There’s nothing wrong with letting conference and the actual membership decide policy. If members feel they own the policy, they’re much more likely to campaign for it, allowing Corbyn to actually use the movement he’s built. It’s a huge risk, and I agree that there could be a number of deselections if MPs openly rebel against the membership in their CLP. Potentially traumatic, but in those circumstances and under a representative system, it’s arguably the correct thing to do. It may even strengthen the party in the long term.
It must really sicken committed Labour activists to see a member of the old Red Royalty parachuted into town to become the MP. Voters don’t like it either, and while Labour can get away with that sort of stuff here in Liverpool, they were insane to try it in Southampton Itchen. Ed Miliband’s Labour was a shambles, pilfering Conservative ideas past and present, aiming for the mystical centre ground while simultaneously losing the firmanent underneath their feet. New Labour in general was no better; same direction of travel, same pass-through foreign policy. Unions were disaffiliating long before they were out of power.
This slow crawl to an ever corporate controlled world, benefiting those who already have the most, needs to be challenged. It isn’t modern. It’s a throwback to even earlier times, and a disgraceful legacy to leave for those that Corbyn allegedly dishonoured when he didn’t belt out the Queen’s theme tune. I am glad the mainstream consensus is being challenged.
There’s nothing wrong with letting conference and the actual membership decide policy. If members feel they own the policy, they’re much more likely to campaign for it, allowing Corbyn to actually use the movement he’s built. It’s a huge risk, and I agree that there could be a number of deselections if MPs openly rebel against the membership in their CLP. Potentially traumatic, but in those circumstances and under a representative system, it’s arguably the correct thing to do. It may even strengthen the party in the long term.
He’s aiming to be Prime Minister, not Fuhrer - and the theory is that we live in a representative democracy.
He also campaigned on a promise to democratise policy-making. Tony Blair “led” in the way that you mean leader. Marginalised opponents, kept people out of decision making, and was noted for running a Presidential style of cabinet.
Leadership isn’t about stamping your feet down and asserting that what you say goes. It’s about setting an example and making the best of the people in your charge. Spoiling rebels aside, I don’t see that as being a problem for Corbyn.
There’s nothing wrong with letting conference and the actual membership decide policy. If members feel they own the policy, they’re much more likely to campaign for it, allowing Corbyn to actually use the movement he’s built. It’s a huge risk, and I agree that there could be a number of deselections if MPs openly rebel against the membership in their CLP. Potentially traumatic, but in those circumstances and under a representative system, it’s arguably the correct thing to do. It may even strengthen the party in the long term.
Isn’t a leader supposed to, well, lead?
He’s aiming to be Prime Minister, not Fuhrer - and the theory is that we live in a representative democracy.
You’re barking up the wrong tree with this. “Representative democracy” means the representation of the electorate who voted for a parliamentary representative - and absolutely not the mandate of whatever emerges from smoke-filled rooms at party conferences. That doesn’t mean that conference shouldn’t be a key platform for deciding policy to be put to the electorate in a representative democracy. It does mean that by itself, a series of conference “mandates” would never amount to a coherent, unifying political platform, simply because each individual “mandate” is the outcome of majority-voted special interests. Unions like Unite will ensure, for example, that the jobs issue associated with Trident will override Corbyn’s anti-nuclear stance. That MAY not happen, but I bet it does. And so on through the list of issues, each with their blocs of power and interest. And in the real world, vital things like economic and foreign policy are think-tanked out, and the role of specalists come into play.
Putting a party platform together is so much more complex and difficult than simply handing the floor to shiny-faced Corbynites, no matter how (horribly un)attractive that might be.
There’s nothing wrong with letting conference and the actual membership decide policy. If members feel they own the policy, they’re much more likely to campaign for it, allowing Corbyn to actually use the movement he’s built. It’s a huge risk, and I agree that there could be a number of deselections if MPs openly rebel against the membership in their CLP. Potentially traumatic, but in those circumstances and under a representative system, it’s arguably the correct thing to do. It may even strengthen the party in the long term.
Isn’t a leader supposed to, well, lead?
He’s aiming to be Prime Minister, not Fuhrer - and the theory is that we live in a representative democracy.
There’s a big difference between Hitler style leadership and letting the membership decide policy. It’s a tantalising idea no doubt, but it would enivitably end up a bit of a hodge podge of ideas. Like women in segregated train carriages. A leader needs to drive a party forward with some kind of vision…
I’d be really curious to know what Corbyn would actually do about Theresa May’s opting out of the hard-won EU agrement today on migrant quotas. His reluctance to publicly talk specifics on the issue of migrants and refugees - a HUGE humanitarian crisis - is strikingly odd. It makes him look competely out of touch, divorced from reality.
I keep seeing people use words like “fantasy” and “inevitable”. I’d love to know where you’re all getting your information from. The same received wisdom saw bookies put Corbyn on the market at 200/1 and pay out early.
I think Corbyn articulates a compelling vision. One in which workers rights are respected, a more independent foreign policy focused on conflict resolution instead of conflagration, nationalisation of key industries, proper funding of key services, funding education, advancing green industry and rebalancing the economy so more of us are doing high tech, high skilled work. All that, and the lifting of the hated and gratuitous austerity.
Sure, he has to get these things through conference, but these are the same policies people voted for when they elected him leader. If he has no vision, how has he managed to contrive such an upset? You may not buy into it, but plenty of other people did, and they can’t all be rebellious self-harmers.
I covered the train thing comprehensively when it broke; I can’t add to it and I try not to do repeats.
That doesn’t mean he is the sole source of policy and direction, the Union movement hopefully will push this, there may be a split but for me it is a price worth paying for a more ethical mode of politics. that said Pap brought up a very good point as one of the biggest things for me personally is electoral reform and a more shared way of doing things, there is nothing wrong with compromise and coalition in politics at all.
Sometimes amidst the sanctimonious trashing of any Labour politician viewed as non-Corbynite - as “Tory-lite”, “scum”, etc - it’s worth remembering that there are, among the large number of centre-left politicians, some who are (or were) far superior to Corbyn. Superior as parliamentarians, superior as public speakers, superior as articulators of great truths, superior as articulators of a public mood, particularly at times of crisis - and ultimately superior in having the courage throughout their political careers to wrestle with the frequent clashes between principles and power, so that they might make some sort of difference for the better to people’s lives.
This is one of the greatest parliamentary speeches of modern times, delivered by a representative of the now-hated “modernising” wing of the party. Yet I defy any Corbynite to find a single thing here to disagree with. It’s a condemnation of the Iraq qar delivered BEFORE the invasion, spelling out with remarkable accuracy all that would follow.
You’ll notice a familiar figure in his pea-green suit skulking in the background.
I love that speech, have tremendous respect for Robin Cook for making it. It’s a real shame he died so soon after speaking out so defiantly, passionately and eloquently about the folly of the government’s inevitable decision to become an aggressor in the invasion of Iraq.
Mutual respect for Cook’s bravery noted, the centre-left doesn’t have a monopoly on personal principles, and I would disagree profoundly with your naturally superior rhetoric, especially in the case of Cook. There’s no shortage of principled anti-war speeches from back benchers. Cook was Foreign Secretary, and a great deal of that speech’s power comes from the context. Not only is he utterly rejecting the proposed Foreign Policy, he’s also indicating that he has no control over the outcome.
Cook also doesn’t have a monopoly on prescience. Throughout history, there have been people that have predicted how certain situations will develop if resolved in a certain way, vindicated by events that followed. The sources of conflict in the Middle East right now were accurately predicted in the King-Crane Commission’s report, published 1919.
Huge props to Robin Cook, but as he and King-Crane Commission illustrate, it doesn’t matter what you say if you’re not listened to.
I thought they couldn’t remove a sitting MP. Only deselect them for the next election. If thats the case, they have 5 years of infighting on their hands as the “outgoing” centre left try to sabotage the “incoming” far left and Corbyn at every turn. After all they will have nothing to lose.
They can remove the whip from him ahead of deselection. He can either plod on until the next election or fight a bye-election on his own terms. Personally, I think he realises how fucked he is under the new leadership. Another right leaning candidate that was happy to benefit from a safe left-wing seat, until he had to be accountable to them. He had five members of his CLP expelled a while back.
Good to see that Corbyn being elected Labour leader hasn’t stopped the media machine taking his quotes out of context to attack him! The headline suggests that he’s a conspiracy theory nut but he’s really talking sense about how 9/11 was used as a springboard for the West to intervene in Afghan & Iraq using that event as justification for an unpopular and risky military intervention. Funny how they’ve had to go back to copies of the Morning Star from 1991 to find something controversial though! They’ve exhausted 24 years of material in a matter of months…
Has your love-bunny been attacked by the nasty right-wing media again? You do know the Telegraph is known as the Torygraph, right? So what do you expect?
Besides, there is no question that Corbyn was advocating a conspiracy theory involving a ‘new world order’.
You might also consider how articles that were, you say, written in 1991, managed somehow to conjure up a conspiracy theory about an incident that didn’t happen until a whole decade later. How does that work?
We understand that you’re not a fan of Corbyn; it would, after all, be hard not to. But does every reference you make to him really have to be couched in terms that a sixth-former would cringe at? Love-bunny? Really?
Well, that’s a fair point - the Torygraph are always going to have a mandate to attack him. I just don’t know why they’re repeating the same trick that didn’t work during the leadership elections by dragging up quotes from the past to try to smear him - people saw through it before and they just won’t pay attention to it now.
The 1991 part was in reference to the “New World Order” quotes rather than the 9/11 part, could have phrased that all better - long day at work for me.
We understand that you’re not a fan of Corbyn; it would, after all, be hard not to. But does every reference you make to him really have to be couched in terms that a sixth-former would cringe at? Love-bunny? Really?
You’re right. I shouldn’t abbreviate. The full term is “emotional love-bunny”. It is not a term so much about Corbyn himself as about the weird devotionalism that envelops him.
This is becoming something of a theme on here. I understand you’re all fans of Corbyn. But why do you have to defend him in such a sophomoric way? And why the nagging to those who don’t buy into him and think he’s an incredible menace to the people that Labour are supposed to help to basically shut the fuck up?
Anyway, here’s an excellent piece by Nick Cohen which expresses my own view pretty well, except that I believe that Labour needs to be reclaimed from this vandalism to go back to doing what it’s here for.
Jeremy Corbyn did not become Labour leader because his friends in the Socialist Workers party organised a Leninist coup. Nor did the £3 click-activist day-trippers hand him victory. He won with the hearty and freely given support of ‘decent’ Labour members.
And yes, thank you, I know all about the feebleness of Corbyn’s opponents. But the fact remains that the Labour party has just endorsed an apologist for Putin’s imperial aggression; a man who did not just appear on the propaganda channel of Russia, which invades its neighbours and persecutes gays, but also of Iran, whose hangmen actually execute gays. Labour’s new leader sees a moral equivalence between 9/11 and the assassination of bin Laden, and associates with every variety of women-hating, queer-bashing, Jew-baiting jihadi, holocaust denier and 9/11 truther. His supporters know it, but they don’t care.
They don’t put it like that, naturally. Their first response is to cry ‘smear’.
And who says that I’m a ‘fan’ of Corbyn? I’m not a Labour Party member, and had no vote in the leadership election. I don’t know a great deal about Corbyn, and I’ll wait and see how things pan out. I’m interested in the election of Corbyn on a philosophical level, but that’s a different thing altogether.
My point was simply that you are very clearly capable of discussing and debating matters in a polite and civilised manner, and yet you constantly choose not to do so when discussing Corbyn. You’ve done it again here. Strange as it may sound to you, it hardly enhances your arguments.