Very impressed but my issues aren’t with him or most of his policies just that I really want a labour government and still don’t believe that they will get elected with him in control.
I don’t like how he acted when he refused to sing the national anthem and I’m a bit of a royalist and think if you don’t like having a royal family then fuck off to a country without one.
On your question of who to replace him, I’ll be honest I haven’t a clue.
what we need is someone who is a little less left wing but will still implement the most important policies but has a more polished public persona to convince the middle of the road voters to vote labour.
I genuinely don’t mean to patronise, but I don’t think people understand the concept of left wing and right wing.
At its core, the question was “who gets to own the means of production?” Communists said state, capitalists said private industry, Your basic left and right wings, without the speeches.
It has always been a question of balance. If we expand “means of production” to the rather cruder “shit we all need”, where does that balance lie? Our social programs are now “free at the point of use”, to use an NHS term. When Labour say that, they’re invoking the old Nye Bevan words, meaning it’s not a charity. When Tories say that, they usually mean it’s going to cost later.
When you consider that balance, it’s nearly all private. Even state initiatives, such as health care, social services, are often mere funnels into private industry, often with disastrous results. We remember the financial collapse of Southern Cross, and the numerous cases of abuse in privately owned care facilities up and down the country.
This ain’t my line, but Owen Jones reckons we’ve still got socialism; it’s just socialism for the rich. I think there is a debate to be had about where the balance lies if we’re to address some of the problems. Unfortunately, I don’t see any other politician outside of Corbyn’s camp that is even considering it.
Problem is, that’s all lefties have been considering for years.
I don’t like how he acted when he refused to sing the national anthem and I’m a bit of a royalist and think if you don’t like having a royal family then fuck off to a country without one.
Or we could just have a revolution and behead the queen.
if you think people should “fuck off” to another country if they don’t want a royal family, I would say that your earlier classification of “a bit of a royalist” is quite inaccurate. You sound fucking mental and obsessed.
Do youthink singing a national anthem makes you more patriotic than someone who doesn’t? Does it make someone a better citizen or person?
Not quite. Marx’s view was that the means of production were in the hands of the bourgeoisie but should be in the hands of the proletariat. His belief was that capitalism could and should be overthrown, being initlally replaced by socialism, which would entail having a proletarian rather than a bourgeois state; this would then move towards communism, during which transition the state itself would “wither away” as it would become redundant. In a communist society, as Marx envisaged it, the answer to “Who owns the means of production?” would be either “everybody” or “nobody”.
But then that was in 1848. Popular definitions of ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ etc. are very different now. Most people consider China to be a communist country, for example, whereas in reality it has a state capitalist economic system, with a cerain amount of private capitalism thrown in. It’s cerainly safe to say that there has never been a communist society; a country run by an entity calling itself the Communist Party should not be taken as that.
Other than that, I can only agree with you. Hadn’t heard Owen Jones’ “socialism for the rich” line before, but I think I can see what he means.
Nope but how insulting can you possibly be to do it straight to her face
And sorry if I came on a bit strong and did sound a bit fanatic didn’t I.
How can you not? Her face is everywhere. Hers is the image that every British citizen will carry around most. You’ll carry more pictures of the Queen than you’ll probably take of your kids in a lifetime.
Corbyn is now a party leader, a potential Prime Minister if he can get the votes. As a leader, there should be loads of paths open to him. He could have formed a bullying cabal just like Blair did, doing a my way or the highway thing from day one. Would have been a risky strategy, but it would have put him on the front foot.
He didn’t do that. He tried to build a broad Labour movement representing all of the interests. He has a different opinion on the monarchy than you, but certainly can’t be accused as holding the institution or the views of those that support it in contempt.
I wouldn’t have sung the national anthem either. If you don’t believe in gods and don’t believe in the institution of monarchy, there’s not much to shout about.
Mr McDonnell argued that the challenge is not about Mr Corbyn, saying it instead targets his supporters, and the hundreds of thousands who joined the party since he was first announced as a leadership contender last year.
“It’s about you, you’re the problem,” he said. “How dare you elect a socialist as a leader for the Labour Party.
“They want to return to when they had Labour leaders who made noises about challenging the system but were easily incorporated into it.
“They want to return to politics as normal, which is simply returning to the elite and nothing more. This is the one per cent telling the 99 per cent to get back in your place.”
Some more interesting stuff this morning from LSE.
Three-quarters of newspaper stories about Jeremy Corbyn in the first months of his leadership either distorted or failed to represent his actual views on subjects, a study has found.
Academics at the London School of Economics analysed the content of eight national newspapers between 1 September and 1 November 2015, when Mr Corbyn was first elected.
The media researchers found that in 52 per cent of articles about the Labour leader, his own views were not included – while in a further 22 per cent they were “present but taken out of context” or otherwise distorted.
In just 15 per cent of 812 articles analysed, Mr Corbyn’s views were present but challenged, and in only 11 per cent were they present without alteration.
The Labour Coup just won’t die. It has become the masked killer from a b-list horror film. Lurching from one unlikely scenario to another, staunchly surviving an endless series of self-inflicted wounds, each one alone capable of felling a lesser being. Most observers knew it was all over the moment Corbyn refused to resign, if it survived that it was only by clinging to faint hope that they could keep him off the ballot. The NEC’s vote effectively put a stake through its heart. It is over.
The frantic struggling, as the traitors in the PLP and their media accomplices refuse to go quietly, is frankly undignified. The weasel-worded insinuations, and laughably obvious attempts to rig the rules, are pathetic. If the vote is anything even vaguely approaching fair, then Corbyn will win. The slimy tactics of his opponents will only drive people to the other side.
