This actually opens a rather interesting question: what’s a party for? Is it just a means for grabbing power, no matter the changes it must go through? Or is it a method for giving a certain slice of the populace a voice? Because, I rather think it is the latter. The Labour party’s prime purpose is giving a political voice to its core constituency: the working class and the left-minded. And if it gets only 10% of the vote, then, well, that’s how large its constituency is. If it rushes towards the right and joins every other party out there in its adherence to death-march austerity and joins in with the hosannas to neoliberalism sung in Westminster daily, then whose voice is it? Aren’t they then just the same political party, all of them, with vaguely different flavors?
Parliamentarian government only works if there is a plurality of opinion and a possibility of compromise. Having all of the political options converge in a beige dictatorship of TINA is a serious failure mode of democracy.
That could be seen as viewing the Blair/Brown/Callaghan/Wilson governments as worse than Thatcher/Major/Cameron/May ones, because those Labour governments had to compromise.
Being a voice, like Greenpeace, Amnesty are, etc gets you only so far.
Not being in power means having the Conservatives running the country.
The problem with your comparison to the Dolchstosslegende is that the legend was a “we was robbed” narrative, not a warning about being assasinated. The legend was past tense, not comparable to the more common reference to Caesar and its parallels to how Labour’s MP’s have openly attacked Mr. Corbyn.
The Dolchstosslegende is more of an excuse for losing that blames a scapegoat, not a tale of how elites plot against a popular leader to bring him down.
No, seriously. I always get accused of defending Putin on threads like this[1], but everyone seems to know things about Russia and what it wants to do, and then when I try to find where the hell that info comes from, I find that it just got conjured up from the ether one day. The one place I’ve been able to find anything uses as a source notes compiled by an unnamed source at an unnamed meeting with unnamed Russian officials.
Other articles just speculate wildly and make mention of things I know are silly (Latvian LNG terminals which are supposed to be fed out of… what? Fracking shale deposits? Which are only viable if oil goes to $100 a barrel which would be great for Russia?). I honestly think this is some weird snow-job serving recondite ends.
Now, if they said Romania what with a ballistic shield that is impossible to distinguish from short-range ballistic missiles which may easily be nuclear-tipped… yeah, that’d make anyone nervous, and yeah, Russia might risk a confrontation there. Maybe. But the Baltics? Why?
As substantiation I offer this article from an Cato institute fellow who can in no way be mistaken for liking Putin.
[1] We’re miles apart, politically. I’ve no great affection for him.
Indeed Livingstone was thrown out of the Labour party, and only allowed back because he had an annoying habit of winning elections with Londoners. Galloway left Labour over the Iraq war and gradually sank into the worst aspects of his personality.
Giving up your principles and drifting right in order to win means having the Conservatives running the country. But now they’re wearing different coloured ties.
If the majority of the people want the Tories running the country then so be it. That’s democracy. Compromise is all well and good, but the place for compromise is in parliament where it is nice and public and you can tell who wanted what and what they settled for. Compromise before the fact means that, even when you voted Labour you really didn’t vote for Labour. That option wasn’t even on the table. Instead the so-called left-of-centre option was consistently drifting right as each election required a further rightward shift.
I mean, if you were against interventionist wars, against austerity and privatization of vital state resources… who do you vote for? Your option isn’t even on the ballot. Your political views might as well not exist.
The moral authority to govern in a representative system is predicated, one would think, on being representative. Not on being slightly less terrible than the other guy. Not being in power means having Tories run the country? Okay. But being in power at any cost gives you the charming political landscape of the United States and we can all see how well that’s worked out.
I am not sure which of the two knives stories is the better one for the state of the Labour party. Corbin has the support of the base* but seems to be unpopular with the bulk of the representatives and functionaries.
Caesar narrative:
The party is completely out of touch with the general public and tries to get rid of a popular party leader
Stab-in-the-back narrative:
Corbin won a vote but many of his supporters are not really interested in the party. The establishment tries to remove him because of party-internal decision processes and the outsiders cry foul for unclear reasons, one can assume for teh lulz.
* I think the party leader can be voted not only by Labour members but also interested outsiders?
Can you explain more? All I ever see on the news are Labour reps like Ken Livingstone putting their feet in their mouths, but the only UK source I follow regularly is the BBC.
Livingstone (and Galloway) are marginal figures in the Labour Party; the Party did not want him as London mayor because of his colourful behaviour.[/quote]
I only mentioned him because he’s the most visible example. There have been others, eg Downing and Kirby and McDonnell,. If you say that they too are marginal, then fair enough, but of course every individual is marginal by him/herself.
Antisemites are like cockroaches, when the light of day reveals a few that means you have legions hiding away in the dark. Most recently the light has revealed a problem with Labour, and while there might also be a problem with the Conservatives that’s not who has been caught in the public eye.
I was hoping you had something more than anecdotes.
Generally, anti-Semitic incidents are not reported in the national press because that tends to cause copycats. You would need to read the Jewish press to find out what happens.
You mean like The Jewish Chronicle? They paint an even darker picture of Labour’s relations with the Jewish community than I’ve seen on the BBC or in the Graun.
He does have the disadvantage that every major media outlet treats him like shit, including the Guardian, which has been super busy carrying water for their Blairite mates. So the wider electorate who isnt that interested in politics will take a while to get through that blizzard of negative press. That said, I think it is changing and despite the natural tendency of Brits to love getting harangued by assertive Tory women, I think he has a very good chance of winning the next election. Especially when it becomes clear that the Tories have totally misjudged their negotiating position vis-a-vis the EU. Give it two years and the UK economy will slide into the toilet pan.
I was replying to the source you quoted (talking about Smith’s poll results) rather than to you. And I too am skeptical about those figures. But my point was, even if you believe the numbers, the argument amounts to “Smith may be decisively losing this vote, but if you included people who don’t care, he’d be winning!”
Oh dearie me. These people think the wrong person won leadership despite their ‘best’ efforts; and their chances of awarding themselves a contract for printing identity cards, or a council house, or something else equally juicy may have to come second to doing something for the common people for a bit. Well, boo-hoo: Labour can afford to leak a bit more of that sort of pus.
Major negotiated with the IRA because he was told to: by the city, and by the US.
That sounds like weakness rather than strength to me. Proving how hard and strong you are never led to peace though. It’s hardly as if Thatcher left a legacy of peace did she?
There seem to be a lot of Balts in the US who think talking up the Russian threat will get US support for their countries?
I agree; if Putin is an evil cat-stroking power mad genius seeking to restore the Soviet Union 1, attacking the Baltic states seems an extremely odd place to start. His biggest worry at the moment is Islamic terrorism and part of his popularity depends on preventing it reaching Russia; that’s where his attention seems focussed to the extent that he went to the confabulation of Sunni scholars in Grozny.
[1] Which is silly. He seems actually to be quite pragmatic, but equally aware that post-Yeltsin, any kind of attempt to introduce “Western values” to Russia will have him out on his ear at best, tanks on the lawn at worst. A lot of ordinary Russians seem to feel about Yeltsin the way Germans were persuaded to think about Weimar.
I think that the next time any politician gets 23% of the available votes and claims to have a “mandate from the people”, their head should be stuck on a pike and displayed outside Downs Street.
We did have a referendum on the Alternative Vote a few years back, which would’ve had automatic run-offs until someone had secured a majority of over 50%.
The government campaigned hard to obfuscate the issues however, and the idea was rejected.
