This sounds like my dad. But then he’s a bit of a lefty too.
I agree to a certain extent, but this only applies to a level of people who have the intelligence to challenge what they are seeing in the media, like most on here. We still have a very large percentage of the country, who take what they are seeing and hearing in small sound bites, believing the ‘experts’, just taking what they see in headlines (Daily Mail & The Sun for example) and taking this as gospel. Same as Facebook, people post and share anything, that they believe no matter what it is. Knee jerk most of it.
There of course, are many more sources of media for those who want to challenge what they see and hear in the media, as the media will tend to put their own slant on a story.
Just watched the news for example on the Tory leadership race, they had a slant on Mrs May, but give negative information/stats on Andrea Leadsom.
I don’t believe Corbyn loves himself enough to get elected.
His honest approach to most issues and his reluctance to play the PR game means the readers of the papers quoted above will not be given an opportunity to see his actual policies, they’ll just be fed a twisted cartoon version.
It’ll be all about silly Jezza in his old jacket, and I fear the millions who didn’t understand the referendum will once again vote for whoever Murdoch tells them to.
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rallyboy touches my balls with hidw words
I just caught the end of Question Time.
Has George Galloway morphed into Elvis Costello?
This is just as much about Chilcot as it is Corbyn, but a good read nonetheless. JC is one of the few to emerge from Chilcot with any credit, which makes him the only person that can lead this party.
Falconer came across as a right twat - and thankfully that member of the audience told him so.
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Exactly what I believe and the only reason why I think that if Labour want to be the next government they have to change leader.
It has nothing to do with how good he is or how good he has come out of the report, it is purely how marketable he is to the general public, not the people that will want to actually understand policies and make up their minds, to the general public who just need to be sold a figurehead.
Busy times.
Cameron - Gone
Boris - Gone
Blair’s ‘legacy’ - Gone
Farage - Gone
Truth on Leadsom’s CV - GoneCorbyn - Going nowhere.
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Two ways to take that - pompey are going nowhere.
Isn’t it a terrible state of affairs that politics is about personalities and ‘marketability’ instead of policies and conviction though? It’s people’s perceptions of what the priority is that needs to change, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to keep perpetuating the myth the greasy spivs make the best leaders.
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Boris being a recent example of PR style over substance - good old Boris, he’s a laugh, a man of the people.
No, he’s a clueless self-obsessed buffoon who ran away as soon as it was time for action.
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I do think you do him a bit of a disservice, I think he is far more intelligent that his persona would have you believe
There’s a reason he ran away and Gove ain’t telling
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Members or MPs - who’s in charge of the Labour Party?
question of who runs the Labour Party. Is it the MPs who overwhelmingly oppose him, or the membership which overwhelmingly backs him?
Labour’s fixation on parliament has always meant a hugely privileged position for its MPs. From 1922 to 1981 they had a monopoly on choosing a leader.
The first act of the first Labour MPs in 1906 was to form what is still formally a separate party, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).
Labour’s 1907 conference made clear that members’ democratic decisions couldn’t bind MPs.
Philip Snowden, later Labour’s first chancellor, said, “Conferences will talk; let them talk. Governments, including Labour governments, dispose of conference resolutions.”
That’s been the practice ever since, right up to Ed Miliband’s front bench ignoring a hard-won conference vote to renationalise Royal Mail.
That’s why a PLP of 242 people now thinks it can face down a Labour membership of 400,000.
The PLP’s independence expresses an unbridgeable division at Labourism’s heart. The Labour project of winning reforms through parliament relies on looking two ways.
Force
Labours deputy leader Tom Watson
Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson (Pic: Chris Boland/Flickr)
It has to convince workers they have class interests of their own and need a party to represent them. Many workers look to Labour as a force for change. Without this Labour loses its base.
Yet it also has to show that it can rule for “the nation”—not just the “private interests” of workers.
MPs say they are answerable to their constituents of all classes, not just Labour’s working class membership. They mean that they have to show they can be trusted not to endanger ruling class interests.
As bosses’ and workers’ interests are irreconcilable so, ultimately, are the tensions in Labour. The separation of the PLP creates a distance that makes them manageable.
As Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein wrote in their book, The Labour Party—A Marxist History, “Much of the history of Labour revolves around the struggle for dominance between the party leadership centred on the PLP and its supporters outside.”
Yet the PLP doesn’t have fully free rein—as Snowden and his leader Ramsay MacDonald found when they formed a coalition with the Tories in 1931. The bulk of the party didn’t go with them.
There are limits to what its members and structures will take, with union leaders playing a key role.
Battles inside Labour have taken many forms over the years, particularly as capitalism becomes less able to concede positive reforms.
But neither side can finish the other off without destroying the party—an outcome that’s increasingly plausible.
It will be an outrage if the PLP topples Corbyn. But it will also be a tragedy if the aspirations of Corbyn’s supporters are held back by Labourism’s limits.
Power in the unions - but which side are they on?
Over-zealous attempts to marginalise union leaders inside Labour may have handed them back the balance of power they held historically.
Union officials mediate between classes. They live by showing workers that they can win some gains from bosses, but also that the gains bosses concede are good enough.
This makes them masters at the Labour balancing act.
For a long time their main role in Labour was using union members’ “block vote” to veto the left wing demands of the working class membership.
But after the bitter 1980s Labour’s mass base dwindled and so did union influence.
Tony Blair moved Labour’s centre of gravity so far to the right that union leaders found themselves to its left.
After unions kept David Miliband from becoming leader, Ed Miliband went on the offensive. He hounded the Unite union for attempting to get its supporters selected as candidates.
He removed union block votes and opened leadership elections to non-members—presumed to be former Tory and Lib Dem voters.
This was meant to free Labour from any remaining accountability to workers, turning it into a purely electoral party more like the US Democrats.
Instead working class people with hopes of real change flooded in behind Corbyn.
No longer being channelled through union leaders’ block votes, they gave an historic mandate to Labour’s most left wing leader in 90 years.
Union leaders once more stand between a renewed, more working class and more left wing membership and a largely contemptuous PLP.
So far they back Corbyn—but at a price. Unite general secretary Len McCluskey’s support could be decisive—and dependent on Corbyn softening his opposition to Trident nuclear weapons.
Union members must ensure their leaders don’t betray Corbyn or squander workers’ money on the MPs who stabbed him in the back.
Making executive decisions
There are other centres of power inside Labour. One is its full time apparatus of around 200 organisers, researchers, spin doctors and wannabe ministers.
They answer to the general secretary—currently Iain McNicol.
In local Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) a tension between councillors making cuts and activists who joined to oppose them replicates the tension over the PLP nationally.
And the national executive committee (NEC) brings together representatives of all wings of Labour to test the balance between them.
Current members range from Corbyn’s staunch ally Dennis Skinner to Angela Eagle, who could be the one to challenge Corbyn for leader.
Elections for CLP representatives on the NEC run until 5 August.
Labour left group Momentum has made it a priority to get Corbyn supporters elected—in the face of similar efforts from right wing group Progress.
To howls of hypocritical outrage, some activists raise the possibility of getting CLPs to deselect sitting MPs in favour of candidates who represent them.
But for our class to win we have to fight on the battlegrounds where we are strongest.
That isn’t inside Labour’s bureaucracy, but on the streets and in the workplaces.
Article Information
Background Check
Thu 30 Jun 2016 - Socialist Worker.
Sim, long read that. Is it from an article?
Like what Bojo did to that pig at that dinner
Yes Socialist Worker article. I did put it at the bottom. I have since found it online. I was going to take a picture.
Ah yes. It was. Found it a bit hard to read in that format. Not sure why.
Ah I remember having arguments with socialist workers when I were young.