Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/24/despite-sabotage-and-dirty-tri.html
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I’m sure Labour MPs will all get behind him now.
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with knives…
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I think this might be the turning point, but not the final battle.
There are still too many MPs closer politically to the conservative party than they are to Labours founding ideals. It’s not going to be pretty for the next few years…
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who said history repeats itself, but the second time as farce? the first stab-in-the-back narrative didn’t end so well
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Meanwhile, outside the bubble, the wider electorate - and even those who voted Labour at the last general election! - seem to prefer May to Corbyn. He does a fine job of gathering and speaking to crowds of supporters; not so well at talking to the millions of voters who he’ll need to get a parliamentary majority. It’s no good blaming the media or disloyal MPs (which is gross hypocrisy considering his voting record) - whether or not they’re being fair to him, Labour is not going to win if it carries on ignoring them. And for all that he’s spoken against abuse and for party unity, his supporters don’t seem to have got the message.
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I’d say that Jeremy has been very loyal to the ideals of the Labour party, far more than the Blairites ever were.
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This party political broadcast brought to you by the Conservative [edit- Lib Dem] Party.
The media does have a lot to answer for, as has been shown by independent studies. That is a big problem from now on. Reporters and columnists had built up relations with Blairites since the mid-1990s. That’s twenty years of political connection building and access gaining down the drain, and possibly the end of the careers of some of them, already threatened by the end of print journalism in the UK. Then there’s Murdoch and the Barclay Brothers, none of whom relish the idea of a future government that might want to look very hard at the fine line between tax avoidance and tax evasion. For Labour, Corbyn’s victory is a shaking of the foundations. Zionist settlement supporters are worried about him - given the number of Jewish people in senior roles in Momentum the charges of anti-Semitism look weak. There are an awful lot of people who want to ensure that while Corbyn is in charge the Labour Party goes nowhere.
Politically, Corbyn is nothing like hard left. His home views are probably little different from those of Heath; it’s his foreign policy the neocons don’t like. But it was John Major who engaged with talks with the IRA, which Blair continued, and it was Thatcher who encouraged Reagan to talk to Gorbachev. I suspect that in reality the gap between Corbyn and May is narrower than a lot of people realise, it’s just that the extreme wing of her party is far more extreme right wing than his. Even Blair’s worst enemies wouldn’t rank him with Redwood or Rees-Mogg.
Labour is going to need to build a very large social media presence to combat the paid-for media, and a lot of grassroots organising. But the next election campaign starts in 2019 - and as Harold Wilson said, three weeks is “a long time” in politics. By then economic disaster from Brexit could have had dramatic effects, and the people in the media who constantly talk up the Right may be wondering what they have unleashed.
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Yiu mean until they go into an election on a Corbyn manifesto and all of them lose their seats?
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Comparing Corbyn to Thatcher and Reagan is nonsense. They negotiated from a position of strength and the Soviet Union knew they would use military action to defend their interests. Gorbachev respected both leaders. There is no way Corbyn engenders respect. He has publicly questioned the role of NATO and said he would never countenance using nuclear weapons. All this at a time when our allies in Eastern Europe are rightly nervous about Russian aggression against Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova and not-so-subtle threats to the Baltic States.
As for the anti-semitism in the Labour Party, I’m not sure if it is all new, but it has certainly become more overt since Corbyn took over with him benignly smiling at the crowd when a Jewish MP was abused at the publication of his own report into antisemitism in the party. I’m afraid there is a significant part of the far left in Britain that has never considered Israel a legitimate state and sees it as the cause of all the problems in the Middle East. When you have a party leader who has called Hezbollah and Hamas ‘friends’ and a shadow chancellor who praised the IRA when it was bombing British cities, it is worthwhile questioning their fitness to represent Britain on the world stage.
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I’m actually a member of the Liberal Democrats, and generally more sympathetic to Labour than the Conservatives.
I’ll just leave this here.
I said nothing about policies, only about presentation.
It has a large social media presence. That isn’t enough.
And that would be partly thanks to Corbyn, who made no more than a token effort to campaign for Remain.
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And yet Labour and LD voters voted to Remain in about the same proportion.
(although I’m pretty sure that if Corbyn hadn’t been leader, he’d have been in Labour Leave with Kate Hoey).
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Sometimes losing an election while giving voters a real choice is better than winning with all the parties the same. Not for the MP:s losing their job, of course, but for democracy.
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Wait, is this the Let’s Have A Nuclear War thread?
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Yes - selective quoting without supplying context. You carefully omitted the background I supplied to every one of those phrases.
I’m not going to go into my own background in this but I would suggest - very strongly - that there is a current of anti-Semitism throughout Britain and that it is much stronger on the Right than the Left. It isn’t a Labour problem per se but a British problem.
Reading that paragraph you seem basically to be saying “Corbyn is not deserving of respect because he questions the Cold War narrative I support.” I am intensely disappointed about not only the referendum but the way the government took the result, because I think it’s time Europe got out from under the US, sorted itself out militarily and forged its own destiny. If there are figures this year who have emerged as being utterly unworthy of respect, Johnson, Gove, Farage, Rees-Mogg, Fox (and I could continue but won’t) must surely rank above Corbyn in any list as they set their own private interests above the country.
Edit:[quote=“benhutchings, post:11, topic:86129”]
I’m actually a member of the Liberal Democrats, and generally more sympathetic to Labour than the Conservatives
[/quote]
I should have picked up on this but I was more incensed by your attempt to slur me by omission.
I would just observe that your post reminded me of Farron’s conference speech; half truths and omissions. So you are clearly in the right place.
Incidentally, I do not belong to any political party, but the way Corbyn has been attacked over the last year has caused me to become extremely depressed about British democracy; and then the behaviour of the Conservative Party post referendum has caused me to become more depressed still. I feel I’m living in a country that’s being divided up between the very rich and the extremely rich, with the odd bone tossed to the peasants.
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“Accusations of antisemitism are currently being weaponised to attack the
Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party with claims that Labour has a “problem”
of antisemitism. This is despite Corbyn’s longstanding record of
actively opposing fascism and all forms of racism, and being a firm a
supporter of the rights of refugees and of human rights globally.”
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So Britain is going to be a Tory/LibDem circle-jerk for the forseeable future? Ok.
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Red Tory, blue Tory, yellow Tory. Whats the difference?
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Purely a Tory circle-jerk, they did for the Lib-Dems in the 2010-5 coalition government by a ruthless exploitation of the Lib-Dems naivety making them un-electable for a generation by getting them to renege on a major manifesto promise not to impose University tuition fees that had appealed to the youth. This lead to alienating large chunks of millenials, particularly middle class future influential media/politics/journo types.
The Conservative and Unionist Party are not the most successful election winning party in the world for nothing…
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Marx, I believe.
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