I’ve got a good idea: let’s all blame Corbyn!!

If Corbyn was a different person he could have come up with a stronger and more effective campaign for Remain that was *not* in the same vein as the Tory campaign and taken it to Brexit voting regions. He was weak as piss, no getting away from that. Agree the alternatives on hand prob wouldn’t have done better, and you may be right my fantasy more effective Corbyn might not have made much difference to outcome we shall never know. This is Labour’s problem: no good options. Never been clear what addressing the concerns of immigrant-blaming Labour voters would look like, without also becoming anti-immigration.

Both Oxbridge and Islington are terms of abuse—and highly toxic to the new sector of the electorate which imports its political views directly from Breibart and Infowars. Old Labour use to incite similar lumpen elements to class hatred; now the UKIP activists are doing the same thing—only directing it against a local educated and cosmopolitan elite. So neither Islington nor Oxbridge. Corbyn is despised by those he would help most—despised for his refusal to dance to jingo when expected to, despised for his honesty and the integrity of his views about immigration and nuclear weapons. Dan Jarvis MP (Labour, Barnsley) may be the coming man.

That is a blatant a lie as any I have read.

I agree with much of the analysis, but as I’ve said before, Corbyn is very bad at doing the job of Politician. He has no leadership skills, cannot build coalitions or consensus. One of the signs of his inadequacy is that he is on the receiving end of all moves and manoeuvres. He could have engaged from an early stage in building a labour case for Remain and made sure this was embedded in the Remain case; instead he had no role, risked no personal capital, and is drifting to irrelevance.

There were two Labour politicians who did an excellent job; Gisela Stuart and Kate Hoey. A fantastic performance for Leave.

A vote of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn after Brexit

As dsquared points out in another thread, about 70% of Labour voters went for Remain. Not sure how that breaks down regionally, but it it makes the assumption of the OP problematic.

Why? I would think it would confirm the OP.

Is that 70% of Labour voters or 70% of Labour members? Genuinely curious.

This is what happens when incredibly important issues get subsumed under a need to fight proxy wars over party leaderships (both Labour and Tories).

Whatever the merits of Jeremy Corbyn in this the one I find astounding is people ragging at him for only being a 7/10 for enthusiasm. What? He’s a eurosceptic of 30 years standing – suddenly doing a 180 and being 10/10 would have convinced no one and been seen as dodgy by all.

Then again I suppose I am talking about the strategic titans of the right of the Labour party here, so I shouldn’t be surprised that they’re making fools of themselves.

@17

There didn’t seem to be any clear rationale for calling the referendum at this time other than for reasons of internal Tory politics.

I mean I’d love referendums on all kinds of tory policies in the hope of defeating them but given they won the most recent election I have to put up with them passing them into law without any further say from me.

@Luis Enrique – it appears that in Newcastle (for example) a large number of people who did not vote at the General Election turned out to vote Leave.

These people are in the socio-economic classes we associate with Labour – so we might ponder why they typically haven’t voted Labour since around 2001 – but it does feel erroneous to target Corbyn on that issue.

Before this is over, you’ve gotta blame somebody.

… Apparently too much democracy is not stable. … confirmation bias in constituents incents politicians to lie, arbitraging between the money people and the voters. Since the politicians are lying they can’t deliver, therefore the campaign support goes to a set with bigger lies, and policy goes winging off in some essentially random direction, left, right, up, down. Instability. “Tiberius’s [Gracchus] Greek education had caused him to overestimate the reliability of the people as a power base”. It has been ever so.

People have been lamenting the existence of veto points or choke points in the modern US system, like superdelegates or the filibuster, but maybe such are the only hope of keeping this thing on the rails.

Atrios summed it up nicely: The logical thing would have been to express your anger at austerity by voting for the other party, but there was the austerity party and the austerity-but-we-are-a-bit-sorry-for-it party. Ed Miliband ran a campaign about as competent as a typical Dem midterm campaign. Voters are still pissed, and someone gave them a target…

Manoel – I’m sympathetic to Richard Dawkins’s argument that we have a representative democracy so that difficult & complex questions with far-reaching implications can be handled by politicians with civil servants to brief them, not by ordinary people who don’t necessarily know anything about the issues.

Beyond that, this particular referendum was particularly woeful. The fact that almost every economist in the country agreed Brexit would be bad news was kept out of the news media fairly systematically. The BBC, true to their understanding of impartiality, mentioned it but immediately ‘balanced’ it with somebody from the Leave campaign saying they were just scaremongering. When the message finally started to get through, the Leave campaign said that all these economists took money from the government, which made them a bit like the ‘German physicists’ who the Nazis got to debunk relativity. So people voted No in blissful ignorance of the likely consequences, which promptly came about. A referendum might not be a bad thing in itself, if only we could ensure honesty from all concerned.

[I moved to the UK (London) in 2006 and then on to a rural place in the US in 2011. Before that I lived in 2 other EU countries and am a non-British EU citizen.]

What Christopher Phelps says @6. The degree to which English (not really British, but English) people casually have been referring to Europe as an entity they aren’t part of underpins this whole debacle.

Now of course the immediate blame goes to a) Cameron and b) the xenophobic, dishonest populist demagogues. But the question I’d like to see more thought of is how the Labour / left can reconnect with those populations that used to be part of their natural constituency (low middle class formerly working class, in deindustrialised areas, unhappy with their lot). It’s everywhere (US, Germany, France, …) that these populations have flocked to the populist xenophobic right.

Bexley (@19), Zamfir (@22) and Phil (@27), thanks for the comments.

I find the argument that things are complicated for the people to understand unpersuasive, because, when was it any different? It’s always too complex for the common people to understand things. And yet, it’s their lives, so I prefer they decide instead of a bunch of technocrats or political elites unresponsive to their needs. I understand that a lot of people prefer for representatives to decide. It’s a standard argument in political science. If that’s the reason for someone to be against this form of decision-making, fair enough. We can agree to disagree.

As for the timing of the referendum, this may be a good point. But then, when the timing would be good? It can’t be when people would vote to remain, because this means to use the agenda power only to legitimize what we want.

Last, but not least, there is the argument that there weren’t unbalanced view being expressed or that people were fooled by simplistic arguments such as economists aren’t trustful (are they?). My question then is: why isn’t it the case in general elections? Why can’t we use the same argument to the results of elections? It can’t be that, when the people agree to us, they aren’t being fooled, and when they disagree, they’re being fooled. So, why this time is different? It doesn’t sound like a good explanation that this single time people were fooled, and the rest of the time they aren’t.

@20

“In fact when they started bringing out Blair and Major I was wondering whether Leave had paid them to come out — every time Blair speaks a fairy dies”

Labour, or certain sections of it, have a really devastatingly severe hang-up about thinking Blair is still great that they are in desperate need of getting rid of.

As for the timing of the referendum, this may be a good point. But then, when the timing would be good? It can’t be when people would vote to remain, because this means to use the agenda power only to legitimize what we want.

Why did there need to be a referendum at all? Like I said most Tory policies are not being put to a referendum. Why this one? If Leavers are worried about restoring the primacy of Parliament why not leave this issue to Parliament like most others.

@35, good question about why this issue, but not others. But then, again, we’re back to the debate that shouldn’t be any referendum at all, ever.

I liked this part though: “If Leavers are worried about restoring the primacy of Parliament why not leave this issue to Parliament like most others”. Good catch.

merian @29 – Yes, the English, and I’m also in the East Midlands which excelled any other region other than the West Midlands in voting Leave. Just down to the village pub where there was general contentment.

Kudos, Harry, for getting this out. Corbyn is absolutely the right leader for Labour at this time precisely because he exposes so clearly the fissures splitting the Labour party that many, it seems, would prefer to paper over. Attempts to pin the defeat of Remain on Corbyn are, imho, almost sure to backfire among the broader population, including those generally unsympathetic to Labour.

The coup will likely be seen as a cynical power-grab by anti-Corbyn forces looking to oust Jeremy despite the generally ‘fair-to-good’ job he did for Remain. Does Labour need the support of urban well-t0-do, economic strivers? Yes, if Labour hopes to get elected nationally.

Capitulation to the forces of globalization worked in the past. Leave success should, I contend, be seen as an expression of much broader on-going rejection of the status-quo by all those left behind. We only seem to wake-up and notice wage stagnation and job loss when the elites suffer a temporary setback , such as when the Dems were trashed in the elections of 2010. Even then, it took the jobless figures issued six months later to get well-heeled liberals to (kind of) notice. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/business/the-unemployed-somehow-became-invisible.html?_r=0

The jobless rate rose to 9.2 percent in June. What gives? And where, if anywhere, is the outrage? The United States is in the grips of its gravest jobs crisis since Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House. Lose your job, and it will take roughly nine months to find a new one. That is off the charts. Many Americans have simply given up…

To the extent that frustrations are being channeled at all, they are being channeled largely through the Tea Party. But the Tea Party is mostly against devoting government resources to helping the unemployed.”

As recently as last year, ‘liberals’ here displayed an equal ignorance to the plight of African-Americans under Obama, demanding ‘proof’ that the poor really were suffering.

Regional inequality and the impact of globalization on older, less-mobile voters is fairly clearly a challenge that left-wing elites can no longer safely ignore in any nation. Yet, that’s exactly what the blame Jeremy would have us do.

Manoel @31 – all I can say is that, this time round at least, the lack of party labelling seems to have made a difference. If during an election a major political party sent out an election communication to every household, headed ‘Official Information’ and consisting largely of outright lies, I think there would be some fairly vocal resistance – from the official body monitoring the election, from other parties and even from within that party. But the Leave campaign did precisely this without any negative consequences at all.

My own view is as follows:

1/ Brexit is a fucking catastrophe
2/ A decent Labour leader would have avoided same
3/ Jeremy Corbyn is not a decent Labour leader

I can’t say that Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper could have done better. We’ll never know. But they couldn’t have done worse, could they?

Some people might say right-wing Labour MPs like Kate Hoey and John Mann ACTUALLY campaigning for Leave might have been a bigger problem. NOPE! Corbyn’s fault. He like, campaigned for remain and got Labour voters to do it at the same rate as Lib Dems and Greens, Still Corbyn’s fault.

I’ve long thought that the best (general) cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. The democratic answer to the question ‘How frequently should referenda on EU membership be held?’ is ‘As often as the people want’. We don’t know what frequency of referenda the people of the UK would prefer because their views on that question have never been sought.

Is there any substance to the suggestion made here that the outcome was due to young people not voting?

Nyquist’s rule would suggest not more often than every second referendum

Gregor Sansa @49

When that problem actually exists will be time enough to think about remedies.

People are correct that a Labour leader was largely responsible for the vote to leave the EU, it was Blair’s overdoing it on allowing too many immigrants in during too short a time that was the main factor in turning public opinion against the project.

Zizek has the solution:

http://europe.newsweek.com/brexit-eu-referendum-left-wing-politics-europe-zizek-474322

I think the general idea is that we need to establish an agrarian economy based on chaos farming.

If sanity prevails the EU will punish England/Britain as severely as possible to discourage any other potential leaver. While the far right throughout Europe is no doubt celebrating today, if the EU makes an example of the leavers the far right might recede. Within the EU, that is, but I don’t see why the leaders of the EU should care about what happens in England.

@56:

Is that a remotely “fair” reading of the linked article. Come to think of it, what do you actually know about agricultural/ecological issues?

@58 Perhaps a minor edit will clarify the problems with your suggestion

“If sanity prevails the unelected, overpaid, corrupt EU bureaucrats will punish English and Welsh pensioners and others fearful of the future as severely as possible for daring to express their desire to determine their own futures by voting in their own nation, others who dare to defy the bureaucrats and their City and business-owning backers will grovel and retreat in fear.”

I’m certain this isn’t your real position.

It’s been a difficult 24 hours, perhaps you should lie down.

I wish I had seen this before. I just spent 8 hours reading everything I could find to figure out how this craziness happened and most of it led me to (pretty much) the conclusion you state here.

This is one of the oddest political events I’ve ever witnessed from the sidelines though. There is so little consensus on this thing. There are a number of elements to it and everyone is quite sure of their view–but there are about 1,000 different views on each element–what it means for Europe, what it means for Britain, what it means for the global economy, why it happened, what the motives were, what the ultimate cause is, what the run up was, who is at fault, what could have been done differently. Even if some agree about one of these, they are likely to disagree about the others. This makes me wonder if anyone actually understands what just happened and why.

If sanity prevails the EU will punish England/Britain as severely as possible to discourage any other potential leaver. . . . I don’t see why the leaders of the EU should care about what happens in England.

I hope you took k’s advice.

“Zizek has the solution:

I think the general idea is that we need to establish an agrarian economy based on chaos farming.” Holbo @56

“Is that a remotely “fair” reading of the linked article. Come to think of it, what do you actually know about agricultural/ecological issues?” halasz @60

First off, not even the remotest corner of my unconscious could have dreamed up the possibility, never mind the reality, of reading a Zizek opinion piece in Newsweek.

Anyway, halasz is right about Holbo’s gloss. Zizek is just, rather tamely I might add, stating what should be obvious to be reasonably intelligent people. But the generalized response of reasonable and intelligent people to the political events of the last year has just about convinced me otherwise.

Seriously, harry b @58 writes this? “If sanity prevails the EU will punish England/Britain as severely as possible to discourage any other potential leaver. While the far right throughout Europe is no doubt celebrating today, if the EU makes an example of the leavers the far right might recede.”

What does this mean? Fuck ’em all? Wasn’t Greece punished enough for the rest of Europe? Are the “good Europeans” not yet satiated by Greece’s prostration? Will no lessons be learned in this historical epoch?

If the goal is to make the future even more interesting than the present moment then by all means, the EU should act as severely as possible toward the UK. I’m sure that will ease tensions. It would also have the added benefit of demonstrating the concrete advantages of European integration to the rabble. Punish!? The hacks–sorry, technocrats–in Brussels couldn’t have said it better themselves.

As for the OP: can someone explain to me how the attacks on Corbyn are not just political opportunism? A chance for the Blairites or neoliberals or centrists or whatever the fuck they are to put the knife in and get back to business as usual?

phenomenal cat — I hope the above comment explains what I meant. Sorry — it was completely clear in my head what I meant but I see why you, k, and bruce interpreted it as you did. I plead bad wifi demanding unfortunate brevity…

And, yes, this is political opportunism of the worst kind.

“Zizek is just, rather tamely I might add, stating what should be obvious to be reasonably intelligent people.”

It is possible that my vexation with Zizek’s recent contrarian opinionations – plus the absurdity of him writing for Newsweek – came to a head in my gloss. I just think, with him, it always comes down to absent-minded gestures like this: “Recall Mao Ze Dong’s old motto: “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” A crisis is to be taken seriously, without illusions, but also as a chance to be fully exploited.” There isn’t really anything wrong with ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’. It is common sense, even. But if it’s literally your only thought … ever?

@ 67 Actually, there are a number of arguments to support that notion that the financial sector is the only sector likely to suffer, which explains why the City worked so hard to scare the Leave camp.

Markus Kerber, head of the (German) BDI made clear that German industry sees no utility in any disruption to British-EU trade. Plenty can go wrong, but Britain remains a very an attractive market for EU products. I don’t see anybody suffering in the short term, but the wealthy.

Thanks for the comment.

I don’t get this stuff about Labour having to get back the voters they’ve lost in this referendum. This referendum had nothing to do with the parties, with people from both parties campaigning on both sides, and to the extent that party loyalties were involved the whole thing was just viewed as a Tory shitshow. Sure lots of labour voters voted leave, but that doesn’t mean they won’t vote Labour at the next general election.

The problem for Labour is now as it has been since Thatcher, prising the Tory’s sweaty hands off that sector of the working class called the “Tory working class,” who vote against their own interests. These are the people I have been talking about in other threads, for whom race consciousness trumps class consciousness, they’ve been a problem for labour since Thatcher and now that Labour has lost Scotland its only pathway to victory now is to get those people back. Blair could have done it if he had bothered to find ways to offset the social pressures of immigration, but he couldn’t because he’s a vampire who bathes in the blood of children. Corbyn, an actual human being who talks to the interests of actual human beings, may have a chance.

But as I have said repeatedly here, the left in Britain is screwed until it can come to terms with this simple political order, of race over class, that has infected a large part of its potential voting base. This is going to get worse after Scotland goes independent next year, since England is solidly Tory – a nation of real estate agents aren’t going to vote for the party of work.

England is now reaping the final consequences of a 50 year post-colonial arc. No longer able to kill people and steal their stuff to buy off the workers, they needed a genuine industrial policy to build a new economy. Then Thatcher put paid to that idea, and Blair thought instead of going to industrial policy the UK could just tax bankers and pay off the lumpen proles. With the continued decline of industry and the colonial loot squandered on boutique wars, someone’s gonna have to get serious about an alternative policy – even though your new Clown Leader just gave the main market for any economic resurgence the two finger salute.

I don’t see any way out of this. England’s days as an economic power are done.

@ 75 Thanks for the compliment.

I assume you’re familiar, generally, with my position on the current crisis, as in it’s not about individual nations, but about globalization and those left behind. I favor Trump over Clinton precisely because he’s willing to at least, discuss, opposing globalization. I don’t want an end to borders. I preferred Remain out of self-interest, and for no other reason.

It follows, then, wouldn’t it, that the prospect of the EU collapsing does not exactly fill me with dread? The EU as it stands is finished. The encumbrance of presenting a passport crossing borders bothers me not a wit. I do want relatively free movement of peoples, but under the kinds of controls we enjoy in Canada.

The challenges facing Britain and other nations in Europe are precisely the same as those facing Britain before the referendum. EU managers dance to the tune of EU business leaders. Indeed, those in the financial sector are probably licking their lips at the prospect of peeling off some business from the City.

I suggest you wait more than 48 hours before shrieking that the world is about to end.

kidneystones, you are quite wrong that the City is the only sector that will suffer. British higher education will suffer immensely. Something like 16 percent of its budget is from EU research allocations, and then there are the students and staff garnered from Europe. The cuts that have already been visited across the sector will now be compounded. There is no way the national government, which is now veering even further rightward, will make it up.

@ 78. I don’t see cuts to education funding being an issue. I mentioned earlier that I doubt the EU will be able to continue dispensing grants at current levels.

I teach at two exceptional institutions with extremely talented students. In my classes, all work is done by hand in pencil and paper. I keep the windows open and the air-con and the lights off. Guess what, the work still gets done. We use one computer – my laptop and when students do need to use computers in class, I allow them to use their smart phones. The buildings are old and weeds flourish.

Small class sizes, great students, a great library, and great faculty are more important than any other factor, including EU grants.

Bad me.

In which kidneystones reveals he doesn’t understand how research grants work or what they’re for.

The criticism of Corbyn from the right is obviously completely disingenuous. The Ashcroft pole shows that Labour voters voted remain only slightly behind the Lib-Dems. Tory voters only voted 42% for remain, and yet much of the media punditry has rushed to Cameron’s defence.

The Labour party has spent nearly 20 years alienating its base and Corbyn is getting the blame for failing to turn it around in 11 months.

The problem for the Labour right is the Tony Blair never actually lost an election (like Thatcher). Given the decline of the Labour vote between 1997 and 2005 he certainly would have done in 2010. He only managed to win as long as he did because the Tory vote was even more depressed than the Labour vote. Brown has ended up taking the blame for continuing a trend that started under Blair and the myth of Blair as the perfect leader has developed. In 2015, this allowed the Blairites to believe that Labour lost because Ed Milliband was too left-wing and not because the party had no coherent position at all.

The irony is that the Blairites supposed strength, winning elections, couldn’t win them the leadership of their own party. So now they’ve decided its the party membership that is in some way out of touch. They don’t actually know how to win the leadership so they’re just attacking Corbyn at every turn in the hope that something turns up.

Meanwhile, Tim Farron is joining in, because Corbyn’s election wrecked his plan to move the Lib-Dems to the left of a new Blairite Labour party. And much of the media is quite happy to jump on board, because Corbyn won’t, in incapable of, playing their game.

So, whatever Corbyn’s merits or faults as Labour leader, none of the criticism of him, from his own party, from his political enemies, from the media, can be taken at face value.

@ 82 Feel free to correct me where I’m wrong. EU funding for research dries up with Brexit, forcing researchers to find new funding. That money will most likely have to come from British sources, forcing the government to decide how to raise and distribute new money. From that large pool, Britain will have to decide how to fund and what to fund: whether we’re talking about high-speed rail, or Trident. British researchers will have to make the case to the British people that their research deserves taxpayer support. Is that about right?

Meanwhile, 5 more nations look ready to quit. The EU is breached/broken and I don’t see the Eurocrats putting the pieces back together.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/683282/EU-brexit-germany-says-more-nations-to-quit-juncker-amicable-divorce-boris-johnson-cameron

Where you’re wrong is about the government feeling compelled to step in and make up the difference.

Ecrasez – you might have missed kidneystones saying that he writes from Canada. I write from Nottinghamshire. The view looks decidedly less rosy on site.

Kidneystones, you are missing the bigger picture, which is decidedly lower British growth. My point about higher education being hurt is true, but it’s just a fragment of the picture. So the City gets hurt, higher education gets hurt, but above all the general UK economy will be hurt. This is exactly why the pound had its largest drop in more than thirty years. That’s essentially a verdict of the entire world market that the UK economy and its prospects going forward are no longer worth what it was the day before.

Harry is correct that the EU has every incentive to use Britain as a demo case for why states should not leave. But even without that, it’s just a fact that in leaving Britain will arrange for itself worse terms of trade than it had before.

“No more than one university per major city should be funded and all other institutions should be, closed, or re-tasked as community colleges/adult education centers and vocational training centers.”

This is supposed to reassure us that all will be well with the sector? Yes, London should have only one major university. Close LSE, close UCL, we’ll only keep Imperial?

I think you lost the argument when you said you support Trump, but I guess it gets worse.

We have no job security in the UK, where Thatcher adopted tenure. I’m not sure why you think you’re advocating something that doesn’t exist here already. The Arts Faculty provost at the University of Nottingham this spring announced 18 redundancies (layoffs) that in the end were solved by 17 early retirements or exoduses, and 1 reassignment. But believe me, there is already acute awareness of no job security here.

UCL, LSE, and Imperial are considered pretty autonomous and ranked distinctly, with totally different admissions processes, though they may technically be under the same umbrella. The point remains the same. Your plan is stupid. Multiple universities in great cities are complementary and salutary. Columbia, NYU, CUNY: good enough for you?

Voting Trump is a vote for stupidity, coarseness, bigotry, and self-beggaring nationalism and is not continuous with support for Sanders or Corbyn.

As for a Canadian teaching in Asia who opposes globalization, I’ll leave that to Freud.

@ 96 I can tell you believe you carry an especially burdensome cross. Like it or not, we’re all in the same boat. As for Asia, you’ll be shocked to learn that national boundaries need not mean an end to cultural exchanges and interactions. By globalization I mean the export of industry, manufacturing, and jobs to third-world states. It might have been a good idea at one time, but that time has passed.

As for misunderstanding the tenure system in Britain, please accept my sincere apologies. The academics I know in the UK appear to enjoy ironclad job security. It was quite wrong of me to generalize from a particular which I clearly misunderstand.

That said. Perhaps the best way to ensure better funding and job security for academics in Britain is to close some of the schools. The US system is tied, of course, to the US economy and requires a steady stream of graduate students, many of whom will not find employment in universities, other than as adjuncts.

@99 gulfs, etc. I’ve noticed. I’ve made my mea culpa re: British universities.

“Aren’t EU students funded by HM Treasury under the equal treatment in HE directive?”
Aside that British students dont get much* government money either these days, the Brits made quite an art of circumventing EU equal treatment laws. So no, not really.

*From my pov, none, at least local tuition fees far exceed German overall budgets per student now.

Here, to provide proof, is what our union local rep sent out a few months ago about the situation here (as I say for now this got resolved without compulsory firings, but the possibility remains). Now going.

The union:

Further to a review of the Arts Faculty, the University of Nottingham is proposing to make 11.5 academic staff redundant across 5 departments in the faculty. Between March 2015 and March 2016, the faculty has seen a reduction of over 20 full time equivalent staff. The current proposals will inevitably lead to compulsory redundancies for academic staff.

The prime rationale behind the proposals are the cutting of staff costs, arising from a new budgetary system applied within the university, and the new imposition of higher staff student ratio targets for the departments. It is clear that the same logic of cutting staff costs will be rolled out across the whole of the university. What is happening in Arts now will happen in other faculties soon unless we act together to stop these proposals.

Kidneystones repudiates the neoliberal agenda everywhere except in higher education, apparently, where he thinks it hasn’t gone far enough.

The idea that opposing globalization will improve things is likely to be a big error.

More likely is that the smaller entity (Britain, in this case) will recreate and maintain the world capital hierarchy in its own smaller scale.

bruce wilder 06.24.16 at 5:17 pm
“Atrios summed it up nicely: The logical thing would have been to express your anger at austerity by voting for the other party, but there was the austerity party and the austerity-but-we-are-a-bit-sorry-for-it party. Ed Miliband ran a campaign about as competent as a typical Dem midterm campaign. Voters are still pissed, and someone gave them a target…”

This, a thousand times!

Labour was gutted by the Blairites, to the point where they had already accepted so much of the Tory platform that they had no real opposition.

kidneystones @ 72: “Markus Kerber, head of the (German) BDI made clear that German industry sees no utility in any disruption to British-EU trade.”

Clearly the spokesperson for German industry is going to be in favour of Germany still being able to sell stuff to the UK. But up to now the European single market has also included the ability to work anywhere in it. Would (could?) southern and eastern European countries block a post-Brexit settlement if it doesn’t include free movement of labour? What happens if UK has a choice between “free trade in goods and labour” and “treated like any other WTO member”?

@ awy,

I imagine that depends on what replaces it…

You can’t blame Corybyn in the sense of primary responsibility. But you can still find him guilty of inertia, indifference, and organisational/motivational mediocrity. I don’t think anybody is blaming him of anything other than that.

Hidari: “But the Blairites, like the communists before them, would rather have ideologically pure failure than compromise to achieve success.”

No, they’d rather that **they** were in charge, and would eagerly betray Labour if they are not.

faustusnotes – I only come and go on Crooked Timber, and so didn’t know the track record, but you’re right and it’s a policy I’ll follow now.

Apparently, a large number of folks who voted to leave decided to learn about the EU afterward. Google noted huge spikes in searches for what the EU actually does, its rules, how they impact Britain, etc. etc. It’s also apparently the case that many of the leave voters now have “buyer’s remorse” and wish they could have a do over.

Another thing I’ve noticed in discussions around the Internet. Some people seem to believe that Britain has no control over its own finances, that Brussels ran everything. So now, everything is going to be awesome, cuz they have “sovereignty” for the first time. In reality, of course, Brits voted in their own governments, and those governments voted in their own austerity and neoliberal economics. Brussels had nothing to do with it. The EU didn’t force them to go that right-wing route at all.

It would also appear too many people are confusing Greece with Britain. Greek economics actually were severely constrained by the Troika. Not having your own currency does that. Grexit, under those conditions, made a certain kind of sense, and should at least have been used as a serious negotiating tool for a much better deal than Syriza ended up getting. But there really isn’t the equivalent impetus for Brexit. It would seem primarily to be a function of the rabid, racist right, whipping up fear of black and brown people, “coming to take your jobs,” etc. etc.

This won’t end well. And it won’t do a thing to stop capitalist hegemony or neoliberalism. That will go on as before in England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland*, OTOH, make just break free and go back to the EU.

*That’s the one bright spot for me. I’d love to see a united Ireland.

Plume: It would also appear too many people are confusing Greece with Britain.

Actually, I think one the best arguments for getting out was and is the agenda and power relations revealed by how the EU treated Greece. It is hard not to suspect that Britain’s time in the box would come.

Sorry, thought I had included the link:

Brexit won’t shield Britain from the horror of a disintegrating EU:
Yanis Varoufakis

“Actually, I think one the best arguments for getting out was and is the agenda and power relations revealed by how the EU treated Greece. It is hard not to suspect that Britain’s time in the box would come.”

Again, Brussels can’t force Britain to do what it forced Greece to do. The Troika together can’t, either. Britain has its own currency.

Beyond that, as mentioned, Britain imposed austerity on itself. It voted that in. The EU didn’t. It chose right-wing governments that imposed right-wing economics, going back at least to Thatcher. With or without brexit, that was its choice. Ironically, the same people on the right shouting for brexit, set up the conditions that angered enough Britons to vote to go. I think they’re going to be incredibly disappointed at what those same right-wing forces do with this newfound “sovereignty.”

Well if my social media feeds are anything to go by I can see tens of previously ardent Corbyn supporters who are now furiously arguing about whether the crap Labour campaign was due to incompetence or him actually wanting brexit and Johnson as prime minister.

Anyway, good luck from Norway. If emulating our relationship with the EU is the best you can now hope for then I can tell you that it’s a shit future and pretty much everyone here is amazed that the UK would want it. The old phrase ‘democracy by fax’ summs it up. Though now ‘democracy by scanned email attachment’ would be better.

Britain imposed austerity on itself. It voted that in. The EU didn’t. It chose right-wing governments that imposed right-wing economics

“chose” is worth examining closely. The process of choice featured the complete abdication of the mainstream Left. Both Labour and the Lib-Dems echoed the neoliberal rhetoric in a me-too chorus. And pretty much every Party, major and minor, except the right-wing, continued this elite consensus regarding Brexit.

There is no left, left. In the sense that the left apparently cannot conceive of any institutional means of better government that does not involve abdication to a Tory gov’t or a Europe in the iron-grip of a neoliberal cabal of sociopaths. It is pathetic.

Yanis is an idiot. A highly intelligent, but completely ineffective idiot. No one can understand what he is talking about; he couldn’t rally a frat house for a beer run.

The problem of Europe is how to organize political cooperation that enables democratic action for public purposes, and particularly in the management of money (“movement of capital”, fiscal discretion in taxing and spending), trade (movement of goods and services), and migration (movement of people).

The neoliberal regime seeks to disable the nation-states as managers of these flows and the economic risks that attend their fluctuations, freeing private business and finance to organize and dominate the management of flows and attendant risks (externalizing the risks and looting the vulnerable vestigial nation-states and communities).

I do not understand how a left that refuses to manage any of these things ever even conceives of governing.

Ze K,

“Remain would, without a doubt, cement the status quo – another glamorous win for The Management, confirmation of the Rightness of the Path Chosen.”

What makes you think leaving will change the status quo? What makes you think the Management doesn’t win regardless?

I think some folks are projecting their dreams onto this situation, and turning it into something revolutionary, when it’s really going to be status quo ante. A slight change in the location of where a small part of the levers are pulled. But the same ruling class is still in place, and it’s not going to do right by “the people” — Bremain or Brexit. This just isn’t some great victory for Brits, even though that’s how the right casts it. And the people in Britain are now something like 800 billion (in dollars) poorer. Worldwide, it’s something like 2.1 trillion. As always, those massive hits won’t be taken on by the rich. The poor and the middle will carry that new burden.

The Blairites were always quite clear about their position. They were in favour of the free market and capitalism, they accepted that Thatcher had been mostly right about the economy while disagreeing pretty fundamentally on social issues.

Labour failed to defend Brown’s handling of the economic crises despite the fact that he was right and followed standard Keynesian economic theory and that the IMF was critical of austerity.

Does anyone know enough about UK law to know whether Scotland and Northern Ireland might be able to save England and Wales from themselves? It seems like the terms of the devolution settlement mean that Westminster does not have the power to take Scotland and NI out of the EU without the consent of Scottish and Northern Irish parliaments and that’s not going to be forthcoming. So if England and Wales want to leave the EU, they have to leave the UK. I doubt that England and Wales would be ready to do that so isn’t it the case that there’s a strong chance that this referendum is not going to get through Parliament? (See p. 19, para 70-71 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201516/ldselect/ldeucom/138/138.pdf

@144,

Are you familiar with the term “paranoid delusions”?

@111
Yes but it’s not quite that simple is it? Another key finding is: ‘The AB social group (broadly speaking, professionals and managers) were the only social group among whom a majority voted to remain (57%). C1s divided fairly evenly; nearly two thirds of C2DEs (64%) voted to leave the EU.’ ‘Among those whose formal education ended at secondary school or earlier, a large majority voted to leave.’

As someone pointed out on the internet which I can no longer be bothered to track down, we are now reaping what we sowed in the early 1970s when proto-Thatcherites decided to destroy social democracy and consciously create a more unequal, unfair, class stratified society. And essentially, she won, and that is the world we live in now. We are all Thatcher’s children.

In this world you have winners and losers. The winners…well you all know about them.
And the losers, well, fuck ’em: is the viewpoint of the politico-financial-media elite.

These are Trump’s people, these are Farage’s people.

And they are very very very angry.

This is not a problem that is going to go away, regardless of whether or not Trump wins the American election, regardless of the make up of the next British government.

Just in case anyone is tempted to take Daregh’s ramblings seriously, the ‘LABOUR’ figures Corbyn refused to collaborate with were, from the article he linked to: ‘ Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown.’

Obviously the man’s a lunatic. There are literally no three people on God’s green Earth that the working class of Barnsley pay more attention to than Blair, Brown and Voldemort, sorry Mandelson.

To me, there is one way to see this as a huge change in the status quo. Without it, I can’t see that actually being the case.

Scotland secedes from Britain, remains independent, and likely hooks up with the EU.
Northern Ireland secedes from Britain, Ireland unites, and it likely hooks up with the EU.

This would leave Wales and England alone to weather the brexit storm. It would give real sovereignty back to those who didn’t vote to leave. It would take away UK control over nations that didn’t want to leave the EU. England and Wales would be on their own.

That comes much closer to setting up a democratic match for those who wanted to leave, and for those who wanted to stay. It comes a lot closer to geographic correlation.

Right now, that close democratic fit doesn’t exist. If the status quo for the UK remains, at least 48% will be very unhappy with results, and from what we’re hearing, a huge number of those who voted leave now regret it.

For UK commenters or readers, there is an online map showing the numbers of people who are signing a petition for a second EU referendum, which apparently there are EU rules about how to trigger. The map shows the numbers in each area signing it, and has 2,394,379 signatures so far.

http://petitionmap.unboxedconsulting.com/?petition=131215&area=uk

Who are the Decents? They use the entitled screech-word ‘sabotage’ because they bet everything on Project Fear and lost.

The slobs just hate Corbyn Decent headlines regret to inform us, although and

The Labour right cannot fail, it can only be failed.

@Hidari –

A couple of other salient quotes from the article –

“The phrase ‘That’s why I am campaigning to remain in the EU’ was deleted from numerous leader speeches and interventions in the long and short campaigns outside of the LabourIN campaign, despite calls from other parts of the Party to him to get involved.”

“James Meadway, a part-time economic adviser to McDonnell, had written in the Counterfire website last year that “In our own referendum, on British membership of the EU, the left must vote No.””

“Corbyn’s allies signed off a planned visit to Turkey early in the ‘short campaign’, to talk about “open borders”. After opposition from other parts of the party, it was eventually vetoed.”

“The leader’s office declined to cooperate with other parts and wings of the Labour Party in making the case to remain, including any cooperation with former leaders Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It also vetoed repeated attempts to get him to make a video explaining why he was campaigning to remain.”

“One Labour campaign source said that the head of the LabourIn campaign, Alan Johnson, asked for a meeting with Corbyn in April and was told by his team that the only available date would be July.”

“But focus groups at the start of the campaign had shown that voters felt Corbyn’s speeches on Europe looked like he was being told to back the Remain case rather than really believing it.”

“One particular flashpoint came when Corbyn’s team promised to include significant pro-Remain content in a keynote speech Corbyn was due to give at green energy firm Ecotricity in mid-May. The speech was in the “EU grid” and was flagged as a big EU intervention to the press. But all pro-EU content ended up being removed by Milne, insiders say.”

“On the Sunday before polling day the leader’s office broke promises to let Sunday newspaper journalists have pro-EU comments ahead of Corbyn’s appearance on the BBCs Andrew Marr show.”

“It is alleged that Corbyn’s aides refused to allow LabourIN and senior Labour colleagues to discuss or address concerns around immigration, writing them off as ‘xenophobia’, ‘prejudice’ or ‘racism’ at every turn.”

“Instead, Corbyn focused on the dangers of TTIP, the EU-US trade deal, even though his team were shown evidence that this message would hinder the campaign and would not persuade core Labour voters.”

“And his EU planning diary – leaked to HuffPost – as a result was ‘light’ on EU events. MPs felt there were days where Corbyn did nothing at all on the campaign, while Cameron was out on the stump nearly every single day. Some were surprised he took a holiday in the middle of the campaign itself.”

Exactly Daragh. ‘Sabotage’ is the blame-shifting slander of the bitterites. Almost everything you ‘quote’ as ‘fact’ if isn’t the unverifiable insider gossip from the people who lied about the Iraq war and the rest is ‘but they didn’t campaign like I wanted to THAT MEANS THEY LOST ON PURPOSE’. It’s a wonderful theory if you’re so bought in to their agenda you think Corbyn lost on purpose. This is that unique @bbclaura definition of ‘sabotage’ that is ‘u suck and i hate u and u suck’.

Whereas Cameron deliberately undermined the remain campaign so half of his party wouldn’t immediately depose him in vengeful outrage…like…you know….
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/senior-figures-in-remain-campaign-say-they-were-hobbled-by-number-10

MY SOURCE comes from independent members of the Remain campaign who aren’t professional pols, aren’t after Cameron’s job, didn’t bring us the Iraq War.

Your appeal to vividness fallacy…maybe you really believe it. An anonymous source that swears at Corbyn is not ‘credibility’ followed by a picture of a single diary entry. I don’t care if you think Corbyn should have lied like Yvette and said ‘i ain’t never heard of no freedom of movement’ (urgent forward: Polish ambassador)

You are clearly cutting out the clear resentment agenda behind your ‘source’
‘Now Remain campaigners say that pro-EU lines in Corbyn speeches were cut, his diary was scheduled to avoid Labour In events and any attempts to work with Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown were overruled.’ Oh yeah, them, so popular, so credible.

‘Corbyn was on Saturday accused at a gay pride event of being responsible for the Brexit defeat, but he said “I did all I could”.’ Oh look it contains a link to a gay activist heckling Corbyn whoops it’s one of Liz Kendall’s campaigners who works for Alistair Campbells PR firm. (you google it)

‘Corbyn’s allies signed off a planned visit to Turkey early in the ‘short campaign’, to talk about “open borders”. After opposition from other parts of the party, it was eventually vetoed.’ What even was this plan – YOU don’t know, it’s snide unsourced incitment from anonymous bitterites.

‘Those close to the Shadow Chancellor felt that the independence referendum in Scotland had shown how Project Fear went down badly with Labour voters. McDonnell’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC) would have felt the sterling crisis idea was counter-productive too, one source said. McDonnell preferred to point to ‘Tory cuts’ that would take place after Brexit, a message that his team felt was more consistent with Labour’s anti-austerity narrative.’ Well through spite glasses I suppose that’s SABOTAGE.

“They said that, until near the end of the campaign, Downing Street was paralysed by fear of “blue on blue” attacks. Cameron is understood to have blocked an attack ad – a pastiche of the party’s 2015 general election poster which showed Ed Miliband tucked inside the breast pocket of Alex Salmond. The ad for which all the artwork was prepared showed Johnson inside the top pocket of Nigel Farage. “We were hobbled in what we were allowed to do by No 10. They were sure they were going to win, and their chief interest was putting the Conservative party back together. There was a huge reluctance to attack Boris. A campaign that cannot personalise an attack is fighting with one hand behind its back,” said a senior campaign insider.”

HOW ABOUT THAT FOR SABOTAGE?

@Daragh, supra, so what I’m seeing is that Corbyn was a bit between a rock and a hard place: allying himself with Cameron et al. would be political suicide; appearing next to Blair et all highly toxic. So having done nothing to bring this calamity about he is now blamed not to have single-handedly averted it?

@merian – He didn’t have to appear next to Blair. But given the people he HAS shared platforms with (including Cameron, after Jo Cox’s assassination) would it REALLY have been so much to ask for a few ‘I agree with David on almost nothing. But what I do agree with him on is that it is vital to stay in the EU to protect the jobs and living standards of hard working Britons’ appearances? And even if Blair and Mandelson aren’t exactly going to light the room on fire, Gordon Brown is a helluva campaigner when let loose. He could have been used. Above all – loudly declaring in the media that it’s time for a Labour voice in the campaign, then getting into a public fight with your shadow cabinet to defend a policy (free movement of people) most likely to alienate the voters whose support you need is a new level of political incompetence. It’s simply mind blowing.

I suspect that fantasies of Irish unity are still just that- I’d be surprised if the votes were there for NI to separate from the UK.
Brexit is economic doom for NI which needs lots of FDI to get its economy working well and which was getting a fair bit of EU money and even so the majority for Remain wasn’t that big. The genuine increase in closeness between NI and the Republic stemming from the fading of the border and the various cross border initiatives (tourism, business etc) was IMO promising far “better” results in the long term than the latest notion of finally managing to drag a hostile unionist rump into unity. The border will have to come back in some shape or fashion – perhaps even worse than before since it was never really an immigration border. Bad news for the whole island.

Ais @145

‘It seems like the terms of the devolution settlement mean that Westminster does not have the power to take Scotland and NI out of the EU without the consent of Scottish and Northern Irish parliaments and that’s not going to be forthcoming.’

I don’t know whether that’s right, but if it is, then the question that suggests itself to me is this: is there anything to prevent the UK Parliament from changing the terms of the devolution settlement in a way that enables it to take the UK out of the EU without the consent of the Scottish and Northern Ireland parliaments?

I thought it would be better not to read CT comments after an event of this magnitude because it would be too depressing and infuriating. I was right.

And then Daragh showed up.

it is vital to stay in the EU to protect the jobs and living standards of hard working Britons’

And if you’re not ‘hard-working’—then there’s plenty more where you came from. You can lead a neoliberal to water…

Engels @156: very cogent. The question is how would one even begin to reach the working class with such analysis these days.

My kids used to deliver newspapers around my village (here in the East Midlands, as I say, near the epicenter of the Leave vote). For every Guardian reader, 20 Mail and Sun readers, and perhaps 3 Times readers, maybe 1 Independent reader. (For those in U.S., Mail and Sun are roughly equivalent to Fox News in newsprint. And the Independent, which was pretty great, esp. in Middle East coverage, is now only online. The Times I actually prefer to the Guardian since I can predict the Guardian and the Times, though Tory, provides information – as in Saturday’s pullout with all the voting breakdown analysis.) Back to the point: Every morning the vast majority of Britons, particularly down the education and class scale, don’t get anything even approaching an actual analysis. What they get are pictures of the hordes swarming Calais and hysterical rants about the immigrants. Do that for years on end, you get a result like this.

But we can always blame Corbyn.

Yes, I really wish UKIP voters want radical popular socialism, but I’m afraid they tend to vote otherwise. (Although I will concede this: 4% of UKIP voters voted Remain. Didn’t get the memo, I guess!)

It’s not often that a political event ends the careers of both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.

@ 109 is apposite.

@ 109, highly recommended.

Good! Time for a labour red wedding. Clear the blairites out and run a principled campaign to sink Johnson. Let Europe tear the Tories apart a second time, but please please no more new labour…

I don’t understand the point, kidneystones. The blairites want to push out Corbyn and have been sabotaging him and trying to get rid of him since he was selected. It’s hardly Corbyn and his supporters pushing anyone out, is it? All those new labour ghouls resigning are the ones doing the leaving. Similarly, I don’t expect you to leave and I’m happy to engage with you if you could just stop being rude. You seem to mistake someone objecting to your offensive manners as some kind of censorship.

The blairites could stay if they could just get along with the party direction, they could even contribute by making positive suggestions about how to rescue labour from the grave they dug for it. They clearly can’t even handle being told they were wrong, hence this petulant round of resignations and the pre-referendum, background briefings. So who is being exclusionary here?

No one has sought to exclude anyone, just to disregard those who are consistently ill-informed and obnoxious.

Like every good trump voter, kidneystones, you are having difficulty discerning the difference between being told you’re being rude and I don’t want to talk to you, and being told not to speak. And I really don’t need any lessons on the truth of English working class culture from someone who didn’t grow up there and has shown himself to be consistently ill-informed about the basics of British political life. I’m also not cheering for the clown show unfolding – I want the people trying to bring down Corbyn to fail, and I think they’re fools to bring this on just when the country needs a stable opposition.

But that’s the New Labour ghouls for you. The sooner someone puts a stake through the corpse of new labour the better.

On a previous thread, someone else said that I thought racists were inferior and “unpeople”. I don’t think that at all, I just think that the left won’t regain its equilibrium with working class people in Britain until it confronts the truth about how they live and how they think. I don’t have any plans for my “countless racist inferiors”, or any vision of hell for them. In fact I want all of those people to vote labour, so that their lives can be made better when labour again wins office. Unfortunately, tearing those people away from UKIP and the Tories means confronting and engaging with their racist views. New Labour conspicuously refused to do anything about that, and I see on this and related threads a lot of people who I presume are British leftists assuming that this issue can be ignored.

Note that “confronting and engaging with their racist views” doesn’t mean doing it kidneystones style, by insulting them and yelling at them. I know you find it hard to believe despite your sophisticated background teaching “communications” but there are other ways to engage with people besides telling them they’re stupid and wrong.

You should try it some time.

JMG, the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party, that is the MPs of Labour in Parliament) have never liked Corbyn as they see him as too far left to lead in a general election. They fear that the Tories will make mincemeat of Labour with Corbyn as their poster boy. They also hate Corbyn’s politics as they are largely New Labour except for a small minority that is Labour left. This is what underlies the present dynamic.

If Corbyn persists, and stands again in a new Labour leadership contest that their defections compel, he might still be approved again by the Labour members. On the other hand, if they share the doubt now about his capacities and personal qualities for leadership – quite apart from his politics – they may well opt to go another way.

This time the opponents of Corbyn will settle on one figure rather than fracturing and that figure is, I suspect, likely to be Benn. Corbyn therefore will have to defend himself in a new context of a) the referendum failure, and b) a determined and united set of opponents drawing off old power centers in the party.

192 Christopher Phelps.

Thank you very much for confirming clearly here that you are unable to accept even a modicum of substantive responsibility for your censorious efforts. These are clearly on display and about as far from fair-minded open discussion as can be imagined.

I offered you a clear apology for any intemperate and unfounded remarks on the topic of academic tenure in the UK. That, too, is a matter of record.

However, rather than acknowledge that there was, in fact, some substance to support my impression that UK academics do in fact enjoy some measure of security of employment, described as ‘permanent’ in EU literature on the topic, you instead denied that UK academics enjoy any at all. You decided (unwisely, I think) to then support Faustusnotes predictable, but nonetheless ill-conceived attempt to organize a shunning.

A simple apology will do.

We all have bad days.

194 Thanks for this.

This seems a good opportunity to disengage. I find much to appreciate in your comments.

@Hidari – I see we’ve now expanded the definition of ‘Blairite’ to Seema Malhotra (a close McDonnell ally) and Kerry McCarthy. This is after it was already expanded to include the likes of Tom Watson.

Blair – the Emmanuel Goldstein of Corbynism.

@kidneystones seems to prefer the label ‘opportunist’. Of course it’s notable that Andy Burnham, unquestionably the most opportunistic member of the ShadCab, is staying put. Can’t have his fingerprints on that knife when the leadership election rolls around…

Charming Daragh. Blair killed a million Iraqis, but you think he’s some symbolic figure? The man is a war criminal and an apologist for the worst dictators. He should be in the hague, and his supporters driven out of public life, but you think all of that is just some weird far-left obssession …

@faustusnotes – Given that dozens of MPs who opposed Blair (Watson et al) are now being labelled ‘Blairites’ because they don’t back Corbyn, yes, I’m afraid it does have more than a whiff of far left obsession I’m afraid.

And FWIW – I share your contempt for Blair’s stance on Iraq and post-premiership snuggling up to the likes of Nazarbayev. It was a big reason I pinned my colours to the Lib Dem mast when I first moved here. But of course, because I’m not part of the ‘if we just BELIEVE in Corbyn, he’ll win!’ crowd, I am of course entirely at one with Blair now, and share responsibility for the carnage in Iraq. Is that right? Frankly a lot of the invective is just getting confusing right now.

“You can do better than that.”

This is very much in doubt.

@205 I’ve made it quite clear that in my view lecturers enjoy considerably more job security than many others, certainly all the other employees at UK universities below the rank of lecturer. You stated that a lack of tenure meant that UK lecturers effectively have no job security. Nonsense, and by your own statement here.

Not even tenured positions offer the kind of security you demand under your definition – that is security without constraints and conditions. Whether you realize it, or not lecturers and those above are close the top of the academic food chain in terms of job security and still you pretend to being subject to unusual, or unjustifiable pressures because you, too, may find your ‘permanent’ position unfunded.

I’ve no particular interest in engaging with you further. Nor do I have a fingernail of sympathy with your plight. I can think of about ten to fifteen million in the UK alone who are more deserving. Your preoccupation with preserving all the entitlements of your already very comfortable position whilst cuts abound everywhere else is frankly revolting.

There’s nothing quite as illuminating as an invitation to pile on and join the shun. I couldn’t be more pleased with this outcome. Hope you are, too!

We’re done.

Questions from an uninformed American. Is there any person in either wing of the Labour Party who could credibly appeal to both wings? And if not, what possible benefit is there in dumping Corbyn? He leads the bigger wing.

Firstly, Labour’s got three wings, not two.

Radicals: Corbyn, Livingstone, the NUS. “The Loony Left.”
Managerials: Brown, Blair, Demos. “The Blairites.”
Traditionals: Prescott, Dobson, the GMB. “The heartland voters.”

Secondly, it’s not at all clear that Corbyn leads the biggest wing. He leads the smallest wing, in terms of voters, and the second-smallest, in terms of MPs. But his wing is the largest among activists. Fortunately for him, activists choose the leader.

Corbyn was supported by about half of the Labour Party membership (people who pay an annual membership fee) and the overwhelming majority of “registered supporters” (people who paid a one-off fee for the right to vote; many were from groups further left than Labour). That gave him a total of 210k votes. Labour got 9.3 million votes at the general election – and lost.

I’d suggest Andy Burnham as the figure best placed to bring relative peace, but regardless of who leads, Labour needs to have a policy agenda that looks something like “renationalise the railways and restrict immigration.” If they aren’t quick, another party is going to eat their lunch on it.

k@95
75% of US academics are contingent workers. So you have it wrong for the US as well.
As a general rule, I’m struck that many non-US commentators at CT think they’re frickin’ de Tocqueville. There are a significant number of very large subcultures in the US that most Americans don’t even have a grip on much less folks outside the US. Maybe ask a question from someone who knows? Maybe make less categorical statements? Flame away.

‘I’d suggest Andy Burnham as the figure best placed to bring relative peace”.

The word ‘relative’ is doing a lot of work there.

‘Regardless of who leads, Labour needs to have a policy agenda that looks something like “renationalise the railways and restrict immigration.”

This is a phenomenally bad idea. As Cameron found out, you essentially can’t run a modern economy without immigration. He made lots of promises about immigration and broke them all. So it can’t be done. What can be done is to whip up hatred against foreigners and the Tories will always be better at that than Labour.

Labour’s policy already is to nationalise the railways, incidentally.

A lot of thoughtful analysis here including a recent post about Corbyn.
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/

As Cameron found out, you essentially can’t run a modern economy without immigration. He made lots of promises about immigration and broke them all. So it can’t be done.

So because Cameron didn’t really try to restrict immigration (in part because of EU law that will soon no longer apply), it’s not possible? Of course it’s possible. No freedom of movement, and cap the number of work permits. Some employers will complain that they can’t find the workers they need. Tell them to raise their wages and they’ll find British people willing to do the job.

Whether it’s desirable is another matter. There would be winners and losers. Personally, I am strongly opposed to such a policy, but I don’t suffer the common delusion that the way to win elections is to follow the policies that I wanted to do anyway.

Labour’s policy already is to nationalise the railways, incidentally.

Yes, but it is not to restrict immigration. Labour needs to move to the centre ground, but that doesn’t mean adopting a Blairite agenda. Indeed, it means the exact opposite.

@221
do not believe a word you read about Corbyn in the Guardian. They are hysterically anti-Corbynite and always have been.

If anyone cares, apparently the plotters want to have a putsch and then keep Corbyn’s name off the ballot for any election: this would be their best way to ‘win’ any leadership election.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/06/what-labours-plotters-are-thinking

Does anybody know anything about the law? Is this possible? (I mean it is obviously grotesquely anti-democratic and immoral, but to Blairites these are words of praise).

Zoe Williams was pro-Corbyn until that column, though.

What’s your scenario for him surviving in power without the party splitting?

So because Cameron didn’t really try to restrict immigration (in part because of EU law that will soon no longer apply), it’s not possible? Of course it’s possible. No freedom of movement, and cap the number of work permits. Some employers will complain that they can’t find the workers they need. Tell them to raise their wages and they’ll find British people willing to do the job.

Exactly, the problem isn’t the economy. It’s pro-immigration cultists. For all the nonsense about a “modern economy” there are plenty of people the UK can do without.

Take farm labourers, the overwhelming majority of whom were born overseas. The fact is much of the farm related sector wouldn’t exist without EU subsidies. The EU is paying unprofitable UK farms to stay open and then we have then been “solving” the “problem” of Brits being unwilling to work on farms that have no reason to exist by importing Bulgarians and Romanians to do it. And this has now generated a backlash which is jeopardizing productive industry – it’s fundamentally stupid. This isn’t about the economy, it’s about fanatics wanting immigration for immigration’s (sorry, diversities) sake.

It’s the tropes of Labour Party revolt that amuse me most, I think.

CB presents with modal rhetoric: “Much as I like Corbyn the man and many of his views, . . .”

It seems to be a common sentiment. This from Hilary “bomb someone somewhere in Syria; it’s the moral thing to do” Benn: “Jeremy Corbyn ‘is a good and decent man, but he is not a leader’ ”

Matthew Norman offers as much at the Independent: “Being a decent chap with values shared by young idealists and old lefties like me is not enough. It is not the beginning of enough . . .” This was a preliminary to a couple of longing sidelong glances at Alan Johnson as Labour’s savior. Alan Johnson!!!

The idea that “good and decent” is disqualifying is Blairite wisdom that no one seems to want to pin on the old chief anymore.

My favorite trope of the morning though was from The Guardian news reporters, who announced: “Loyal members of shadow cabinet told the Guardian they were writing their resignation letters . . . ” No word on what the disloyal were doing, apart from Tom Watson raving at a silent disco.

@Pete Well, don’t underestimate the Tory far right and core of the UKIP, or for that matter Farage himself, not being up for the “ethnic cleansing” bit. Especially, if the economic hard times of the last 8 years become extended and aggravated for another 10. After all, some foreigner or Asian or Black person must be to blame.

Unfortunate as it seems to me, Corbyn’s ouster is starting to seem like a done deal. (Yes, the Guardian’s been depressingly awful re Corbyn since he was elected leader, but if people who had consistently supported him in the past are turning away now, it’s hard to see how he survives.) So, what do people here think about the alternatives? The Guardian (again, I know) is hinting it could be Tom Watson? John McDonnell? Mostly interested in hearing from Labour left types, to be honest.

I’m trying to keep track. Is the “issue” doing as well as Nicola Sturgeon in getting his party’s voters to back Remain? Or is it sacking a Hilary Benn for plotting a coup against him?

Presumably, we’ll see something tomorrow morning like, “200 Labour elected officials support Corbyn as party leader in face of coup.” With everyone from village councilor to MP (there have to be some – Dennis Skinner…).

If his team can’t generate that, he really is toast.

Corbyn is being blamed for being a lukewarm endorser of the EU. He gaves the EU a 7 out of 10, which seems within range of reason to me. If the alternative is announcing that Brexiters have cooties, . . . well . . .

Yes, “Remain and reform” was likely actually the sentiment of most Labour Party supporters. Ambivalence was typical until the day after had a clarifying effect. Even now “Remain and reform” is not a bad program.

‘Much as I like Corbyn the man and many of his views, he’s done. The coup may have been imprudent and even immoral, but it would now be worse for it to fail than to succeed. To win (a distant prospect) Labour needs a new leader’.

Do you seriously think this treachery will be forgotten Chris? Incidentally in case you labour (sic) under the apprehension that the Blairites have any idea what they are doing the reality apparently is this: Ian MacNicol got legal advice from some guy he met down the pub a top legal expert, that the Blairites can legally keep Corbyn’s name off the ballot for any future leadership contest (because of course he would win). The idea that this will work without extraordinary levels of bitterness and chaos is beyond science fictional, but that’s their ‘plan’.

And then presumably all they have to do is keep the names of all the other parties off the general election ballot paper and government is theirs.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/06/what-labours-plotters-are-thinking

Please note none of the Blairities turned this degree of ire towards even Gordon Brown when it was clear that he was a frozen rictused fuckwit who was heading the party towards certain (and humiliating) defeat. But of course they aren’t worried Corbyn will lose, they are worried he might win.

If the Blairites are opposed to Labour values (and they are) they should leave the party and start their own.

Except of course the last time this farce happened they tried that, didn’t they? It was called the SDP as I recall.

Younger readers may wish to google it.

Ben, do you understand ours?

I don’t get British politics but I find ours even more remote these days.

WaPo had a piece (which I couldn’t click on beyond the summary b/c I’ve run out of free articles for the month) about how Cornwall, a relatively poor region that supported Brexit, stands to lose millions in EU subsidies. I wonder if Ze K might take a minute from his increasingly unhinged ravings to spare a thought for such consequences. Not likely, but one can hope.

I noted C. Phelps’ comment upthead (around 177 I think) about the right-wing press. Off-topic, but I learned recently that the highest-circ. daily paper in Israel is owned by Sheldon Adelson and distributed for free. Presumably a rough analogue of the Sun and Daily Mail.

@249
I genuinely and truly think that Corbyn pitched it exactly right. Does anyone deny that the EU is a seriously flawed institution? Obviously, we should stay in, but to reform it and change it, not to accept it as it is. So ‘7 out of 10’ is about right. Corbyn was also right, in his first speeches, to point out that ‘leave’ did so well because large swathes of the electorate are completely and utterly alienated from the political process and that unless the Labour party reaches out to these people then it can no longer call itself a party of the working class.

Which is why comments like #258 are not helpful.

I am always up for sniggering at right wing fuckwits crooks and liars like Farage, Gove and Bojo though.

@262
I don’t know if it’s as simple as that. I know this is from the Daily Telegraph but many of the Blairites lead to that paper (for the good reason that their political views are roughly congruent with its own).

‘The plot to oust Mr Corbyn had got underway at Hilary Benn’s home on Saturday afternoon. Already angry at Mr Corbyn’s failure to persuade Labour supporters to vote Remain in Thursday’s referendum, Mr Benn was appalled as he watched his leader make a speech at the Pride festival in London in which he claimed free movement of people would continue despite the vote for Brexit.

Labour MPs accused him of a “complete lack of understanding” of immigration .’

Now this might be true or it might not, but it is noticeble that a very large swathe of Blairites’ criticisms of Corbyn (even when his statement was entirely accurate) are that he fails to ‘understand’ ‘concerns’ about ‘immigration’.

It’s difficult to get one’s head round the weird cult of Blair, but Blairites seem to think that the reason people turned against Blairism was that it was insufficiently racist, and that only by being more racist (sorry ‘listening to the core concerns of the white working class’) can it regain its electability.

I am not sure about now, but until about an hour ago, all of the people who had resigned from Corbyn’s cabinet voted in favour of Cameron’s ‘welfare cuts’. It cannot be stressed enough that were it not for tribal loyalty, most Blairites would fit comfortably in David Camerson’s metrosexual Tory party (and not even necessarily on the left wing of that party). Indeed, it seems that the Blairites see a gap in the market: now that the Tory part has been taken over by more ‘nativist’ types, the Blairites want to restructure the Labour party as being the heir to Cameron’s ‘intellectual project’ (i.e. hard right economics with a patina of social liberalism), just as Cameron’s project was, in turn, the heir to Blair’s.

It would be extraordinarily dangerous for Labour to go down that path. The Tories will always be able to outracist Labour, but it’s truly a race to the bottom.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/26/project-jexit-how-labour-imploded-as-shadow-cabinet-tried-to-for/

They seem to be mad at Corbyn because: 1, he didn’t save Caneron from himself allowing easy and uninterrupted Tory rule. And 2 he didn’t go to Eaton.

‘ When Greece was being trampled, what was the British internationalist left doing about that exactly?’

Well last time I checked the government of the UK at the time was the Tories, so there wasn’t much the British left could do about it. I am not denying, incidentally, that the Euro is stupid and evil (as is everyone who planned it and introduced it). But the Eurozone is not the EU.

“Getting rid of Corbyn is just one move in this process — to ensure that Labour MPs in the end adopt the ‘sensible’ view.”
“It’s difficult to get one’s head round the weird cult of Blair, but Blairites seem to think that the reason people turned against Blairism was that it was insufficiently racist, and that only by being more racist (sorry ‘listening to the core concerns of the white working class’) can it regain its electability. ”
“They seem to be mad at Corbyn because: 1, he didn’t save Caneron from himself allowing easy and uninterrupted Tory rule. And 2 he didn’t go to Eaton.”
It must be particularly emphasised that in the links Daragh gave that’s being passed around as ‘proof’ that Corbyn ‘sabotaged’ the campaign is that he didn’t mention immigration enough. Or just lie about freedom of movement like Yvette Cooper as though Poland wouldn’t have summoned an ambassador over this. Their strategy has always been to shepherd immigration for the business wing and when people complain say ‘it’s the EU, the EU made us do it, can’t leave the EU’ until finally that subprime strategy broke when Cameron offered the chance to exorcise the bogeyman.

The neoliberals are as spiteful because they’re losers and because they’re cowards. The Liz Kendall PR man shouting at Corbyn at Pride was a campaign manager who talked about how he was responsible for hatred of Polish workers despite his own candidate promising an Australian style points system. That’s why they’ll never do anything about John Mann or Frank Field actually CAMPAIGNING FOR THE OTHER SIDE because they now realise they have no control over anyone with ‘concerns over immigration’. Lynching Corbyn is all they have.

“How much reform and change has Britain or the British left exerted on the EU thus far?”
Blair ended Major’s 1992 opt-out on the ‘social chapter’ – the one that deals with workers rights – immediately after coming to power in 1997. AFAIK it’s the only opt-out so conceded. I won’t deny that because unlike the Bitterites I actually believe what I’m saying whatever the qualifications.

Me: “How much reform and change has Britain or the British left exerted on the EU thus far?”

Placeholder: “Blair ended Major’s 1992 opt-out on the ‘social chapter’ – the one that deals with workers rights – immediately after coming to power in 1997. ”

I don’t understand how this is an answer to this question. The “social chapter” is arguably an effect of the EU on Britain. When has it been the other way around in any left direction?

merian’s point supports mine. OK, so is it safe to say that people really have no idea how the British left might affect EU policy, or even whether it has done so?

All right, then, what does this “remain and reform” sentiment begin to look like, to people who are tired of being lied to? Let’s take novakant’s “everybody I know thinks it’s a great, warts and all.” I don’t think so. Maybe novakant doesn’t know any Greeks?

Is this really internationalism, or it is a defense of educated-professional class interest? Don’t get me wrong, I’m an educated professional too. But if people are going to lose, can they at least not be lying when they lose?

Hidari 06.26.16 at 4:41 pm

@221
do not believe a word you read about Corbyn in the Guardian. They are hysterically anti-Corbynite and always have been.

If anyone cares, apparently the plotters want to have a putsch and then keep Corbyn’s name off the ballot for any election: this would be their best way to ‘win’ any leadership election.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/06/what-labours-plotters-are-thinking

Does anybody know anything about the law? Is this possible? (I mean it is obviously grotesquely anti-democratic and immoral, but to Blairites these are words of praise).

You may find this attempt at elucidation helpful:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2015/11/could-labours-rule-book-be-used-keep-jeremy-corbyn-leadership-ballot

One thing largely taken for granted in this discussion may bot actually be so. The “working class” is more than just the people on low wages. It’s the people who do work – not just time paid for at any wage, but activity that is engaging, identity-forming, socially and personally meaningful. Stuff you can talk about at the pub (“had a problem fixing an ’02 Rover gearbox/had an interesting talk with an old pensioner while I changed her dressing..” sort of stuff). A shift in the call centre is not this kind of work.

A large part of the modern economy does not offer this (nor, to be clear, did some part of the old economy, and a large part of the economy before that). One chunk of the people who voted out are not working class. They are the lumpen-proletariat created by decades of policy. Labour has no attraction for them, as it does not offer them real work. Just (under Blair) strictly-policed hand-outs. The Tories offer them slave labour at slave wages. And this is not just a UK phenomenon.

These people were brought into the political nation when they were actually workers. There is every prospect that they will now be shoved out if it, as both surplus to economic requirements and a disruptive influence on the conversation. Indeed, this process is well under way in the US.

“I do know Greeks, and they don’t happen to subscribe to the simplistic “oh it’s all the fault of the evil neoliberal EU” narrative. ”

So the poll that I linked to is wrong because you know some people who think otherwise.

As for “The “educated professionals” I know don’t constitute a class as many of them struggle economically will do so forever”, I really don’t know what to reply. Does the working class not constitute a class because they struggle economically and will do so forever? I’m basically sympathetic but this is totally unconvincing.

Why do you think that “What ties them together are beliefs like tolerance and cosmopolitanism and the rejection of nativism, nationalism and racism”? I’m not arguing from vulgar Marxism here. But are educated professionals just more moral than the proles, or more mobile?

merian @270 – That gets at the issues really well. The little town you describe could fit Boston, not far from me, which was one of the ten largest Leave margins of victory. Several small towns in the 15% range of immigrant populations did.

Corbyn should have given such a clear and resounding statement as you suggest, both repudiating racism and asserting a social agenda going forward. That he didn’t is regrettable, and though he still could he’s consumed in a battle for his life against the very bunch who put him up only as a joke candidate to be able to serve as punching foil for Andy Burnham, then saw him ascend to victory in horror, and sat in stony silence at his first cabinet meeting. They’ve been waiting for some way to push him out since. As you indicate, it’s Corbyn’s social program that offers the most hope for charting a politics that can blunt the effects that lead to immigrant-baiting. Instead of that being asserted we get the neoliberals seizing the moment to oust him.

Last night on Westminster Hour on BBC 4, the Oxbridge host kept on about how many Labour voters didn’t vote for Remain. There was no mention that 70% did vote Remain, and no one on the show to say that was about as good as it would be under any party leader. Just on and on about how Labour voters didn’t vote Remain. This is a moment of the whole establishment coming together to push out Corbyn with no regard for democracy or truth. A dark moment.

Christopher:

My description was a mash-up of several stories I read, and yes, Boston was one of the places.

Couldn’t you people import, say, integration consultants from Canada? 12% recently arrived minority population (with a good basis in English, and only a minimal cultural gap between them and the locals) sounds like something that could be dealt with in a snap if there’s actual, genuine interest in what the Canadians call “good government”. (I keep telling my German friends they shouldn’t be staring fixedly at the US but maybe take a look at Canadian ways of dealing with the terrible specter of multi-culturalism.)

What a shame re: what’s going on and how it is being reported.

Isn’t Corbyn’s problem now that his views don’t satisfy either side of the In/Out campaign, being both lackluster in terms of support for the EU, but an enthusiast for migration generally? The charge isn’t so much that he could have changed voters’ minds, but that he could have put more effort into his attempts to do so (e.g. not going on holiday during part of the campaign, having more pro-EU content in his speeches).

Talking about Blairites and Brownites as being anti-immigration is also somewhat misleading. Tony Blair, after all, was the enthusiast for immigration from Eastern Europe, and Gordon Brown was the one who called Gillian Duffy a bigot for being anti-immigration. And they both campaigned hard for the In campaign this time round.

The change in the more recent Blairites is that they’ve realised that immigration is unpopular in large parts of what were always Labour heartlands, where they have their seats. There were already worries that “Red UKIP” could take a lot of such seats in the next election. Now they’ve just seen how strong such feelings can be whipped up to be and they’re worried they’ve got an imminent election coming up with a pro-immigration leader and that they are going to lose their seats as a result.

The assumption that Labour can benefit from an election soon under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn is that working-class voters who voted out will nevertheless either now vote Labour again or not vote at all. That is quite a gamble to take. If you overlay areas that voted in with constituencies that voted for Labour in 2015, you’ve got London, a handful of big cities and almost nothing else. The idea that Labour can be saved with an influx of young voters inspired by Corbyn has also been dented: there aren’t enough of them actually voting. As a result, there is at least a possibility that Labour could get wiped out and lose dozens of seats, which is why MPs are panicking.

magistra, @285

Isn’t Corbyn’s problem now that his views don’t satisfy either side of the In/Out campaign, being both lackluster in terms of support for the EU, but an enthusiast for migration generally?

Given the legitimate criticism in the EU on the one hand and the misrepresentations and confusion on the other, that might as well be construed as a feature rather than a bug.

@241 The only way Corbyn loses an election is if the anti-Corbyn crowd unify around a single figure. But even then the money’s on Corbyn.

How did he fail to passionately defend it? Labour voters were 63% for remain, vs. 50% for Tories. How do you know they wouldn’t have been 63% for leave if Labour hadn’t got out there?

So, Val, in order to avoid war I have to give up all say in how I am governed?

And I say that realizing you think a blow against immigration is a blow against bankers, hence fully in working-class interests. I don’t concur with that because it avoids the fact that Polish workers will compete with British even if they remain in Poland. They can either do so in proximity or do so by the machinations of mobile capital playing them off one another. This is why my own leaning is toward free movement of people however wrenching it is within Europe. I can’t say I’m thoroughly expert in all aspects of immigration, though, an area I feel in greater need of education on.

faustusnotes – Greece.

> Wow Dipper, is there a country that gave up all say over how it is governed?

The thing is, the erection of the EU in the UK was done by the UK legislature, and thus can’t represent any powers not originally possessed by Westminster.

+ The powers the EU exercises represent an intolerable challenge to the autonomy of british subjects…
+ After formal Brexit, the powers formally exercised by the EU in britain will be exercised by Westminster, as they were before british EU entry….
+ conclusion….?

merian – In regard to your good question about good government: It is a well-taken point that immigration could be managed in ways to reduce friction and enhance appreciation. But this is impossible to do when austerity is being imposed. That’s why I posted (@ 6 or something like that) initially about the Leave vote reflecting immigration being made a scapegoat for cuts to the NHS, etc. Everyone I have met in a position of mental health, medical clinic work, and the like feels pressed to the max and strained beyond imagination at what they must do with so much less.

Ze K: Organically people can have friction but also develop friendships across lines of nationality, ethnicity, race, etc. Trust me, having lived in five countries, it happens. There’s nothing that says immigrants must be hated, that natives are always at odds. Right now in the UK we have the blaring of certain press and party voters inculcating the hatred. These are monied and propertied voices.

“Is there really a British politics of young, educated internationalists that fits in between old, poor, and uneducated people on one hand and really wealthy people on the other?” – Rich@260

Of course. We found out yesterday that they’re 48% of the population.
One of the things that seems to be missed here is the absolutely extraordinary young/old split in voting patterns – much bigger than the regional or even ideological ones we’ve spilled so much ink over.

Ze K @ 302 : Providing the UK does leave the EU, and instates limits on immigration, my guess is the shift is merely to illegal immigration, with expansion of the carceral state to keep it in turmoil, as in the US, and the result being even greater pressure downward on wages and standards as a result of it being driven underground.

I would say a good part of the UK economy is paid under the table as it is, particularly in the areas you identify (plumbing, construction, etc.). I think you also underestimate the likelihood of a government run in the interests of business wanting to stand in the way of higher profits. So what seems more likely to me is a cycle of continued illegal immigration, which allows the UKIPers to fulminate ad infinitum, does not result in any curtailment of labor competition, and serves as a scapegoat for further cuts. Constant downward motion. I don’t think anti-immigrant stances a road forward for the working class.

@Hidari – I’m confused. I just read in the Guardian that the NEC legal advice said Corbyn has to be on the ballot. But the Guardian is of course, unCorbyn and therefore full of lies. But this means that the NEC can legally keep Corbyn off the ballot, but that would also be unCorbyn and therefore by definition not true! Can you enlighten us all as to how to interpret the will of the great Corbyn in the wake of such contradictory signals?

In a less sarcastic vein, I thought this passage from Jess Phillips’ resignation letter was pretty apt for the moment –

“Writing or saying anything against you risks my job, the livelihood of my family, the threats are already rolling in. Turns out when you stand up for what you believe in you are principled; when I do it, I am an opportunist, careerist, Blairite of even a Zionist plotter. Funny that. I am a socialist. I live my life as a socialist. I speak up regardless of the risk because I am considerably less important than the struggle.”

derrida derider: “Of course. We found out yesterday that they’re 48% of the population.”

I assume that 48% means everyone who voted for Remain, but I don’t think that all of the people voting for Remain were young, educated internationalists. (Unless most of Scotland is assumed to be, etc.) But I agree that there’s a generational split. OK: for those people to come together as a politically powerful group, perhaps with some kind of party realignment, they need to have a shared idea. They do have a shared idea in the form of certain ideals, but if those ideals are expressed as leading to “remain and reform”, they lead straight to what I think is a political falsehood. Politicians tell lies all the time, of course, but I don’t think that having a general politics organized around a lie is a good thing.

I take back what I said above about how Corbyn should have made a clearer statement, having just now watched the whole of his 18-minute Saturday talk, which seems to me just magnificent as a statement challenging both economic inequality and anti-immigrant bigotry:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/watch-jeremy-corbyns-brexit-speech-8279061

It could have been shorter and punchier, but worth watching. The problem is that this message didn’t reach people on the day when the Tory shakeup and other shockwaves were dominating everything, plus the filter of a media that didn’t cover it well. (The Mirror is a Labour tabloid, small in circulation compared to Mail or Sun.)

It’s no wonder the trade unions are sticking by Corbyn despite the coup, though I’m still not sure he survives this given its magnitude.

“Not intentional”

The repetition or the sarcasm?

@324 Thanks to the Wayback Machine you can still look at all their old pages if desired:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/

I can’t wait to hear how Hunt and the rest spin this as: ” ours hands were tied, we had no choice but to ignore the will of the members. We’re the real martyrs, here.”

UKIP is alive, well, and extremely well-positioned to peel of disaffected Labour supporters who must be having fits over the coup, especially those who voted Leave.

I was certain the Tories, the bankers, and the City would try to scotch the outcome. I’d no idea, really, that the ugliest anti-democratic opportunism would come from Benn and the rest of the warmongers. Silly me.

Meanwhile, the war candidate is firing on all cylinders as corporate America proceeds to place another of their candidates in the Oval Office. Sanders looks ready to sell out.

I’m almost ready to call Corbyn and his supporters noble and even, heroic. Whatever happened to the educated, principled left in Britain. I’d expect the Tories to turn on their own, but this spectacle unfolding has to be one of the most cynical betrayals in recent political history.

It’s been on the front page of Le Monde for the last 18 hours, or so. At least the French respect a fighter. Good for him and for those who’ve stepped forward. Steep learning curve, but perhaps Corbyn can withstand the onslaught.

Caesar stumbles from the Senate, plucks the daggers from his back, and appeals to the people. If only…

329 I know. But that was the first dozen, the others have had to work with the body parts they can get. It’s grotesque. Covering themselves in glory, they’re not.

My respect for Corbyn continues to rise. He’s played it well, no wonder they’re trying to keep him off the ballot. Slime.

@Gastro George – you don’t know the half of it. It turns out even Richard Murphy is a closet neoliberal Blairite!

@Daragh – you’ll notice that Murphy is not endorsing the coup or the Labour right – just saying that Corbyn is a less-than-prefect leader. Now I have some sympathy with that view, but you have to choose your fights. The EU is less-than-perfect but I voted in.

Placeholder, Osborne isn’t hiding – he gave a big news conference this morning about the soundness of the economy, contrary to his draconian budget promise, at which point the pound promptly dropped again.

It would be like a comedy of errors except it’s all so disastrous.

I tend to think Gastro George right to a point. Can’t have a coup without a conspiracy. But it’s widened and reflects real a) irritation that more wasn’t done on EU, and b) fear of the impending autumn election. Boris v. Corbyn would be worth paying money for, though, so I hope it comes off.

Goodness, Christopher Phelps, with 90% of the Parliamentary Democrat Party behind Clinton it’s amazing Sanders is even allowed to run at all. Very irresponsible of him to get nearly half the actual vote.

I also by the way accept that Bernie’s moment is over even though I’d rather have him than Hillary.

@Placeholder

It is so remarkable how the only people who disagree with you on Corbyn are either irrelevant or bad. But could you clear something up for me? Paul Mason had been defending Corbyn a bit, so he is by definition but correct and not corrupt. But he did so in the Guardian which only publishes less about Corbyn. Is Mason therefore a self interested liar? Or does his purity cleanse the notCorbyn taint of the pages of the guardian he appears in?

@Daragh – as any fool knows, the Guardian is not a monolith – Seamus Milne used to work there FGS. But the political desk is a nest of Blairites and have been on Corbyn’s case from the off.

“Now, now. US analogies don’t really hold when the function of PM and opposition leader is to lead whole delegations.”
Yous say PLP, I say superdelegates. You say primary, I say deselect.

“Campbell has a quote somewhere about if you’re still the story after two days, then you have to go.”
If elected officials decided elections, there would be democracy. If people, activists and unions decide elections, the capacity for people to rule is within them. Who does the Labour Party NEED?

@Daragh: Richard Murphy has one left-favouring but pretty popular issue and wands it to be a government agenda, it would not be surprising if his support for Corbyn is dependent on his access to power. This an ANALYSIS. Since I don’t recall saying ‘the Guardian is all liars and all they say is lies’ it seems more like you want your rivals to be in a war of purity so you can be and feel good about yourself. This is PSYCHOTHEOLOGY. I am not interested in engaging in this kind of fallacious dialogue. Come back when you have another email ‘leak’ from Chris Bryant and then we can talk about something.

And I’m not saying Corbyn = Trump. I’m saying that their difficult prospects in a general election are what is comparable, and the prospect of wipeout for all the down-ticket figures at the polls too. The PLP may be wrong about this, but I think it is above all what motivates them. The fact that some who have been closer to Corbyn than the Blairites have joined in will raise doubts in the party and in the public about his competence, beyond politics. It’s a problem now. He’s not in a good position.

@gg

Yes Milne – he of the ‘purely defensive’ annexation of Crimea and ‘Stalin – not so bad’ stuff. And the one who is still technically employed by the paper, putting its entire political editorial staff in a very difficult position. Of course this was an indulgence granted by the paper’s editor (who owes her job to Milne) despite being ethically indefensible from a journalistic standpoint.

I’m starting to think it’s not how the reporters are reporting that’s troubling you, is that they’re daring to criticise your messiah.

New statesman editor now tweeting he’s virtually certain Corbyn voted leave. I look forward to hearing about how it’s yet another Red Tory tag for sellouts, or some such.

@Christopher Phelps 3248

“his personal ability to communicate that to wide publics beyond Labour’s membership seems limited”

Where do you get the idea he can’t communicate to the wide public beyond labour’s membership? I’m open to evidence but all I’ve seen so far are assertions or “I heard it while canvassing from a constituent’s father’s brother’s nephew’s cousins’s former roommate.”

There has been a ton of projection, a “he reminds me of someone I didn’t like in university so obviously everyone else will feel the same way”. You would think after the Brexit vote these people would reassess their ability to get into the minds of the working man and woman. That is probably too much to ask.

‘New statesman editor now tweeting he’s virtually certain Corbyn voted leave’.

Not that I care, but given that we have a secret ballot in this country, how is the editor of the New Statesman aware of this interesting fact?

Incidentally I have found out, through means that I can’t share with you, that the editor of the New Statesman voted leave. Or at least I am ‘virtually certain’ of this. This is now an Official Internet Rumour and I hope you will all spread it as quickly as I made it up, er, I mean, used my top secret sources to uncover it.

@CP – I think that’s a pretty good, if slightly generous, description of the view of the more honest part of the PLP.

The problem is the conflict between these short term careerist problems and the long term. In the long term, being a Tory-lite party is a dead end. 4 million votes shed by the end of the Blair era, and the fate of the Lib Dems shows this. In the end Tory-real wins.

And it’s not an adequate response to the Brexit vote. I saw an interesting analysis of the vote in Sunderland. In short, Labour got their core vote out for remain, but overall the vote was for leave – entirely due to a higher turnout of “non-voters”. These are the disenfranchised lost Labour voters, who are more likely to vote UKIP than New New Labour, Tory-lite offers them nothing – even though they believe a bit of light racism will.

Gastro George, I hope you’re right. The problem is Corbyn looks hamstrung by all this and the shadow cabinet he assembles risks looking like amateur hour, the party divided, etc. Even if he survives doing well in the general election would be miraculous.

You can’t make it up. Apparently Kuenssberg has said that MPs are suggesting that Mandelson should stand as leader. I guess that will go down well in Sunderland …

‘Even if he survives doing well in the general election would be miraculous.’
No what would be miraculous would be a Blairite doint well in the next General Election. Scotland is now gone. The North of England is now on its way to going (and getting in a posho to act all racist might work in a referendum, but it won’t work in a general election and it won’t work long term). Wales may yet soon be history.

The objective facts are that Trump, Podemos, Syriza, Corbyn, and yes, Trump and Farage are signs of something and they are signs that the neoliberal consensus is breaking down. It might break down into some kind of ethnonationalism, or we might see a resurgence of right wing religiosity, unlikely as that now seems (although not in Poland or Hungary).

The Tories, for their many faults, have woken up and smelt the coffee: hard right English nationalism with a sprinkling of racism may well be a vote winner. But Cameron’s metrosexual ‘heir to Blair’ act didn’t last.

In any case, Blair and his minions are a thing of the past. Hilary Clinton is very very lucky to be running against Trump or else the fact that so many people hate her fucking guts might actually count for something, electorally.

Those who are obsessed with Corbyn (or for that matter, Trump or Syriza or whatever) are really not looking at long term sociopolitical trends. This problem (of the ‘rabble’ against the Elites) is not going to go away. If it wasn’t Corbyn, it would be someone else. If it wasn’t Syriza, it would be someone else. If it wasn’t Trump it would be someone else. And so on.

Incidentally has anyone ever wondered what it would be like to live in a country like Brazil where anti-democratic coups against elected leaders are led by shadowy business and media cabals?

Wonder no more!

And yet it will (probably) fail for lack of a plausible Pinochet figure. *

*This claim, like all predictions of the future, may well look ridiculous in light of later events. Caveat lector.

Christopher Phelps @ 363

Yikes! I just realized that I did that upthread. Dunno what got into me. Sorry!

Alpers, all forgiven, I tend to let it slide until it threatens to snowball. I have friends who never can manage the full name and they are still great friends. Then there are those who can, and how sweet they are.

Placeholder, so you think it all leads to a new “Gang of Four” a la 1981? But this is a rather more sizeable contingent. I’m not sure Corbyn survives. You surely are right about the decisive battle.

Well, puttering off to bed to read and anon we’ll have some of the answer as to just how bad the no confidence vote goes. May your side triumph.

Christopher Phelps: The GOP bosses may be correct and the PLP mistaken, or vice versa, or they may both be right, but . . .

The PLP don’t want or like their leader and they say it is because . . . . electability.

But, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Talking about how your concerns are all about electability is a nice way of dodging questions about policy preferences and desiderata, questions that are painfully acute given the wide gaps on policy, trust and class that have opened between the Labour electoral base and the PLP.

One parallel with the situation in the U.S. Presidential election that you don’t draw out is that the Republican establishment is comfortable with Clinton’s prospective election. Clinton’s personal qualities may be questioned, but on policy, she’s status quo, the Republican establishment is status quo, she’s neocon, they’re neocon . . . really, it’s all good, on the policy front. The Republicans in Congress are afraid of being turned out of power, though it is a remote possibility in the House and the Democratic establishment is trying to nominate the most Republican and conservative Democrat in Congress for the Florida Senate seat which would be the most likely marginal seat for Senate control. So, neoliberal wonder of wonders, the Republicans may win even if they lose — thank you, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

A Labour PLP that wants to go into a general election on David Cameron’s platform, because the Tories no longer want that platform, might be right about electability. Finding a Labour-version of David Cameron to grab some of the professional classes alienated by a more frankly reactionary Tory Party — maybe that is a winning electoral strategy. But, it is not obvious on the numbers, given the numbers that just followed Boris into the voting booth.

I can well believe that Corbyn is not the guy to fashion a new Labour platform: nationalize the railroads plus immigration controls as Hidari says. He seems plodding and consistent, when the situation may require brilliant, inventive and charismatic. I get that. But, he does have something most of the PLP doesn’t have: that principled consistency has purchased a degree of trust that the Blairite SPADs have forfeited. In the circumstances, a parliamentary coup might not be the best course to enhance electability among people actually predisposed to vote Labour, who voted in the guy they’re trying to get rid of.

Making something good out of Brexit as the task of the next government is something the Conservatives are likely to sell, with or more likely without a new general election. Labour has to find its own straddle. They really need to think thru the perils of becoming the Party of Bremain a bit more clearly and openly.

Meanwhile, Brevote(tm) getting tons of sigs on the House of Commons website. Can the elite just keep running elections when they don’t like the result? Well, they did it for Maastricht. I think a fair way to address Democracy concerns would be to say to Bremain has to win on the second vote by a larger margin than Brexit did on the first.

Just watching BBC News 24 as they interviewed an actual Nazi who explained he wasn’t really racist. Interesting times! *hollow laugh*

In Australia a referendum requires much harsher conditions than a mere simple majority. Traditionally one sets the conditions before one holds the referendum, but since the UK has entered topsy turvy land I guess fair’s fair.

Also Farage stated a few months ago that he’d push for another referendum if remain one the first one by 52/48. So …

@377 Look at the date on this
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/13/labour-rebels-hope-to-topple-jeremy-corbyn-in-24-hour-blitz-afte/
and how accurately it describes what actually happened. I have noticed that Blairite plotters prefer to brief Daily Telegraph journalists even more than those of the Guardian: I wonder why.

@375 Even one second’s thought will tell you that unless the Blairites have illegally looked at how people voted, or unless there is no longer a secret ballot in the UK, any claims about how Corbyn voted in the recent referendum must, of necessity, be evidenceless. But as someone pointed out on Twitter, these are the ‘centrist’ equivalents of Republican meanderings about Obama’s birth certificate. People cannot be reasoned out of what they weren’t reasoned into.

Incidentally, in case anyone is in the slightest bit convinced that this coup is about the General Election a well briefed Telegraph journalist let’s the cat out of the bag.

‘ But an autumn vote would have two very significant consequences. First, every sitting Labour MP will be automatically reselected as a candidate without having to go through a fraught grilling by Momentum, Corbyn’s grassroots campaign group. Secondly, David Cameron’s precious boundary review, with plans to reduce the number of seats in the Commons by 50, as well as equalise numbers of voters in each seat, will have to be postponed for yet another electoral cycle. Redrawn boundaries might also have required Labour MPs to be reselected. Both these factors mean that Labour MPs – spared trial by Momentum – will face far less pressure on them to nominate Corbyn. Keeping Corbyn off the ballot paper sounds like the moderates’ best case scenario.’

So, in answer to the question: why now?

Because the longer Corbyn stays in power the more he ‘tightens his grip on the party’ (as a Blairite might put it).

So the plotters best chance is still to push for a leadership election and then illlegally keep Corbyn’s name off the ballot. I have no idea whether they can do this (or at least I am sure they can do it.What I am not sure of is if they will get away with such a blatantly illegal and anti-democratic move, even in a country where Boris Johnson is going to be Prime Minister).

Still we’re shortly going to be a third world country, might as well start to adapt our politics accordingly.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/27/no-deal-is-possible-between-jeremy-corbyn-and-his-enemies-labour/

I agree with lots of what you say, Hidari, Wilder, Placeholder, but here is one thing :

Corbyn and his team have seen this coming since it has been in play since day one. This should have dictated assiduous cultivation of allies. And yet there are resignations here of people who are *not* Blairites, people who he should have been able to keep on board had he been seen from the inside as effective and plausible as leader by people whose politics are closer to his than the Blairites. That he kept Burnham is purely due to Manchester prospects of Burnham. Or even national prospects since his hands will be clean.

So the vote today, I suspect, will be so overwhelming (something like 90 percent) as to clearly indicate that he wouldn’t be able to stand for party leader if the 20 percent rule were required of him (which it shouldn’t be given that he is already party leader).

They may strip him of ability to stand again, which I agree would be totally illegal and would split the party. That would probably mean Corbyn and Momentum going off to the left, forming something like a new Respect, but would leave them a rump and ineffectual group. But the battle will have been lost long before because of his own inability to secure the loyalty and confidence of people whom he should have been able to keep in his stable. That is what makes this delegitimation in progress a likely success, that a soft left of non-Blairites are in on it.

So there is electability as issue, and genuine bad feelings about the EU outcome and his febrility on it, but also a matter of *leadership ability* that has to be acknowledged. Intellectuals and leftists tend to think of politics as about principle; Trotsky said program is everything, which is just plain wrong. Politics is equally about forming blocs and holding them together. Which requires some deft personal qualities.

Can you Corbynites just get over your Blairite obsession please? This isn’t about you and your pointless irrelevant ideological squabbles. This is about showing leadership at a time when the party and the country needs it.

As I have said ad nauseum a large part of being a political is about doing a job, having professional skills of listening, organising, motivating, leading. Corbyn just cannot do it. We need politicians who can speak for people and move the country forward but instead we have a total incompetent who is destroying the credibility not just of the Labour Party but of parliament itself.

McDonnell would be much better, just to make the point that it isn’t about ideology.

Sorry mine was to Igor not Dipper. If I understand where you both are coming from, I agree on politics with Igor but on assessment of Corbyn’s personal abilities with Dipper.

I note with interest these formulations by what I’ve seen referred to as the soft left. They’ve found every (Red) Tory argument persuasive, and refuse to be persuaded by alternative explanation. Still they see themselves as solidly progressive.

‘I’m persuaded by his politics but the man has to go/ the man can’t stay because he isn’t able to persuade the country/ I like him and what he’s done for the put upon but his tie’s not done right/ he’s a decent man but Falklands/Syria/Trident/the Queen/ get a proper jacket.’ Maria Eagle’s ‘he will be remembered fondly’ was the absolute best of the bunch.

I noticed this dissimulation first in discussions about Sanders, and now here they are supplying much needed comfort to the pragmatists with bleeding hearts. Obviously every last person pitching this is distressed to tears for poor people, people of colour, women, workers, and against misogyny, racism, war, predatory capitalism, neoliberalism, and so on but needs must.

——–

An interesting thing about Corbyn is that he is an anti-leader, and ardent in his rejection of the chicanery of salesmen like Mandelson and Campbell. Liberals/ the centre-left/ the soft-left!!!/ the authoritarian left obviously won’t or can’t have that. They want someone who exudes strength, majesty and projects the capacity to be a military commander; change with submission to the old touchstones – God, Queen, Country. They want a charismatic who supplies direction and guides the mindless proles against their base instincts. Blair’s presidentialisation of the Prime Ministership has got so extreme that the likes of Alan Johnson, Gloria del Piero and Margaret Hodge can hold Corbyn responsible for the referendum’s outcome with not a single journalist asking them about their ineffectiveness as ambassadors of the EU.

That Corbyn, his small group in the PLP and Momentum are pursuing lasting change against the hostility of a determined media, and without the support of Labour MPs is truly brave. It was never going to be a 9 month project.

I am wrong. It isn’t true that what’s desired by the liberal/soft-left is a persuasive leader chasing after progressive ideals.

Among Corbyn’s capital crimes is the manner of his speech in talking about immigration, and his stubborn refusal to pander in pursuit of the UKIP vote. When tackling fears of the immigrant horde, or the Falklands or Syria or Trident, or Welfare, one earns plaudits for affirming and legitimising the ‘concerns’ about immigrants, offering manly military solutions and standing up to the tricky poor who’d have hard working people fund their anti-social customs.

Right, so you’re reluctantly backing the coup and hoping that the plotters will now nominate someone who shares Corbyn’s positions but is a better organiser, and a more effective spokesman.

You really believe that it isn’t Corbyn’s politics that are offensive, just that they are poorly prosecuted. Is the idea really that recognizing the perils of the present, the PLP is sure to find 100 votes, okay even just 37 votes to nominate a savvier, more telegenic candidate who shares Corbyn’s politics?

I’m not backing the coup, I’m seeking to explain why it seems to be working, and to examine what else might have been done. Your answer is he’s noble so he didn’t need to do anything else. I don’t find that persuasive. Politics is about translating the noble into reality. When one fails a think is in order.

@ 392 I totally agree. I’ve held plenty myself. Optics matter in modern politics, though, so if the SWP really cared to see Corbyn win, or more important if Corbyn’s people want him to, having union signs for people to hold that have just as good slogans on them would have been far wiser.

Winning through better choreography!!

There’s something to the Telegraph article, and something to the notion that the Telegraph is making mischief. That said, the fissures that exist between Corbyn and the PLP are decades old and a matter of record. Imagine how many maligned him as an out-of-touch idealist, or a self-centered narcissist, (take your pick) during those long years of beyond the fringe.

How it must gall and grate all those who swallowed whatever integrity they once had in order to suck-up to Blair, Campbell, and Brown all for a place at the high table and a chance at the ring to now see Jeremy Corbyn, of all people, as the elected leader of Labour during this momentous period.

I don’t frankly see how the damage they’re causing gets repaired, other than by tribalism and identity politics. The rebels are every bit as willing to kill if we can whilst feathering their own nests and generally making damn sure they and their pampered offspring live as close to the life of a City banker as they can manage. Don’t Benn and company understand that they’re replaceable servants of the party, not rulers by heredity and pedigrees from the ‘right schools.’ The party can do without them, but the party cannot survive without the working-class base, including the Leave supporters.

The signs don’t matter a fig.

@115, faustus is the policy, apologies for the misdirect.

Momentum placards would have suited. Union placards would have suited. SWP ones for a Labour Party rally – bear in mind to the average person out there they look like a competing party, for after all they call themselves party – was not the best option.

Are politics about expression or strategy? If the latter, what’s the strategic advantage of having a sea of SWP placards on this occasion? I don’t see it.

@ 399 –
6,13,39, 83, 93, 95, 97, 99,
102, 103,109,110,183,185,187, 190, 192, 198, 199,
202, 203 211, 219, 225, 227, 230, 232,245, 249, 250, 254, 257, 281, 282, 298, 299,
307, 311, 313, 315, 321, 325, 336, 337, 339, 340, 347, 348, 353, 355, 358, 361, 363, 365, 368, 380, 384, 385, 388, 390, 393, 396, 398, 399 , and, btw, ks is taking over the thread.

Pure poetry.

What we need are better signs!

The SWP are a publicity-obsessed cult who turn up at any event with shedloads of signs. They’re only really after more cult members, so their presence, as any regular attender of such events knows, is both inevitable and meaningless.

They are very important for certain media types, though, as it enables them to point out that the main cause of the event is dominated by “loony lefties” and can therefore be safely ignored or dismissed.

It’s all part of the normal ritual.

@ 406

That’s as opposed to the ‘competent’ anti-Corbyn camp, who were unable to manipulate a leadership election against him, or manipulate the Euro referendum against Farage, Johnson & Gove, or do any better than fail miserably in the 2010 and 2015 General Elections.

You’re a Lib Dem, so you’ve got a bit of a cheek commenting on incompetence. Or maybe you know all about it now?

@Igor

Well, I’m actually not (joined Labour after the last election) and was never a particularly significant Lib Dem (delivered a few leaflets). In any case the fact that you think ‘you supported a political party that failed and therefore you are also fail!’ isn’t actually a particularly strong argument.

And yes – failing to win a referendum by a margin of under 4% when, as it’s becoming abundantly clear, the leader of the Labour party was doing his best to half-arse and sabotage the campaign, is still several million light years ahead of Corbyn’s leadership to date in terms of basic political competence.

“One thing I genuinely admire about Corbyn is his basic decency”

I actually found echoing Vladimir Putin’s talking points on Crimea, and accepting payment from the Iranians to host a show on PressTV were pretty clear signs that Corbyn is lacking in the ‘basic decency’ department.

” This class of people would very much like a candidate who mirrors their own ambitions and self-interest.”

I have principles and integrity. YOU have ambitions and self-interest.

“the search for this political chimera cost Labour Scotland, the last election, and very likely contributed to Brexit. ”

The first of these is entirely unproven, the second simply ridiculous given how much time EdM spent rubbishing Blair and the entire 1997-2010 Labour government (which might have had something do with people not being particularly fired up about voting Labour again). As I’ve said above the Brexit debacle has many answers.

“Northern English and Welsh working-class voters who’ve been pilloried, patronized, ignored, and/or condemned as racists and xenophobes went to UKIP.”

According to reports from the campaign, Corbyn’s team refused to discuss limiting immigration precisely because they thought it was inherently racist and xenophobic to do so.

“So, apart from the fact that your strategy helped propel Cameron to a record victory in 2015 and propel Britain out of Europe a year later, you’re entirely right.”

Apparently I’ve become chief strategist for the Labour party. I’ll let Seumas know he can head back to the Guardian.

“The defeat of Labour in 2015 was an absolute rejection by the British public of the kind of politics you’re proposing.”

I thought it was a victory for David Cameron. And I’m not really proposing any kind of politics – I’m pointing out Corbyn is totally useless at the basic media and presentational skills of politics (among many other things). Oddly enough, you’re attempting to refute that position by pointing to an election in which a politician extremely skilled at presentational politics, if not a lot else, increased the incumbent government’s share of the vote for the first time in decades and achieved an overall majority widely regarded as an impossibility beforehand. This is… not a good argument.

“Corbyn stands for something.”

If you like. I think his platform is largely empty sloganeering and the dimmest kind of ‘West bad, everyone else good’ moral preening. But again, the problem is that the ‘something’ Corbyn stands for is rejected by everyone who isn’t already a part of his personality cult (which would be a very large number of people).

“Bad hair and bad signs aren’t the problem, and good grooming and smarmy, lying communications officers aren’t the solution.”

They certainly aren’t. But as I started by saying – elementary competence is.

PS – I note that you don’t bother assessing the IDS thing. Probably because it shows Corbyn, given a golden opportunity to shame the Tories as the heartless bastards he believes them to be, and label them as too extreme even for IDS, didn’t seem to think it was his job as leader of the opposition to do so. I mean honestly, if you can’t come up with an answer for that I don’t know why you’d bother with even the partial defence.

“But again, the problem is that the ‘something’ Corbyn stands for is rejected by everyone who isn’t already a part of his personality cult (which would be a very large number of people).”

Yes, Corbyn’s problem is apparently that he both lacks the personality and leadership capabilities necessary to command allegiance and motivate voters, AND that he is the mesmerizing leader of a cult of personality who commands the allegiance of, well, voters.

“Yes, Corbyn’s problem is apparently that he both lacks the personality and leadership capabilities necessary to command allegiance and motivate voters, AND that he is the mesmerizing leader of a cult of personality who commands the allegiance of, well, voters.”

A small, very dedicated, group of voters who are utterly atypical of the electorate at large.

“Squash ’em Blairite bastards.”

ALL HAIL THE CORBYN! ALL WHO ARE NOT OF THE CORBYN ARE OF THE BLAIR! DEATH TO THE BLAIR!

“A small, very dedicated, group of voters…”

Apparently you want to double down on your contradictions, and say both that Corbyn has few supporting voters, and that they constitute a majority of votes for the leadership.

Daraghs view is, more or less, “fuck the voters, elites know better.”

Parliamentary Labour Party motion of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn, result (MPs):
Confidence: 40
No confidence: 172

What a fucking mess.

“Yes, that’s why I’m advocating for a Labour leader who has shown absolutely no ability to connect with the electorate in favour of one that can.”

Who? Specifically who?

@ 408 One thing I genuinely admire about Corbyn is his basic decency, even in the face of all that’s on him. So I will refrain from joining the three people who have called kidneystones an arsehole in this thread, every time for his badgering of moi.

Ahem. I hadn’t noticed this, only that you’re now working on adding to your amazing total of comments on this thread. The problem now, I see, is that I fail to fully appreciate the importance of your signs. I’ll try harder to take you seriously in future, but I’m not making any promises.

Tying Corbyn to your toilet insults and your narcissistic claims of persecution, btw, is a combination of bad taste, bad judgement, feeble invective, and self-degradation we rarely see. Made all the more astonishing given your claim to admire the man.

Isn’t Jeremy suffering enough?

I’ll say this for the PLP: with Tory voters clearly responsible for Leave’s win and the Conservative Party leaderless and in disarray, they’ve managed to cast the blame for Brexit on their own party and make their own party’s disarray the lead story. Nice work!

@ 421 wet fart in paper bag

Really? What is it with the fecal fixations?

@424. Well, if there were any doubt that this is about Hidari’s claims of election posturing, this news pretty much settles things for me. I’m sure a great many carrots and sticks came out.

The end result? Socially-conscious voters go with the Greens, Leave supporters go with UKIP. Cooper evidently feels she can cobble together a cross-party coalition of Leave and Remain supporters to negotiate Brexit. As if. The Leave Labour voters are going to be livid, I expect, if the coup against Corbyn succeeds. They’ve made their move and now all that’s left is for the party to splinter.

“So little ability, in fact, that he won the leadership election, and seems likely to do so again. The contradictions just keep piling up!”

You are making the same error Corbyn does of continually confusing ‘left-wing activists and Labour party members’ with ‘the electorate of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’ It is not a contradiction to think someone who is immensely appealing to the former would be largely repellent to the latter. It’s like the old story about Michael Foot saying he didn’t believe the polls because ‘there were 1,000 people at my meeting last night and they all cheered’ only to be told, ‘yeah but there are 122,000 outside saying you’re crackers.’

@MPAVictoria

A literal cold bag of sick would be an improvement at this point. Would make fewer unforced errors. But I’m up for either Eagle or Watson being some form of interim ‘repair the damage’ leader.

Honest question: what does the ascending faction within Labour want to do? What is/will be their platform?

The discussion about Corbyn here puts a lot of weight on charisma and leadership qualities. Isn’t it a fair summary to say that the importance of politicians’ personal attributes and abilities is inversely related to the clarity and urgency of their platform?

Personally, if droopy dog runs on redistribution, Keynesian stimulus, civil rights, and dovish foreign policy, I’m voting for him.

Okay then, why don’t you be superdemocratic and let CONSERVATIVE MPs pick the leader. Double the ‘mandate’, double the fun, eh?
Such is the nonsense of the superdelegate ‘legitimacy’.
Labour Party rules require the nomination of 15% to run. Bernie Sanders has about 5% at the end of his campaign. By their logic, Bernie Sanders would never even have been allowed to run.

One last point: everyone laughs at the 40 MPs who support Corbyn. But somewhere or other (I have lost the link) one of the plotters confessed that the point of the vote of no confidence was to reduce the number of pro-Corbyn MPs to essentially zero (or at least single favours) such that he could no longer fill the shadow cabinet and the opposition would simply cease to function.

That attempt has failed. 40 is enough. And the plotters have used their ‘worst’ weapons. There is nowhere now for them to go except a leadership contest they desperately didn’t want.

Daraghs view is, more or less, “fuck the voters, elites know better.”

You might want to update your history books. It turns out that MPs have been directly elected by the voters for some time now.

Seriously, I’m really not seeing how “Labour MPs” automatically equate to “elites unaccountable to voters.” Are 172 Labour MPs really all just Blairite moles, secretly appointed by the Bilderberg Group or some such to lead a coup against representative democracy? Because if so, how is Jeremy Corbyn going to accomplish anything even if he is a more skillful politician than he appears at the moment?

Daragh, I believe, subscribes to the traditional view of democracy: knowing what the people want, and giving it to them—good and hard.

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/el6yejz7wn/TimesResults_160627_LabourLeadership.pdf

Oh look at that. Labor voters don’t want Corbyn to resign. By a 50-30% margin! The Blairites have NOTHING!

Sorry link fail in 447

Jacobin

Bob I came here to post the Jacobin piece but you beat me to it.

‘MPs believe that Corbyn is an awful campaigner with little appeal to the electorate’.

It cannot be stressed enough that this is a blatant and utter fabrication. Corbyn is currently neck and neck in the polls with whatever crook, aspiring nazi, or succesful date rapist the Tories are ramming down the public’s throat, and would undoubtedly be doing better if the Blairites weren’t trying their best to tear the party apart and render it unelected and unelectable for a generation.

If they were serious about getting elected the last thing they would be doing would be staging a revolt on the possible eve of a general election (even David Blunkett, no fan of Corbyn, has admitted this, stating that now is ‘not the right time’ for a coup).

Here’s a thing you probably don’t know.

Whereas (say) in the SNP, MPs face almost automatic reselection, it’s unheard of (for now) in the Labour Party.

In other words, if you are in a safe Labour seat (not that there’s many of them left) you are on the gravy train for life. You can claim expenses, have a nice little earner in ‘conultancies’, and all you have to do is pretend to oppose Tory policies every so often.

Governing would get in the way of this. Why did the Labour party not tear itself to pieces after Gordon Brown’s shock defeat, or even Milliband’s? Why did losing the entirety of Scotland not cause too many shockwaves? ‘Cos many Labour MPs don’t really care that much. They are pretty much in favour of Tory policies anyway. They are happy to put up failed Blairite lunatics for election until the end of time, each time, having a ‘heroic defeat’, vowing ‘next time’, and so the party (with a small ‘P’) continues. The fact that some of them are with a straight face proposing Tom Watson as the Dragon Slayer shows that they are fundamentally unserious about gaining power.

And don’t for a second assume that their ‘principled’ revolt will necessarily amount to anything. They revolt at present because they think they will win and get cushy jobs in the New Order. But when push comes to shove and they are faced with the prospect of living up to their principles and quitting and setting up a separate party, how many of them will risk their salaries and their expense accounts for something that will almost certainly not work long term? Many Labour MPs now make a ‘principled’ stand because it will not cost them anything, financially. When it comes to jeapordising the mortgage, far fewer of them will be prepared to stand up for their principles, whatever they are.

Look what happened to the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Look what happend to the SDP.

I stand corrected. It’s not Tom Watson. Apparently the useless Blairites, having finally realised their coup attempt has failed, have now got it together to pick a candidate and it’s Angela Eagle. Not as bad as Tom Watson, but I think it’s reasonable to ask if she is the woman to win Scotland back (let alone the North).

@Hidari – wow! Corbyn is neck and neck with a crook, Nazi or date rapist? How could I have overlooked such world beating electoral appeal?

Corbyn has plenty of leadership qualities: no other British politician outside Scotland inspires hundred of thousands of people to organise, to give their money, to come to meetings and participate.

The fact that he’s not a demagogue is a big bonus: in that sense he follows in the footsteps of “all substance and no show*” Attlee.

*So described by Margaret Thatcher

Home now from rally in Nottingham city centre against racism in aftermath of the EU vote, dragged there by my two teenage daughters who insisted. Very well-attended for the city, something like a thousand on hand, very spirited talks despite a steady rain.

There was a great Unite speaker who unlike any American union leader I’ve ever seen gave a rousing call for socialism at the end of hers. Labour city councilor who spoke for a long time about the waves of migrants – Saxon, Viking, Huegenot, etc. who inform local history, with some nice details to make it vivid.

Best line, from a Muslim speaker. His friend’s kids were walking home and someone asked them, “When are you going to go home?” Their insouciant answer: “At tea time.”

All in all a strong local assertion of need for economic justice, pushback against austerity, and welcoming solidarity. Very inspiring and uplifting, with a crowd very diverse.

Oh, yes: the signs were brilliant, big, and colorful. “Nottingham Says Everyone Stays” is the one I had, and my daughters had “Nottingham Says No to Racism.” Loads on hand, paid for by Nottingham People’s Assembly.

On the way home I had a no-confidence vote in my ability to get scholarship done this summer if I keep at CT, so bid adieu until a year from now or whenever spirit next again strikes. Fun dialogue (mostly) in a weird time. And though the Westminster vote went as lopsided as I feared, l resist further jousting even in this note to leave off on a more or less good spot. May we all work out of the mess they’ve left us.

If the PLP have their way, then Labour might as well do away with having a membership altogether. Who on earth would lack self-respect enough to post leaflets, go canvassing or even post supportive messages on facebook for a party that holds their opinions and votes in such contempt?

@459

It’s pointless. You can’t reason a man out of what he wasn’t reasoned into.

The Blairite position was, and is: Corbyn is useless or he would be in a stronger position to stop me smearing him to friendly journalists as being useless.

Corbyn is useless or else he would be in a stronger position to stop me creating chaos and deliberately attempting to lose the next election to prove a point to myself that I can no longer clearly remember.

Corbyn is useless because he hasn’t fought back viciously enough against my unprovoked attack and thus split the party.

Corbyn is useless compared to the wonderful Blairite candidate who will win the next election who exists only in my imagination.

And so on.

Atrios gets it

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2016/06/what-blairites-were-busy-doing-instead.html

Gee, where have I heard that one before?

As a devoted follower of the politics of impossibility, I’m sure you fret against such truisms all the time. They remain true, nevertheless.

Labour should stick with Corbyn, because in the current circumstances letting the plotters win is likely to be even worse. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t a shambles. The idea that both options can be terrible shouldn’t be foreign to you, of all people.

In other news, it turns out the Blairite conspiracy runs deeper than anyone ever thought possible! Even Jack Monroe is a Blairite!

Hidari @ 472

Labour votes, 1997 GE: 13.5 million
Labour votes 2005 GE: 9.5 million

Blair lost more votes than any Labour leader! Even Kinnock got 11.5 million on the losing side in 1992.

Many people either choose to or tend to forget that Blair did more than most people to alienate the public from mainstream politics, and prepare the ground for Corbyn’s victory in last year’s leadership election.

Val
the two situations are so wildly different I don’t even know why you are raising them. From Wikipedia (so you can probably correct any factual errors):

‘Despite a long period of popularity in opinion polls, a significant fall in Rudd’s personal ratings in the middle of 2010 was blamed on a proposed Resource Super Profits Tax and the deferral of the Senate-rejected Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. With the next election drawing near, there was growing dissatisfaction with Rudd’s leadership within the Labor Party. Eventually, Rudd’s deputy, Julia Gillard, announced on 23 June 2010 that she would challenge him for the leadership the following day. Knowing he would be defeated if he contested the leadership, on the morning of the ballot Rudd resigned as prime minister. After his resignation, he successfully re-contested his seat at the 2010 election, after which Labor formed a minority government.’

The key points are this: Corbyn is not prime minister (obviously) and he will not ‘obviously’ lose any future election.

The point you are trying to make is that if Corbyn loses the coming leadership election he should not try to undermine his successory as the Blairites have tried to undermine him (in fact, with your comparison, the Blairites are behaving much as you describe Rudd did). But that’s the only comparison.

Incidentally isn’t it interesting how those who (doing the Blairite concerned face) state that ‘you have got to let go if you have lost’ never put that point to the plotters of the so far failed coup? The coup which, let’s not forget, they started and have kept going, and which has achieved, so far, nothing?

‘If the leader can’t lead a united team, you won’t achieve anything.’

Ipso facto, if the team can’t unite round the leader, you can’t achieve anything. In fact, at the moment, the team can’t even unite itself.

Leaders, it’s true, can be replaced. But so can teams.

I agree with Ian Welsh on this one.

TIMES POLL: Should Jeremy Corbyn resign? Labour voters: 54% No, 35% Yes (YouGov/Times)

172 Labour MPs have no confidence in Corbyn. 184 Labour MPs didn’t vote against TORY AUSTERITY!

There was a three line whip for Labour to abstain on that vote. A pretty stupid decision on the part of Harriet Harman, the acting leader, but that is what happened. The PLP remained loyal to their acting leader even though many questioned her decision. This time they aren’t prepared to blindly follow a leader they believe is making a mistake.

Yep I’m definitely offering this advice because I’m a spiteful Blairite who simultaneously always wants to talk about Australia. As you were.

The standard of debate on CT is a bit low sometimes :)

I think those comments were individually silly as well as collectively silly JD. Of course I draw on my own experience – who doesn’t? And my experience is relevant – there are differences between the Australian and UK Labor parties, but there are also similarities, and they often share ideas.

I’m not saying one should never attack the person making comments (in theory I believe that, but I’d be a hypocrite to say I’ve always practised it) but you should at least try to respond to the substance of what the person is saying.

I am also not trying to make an exact parallel between Rudd and Corbyn (and it is quite obvious that I wasn’t), but saying he does risk dragging the party down with him.

…but saying he does risk dragging the party down with him.

Ahhhh…so Val’s with the Blairites above in 487.

Australia will indeed be Clinton’s faithful ally in bombing whatever old/new target she takes aim at.

One of the things I think hasn’t been discussed much in regard to Brexit is how it relates to ISIS. The connections might be something like: general fear caused by terrorist incidents + greatly increased numbers of refugees from Syria:- Leave advocates whipping up fear of immigration ((eg as shown in the Leave poster):- increasing division within the UK and the EU. That seems like the sort of impact that terrorism is intended to have.

Btw – I am not trying by this to deny or obscure the responsibility that Blair, Bush et al have for the emergence of ISIS. I feel I shouldn’t need to say that but in the heated tone of this debate, where apparently anyone can be accused of being a “Blairite” no matter if, like me, they actually have a very strong record on left wing causes, I should point out that I strongly opposed the Iraq war, always and consistently.

Val 06.29.16 at 12:49 am

I think those comments were individually silly as well as collectively silly JD. Of course I draw on my own experience – who doesn’t? And my experience is relevant – there are differences between the Australian and UK Labor parties, but there are also similarities, and they often share ideas.

I’m not saying one should never attack the person making comments (in theory I believe that, but I’d be a hypocrite to say I’ve always practised it) but you should at least try to respond to the substance of what the person is saying.

I am also not trying to make an exact parallel between Rudd and Corbyn (and it is quite obvious that I wasn’t), but saying he does risk dragging the party down with him.

I have observed a pattern, not just this one instance, which makes me feel that you have a strong tendency to respond repeatedly in the same kind of way. This doesn’t mean that any particular comment you make is not relevant; in this instance I was responding to somebody who had already decided that your comment was irrelevant with a possible explanation for why you were offering it regardless. Of course people draw on their own experience, but I suggest that my own example (whatever my undoubted faults) shows that not everybody has the same strong tendency to respond repeatedly along the lines of ‘Well, what happens in our country is …’

And, yes, there are parallels between Australian circumstances and UK circumstances — but (as had been pointed out, in a substantive response before I commented) not in this case. You have suggested that it’s bad for a party if people who have lost an internal contest respond with spite and bitterness, refusing to accept their loss — and that’s true, but why, in this instance, are you directing that comment at supporters of the leader and not at opponents? The example you gave from Australia was one in which the party leader (Rudd) had been replaced as leader in accordance with the rules as they were at that time, which allowed for the leader to be removed by a majority vote of the parliamentary party. The current situation in the UK is one in which the party leader (Corbyn) has not been replaced as leader and the rules do not allow for the leader to be removed by a majority vote of the parliamentary party. It’s the opposite situation. If there had been a vote on the leadership in the parliamentary party in Australia in 2010, it would have been due process under party rules; a vote on the leadership in the parliamentary party in the UK in 2015 has no official effect under the rules (although permitted because not forbidden). When there actually was a vote under the rules on who should be leader, it was Corbyn’s opponents who lost, not his supporters.

Hidari 06.28.16 at 5:47 pm
…
In other words, if you are in a safe Labour seat (not that there’s many of them left) you are on the gravy train for life. You can claim expenses, have a nice little earner in ‘conultancies’, and all you have to do is pretend to oppose Tory policies every so often.

Governing would get in the way of this. Why did the Labour party not tear itself to pieces after Gordon Brown’s shock defeat, or even Milliband’s? Why did losing the entirety of Scotland not cause too many shockwaves? ‘Cos many Labour MPs don’t really care that much. They are pretty much in favour of Tory policies anyway. They are happy to put up failed Blairite lunatics for election until the end of time, each time, having a ‘heroic defeat’, vowing ‘next time’, and so the party (with a small ‘P’) continues. The fact that some of them are with a straight face proposing Tom Watson as the Dragon Slayer shows that they are fundamentally unserious about gaining power.

That analysis is much less plausible in relation to frontbenchers than in relation to backbenchers.

The personal rewards for the holder of a seat in Parliament are not significantly greater as a government backbencher than they are as an opposition backbencher (in some ways possibly less).

However, the personal rewards for a Cabinet member are much greater than the personal rewards for a Shadow Cabinet members; particularly given the kind of person likely to become a frontbencher, most Shadow Cabinet members (it must be calculated) would much prefer being Cabinet members — not always to the extent that it outweighs all other considerations, but very strongly. It is not the whole explanation of what’s happened to say that the Shadow Cabinet members who have resigned sincerely believe that the party has little or no chance of winning an election with Jeremy Corbyn as leader, but it’s much closer to the truth than saying that they don’t care about sacrificing their chances of getting into government so long as they can stop Jeremy Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister.

It’s possible that their belief that Corbyn is hurting the party’s chances is woefully misguided and wrong-headed, but that’s not the same as saying that they don’t sincerely believe it.

Val, the UK has taken all of 5500 Syrian refugees, with a promise to offer residency to 20000 by 2200. (source))

Also, if we agree (and I do) that sowing discord and, especially, hindering integration of Muslims are goals of ISIS, why is this hammering this message and taking counter-measures not a greater priority in Europe?

As for Labour, there are times where “which leader is most likely to win the next election” is a good way of going about leader selection and there’s a time where it isn’t, and right now very very much looks like the second case to me. If you’re so deeply in the crap and so many of figureheads are so badly tainted, and your policies have been little better than a neoliberal surveillance state with handouts, then working on policy content is an indispensable prerequisite to turn the decline around. Is Corbyn the right person for it? Maybe not: maybe there’s someone better. But there’s also a cost to chopping off your leader, so I’d be careful in my calculus. So maybe the next election is, in the best case, winnable, or maybe it isn’t. It’s unlikely a leader of the Mandelson/Milliband etc. mold has a better chance than a Corbyn-type person.

Is the only example where things look a bit up Canada? Where you got an ever-so-slightly-left-of-center party that won an election on the platform of running a 3-year deficit budget, plus there’s still a viable (though also currently stupid) opposition party to their left? BTW, Trudeau just announced Canada is abolishing visa requirements for Mexican visitors.

J-D I think you are tediously insisting on your right to gratuitously insult me in a way that is not useful to the discussion so I won’t respond further to you on that.

bob – I was talking about the architects of the Iraq war in 2003 particularly (it did occur to me I could have included our own John Howard, but the point was mainly relevant to Blair or being a so-called “Blairite” which I am absolutely not, even though I seem to have been lumped in with them by one commenter – does make one wonder how credible the ‘Blairite’ label is). I don’t think we should derail this into an argument about Hillary Clinton (and I don’t think you do either).

@RNB 496
Immigration reform? Are you referring to when Sanders voted “no” on Bush’s Kafala immigration program? indentured servitude is pretty leftist.

And what alternative are you promoting? Doing the same as we are doing now isn’t “the alternative”. It sounds like the same “it’s all pareto optimal in theory, just keep waiting for the trickle” internationalism we have right now.

Oh, FFS, that HRC shill RNB is at it again…

@510 efc, Sanders did not oppose immigration reform because he is opposed to guest worker programs. He supported them for the dairy industry in VT. He opposed immigration reform because he wanted to make a nativist statement, which he did. But what Brexit has revealed is the power of nativist and protectionist sentiment. Sanders has a record of this kind of sentiment. Trump would have said that he would be stronger on the very issues that Sanders understands are the important ones. We are lucky that Sanders won’t be the one going up against Trump. Clinton can lay out an alternative vision of the US place in the world.

Val 06.29.16 at 4:25 am

Fn The parallel is that Rudd and Corbyn both lost the support of their PLP colleagues (overwhelmingly in both cases). That’s really the key thing.

Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters think that the key thing is not who has the support of the parliamentary party, but who has the support of the party as a whole. Under the former rules of the Labour Party, the support of the parliamentary party was the key to the leadership. Under the current rules, that is not the case.

‘ It is not the whole explanation of what’s happened to say that the Shadow Cabinet members who have resigned sincerely believe that the party has little or no chance of winning an election with Jeremy Corbyn as leader, but it’s much closer to the truth than saying that they don’t care about sacrificing their chances of getting into government so long as they can stop Jeremy Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister.’

No they were making a calculated political decision that Corbyn was toast, and that, by ensuring his political defeat (and therefore proving their loyalty) they might well get places at the high table when his replacement was chosen. Remember Gordon Brown had little or no chance of becoming Prime Minister and this was widely known at the time (paradoxically, not least by Blairites…who briefed friendly journalists consistently that he was mentally ill). And yet none of them did anything about it, even though it was obvious Brown was leading Labour to disaster. Same with all the Blairite or proto-Blairite losers (and with the exception of Blair they were all losers…..people it seems don’t vote for Blairism. They vote for Blair. But Blair is gone).

You must ask yourself: why did the plotters not have a plan B? Why did they not have a stalking horse candidate?

Because they expected Corbyn to be gone by now.

The plotters expected to be out of power for a day or so and now back in power and dividing up the spoils.

It hasn’t gone their way, so far, and so they are throwing their toys out of the pram, but I will only take their ‘principles’ (whatever they are) seriously when they are faced with the prospect of a split and they risk setting up a new party.

As I pointed out before, don’t be surprised if, when faced by the loss of a steady permanent income, many of them suddely rediscover enthusiasm for their leader.

One final point: the plotters are like the Leave voters in this respect. They presumably plotted with their leaders who lied to them and said that it would all be over in a few days. But when that doesn’t happen they are going to turn on each other.

People who are disloyal to the leader have advertised that they can be disloyal to anyone and therefore can’t be trusted. Groups made of people like these tend to tear themselves apart.

Val @508

It would be a relevant comment, and worth discussion, to write something like ‘Taking control of the leadership entirely away from the parliamentary party is unwise, because the leader has to be somebody the parliamentary party can work with’. It adds nothing to preface it like this ‘Taking control of the leadership entirely away from the parliamentary party is not what we do in Australia’.

J-D: But what does telling Val this add to the discussion? It’s not as if she said anything offensive or rude. Presumably, if she wanted advice on how to write stronger persuasive texts she’d be hanging out in a writers’ group, not Crooked Timber.

The problem with a lot of the Labour MPs is cowardice and lack of vision as much as ambition.

Mainstream UK politics is all about manipulation of the electorate, as the recent EU referendum demonstrated only too well. Despite failing miserably to manipulate votes in its favour over the past ten years, the vast majority of the Labour Party’s MPs regard manipulation as an essential tactic when it comes to electoral gain.

As such, the tactics of manipulation will not work if MPs are held accountable to principles or policy, whether they are dictated by party members or sections of the electorate. This is what MPs are fighting for- their freedom to make things up as they go along.

Unfortunately, the MPs have not recognised that this style of politics has discredited them and the system among vast groups of people, as well as leaving the way open for more gross and shameless manipulation from the likes of UKIP.

What Corbyn offers, for all his real and imagined flaws, is a rejection of manipulation in favour of debate and persuasion based on principles and arguments. This requires a break with the current mainstream consensus. While this is seen as naïve by many, it represents the only way out of the party’s (and the Westminster system’s) impasse. What the PLP are demonstrating is not pragmatism but myopia.

I was at that pro-Corbyn rally in Westminster the other night. There was a guy with a t-shirt reading “ERADICATE THE RIGHT WING BLAIRITE VERMIN”.

The SNP are asking to be declared the official Opposition, on the grounds that Angus Robertson has more Parliamentary support than Corbyn, and that they (unlike him) can fill all the relevant shadow posts.

Hilarious if the Speaker accepts this argument.

J-D @ 511
You don’t even understand what I’m talking about. Stop lecturing me on what I can and can’t say, and stop trying to tell me about Labor politics, when I’ve actually been a Labor party advisor. I don’t know if you’re trying to mansplain or what, but just stop. I won’t reply to this stuff again.

@517
Dan Hodges, Blairite extraordinaire, published an article in the Mail openly calling for Corbyn to be murdered. Jo Cox who, considering her stand on Palestine, one might well infer to be sympathetic to Corbynism, already has been murdered.

Val 06.29.16 at 9:23 am
J-D @ 511
You don’t even understand what I’m talking about. Stop lecturing me on what I can and can’t say, and stop trying to tell me about Labor politics, when I’ve actually been a Labor party advisor. I don’t know if you’re trying to mansplain or what, but just stop. I won’t reply to this stuff again.

The things you are instructing me to stop doing are things that I never was doing.

J-D I apologise for losing my temper and I realise that you may have a problem with communicating sometimes. But don’t tell people what they should or shouldn’t say in these conversations ok? And try to accept those people on CT are pretty smart and thoughtful even if you don’t agree with them, so try to think about that before engaging ok? I think that’s enough for now.

@528
Dan Hodes’ lawyers can contact me via the CT moderators. I await their missive with baited breath.

This is why the plotters didn’t want to do things democratically.

‘One Labour MP backing Eagle said there was “a lot of satellite traffic” between her camp and Watson’s – <strong.and said they were likely to regard any bid to persuade Corbyn to step aside as manoeuvring by the deputy leader.'

Once you have stabbed someone in the back (or the front) you reveal to the world that you are the sort of person who is likely to stab someone in the back, and that, therefore, you can’t be trusted. The Blairites despise each other, and the only thing that unites them is their greater hatred of democracy Corbyn. Once the politicking starts, they are likely to turn on each other, thus preventing them from forming a unified front.

Doesn’t mean that they won’t eventually settle on a ‘unity’ candidate but that person must always be fearful that someone who once supported them will turn on them, just as they turned on the leader before them. Game of Thrones.

I wondered why Watson, who obviously wants Corbyn’s job, hadn’t yet stuck the knife in.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/29/senior-labour-figures-warn-of-party-breakup-and-urge-corbyn-to-go

J-D: “The fact that there was no candidate arranged in advance (for so it appears) suggests, for conspirators, a degree of ineptitude bordering on the comic, but sadly plausible.”

To me, this suggest that ambition is their prime motivation. The reason not to designate a new leader is that too many potential conspirators simply want to be that leader. If you pick one, the others won’t join the conspiracy, and the conspiracy fails for lack of support. Leave the question open, ensure the support of those who are in it only for themselves, and let them fight it out later. Each conspirator is free to believe that, of course, they’ll emerge the victor, or among the victors at least.

This isn’t about improving Labour’s chances to win an election – though of course the ambitious may have convinced themselves that only they can do that! – it is about using a crisis to topple the leaders and replace them for personal gain.

If an MP has after thirty years failed to get off the backbenches that tends to indicate they are either exceptionally mediocre or utterly mad. Corbyn seems to be mediocre.

Until last week his critics in the PLP seemed to be willing to wait until either his ineptitude caused his support in the rest of the party to erode or he got better at leading. Neither has really happened. His support hasn’t eroded that much and he is still fairly useless.

I don’t think there was a plot. There’s panic that they suddenly face an unexpected general election under an ineffective political campaigner and they are afraid of losing their seats. No one seems to have really believed that leave could win so no one really thought seriously about what to do if leave won. With the changed situation many of his conditional supporters have turned on him as there just isn’t time for him to get competent at his job.

“There’s panic that they suddenly face an unexpected general election under an ineffective political campaigner and they are afraid of losing their seats. ”

These Labour MPs have manage to shift the blame from Cameron (who launched the referendum for personal political gain) and the Conservative Party (who voted Brexit at a rate of 58%-42%) to Corbyn, who led a campaign that delivered a resounding 63%-37% Remain vote from Labour. Somehow, despite those facts, the conventional wisdom is that Corbyn(!) is the weak campaigner who lost the referendum. Well done!

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-voted-and-why/#more-14746

@Hidari –

‘Purely because I don’t want to cause trouble for the moderators.’

And not, say, because the claim you made was false and defamatory?

I’ve a comment stuck someplace but this from Twitter is interesting. The Guardian hailed this as the best post-referendum speech.

https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/747742806144389120

This is no “trouble for the moderators”. I don’t know what kind of libel laws you have in the UK hellhole but I’d guess that CT is under US ones, under which blog owners are not responsible for comments.

Yes, I believe that is correct.

“I have no idea what the law is in this case”

Yes, that’s perfectly clear, but, like everything else, why let that stop you?

@novokant: I agree that Cameron is a master tactician and a poor strategist. But I disagree on the specifics here.

Pressure for an EU referendum has been building for a long time and we had to have one sooner or later. In the 2015 election, every national party except Labour supported an in-out referendum on the EU. This wasn’t Cameron’s personal calculation; this was happening like it or not, and the only thing Cameron could control was the timing. This referendum has been inevitable since Brown’s duplicity over the Lisbon Treaty – another fine example of short-term advantage leading to long term disaster, by a PM addicted to the move.

Cameron’s specific error was the renegotiation farce. He knew, and they knew, that he would always be campaigning for Remain, so they had no incentive to offer him anything; and I don’t think he really believed he could lose, so he settled for it. It was always a paper-thin settlement, and they weren’t able to campaign on it in the Referendum – no-one was saying “look at all these awesome concessions Cameron got, the EU going forwards will be much better for us.” Ironically, Prime Minister Johnson would have kept us in.

@Ronan(rf)

Well what can I say – I’m also a proponent of the position that people shouldn’t simply throw around casual accusations that journalists they don’t like are inciting murder and should be called out when they do.

“And, having done that, he was further responsible for the form of the referendum. It didn’t have to be a simple 50% +1 vote. It could have required a supermajority.”

That, of course, would require the legislation enabling the referendum to include that. The Tories currently have a majority of 12. At least half of them are quite eurosceptic. Do you honestly believe they would have voted for a referendum run under conditions where it was de facto impossible for them to win?

Cameron certainly has made many tactical errors, but this is like criticising him for failing to win the vote by deploying the government’s secret mass hypnosis machine.

@552. You’re right about the calculation and the cynicism. It’s less clear to me that Cameron could have set the conditions as you suggest. You’re usually correct (I think!) on questions of law. Could Cameron have demanded a super-majority decision? I don’t see any extension of veto authority to any of the four ‘nations’ happening.

Did you check the facts before damning Cameron on these questions, not that I object to damning Cameron – its almost always the right thing to do.

I do think you’re right re: the hubris. The fix was in from the beginning, and the elites had every reason to believe they could conjure a victory irrespective of the will of the voters.

I think Corbyn could yet pull it off. He’s going to look like some sort of political king-kong if he can fend off the attacks and rally enough troops to stiffen the backs of some of the slightly moral PLP members, a few of whom might actually be suffering a few pangs of loyalty and conscience.

Val and J-D,

On the issue of who chooses the leader, the membership of the ALP or the parliamentary ALP , I know we have a situation that includes both with the ALP here now since Kevin Rudd introduced those reforms, but even if the leader was someone who was more preferred by the membership wing than the parliamentary wing, shouldn’t the party whips be able to ensure that the leader was supported by the parliamentary ALP? I think that is what the whips are there for.

I was thinking this election we are having now is kind of strange, neither major party is talking about any substantial police reform, but any analysis of the challenges Australia faces would indicate that we are at a time when substantial policy reform is needed. It is sort of like a sleep walking election.

I wonder how much this has to do with the situation in the UK with the Brexit, where some voters seem to be scared of the future and have voted to exit the EU which seems really like looking to the past. Even though I liked Bernie Sanders when I learned more about him over this year, I think both Sanders and Corbyn are presenting ideas which seem to look backwards more than forwards, to the security they identify in the post war era. It seems like there should be opportunity for young forwards looking people in the major political parties now, but we don’t seem to be seeing them.

Of course the enabling law would have passed with a supermajority requirement – it would have been perfect for the so-called “eurosceptics” given they never actually wanted to win, just make Cameron look bad. It was Cameron who couldn’t live with this, because he on the other hand wasn’t so much invested in staying in as in being seen to head off an internal challenge.

@Daragh,

Yes, it’s perfectly clear. Cameron didn’t have to promise a referendum p, but he did have to promise one. He could not have structured it to require a supermajority, but he could have structured it to require a supermajority. Eurosceptics would never have approved that, but of course they would have approved that. Tories would not have tolerated giving Scotland / Wales / Northern Ireland a veto, but in fact Tories tolerated giving them a veto. Cameron is a tactical genius, only he’s a blunderer. Corbyn is an ineffective campaigner, but he’s improved Labour’s electoral performance.

I’m told by various parties here that each half of these contradictions is certainly true. Perhaps the confusion isn’t mine. In any event, you’re probably not the one to school me on politics.

Putting a supermajority requirement in is certainly possible. The Scottish referendum in 1979 required both a majority voting yes and at least 40% of registered voters voting yes (due to the nature of the register this is more like 45% of the electorate). It met the first criteria but not the second so devolution didn’t happen. It is widely accepted that that was a wrecking amendment, the genuine eurosceptics would not have accepted either a turnout or a supermajority requirement as it is essentially cheating. They expected to lose honestly and would then spend the next few decades whinging about it and claiming the public had been misled (as they did after losing overwhelmingly in 1975).

Layman – what you’ve typed is largely incomprehensible, but if you’re suggesting that eurosceptic Tories would a) acquiesce in running a complete sham of a referendum b) not immediately depose and replace Cameron if he attempted a), you really are talking nonsense.

In other news, further evidence that the neoliberalblairiteiraqwarmonger coup is driven solely by their terror at Corbyn’s magical election winning powers.

“What is clearer is that the U6 has fallen sharply under Obama’s Presidency and the labor share of income has risen since 2007; moreover real wages grew last year even with anemic job growth.”

1) Given the labor force numbers, it is not at all clear how much better the employment climate has become.

2) This is wildly off topic, and I won’t respond to it again.

@567 I know it’s off-topic. But given previous discussion I wanted to share with you the best analysis I had found that was making some of your points against me. You may have already known about it of course.

Jim – the only papers that have weighed in against Corbyn so far are the Guardian and the Mirror. The former is owned by a trust, the latter by a British company.

And ‘the Tories are actually TERRIFIED of Corbyn’ is pretty much the same thought process employed by Palin and Trump supporters when confronted with their candidate’s record breaking levels of unpopularity too.

@Layman – you’ve now reached the ‘but you voted Lib Dem so neener neener’ stage of the process by which people here seem to defend spectacularly wrong headed arguments they can’t let go of. I’m sure if Cameron could have held a referendum he was guaranteed too win he would have. That you’re convinced he didn’t because of what you perceive as his moral failings says much, little of it complimentary.

Daragh: “you’ve now reached the ‘but you voted Lib Dem so neener neener’ stage of the process…”

You misunderstand. By ‘track record’, I mean the arguments you make here. When it comes to predictions and other matters of informed opinion, I see no reason to prefer yours.

“I’m sure if Cameron could have held a referendum he was guaranteed too win he would have. That you’re convinced he didn’t because of what you perceive as his moral failings says much, little of it complimentary.”

Again, you misunderstand. I think Cameron thought he was already guaranteed to win the referendum he put forward, and that he didn’t put forward a stronger one, because he is an idiot. Sure, he’s got moral failings as well, but that’s another story.

The FT was one of only three national daily newspapers to back Labour in 1992 (with the Guardian and Mirror). It also supported Labour in 1997, 2001 and 2005. The FT is not a right wing paper.

I only buy the FT on Saturday. The other papers may not all be carrying editorials telling Corbyn to go, but the narrative pulse quickens as it passes go.

It’s the timing of the attempted coup that revolts me. Each and every one of the ringleaders either abstained or voted for the cuts to tax-credits and the aborted cuts to disability allowance. I just cannot bring myself to support them neither as individuals nor as a faction.

New Labour are still centre-left. It’s just that on the economy the old left position had failed. The state just wasn’t good at running businesses. The area of disagreement had shifted to social policy and there new labour basically won. The conservatives are led by their social liberal faction, Cameron mentioned marriage equality during his resignation speech as one of his achievements as PM.

I believe we’ve made great steps, with more people in work than ever before in our history, with reforms to welfare and education, increasing people’s life chances, building a bigger and stronger society, keeping our promises to the poorest people in the world and enabling those who love each other to get married whatever their sexuality, but above all restoring Britain’s economic strength.

In 1992 Labour was led by Neil Kinnock; that wasn’t new labour and the FT supported his economic policy. The FT is pretty much a centrist newspaper with a conservative leaning readership.

The only time since 1945 a sitting Labour leader has faced a challenge was 1988 Kinnock believed he needed to be nominated on the same basis as his challenger. If so then Corbyn need the support of 51 MPs and MEPs. Angela Eagle already has the required support. Corbyn only got the 35 he needed last time (as there was a vacancy the threshold was lower a vacancy now would need 38 nominations) due to a number of MPs and MEPs nominating him despite having no intention of voting for him. Getting 51 nominations might prove difficult as his support is limited to the hard left. So his supporters are arguing that the sitting leader’s name should go on the ballot automatically.

Corbyn seems determined to hang on until the bitter end, even though it is clear that the parliamentary party has entirely lost confidence in him. Leading the parliamentary party is the bulk of the day to day part of his job.

Guardian wrote something to the effect of, “divisiveness started when corbyn sacked whatsit for plotting against him”. A normal person shouldn’t write that shit.

@ 581 You’re absolutely right – in the alternate universe constructed by the same PLP which opposed Corbyn throughout his career, and the all the energy they could discreetly muster from the time it looked like their life long enemy might actually win the leadership.

And let’s not forget why Corbyn was placed on the 2015 ballot in the first place – twas in very large part because the PLP in general, and the leadership in specific had failed utterly to manage/attend to the needs of the people who normally vote Labour at least a major part of their job.

The interpretation of events stands in direct contradiction to an extremely well-documented account of Labour confusion, division, and lack of ideas dating to the time Ed backed the Syrian bombing ( and then changed his mind) and before.

Corbyn should never have been anything other than a rumpled lefty whose utility was to serve ( so the PLP thought) as a Judas goat providing careerists with the working class cred to dupe loyal/gullible voters into believing the PLP shared some common ground with the membership. Very few do.

The conflict is right out of Burke. The PLP regard themselves as the ‘best’ sort of people who are selected for their ‘vision’ and ability to see to best attend (in theory) to the needs of their grubby inferiors, as in inferiors in every respect.

there just aren’t enough easily-manipulated people out there

many, too many to my reckoning (I think I am too easily manipulated)

Brett I know it was a long time ago but perhaps you remember the last general election? FT couldn’t back Miliband because he was ‘preoccupied with inequality’ and instead endorsed Cameron. Yes, that’s right: pigfucker. The worst prime minister in British history. The man who broke up both the UK AND the EU by mistake and fucked the global economy for the foreseeable future. At this point I’m inclined to pay even less attention to their political judgments than I do to Daragh’s.

The FT are a fairly neutral newspaper politically; they aren’t part of the Tory press and rather like having a viable opposition and their endorsement of the coalition in 2015 was fairly lukewarm, like most of us they believed the polls. Advice from them doesn’t come from a desire to weaken Labour.

Novakant @592

And now it seems deleted scenes from the Vice video confirm Corbyn’s apathy about the campaign.

I’d like to think this will make some people change their minds, but I suspect it will simply make them add ‘Ostrovsky’ to the name ‘Kuensberg’ on the ‘list of people who I have decided are biased and not doing their job properly because they don’t depict Corbyn in the exclusively hagiographic terms I demand.’

ZM 06.29.16 at 1:37 pm

Val and J-D,

On the issue of who chooses the leader, the membership of the ALP or the parliamentary ALP , I know we have a situation that includes both with the ALP here now since Kevin Rudd introduced those reforms, but even if the leader was someone who was more preferred by the membership wing than the parliamentary wing, shouldn’t the party whips be able to ensure that the leader was supported by the parliamentary ALP? I think that is what the whips are there for.

There is no reason to think so. The Labour Party in Britain also has whips, but they haven’t been able to stop members of the Parliamentary Labour Party from expressing their lack of confidence in the leader. For that matter, the ALP whips couldn’t enforce support for the leadership of Gillard, or Rudd, or Beazley, or Latham, or Crean, or Hawke, or Hayden.

Two things can be true at the same time:

the members of the PLP who plotted against Corbyn are a bunch of opportunist, incompetent SPADS with very little connection to the realities of lower-class life in Britain and no idea how to make things better (and who should therefore be replaced at the first opportunity); and

Corbyn, for all his virtues, has not the political/managerial competence to lead the PLP out of the morass.

The trick, therefore, is to replace Corbyn with someone of similar principles but better practice. Corbyn himself might be best placed to manage this, but I doubt he will.

J-D,

I suppose so, but then it means that the membership of the party are at a disadvantage to the parliamentary party. There must be some way for the membership to have more of a say.

The Guardian is reporting today about radio host Neil Mitchell telling Turnbull if he doesn’t win by a good margin then the parliamentary liberal party will replace him. I already heard something like this at a public talk I went to, that the liberal party would replace Turnbull with Morrison if Turnbull wins because the MPs find Turnbull isn’t right wing enough.

After the parties keep changing the Prime Minister’s in office so much lately it means that with elections we have no idea if the Prime Minister we elect will actually be the Prime Minister for the whole term. I know the parties can do this, but the frequency with which they have been doing this is unusual.

@ 594 Agreed.

How can it be that the ‘leader’ of a ostensibly democratic party where each and every matters is expected to steamroll an extremely sizeable minority of the membership and tell them their views don’t count? Corbyn’s long history of questioning the benefits of the EU are a matter of record. Any enthusiastic tub-thumping for Remain wouldn’t have convinced anybody to change their minds about the EU (I suspect). Rather Corbyn’s credibility with the membership would have been shattered, as well as their (perhaps wrongly-placed) belief that some of the PLP were willing to champion the views of the 37% minority.

Given that UKIP was/is already bleeding Labour support, a tactical and probably futile effort to make voters ‘do what Jeremy tells’ them seems a silly argument to make.

This rebellion was built into the cake the day he won the nomination. No sane person would try to deny it. People have every right to attack Corbyn. As a fan, I agree he’s unlikely to lead Labour back to power. He is, however, the only leader who can convince working-class/socially conscious voters to stay within the fold and not bolt to the Greens, or UKIP.

The parliamentary party never had much confidence in Corbyn, mind you anyone who has spent thirty years in parliament and hasn’t got off the backbenchers probably isn’t much of a talent. They were prepared to wait, Corbyn’s popularity with the membership would decline if it became apparent that he wasn’t up to the job but that takes time. It was also possible that he would grow into the role; occasionally people greatly exceed expectations. Either way waiting seemed like a good idea, which is what the Conservatives did with IDS. Popular with the membership but too right wing and too inept to appeal to the voters who matter (swing voters in marginals).

Corbyn had a bit of a problem as leader in demanding loyalty from his party, he rarely showed any himself, as a backbencher he was one of the Labour party’s most persistent rebels. So his moral position to demand loyalty is fairly weak.

The far left voters mostly live in places where Labour already wins easily. Losing a few of them doesn’t matter very much. Corbyn lacks appeal to the bit of the electorate that decides elections.

@603

You faithfully parrot Blairite propaganda, even though the putschists have made their long term plans perfectly clear, briefing friendly journalists in ‘liberal’ papers that their plan is to split the party, set up an alternative in alliance with ‘moderate’ Tories, funded by wealth donors.

‘MPs …are privately discussing a new party. Mary Honeyball, a Labour MEP, said 200 Labour MPs could form a new party if Corbyn were re-elected, and that she would join them if necessary.Unlike the remaining socialist Labour Party, which would be depend on the trade unions for money, the breakaway group would be assured of backing by rich individual donors who have shunned the Corbyn-led one….

Some Labour MPs believe that a new party would find much common ground on policy with Liberal Democrats and might even merge eventually. The Labour Democrats, perhaps? They might even agree that Britain should re-enter the European Union, which the Lib Dems are already calling for….Some anti-Corbynites even dream of attracting some Cameron-supporting Conservatives now that they are about to lose power. There were close personal links between Blairites and Cameron’s Notting Hill set, and Cameron extended Blairite public service reforms such as academy schools.’

Some indication of the calibre of the intellects involved can be gleaned by this sentence:

‘The Labour defectors would be doomed to be branded the “SDP Mark II,” even though they would try to avoid that by not calling themselves the Social Democrats.’

So….there you have it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-election-brexit-blairites-splitting-party-in-two-new-liberal-a7109551.html

Some idea as to the quality of the intellects involved can be given by this sentence:

‘

Corbyn may well be incompetent (probably is, if experience serves) but he is called on it (and then some).

So if you’re saying Corbyn is ‘probably incompetent’ why do you want him to stay?

Sorry, that should be no *more* incompetent than his opponents!

Collin Street 06.30.16 at 7:19 am
But what possible reason would there be for somebody who was calculating on standing for the leadership to do anything other than what the rules prescribe — line up the necessary signatures from nominators and then declare candidacy? If that’s a requirement anyway (and it is), what advantage is there in messy preliminary manoeuvring? The suggestion somebody made that they acted out of panic (a common cause of ineptitudes) seems more likely to me.

Empathy impairments severely impact your ability to make allowances for the impact of the decisions of others on your plans, because they impede the ability to predict what those decisions will be.

Instead you’re going to assume that everyone thinks more-or-less the same as you, that there won’t be any substantial opposition; you’ll conclude that your own ideas are flawless [after all, you can’t see any flaws in them! and you’re as good as any man!], that any opposition will come from troublemakers and malcontents who can be safely ignored, and that any expectation that you plan for opposition comes from defeatists.

I’m sorry, you’ve lost me. I think (perhaps wrongly) that I understand what you’re saying as a matter of general principle, but I don’t see how it’s supposed to translate into a specific explanation of what’s happened in this particular case.

Actually, according to the Mail Corbyn wants to quit but his mind is no longer his own. A sinister pair of villains have denied Corbyn the right to choose freely for himself. Which, if true, might be the only justifiable reason to dump him.

The fact that Corbyn spent his entire career giving public opinion and his peers the finger rather than compromise, now would seem a rather remarkable moment in his personal history to abandon his supporters and start sucking up to the rich.

The Mail (no linky).

@ 614 You mean it’s not true?!? But the Mail says it is!

Good times!

‘The far left voters mostly live in places where Labour already wins easily. Losing a few of them doesn’t matter very much. Corbyn lacks appeal to the bit of the electorate that decides elections.’ (Brett Dunbar 06.30.16 at 2:05 am, post 305)
Isn’t this pretty much the thinking that lost labour Scotland and made winning UK elections almost impossible for them?

Splitting is a fallback option, the PLP really wanted to present Corbyn with clear evidence that his position was untenable. If he refuses and the membership re elect him then it is possible that they might quit. Equally if they succeed in ousting Corbyn then the hard left might quit, either way it seems unlikely.

Corbyn’s problem isn’t that he compared Israel and ISIS (he didn’t), but rather that he managed to say something that entirely predictably opened him up to the accusation that he compared Israel and ISIS. As has been said repeatedly upthread (though some, not I, think this a virtue), Corbyn isn’t very good at politics.

No sorry Ben Alpers (621) this just isn’t on. Since the UK media are clearly willing to just alter quotes to suit their right wing agenda there is no way for Corbyn to avoid these constant smears. What he said was absolutely correct, was in no way suspect, and indeed could only be made to sound suspect at all by lying about the actual words. There’s no defense against such behavior by the press.

He. Did. Not. Even. Mention. ISIS. It’s not in the speech – the text of which was released ahead of time – and he didn’t say it. It literally took lying about the actual words he spoke to even get to the point where they could be misinterpreted as “compared Israel to ISIS”.

Shorter Ben: Corbyn can’t afford to take the attitude that the press will deliberately misrepresent him. Therefore when the press deliberately misrepresent him, it’s Corbyn’s fault.

@623: If the quote I saw is correct, Corbyn said this: “Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those of various self-styled Islamic states or organisations.”

That really does seem to be a clear reference to Daesh – in prepared remarks at a conference on anti-Semitism. Not good.

BBC News chose to refer to it as “Islamic State group”, “so-called islamic State”, or “self-styled Islamic State” in the first instance, shortening it to IS on subsequent mentions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant

This is just idiotic, I suspect some speechwriter couldn’t help himself but include a slight at Israel at this event and Corbyn was either OK with this or didn’t even notice.

Again: incompetent.

But apparently this is regarded not as a bug but a feature by some Labour supporters.

engels @ 627:

“Shorter Ben: Corbyn can’t afford to take the attitude that the press will deliberately misrepresent him. Therefore when the press deliberately misrepresent him, it’s Corbyn’s fault.”

Not at all (an oddly bad try at a shorter given your upset about people misrepresenting what others say).

My view is that given that Corbyn should rightly take the view that the press will deliberately misrepresent what he says, he needs to be doubly careful about what he says. Maybe “various self-styled Islamic states and organizations” isn’t a reference to ISIS. But if one might reasonably be worried that it will be read as one, surely there are ways of saying what I believe Corbyn was actually trying to say that would make the press’s job of distorting his statements slightly more difficult.

“Self-styled Islamic state” is an obvious reference to ISIS, and I am taken aback at the brazen dishonesty of Corbyn supporters in trying to deny this.

I’m amazed at the lengths that some people will go to smear Corbyn now. It is obvious to any half-educated person that the meant that you cannot criticise or stigmatise either groups of people or individuals from those groups on the basis of the actions of some members of the collective. He could have said that that you can’t blame all Germans for Hitler, or all Cambodians for Pol Pot, or all British people for the Parliamentary Labour Party.

This is censorship and scapegoating, pure and simple.

No, Bruce.

Corbyn is right that Muslims (or Arabs) are not collectively responsible for the actions of Da’ish.

Corbyn is also right that Jews are not collectively responsible for the actions of Israel.

Corbyn is entirely inflammatory and disgusting, however, to equate the actions of Da’ish with the actions of Israel. But then, he probably had help drawing up his speech, much as Ian Brady had help in murdering those children.

You see how it’s an obvious smear when used against your hero? Equating him to Ian Brady just because they both “had help”? Obviously drawing up a speech is nothing like murdering children, and there is no justifiable reason to put that tendentious comparison in there. But somehow when Corbyn does it, you want to pretend you don’t see it.

And then you have Igor Belanov doubling down. No, Igor, it would be inflammatory and disgusting beyond belief to say “You can’t blame all Jews for Israel just like you can’t blame all Germans for Hitler.”

The rhetorical parallel unmistakably implies that the current Israel government has all the legitimacy of “self-styled” Islamic states

No, it really doesn’t—but the fact that you and Alpers both sincerely think such an idiotic misreading is somehow reasonable does say something about the state of US politics I guess.

Salem @ 640

You’re quite right. I do not see Corbyn making a comparison between Israel’s Netanyahu and Da’ish. He’s drawing equivalency with regard to the responsibility of British Jews and Muslims for those foreign political entities toward which entities, news events may well prompt hostile feelings.

I think it is reasonable to suppose that his persuasive strategy includes the notion that Muslims hostile to Netanyahu will see that it is as wrong to express personal hostility toward Jews in Britain on that account as it is wrong that many in Britain may be inclined to express personal hostility toward Muslims due to the well-publicized atrocities of Da’ish.

It seems perverse to me to undermine that persuasive intent by tendentiously asserting that Corbyn sought to weigh Israel and Da’ish on the evilness scale. Are Muslims in Britain more responsible for Da’ish because it is so intensely evil, but even Zionists in Britain are off-the-hook because the execrable Netanyahu is “the lesser evil” by some standard of comparison? Examining your reasoning just adds to the absurdity of this smear and the impulse toward political bullying that it reveals.

https://mobile.twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/748577259561324544

Colin, yes—er no—maybe? That has nothing to do with the issue I was commenting on afaict…

Here’s a partial list of states that style themselves ‘Islamic states’: Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Mauritania, Libya.

If he meant this, he’s insulted the lot of them, right? Okay, they call themselves Islamic…

Anyway, I’m happy to give him the benefit of the doubt on intent, but in execution he can obviously do better.

There’s no f***ing way Corbyn or those around him would intentionally make and release a statement equating Israel and ISIS. I’m pretty sure he’s not interested in career suicide. Rather, it sounds like a guy who has spent his career criticizing Israel to an audience that struggles to understand why Israel deserves criticism.

Good lord… It was the launch of an inquest into anti-Semitism precipitated by one of Corbyn’s key allies saying crazy stuff about Hitler being a ‘zionist.’ Literally all Corbyn had to do was say ‘anti-Semitism is bad and we’re against it’ and sit down, but he couldn’t even do that. More to the point, this is not a new thing nor something Jewish members of Labour have been unaware of for quite some time.

I note that none of the Corbyn die-hards have even bothered to try and defend him doing absolutely nothing after a Jewish Labour MP was literally bullied out of the room in tears by a Momentum activist.

In any case, new polling indicates things are starting tosink in among the membership. I look forward to their denunciation as BlairiteTraitorousNeoLiberalWarmongerWhatevers.

all Corbyn had to do was say ‘anti-Semitism is bad and we’re against it

That’s basically what he said

engels 06.30.16 at 8:19 pm

And I’ve just learned that the Israeli ambassador okayed Corbyn’s speech before it was delivered.

Is there a source for that information cited online?

It’s Daragh who is libeling people. His behavior has gone beyond his usual concern trolling.

@659

They’re watching power slip away from them. This isn’t 1983. The Guardian is dying (on their front page they literally have, at the bottom, begging notes pleading for money from their readers. This is not a good look). The BBC will be lucky to survive a term or two of the new extreme right Tory party which has been desperate to privatise it for years. Tony Blair will be lucky to escape jail. Jack Straw is facing deportation to Libya. The rise of Syriza, Podemos, Sanders and, for that matter, Trump, UKIP and the various extremist nationalist parties in Europe are all signs that the centre-right political consensus that has ruled since 1979 (and to which the Guardian and the BBC gave de facto suppport) is simply coming to an end. What replaces it may well be worse. But it is definitely coming to an end. Whether or not the plotters finally manage to ‘get’ Corbyn will not change this.

@665

I don’t think Straw will go to Libya, and I don’t think Blair will be arrested for war crimes. The ICC exists to white people can lynch black people, not the other way round.

Nevertheless it’s not a good look for Straw or Blair that people are talking about this.

When it comes to the Labour leadership contest, remember this.

As Owen Jones stated in a Tweet recently, no one who voted for the attack on Iraq will ever become leader of the Labour party. This is so obvious you would have to be a member of the corporate media to deny it.

So….this puts Corbyn’s opponents in a somewhat awkward position.

Jonathan Sacks called Corbyn’s statement “demonisation of the highest order, an outrage and unacceptable”. But no doubt Corbyn’s comrades here know far more about what’s offensive to the British Jewish population than a mere Chief Rabbi.

Or even vice-versa.

Oh dear the shadow chancellor is about to give a speech. I wonder what the Guardian reporter on hand will mishear and twist this time? I’m thinking they’ll report “revenue” as “revolution” and title the resulting hit piece “McDonnell demands blood in the streets”.

@christian_h

I’m attempting nothing. What Hidari chooses to say is his own business. I would think the mods know their legal position, and act accordingly. But I do think that libelous accusations based on nothing should be called as such. You’re both now claiming that journalists who report facts that you don’t like or reflect badly on the politicians you support are deliberately distorting the truth as part of a conspiracy, and that there is no other explanation. This is not only blatantly defamatory, it’s reflective of a staggeringly paranoid and insular cult of personality. The leader can do no wrong – if he does it’s because of a devious plot against him! And then you wonder why the country votes Tory…

@christian_h

I have watched video of the event. Multiple videos. I just posted one for god’s sake. The events in question aren’t disputed. Wadsworth was expelled from the Labour party this morning.

That you’re now reduced to calling me a racist based on your apparent telepathic ability to read my mind and tell me what my motivations are (and not, say, anything I’ve actually written or said) is frankly, hilariously pathetic.

“I note that no-one hear is trying to defend the treatment of Ruth Smeeth. Or the fact that, after Marc Wadsworth reduced her to tears and hounded her out of the room, Corbyn apologised – to HIM.”

I suggest she develops a thicker skin or a better sense of hearing. If Corbyn blubbed every time he received a bit of criticism then the whole country would be inundated by now.

@Igor Belanov

That’s nice. I’m sure if it was a member of another ethnic minority being abused you’d be similarly glib. I’m sure you’ve also factored in that these are human beings who, two weeks ago, saw one of their colleagues brutally murdered, and for the last several days have been hearing Momentum activists online and on the streets referring to them as ‘scum’ and ‘traitors.’ This is before we even get to the trauma of Brexit and the generalised lack of sleep around Westminster at the moment.

But then again, it’s a non-Corbynista MP being bullied to tears, so she’s obviously a Blairite warmonger. Probably a racist too. The only thing Corbyn did wrong was not joining in himself.

@layman

Yes it is terribly pompous of me to point out that spreading malicious falsehoods about me and others in this public forum is not only slimey, but in certain jurisdictions illegal.

Daragh: “I have watched video of the event.”

It would be less damning if you hadn’t. I have, and this:

“Or the fact that, after Marc Wadsworth reduced her to tears and hounded her out of the room…”

…is hardly an accurate description of the events. Wadsworth made one rude comment intimating she was disloyal to Corbyn, she objected, she collected her things, she left. She was not crying at that time, and Wadsworth said nothing else to her or about her as she left.

You can’t be trusted to accurately render events, can you?

@Daragh, of course it would be asking too much to expect you to say ‘yes, you’re right, I’ve wildly exaggerated the incident.’

Yes it is terribly pompous of me to point out that spreading malicious falsehoods about me and others in this public forum is not only slimey, but in certain jurisdictions illegal.

See, here’s the thing.

Your use of the word “malicious” there is actually a claim about people’s motivations. Claiming that a person acts with “malice” — particularly when coupled with “falsehood” like you’ve done here — is a claim that would if believed lower that person’s esteem in the eyes of others.

Is defamatory. You’re complaining about being defamed, and you’re complaining about other people being defamed… but you’re doing the exact same thing yourself and you can’t even recognise it.

Daragh, the reports say ms. Smeeth left in tears but they don’t say why – was it anti semitism? Reports suggest wadsworth was handing out posters recommending deselection, nothing to do with anyone’s Jewish ancestry. Do you dispute that? Wadsworth is well known in labour circles and has apresence on the guardian (multiple obits and opinion pieces) so it’s not surprising he ended up talking to Corbyn, and the video suggests he was talking about leadership issues (and the apology was unrelated to ms. Smeeth). The whole situation appears crowded and chaotic from start to finish, with no apparent distance between MPs and campaigners. Ms Smeeth claimed she wasn’t going to say anything about Corbyns leadership but the independent article suggests she resigned before the event, so it’s unclear whether she was one of the targets of wadsworths leaflet or not.

So are you claiming wadsworth engaged in antisemitic abuse or not?

Corbyns “Islamic state” comparison was an obvious attempt to tell people if they think Muslims shouldn’t be tarred with the Isis brush they should back off from similar comparisons of Jews with Israel. Do you think that is a stupid point? because it is a perfectly legitimate rhetorical tactic, and if you believe the left has a problem of anti semitism that excuses itself through references to Israel then it’s an important point to make.

I think you are looking for reasons to hate Corbyn, and deploying claims of anti se,toms to that end. Any reasonable person would understand Corbyns point immediately – unless hey thought all Muslims should be held responsible for the acts of Islamic state, of course,in which case his statement would be deep,y offensive to Jews everywhere.

You dont think that do you?

Daragh: “I’m pretty happy that meets the test of malicious falsehood.”

I admit that you seem to be something of an expert on malicious falsehood.

Jeremy Corbyn would easily defeat likely leadership challengers, poll shows
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-election-poll-support-angela-eagle-dan-jarvis-tom-watson-2016-eu-a7113036.html

Labour Party gains 60,000 new members in one week following attempted coup against Corbyn
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-party-gains-60000-new-members-following-attempted-coup-against-corbyn-a7112336.html

Kidneystones – I really couldn’t care less if some anonymous blog commenter here calls me a racist. However, it says everything that needs saying about the Corbynistas that their first resort whenever the messiah is criticised is to denounce the heretic in the most hyperbolic and offensive terms possible.

Nor is this a new thing. There is a segment of the hard left that is as batty and almost as unpleasant as the hard right, that delights in nothing more than a factional struggle in which opponents are denounced as treasonous scum and driven out (in the best Leninist tradition) and all thought is replaced by vapid sloganeering. And then, when they receive yet another electoral horsewhipping, they blame it on false consciousness and press bias. The tragedy in this case, is that they’ve managed to briefly reach the heights of a political party that might actually be an influence for good, under the right leadership, and absolutely trashed it in the process.

“… denounce the heretic in the most hyperbolic and offensive terms possible.”

That sounds like hyperbole to me.

“… political party that might actually be an influence for good, under the right leadership, and absolutely trashed it in the process.”

Remind me, what wing of the party lost 4 million votes, in doing so alienated a high proportion of the core vote, and also saw membership decline dramatically?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-opposition

> Why do I not find this surprising?

I’m sorry; I keep on writing for a normal audience, and forgetting that you have severe language impairments. I’ll try better next time.

Daragh,

My politics are probably closer to yours than they are to the typically more leftist commenters here (though I certainly don’t ascribe to your “any criticism of Israel is antisemitism” position), but, on the evidence of your comments, you are quite an ass.

@Larrym

Given that you’ve somehow managed to ascribe to me a position I do not, and have never held (I’m actually quite Israel critical, and think the BDS movement has a valid point), based on absolutely zero evidence (the above being the first time I have expressed any opinion about the state of Israel, or it’s policies, or the validity of criticising same throughout this thread), I’m not really sure why I should pay any attention to the ‘evidence’ you’ve managed to mine from these comments.

Engels @707

Of course, you omit to mention that while confirming that he had resigned from the council, Piketty also took the opportunity while doing so to publicly criticise Corbyn’s conduct of the referendum campaign.

As did the entirety of the rest of the council in a joint statement.

And Danny Blanchflower has accused Corbyn of playing ‘idiotic games.’

Y’see engels, the problem with using half-truths and omissions to make your case, is that other people here ALSO have the internet and an ability to read.

Correction: I see the Independent doesn’t say Piketty resigned in protest at Corbyn. Good. The Guardian report did and that was made up out of whole cloth.

How on Earth do you think I have been dishonest?

He’s not part of the Labour Party. He held an advisory appointment (I’m not sure if he ever attended any meetings) but resigned it some time ago to work pressures. He has said that he supports Corbyn’s efforts to move the party to the Left but disagreed with his position on the referendum campaign. It is extremely muskeading to report this—as the Guardian and others did initially did—as ‘even key advisors like Piketty are turning on Corbyn’…

Quite a correction!

This headline, subheading and body text of this article were amended on 30 June 2016. Earlier versions said Thomas Piketty had quit as an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn on Wednesday after criticising Labour’s “weak campaign”; in fact he quit two weeks ago and his departure was not connected to his criticism of the campaign.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/29/thomas-piketty-quits-as-adviser-to-jeremy-corbyn

@633: Sure, it’s an anodyne remark – in certain contexts. Coming from the Labour leader in that particular venue is, I think, not good. By that I don’t mean Corbyn is an anti-semite or anything like it. It just seems like a self-inflicted shot in the foot at a time when there are already plenty of people trying to make him do the bullet dance.

Daragh 07.01.16 at 10:35 pm
… The reason no-one has put down a formal challenge is they’re hoping Corbyn will do the decent thing and resign, particularly given the latest figures showing union members turning against him fairly heavily.
…

That (still) makes no sense. Nominating somebody else for the leadership makes it neither easier nor harder for Corbyn to resign. Those are two unrelated variables. If they want somebody else to be leader of the party, the way to achieve that result is to nominate somebody else, regardless of what Corbyn does. If they’re not nominating a leadership candidate, either they have some other motive for not doing so, or they’re not thinking straight.

Maybe the Blairites will do the decent thing and stand down, starting with Tristram *unt
https://twitter.com/aaronbastani/status/748802169122369536

Now that Britain’s going to leave the EU it will have to turn to its natural strengths as a destination for EU tourists. Luckily we can rework an old song:

Safe European Home

Well, I just got back and I wish I never leave now
(Where’d you go?)
Who that happy person at the airport, yeah?
(Where’d you go?)

[Chorus]
I went to the place where every white face
Is an invitation to snobbery
And sitting here in my safe European home
Don’t wanna go back there again

Oh, they got the rain and they got the cold breeze
(Where’d you go?)
They got the warm beer, they got the sad weeks
(Where’d you go?)

[Chorus]

Whoa, the infighting and the Labor bollocks
(Where’d you go?)
I’d stay and be a tourist but can’t take the politics
(Where’d you go?)

[Chorus]

Daragh 07.01.16 at 11:34 pm
J-D

If someone launches a challenge while the leadership is not vacant, it’s likely Corbyn is placed on the ballot automatically and there’s a long, vicious leadership fight (even though this is entriely a Corbynite innovation – Kinnock had to get nominations in 1988 after all). This is already in a context where Momentum is being pretty aggressive in picketing offices, MPs are reporting pretty ugly abuse including death threats, and MPs are already on edge due to Jo Cox’s murder. It looks like the PLP is doing all it can to avoid that.

If Corbyn resigns and the leadership is vacant, there can either be a quick coronation or a contest in which the rest of Corbyn’s faction is excluded from competing due to their minimal numbers, or they put forward a much less personally attractive candidate like Clive Lewis or John McDonnell, who is much easier to beat. Not particularly edifying maybe, but also gives Labour a chance of achieving power sometime before the heat death of the universe.