:labour: New Old Labour in trouble

She seems to have made quite an impression on you, Bob.

Did you pull that memory out of the wank bank?

I made the deposit.

One look at the poor souls Twitter page shows the inevitable shitstorm of bollocks being thrown his way. Predictable and daft.

I think he sums up my general views/doubts perfectly.

Likewise. Given the choice currently in front of Labour Party members (and I’m not one myself), I could only possibly choose Corbyn. But, like you, I have grave misgivings about his ability to win over the electorate generally. He can enthuse Labour members like hell, but so could Michael Foot.

Give it up, Smith.

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Originally posted by @Fowllyd

Originally posted by @Flahute

Originally posted by @Fowllyd

Originally posted by @Flahute

Owen Jones Nails It.

Excellent article - thanks for the link.

I think he sums up my general views/doubts perfectly.

Likewise. Given the choice currently in front of Labour Party members (and I’m not one myself), I could only possibly choose Corbyn. But, like you, I have grave misgivings about his ability to win over the electorate generally. He can enthuse Labour members like hell, but so could Michael Foot.

Jones didn’t bother to mention the Falkland Effect either.

Personally, I reckon Paul Mason has a better take on it.

What a mess Angela Eagle has made of her situation in Wallasey.

She’s claiming that she has suffered homophobic abuse at the hands of CLP members, a claim backed up by 17 of her CLP delegates. Most of the rest of the CLP are in uproar at the allegation being levelled in the first place, with those present at the meetings vehemently denying anything of the sort happened.

The article does confirm something that many have been saying all along. The infamous brick which apparently enabled Eagle to call for Corbyn to get his supporters “under control”, did in fact go through a communal stairwell, not Eagle’s office.

This is a different story than was told on the day. Now that’s confirmed, we know there was at least an element of choice about how you’d go about sorting that. Most people would call the building manager, who would then sort a glazer. They chose to patch it up with a Labour sign and make out on the national news it was Corbyn supporters wot done it.

While our elected Blairite Labour Police & Crime Commissioner Jane Kennedy is eagerly colluding in turning a bricked window into a national story with a seedy political bent, there are teenagers riding around Merseyside on scrambler bikes doing ride-bys.

Angela Eagle is irreconcilable with her own CLP, but it’s a situation largely of her own making. Her job is to represent her constituents. If the majority of her _members _are incensed about being falsely, labelled thugs, there’s no way back. She has lost the dressing room.

So I was at the Jeremy Corbyn rally tonight with ms pap and Juvenile Unit #2. I’ve already posted a photo which doesn’t come close to capturing all the people that were there. I’ve posted others on my Twitter feed. Having spoken with some colleagues tonight, I’m fairly sure that Smith didn’t get 100 people, once you take away his entourage. There were 7K-10K people on St George’s Plateau tonight, coming out in the rain, to see Jeremy Corbyn.

We arrived at 6:30pm and there were easily more people than Smith’s rally there at that point in time. At first, traffic was still swerving around the London Road corner, only having to do 2mph once they’d done so. It was too much. Eventually, the city just closed Lime Street. It didn’t reopen until after the rally.

I’ve met the compere before. He was at the West Derby CLP meeting, is a councillor for Croxteth, and did a speech at our last meeting in favour of Corbyn. He was a decent choice to lead proceedings, a stocky bloke full of fire. We had a series of local councillors do speeches first in support of Corbyn. They were alright. Rhea Wolfson did a speech and came across pretty well. I can see her being formidable if she hits the front benches. Scottish, passionate and already good with rhetoric, she’s got potential to do very well. She’s up for election for the NEC after being rejected by Scottish Labour’s Jim Murphy for her links with Momentum.

One of the best speakers was a nurse, speaking about the pressures that the privatisation and cuts agenda had put on the NHS, how that’s leading to increases in waiting times for kids, and repeating what a lot of us have suspected for a long time; that they want to run the NHS into the ground.

Steve Rotheram, running for Liverpool Mayor, was the last person to speak before Corbyn. Rotheram explained that last year, he was Burnham’s man, and did everything they could to get him elected. They came second, but as he remarked “we got whacked”. Said that in the year since, serving as Corbyn’s PPS, not only respects the huge mandate but also respects the man.

Corbyn himself was excellent. Most of the other speeches had been slightly marred by a combination of weather and circumstances. They were all conducted from the top of a fire engine with a big FBU sign on the side. There was no real protection from the elements, and most came rocking A4, grappling with them in the wind or sometimes employing assistants to turn pages.

Corbyn referenced a notebook from time to time, but I reckon most of that was just referring to the up to the minute stuff. Lloyds & BHS were both held up as examples of what is wrong with our system, he made reference to the total abolition of maintenance grants, making a good case for why training an engineer might benefit everybody.

Superbly good natured event. On the way back, ms pap made a confession. She’d attended the previous Corbyn rally out of a sense of obligation. She’s now going to join the Labour Party, and as many on here can attest, she has had fuck all interest in politics before and loves doing things to wind me up. She frequently regales me with stories of people from work that believe Corbyn is unelectable to do just that.

People ask how Corbyn’s politics can win an election. It’s people like ms pap, never involved or clued up in politics before, now taking an interest in doing both. It’s about people that have willingly ceded their powers to systems in the past questioning the nature of those systems, and asking whether they can be reformed.

We’ve all yarned for hours about apathy in the electorate, often eventually concluding that people don’t care because they feel politicians are dishonest shits and there is no effective choice anyway. That has changed. It’s why up to 10K people turned up to see Jeremy Corbyn tonight at one of most Liverpool’s most iconic locations, and your supposed appealing candidate mustering a ton at best on a dismal bit of wasteground on the edge of an industrial estate.

Mrs pap is slightly different to the rest of the electorate as they don’t have any obligation to you to attend such meetings. As Owen Jones said, those thousands of people you refer to are supporters already… What about everyone else? The general public aren’t backing him and that’s the problem

Who says people need to be obligated by partners? People are going to make their way to those rallies regardless, especially now they’re posting such big numbers. Besides, the huge growth in Labour Party membership since Corbyn took over the leadership suggests that she’s not an isolated case.

I know that she’ll return to that office, and can think of at least two people she’ll convince on Corbyn. If Corbyn wins the election, Labour could swell to over a million members. It’s now the fastest growing political party on the planet, but there seems to be this idea that once people join the Labour Party, they don’t count anymore.

The very thing you claim he can’t do is already happening. He’s waking people up that have either been politically dormant because they couldn’t stand holding their noses anymore, or completely politically inactive. It’s easy to forget those Labour sign up numbers are actually people, something i saw my with own eyes this evening with my never-before-arsed missus.

A lad on Twitter said it was the biggest crowd he’d ever seen for a politician outside India. Jeremy’s only supposed to have appeal inside his metropolitan Islington bunker, according to some pundits.

I like Corbyn and was very pleased when he became leader. He seems like a good egg and I’d be very happy if he was PM. The problem is, that isn’t going to happen. I’ve come round from thinking “so what, he’s exactly the sort I want to front the labour party, even if he won’t get elected” to thinking its best if he goes. Much of the criticism of him had been unfair and underhand but its what sticks in the voters minds that’s important. And, for whatever reason, they don’t like him. Those who set out to destroy him and his standing have won, I fear. And he hasn’t really helped himself. It’s time to face up to that.

I don’t believe you.

Don’t take it personally. I don’t believe the newspapers when their opinion writers spend four times as long arriving at the same conclusion. Fair play to you for both keeping your comment brief and actually acknowledging that he hasn’t had a fair crack of the whip, but you’re no further on.

I’d also take issue with your declaration of victory for the other side. The time to call that outcome has long passed - I think the high court case would have been the last, real opportunity to win. Most of all though, I take issue with the claim that voters don’t like him. I’ll admit that I’ve come across people online that are actively against him, but that really hasn’t been the experience out and about.

It’s not even like I have to rely on my own anecdotal account. Party membership is up, vote share is up across the country, including many marginals. Biggest party in the country, fastest growing in the world. Does that sound like a man voters don’t like?

It’s like that old Richard Pryor joke where his missus catches him shagging (Jeremy is electable) and he says he is not shagging (Jeremy is unelectable). Now the evidence in the “shagging” column couldn’t be clearer. His missus arrives home to find him hanging out of another woman. Bang to fucking rights.

He amazingly gets out of it by asking “Who you gonna believe babe? Me? Or your lying eyes?”

I’m going to believe my lying eyes, ta.

Those lying eyes:-

Originally posted by @Fatso

what about my post don’t you believe?

The rote repetition of the voters don’t like him/unelectable mantra that has been adequately destroyed by election results. That his political opponents have already won. That he can’t win a GE.

I’m not saying that he’ll definitely win a GE, but the idea that Smith will do any better is simply irreconcilable with the evident support you can see out there.

On the metric that determines the winner of a GE, the capture of Parliamentary seats, he’s done fine. Won all of the available by-election contests, and increased majorities in three quarters of them.

I’ve spent a year listening to people tell me that things definitely wouldn’t happen. The track record of the people you’re parroting has not been good. Not on the 2015 GE, not on Brexit and definitely not on Corbyn. How many hurdles of impending and immediate doom would he never clear, exactly? And yet he’s still about, defying the plotters in the PLP and every expectation.

If people have been so consistently wrong about Corbyn, why do I listen to them when they tell me that this one thing is definitely true, just like all the rest of it was?

At the risk of adding ammunition to Pap’s one-man Sotonians crusade to convince people to vote for Corbyn, I’ve never voted Labour, but would seriously consider it if Corbyn was leader (and if I happened to be in a constituency where it made a blind bit of difference if I voted for them… and as long as the local representative was a worthy candidate… but you get my drift).

I know I’m not representative of Britain, and certainly not representative of the ‘middle England’ that Flahute describes, but I AM someone who has been persuaded to vote for a party I’ve never voted for… because of Corbyn. Interesting, no?

I hasten to add that Pap’s constant deluge of pro-Corbyn propaganda has had absolutely no positive influence on my opinion! :lou_smiley:

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We’ve already had bTripz say similar, and he would lean Tory most of the time. You can even make the case with people more to the right :lou_wink_2: An exchange on the Corbyn rally I had last night:-

This is another tale of political awakening. Scroll down for the comment from Sarah. She’s the girl in the picture all gooey-eyed at Corbyn. It’s just one story among hundreds of thousands.

https://notsoloonyleft.wordpress.com/2016/07/30/what-is-the-deal-with-this-guy/

Hey, why doesn’t this link open in a new window?

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While Corbyn was entertaining 10,000, Owen Smith was being interviewed on Channel 4 News. Opinions may differ, but I think Guru-Murthy takes him to bits.