The Chairman Mao resembling, Monarchy hating, threat to Britain, Labour Party thread

[MakemineVanilla]

A lot of cant about equality is all well and good but sooner or later Labour have to decide who is to be made more equal to whom.

Unless Labour target the top 15% who have increased their share of the nation's wealth, which seems unlikely, they will have to take more money from the 55-82 percentile, who have lost the most over the past decades, because their wages have remained flat despite substantial increases in their productivity.

Going into a General Election Labour would have to explain all this to the people they are planning to tax.

Until then, such Welsh windbaggery is meaningless. 

 

Edited July 18, 2016 by MakemineVanilla

[chrisp65]

stay classy MMV

 

 

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, hippo said:

Yeah - don't copy someone who 3 elections. 

 

21 minutes ago, hippo said:

All true - but it doesn't alter the fact he won 3 elections. 

The year is 2016. Nobody is denying that Blair won three elections, but copying him would be supremely pointless unless you were sure that the public would vote for Blairism now. 

I see no evidence to suggest that they would. 

[HanoiVillan]

Richard Murphy's post-mortem on his involvement with Corbyn and McDonnell is brutal and gets to the heart of the disappointment:

'So why didn’t things work out? There are four fundamental reasons.

The first was a lack of conviction. John McDonnell became shadow chancellor and the first thing he said was he would sign up to George Osborne’s bizarre, and now abandoned, fiscal charter, guaranteeing a balanced budget. It was lunacy. I told him so. He still put it in his conference speech only to have to U turn on it. But the damage was done, and has remained done. The message was clear: a Corbyn / McDonnell opposition was going to do economic policy on Tory ground. Radicalism disappeared and never returned. Labour’s own fiscal charter is evidence of that: it was re-heated neoliberals Balls at best. If this was meant to be what left wing economics was meant to deliver then it looked very much more like a lot more of the same failed policies to me based on a total misunderstanding of what the role of the government in the economy actually is..

Second, Corbynomics disappeared. PQE, which had been the defining economic and industrial symbol of Jeremy’s election campaign – the policy that was going to deliver growth, jobs, new industry and hope – might well have never happened. It’s taken Stephen Crabb and Theresa May to revive it.  In its place nothing was offered at all; just vague words at best for months and then reference to a National Investment Bank on occasion but nothing else.

Third, I had the opportunity to see what was happening inside the PLP. The leadership wasn’t confusing as much as just silent. There was no policy direction, no messaging, no direction, no co-ordination, no nothing. Shadow ministers appeared to have been left with no direction as to what to do. It was shambolic. The leadership usually couldn’t even get a press release out on time to meet print media deadlines and then complained they got no coverage.

Fourth, and critically, there was no vision. A team of economic advisers were set up, but never properly consulted, let alone listened to. Three enquiries, into the Treasury, Bank of England and HM Revenue & Customs were established and given far too long to report: none has as yet. I gather the tax report is in draft: I have not seen it. Whether it will be presented is anyone’s guess. The Bank of England study has collapsed with the departure of Danny Blanchflower. Of the Treasury report I haven’t a clue. The point is though that for coming on for a year now policy has been on hold for these reports and the world has moved on. That’s just not competent.'

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/07/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-corbyns-economics/

'Danny' Blanchflower has expressed similar sentiments. These are not right-wing people; nor are they Blairites. They signed up to the program in the first place, but have given up in despond at how useless Corbyn's opposition is. I share their sentiments. Unfortunately, I've yet to see anything competent to replace him. 

[darrenm]

http://www.thecanary.co/2016/07/18/truth-trident-shocking-fact-turn-us-paying-nukes/

"

The main companies involved in Trident are US multinational Lockheed Martin (who produce the missiles), BAE Systems, Babcock & Wilcox and Rolls-Royce – who are involved in the Successor programme – and also names like Bechtel, Honeywell, Raytheon and Serco who are contracted or subcontracted in relation to the current Trident system.

According to the House of Lords register of interests, around 15% of sitting members are directors of, or shareholders in, companies that are either directly contracted to the Trident programme or invest in it.

Prominent names include Lord Hollick, a Labour Peer who is a director of Honeywell. Lord (William) Hague, chair of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). RUSI, who are supposedly impartial US and UK government defence advisors, are sponsored by Babcock, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Rolls-Royce.

But one of the most telling individuals is Labour’s Lord Hutton, defence secretary under Gordon Brown. He is an adviser to Bechtel, consultant for Lockheed Martin and chair of the Nuclear Industries Association (NIA). The revolving door (the phrase used to describe MP’s who, once finished in parliament, go into jobs related to their previous role) has never spun so quickly.

It may be no wonder then, that the majority of parliament (excluding the SNP and the Green party) are supportive of renewing Trident.

"

No wonder most of Conservative and Labour are terrified of Corbyn getting in and scrapping Trident - they'd lose their pensions.

[blandy]

23 minutes ago, darrenm said:

http://www.thecanary.co/2016/07/18/truth-trident-shocking-fact-turn-us-paying-nukes/

Quote

 

According to the House of Lords register of interests, around 15% of sitting members are directors of, or shareholders in, companies that are either directly contracted to the Trident programme or invest in it..

It may be no wonder then, that the majority of parliament (excluding the SNP and the Green party) are supportive of renewing Trident."

 

No wonder most of Conservative and Labour are terrified of Corbyn getting in and scrapping Trident - they'd lose their pensions.

That's a dreadfully put together argument. Because 15% of the house of Lords have some sort of connection or interest with companies involved, that the house of parliament is in favour of it. Awful by the canary. Just woeful and indicative of how, unless better made cases are put, the argument they have will repeatedly be lost.

[chrisp65]

Just about to post the same thing. Really poor and lazy and relying on people seeing something they already want to believe.

15% of the House of Lords is not a majority of anything. Not least a majority of something other than the House of Lords.

He article finishes by describing the threat as a threat that doesn't exist.

I'd be interested to see a poll of how many people think there is or isn't a significant threat to us out there. Nukes might not be your personal solution to it, but to say the threat doesn't exist is to hope people haven't actually read that far down the article.

Very poor.

[chrisp65]

1019 party members canvassed, all selected for being members before 2016

[blandy]

47 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

relying on people seeing something they already want to believe.

In a nutshell that's, sadly, how it seems to work these days. Things are won or lost based not on review and analysis of facts and of taking into account a range of expert views and then reaching a decision, but on putting around "feelings" to arouse people's suspicions, prejudices, fears and hopes and then to recite something that matches the fear or hope they've planted, to get a vote.

A bit of it also applies to this "safe spaces" thing that seems to be catching on at Universities, where people with differing views, even orthodox ones, are barred from speaking or entering campuses. It's all a bit weird and worrying for people who would rather have an evidence based process or a process where views are exposed to scrutiny and then taken apart or taken onboard as having validity.

And it's not just a left wing thing. The method is slightly different between say UKIP and Momentum, but the result is the same - UKIP are "don't listen to the Governor of the Bank of England, he's in the pay of Brussels" and momentum are "Don't listen to the Governor of the Bank of England - he's a banker and they crashed the economy"

Everyone's a self appointed expert on everything, and no one wants to listen to actual experts, they'd rather just cast aspersions and make up spurious half-baked conspiracies. Grrr.

 

[MakemineVanilla]

9 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

 

The first was a lack of conviction. John McDonnell became shadow chancellor and the first thing he said was he would sign up to George Osborne’s bizarre, and now abandoned, fiscal charter, guaranteeing a balanced budget. It was lunacy. I told him so. He still put it in his conference speech only to have to U turn on it. But the damage was done, and has remained done. The message was clear: a Corbyn / McDonnell opposition was going to do economic policy on Tory ground. Radicalism disappeared and never returned. Labour’s own fiscal charter is evidence of that: it was re-heated neoliberals Balls at best. If this was meant to be what left wing economics was meant to deliver then it looked very much more like a lot more of the same failed policies to me based on a total misunderstanding of what the role of the government in the economy actually is..

 

Wasn't the fiscal charter the UK's version of the European Fiscal Compact, which sets the Euro nations' deficits to a limit of 3% of GDP?

Countries which fail to comply are fined 0.1% of their GDP a year (£2.1m for UK)

Denmark have made their own domestic policy to comply with the treaty.

Osborne's policy was more aggressive than the EU treaty in an effort to arrive at the sort of surplus New Labour had in 2000 (1.2%)

The UK's fiscal deficit was 4.4% in 2015.

Some economists say that it is austerity by treaty and just shrinks the economies and ensures that debt increases as a proportion of GDP and the countries remain in deficit: in short it is a race to the bottom.  

France are coming under pressure from the EU to reduce its deficit, even if at 3.9% it is better than the UK's.

 

 

[dAVe80]

Having watched Mhairi Black's speech against Trident, I can't help but wish she was in the Labour Party.

Sorry to link to The Mirror, but they have printed her full speech. Worth watching the video of it. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mhairi-blacks-powerful-speech-explaining-8446547 (Apologies Mods - The link feature doesn't seem to be working on my browser - please feel free to clean it up if want to, or I'll try to do so later)

Quote

Here's Mhairi Black's speech on Trident in full

Government Members seem to have the idea that we in the Scottish National party are against nuclear weapons for some kind of romanticised reason, but the reality is that we are against nuclear weapons and renewing Trident for logical reasons.

First, we have to remember the fact that, fundamentally, Trident is a weapon. We have already established that we would not fire first, so the only time that we would ever use this weapon would be if somebody launched a nuclear strike against us. To be frank, that would mean that we were all dead anyway. If I am dying, I do not care if we send a weapon back; I am more worried about the one that is coming towards me.

We keep hearing the phrase, “We can’t predict the future”, but if we are going to make defence policy, surely we have to think wisely about what we are deterring. What are the threats that we face? The 2015 national security strategy set out the tier 1 threats faced by the UK: international terrorism, climate change and cybercrime. How many terrorist attacks have nuclear weapons protected us or France from? The answer is zero. They have got hee-haw to do with climate change or cybercrime, so that brings us back to the argument that they are a deterrent, but only nine countries in the world have nuclear weapons. How come the other 180-plus countries do not feel the need to have this deterrent?

What other arguments are there for keeping Trident? We keep hearing that we need to keep it for the sake of jobs. Yes, it involves skilled engineers, scientists and workers who work very hard and are very talented, but why do we not invest the billions of pounds that we are proposing to spend on it in our energy and engineering sectors? Why do we not use that money in our renewable energy sectors? Climate change is a tier 1 threat to us, so why do we not spend that money on trying to tackle it?

If these weapons are not a security necessity and they are not necessary to save jobs, that prompts the question: what are they for? The fact of the matter is that this is all really about the UK maintaining a permanent place on the UN Security Council. As the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), who is unfortunately not in his seat, made clear, these weapons serve no purpose other than satisfying the ego of the British establishment. This is about us putting our stamp on a world from which we are isolating ourselves more and more.

Too many times, I have sat in this Chamber and heard, as my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) eloquently said, that we cannot afford to look after the disabled, we cannot afford to look after our unemployed and we cannot afford to pay pensions on time. We have heard Conservative Members say that they are the Government making the difficult choices, but the very same people who made the argument for austerity are now telling us that we can afford to write a blank cheque for these useless weapons. And for what? To preserve Westminster’s self-indulgent image of importance. This is all part of the Government’s long-term economic sham.

I want to provide some context about the reality of what this means. Paisley Gilmour Street, in my constituency, is the busiest railway station in Scotland outside Glasgow and Edinburgh, and it is one of the main routes on which nuclear waste is transported. Used nuclear rods come through my constituency, not in the dead of night but during the day when people are standing on the platform waiting to go to work in Greenock, or wherever else. If a mistake was made and an accident happened, it would be the equivalent of a dirty bomb. I put it to the Government that they, and their obsession with nuclear weapons, are one of the greatest threats facing my constituents.

 

[blandy]

14 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

Wasn't the fiscal charter the UK's version of the European Fiscal Compact, which sets the Euro nations' deficits to a limit of 3% of GDP?

No, it was stupid politics by Osborne, well actually it was just stupid. Which is why it's been dropped like a hot potato a the first opportunity.

It basically said that the gov't must take in more than it spends (including spend on infrastructure) every single year (it gave a handful of years to get to the point of surplus).

At any level beyond complete dunce, that makes no sense at all.

The EU thing is ( I think) more about the problems where you have a single currency across different economies at different stages in the cycle, and a desire to remain stable. Perhaps also not the best, I dunno, but not the same and not for the same reason as osborne's idiocy)

 

[blandy]

13 minutes ago, dAVe80 said:

Having watched Mhairi Black's speech against Trident, I can't help but wish she was in the Labour Party.

That, and other policies and speeches and so on are one of the main reasons why Labour isn't in power in Scotland any more. The SNP better represent what Labour used to, in most ways.

There are a number of counter arguments that can be made against her trident case, but that's another topic. Corbyn's arguments were pretty decent, too. to be fair. And slightly OT, but when May was asked "would you fire it and kill 100's of thousands of people she just said "Yes".  No qualification, no "with the greatest reluctance", no "it would be a massively difficult decision.." just a yes.

Do you take that as "psycho/lacking in any humanity or empathy" or "admirably honest" or "bulls**t" ? If the roles were reversed, the press would be all over Corbyn. "Psycho Corbyn will kill millions of innocent men, women and children" "Labour's unthinking warmonger" etc.

 

[chrisp65]

I actually thought she was going to say 'yes please'.

[dAVe80]

Looking at the page to sign up to become a "registered supporter" of the Labour Party, it seems they want to know your Twitter and Facebook accounts. I can understand them wanting to weed out people voting, who have an interest in another party, but this seems rather intrusive.

[blandy]

1 hour ago, dAVe80 said:

Looking at the page to sign up to become a "registered supporter" of the Labour Party, it seems they want to know your Twitter and Facebook accounts. I can understand them wanting to weed out people voting, who have an interest in another party, but this seems rather intrusive.

I don't think it's for weeding out - I mean surely it's easy enough to just not tick that you don't have a facepage or twitter? More likely they want to interact or whatever the phrase is - send you facepage messages or tweets n'that.

Then again, I suppose if people are daft enough to tell them and their facepage is full of anti-semitism or love for the tories or whatever then hoofing them out would be a good thing.

[OutByEaster?]

The pacemaker has dropped out.

I'm not sure she's done enough.

 

[dAVe80]

Jess Philips on the news, insinuating she would consider her position in the Labour Party, if Corby was voted back in as leader. There's another reason to vote for Jezza.

[Davkaus]

Not that great at this, are they. It's like LAbour and Turkey are competing in Shittest Coup of the Year, 2016.

Edited July 19, 2016 by Davkaus

[Chindie]

The Eagle served most of its purpose, and managed to spook out a mildly more viable candidate. Although one from the Trump school of rattling off any old shit that plays to the crowd and is allegedly the kind of bloke that decides TV is more likely to be interested in a woman than a party leader.

It's still a case of holding pattern until they ditch Corbyn and the real 'powers' come forward.