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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The curtain lifted a little this week on Labour’s civil war
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The curtain lifted a little this week on Labour’s civil war and it’s not pretty
Power struggles are the nature of politics. Usually, the public gets to glimpse only a fraction of the battles waged behind closed doors in what were once smoke-filled rooms. Outsiders end up having to engage in their own form of Kremlinology to work out what’s really going on:
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And I even warned you RobD
Benn of course had been a Minister, and a reasonably competent one at that. Corbyn does seem to be a permanent revolutionary, and for me, the most damning critique is that he was apparently totally unable to run useful Shadow Cabinet meetings. There’s little more disheartening for an organisation than an incompetent Chairman!
In the 80’s too there were some significant and able figures activce on the "other side"; can’t see Owen Smith as a Roy Jenkins or a Denis Healey!
Labour are in the worst imaginable mess of their own making since Ambrose Everett Burnside ordered his men to blow a mine that would create a trench into the enemy camp, only to find that it had been dug deeper instead of shallower at the far end and they were completely trapped.
At this rate, it'll end up like the first episode of Red Dwarf.
"Everybody's dead, Dave."
'Nominate McDonnell or we deselect you.'
It would only take five to cave in.
As succinct and informative as ever
No one has a clue who's right.
She finds it genuinely upsetting, something she deeply valued has died. I cannot believe that she is even close to being alone in that view.
Make the tea, organise taxis, etc.
How surprising - a piece written by a Conservative activist having a jolly good poke at Labour's open wounds. Yes, civil wars aren't pretty - look at the one the Conservatives have had for a generation over Europe.
Gloating at Labour's misfortunes may be the fashion for summer 2016 but we have the far more serious (and much less talked about) of Messrs Johnson, Davis and Fox (aka the Three Stooges) negotiating this country's economic and political future with the EU and the rest of the world while fighting their own turf war and massaging their own egos.
Whether or not Jeremy Corbyn can find a seat on a train will seem the most trivial nonsense once we let Curly, Mo and Larry loose on the Article 50 negotiations. It is to be hoped there will be a serious team of capable officials behind him to do the actual work and clear up the mess and smooth the ruffled feathers.
At the same time, the Prime Minister, whose sole achievements so far have been to go for a walk with her husband and say "Brexit means Brexit" will begin to realise that managing everyone's hopes and expectations for what Brexit actually means won't be that easy whether it's the City with financial passporting or those people who want to see the Channel Tunnel bricked up to stop further economic migration.
Michael Emerson was brilliant as sinister Ben. I'll miss Person of Interest now that's done too. Just looked on IMDB but nothing new listed for him yet. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0256237/
Gramsci
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07n7grm
I did not think it as good as his series on the Seventies. Sandbrook is too much of a transparent Thatcher worshipper to provide balance. So much was missing because it did not fit his theme of consumerism. The Eighties had a very strong counter-cultural movement that contradicts his thesis.
It is also worth noting that much of what was considered "Looney Left" back then is now mainstream, and even Conservative party policy.
Edit - it is of course uncertain what happens with the next Euro elections in 2018 - it is just possible albeit unlikely there may be no British MEPs after that.
Energy drinks can replenish your glucose levels but can be very high in sugar.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zx4sp39
... which is true, I suppose.
You are quite right that may has an impossible job to please everyone in front of her, that does offer some hope even to a distracted labour, since if Brexit goes crap enough their divisions will reemerge. It's not unreasonable it is less talked of less since Labour's problems are much more acute. The question is how chronic they will be. Not as much as David thinks, I believe. Maybe both think they can win now, but if smith loses that side will no they cannot win for years and will stop fighting. The alternative would undermine the party without the justification of internal victory to aim for. No more than a handful will dare.
If it is clear that in fact Corbyn is a spinner and teller of falsehoods in order to make a political point then he is no different from the rest and his usp is shot to pieces.
That the division is over who is doing what is best for the labour brand, with not a whisper of any wondering if, the way the membership now is, that the LDs or God forbid the Tories or UKIP really are closer to their ideals, and given the difficulty of creating a new party and desperate theories of splitting in parliament without really splitting the party, shows that they are still looking to avoid confronting the possibility they cannot win, and therefore the party is not for them. They'll retire or try to sit it out and play the long game.
Jumping just means a few years of relative peace before finding a new job.
I don't mind teasing things out, but it just bored me in the end.
Mr. L, that reminds me: the demented move to give men and women the same advised weekly alcohol guidelines have come under attack (read in yesterday's Mail) for the rather obvious problem that they suggest men and women have equal alcohol tolerance.
It's politically correct but, alas, not in line with biological science.
Sadly so. You need a full grown woman to handle these important tasks.
PS Re ethanol intake. It should be related to body weight, and to sex, but then, it gets too complicated (they think) for the plebs.
And if they recommend a small intake (scientifically valid), the plebs will take that to mean more = better.
They don't have much respect for the plebs' intelligence.
Where was freedom of speech with the Danish cartoons? Or Jesus and Mo, when Newsnight attacked an atheist for having the temerity to draw a cartoon not in accordance with Islamic rules? Or the ban on bikini ads on the Tube? Or 'cultural sensitivities' forestalling action in Rotherham for a decade and a half? Or the pretence by a cretinous media that terrorism is mental illness committed by men called Dave?
Mr. L, well, quite.
Mr. kle4, one is a bastion of scientific authority.
Reflecting on it her socialism and activism in the party was strongly correlated with her activism in the church which still continues. She was a classic Christian Socialist driven to help the disadvantaged both by Christian acts and by trying to create the sort of society that actually cares. It was a strong strand in Labour in the past. Not so obvious it will survive into whatever future the party may have.
The main problem is the centre, centre-left, progressive or whatever you want to call it has failed to come up with a coherent economic alternative to the policies followed since the 2008 financial crash.
Oddly enough, we even see the proponents of austerity now admitting the policy has failed and heading off to a reflationary utopia predicated on eternally low interest rates fueled by the financial methadone known as QE.
Perversely, the way is clear for a fiscally sensible centre-left party to trumpet the virtues of a normal monetary policy helping savers and prudent financial management aimed at reducing public debt and deficit rather than tax cuts.
There'll still be a pre-qualifying piece overflowing with riveting insight, of course.
http://tinyurl.com/gvgs5te
Monday It’s a quiet day, so I’ve taken all of my supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party to the cinema to see Swallows and Amazons. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough seats.
“Yes there are,” says the usher, shining his torch.
Not if we all want to sit together, I explain.
“But there are over 40 of you,” says the usher. “And you didn’t book.”
This is precisely the problem with a privatised cinema industry. We’ll have to sit on the floor.
“You can’t,” says the usher.
Seumas, my press guy, is hovering, unhappily. He hates the cinema, on account of it being an instrument of false consciousness, but he says the usher has a point. It’s simply not plausible to expect that my entire parliamentary support could all sit together in a place as small as this.
“Unless you come back in a year!” says Tom Watson, brightly.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f9216ff8-6ba6-11e6-998d-9617c077f056
Mr. F, wrong sort of free speech. Like women should be free to choose to wear what they want. Unless it's bikinis in an advert on the Tube. Then it should be banned.
I see GOD himself has said we might possibly remain in a looser EU despite the Brexit vote on the basis it will be bloody difficult to untangle it completely. I'm a little surprised he doesn't see the flaw that even if politically May could do that even if she wanted, the eu has every reason to make it impossible. Letting us pull lose but not actually leave woukd be their nightmare,
How the Brexit team is built will be interesting:
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21702229-bureaucratic-marathon-lies-ahead-does-britain-have-enough-pen-pushers-building-brexit
Oliver Letwin using a team where our 30 or so trade negotiators who have gone native in Brussells are now negotiating with their old mates in the EU team may well not be to the taste of the three Brexiteers. Indeed I can see trouble there spreading into further aspects of public life. The Bitter Enders are not going to shut up if there seems to be backsliding.
My view is that we should go for Hard Brexit asap and then negotiate on WTO terms with the EU.
Once you accept that and demonstrate that it works (up to some yet to be ascertained point) then having a logical argument against policies such as Owen Smith's Peoples QE or printing to invest in actual infrastructure becomes more difficult. Doesn't mean such policies would work of course (see Japan) but the reality is that it is not just the left that is blundering around in the hope that we can get ourselves out of this debt trap (public and private) that we and most of the west fell into in the last 20 years. We are in a real mess and good ideas from anywhere on the spectrum would be welcome.
You paint it as a good thing that a backlash is necessary against politically correct fools who hold cultural sensitivity so sacred they let almost one and a half thousand children be sexually abused rather than call out the criminals.
It's not. In the same way the backlash against migration is because it's been too high for too long, the backlash, by some, against the rancid political correctness (now infecting even medical guidelines*) is because things are so badly wrong.
*If women get the message they can drink the same amount as men, implicit in the new guidelines, it'll at best have no affect and, more likely, lead to higher alcohol poisoning amongst women. Still, women ruining their livers and dying is a small price to pay for 'equality', according to a few over-promoted clowns.
I'd imagine for people like your mother in law tangible results would be very much part of their activism, and Labour's current occupation of the land of theory must be galling.
I'm currently working on a piece about modern liberalism. I look around and don't see much of it embraced by my peers, and this worries me.
Ha, so Mrs Clegg things we should use Brits who work in the EU to negotiate against them! What could possibly go wrong there?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37194207
Best to ignore anything teh chancers tell you or even better do the opposite, it will nearly always be the best option.
What I meant was that social attitudes associated with the "Looney Left" in the eighties are now mainstream.
There are obvious things to this in how the Tory party party explicitly tries to have ethnic and gender diversity, with an openly lesbian leader in Scotland; that gay marriages are no longer remarkeable and that Paralympic sport has equal status with Olympics in many ways.
Sure, there is a flipside to this (though there are more than a few things that I would take issue with in your list) but that is a seperate issue. The point is that these things are now mainstream, to the point that we have a Tory PM who sees a place for sharia law in the UK. That would have been considered "Looney Leftism" in the Eighties.
It means Brexit.
Get over ii.
And incidentally, didn't ex Cab Secs and ex PMs used to keep quiet about policy? Major was a weak leader of the Tory party (because he was too pro-FO and pro-EU) but a gentleman who retired and watched a lot of cricket.
Judging by his pretty ineffective interventions in the EU ref, he ought to have stayed out of politics altogether.
The problem is Conservatives won't raise taxes and Labour won't cut spending so the problem never gets resolved.
That particular policy cocktail would cause serious economic harm. Almost immediately.