The Jeremy Corbyn thread

[beorhthelm]

that is indeed a poor way to address economic issues.

 

[Theatre of Trees]

New footage of Labour Party members celebrating remembrance has been released.

 

[Soulman]

Well it has set out very clearly that Labours policy is to remain part of the single market in the interests of our economy. The tories response to McDonnell's statement is as follows:

"...what is truly astonishing is that John McDonnell completely failed to mention immigration, or control of our borders, in his vision of post-Brexit Britain.

This is yet more evidence of how out of touch Labour are with the values of working people in our country.

Only the Conservative party can deliver the best possible deal as we leave the EU - and that must mean controls on the number of people that come to Britain."

Rather than debate what is best for our economy they would rather bring this back to the divisive argument over immigration.

Perhaps if Labour had shown an interest in " the divisive argument over immigration", perhaps if they had not let mass immigration in exchange for votes etc, then a referendum would not have been on many peoples lips.
No wonder Labour were "divisive over immigration" they probably realise that the issue would rebound on them.

 

[Hastings gull]

Good speech by McDonnell

McDonnell strongly affirmed Labour’s commitment to fiscal discipline, saying there is “nothing ‘progressive’ about running up excessive deficit”. Pointing out that the government has missed its previous fiscal targets, he urged Philip Hammond, the chancellor, to adopt something similar to the “fiscal credibility rule” he committed Labour to in March.

"Those on the left have a duty to be scrupulously honest about the economic tasks in front of us.

There are no easy options.

There is no proverbial magic money tree.

We can only deliver the high-quality public services that our communities want and need when we have a high-quality economy that can pay for them.

That means an absolute and unbreakable commitment to fiscal discipline on the part of any future Labour government.

There is nothing “left-wing” about running an excessive deficit.

There is nothing “progressive” about running up excessive debts.

A government has an absolute responsibility to manage the money it is entrusted with by the people it serves."

Last week the Institute for Fiscal Studies published a report saying, among other things, that almost all Treasury targets set since 1997 have been missed. The IFS said there was a lot to be said for flexible fiscal targets, and the Labour target qualifies as an example because it says the government would have to show at every budget how it would balance the current account budget over five years.

He praised Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England.

"I want to pay tribute here to the Governor and to those at the Bank.

When the Chancellor was nowhere to be seen, the Prime Minister resigned, and assorted Tory Brexiteers simply walked away from the mess they helped create.

It was the actions of the Governor and the Bank of England that were there to offer the necessary support to our economy.

And yet their reward has been noises off from the Tory Party elite about the alleged failings of the Bank."

He said Labour was committed to protecting the Bank’s independence.

"At a time of economic uncertainty, not just here but across the world, we would trifle with the Bank’s independence at our peril.

It is a hard-won economic asset for this country.

So I want to repeat a point I have made already: under Labour, the Bank of England’s operational independence will be sacrosanct.

It is up to the government of the day to give the Bank its mandate.

But it is up to the Bank, and the Bank alone, to achieve it ...

The public servants who run the bank are drawn from the very top of the global talent pool. We will not allow a cabinet drawn from the dregs of a Tory government to place the blame for their failures on the bank."

Conservatives who have questioned Bank of England independence include William Hague, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg. McDonnell seems to working on the basis that defending the Bank robustly will help to boost Labour’s economic credibility.

McDonnell claimed that George Osborne’s austerity policies failed.

"Philip Hammond will have to admit that the Conservatives have failed in every task they set themselves.

They failed to bring the deficit under control. It was supposed to have been eliminated by 2015.

They failed to bring down the government’s debt. It’s now 1.7 trillion.

They failed to restore wages, they failed on productivity, they failed on investment.

They failed because at every step of the way there was a Conservative Chancellor who put rhetoric ahead of the hard economic facts.

He chose austerity, when he could have chosen investment ...

Worst of all, it is an economy where after all the sacrifices of spending cuts and stagnant wages and zero hour contracts - the government debt burden continues to rise and the government deficit remains stubbornly high.

There is no other way to say it. Those sacrifices were made in vain.

The Tories want you to forget George Osborne but I want to you to remember what he did in detail.

Because he not only failed on every target he set himself – he plunged Britain’s hard pressed communities into such a state of neglect that they reached for the option of a break with Europe.

Labour accepts the referendum result as the voice of the majority and we must embrace the enormous opportunities to reshape our country that Brexit has opened for us.

In that way we can speak again to those who were left behind and offer a positive, ambitious vision instead of leaving the field open to divisive Trump-style politics.This means we must not try to re-fight the referendum or push for a second vote and if Article 50 needs to be triggered in parliament Labour will not seek to block or delay it.

We are insisting on full, tariff-free access to the Single Market for our businesses because this is the best way to protect jobs and living standards here.

This must include provision for our financial services sector, as part of a deal for the whole economy."

Well, they have had years to do that, but clearly failed miserably. But then Thornberry, Abbott, Corbyn etc and the rest of the North London toadies are miles away from traditional working class voters, in more ways than one.

 

[carlzeiss]

http://www.lbc.co.uk/politics/parties/labour/owen-smith-early-election-would-decimate-labour/

 

[Titanic]

Good speech by McDonnell...

This McDonnell?

http://order-order.com/2016/11/17/249582/

"Last night John McDonnell swore allegiance to the Queen as he was appointed to the Privy Council. The final act of selling out for the Shadow Chancellor, who Guido can reveal just five years ago backed calls to arm the working class and mount a revolution. In 2011 McDonnell wrote the foreword for a pamphlet by the Trotskyite organisation Permanent Revolution, in which he endorsed the “timely” proposals and “range of resistance” detailed inside. That resistance included calls for a “militant movement” to carry out a “revolution” and bring down the government:

And the pamphlet endorsed by McDonnell also called for the working class to be “armed” so they could disband the army, police and secret services:

Just a few years ago John McDonnell was an ultra-republican who backed calls for the violent overthrow of the British state, to arm the working class and form a militant movement which could fight the police and the British army. Now he’s on bended knee to the Queen having joined the Privy Council, the epitome of the establishment. Is there a bigger sellout in British political life?"

 

[deletebeepbeepbeep]

Brilliant speech by Clive Lewis, also talking a lot of sense in an interview afterwards

http://press.labour.org.uk/post/153298011344/clive-lewis-speech-at-the-royal-society-of

"I think one of the things you are seeing with this government, for six years now, has been a complete failure in terms of apprenticeships, in terms of training, in terms of our approach to schooling and to further education and universities.

This is a little bit of a bugbear of mine. I think our schools and our universities and our technical colleges should have a strict focus on providing people who can come into the workplace and who have those skills and the knowledge to be able to do the jobs that we need them to do. But I’m also keen that schools and colleges and universities produce good citizens, people who can actually take part in a modern, democratic system.

I don’t just want to create automatons and consumers, people who can take and be told what to do, what to think. We want people coming out of school that ask, that have the ability, the critical faculty, to ask questions. Those people are often far more creative in their approaches, and it’s creativity and innovation which is going to be at the heart of the 21st century fourth industrial revolution and we have got to get ahead of that curve."

 

[Pavilionaire]

I've read that speech and this just reinforces the idea that - to all intents and purposes - the Labour Party is finished, dead.

The decline has been 10 years now, ever since Blair announced he'd be standing down and the left of the party began to regain control. Corbyn has lost the dressing room and the fans.

 

[Ernest]

I've read that speech and this just reinforces the idea that - to all intents and purposes - the Labour Party is finished, dead.

The decline has been 10 years now, ever since Blair announced he'd be standing down and the left of the party began to regain control. Corbyn has lost the dressing room and the fans.

#bonkers

 

[Titanic]

Mid-term by-elections, usually rich pickings for the Her Majesty's Official Opposition... somehow Corbyn's Labour party managed to buck the trend...

Caroline Johnson, Conservative – 17,570, 54% (-2.7%)

Victoria Ayling, UKIP – 4,426, 13.5% (-2.2%)

Ross Pepper, LibDem – 3,606, 11.0% (+5.3%)

Jim Clarke, Labour – 3,363 10.2% (-7%)

 

[portslade seagull]

Corbyn and his cronies are doing a fantastic job of self implosion. Long may it continue

 

[Bozza]

Mid-term by-elections, usually rich pickings for the Her Majesty's Official Opposition... somehow Corbyn's Labour party managed to buck the trend...

Caroline Johnson, Conservative – 17,570, 54% (-2.7%)

Victoria Ayling, UKIP – 4,426, 13.5% (-2.2%)

Ross Pepper, LibDem – 3,606, 11.0% (+5.3%)

Jim Clarke, Labour – 3,363 10.2% (-7%)

You need to remember the Corbynistas are playing the long game.

It will be another year or two before they're losing their deposits.

 

[Simster]

Christ, Labour went from 2nd to 4th. They are a total shambles at the moment.

Luke warm levels of satisfaction for the Lib Dems who polled more votes than they did in 2015 with half the turnout, (11% v 5.7% in 2015) but were still nowhere near the levels of support they enjoyed in 2010 (18%).

Tories lost a relatively small share of the vote as to be expected, and UKIP lost a chunk more but still nothing significant.

All in all, a good night for most of the parties in one way or another, with the glaring exception of Labour who are turning into the political equivalent of rugby league - rabidly followed in their heartlands, but irrelevant pretty much everywhere else,

 

[Monkey Man]

Very hard to see Labour forming a majority government again. Their best bet is in the form of a "progressive alliance" coalition but even that seems far fetched given how much party members hate each other at the moment, without factoring in politicians from rival parties.

We're stuck in a one-party state until something quite remarkable and unprecedented happens.

 

[Buzzer]

I'm surprised more hasn't been spoken of influential Labour-supporting columnists (Paul Mason, Owen Jones et al) finally admitting that Momentum has been a vehicle for Trotskyites to enter and try to control the Labour Party. Both have written at length about this in recent weeks and the inevitable split that is occurring.

There's an article on Buzzfeed where one Momentum supporter has a moment of clarity about what it is all really about and comes to the same conclusion that the rest of us already had about the movement, namely that it's a talking shop for pointless hard lefties and that they can't help but splinter into ever more ridiculous factions. Freud called this the 'narcissism of small differences'. That's such a brilliant way to describe it.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/pro-corbyn-activists-fear-momentum-could-split-in-two

Laura Murray, the newly elected Momentum women’s representative, accused fellow activists of attempting to turn the group into a rival political party that would ultimately stand candidates against Labour, writing on her blog: “Jeremy Corbyn will inevitably make one compromise or concession that isn’t ideologically-pure enough for them and they will abandon him and Labour altogether to turn Momentum into a rival left-wing party."

She added: “Naively, I assumed that all Momentum members would be focussed on building a positive and unprecedented movement to transform the Labour Party and society. “I never could have imagined the sheer capacity that some people have to endlessly argue with each other, either over the boring bureaucracy of structures and process or pointless motions on policies they can’t implement because they’re not actually a party.”

 

[Machiavelli]

I'm surprised more hasn't been spoken of influential Labour-supporting columnists (Paul Mason, Owen Jones et al) finally admitting that Momentum has been a vehicle for Trotskyites to enter and try to control the Labour Party. Both have written at length about this in recent weeks and the inevitable split that is occurring.

There's an article on Buzzfeed where one Momentum supporter has a moment of clarity about what it is all really about and comes to the same conclusion that the rest of us already had about the movement, namely that it's a talking shop for pointless hard lefties and that they can't help but splinter into ever more ridiculous factions. Freud called this the 'narcissism of small differences'. That's such a brilliant way to describe it.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/pro-corbyn-activists-fear-momentum-could-split-in-two

Laura Murray, the newly elected Momentum women’s representative, accused fellow activists of attempting to turn the group into a rival political party that would ultimately stand candidates against Labour, writing on her blog: “Jeremy Corbyn will inevitably make one compromise or concession that isn’t ideologically-pure enough for them and they will abandon him and Labour altogether to turn Momentum into a rival left-wing party."

She added: “Naively, I assumed that all Momentum members would be focussed on building a positive and unprecedented movement to transform the Labour Party and society. “I never could have imagined the sheer capacity that some people have to endlessly argue with each other, either over the boring bureaucracy of structures and process or pointless motions on policies they can’t implement because they’re not actually a party.”

Paul Mason is now employed by Labour
Has anyone actually heard from Corbyn since the referendum? Seems he thinks that silence is the best way to persuade the electorate of policies, how to view the world, respond to events, etc. It's also an interesting game to speculate just how he will cease to be Labour Party leader. The PLP 'reacted' and jumped far too early last time round and, as a consequence, are probably stuck with him until 2020, if not for longer, because he's hardly likely to fall on his sword.

 

[Ernest]

Nothing to see here, I see more PANIC in Tory HQ this morning than I do at Labour HQ. Once Maggie May is UNABLE to provide a detailed plan for BREXIT by the end of March she will be gone

 

[Buzzer]

Has anyone actually heard from Corbyn since the referendum? Seems he thinks that silence is the best way to persuade the electorate of policies, how to view the world, respond to events, etc.

Earlier this week he said he was too busy to attend Israel's Holocaust Memorial but did find time to hang out with Iranian state broadcaster Press TV and in particular Hatem Bazian, a man who doesn't much like Jews and isn't afraid to let people know it.

 

[Titanic]

YouGov/Times Westminster voting intentions (4-5 Dec):

CON 42(+3)
LAB 25(-2)
LD 11(+2)
UKIP 12(-2)
GRN 4(=)

This is a seven year low for Labour... I just hope they haven't bottomed out too early!

 

[carlzeiss]

YouGov/Times Westminster voting intentions (4-5 Dec):

CON 42(+3)
LAB 25(-2)
LD 11(+2)




UKIP 12(-2)
GRN 4(=)

This is a seven year low for Labour... I just hope they haven't bottomed out too early!

Still managed to beat the Monster raving loony and Bus Pass Elvis candidates though .