babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.
Syndicate
Support rabble | Advertise with us | Contact our staff | About rabble | Log-in or Register for a new account | Corrections | Privacy policy | Comment policy | Newsfeeds | Mailing lists
rabble: Features | Columnists | In Cahoots | Blogs | Books | Photos | What's Up | Polls
babble: Forum Topics | Active Topics
The rpn: About the RPN | Become a podcaster
rabbleTV: Program Guide | Features | Indie Inside | Best of the net
Copyright © 2001- the authors
Thanks, Meg.
At this point, it's prediction time, since the results will be announced Sunday.
Here's mine:
Corbyn 62%
Smith 36%
2% spoiled ballots.
After which, the PLP will AGAIN demand that Corbyn resign.
Corbyn and the Future of Labour: A Verso Report
Corbyn and the Future of Labour - a FREE ebook - looks back on an extraordinary year, in which the Labour Party and its membership changed almost beyond recognition. Already we have seen that the party is willing to move away from the centre ground for the first time in twenty years and beginning to offer an authentic alternative to the neoliberal doctrine of austerity. Perhaps the only thing the writers collected together here might agree on is that the road ahead is going to be hard.
This free ebook includes essays by Tariq Ali, Joanna Biggs, Rachel Shabi, George Monbiot, Jamie Stern-Weiner, Richard Seymour, Hilary Wainwright, Jeremy Gilbert, Alex Williams, Ellie Mae O'Hagan, Michael Rosen, Aaron Bastani, Lindsey German.
Thanks for that.
Nice! Here's what CBC said:
From that CBC story:
The battle just moves on
It's clear the Blairites will have to be purged from the party. When they cannot accept the decision of the membership, it's time for them to move on, or buy Conservative memberships, a party where they'll feel much more comfortable.
The Bastards Live
Far from vanquished, Blairites are playing a long game to win back the Labour Party.
quote:
This is a significant shift from the complacency of the “modernizers” in the runup to Corbyn’s victory. It also marks a break from the tone-deaf spite of some backbench MPs. It tacitly recognizes that simply pointing out that they believe Corbyn is “unelectable,” and that his supporters don’t really want to govern, is at best ineffectual and worst counterproductive to their ends.
Currently, the Blairites are thinking several steps ahead. Their strategy is to split off as much of Corbyn’s soft-left support as possible, and use it to break the Corbyn wedge. As in the 1980s, they hope that in so doing the soft left will exhaust itself and hand the leadership over to a revived and confident new right. Indeed, the evidence is precisely that by letting the soft left and the old right lead the resistance from the backbenches, they are achieving just that.
To that end, they advocate a “legacy group” to carry on Owen Smith’s “soft left” critique of Corbyn in the coming years. Only a fool would imagine that this is because Progress suddenly believes there is mileage in the politics of Ed Miliband. And just in the nick of time, a number of anti-Corbyn backbenchers have declared a relaunch of the old soft-left Tribune group. In the interim provided by their holding up the rearguard of the battle, they aim to reconstitute themselves and work out what a twenty-first-century Blairism could look like.
Crucially, they are not talking about a split. It is very clear that they regard coexistence with the current membership as an impossibility. Blair and some of his allies openly declare that the membership is the problem, but the preferred way of expressing this is to attack proxies like Momentum or “Trots.” They mean to fight, but to fight from within. This means gradually converting waverers, and driving the rest out in demoralization.
Theirs is a long game. They are used to letting others do their dirty work, while they operate as a tightly knit minority forging alliances behind the scenes. They have form in allowing demoralization and acrimony to do a lot of their work, while they slowly appropriate just enough of the thematics of their opponents to gain the edge. And they have no qualms about brutally antidemocratic practices, even if they prefer to outsource where possible.
Blair’s talent for “delegating nastiness” was infamous back in the day. In some ways, they resemble the popular caricature of a Leninist vanguard: professional politicians who aspire to bring correct theory, strategy, and tactics to an otherwise passive and largely incapable base.
Congratulations Ken on your very accurate prediction of the leadership vote.
Permit me to make a prediction about the next British election if the new 500 seat map is implemented and if Labour continues to be cursed by Corbyn's "leadership":
Con 350 seats
Labour 100 seats
Others 50 seats
This bleak outcome is pretty much what current polling indicates.
At least the Labour party will be able to console itself in its purity.
If that result happens, it will be solely because the Blairites will find some way of sabotaging Corbyn's chances in 2020.
Would you at least agree that all efforts to remove Corbyn from the leadership should stop?
That everyone who said they were trying to remove Corbyn because of their supposed concern about helping the vulnerable should prove that they care about the vulnerable by ceasing their campaigns to delegitimize and remove the leader the vast(and now-increased)majority of the party wants as its leader?
That they should back him in parliament rather than screaming "Sit Down and Shut Up!", the way a right-wing Labour MP did as Corbyn was speaking in the HoC on the Chilcot Report?
There was never any possible way that dumping Corbyn and moving the party back to Blairism could ever have increased its support.
There was no polling evidence that ever supported the argument that making Owen Smith(or Angela Eagle, before Smith entered the race) leader would raise Labour's poll ratings. If there had been, the Smith campaign would have trumpeted it to the skies.
You increase a left party's vote by making a coherent and confident argument for change...not by saying, in effect, "we're done with all that socialist nonsense and we hate activist scum as much as the Tories do".
Wow Nicky it is apparent that you don't believe a political party should represent the views of the majority of its membership. What should citizens do to get their voices heard if they don't believe in the neo-con inevitablity. Obviously in your opinion joining the Labout party is not the proper method because that is a party that needs to remain true to its neo-con heritage. Should they maybe just shut up and leave the field to the Blairites and Conservatives because resistance is futile?
If the voters wanted Blairism back, Liz Kendall would have won the leadership in 2015. Instead, she took 4.5% of the vote.
It's time to stop acting as if Corbyn has no right to be leader and should have just resigned.
The triumphalism of the Corbyn camp is to be expected and not entirely unwarranted given the result: it was a nasty campaign as are most civil wars and a lot of scars will remain for some time.
IMHO, Corbyn has little to no prospect of rebuilding Labour fortunes with the national electorate before 2020. As I have said previously, my own sense is that the overwhelming PLP vote of non-confidence was a deathblow to Corbyn's Prime Ministerial ambitions. But others are more hopeful - and we will see what we will see. If Corbyn does fail as miserably as Nicky predicts, the Corbyn crowd will bray no doubt about a biased media and Blairite betrayal: it is what they do best. (I see Ken is already test driving that excuse today!)
The internal party challenge for a Corbyn Labour Party moving forward will be to see whether they can build bridges to the long-standing membership of the Labour Party that voted overwhelmingly for Owen Smith. These are the long-term party members, canvassers, local councillors, etc who have been the backbone of the party for years, but who have since been numerically overwhelmed by the recent influx of Corbyn supporters.
Time will tell whether the new arrivals have the same long-term commitment to party and electoral processes. Or, having won the Corbyn battle this summer, will they now move on to polar bears and ice caps? Are the new members willing and able to build a viable electoral campaign that reaches out on the door step to other (less driven? more mainstream?) voters? Or are they irrevocably stuck in a tight little bubble of like-minded believers, disparaging all those 'others' whose views do not quite match theirs?
If the Corbyn cheerleaders here on Babble is at all indicative of those in the UK, the signs are not encouraging. Their sustained and facile insistence upon characterising all Corbyn critics within the Labour Party as “Blairites” and neo-cons does not leave much room for optimism.
The Labour party membership had the right to vote for Corbyn just as the electorate at large has the right to vote against him, which according to all polls it will do in record numbers
There is a democratic process in the Labour party that allows for annual challenges to the leadership. In order to avert the disaster that awaits it under Corbyn perhaps there will be another challenge. There is nothing undemocratic about that.
It is highly misleading to proclaim that the "Blairites" sabotaged Corbyn when in fact he sabotaged himself. Since he was first chosen and until the new challenge was launched there were 86 opinion polls, as reported in the New Statesman. The Conservatibves led in 82 and 4 were tied.
I don't think much is gained in these discussions by throwing around the term "Blairite" with the same abandom that Joe McCarthy threw around "Commie."
Corbyn won the overwhelming majority among full paid party members. What difference does it make how new members voted as opposed to longer-standing ones.
Labour needs to keep getting people to join it, Every old-time party member was a new one at one time. Why should the old liners(Corbyn couldn't have done THAT badly among them if he took 57% of party members overall) be given special deference over everyone else.
And Nicky, seriously, for the love of goddess, you can't really be saying that nothing has changed and the attacks on Corbyn from the right should just go on.
Continuing to challenge the guy(you know he's going to win everytime, and that the NEC will no longer have an anti-Corbyn majority to try to rig the rules to make sure he eventually loses)can only hurt Labour. If someone else were to win after, say, the THIRD successive challenge, how could that challenger ever be able to unite Labour behind her or him? Having done everything possible to destroy party unity, by what right would such a person ever have to demand unity behind her or his leadership? You do realize that Labour is doomed to defeat if Corbyn's supporters are driven away, don't you?
Why can't you just accept that this is settled and that the only reasonable thing would be to stop trying to oust the guy?
He's earned a united party now.
And Corbyn would be calling for unity behind Smith if the result had gone the other way.
The numbers show that Corbyn picked up a lot of support from party members in this latest challenge. Your analysis is not based in numbers just yoour perception.
In 2015 he got the support of 121,000 full members the combined oppostition got 123,000, This time he got 168,000 to Owens 116,000. Owen couldn't even get the same backing as the oppostition to Corbyn in 2015. The full members vote was the closest and Owens did even worse with the two other voting types.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/24/labour-leadership-jerem...
From your quote epaulo13
Kind of a backwards comparison, since at the time it wasn't Tribune, but the left of the party - Militant - which was pushing an agenda to co-opt the party.
This is less about ideology than it is about legitimacy. As much as the caucus might think they wield control here and can remake Labour, they aren't the party. The membership just showed them that.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/24/i-fought-labour-ha...
We don't havew to 'test drive' an excuse about Blairite betrayal. As I showed in my post above, a leading Blair adviser from the old days has already stated clearly that he will continue the fight against Corbyn.
How do you 'build bridges' to someone who has already said they will continue to fight to have you removed? Seems to me the shoe is on the other foot. Why don't the old Blairites come forward and say, 'Look, we were wrong to try and tear the party apart. We yield to the membership, but would like to bring our concerns to the Leader of the Labour Party, Mr. Corbyn'?
Look, they tried everything. They did all they could to defeat Corbyn, including throwing around ridiculous accusations about 'Trots' (which gives the 300 Trots in the UK a big boost), they tried using the rules ot eliminate Corbyn supporters, the flung accusations of anti-Semitism, they did it all, and they lost.
Now you're saying it's up to Corbyn to go to them and try to assuage their hurt feelings, and convince them he will run the party as Blair would. My question is, is the Labour Party democratic or not? If it is, it's time for the minority to accept the decision of the clear majority, and start working towards the next election. Thsoe that can't accept the decision of the majority should probably go and join another party.
A part of the job of a political party, especially one of the left, is not to bow to prevailing attitudes, but to try and change them. We just saw here what that bowing to the 'mainstream' did in the last election. It left the NDP out in the cold.
We accept that mainstream media hold the captialist viewpoint. If we want to achieve some success, we have to do what we can to try and change attitudes within the situation that exists. Just saying we have to appeal to 'mainstream' voters changes nothing. In fact, it just accepts what is there. But what then is the purpose of the party?
The result of taking your attitude towards things was the Blair Labour party going to war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya. Blair was always there to be lieutenant in the 'coalition of the willing'. the puppet on Bush's knee, who was the puppet on Cheney's knee. What an acheivement for Labour.
You don't necessarily have to be a Corbyn supporter. You might just be a supporter of party democracy. And that's the difference between Corbyn supporters and opponents.
Kropotkin wrote: Your analysis is not based in numbers just yoour perception.
Nice try, Krop. But unlike other Babblers, I do not presume that my powers of 'perception' from an ocean away are infallible. My comments about longer-standing members overwhelmingly supporting Smith were actually based on the YouGov exit survey of voters, the report of which can be found here:
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/09/24/labour-members-exit-poll-corbyn-win...
And I see today's Daily Mirrror headline on this story reads: "Long-term Labour members chose Owen Smith by a landslide in leadership election, exit poll says".
Rev Pesky wrote: You don't necessarily have to be a Corbyn supporter. You might just be a supporter of party democracy. And that's the difference between Corbyn supporters and opponents.
How droll, given that Corbyn consistently and repeatedly voted in Parliament against his own party whip - over 500 times according to some reports. But now HE's in charge - and he and his followers are really going to crack the whip on all those others for disloyalty.
And with not a shred of irony, - nor whiff of hypocrisy.
Most of the people in the party AREN'T "long-term" members. Therefore, the fact that the long-timers(now a trivially small group that is only going to keep getting smaller, through old-age and death if nothing else)does not delegitimize Corbyn. And the results among long-timers are skewed due to the fact that many long-time members who expressed public support for Corbyn or (horror of horrors) called Smith supporters "Blairites"(why, exactly, is it a bannable offense to call people who are nostaligic for the Blair era "Blairites", when it is apparently just fine to slur Corbyn supporters as "Trots" in an era in which Trotskyism is essentially extinct in the UK)were suspended or expelled and therefore denied the right to vote. One of the long-timers who got this treatment was Clement Attlee's grand-nephew, for Keir Hardie's sakes.
Also, for some inexplicable reason, Smith carried the 18-24 year old vote.
It's time to admit that no good can come of any continued efforts to remove Corbyn. There was never even any evidence that Labour's poll ratings would have risen with Smith as leader.
Smith lost in Wales and the Midlands(you'd have thought he could count on carrying his own country), the North, among women, among 40-59 year olds(so much for the myth that Corbyn's supporters were all irresponsible college kids and macho bigots).
Corbyn's lead was much stronger in the working-class heartlands than in London(so much for the notion that only urban cosmopolitans supported "Jezza".
All of this proves that continuing to try to bring the man down(I assume nicky and sherpa-finn will now concede that the PLP vote does not obligate him to resign) can only do harm.
And of COURSE Corbyn supporters want Labour to increase its vote share. None of them ever said that winning elections doesn't matter. It's just that they reject the idea that continuing to accept Thatcherism, being almost as pro-austerity as the Tories, preserving the anti-worker laws of the Eighties and bombing the living shit out of Syria are the only policies that CAN elect a Labour government(or that a government elected with all those reactionary commitments could still be "Labour" in any recognizable sense. They believe Labour can win by boosting voter turnout with policies people actually care about, while winning over voters from the Greens, the wing of UKIP that was anti-establishment rather than xenophobic(this accounts for half the UKIP vote share in 2015) is a more plausible path to victory than the Progress faction's insistence on trying to out-Tory the Tories.
No one who actually votes Tory on strong ideological grounds is ever going to vote for any party other than the Tories or UKIP. The only people who would switch away from them would be people who thought their whole approach had failed-they wouldn't swing to any other party that promised to be just barely different, or who actually tried to imitate Tory pomposity about foreign policy or Norman Tebbit's "cricket test" for immigrants.
Here is a piece from 2008. Apparently the only people left in the party at the end of the Blair years were Blairites. They sure have perfected infighting as an art form.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/2475301/Labour-membership-falls...
2031 onwards is the favourite for when Labour will next form a majority government.
Sometimes a betting market beautifully captures the political zeitgeist, and this market from William Hill eloquently expresses Labour’s current predicament with Jeremy Corbyn as leader, it’s not so much Labour are up a certain creek without a paddle, Labour are up that creek sans a canoe too.
If I were forced to choose, I’d go for the 2031 onwards option
http://politicalbetting.com/
Online betting didn't predict Occupy because betting is based on probabilities rooted in the past. Over the past 5 decades or so the move has been to the right.
No one would have predicted the Liberals rise from 3rd party status to majority government. The Liberals entered the election in 3d place.
What were the betting houses saying about Brexit? What about the pundits? To hear them tell it the financial markets of GB should have collapsed by now. What a shock the banks are still standing.
The right has a stranglehold on power worldwide so the chances of upending that are not high, but they are not non-existant either otherwise the right would not be putting so much effort into trying to convince the left they can't win so they should give up without trying.
This is a game of chicken between the lords and the serfs. The lords can't kill all of the serfs or they won't have anyone to generate their wealth for them. So, they convince the serfs not to fight back, and keep them busy fighting each other over other injustices. At the same time they insist they earned all their wealth and everyone else can do the same so it would be unfair to take theirs or even to compete their wealth generating enterprises. They are even establishing in trade law that citizens don't have a right to band together collectively to provide their own services without paying a penalty.
Corbyn is only moderate left but the MSM would have us believe is is a raving socialist therefore unelectable.
It's true he could lose the next election, and Brexit could have lost, we can't predict the future. Electability is an important consideration for any political party including on the left but when that becomes the only or primary consideration there is less and less reason to support the party. If the plan is pretty much stay the course then might as well stay with the current government. If a new party would just tweak things a bit why take the chance? Maybe that is why Labour's support has dropped, not the popularity of right-wing policy and corruption.
So you are right he could lose, but he can also win. Even if all he gets is keeping the Tories to a minority that would be a good start.
If Corbyn is too left wing for some MPs then maybe their positions as representatives of their ridings should be challenged by more left-wing candidates that do support Corbyn. Perhaps there are good candidates amongst the new membership.
It seems to me that neither sherpa-finn nor nicky believes that party members should be allowed to choose a leader, unless the savvy insiders like themselves approve of that leader. I suggest they work towards a new constitution for the NDP which only allows "approved" members to vote for "approved" leadership candidates.
Corbyniites have displayed NO misogyny(or antisemitism, or any other form of bigotry). They didn't throw a brick through Angela Eagle's office window, they didn't threaten female Labour MPs, and if they really were misogynists, Corbyn would not have carried female voters in a landslide.
There is a third option. They can give Corbyn full-throated support, unite the party and WIN the election. The choices are not a sharp swing to the right or defeat.
You just want Labour to go back to what it did under Blair...not disagreeing with the Tories on anything but trivial side issues. It couldn't be WORTH winning like that ever again, because that would be winning in name only.
Why not at least consider treating Corbyn and his supporters with respect and actually working WITH them?
It is the same reason that the apparatchiks in the NDP have tried and largely succeeded in marginalizing the left. The goal is power but it is power for the clique of insiders who believe they are entitled to the resources given to them by the members but without having to respect their wishes or political ideology. Just give us your money and your vote and we will be rewarded with jobs in Ottawa and you will get a wonderful liberal lite government that might be marginally better than the alternatives. No use talking about changing the world because there is no New Jerusalem ever coming.
https://noramulready.com/2016/09/24/labour-comrades-one-day-this-will-al...
"Here we are, again, having elected Jeremy Corbyn as the Leader of the Labour Party, solidifying a terrible chapter in Labour’s history with the cement of a fresh mandate for destruction. This time we know that appeals to Corbyn supporters about how poisonous, unelectable and just plain wrong the Party will become are pointless."