I came here for the Corbyn win and ended up stepping into the wayback machine!
Contrary to popular opinion, women's very existence - and good looks - does not solely exist for third party consumption (unless, to Skel's point, it is a vital part of their profession/brand/service delivery).
Speaking of the third, here's another option - other than men and other women, who we want to look good for and whose admiration we feel good about is OURSELVES.
The notion that out-of-pocket, inappropriate and unprofessional behaviour is some how acceptable to women if the douchebag is good looking just sounds like some poor coping skills from having been rejected..."I'm sure she'd be game if I were rich and famous and buff." What's the next step in this amazing theory? That women are ok with being groped on the train and thrown against a wall after the club if the guy is handsome? GTFOOHWTBS.
Using LinkedIn to getting laid aside, the dynamics of mutual attraction is vastly different than unwanted attention; please do not act like women are somehow at fault or hypocritical for liking it when people they are attracted to are attracted to them. Especially as men's attitudes and reactions to, and valuation of women who they find unattractive is nothing like those who they do find to be fit.
Having had my rant out, I will say that people really need to chill the fuck out on the way they throw the word misogyny around. Sexism and being a general idiot when it comes to dealing with women does not necessarily a woman-hater make.
As it stands, Corbyn renders Labour unelectable.
There will be untold rehashed tales of succour to terrorists and so on.
If he survives the next couple of years, may just ride the wave of underdog momentum to the most unlikely victory we've ever seen.
But I think Labour are basically fusked.
As Canada is about a month away from federal elections and our establishment left is doing better than most expected, this Corbyn win provides a glimmer of hope as far as making statements go, however unelectable he renders Labour. We have endured 10 years of Scrooge, Dr Evil with hair and a CanCon Republican in one awful awful man, we need to see this.
Well, that is what the Tory party and New Labour grandees are hoping: However, Corbyn himself has proved remarkably electable for 32 years with the biggest labour majority in parliament. His proposed policies on nationalising rail, some utilities and abolishing university tuition fees also chime with the majority of the electorate in most polls. Whether he survives and wins in 2020 will depend on the extent to which Labour MPs will respect his crushing mandate from the party members, affiliates and supporters and go out and sell his message effectively and with conviction. The press in the UK have been routinely anti labour (in any of it's guises) for 35 years, but i think Corbyn is well placed to mobilise a grassroots support network (e.g. social media) to bypass this.
The notion that out-of-pocket, inappropriate and unprofessional behaviour is some how acceptable to women if the douchebag is good looking just sounds like some poor coping skills from having been rejected..."I'm sure she'd be game if I were rich and famous and buff." What's the next step in this amazing theory? That women are ok with being groped on the train and thrown against a wall after the club if the guy is handsome? GTFOOHWTBS.
If we're next-stepping, I seem to recall various women/girls creating a furor with remarks on Twitter about how Chris Brown could beat them any day (Rihanna-r).
But I wasn't going that far.
When you live in the world of the people who usually have to make the first move (men), your experience of women's responses may vary. I'm not endorsing hitting on strangers via linked-in or any other medium - I rarely do any approach work (maybe fear of rejection? I will conceded that definitely!) but I know what I observe. Not 100% of the time, as nothing is that simple.
Interestingly, woman who called lawyer dude out for linkedin faux pas has herself been outed for various 'hottie' and 'phwoar' comments on young hottie dude pix online.
I'm not sure what this all says, but the whole thing is clearly a mess of right-on-ism, manufactured outrage, old people unable to keep up with 2015 social mores, and general confusion over the state of the debate on what is and isn't acceptable. Neither side comes out unscathed.
Surely Corbyn will move to the middle come election time? Besides, I'm with Jimster that the decision-making is made by big business.
b/w
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
First of all; Rodgers out. Let's get that over with.
Secondly, what follows is the slightly edited text of my side of an FB convo with my younger brother, who doesn't share my somewhat pessimistic view of Labour's future. You're getting the C&P because a) it's a pretty thorough summary of where I stand on Corbyn, apart from a few points I'm no longer willing to get into on here (or via DM), and b) there's no fucking way I'm typing all this out again. If you're going to read it, I suggest you grab a sandwich. Otherwise, there's a tl;dr version at the bottom.
[strong]********************************[/strong]
Sure Start, the minimum wage, a reduction in child poverty and NHS waiting times, more doctors and nurses, NHS Direct, civil partnerships, more women in parliament, a year-on-year increase in spending on the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society, breast cancer screening, less crime, no riots, Gift Aid to help charities, devolved power to regional assemblies, winter fuel payments for pensioners...
These are some of the things that 13 years of unbroken so-called "Red Tory" government achieved. That's why I held my nose after the Iraq war and voted Labour at the subsequent election; because I took a look at the options (which were particularly pitiful in my constituency) and decided it was more important to return a Labour government, and all of the agonising over the damage done to the concept of liberal intervention could wait for another time.
I have this dotty belief that politics is about finding the balance between what you want (your principles or core values, if you like), and what you can realistically achieve (let's call that "what the electorate will vote for"), and that it's about getting as much as you can from the first box into the second. It's been a problem of Labour's for some time now that they're embarrassed by their successes. They'd much rather beat themselves up over the Iraq war than talk up that string of remarkable achievements because Tony Blair. Well, fuck Tony Blair. Let's get that out of the way right now. I detest what he's become, but he resigned nearly ten years ago, so let's not let his ghost continue to piss in the pool just because some people can't or won't admit that he actually brought about a lot of positive change while he was in power.
Right now, I'm seeing more enthusiasm amongst Corbyn supporters for a full-scale purge of the party's ideologically unsound elements than I am for an effective strategy to challenge the Tories. That may change - we'll see. But for some, a step in the right direction appears to mean a return to 80s student politics blown up to IMAX level; proper People's Front of Judaea stuff where the pejorative "Red Tories!" takes the place of "splitters!", and the comfort-blanket of virtuously principled opposition is preferable to the awkward business of political compromise that [em]every[/em] governing party has to deal with. That's just self-indulgent shite.
I had this picture in my mind last night of Corbyn's keynote speech at the 2019 Labour conference, where he stood at the lectern and had half the hall cheering and the other half holding their head in their hands as he told them, "Return to your constituencies and prepare for opposition!" That's what I think we're in for, sadly. The electorate hasn't returned a radical socialist PM since 1945. That depresses me enormously, but the facts speak for themselves. I don't believe Corbyn has a hope in hell of bucking that trend, and he may well do irreparable damage to the Labour party in the process. In fact, in the eyes of many Labour-supporting friends of mine - many of whom are now being told they should fuck off and form their own party by people who might want to ask themselves why [em]they[/em] don't fuck off and join the SWP - he already has done. I'd be delighted to be wrong about all of this, but I worry I won't be.
If you think I spewed out all of that because I reckon I'm one of these people who's got all the answers if only everyone would just listen to me...well, I'm afraid I'm not. I don't know what the answer is. To tell you the truth, I wouldn't have wanted to vote for any of them as Labour leader. But at a push, maybe Stella Creasy if she'd stood for the leadership, or Yvette Cooper; reason for that being, if it's change we really want, then how about we start by putting someone other than an old white bloke (Oxbridge-educated or otherwise) in the big chair? That'd have been good to begin with. But it might be that the person with the answer that most appeals to me personally may not even be eligible to vote yet. Perhaps it's one of those wide-eyed young idealists who've just joined (and are now trying frantically to switch off their email notifications). It'd be great if they were. Who knows? I certainly don't.
But if I had voted for either Creasy or Cooper and they'd won, I wouldn't be expecting them to work miracles. Corbyn, on the other hand, will have to do exactly that. He has to convince the electorate to embrace a set of political values and policies that they have consistently rejected at the ballot box time and again, certainly for as long as I've been able to vote. I don't like that any more than you do, but it's a fact. Either way if he does pull it off, it'll be a political miracle to rival the second half of the 2005 Champions League final. I just don't believe he's up to it, simple as that. I am, however, willing to be proved wrong.
I have a friend who works for the party who listened to my ranting shortly after May 7th about how it was being too soft and right-wing that had cost Labour the election. He then patiently explained to me that actually, Labour had just fought the election on their most left-of-centre ticket since 1983, and they still lost. He also explained the strategy behind the abstentions on the welfare bill which I, like many, was outraged by. I wasn't wholly convinced by his answer, but I was willing to accept that perhaps things weren't as cut-and-dried as they appeared. So, having been disabused of a couple of preconceptions, I went away and thought to myself, “OK, what now, Earthman?”
And so we return to what I was saying above about the difference between what we want and what we can realistically achieve. Let's say for the sake of discussion that Corbyn survives until the 2020 election, having ridden out Christ knows what over the preceding years. He offers up precisely the kind of policies he'd run on if there were a general election tomorrow. He loses. Whose fault is it then? The media? Do me a favour. We all know they'd give any and every Labour leader a torrid time as a matter of routine. You can only blame them for so much. As for the Tories themselves, I doubt they're scared by him at all. They know that all they have to do is give him enough rope and, whether he lasts until 2020 or not, eventually he'll hang himself whilst in the process reviving that long-dormant link in the minds of the voting public between the entire Labour movement and political extremism; something that'll take decades to overturn once more.
So, how many more times after he loses will the party be expected to fight a battle it keeps losing and may never win? At what point will someone say, “Y'know what, maybe we're never going to get what we want here. If the electorate keeps saying thanks but no thanks, maybe we'll just have to suck it up and focus on what we actually [em]can[/em] get.” The alternative is more Tories – [em]real, actual[/em] Tories – for longer. That's unacceptable. And I don't give a fuck what all these prolier-than-thou, “rather 100 years in opposition than Liz Kendall as leader” muppets are saying, a Labour government – any Labour government - is [em]always[/em] better than a Tory one. Better a succession of small victories than fuck-all. And as long as the real Tories are in power, fuck-all is what we're going to get, so we need to face the strong possibility that the people may simply not want to buy what Corbyn is selling. If not, what [em]can[/em] we persuade them to buy? Might be a good idea to keep that question in mind.
There's a possibility – a very remote one, but while he's party leader, it exists – that the responsibility of leadership might force Corbyn to rethink his position on one or two things and learn that compromise, however painful or distasteful, is sometimes necessary and even unavoidable. You can't always get what you want, and all that. But for someone who's made a virtue of how principled he is, Corbyn's likely to find that kind of compromise very difficult. He's not a young man, and the ability to question a few of the lifelong certainties he's built his entire values system upon will not come easily. But if he's going to lead, and especially if he has ambitions to govern, then at some point he'll have to. It's one thing getting the party membership (and all the £3 political tourists with no stake in the party at all) to elect you leader by a landslide. It's getting into No. 10 that's the hard job.
Great post Doc, and your bro eloquently posits much of my own thoughts.
I do think that the rah-rah mob who have cheered him in have not a single clue about the realities of life.
To whit:
- The real destitute are neither numerous enough to make an electoral difference, nor engaged enough to mobilise
- The struggling-but-surviving don't want anything but the opportunity to take part in the game, and that means increasing the pie, not making it smaller and divvying up on a numbers basis
- these and the comfortable are the majority, and they will not vote in a utopian dreamer who ignores their life
- the rich are, always have been, always will be an unavoidable fact of life.
Few hundred thousand Islington socialists and student idealists will never hold sway.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
skel said:
Great post Doc, and your bro eloquently posits much of my own thoughts.
Nah, that's all me, that. Obviously I didn't make that clear. Me and R Kid don't quite see eye-to-eye on this, although I hope it won't take too hard a lesson for him to come round..
I do think that the rah-rah mob who have cheered him in have not a single clue about the realities of life.
To whit:
- The real destitute are neither numerous enough to make an electoral difference, nor engaged enough to mobilise
- The struggling-but-surviving don't want anything but the opportunity to take part in the game, and that means increasing the pie, not making it smaller and divvying up on a numbers basis
- these and the comfortable are the majority, and they will not vote in a utopian dreamer who ignores their life
- the rich are, always have been, always will be an unavoidable fact of life.
Few hundred thousand Islington socialists and student idealists will never hold sway.
Quite an interesting and thoughtful analysis here from a Camden Labour councillor who identifies as a moderniser.
In 1998 he [Jack Warner] was awarded the 2002 World Cup TV rights for Trinidad and Tobago for only one dollar, a practice that had begun under Blatter’s predecessor João Havelange. Warner’s JDI also sold the 2006 World Cup rights to the Caribbean for $4.25m in 2001.
What I like most about this goal is Coq's tackle (ooo-err missus). Who in the league is playing better than him at the moment in that role?
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
Returning to the Corbynite Maneuver for just a brief moment, this excellent piece by Brit-in-exile (and former film critic for The Face) Anthony Lane on the New Yorker site acts as a first-rate primer for any non-Brits who may be listening in and wondering just what in the hell kinda shithouse outfit you runnin' over there, son?
Jim, I fear for your ill-gotten Ponzi dough under the Corbyn regime.
His new chancellor, with the "foment the downfall of capitalism" shtick will take every pennycent for make purpose of building statues to fallen terrorist.
I am simply having a punt on a two-horse race.
Sterling V Dollar.
Would man deny a humble working man his weekend trip to the bookies, resplendent in slippers, trackie bottoms and flat cap?
Until the Scots are also voting Labour, there's no way in for the left anyway - The change will only come when there is nothing left to eat except the rich. By which time you will be retired and laughing your ass off from atop your mounds of gold.
b/w One man's "Ill-gotten" is another man's "Speculate to accumulate."
Mr. Abramovich tells it so well.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
Pretty much every last word of this is depressingly dead-on. Whilst I can't make any claims for the soundness of the analysis itself, nor can I make any claims against it.
And what happened in the Commons last night? Parliament voted to cut tax credits, and by a larger margin than expected as well. And where was the dynamic new Labour leadership we've been hearing so much about when all this was taking place? Front and centre in the Commons rebellion as they took the fight to the Tories against such a shitty policy? Or was it allowing itself to be dragged into an equally shitty but nonetheless utterly predictable debate about singing the National Anthem[strong]*[/strong], just because that's the kind of principle Jeremy Corbyn believes it's important to be seen publicly standing firm on? At this rate, he'll be lucky to last as long as Brian Clough did at Leeds.
[strong]*[/strong] For the record, I personally could not care less who does or doesn't sing the National Anthem, nor do I care whether or not one chooses to define “not singing” as “maintaining a respectful silence”. It doesn't matter to me. The problem is, to a lot of people, it [em]does[/em] matter. And many of them are precisely the people Labour has to reach if people like [em]me[/em] are to have any hope of seeing another Labour government before we start drawing what's left of our pensions.
OK, that's it, no more Corbyn from me until he does something that's actually surprising or unexpected. Let the cunt carry on digging his own grave, because the quicker this is over, the better it'll be for everyone that actually needs an effective opposition to face down those spiv bastards.
The Tories have a majority so unless a bunch of them rebelled all the opposition parties couldn't win the vote last night, and only two rebelled. Liberals abstained. Scots are probably most cheesed as SNP sided with Labour against and now have it going through to the next reading. No new Labour leader at this stage was going to get a mass of Tories to defect on the 1st bill, Cameron would have made sure of that with the Tory whip.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
soulcitizen said:
The Tories have a majority so unless a bunch of them rebelled all the opposition parties couldn't win the vote last night, and only two rebelled. Liberals abstained. Scots are probably most cheesed as SNP sided with Labour against and now have it going through to the next reading. No new Labour leader at this stage was going to get a mass of Tories to defect on the 1st bill, Cameron would have made sure of that with the Tory whip.
Yeah, they can basically put their feet up between now and 2020. I was thinking more of how it would have been better for Corbyn to go in swinging ASAP and at least look like he's going to give them as rough a ride as possible, but no - he'd sooner walk face-first into a media shitstorm and then waste time complaining about the same media doing exactly what any experienced politician would expect them to. Speaking of negative fallout from ostentatious displays of republicanism, he's unlikely to be terribly popular with (or sympathetic towards) the DUP either, is he? Pity, since the current Stormont crisis might otherwise have offered him a great opportunity to get a few digs in. Good luck trying to get [em]them[/em] to vote with Labour on just about anything.
Comments
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/12/donald-trump-duped-into-retweeting-picture-of-jeremy-corbyn
Is Labour going to actually (or pretend to) represent a Socialist party again?
And can he eat a bacon sarnie?
Contrary to popular opinion, women's very existence - and good looks - does not solely exist for third party consumption (unless, to Skel's point, it is a vital part of their profession/brand/service delivery).
Speaking of the third, here's another option - other than men and other women, who we want to look good for and whose admiration we feel good about is OURSELVES.
The notion that out-of-pocket, inappropriate and unprofessional behaviour is some how acceptable to women if the douchebag is good looking just sounds like some poor coping skills from having been rejected..."I'm sure she'd be game if I were rich and famous and buff." What's the next step in this amazing theory? That women are ok with being groped on the train and thrown against a wall after the club if the guy is handsome? GTFOOHWTBS.
Using LinkedIn to getting laid aside, the dynamics of mutual attraction is vastly different than unwanted attention; please do not act like women are somehow at fault or hypocritical for liking it when people they are attracted to are attracted to them. Especially as men's attitudes and reactions to, and valuation of women who they find unattractive is nothing like those who they do find to be fit.
Having had my rant out, I will say that people really need to chill the fuck out on the way they throw the word misogyny around. Sexism and being a general idiot when it comes to dealing with women does not necessarily a woman-hater make.
Now about Corbyn...
There will be untold rehashed tales of succour to terrorists and so on.
If he survives the next couple of years, may just ride the wave of underdog momentum to the most unlikely victory we've ever seen.
But I think Labour are basically fusked.
:coolsmile:
Well, that is what the Tory party and New Labour grandees are hoping: However, Corbyn himself has proved remarkably electable for 32 years with the biggest labour majority in parliament. His proposed policies on nationalising rail, some utilities and abolishing university tuition fees also chime with the majority of the electorate in most polls. Whether he survives and wins in 2020 will depend on the extent to which Labour MPs will respect his crushing mandate from the party members, affiliates and supporters and go out and sell his message effectively and with conviction. The press in the UK have been routinely anti labour (in any of it's guises) for 35 years, but i think Corbyn is well placed to mobilise a grassroots support network (e.g. social media) to bypass this.
If we're next-stepping, I seem to recall various women/girls creating a furor with remarks on Twitter about how Chris Brown could beat them any day (Rihanna-r).
But I wasn't going that far.
When you live in the world of the people who usually have to make the first move (men), your experience of women's responses may vary. I'm not endorsing hitting on strangers via linked-in or any other medium - I rarely do any approach work (maybe fear of rejection? I will conceded that definitely!) but I know what I observe. Not 100% of the time, as nothing is that simple.
I'm not sure what this all says, but the whole thing is clearly a mess of right-on-ism, manufactured outrage, old people unable to keep up with 2015 social mores, and general confusion over the state of the debate on what is and isn't acceptable. Neither side comes out unscathed.
b/w
Secondly, what follows is the slightly edited text of my side of an FB convo with my younger brother, who doesn't share my somewhat pessimistic view of Labour's future. You're getting the C&P because a) it's a pretty thorough summary of where I stand on Corbyn, apart from a few points I'm no longer willing to get into on here (or via DM), and b) there's no fucking way I'm typing all this out again. If you're going to read it, I suggest you grab a sandwich. Otherwise, there's a tl;dr version at the bottom.
[strong]********************************[/strong]
Sure Start, the minimum wage, a reduction in child poverty and NHS waiting times, more doctors and nurses, NHS Direct, civil partnerships, more women in parliament, a year-on-year increase in spending on the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society, breast cancer screening, less crime, no riots, Gift Aid to help charities, devolved power to regional assemblies, winter fuel payments for pensioners...
These are some of the things that 13 years of unbroken so-called "Red Tory" government achieved. That's why I held my nose after the Iraq war and voted Labour at the subsequent election; because I took a look at the options (which were particularly pitiful in my constituency) and decided it was more important to return a Labour government, and all of the agonising over the damage done to the concept of liberal intervention could wait for another time.
I have this dotty belief that politics is about finding the balance between what you want (your principles or core values, if you like), and what you can realistically achieve (let's call that "what the electorate will vote for"), and that it's about getting as much as you can from the first box into the second. It's been a problem of Labour's for some time now that they're embarrassed by their successes. They'd much rather beat themselves up over the Iraq war than talk up that string of remarkable achievements because Tony Blair. Well, fuck Tony Blair. Let's get that out of the way right now. I detest what he's become, but he resigned nearly ten years ago, so let's not let his ghost continue to piss in the pool just because some people can't or won't admit that he actually brought about a lot of positive change while he was in power.
Right now, I'm seeing more enthusiasm amongst Corbyn supporters for a full-scale purge of the party's ideologically unsound elements than I am for an effective strategy to challenge the Tories. That may change - we'll see. But for some, a step in the right direction appears to mean a return to 80s student politics blown up to IMAX level; proper People's Front of Judaea stuff where the pejorative "Red Tories!" takes the place of "splitters!", and the comfort-blanket of virtuously principled opposition is preferable to the awkward business of political compromise that [em]every[/em] governing party has to deal with. That's just self-indulgent shite.
I had this picture in my mind last night of Corbyn's keynote speech at the 2019 Labour conference, where he stood at the lectern and had half the hall cheering and the other half holding their head in their hands as he told them, "Return to your constituencies and prepare for opposition!" That's what I think we're in for, sadly. The electorate hasn't returned a radical socialist PM since 1945. That depresses me enormously, but the facts speak for themselves. I don't believe Corbyn has a hope in hell of bucking that trend, and he may well do irreparable damage to the Labour party in the process. In fact, in the eyes of many Labour-supporting friends of mine - many of whom are now being told they should fuck off and form their own party by people who might want to ask themselves why [em]they[/em] don't fuck off and join the SWP - he already has done. I'd be delighted to be wrong about all of this, but I worry I won't be.
If you think I spewed out all of that because I reckon I'm one of these people who's got all the answers if only everyone would just listen to me...well, I'm afraid I'm not. I don't know what the answer is. To tell you the truth, I wouldn't have wanted to vote for any of them as Labour leader. But at a push, maybe Stella Creasy if she'd stood for the leadership, or Yvette Cooper; reason for that being, if it's change we really want, then how about we start by putting someone other than an old white bloke (Oxbridge-educated or otherwise) in the big chair? That'd have been good to begin with. But it might be that the person with the answer that most appeals to me personally may not even be eligible to vote yet. Perhaps it's one of those wide-eyed young idealists who've just joined (and are now trying frantically to switch off their email notifications). It'd be great if they were. Who knows? I certainly don't.
But if I had voted for either Creasy or Cooper and they'd won, I wouldn't be expecting them to work miracles. Corbyn, on the other hand, will have to do exactly that. He has to convince the electorate to embrace a set of political values and policies that they have consistently rejected at the ballot box time and again, certainly for as long as I've been able to vote. I don't like that any more than you do, but it's a fact. Either way if he does pull it off, it'll be a political miracle to rival the second half of the 2005 Champions League final. I just don't believe he's up to it, simple as that. I am, however, willing to be proved wrong.
I have a friend who works for the party who listened to my ranting shortly after May 7th about how it was being too soft and right-wing that had cost Labour the election. He then patiently explained to me that actually, Labour had just fought the election on their most left-of-centre ticket since 1983, and they still lost. He also explained the strategy behind the abstentions on the welfare bill which I, like many, was outraged by. I wasn't wholly convinced by his answer, but I was willing to accept that perhaps things weren't as cut-and-dried as they appeared. So, having been disabused of a couple of preconceptions, I went away and thought to myself, “OK, what now, Earthman?”
And so we return to what I was saying above about the difference between what we want and what we can realistically achieve. Let's say for the sake of discussion that Corbyn survives until the 2020 election, having ridden out Christ knows what over the preceding years. He offers up precisely the kind of policies he'd run on if there were a general election tomorrow. He loses. Whose fault is it then? The media? Do me a favour. We all know they'd give any and every Labour leader a torrid time as a matter of routine. You can only blame them for so much. As for the Tories themselves, I doubt they're scared by him at all. They know that all they have to do is give him enough rope and, whether he lasts until 2020 or not, eventually he'll hang himself whilst in the process reviving that long-dormant link in the minds of the voting public between the entire Labour movement and political extremism; something that'll take decades to overturn once more.
So, how many more times after he loses will the party be expected to fight a battle it keeps losing and may never win? At what point will someone say, “Y'know what, maybe we're never going to get what we want here. If the electorate keeps saying thanks but no thanks, maybe we'll just have to suck it up and focus on what we actually [em]can[/em] get.” The alternative is more Tories – [em]real, actual[/em] Tories – for longer. That's unacceptable. And I don't give a fuck what all these prolier-than-thou, “rather 100 years in opposition than Liz Kendall as leader” muppets are saying, a Labour government – any Labour government - is [em]always[/em] better than a Tory one. Better a succession of small victories than fuck-all. And as long as the real Tories are in power, fuck-all is what we're going to get, so we need to face the strong possibility that the people may simply not want to buy what Corbyn is selling. If not, what [em]can[/em] we persuade them to buy? Might be a good idea to keep that question in mind.
There's a possibility – a very remote one, but while he's party leader, it exists – that the responsibility of leadership might force Corbyn to rethink his position on one or two things and learn that compromise, however painful or distasteful, is sometimes necessary and even unavoidable. You can't always get what you want, and all that. But for someone who's made a virtue of how principled he is, Corbyn's likely to find that kind of compromise very difficult. He's not a young man, and the ability to question a few of the lifelong certainties he's built his entire values system upon will not come easily. But if he's going to lead, and especially if he has ambitions to govern, then at some point he'll have to. It's one thing getting the party membership (and all the £3 political tourists with no stake in the party at all) to elect you leader by a landslide. It's getting into No. 10 that's the hard job.
[strong]tl;dr[/strong] – he ain't tha 1
:lol:
For me, Tom Watson. Maybe he's one for the future.
I also think Vince Cabal should be in charge of the Lib Dems, so what do I know.
I do think that the rah-rah mob who have cheered him in have not a single clue about the realities of life.
To whit:
- The real destitute are neither numerous enough to make an electoral difference, nor engaged enough to mobilise
- The struggling-but-surviving don't want anything but the opportunity to take part in the game, and that means increasing the pie, not making it smaller and divvying up on a numbers basis
- these and the comfortable are the majority, and they will not vote in a utopian dreamer who ignores their life
- the rich are, always have been, always will be an unavoidable fact of life.
Few hundred thousand Islington socialists and student idealists will never hold sway.
Nah, that's all me, that. Obviously I didn't make that clear. Me and R Kid don't quite see eye-to-eye on this, although I hope it won't take too hard a lesson for him to come round..
Quite an interesting and thoughtful analysis here from a Camden Labour councillor who identifies as a moderniser.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/sep/13/jack-warner-sepp-blatter-world-cup-rights-profit
His new chancellor, with the "foment the downfall of capitalism" shtick will take every pennycent for make purpose of building statues to fallen terrorist.
I am simply having a punt on a two-horse race.
Sterling V Dollar.
Would man deny a humble working man his weekend trip to the bookies, resplendent in slippers, trackie bottoms and flat cap?
Until the Scots are also voting Labour, there's no way in for the left anyway - The change will only come when there is nothing left to eat except the rich. By which time you will be retired and laughing your ass off from atop your mounds of gold.
Sleep well.
Mr. Abramovich tells it so well.
And what happened in the Commons last night? Parliament voted to cut tax credits, and by a larger margin than expected as well. And where was the dynamic new Labour leadership we've been hearing so much about when all this was taking place? Front and centre in the Commons rebellion as they took the fight to the Tories against such a shitty policy? Or was it allowing itself to be dragged into an equally shitty but nonetheless utterly predictable debate about singing the National Anthem[strong]*[/strong], just because that's the kind of principle Jeremy Corbyn believes it's important to be seen publicly standing firm on? At this rate, he'll be lucky to last as long as Brian Clough did at Leeds.
[strong]*[/strong] For the record, I personally could not care less who does or doesn't sing the National Anthem, nor do I care whether or not one chooses to define “not singing” as “maintaining a respectful silence”. It doesn't matter to me. The problem is, to a lot of people, it [em]does[/em] matter. And many of them are precisely the people Labour has to reach if people like [em]me[/em] are to have any hope of seeing another Labour government before we start drawing what's left of our pensions.
OK, that's it, no more Corbyn from me until he does something that's actually surprising or unexpected. Let the cunt carry on digging his own grave, because the quicker this is over, the better it'll be for everyone that actually needs an effective opposition to face down those spiv bastards.
The party oust him after some painful embarrassment- which we are seeing each day of his few days as leader.
He realises he hates being a leader, is a natural outsider backbencher, and goes back to his lane.
The spread bet market said 475 days last time I checked.
I'd sell that.
Cenotaph vibes.
Yeah, they can basically put their feet up between now and 2020. I was thinking more of how it would have been better for Corbyn to go in swinging ASAP and at least look like he's going to give them as rough a ride as possible, but no - he'd sooner walk face-first into a media shitstorm and then waste time complaining about the same media doing exactly what any experienced politician would expect them to. Speaking of negative fallout from ostentatious displays of republicanism, he's unlikely to be terribly popular with (or sympathetic towards) the DUP either, is he? Pity, since the current Stormont crisis might otherwise have offered him a great opportunity to get a few digs in. Good luck trying to get [em]them[/em] to vote with Labour on just about anything.