Jeremy Corbyn.

[beorhthelm]

Quit thinking
Prices charged have to include £100m's of divvi's required to be paid out, money that could/should be used on further improvements.

under public ownership the financials include £100m's to pay bond holders for the money government borrows. everyone ignores. in fact the typcial profit margin in regulated industries is less than the interest rate of government bonds historically. the other thing everyone ignores is that, for all the incidents of poor sevice from private utilities, it wasnt any better under public ownship, often far worse (any one recall having to rent phone from BT?).

 

[BLOCK F]

This is the crux of it HT you don't understand state socialism.........and it's why you are a Tory ( or at best a Blairite)

DB AG is running listed companies like Arriva that make profits which are then divested to shareholders (i.e Capitalists).

A genuine state owned concern would not generate any profit or divest it to shareholders, it would simply be reinvested in infrastructure and wages. There is a huge difference between the two models.

The nationalised model Corbyn wants, would work with no profits for capitalists, it is state socialism he wants. This state socialist model is what the EU are working hard to destroy around the EU because they are CAPITALISTS.........I am not saying it doesn't work, but it works on the basis of profit for capitalists.

I don't think we need to take it further, we have arrived at the same destination as always.

Chin chin.

HT revealed as a Tory by Cunning Fergus.
Wow Fergus, you are more cunning than I thought!

 

[BLOCK F]

under public ownership the financials include £100m's to pay bond holders for the money government borrows. everyone ignores. in fact the typcial profit margin in regulated industries is less than the interest rate of government bonds historically. the other thing everyone ignores is that, for all the incidents of poor sevice from private utilities, it wasnt any better under public ownship, often far worse (any one recall having to rent phone from BT?).

Quite right, beorthelm, but the Corbynites just do not like to hear such matters.

 

[cunning fergus]

HT revealed as a Tory by Cunning Fergus.
Wow Fergus, you are more cunning than I thought!

There is an essential truth in this debate though, which is why Corbyn's emergence and the EU debate are so interesting and important.

Blair disgracefully removed clause IV which was a corner stone of Ithe Labour Party's socialist doctrine to help reconfigure Labour into a more EU friendly party.

State monopolies of "commercial character" are now illegal under article 37 of the Lisbon Treaty...........state socialism is effectively dead in the water in the context of Corbyn's political ideology and the modern EU.

It is merely operating now as was intended.

Something will have to give, and why the debate for EU membership is a debate about socialism (out) vs capitalism (in).

 

[Horton's halftime iceberg]

I have only just come across this clip, its hilarious, is Kay Burley always this bonkers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fp_GoKhRT0

 

[Vegas Seagull]

Hopefully it's a two part plan. One, remove the word 'Craft' as its beer. It's ale. Next, ban any 330ml bottles that are less than 5% but are priced the same.
Leave everything else.

it can't be both...Ale is unhopped & beer is hopped

 

[Albumen]

it can't be both...Ale is unhopped & beer is hopped

Er, are you sure? An IPA is heavily hopped.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

it can't be both...Ale is unhopped & beer is hopped

What? Most ale is hopped. Dark Star Hophead, for example. It's only a few specialist brews which don't include hops.

 

[BLOCK F]

Why? Look at the profits the rail and energy companies make! Even if those are just ploughed back into reducing prices and improving infrastructure why would taxes rise? If they can run these companies for huge profit why can't we run them and directly benefit from the profits?

Do you really think that the power companies and the rail industry would become more efficient if they were renationalised? For a start, where is all the cash going to come from to get hold of these businesses in the first place?Let alone sorting out the legal niceties! Don't you think any Government of the day has better things to do with tax payers money?
Why stop at power and rail? Let us nationalise pubs, supermarkets, IT companies or all companies; in fact everything that makes a profit.
Socialist utopia, here we come!
Do you remember the old BR and GPO.......waiting for months or even longer to get a wretched phone?
Nothing is perfect, but renationalisation is not the answer.

 

[Horton's halftime iceberg]

Do you really think that the power companies and the rail industry would become more efficient if they were renationalised? For a start, where is all the cash going to come from to get hold of these businesses in the first place?Let alone sorting out the legal niceties! Don't you think any Government of the day has better things to do with tax payers money?
Why stop at power and rail? Let us nationalise pubs, supermarkets, IT companies or all companies; in fact everything that makes a profit.
Socialist utopia, here we come!
Do you remember the old BR and GPO.......waiting for months or even longer to get a wretched phone?
Nothing is perfect, but renationalisation is not the answer.

If you read a lot of this thread its not about efficiently to a lot of people, but the profiteering and lack of investments in the past few years. East Coast trains ran by the state and worked absolutely fine from my experience of using it, in fact it was my favourite service to use. It put over a billion pounds into the tax mans coffers and not to shareholders. Stagecoach bought it I think on a pledge to invest £100 million into the service, so on things like this most people can see, experience or do the math. In Europe many rail companies are state run and not sold off for private profit. I don't think most social democratic left parties in Europe want to state run everything, just basic public services.

 

[BLOCK F]

I never said they would be more efficient. Surely, even if nothing about the performance of the companies changes we are better off as the profits are not skimmed off for the benefit of individuals but can be used to help everyone!
I really don't understand your point when you imply something state owned will be automatically badly run. It would have the same workers, the same infrastructure the same everything. Why would they all suddenly stop working?

Interesting that both you and Iceberg don't appear to care about efficiency.
Says a lot to me about the folly of renationalisation and the mindset of those in favour.
Oh well, got to sign off now.
Farewell.

 

[pastafarian]

I have to say I am enjoying watching the separatism of socialist ideology, we now have real socialists like [MENTION=12825]cunning fergus[/MENTION] , champagne socialists like [MENTION=409]Herr Tubthumper[/MENTION] and Bollinger Bolsheviks like [MENTION=7]Mustafa[/MENTION].

The 2017 referendum will be very interesting to see if the Corbyn movement will be really different as claimed and get behind unions and other socialist organisations and back a EU exit or will it revert back to New labour and Blairism and stick to the same old EU mantra.

This article caught my eye

http://www.capx.co/socialist-corbyn-supporters-are-living-in-an-anti-capitalist-fantasy-world/

If you want to know what Labour party members really think about the four leadership contenders, you could do a lot worse than ask readers of the Guardian newspaper.

That’s precisely what the Guardian did, carrying out a survey of its “core” readership, asking them who they support out of Jeremy Corbyn, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. That poll found an extraordinary 51 per cent of those committed, long term readers chose Corbyn as their preferred candidate. The next highest scorer was Yvette Cooper with a measly seven per cent.

This is perhaps not staggering news – it is the Guardian, after all – but it does tell us something else about many Left-wing Labour supporters: they have taken leave of their senses.

I say that not because Jeremy Corbyn is a bad, stupid or incompetent man. He is none of those things. On the contrary, he is highly intelligent and very nice indeed.

But he is completely and utterly wrong about one thing and, unfortunately for his party and for the rest of the country, it’s rather a crucial thing: he is a socialist.
By that, I don’t mean that he wants more regulation of capitalism and more taxing of profits. I mean that he genuinely believes that a socialist economic system, with state control of the means of production, would deliver a fairer, more equal, richer and happier society that the existing capitalist system. And huge swathes of Labour supporters – Guardian readers and others – agree with him.

A Corbyn victory on September 12would represent not just a defeat for Blairism but the mass rejection of capitalism by large swathes of the Labour party.

This is not about the wide scale infiltration of the party by the Hard Left. Those claims simply don’t add up since, if you exclude the Greens and the SNP (and there’s no evidence their supporters are paying their £3 Labour joining fee in any large numbers), only a small number of people voted for the array of parties to the left of Labour.

There were 1,229 votes for the Communist Party – across the entire country – while the Socialist Labour Party managed 3,481 votes and Class War got 526. TUSC, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, managed to drum up 36,368 votes. But that still only makes a total of 40,504 votes for the Hard Left in May; 0.0008 per cent of a the 46 million-strong electorate.

Is there a secret crowd of Hard Left devotees living in Britain who have never bothered to vote before but have now been so moved by the prospect of a Corbyn victory that they are signing up to join the Labour party en masse in order to vote for him as the next Labour leader?

No, the votes for Jeremy Corbyn aren’t coming from trouble-makers outside the Labour party, they are coming from existing members. And that suggests something far more worrying: there are still many thousands of Labour party members who are fully signed up to the vision of a socialist utopia.
Thousands of perfectly sensible, educated people holding down often well paid, responsible jobs, who genuinely believe that capitalism is the great evil of our time and that the answer to all of our country’s ills is socialism.

Thousands of Guardian-reading middle class professionals who think that capitalism – the only economic system humans have ever come up with which is proven to deliver wealth to the masses – has failed. They aren’t voting for Corbyn as a joke, or because they don’t care if he wins or not, they are voting for him as a kind of “revolution by proxy” from their smart homes in Islington and Hampstead or from their quaint holiday homes in Tuscany.

The Labour leadership contest has revealed that, in 21st century Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, there are plenty of apparently sane people who genuinely believe – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that capitalism is bad.

Forget that capitalism has brought a rise in living standards for the majority of people on this planet over the past century that goes far beyond the wildest dreams of the most evangelical Victorian benefactor. Forget that not a single state where socialism has been attempted has managed to deliver anything but abject poverty and misery to their people.
And forget too that not a single socialist country has managed to bring even a semblance of real equality to its people. Indeed, ignore the fact that the people of these socialist utopias are so ecstatically happy with socialism that they are forbidden from voting for any alternative and are often forcibly prevented from leaving.

Proper socialism was tried in Russia, in Eastern Europe, in China, in Yugoslavia, and in Cuba. And it failed.

Regardless of all that, the prospect of electing a committed socialist to the leadership of the Labour Party is clearly too good a prospect for some to ignore.

This Labour leadership contest, then, is not so much a battle between the left and right of the Labour party, but a battle between socialism and capitalism or, as it should more accurately be termed: fantasy and reality. In the end, reality will be the victor. Because, whether the Guardian readers who are voting for Corbyn like it or not, most of us in Britain don’t want to live in a socialist utopia. We prefer to live in the real world.

 

[BLOCK F]

Pastafarian, I agree with you and admire your patience in posting such a mega epistle.
I was rather surprised that in the Guardian survey, 51% were shown to be Corbyn supporters, but there again, as my wife says, it is only the middle -class Guardian reading professionals who can afford to indulge in their socialist fantasies whilst smugly sipping a rather nice Sancerre from the Loire region of France.
Enjoy your fantasies whilst you can, deluded ones, because it will all end in tears for you.

 

[Dick Knights Mumm]

Enjoy your fantasies whilst you can, deluded ones, because it will all end in tears for you.

Really ? I am surprised you have not made that point before.

 

[Vegas Seagull]

10 days now since voting forms were posted or available for online voting. Although another fortnight remains to vote I would expect those seeing the data will have seen enough by now to get a picture that is unlikely to alter the candidates finishing order or percentage by any significant amount. No reason for later votes to be skewed other than pro Corbyn's late registration crowd.
Bearing this in mind for the last 3 days JC has hardened on Betfair from 1.5 to 1.4 and now 1.35. Bookies are constantly shortening to reach the same price as the biggest political bookie Ladbrokes who are now 1/4. When people are risking money @ 1/3 it is usually with very good reason. One rule of gambling is to never have a bet with someone that can KNOW the answer. They know.
Corbyn looks home and hosed

 

[cunning fergus]

I have to say I am enjoying watching the separatism of socialist ideology, we now have real socialists like [MENTION=12825]cunning fergus[/MENTION] , champagne socialists like [MENTION=409]Herr Tubthumper[/MENTION] and Bollinger Bolsheviks like [MENTION=7]Mustafa[/MENTION].

The 2017 referendum will be very interesting to see if the Corbyn movement will be really different as claimed and get behind unions and other socialist organisations and back a EU exit or will it revert back to New labour and Blairism and stick to the same old EU mantra.

This article caught my eye

http://www.capx.co/socialist-corbyn-supporters-are-living-in-an-anti-capitalist-fantasy-world/

If you want to know what Labour party members really think about the four leadership contenders, you could do a lot worse than ask readers of the Guardian newspaper.

That’s precisely what the Guardian did, carrying out a survey of its “core” readership, asking them who they support out of Jeremy Corbyn, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. That poll found an extraordinary 51 per cent of those committed, long term readers chose Corbyn as their preferred candidate. The next highest scorer was Yvette Cooper with a measly seven per cent.

This is perhaps not staggering news – it is the Guardian, after all – but it does tell us something else about many Left-wing Labour supporters: they have taken leave of their senses.

I say that not because Jeremy Corbyn is a bad, stupid or incompetent man. He is none of those things. On the contrary, he is highly intelligent and very nice indeed.

But he is completely and utterly wrong about one thing and, unfortunately for his party and for the rest of the country, it’s rather a crucial thing: he is a socialist.
By that, I don’t mean that he wants more regulation of capitalism and more taxing of profits. I mean that he genuinely believes that a socialist economic system, with state control of the means of production, would deliver a fairer, more equal, richer and happier society that the existing capitalist system. And huge swathes of Labour supporters – Guardian readers and others – agree with him.

A Corbyn victory on September 12would represent not just a defeat for Blairism but the mass rejection of capitalism by large swathes of the Labour party.

This is not about the wide scale infiltration of the party by the Hard Left. Those claims simply don’t add up since, if you exclude the Greens and the SNP (and there’s no evidence their supporters are paying their £3 Labour joining fee in any large numbers), only a small number of people voted for the array of parties to the left of Labour.

There were 1,229 votes for the Communist Party – across the entire country – while the Socialist Labour Party managed 3,481 votes and Class War got 526. TUSC, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, managed to drum up 36,368 votes. But that still only makes a total of 40,504 votes for the Hard Left in May; 0.0008 per cent of a the 46 million-strong electorate.

Is there a secret crowd of Hard Left devotees living in Britain who have never bothered to vote before but have now been so moved by the prospect of a Corbyn victory that they are signing up to join the Labour party en masse in order to vote for him as the next Labour leader?

No, the votes for Jeremy Corbyn aren’t coming from trouble-makers outside the Labour party, they are coming from existing members. And that suggests something far more worrying: there are still many thousands of Labour party members who are fully signed up to the vision of a socialist utopia.
Thousands of perfectly sensible, educated people holding down often well paid, responsible jobs, who genuinely believe that capitalism is the great evil of our time and that the answer to all of our country’s ills is socialism.

Thousands of Guardian-reading middle class professionals who think that capitalism – the only economic system humans have ever come up with which is proven to deliver wealth to the masses – has failed. They aren’t voting for Corbyn as a joke, or because they don’t care if he wins or not, they are voting for him as a kind of “revolution by proxy” from their smart homes in Islington and Hampstead or from their quaint holiday homes in Tuscany.

The Labour leadership contest has revealed that, in 21st century Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, there are plenty of apparently sane people who genuinely believe – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that capitalism is bad.

Forget that capitalism has brought a rise in living standards for the majority of people on this planet over the past century that goes far beyond the wildest dreams of the most evangelical Victorian benefactor. Forget that not a single state where socialism has been attempted has managed to deliver anything but abject poverty and misery to their people.
And forget too that not a single socialist country has managed to bring even a semblance of real equality to its people. Indeed, ignore the fact that the people of these socialist utopias are so ecstatically happy with socialism that they are forbidden from voting for any alternative and are often forcibly prevented from leaving.

Proper socialism was tried in Russia, in Eastern Europe, in China, in Yugoslavia, and in Cuba. And it failed.

Regardless of all that, the prospect of electing a committed socialist to the leadership of the Labour Party is clearly too good a prospect for some to ignore.

This Labour leadership contest, then, is not so much a battle between the left and right of the Labour party, but a battle between socialism and capitalism or, as it should more accurately be termed: fantasy and reality. In the end, reality will be the victor. Because, whether the Guardian readers who are voting for Corbyn like it or not, most of us in Britain don’t want to live in a socialist utopia. We prefer to live in the real world.

To be fair Pasta this isn't about socialist separatism, it's socialism versus degrees of capitalism.

The point about the German train network is that it is essentially a capitalist enterprise, distributing profit to shareholders, the bourgeoisie. Socialists supporting capitalists is like Brighton fans supporting Palace.

Those opposing Corbyn in the Labour Party are NOT socialists............they may say they are, they may even believe they are, but they are not.

They are like Muslims who say they are Islamic, but who really like page 3, a bet on the horses, a pint down the pub and a bacon sandwich.

Having had Blairism for 15 years there are literally millions of the f@ckers in the UK............a sad state of affairs for the country's genuine socialists like the RMT, a founding Union but exiled from Labour under Blair.

 

[Horton's halftime iceberg]

Nearly 32,000 views on this post alone, JC is certainly proving his part of new politic systems forming across the UK and Europe, he seems to have the right of politics in confusion. While his band wagon moves on.

 

[BLOCK F]

Nearly 32,000 views on this post alone, JC is certainly proving his part of new politic systems forming across the UK and Europe, he seems to have the right of politics in confusion. While his band wagon moves on.

Hmm, seems to have confused quite a few in his own party, don't you think?
,While his bandwagon moves on'.
Quite; but I wonder where to. Socialist Utopia? I don't think so.

 

[jameswestport]

Will he legalize it?

 

[glasfryn]

Very good summarised speech from Corbyn on American influence over British and international affairs.

I am liking the guy even more now