UK Labour Party elects its first left-wing leader in more than 20 years

NBC is also going with “Karl Marx admirer.”

Karl Marx admirer Jeremy Corbyn voted as Britain's Labour Party leader http://t.co/WkKpclAiY3 pic.twitter.com/fR1rHw5WG0

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 12, 2015
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No, that’s one group wanting their obsolete jobs saved, and another group demanding action on Global Warming, and so promising everything to both groups. UK has a Carbon tax, whose whole purpose is to discourage things like coal fired power stations.

Just saying that you can’t say Yes to everyone, even if that means votes.

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Sanders doesn’t have a chance of beating most of the Republicans, so we’re going to be stuck with Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate, which will be bad, but far better than a Republican, especially since the Republicans will probably be able to hang onto Congress, or at least the House.

Yvette Cooper tonight announced she won’t serve in Shadow Cabinet under Corbyn, so that’s another one down.

It’s funny, you can see these second-generation blairites are simply not used to the fight. All the roles and positions they leave unconditionally, Watson and Corbyn will colonize with their own faithfuls; it’s not like there’s a lack of offer for shadow cabinet appointments. Real big beasts would sit tight and let Corbyn wrangle the smallest concession out of them, gaining something, anything in return, be it bad publicity for a purge. Umunna chickened out even before the contest started! He’s now a walking joke, doing the rounds on talk shows trying to look relevant. It’s not a surprise that they couldn’t field a single decent candidate.

Such is the fate of political dictators, like Blair was: their successors are inevitably weak.

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They have 5 years to tune it anyway, assuming the Bullingdon Boys don’t crap out sooner.

In the meantime, with corbynism even as rough as it is now, Labour is now left enough to have a real shot at getting back Scotland, without which they will never get a majority in Westminster anyway.

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Ha, no chance. Corbyn is bad news for all of them, he encroaches on their growing niches. They will find it much harder to campaign against someone with policies close to theirs but with a chance of actually win the big prize. They will do their best to paint him as an illiberal stalinist or some other nonsense.

You’re not paying attention to what has happened this summer, are you?

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The establishment politicians haven’t yet realized who they’re dealing with. If they try to strike him down, he will become more powerful than they can possibly imagine.

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The “pure socialism” of Foot brought us F-all in change. In fact, it gave us another five years of Margaret Thatcher.

The Continuity Thatcherite Party, as you called it, may have had many faults, but it did give us the national living wage, the Human Rights Act, devolution, Sinn Fein in Northern Irish government, the scrapping of Section 28 (and the age of consent for gays lowered to 16), reduction in poverty, overseas aid commitment etc.

What we are seeing is the start of the battle between the Baby Boomer generation and the Generation Rent/Millennials generation. Corby had the support of Generation Rent/Millennials, but I doubt this group has sufficient size yet to stop the voting power of the Baby Boomers, and their habit of voting for their own self-interest.

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The world has changed a lot in 32 years in case you hadn’t noticed. Corporate media no longer has such a captive audience for a start.
Do try to keep up.

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George Osbourne announced he will spend £500M to keep the Trident nuclear missiles ready, just in case we ever need to end human life on earth. The argument is that the world is unpredictable and we don’t know whether we’d need Trident in 10 or 20 years time.

That sets a high-water mark for profligately wasteful spending.

We should keep coal mining ticking over as a strategic investment. If we couldn’t buy coal from abroad in 10 or 20 years time, we would need the capability to produce it. The world is unpredictable. We can subsidise a skeleton mining industry to retain the skills and technical know-how for much less than the cost of Trident.

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I didn’t vote for Corbyn, Labour lost me in my teens, about the same time it gained Blairism so I felt it was dishonest for me to join and I would likely have been purged before the election if I had.

It also gave us ATOS judging who was really deserving of disability benefits and/or capable of work (and getting it wrong way too many times), workfare, a continuation of privatisation of the NHS.

I am long term disabled and not getting better (mostly because of the lack of funding for mental health care, partly because of constant worries from political attacks on the disabled from both tories and labour), so you might be able to understand why I would say “No more!” to this.

I doubt that even a quarter of the 49.6% full Labour party members who voted for him are Millennials. The Labour voters across the road from me (same generation as Corbyn) view themselves as being further to the left than him.

If I am brutally honest, if the only way that a political party can get elected is by being right wing and fucking over the most vulnerable in society then we don’t need a leadership election, we need a revolution!

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Mmmm… Hams…

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I’m not sure which you are referring to. Brown brought in the Working Tax Credit which is a method for Tax Payers to give money to employers who under pay their employees. Osbourn announced the “National Living Wage” which is a method of taking the wind out of the Living Wage campaign while preventing people from claiming Tax Credit. Actually that is odd, as both bits of legislation seem like they should have come from the supposed opposing party.

Currently I just want a vocal opposition. Burnham and co seem to be indistinguishable from the Government.

I’m not certain which Generation I am from; being born in 1963, I’m too late for the Boomers and too early for Generation X.

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Some policies are so vehemently opposed to the soul of a party, only the party itself can introduce them (or some watered-down versions) while maintaining social peace. There are plenty of examples: Sharon withdrawing from Gaza; German, Italian and Greek leftist parties introducing thatcher-style “reforms”, etc etc. Had these been attempted by the opposed factions, they would have been vehemently fought in the streets; but because party leadership spent political capital persuading their own troops that they were “inevitable”, they came to pass.

Because of these dynamics, at one point in recent years it looked like in Britain you couldn’t trust Labour to enact leftist policies, nor could you trust Tories to be Tories (Cameron built his first campaigns on being green, pro-Europe, pro-NHS).

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See, he is anti-semitic.

Next thing you know, he’ll be supporting bacon butties!

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It’s quite amusingly relevant. Every major smear attack on Corbyn has been increasing Corbyn’s popularity.

Even funnier when the media hasn’t been realising this and have resorted to ever more hysterical attacks that… you guessed it… increased his popularity even more.

They even wheeled out Blair several times for goodness sake, can’t imagine anyone worse they could have chosen to attack with :smiley:

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Given the “tug of war” mechanic of politics, having a left-wing party of significance will likely strong push the Conservatives left as well in an effort to claim the voters that Labour has left behind by its left-ward shift.

Even if Labour doesn’t win the next election, it may well shift governance to the left.

And, of course, few parties rule forever. Elections are, generally speaking, a referendum on the economy. If the economy is doing poorly, the Conservative will lose and Labour will win regardless of Labour’s policies (unless they’re completely insane, but they’re far from that.)

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Mmmmmmmm… Baaaaaay-khaaaaaaaaaan…