Labour Lords Resign the Whip

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Labour Lords Resign the Whip

I thought it was the Tories who were more into that sort of thing, what with their Eton background and so on.

Implications? Essentially none. Mandelson would create a slightly larger stir, but neither Warner nor Grabiner has any significant roots in the Labour party. Grabiner isn’t a politician in any normal sense at all and Warner is a technocrat. Neither has ever held elective office.
So the only real significance would be if this were the first sign of a much bigger trend, with MPs resigning the whip as well as peers. Even a few MPs is probably manageable: things only get really difficult for Corbyn if it starts looking as though we are back in 1981 with the SDP about to break away.
None of which means that Warner and Grabiner are wrong to think that Corbyn can’t win an election, just that their opinions don’t matter very much.

In the short term I suspect that these declarations are net positive to the new direction the labour party is trying to take. At least that seems to be the verdict of those others I know who joined in response to Corbyn’s win.

Mandelson may be seen by many as a major ‘scalp’ rather than a negative, generating a stronger sense of change and increasing Momentum.

I agree with Nick, election victory in 2020 is highly unlikely – this needs to be a longer play – but many will vote for labour as a result of this change including many who would not have voted at all. And if the economy turns sour….

What the Labour Parliamentarians seem to be having a hard time understanding is that—certainly by the measure of the recent leadership election results—most of the non-Parliamentary Labour Party either think very little of them or even very actively dislike them. If there’s any part of the Party that is unelectable it would seem to be them. They have become, if you like, “Old New Labour,” and they are now experiencing what it is to be dismissed in the way that they dismissed “Old Labour” when they were so proudly and brutally “New Labour.” Time and events have now passed them by. They are, it seems, simply out of touch with everyone but themselves and those now fading “opinion makers” upon whom they relied to manage public opinion. Should they even want to be returned to Parliament at the next General Election, maybe they should first have a long quiet think about how to ingratiate themselves with those they, many of them, are presently bad mouthing. This is not to say that they should just roll over and play dead. But should they want to continue to play a significant role in British politics, surely they should try to figure out why the style and content of their politics has become so toxic—they are the ones, after all, who did lose the last two General Elections. Alternatively, like those two not-so-noble lords mentioned above, they should recognise that hardly anyone is now willing to buy their sort of politics, and they should retire to spend more time with their families or to pursue other opportunities or whatever the current fashionable excuse is for withdrawing from the public arena. But my guess is that they, most of them, think too well of themselves to follow either of these two paths, and that they’d rather do everything they can to destroy what they cannot control. I suppose that means they fail to meet Weber’s strictures respecting the role of vanity in politics.

@10

Your summation sounds reasonable to me. In America we’re facing a slightly different situation. Hillary Clinton supporters argue she can beat the Republicans in an election while Bernie Sanders can not. This may be true, but what if in the long run her policies are no better than “austerity lite” which are hopeless.

What Sanders has besides realistic policies is an ability to increase voter turnout and create excitement and passion. Democrats need this to win back the House, Senate and win down ballot elections.

Sanders is pointing out that you need more than a President to fight the establishment power structure and change things. You need a revolution in political activity and participation. Maybe Corbyn and a more realistic Labour party can help increase voter turnout. I understood that’s what they did to help elect Corbyn.

That’s probably true, but it lacks force unless a Labour Party led by somebody else could do so, which I doubt.

Yes to this point. To the limited extent that a Corbyn led party stands any chance of winning in 2020, it’s by continuing to mobilise the previously non-voting people who were interested in his leadership campaign. To the limited extend that a NuLab led party stands any such chance, it’s by reassuring a small number of politically conscious centrists who would otherwise be so busy holding their handkerchiefs in front of their noses to ward of the stench of the other group that they wouldn’t even turn out. Guess which would be the larger number in reality.

It’s quite possible that the Blairites would in fact prefer to lose while in charge. They would blame their loss on the fact that turnout would be around 50%, but their experience with Corbyn might just lead them to realise that the people who don’t vote would never vote for them: they might vote for Corbyn, they might vote UKIP or whatever form the populist right takes by then, they might vote SNP, but they have had it with neoliberalism in any form. It’s clear however that for those who still adhere to it neoliberalism has become a faith based ideology, more important than merely winning elections.

Kendall has earned my respect not for her views, but for her good humour about losing. Too bad that good humour is in such short supply on the right in the Labour Party. I have been laughing about New Statesman’s coverage of Corbyn. New Statesman would like to catch up with the zeitgeist and abandon New Labour, but it just can’t. The hit piece on Communist/stalinist Seaumus Milne, who was named Corbyn’s press spokesman, was a wondrous piece of trip, which rhetorically captured perfectly the concern trolling that is the new fashion among erstwhile left leaning publications like the NS and the Guardian. The article begins and ends like Elmer Fudd: I weely weely want to suppowt Cowbyn, I weely weely do, except that he’s a communist, Putin supporting degenerate. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2015/10/i-wanted-believe-jeremy-corbyn-i-cant-believe-seumas-milne

The claim that Labour under Corbyn probably wouldn’t win in 2020 seems equally to assume that 5 years is a short time in politics.

For someone like me who is not from the UK and doesn’t live there, can anybody explain the “probably unelectable” aspect of Corbyn? Because from a distance he seems quite reasonable, well spoken, etc. Are his ideas too radical for mainstream Britons, or his appearance too far out of the mainstream image of a national leader? In the case of Bernie Sanders in the US, I’m afraid that it is both of those things. However, I will vote for him in the primary because it would be a huge achievement to have a true leftist candidate of the Democratic party.

18 – of course, the USSR invaded members of the Warsaw Pact. But it is very hard for me to see how this is very relevant to either the Ukraine or the modern era, which has been characterized by the US invading half a dozen countries and bombing what, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan in merely the last five years. As for his high credentials – Oliver Bullough speaks Russian and has reported on Russia. Those are his credentials. He has a view of Russia that certainly represents the neo-con consensus. This is fine, except that the NS likes to represent itself as a lefty magazine. In fact, the magazine has attacked Corbyn from the beginning up until now, and was obviously much more comfortable with the Blairite Andrew Burnham, who the editorial board endorsed.
As for Milne’s qualifications, well, they are laid out in the wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seumas_Milne To my mind he is a much more highly qualified journalist than Bullough, and his doveish views are close to where Corbyn wants to take Labour. Anti-nuclear, dialing down NATO aggressiveness, opposing things like the Saudi invasion of Yemen (funny how terrible Putin figures so largely in Bullough’s rant, and Yemen, which is a war where the casualty rate is much higher than in Ukraine and the threat of really high casualties from the forced starvation of the country via Saudi ships just doesn’t get a note), although Milne has written about Yemen: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/12/seumas

Bullough’s article was as I said an exercise in concern trolling. He doesn’t really really want to like Corbyn. Corbyn is everything he doesn’t like, so the larmoyant rhetoric is really really pathetic. The new style of trying to hold onto the fragments of one’s leftiness when real leftiness is actually on offer is simply comic. Bullough is obviously really really longing for someone like Clegg.

Roger Gathmann@21 shows clearly that by scholarly standards Russian speaker Bullough is more qualified on Russia than Milne. CT is all about the high standards. As for Stalin’s invasion of the Warsaw Pact countries? Well, no doubt history would please CT more if he had made peace rather than embark on his career of aggression. Evidently marching on to Berlin was unforgivable. Lastly, “concern trolling” is an internet thing, which means it is not a thing at all I think.

(My answer to @20 crossed.)

#19 For someone like me who is not from the UK and doesn’t live there, can anybody explain the “probably unelectable” aspect of Corbyn?

One meaning is that the system won’t let him win.

Steve Johnson, if Milne’s office was advisor to Corbyn on Russia, then no doubt Bullough would outclass him. On the other hand, Stephen Cohen, who holds opposite views to Bullough on Ukraine, would outrank Bullough. Or Keith Gessen.
And of course, I’m not sure what this means: “concern trolling” is an internet thing, which means it is not a thing at all I think.” I think your comment is on a thing called a “blog.” It is published on a thing called the “internet.” The internet has been here for some years. You might want to look it up. Surprisingly, if we count the invention of the modem in 1958 as the beginning of this thing called the internet, it has been around much longer than Stalin ruled the USSR. Unless, of course, you are convinced that Stalin still rules Russia, and that Stalin invaded the Ukraine and annexed it to Russia back in 1783. If you believe the latter, than you are eminently credentialed and should be writing papers with Oliver Bullough for the Legatum Institute.
Milne is more credentialed to do what he has been appointed to do than Bullough. He might be no good, one might disagree with him, but on the credentialed front, he’s young, fierce, a supporter of Corbyn, and has a national audience. Good choice on Corbyn’s part.

@29:

No, the Ukie cossacks pledge loyalty to the Czar after 1648, but had a fair amount of self-rule until they were finally suppressed by Catherine the Great. Much of the rest of the Ukraine was acquired during the partition of Poland and the southern coast was conquered from the Tatars and Turks by Catherine.

Fr. 10.27.15 at 8:40 pm @ 28 —
‘If you are a Democrat voting for Bernie Sanders in the US primary, you will lose (sorry), ‘

It depends what you mean by ‘win’. If Mr. Sanders is what I think he is, he will not be allowed to win; whatever must be done to stop him will be done. However, if he gathers a lot of votes, and especially if he wins a few primaries, that may frighten the Democratic Party leadership the way Occupy Wall Street did, and we will see less eagerness to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and the other remnants of the social democracy in the next few years. Since I live mostly off Social Security, voting for Mr. Sanders (if I am allowed to) would be simply good business even if he loses. In any case I would not vote for a war criminal in either the primary or the general election.

ps -however, this Ukraine discussion is drifting pretty far from the theme of the reaction of Labour’s right to Corbyn, which has been miserable. As well as the editorial policy and tone of magazines which pretended to be leftish in the past, like the New Statesman. Although it is true that, although Milne has written for the statesman, they do have a habit of hosting articles to attack him. I went back to the archives and found a juicy attack by the editor of the Mirror, Paul Routledge, whose complaint in 2001 was that Milne was the puppet of Lord Mandelson: :Oh, come on now Seumas “Shameless” Milne, Mandy’s chief representative on the paper, don’t disappoint him! Incidentally, why do they call him “Shameless”? Could it be anything to do, I wonder, with his modest workload? ”
Perhaps being Mandy’s former puppet, Milne will have a better time with the Labour Lords than we might expect.

@32 (Anarcissie)

It depends what you mean by ‘win’.”

That’s why I wrote “lose”, as in: failing to get your candidate to represent the party in the election for which the primary is being organised.

There are tons of different things in your reply, but the major point seems to be that a candidate like Sanders can lose the primary and still have some long-lasting, programmatic impact on the winning candidate. If I were you, I would not place too much hope in that scenario, unless of course, Sanders decides to run as an independent after losing the primary.

@36 (John Quiggin)

Re: (iii), Corbyn must also guarantee that every Labour supporter will vote for him, which paradoxically seems to be the hardest part at that point.

Corbyn has to have people around him that he can trust, and are competent at what they do. That pretty much completely explains his appointments. It would be WAY better if there were more people he can trust, but there aren’t. I, also, don’t like Milne, but he will be good at his job. Blair, Brown, Wilson, Callaghan, Kinnock — they all had people around them you wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole, and so would Burnham, Cooper, or Kendall if any of them were leader. Get over it.

I think what Roger meant by concern trolling is that Bullough is insincere in his claim that he really, really, wants to support Corbyn. Maybe Roger is entirely wrong about that, and if so… well, if so, Bullough needs to go to writing lab and work on voice and tone.

And — as Peter Oborne keeps pointing out, on foreign policy and national security issues Corbyn himself has been consistently 10 -20 years ahead of the foreign policy establishment. He’s been right on nearly (but only nearly) every major foreign policy issue for decades. (and Trident? Honestly, when British politicians in any party argue against getting rid of Trident they sound like they’ve been infected by some sort of Beyond the Fringe virus. I’m not saying there isn’t a case for renewing Trident, but no British politician seems to have one)

FR — that was a joke about the primary system, right? I mean, I know that the Republican establishment usually gets its man, and I expect it to this time round, and I expect Clinton to get the Dem nomination , but in congressional elections what you said was a joke. Most seats are gerrymandered to guarantee a seat to one or the other party, which means the median voter might as well piss off in the primary. Hence Boehner is too left wing to be speaker in a country in which he is far to the right of the median voter.

All that said, I don’t see this ending well. The MPs are too powerful, and too determined to do Corbyn in. His #1 priority should give the next generation opportunities and experience, so that there is a core of good people to take over when he is deposed. (What is this coup scenario? They seem determined to destroy him, but they have no credible alternative, either in policy terms or in personnel terms. And the membership that elected Corbyn will still be the membership in 2 years time).

Northern Ireland? Raise your hands if you think, or if you think that the ‘foreign policy establishment’ thinks, that Britain made a mistake by failing to withdraw from Northern Ireland three decades ago – that a united Ireland was inevitable (despite having decidedly failed to ‘evite’ over the past thirty years, with Britain instead achieving all of its Sunningdale demands)?

The quite obvious truth is that a lot of the supposedly sensible left commentators (and I don’t mean commentators on CT- commentators in general) who say “Corbyn can’t win” would, frankly, prefer the Tories to Corbyn. Indeed I think that the majority of the Blairites would prefer five more years of Cameron to Corbyn.

David@41: not only Northern Ireland. On the Israel/Palestine issue, Corbyn has been consistently pro-Palestinian, and pro-violent Palestinians. Now, that is an opinion that he is perfectly entitled to hold, but to say that is in accord with what the ‘foreign policy establishment’ thinks is not easily defensible.

Likewise on the Falklands (an issue of more local importance). Corbyn, and Milne, have been consistently pro-Argentine, and anti-selfdetermination. Again, that’s not a FPE view.

At #19:

As far as unelectable is concerned, my own suspicion is that we’re saying that simply because everyone in the commentariat is saying it. The commentariat are saying this because focusing on anything else would mean talking seriously about his economic policies which simply wouldn’t do because the popular economic debate in the UK is so toxic and wrong-headed, that a middle of the road social democrat arguing in favour of what amounts to a common sense view among economists, comes across as a frothing at the mouth, sandal smoking Stalinist to all of these so-called “serious” commentators: the Overton window is off the reservation and sitting nice and comfortable, deep in batshit-crazy-land.

Electability is therefore a nonsense issue invented to allow the jumped up middle-brow pseudo-intellectuals, who still can’t seem to get their heads around the fact that his economic policies are both serious and legitimate (certainly a lot more-so than Osborne’s), to continue to dominate the discussion.

Over and above being elected therefore, challenging the nonsense that is the current debate on the economy is Corbyn’s real project and the single biggest reason why I supported him.

Stephen: If it helps, your use of ‘get themselves’ on the electoral register has very much the same interesting implications.

“as much as I dislike the Cameron government’s policies, it remains infinitely preferable to rule by Corbyn and his circle”

Bombs yesterday, bombs today and bombs tomorrow? I would prefer not to.

I feel it’s worth noting here, qua Roger Gantham and Ze K, support of Corbyn now requires one either overlook his and Milne’s acceptance of Moscow’s (utterly false and self-serving) narrative of the Ukraine conflict

As opposed to the utterly false and self-serving narrative pushed by the Ukraine, NYT, NATO, etc? Given the choice between Putin and the Ukrainian oligarchs I’d prefer not to.

Fr. 10.28.15 at 12:59 am @ 37:
‘… Sanders can lose the primary and still have some long-lasting, programmatic impact on the winning candidate. If I were you, I would not place too much hope in that scenario….

No, I’m just thinking of two or three years of high-level paralysis based only on fear, not any sort of program. One must eke out as best one can under the conditions and constraints that exist, day by day, year by year. Eventually, the US regime of imperialism and funny money will collapse, and then new conditions will arise which are difficult to predict and will probably be even more difficult to experience. But till then.

Just so, the Corbyn thing will not be allowed to succeed, but it may put fear of the natives getting restless into the hearts of the UK ruling class, and somewhat restrain or mitigate their immediately upcoming predations.

Daragh @54:

and ‘backbench MP whose newspaper all but endorses the Brighton bombing and newspaper columnist who has spent his career claiming the GULag wasn’t all that bad.’

You like this kind of innuendo, but another way to say ‘all but endorses’ is ‘does not endorse’. Isn’t that so?

Layman – they published an article claiming the bombing was a result of Thatcher’s policy and a letter saying ‘what do you call four dead Tories? A start.’ That’s close enough for me thanks, even if we ignore Corbyn’s inviting of the culprits to Westminster two weeks later (and opposed the Anglo-Irish agreement, natch).

@Chris – gosh, the last time you got this sarky was when you were sticking up for St. Julian of Assange. A more cautious individual might reflect on subsequent developments consider whether lashing oneself so firmly to the Corbynite mast is such a wise idea. It might, at the very least, prevent a distinguished professor of Social and Political Philosophy feeling obliged to claim the UK electorate won’t be overly concerned about one of the prospective PM candidates being an IRA sympathiser, apparently due to a willingness to flush credibility down the toilet before conceding an argument.

36, I might be wrong, but I believe Milne himself wrote a column during the Labour leadership campaign that no Labour candidate will win in 2020.
Myself, I have a problem with picking over past election results to predict future ones. The assumption here has to be that conditions are pretty much the same as they were with the last election. That is entirely possible. The long term result of austerity will certainly be bad for the UK economy, or the majority of the members of that economy, but at the moment, it doesn’t seem so bad except at the margins. Now, the margins are huge – that is where the lower paid working class resides – and I think Corbyn is right that the pool of future voters there could put Labour over the top. Unfortunately, he is in the opposition. Instead of doing concrete things that effect that community, he can only oppose concrete things that will harm that community. It remains to be seen whether that will actually motivate people to vote.
On the other hand, the Cameron bet – doubling down on the financial sector and the housing boom – might well blow up in his face before 2020. The anti-austerity program really needs to make the obvious obvious – that as the government shrinks its “debt”, it simply shifts the bearers of the debt function – debt grows enormously in the private sector, where it is taken on by individual households, and where it is held, for fun and profit, by financialized capitalists.
Labour could perhaps pull off what the Liberals did in Canada, given the right circs. The liberals were generally killed in the election in 2011, and if one picked through the data and extrapolated to the next election, it looked very much like the NDP would take the Liberals place. This of course didn’t happen. Trudeau and Corbyn are very different, but they campaigned on broadly similar themes – anti-bigotry, anti-neoliberal foreign policy, pro-active government spending.

‘backbench MP whose newspaper all but endorses the Brighton bombing”
Did Corbyn have a newspaper then? What was it called? And does the publication of an article in a newspaper imply that this enjoys editorial endorsement?

@Puss Wallgreen – it was the lead editorial in London Labour Briefing, when Corbyn was general secretary of the editorial board. I think he bears responsibility.

@Layman – only in that Corbyn fell just short of rocking up to the Brighton hotel and taking a selfie with a thumbs up. If you’d like to get yourself tied up in intellectual knots to pretend Corbyn didn’t support IRA terrorism, go head, but it says more about ou etc.

@Ze K – what shift are you on in the Petersburg troll factory that THIS is your beat?

” it was the lead editorial in London Labour Briefing, when Corbyn was general secretary of the editorial board. I think he bears responsibility”.
Actually Briefing’s front page editorial after the bombing unequivocally condemned it, and notoriously praised Thatcher’s courage. Do you think Corbyn bears responsibility for that also? I suspect you don’t know much about how far left newspapers actually work, but having a couple of figurehead Labour MPs on the editorial board is par for the course – I somewhat doubt that Corbyn would have been going round the Briefing office in a green eyeshade giving the thumbs up to the final copy.

Shorter @Layman – sure the newspaper Corbyn chaired the editorial board of might have published an article with lines like “the British only sit up and take notice [of Ireland] when they are bombed into it.”, alongside letters mocking Norman Tebbit’s injuries and the deaths of four other cabinet ministers, and Corbyn himself may have invited the perpetrators of said bombing to the House of Commons a few weeks afterwards, but only a demented right-winger would think this amounts to tacitly condoning such acts.

@Puss – well according to the Telegraph Corbyn wrote said front page article (though I’m going to guess it wasn’t as unequivocal as you remember, especially given that you appear to believe commending the courage of a survivor of a mass assassination attempt is something deserving of ‘notoriety’.)

I think you need to learn to read more closely, Daragh – what the Telegraph article says is that Corbyn wrote the front page article in the issue of Briefing in which the editorial on the bombing it chooses to highlight appeared – ie the article which Corbyn wrote was nothing to do with Ireland. The editorial condemning the bombing and praising Thatcher’s courage appeared a fortnight before, and presumably on your principle was tacitly backed by Corbyn. Incidentally I really would not base my hypotheses on articles written by Andrew Gilligan – the guy is a dishonest shit and a hysteric, as well as an utterly incompetent journalist (the myriad inaccuracies in this piece and previous ones in the Telegraph could have been cleared up by spending 5 minutes talking with any ex-member of the IMG, but I suspect he wasn’t interested in clearing them up). And yes, I had exactly the same opinion of him when he was trying to dishonestly discredit Blair and Campbell through David Kelly post- Iraq – I have no idea what the Today programme was doing employing such a person.

“at 30% with the Tories double digits ahead”
No, the Tories are 4% ahead with 36% on the latest MORI poll. Given the apocalyptic scenarios painted by our hacks of the damage Corbyn’s leadership would do, that’s pretty good I think. Though I suppose you think it means a third of the electorate are IRA supporters.

“winning elections in order to actually implement policies to benefit the people I claim to care about’ isn’t one of your political priorities.”
As opposed to winning elections to implement truly awful policies that hurt innocent people? I could say this is a pretty poor argument but I would prefer not to.

“Anyway, cut it out, it makes you look like an idiot.”

This ship, I’m afraid, has sailed.

@Chris – you’re doing your usual thing of attributing to me an emotional state which you can’t possibly know (I’m actually in a state of mild irritation, at best, and dashing this off before a post-work drink) and applying rather dishonest and bad faith interpretations of things that I have said in order to avoid engaging in an argument.

I suspect that, no, you’re not silly or stupid enough to actually believe your countrymen wouldn’t look askance at the leader of the Labour party and his deputy both being long time IRA supporters and lying about their motivations for doing so. That you’re willing to claim otherwise than to accept the minor loss of face of conceding an argument on the internet is truly baffling, and yes, why I pointed out that you’re a serious person with a serious position who should know better.

And FWIW – the actions of the Provos may be ancient history TO YOU, but I quite vividly remember Omagh, or hearing about relatives and friends threatened with murder because they had the temerity to engage in politics Gerry Adams didn’t approve of.

@Daragh

the actions of the Provos may be ancient history TO YOU, but I quite vividly

The issue is not what they are to me or to you, but what they will be to voters in the UK general election in 2020.

I suspect that, no, you’re not silly or stupid enough to actually believe your countrymen wouldn’t look askance at the leader of the Labour party and his deputy both being long time IRA supporters and lying about their motivations for doing so.

I’m quite silly, generally speaking, but as a very uninformed outsider my reaction is 1) evidently, some don’t, or Corbyn wouldn’t have scored a crushing electoral victory despite the active opposition of both the establishment of his party and the media and 2) sticking to foreign policy I’m ready to bet that most UK politicians of national stature are as strong supporters of either the Saudi régime, or the invasion of Iraq, or the crushing of the Bahrain uprising, or the colonization of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza as Corbyn is a supporter of the IRA. What, in your opinion, is someone who opposes all this things to do then? And what is so unreasonable in thinking that many people might give less weight to the issue that has actually been resolved since then?

..*in general* in the media and among political lobbyists, not ‘in general’ on this thread.

Ronan,

I see very little evidence the British electorate cares about these elements of foreign policy at all. Ukraine, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia exercise Daragh a lot, but probably not most voters. I daresay for most voters on the island of Britain, the actions of the IRA in the 80s are both ancient history and “foreign policy”.

Daragh has a lot of concerns, but they don’t seem to map well to the concerns of the British electorate. His party, the LibDems, also seems to struggle recently in being of interest to the electorate.

Whatever he truly believes, Corbyn is the kind of leftist who can easily be painted as hating his country. This is a man who, within days of being made head of the party, ostentatiously refused to sing the national anthem. During a Battle of Britain remembrance. In St Paul’s Cathedral.

Shorter Bloix: I don’t know what Corbyn believes, but I’m happy to say he hates his country.

The Guardian:

“The new Labour leader initially defended his decision not to sing, saying it was a respectful ceremony and he stood in respect throughout.
 Speaking to Sky News, he would not say whether or not he would sing the anthem in future…

“Within minutes of the interview being broadcast, Labour sources confirmed that Corbyn would in fact sing the national anthem in future…

“Kate Green, the new shadow women and equalities minister, said: “… For many people, the monarchy, singing the national anthem is a way of showing that respect. I think it would have been appropriate and right and respectful of people’s feelings to have done so.”

Not ready for prime time, perhaps.

ttp://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/16/jeremy-corbyn-will-sing-national-anthem-in-future-says-labour

Oh, I don’t know. Potential Labour voters, maybe. No one important.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2015/09/new-polling-data-shows-challenge-facing-jeremy-corbyn

Bloix, your polling data link says nothing about singing the national anthem (and/or the Ira , Palestine , Ukraine etc) Whst would be the electoral consequences of jeremy corbyn refusing to sing the national anthem while visiting Hamas at the invitation of Putin in Eastern Ukraine with Gerry Adams ? A fascinating topic for which we have no meaningful data

When it was customary to play the “national anthem” at the end of cinema screenings most of the audience used to scramble for the door–leaving a coterie of eccentrics standing dutifully by their seats. . That was the case in the north of England, anyway. It is likely that things were rather different in Northern Ireland. The provenance of the tune needs popularising. Wikipedia claims that it is based on a composition by John Bull. I don’t thinks so, really:

@Bloix, @Marc

That poll is hackery of the first order. That you take it seriously says much about the absence of rigor you’re bringing to the discussion. So, you know, cut it out. Get serious.

#106 – It was in early August, at a Nats game. They were doing pretty well then, and the stadium was full.

#110 – you’ve got it backward- the Germans borrowed the tune from the British. As they say, correlation does not prove causation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heil_dir_im_Siegerkranz

The origin appears to be older and from the UK – perhaps a transposition into a major key of this hymn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fPfmPcys8M

As for Corbyn, as I understand what happened, the mainstream “modern” leadership of the party decided that they had to become VSP’s to win the election, so they went all-in for austerity. A solid chunk of the English electorate (over 14%), given a choice between real Tories, fake Tories, and Tory lackeys, voted for UKIP, who at least are “authentic,” and the Scots stampeded to the SNP. As I understand it, UKIP’s gain was Labour’s loss – and that makes sense. If a working class party decides it needs to go upscale, the workers have to go somewhere, and the radical right is the traditional alternative.

At the leadership election, Labour voters registered their disgust with the fake Tories by voting for the one candidate who wasn’t telling them economic nonsense. Perfectly reasonable choice. The problem is that, as far as I can see, Corbyn has shown little interest in winning back the fake Labour leaders who decided to become Tory Lite, and no appeal to the kind of Labour voter who went to UKIP in this election. His philosophy seems to be better fewer but better, which is fine if you’re leading the vanguard of a revolutionary movement but not so good if you need votes.

“no appeal to the kind of Labour voter who went to UKIP”

Actually he has plenty of appeal to the people who did that, who aren’t ideologically right-wing and did it as a kind of protest against the ‘Westminster elite’ / technocracy / the ‘extreme center

“Corbyn has shown little interest in winning back the fake Labour leaders who decided to become Tory Lite”

This task was made more difficult by the fact that most of them threw their toys out of the pram and resigned from the shadow cabinet en masse when Corbyn was elected.

Corbyn has in fact been remarkably conciliatory towards the sections of the party’s professional elite who he so comprehensively drubbed in the leadership election. Like most of the Labour Left he usually puts party unity above all else when it comes to the crunch.

It should be remembered that strident character assassination as a campaign tactic failed John McCain spectacularly. It seems economic considerations in the minds of voters sometimes trump a Muslim Kenyan Marxist birth.

and even though he was a genuine war hero, they clobbered him with it.

He was a combat veteran. No heroics, really. The ‘they’ in question would be his peers as Swift Boat captains and officers all up his chain of command, who came to have a low opinion of him.

Clinton just avoided the draft.

No, he shirked his ROTC service obligations.

He was a combat veteran. No heroics, really.

He does have a silver star and a bronze star, presumably awarded with the awareness of people in his chain of command.

He does have a silver star and a bronze star, presumably awarded with the awareness of people in his chain of command.

That’s true. He was also awarded three purple hearts. His worst injury landed him in the infirmary for a day and a half. Sometimes the value of these medals is subject to inflation.

I find these controversies amusing. Sometimes partisan Democrats fancy military service matters a great deal (as in 2004), sometimes it matters not at all (1996, 1992), or sometimes only the vice presidential candidate’s service record matters (1988). Successfully maneuvering to shirk your ROTC service obligations is testament to your ingenuity. Signing up for the National Guard is prima facie evidence of having pulled strings, never mind a six figure sum of people were entering the Guard every year and the guy sworn in next to you was Joe Blow off the sidewalks of Muncie. If you had a student deferment on and off during the ‘advisory war’ in VietNam and then your wife got pregnant in 1965, that matters. If you had a student deferment through most of the Korean War, that does not matter, unless of course your the President’s younger brother, in which case it matters to cartoonists who only punch up, dontcha know.

I find these controversies amusing.

It’s just an illustration that the right is good at manufacturing history and sticking to it.

It’s just an illustration that the right is good at manufacturing history and sticking to it.

There is no manufactured history, just humbug which comes and goes and which you’ve taken upon yourself to offer again.

#132 – I really don’t get why people who have dedicated themselves to years and even decades of hard work for the right to be called Dr. and Prof. hate being called Dr. and Prof. so much. I feel when I’m disagreeing with you, it’s polite not to assume too much familiarity by using your first names. But I’m happy to call you John and Chris, if you prefer it, even though I don’t know you from Adam. (Well, as for John, I have a signed copy of Zombie Economics, so I’ve set eyes on you, but I don’t know Chris from Adam.) I assure you I don’t mean it offensively. I actually do think that university professors are a class of people who deserve respect for what they’ve achieved.

No you haven’t.

No you haven’t.

Yes, I did, at post 131 in just a few sentences. I can explain this to you. I cannot comprehend in for you.

“I can explain this to you”
No you can’t. If you think a tone of wankerish world-weary hauteur renders sentences like “I do not think he’s adding little increments with discrete gestures like the one under discussion, unless he fancies the untapped constituency which will drag him over the finish line is made up of people on the Ken Livingstone – Robert Hughes axis of warm and wonderful personalities” comprehensible or literate you are wrong, I’m afraid.

and yet still lose the presidency by a smaller margin than in any previous presidential election against an incumbent.

So what? Incumbents lost in 1992, 1980, 1976, 1932, 1912, 1892, 1888, 1840; felt compelled to retire in 1968 and 1952 due to bad showings in primary elections; and were not renominated in 1884 and 1856.

Kerry vs Bush is a perfect example of the difference between what people claim the electorate value, and what the electorate actually vote for. In recent US presidential elections, when the choice is between a man who has fought in a war and a man who hasn’t, the man who hasn’t always wins. (I think there’s one exception to my rule in the last 40 years.)

My point was that by discussing the swiftboat “scandal” with a straight face,

You’re point is witlessly partisan, false, and stupid. There was no ‘transparent smear campaign’. A mess of people who knew John Kerry and knew the terrain and thought little of him said their piece. Kerry had built his entire public career on the foundation of 44 months on active duty and, 35 years later, was using some of his boat mates as campaign props. Well, some other people on the scene had something to say. If that’s inconvenient to your worldview, tough.

@ Art Deco

I’ll bite – which of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth were actual witnesses to the events they claimed to dispute?

This story is the kind of thing that shows Corbyn is having an effect: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/29/tax-credit-cuts-face-major-mitigation-as-tory-mps-fear-they-go-too-far

The Tories are in revolt over tax credits mainly because, now, Labour is vocally opposing them. As a Guardian reader commented, “only 21 Labour MPs originally voted against the proposals when Harriaet Harman was Acting Leader of the Labour Party and recommended abstaining.” The question at the moment is whether Labour can produce by opposing. That’s the only path to credibility in 2020.

The asymmetry of partisan rhetoric, tropes and tactics revealed by “swiftboating” and the Corbyn national anthem “controversy” — or by the way John McDonnell’s reference to Bobby Sands was used — goes deep into differences of resources and character between left and right, as well as between elites and followers.

The essential character of an effective left is opposition to an oppressive elite establishment, and that effectiveness rests on recognizing elite corruption and hostility to the common or general interest. The essential character of neoliberalism is to deny completely elite predation as the primary motive of conservative politics. Conservative politics, as practiced in our neoliberal times, is to lie, cheat and steal with impunity and a clear conscience, confident that a neoliberal left will not criticize anything of economic substance, confining itself to social issues framed with an eye toward undermining any emergent sense of solidarity.

The confident ease with which the forces of reaction manipulate the electorate is only tangentially related to the particular character or stance or style of a particular politician. The power to manipulate rests in the first instance on the organization and resources of the manipulators, and in the second, on the purposes of those sponsoring the manipulation.

That the shepherd may tend to become indistinguishable from the wolf is the essential political dilemma of a hierarchical society. That the sheep should not complain is the conservative ambition. The neoliberals offer the wolf the job of shepherd, proposing to reconcile the sheep to the depredations of the wolf with better PR. Some of the left is happy to dream idly of a magical world of no shepherds or wolves. The hard practical thing is to maintain the potential for revolution alongside the capacity to distinguish shepherds from wolves.

I’d be more curious to learn what rank and file Labour voters think about Labour policies. As these policies are subject, ahem, to revision, it seems positively silly to speculate about ‘what’s going to happen’ anytime past the EU referendum. In this case, JQ @ 103, is absolutely correct.

I still contend that Labour very much needed/needs Corbyn as the leader of Labour. There’s little doubt that Corbyn believed he believed what he claims to believe, but even he is finding maybe he doesn’t believe somethings he once held to be either true, or worth fighting for. He’s finding which priorities count, and as he does, so do others. Some will be surprised to discover where Labour grandees stand, others welcome the clarity provided by the actions in the Lords. Tis a stupid, outmoded institution that does not provide any of the checks and balances the upper house in two-house system is supposed to guarantee. It should be scrapped – Full stop. I’m not reading much of substance about Corbyn, not that I’m looking, but I’d much prefer to see him promising to flush every Labour peer out of the party at the earliest opportunity. A Labour Peer, if that isn’t an oxymoron I don’t know what is.

kidneystones @ 154: If it helps, ignore all the Ruritanian nonsense and mentally substitute “Senator” or “member of the (appointed) upper house”. If we have an upper house, we need Labour to appoint members to it, this is not an oxymoron.

Defending garbage attacks on a 12-year old presidential candidate is already ludicrous. Doing so knowing that the other candidate who won was a complete disaster, leaving office with approval ratings in the 20s, is just sad.

Bringing this back from the fantasies of US right wingers, I don’t think Kerry is evidence for this thesis at all. His military service was a net positive; the attacks on him just made it less so than it usually would be.

11 millionaires who voted for tax credit cuts in the House of Lords
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/11-millionaires-who-voted-tory-6713773

Two of my British friends, one in his 30s, one in his 40s, have made basically the same comment recently: Blairites and Cleggites have killed more Brits and inflicted far more harm on the structure of society than the IRA ever did, and they don’t feel Corbyn should have any greater burden of apology (or shame) than those crews. Let those who’ve been inflicting mass death and suffering recently start the reparations, basically.