got almost nothing to lose by going more and more right wing. All they can do is gain by recovering votes that might otherwise have gone to Farage. Whereas Labour have to walk a tightrope between being too radical to appeal to floating voters and too centrist to appeal to lefties. Similar thing in the USA with near monopoly that Fox has on the "news" that half the country consumes, and the centrist/leftist split among the other half.
 

luka

Well-known member
maybe, or maybe corona virus and huge popular protest are demonstrating the limits of that approach. let's wait and see what the fallout is.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
maybe, or maybe corona virus and huge popular protest are demonstrating the limits of that approach. let's wait and see what the fallout is.
Yeah, it could be that these crises finally expose the hollowness of populist nationalism, at least for a big enough fraction of the people that some change of direction is possible. But as to what comes next, fuck knows. A return to liberal technocracy and 'politics without the politics' is surely untenable. Some genies have been released from bottles, for good and bad, and there's no putting them back.
 

Leo

Well-known member
I've mentioned before that there's a saying here: "democrats fall in love, republican fall in line." lots of dems tend to passionately support their person or cause and are faithful to them to the end (in the case of Bernie, even after the end), whereas most republicans will cut their losses when their preferred candidate gets knocked out of the race, put aside their differences, coalesce around the party candidate...and too often, win.

the contrast: do you want to remain undyingly faithful to your core values, or do you want to win? what's better, to get 50-75% of what you want or to lose and get zero percent?

perfect the enemy of the good, yup.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
the tories are also riven with infighting though. theyre not immune to it. thats why brexit happened. thats why Theresa May couldnt get anything done. that's why John Major fumed about 'bastards'

They are but they do it differently. No way would the Tories have sabotaged their own election campaign. There are few things as vicious as the build up to a conservative leadership challenge
 
Last edited:

DannyL

Wild Horses
Power matters to the Right. To a significant section of the Left, power and more importantly how you get there, are an afterthought. That's why I'm more favourably inclined towards Starmer - he looks like he wants to win. For now, at least.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
do you want to remain undyingly faithful to your core values, or do you want to win?
I've always disliked this line of thinking

it's a rock/hard place - that's how Dems (for Labour it's varied throughout its history) have always thought - where are left people gonna do, vote GOP?

sure, GOP/Tories always gonna be worse on most things, even in milder incarnations

but if people don't want to vote for someone, they shouldn't be chastised for it

if Dems/Labour wanna win they should have better candidates and run better campaigns

easier said than done, but that's politics. and life.

I'm not championing infighting, but I am against blaming voters for electoral losses.

great majority of infighting takes place within a party's own establishment (i.e. DNC v Bernie 2016, Labour the last few years), anyway
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
You could argue that this leads to the untrustworthiness of politicians. Attempting to be all things to all people makes 'em seem fundamentally slippery.

OTOH, there's something to be said for trying to set and articulate a national mood. I genuinely think the Labour Party failed to do this at the last election - and this isn't just me cunting off Corbyn like usual - I think really trying to sell the Green New Deal, giving a visionary sense of a whole would've really won me over as a voter. The Tories did it via reactionary nationalism, the oldest trick in the book.

In terms of electoral politics, I like and am drawn to politicians who can build broad bases of support and are good at managing coalitions of interests. It seems an inevitable consequence of UK politics and are awful FPTP system that you have to do this.
 
Top