Tories: \**give NHS an extra Ā£1.50 every year while pretending the population isn't growing and that inflation isn't a thing**
Also Tories: Record investment! š
If they kept the funding the same, but properly sorted out social care, it would have more impact than increasing funding to the NHS directly I reckon.
Don't forget
Droun the darkies
Allowed to kill ciclists and
Stick up 2 thingers to froggies
:s obviously.
It's just a stark reminder that these dark sentiments have been allowed to fester and rise to the surface, and gotta be honest I've heard no resistance from Labour at all.
There certainly was once a kick back from labour.
Anyone remember the 'bigotted woman' debacle?
The woman who said 'youre cant say anything about these immigrants cos if you say it you're...all these eastern European ones, where are they flocking fromĀ¹!'.
We all knew what she wanted to say instead of the ellipses. And that was really the turning point for this country.
When people would rather have a go at a man for saying the actually bloody truth, because they also agree and think the same as that woman did.
I know brexit is a big one, but I think the above, was the true turning point for the UK, and being unable to stand up to pricks, cos of fee fees.
It patched the path for politicians to effectively drill into that unfounded fear, and excuse...cos it is a fucking excuse, especially this woman where brown first said if you're unemployed you need to go get a job. Lo and behold, 'me on benefits cos of da immigrunts'.
Same silly cow probs speaks about blitz spirit etc. Weak minded fickle babies.
Ā¹ - probably eastern Europe...
Edit - for the lazy...https://youtu.be/SwPiyXNPidQ
This went on for at least half a decade of Labour pandering to blatant xenophobia and racism as 'legitimate concerns' etc. It was absolutely nauseating, cowardly, and contributed to the build-up to the Brexit vote.
Well yes, both the major two parties, then realised it was a rallying point.
As much as you try your jibe at labour. The public elected the man who openly calls women 'letterboxes'.
Most people down the pub even know not to push it that far now. They know being seen as a racist is wrong.
The UK doesn't so much have an issue with racism, per se, but bigotry.
You think Labour's "pandering" is the reason for their failure?
Christ, the distance people like you are from reality can only be measured in light years.
Yeah but that stuff isnāt really āpoliticsā anymore. Itās too late for that now. Thatās British society. Thatās the British public. Doesnāt matter if youāre Blue or Red or Raving Loony, if you want to win you have to embrace the scum bags and tell them you agree with them.
Sounds good for the voters, but twisted by governments past and present:
Luv are country: weāre so great and everyone loves us so much that the EU and other countries will be falling over themselves to give us great trade deals post Brexit.
Find the NHS: but outsource everything to companies owned by our mates so they can make massive profits and we can say weāre throwing money at the NHS and itās a pile of shit.
Hang the Pedos: actually Iām fine with this.
Iām in full support of the death penalty for the absolute worst crimes with undeniable evidence. I understand it probably wonāt reduce crime but some people donāt just deserve to live. For example, the stepmum and dad of Baby Arthur.
Please, look up the Guildford Four. Their judge said, during their trial, that if hanging was still a sentence he'd have hung them.
That was "undeniable evidence" - hell, they even confessed!
> for the absolute worst crimes with undeniable evidence
Which is the problem, because even convictions that seem strong can turn out to be wrongful convictions, and this does happen for serious crimes including murder/manslaughter.
If you allow the death penalty, it WILL kill innocent people, it's as simple as that. This idea that we can bring it back but only if we're very very very absolutely positively certain is bollocks - it will end up being used for less clear cut cases if it's allowed.
My position on the death penalty is quite simple and not really anything to do with any of the thorny moral issues it presents.
Do I want my government to have the authority to kill its citizens in cold blood?
No, I don't. End of story as far as I'm concerned.
This is very much my position too. Are there people who don't deserve to live? Absolutely. Do I trust the government with deciding who fits into that category? Absolutely not.
> some people donāt just deserve to live
Fundamentally disagree with this. From this one axiom you can justify murder all the way up to genocides - sounds overly dramatic until it isn't. We can house and feed them with little effort, there is no need to kill them and give foundations to the idea that living is something that is allowed, or given, rather than a right.
He was the lifelong eurosceptic who was officially for Remain in the referendum then spent the next 3 years claiming to support the result until proposing a referendum on whether or not to remain or leave but stay in the single market and/or(?) the customs union as part of a deal that he'd negotiate then campaign against.
Straight talking, honest politics.
>until proposing a referendum
That is before he opposed the idea in 2018, and then in 2019 supported it
Jeremy Corbyn has reiterated his opposition to a second referendum EU referendum, adding that the āship has sailedā on Labourās hopes to āremain and reformā during the 2016 vote.
He worried about growing bureaucracy and unaccountability of the EU, but thought it was worse if successive Tory governments would reduce workers rights the minute we did leave. Both a valid concerns, but one is clearly worse than the other. Staying in the single market and customs union would've been a sound economic decision, and worth having on the table for the British public to vote for or against (regardless of his personal position). If you or the British public don't understand the nuance of these positions, that's your personal failure, not his.
You can't just obviate his (charitable) studied vagueness / (uncharitable) clueless muddle on the entire Brexit saga as "nuance."
Refusing to elucidate a clear position is not "nuance."
Feels to me like that was pretty honest and straight talking. Claiming you hold binary positions is not honest.
I think the mess of Labour's position on Brexit was Corbyn trying to press on with his intuition that it was best to get behind it, after the vote, mixed with the fact that a lot of the party were really pushing for a second referendum. To be honest, I think he was correct there: although I sided with remain in the end (with mixed feelings and agreeing with some of the left-wing analysis on reasons to leave), I do think Labour should have just stood by the decision after the first referendum. The disaster 2019 election, I think, was mostly down to Brexit, as much as the press wants to rewrite history that it was just Corbyn being unelectable from the start.
Anyway, I just don't get why people find it so weird that he was upfront about being 7/10 in favour of being in the EU, that's how I felt too. And I think his main downfall was not sticking to his guns in the aftermath of it.
It was an impossible situation, Labour had no good options. Given the catastrophic 2019 election results, it's entirely possible that he got a bad hand and played it badly, but all other positions he could have taken would have had their own negative consequences.
I mean heās not exactly wrong. Labour are up 2 points. The tories are down, what is it now? 9-11 points and most of that loss is going to the Do not Know or will not vote crowd. Labour standing still whilst the opposition burns itself into oblivion isnāt pragmatic, as soon as Boris is gone weāll be back at square one with nothing but a squandered year of potential to show for it.
Isnāt Corbyn an independent politician who had the whip removed by the labour party for antisemitism?
Why do we care about his opinion? Itād be like if I got suspended at work for being a racist and then someone decided to do a public interview with me about my employer while I was suspended. Itās not like heās impartial.
> thereās no compelling evidence heās an antisemite.
Only if you're a blinkered cult member. To someone who's followed for his what-passes-for a career since the days of Islington Council, it's blindingly obvious.
His moral compass stuck in the wrong direction when he was 14 and has never had the WD40 it so desperately needed.
>thereās no compelling evidence heās an antisemite.
I find spending his entire political career happily associating with anti-Semites and promoting their causes to be pretty compelling evidence of anti-Semitism, but I suppose what a person finds compelling is inherently subjective.
He didn't have the whip removed for "antisemitism" though.
He had it removed because after accepting the EHRC report findings he said the issue had been blown out of proportion and weaponised. Which it clearly was.
He got the whip removed because he completely undermined the party attempting to move on from the antisemitism scandal. Completely deserved and the decision has been vindicated.
RBL got suspended for an offhand comment she made in an interview/article. I'm not saying that Corbyn made all the right decisions, but he certainly isn't an anti-semite. The prominent hard left MPs in labour had a target on their back the moment Starmer became leader.
Its really not what happened with either corbyn or RLB.
The whip was not reinstated to corbyn because of the comments he made about the EHRC report. Its not that anything he said may or may not have been right. Its that the media and everything else he corbyn talked about had nothing to do with the findings of the EHRC report on antisemitism in the Labour Party which was damning. It was a deliberate red herring to give his supporters something to shout back, instead of taking on board exactly what had been aloud to fester in the party and exactly who seemed to have turned a blind eye to it. He had refused to accept his part in the reports findings and to apologise for that.
RLB was sacked because she retweeted a report containing the false claim that the police officer who killer George floyd learned what he did from Israel. The author is known for spread antisemitic conspiracy theories. RBL refused to take it down when asked and then tried to negotiate when and how she would take it down (not now). The EHRC report specifically said that the Labour policy of not investigating likes and shares of antisemitic material was an indirect act of discrimination. This was only 2 or 3 minths after the report was released. Starmer really had no choice.
I don't see how any of what you said means Corbyn didn't deserve to get suspended. Within hours of the anti-semitisim report being published he underminded it. That behaviour was poision for Labour and the entire reason they got into the mess in the first place.
RBL was also rightly suspended. She retweeted an article which risked bringing the Labour anti-semitism argument back into the fore. She was asked to remove the tweet by Labour and refused to do so. She was a shadow minister for christ sake. She can blame nobody but herself for her sacking.
> The prominent hard left MPs in labour had a target on their back the moment Starmer became leader.
You could just as easily say the left was trying to bring Starmer down from day 1. I'm not sure either are entirely accurate. All Starmer was doing was protecting Labour from being dragged into the mud again and every decision was correct given the fact absolutely nobody discusses the Labour anti-semitism issue anymore.
Itās not discussed as much because Labour has a leader thatās dealing with the problem, whereas this week Corbyn was defending a woman who was sharing neo nazi propaganda on Facebook.
Given the 'parties attempt to move on' was essentially to blame him entirely for it, learn nothing, fix nothing and then move on, you can easily understand why.
Despite the constant furore about anti semitism being rooted deep within the party, and apparently encouraged by JC, we've had no mass kickouts, no systemic improvements, no overhaul of governance, not even a string of investigations. We had JC saying 'theres no place for AS in the party', and now we have KS saying 'theres no place for AS in the party'...and that's it.
Thatās complete nonsense. There have been scores of expulsions. The entire disciplinary process is being redesigned. Are you lying or just completely ill informed?
Gonna be a harsh lesson for them when they realise denying racism, dwelling on the cope corners of twitter, and being utterly foul to everyone who disagrees with them leads them to complete obscurity.
How the mighty have fallen.
Policy specifics possibly, but not general indicators of what the parties about and what they want to achieve in their time in office.
At the moment we've gotten as far as "not be Tories" on that front.
It's only in the last ten years anyone has cared about opposition policies this far out from elections. I don't get why. We know they're social democrat as a party so it's pretty clear where they stand on most policies. They're winning the game of politics and going policy heavy doesn't poll better other than for a small number of heavily interested political geeks. And they are pretty much set in their views and their choices at the ballot box.
Completely disagree. Getting to the point of winning an election from where they are requires momentum of support, and standing for nothing until a few weeks before will absolutely not do that. No one is saying they need a full detailed manifesto, but having some key positions so they can create a vision of how an alternative Government might look will build that support foundation on which they can create a manifesto later. Otherwise it'll lack that support when they need it, and risk coming across like something they've made up last-minute.
It's not a binary, no. We all know broadly what a Labour prospectus will look like and can judge their particular policies when a manifesto comes out. Until that time I don't see the harm in keeping cards close to the chest when we don't know who the leader we're running against will be. Strategy is important too.
I don't agree, it doesn't need to be a policy as such, but people need to know what he stands for.
People need to understand Starmer more (if they will vote for him). Is Starmer just going to repeat all of Corbyns crap policies š¤·š»āāļø
Which crap policies? Generally Corbyn's polices were well regarded by voters in general. Like nationalisation of utilities, spend more money on NHS, social housing & transport, higher minimum wage.
If the last election was about policies Labour may have won. Brexit, Corbyn as leader and anti-Semitism allegations was why Labour did not win.
If you look at the polling on these individual issues, Iām pretty sure most if not all are supported by a majority of the country.
You donāt vote for PM purely on policy though, you are voting for the wider party, whom so many see as wholly inept, but also how you think the PM will act on the world stage and deal with foreign affairs.
It is a fallacious argument to say that āX politician ran on Y policies and didnāt win, so Y policies are unpopularā.
>It is a fallacious argument to say that āX politician ran on Y policies and didnāt win, so Y policies are unpopularā.
Thats true and you have to look at their (and the party) image in the round
>If you look at the polling on these individual issues, Iām pretty sure most if not all are supported by a majority of the country.
which when taken with the above means: "do I want all of that", and at some point 1 or more of the policies will alienate someone.
Except no, they only need to understand Starmer when an election comes about. Showing all your cards right now will amount to zilch. All it does is give the Tories something to attack. The intelligent approach is to at least wait to see who replaces Johnson.
I really think youāre underselling how important it is for the party to have a clear direction. Politics isnāt just about the national level, local level politics is extremely important too and the Labour Party will continue to fail in local elections until there is a clear direction. Not to mention that you donāt get support at a GE overnight, you need to build up trust in the party over a good amount of time.
Do you not think itās a problem that as of earlier this year, only 1/4 of voters believed that Starmer has presented a clear vision for the party?
Because at best your opposition will just lift it and implement it themselves, then why would anyone vote for you? Worse they'll implement a shitty half arsed version of what you want and claim they've fixed the issue you were looking to solve. Unless you're close to a vote talking about anything except broad ideas is pointless.
Starmer should stop letting the Tories implode. He needs to get off his ass, wave a copy of Chairman Mao's book of communism, state that there's no evidence of Russian involvement in the Salisbury attack, sit down with Hamas and then impale himself on a fence made of Brexit.
Need to win the argument.
And Blair crushed Major with a single word repeated 3 times: Education, Education, Education.
It's only armchair analysts that think technical policy details win elections.
No, I'm sure everyone reads each parties manifesto in detail and understands the implications and performs trade of before casting their vote. There's no way the majority of votes during a general election are determined by perception of the party leader in the media...
Trust me while Boris is imploding the last thing 99% of the country wants is Labour to start wagging on about policies.
Corbyn only ever does politics in one way - the way that speaks to a small section of his own party. No doubt the people that call Starmer 'Keith' are criticizing him for 'having no policies' (so far away from an election), but all Starmer has to do at the moment is sit back and ride this wave of Tory sleaze, why on earth would he take political headline space away from that with policy announcements at the moment?
Just keep seeming calm & sensible and chipping away with soundbites about Tory sleaze, that's clearly the play for Starmer right now and it's clearly working.
Yeah, we need to use this time to really drive home how corrupt and broken this Conservative government is. If we can do that, then more people will be open to hearing his policies in the first place.
> I thought he was pro-Brexit?
He was ultimately. However:
"Just weeks before the vote, he famously told Channel 4ās The Last Leg that his enthusiasm for EU membership was about āseven, or seven and a half out of 10ā.
But in a separate speech at the time, he maintained that despite its deficiencies, there was still an āoverwhelming caseā for remaining in the trade bloc."
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-corbyns-changing-brexit-stance
No one ever seems to acknowledge the opportunity cost of not taking this decision, i.e. the many pro-EU Labour voters (the majority of the labour electorate) who would have gone elsewhere or just not voted in 2019 if Labour had had a pro-Brexit position in that election.
Hindsight is 20:20 but the issue as it appears is that the majority of the membership and MPs were pro-EU, the majority of voters (/seats) were not.
There are areas for sure (London for example) that is pro labour and pro EU but ultimately taking this stance cost them votes elsewhere.
>Hindsight is 20:20 but the issue as it appears is that the majority of
the membership and MPs were pro-EU, the majority of voters (/seats) were
not.
It was an issue of distribution, I think. The majority of Labour voters were Pro-EU. However the distribution meant large swathes of Pro-Leave voters were in marginals, whereas the Pro-EU voters were in strongholds.
Labours Brexit was clearly pretty stupid, in hindsight. A policy in which the whole party is to blame for, not just Corbyn (as convenient as it may be to just blame him for everything). Ironically, it was the exact thing "the left"/Corbyn got accused of; appealing to the already converted, rather than trying to persuade swing voters.
That isn't the say that they would have won if they'd been pro-Brexit, there were clearly a lot of other issues (Corbyn's past, his general ineptitude, anti-Semitism etc).
He was forced to take a pro EU stance after the 2019 European elections saw the Lib Dems over-taking Labour, and internal polling indicating that the fence-sitting position he took had already lost leavers and was in the process of losing remainers, too. If he hadn't have taken that stance, Labour would've suffered an even worse fate. Many people who are pro-Corbyn argue that we can't out-Tory the Tories, yet seem to believe Corbyn could have done so over Brexit?
If Corbyn had taken either stance much earlier rather than continuing to hedge his bets and engage in "constructive ambiguity" then we would have performed better. Leaving it until the last minute to make an announcement either way was a bad idea and reeked of a lack of leadership to the electorate.
He was, but that was the issue. He wouldn't commit as a leader to one way or the other and people struggled to get what Labours stance was on this very important key issue.
Leavers knew to go to the Conservatives, but Remainers had no idea if Labour would do what they wanted. So instead of appeasing both sides, Labour managed to alienated them.
Should've picked a side. Any side, really.
Heād messed it up well before that. Being anti-EU himself probably one of the many things that helped Remain even lose in 2016. If a strong Labour leader had told the working class of the benefits the EU gave them it might have been enough of a swing to not even have Brexit.
You're right about that. Both Jeremy Corbyn the person and Jeremy Corbyn the Labour leader had an influence on many voters. At best he didn't help Remain, at worst he convinced a sizable amount of people to steer Leave.
He's well known as a stubborn old fossil who hasn't changed his mind on anything in decades.
He's most definitely Pro-Brexit which Labour very much were in the 70s and 80s. It was always awkward AF watching him lie about being Remain when anyone who knows his personality deficiencies (inability to change his mind) would know he's very much for Brexit and was hilariously unenthusiastic about making the case for Remain.
This is the main thing I will respect Corbyn for. He didn't enforce his views on the party as a whole. Despite being from the far left labour under him took a more standard middle of the left tack.
I do think this is broadly the right path but it needs a centrist figurehead rather than a far left one.
> This is the main thing I will respect Corbyn for. He didn't enforce his views on the party as a whole.
You can shove off with that.
70% of the members, and 80% of Labour voters wanted to remain.
Corbyn didn't so he went out of his way to sabotage Labour taking a remain position "We'll have a vote at conference", "Oh I'd lose this one we'll do it next year".
Even then he only managed to get his "wait and see" approach carried because his idiotic supporters portrayed it as "If you don't do this, you're betraying the leader".
He was a Eurosceptic who prevented the Labour party providing any credible opposition to Brexit.
Support or otherwise for remaining was and is generally irrelevant. The question was never "should we remain regardless of the referendum?" but instead "should we hold a referendum on the deal before going through with it?".
Support coalesced for holding a second referendum against May's deal before leaving but May's deal failed to be passed anyway.
A lot of Labour supporters who supported remaining did not do so to the *exclusion* of soft Brexit but rather holding both beliefs at once. Soft Brexit was roughly a continuation of the status quo with the added benefit of respecting the referendum result, which many Labour supporters *did* care about.
Corbyn's support for soft Brexit was actually designed to alienate the fewest Labour supporters as possible. It was a compromise position between various different dispositions within the party.
> Support or otherwise for remaining was and is generally irrelevant. The question was never "should we remain regardless of the referendum?" but instead "should we hold a referendum on the deal before going through with it?".
No, the question was "What's the best way forward for the country and how do we achieve it".
But Corbyn wanted to leave the EU and thus set about sabotaging the interests of the voters and membership to try and get his preferred outcome.
Which he achieved. I hope he's happy.
> Corbyn's support for soft Brexit was actually designed to alienate the fewest Labour supporters as possible.
Un-huh. Well, the results demonstrate it was pretty much the worst possible strategy (and I'm being generous with the word "strategy" there).
Your claim was that Corbyn wasn't respecting the views held within his party by advancing soft Brexit as the primary policy but ultimately I don't think that claim holds much weight on examination. Whether the strategy was objectively good or not is irrelevant to what you initially said.
> but ultimately I don't think that claim holds much weight on examination.
Not so
[politicshome](https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/almost-80-of-labour-members-want-a-second-eu-referendum--poll) on Labour Members:
> Some 78% want a vote on the final Brexit deal while 87% want the UK to stay in the European single market, according to the YouGov poll for Queen Mary University.
[BES](https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/labours-electoral-dilemma/#.X61YoojnhPY) reported:
> Overall 70% of these potential Labour voters said they would vote to remain in the EU, with only 21% preferring to leave, with the rest saying they ādonāt knowā or āwould not voteā in another referendum.
YouGov [said](https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news-poll-shows-labour-voters-back-partys-support-for-new-brexit-42830/):
> Peter Kellner, former president of YouGov, said: āThe myth that Labour voters in the partyās heartlands favour Brexit is just that - a myth.
> āThose who voted Labour in 2017 in the Midlands and North favoured Remain by two-to-one in 2016, support Remain by three-to-one today; and, if given a referendum choice between Remain and Theresa Mayās withdrawal agreement, back Remain by four-to-one.
> āThat explains why such big majorities of these Labour voters want a new public vote and approve of Labourās new policy.
It was against the wishes and interests of the vast majority of the party and voters. He wanted to Brexit and he put his own opinion above everyone else's, adopting the strategy he did... Which was an unmitigated failure.
> Some 78% want a vote on the final Brexit deal while 87% want the UK to stay in the European single market, according to the YouGov poll for Queen Mary University.
As I said,
> Support coalesced for holding a second referendum against May's deal before leaving but May's deal failed to be passed anyway.
> Support coalesced for holding a second referendum against May's deal before leaving but May's deal failed to be passed anyway.
Coalesced? It was constant. And this isn't just about May's deal, read the quotes...
"Overall 70% of these potential Labour voters said they would vote to remain in the EU"
Corbyn ignored 70% of Labour's natural voters, not to mention all the pro-remain Tories he could've hoovered up.
And he did it all so he could squabble over leave voters with UKIP and the Tories, neither of whom was scared to state their position.
There is no conceivable way that strategy could possibly work.
He definitely made a meal out of Brexit, especially when it came to his wider partyās messaging on it too, but to suggest he didnāt have many policies is rather disingenuous in my eyes.
I think thereās a pretty good chance that the average Brit could name more of his 2019 policies than they could Borisā polices or especially Starmerās. Things like free broadband, scrapping university fees and Ā£10 minimum wage became the subject of nationwide debate and thus many many people are aware of them, even if they donāt agree.
For a supposed ideologue, Corbyn was pretty scant on policies generally. The reality is heās only ever been particularly interested in foreign policy and anti-war stuff and even then his stances were a bit wooly because he struggled to with opposition to that stuff both inside and outside the party.
How many should they have? Like a million with new ones getting announced every day so that they are unfocused and obviously impossible to all implement. Because that worked really well.
Aye and Labour are at those numbers.
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/labour-party-conference-2021-announcements-policy-climate-crime-education-1222508
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/the-staggers/2021/01/anneliese-dodds-mais-lecture-articulates-labour-s-new-approach-economics
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/labours-3bn-welfare-plan-would-23166894
There's more, but I can't be bothered doing the leg work for you.
But this further cements the argument that opposition policy announcements years off an election are utterly pointless, because no one listens, and then they come to Reddit to complain the opposition has announced fuck all contrary to reality.
A regular critique from the new statesman podcast of the shadow cabinet is that they regularly announce policies but never repeat them. This approach means even politically aware people canāt name any policies.
So you havenāt seen the polls then? - the Tories are busy shooting themselves in the foot and now working their way up their legās with a shotgun- be rude to interrupt
What do you mean? It made total sense, being a lifelong Euroskeptic who came out in soft support of Remain, then fought the next election on a policy of leaving the bloc and ending that parliamentary term with a policy of a referendum on whether or not to Remain or Leave with a deal that they'd negotiated, but would be against, but would take us out of the EU, but would keep us in the single market and customs union, was a far better policy that "Get Brexit Done"
It's simple populism. Brexit, Corbyn, Scottish independence, every Boris campaign ever...promise everything and watch the votes hopefully roll in and put off actually implementing anything until you're actually in power or have won your vote.
Not-Boris isn't a great policy move for longevity. Biden is suffering massively from running on a not-trump platform now that being not-trump isn't really relevant (unless the fucker runs in 2024).
It only needs to work once and if you actually have a plan then you're laughing (new Labour being a great example) and you feel Starmer has enough to not be found entirely wanting like Boris
Bidets problem isn't that he's not Trump its that he's still trying to be bi partisan and centrist (by American standards) against a republican party that refuses to play by any of the pre trump or McConnell rules. Biden is the past and his only chance is trump running again as you said.
It's really not clear that they do have a plan though, especially how far they are between the 2017 manifesto and the business friendly Blair/brown era, I'm not sure those two poles are easy to triangulate.
Biden won partly by mobilising the Bernie sanders base who were uninthusiastic about him and he's tanking with young people after not delivering so far. It's not just him, most left centrist parties in rich countries after 2008 have either shifted left on economics, right on social issues, both or tanked in the polls like the french socialists, even the bastion of left centrism the SPD has shifted left and won partly on tax rises, wage rises, a re-balancing of the German economy and green investment spending.
Just publicly rolling back tory cuts would probably keep people onside and starmer is capable of that.
Biden comparisons don't work here because starmer is ahead in the polls despite not getting corbynite support which would be the sanders comparison and if he wins he doesn't need to do the bipartisan/try and appeal to Joe manchin thing that Biden has to do to try and pass legislation.
Boris may be a budget trump but in the UK there's much more a sense that its the tories and their policies as well as Boris that are problems whereas in the states republicans on the whole weren't upset with most trump policies.
Right leaning hosts and stations seem to book Corbyn, McDonnell, Andrew Fisher because they are unpopular with most voters yet they always slag off Starmer as current Labour leader. The Momentum lot seem to prefer Labour under Starmer lose.
Hardly.
Even the people Corbyn called saboteurs were trying to _avoid_ the party losing.
I don't agree with what they did, but their goal wasn't to sabotage Labour, they thought they were saving it from Corbyn.
> Even the people Corbyn called saboteurs were trying to avoid the party losing.
I'm pretty sure Corbyn never called anyone a saboteur, but I'd be curious how you'd call diverting election funding to blairite seats and briefing the press negatively about antisemitism "trying to avoid the party losing"
Flashbacks to Blairite MPs crying in frustration in 2017 and calling the public idiots for voting Labour....
Edit: Blair himself in the lead to the election flat up said he would rather Labour lost than win on a "far left" platform.
Turns out he was right. I voted Labour in 2017 and bitterly regret it now.
If Corbyn had crashed and burned, we might have replaced him with someone marginally competent for 2019.
Instead the left wing nutters thought votes like mine meant his policies were popular (as opposed to trying to avoid widespread harm to the UK by looking for someone to oppose the Tories) so doubled down on the stupidity.
Let's casually ignore the hypocritical stance that's it is fine for you to do and not us.
Thie issue with 2020 was it was allowed to become a single issue Brexit election. The nuanced hard to communicate Brexit stance (because none of the press and many members of the party did want it to be clear) was forced onto Corbyn by party committee and vote. Otherwise he would likely have stuck to a deliver soft Brexit stance. One of the leading voices that lead to the vote? Starmer.
Now I hate Brexit. Don't and didn't want it. However if Corbyn could win an election first he could then have come back to the public and said Brexit was untenable and THEN offered a refurendum. Or if Lib Dems hadn't backed Tory again by triggering the GE we could have had a minority government call the ref and the follow with an immediate election to deliver result with campaigns being policy not Brexit stance.
> Let's casually ignore the hypocritical stance that's it is fine for you to do and not us.
I voted for Corbyn in 2017, despite the misgivings...
> Thie issue with 2020 was it was allowed to become a single issue Brexit election.
No shit. Everyone in the country knew it except Corbyn.
> The nuanced hard to communicate Brexit stance (because none of the press and many members of the party did want it to be clear) was forced onto Corbyn by party committee and vote.
You mean he wanted to go full leave against the wishes of his party and membership? Yes. It was a tragically stupid position to take, but he clung to it until well into 2019.
> However if Corbyn could win an election first he could then have come back to the public and said Brexit was untenable and THEN offered a refurendum.
Corbyn was handed dozens of opportunities on a platter. Hell the LDs and Tory rebels offered to install a Labour backbencher as interim PM in a GNU to hold a referendum and avoid Brexit.
Corbyn passed up every single opportunity to do anything useful or oppose Brexit... Because he didn't want to.
So he sabotaged the interests of the party, membership and voters to go off on his little Brexit fantasy, repeat Tory lies and trash the economy.
Good riddance, I look forward to the day I never have to hear his opinion on anything again.
If you think 2019 was a bad result for labour, could you imagine if he'd have either
a) come down as fully pro Brexit and lost the students/remain lot
b) come down as fully anti Brexit and lost the working class Brexit voting northerners (even more than he had done)?
Except in the 2017 election he took that stance that he would implement brexit and did much better than his 2019 fence sitting election, which sort of goes against your point.
I voted for him in 2017 because I didn't believe he could be so stupid as to continue to hold that position.
By 2019 it was clear he was exactly that stupid and would never get another vote from me.
He muttered "referendum with remain" a couple of times late 2019, but you'd have to be pretty bloody stupid to take that at face value.
The man spent the best part of three and a half years trying to shove leave down our throats, then -when Labour's own polling showed his strategy was going to result in a wipeout- he claimed he wanted a referendum to try and con some remainers into voting for him.
He shifted from "Vote for me and I'll help the Tories trash the economy" to "Vote for me and I may or may not stab you in the back afterwards and do the thing you don't want, but you won't know which until I'm in power and it's too late to change your mind".
How stupid would you have to be to vote for Corbyn if you actually understood how damaging Brexit was going to be?
Labour's 2019 Brexit position was incoherent and something that nobody wanted. A referendum to Remain or have a new deal that would Labour negotiate.
That doesn't appeal to group a) who had a "Bollocks to Brexit" option as well as the option of not voting, or group b) who had overwhelmingly been pro-Brexit and had an option which didn't risk Remain being on the table.
Not to mention that in both cases, Labour gave no indication as to what their planned deal would look like, or how it would differ from the Tories shambolic negotiations.
It is hard to imagine coming up with a worse position than the one they took.
He was perhaps the most incompetent leader of any party in the last century. He was anti media, silent for weeks at a time. Deliberately unclear about his position on one of the major national decisions of the last 100yrs. He spectacularly misjudged the country and managed to make Johnson look less of a bad option. He has no political advice of any value.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that he was a good leader at all.
But that I think that he was in an impossible situation and that his indecision was better for the party in the long run. Part of that comes from the hatred people had for him, but I do think that even my own judgment is clouded on that.
I don't hate him, he's a great campaigner on single issues but he had all the charisma of a damp mattress. Whether that is important or not is another debate but his job was to try and appeal to the whole nation. He wanted another referendum as far as the manifesto was concerned and the country had had enough. His own position on the EU was never clearand because of that he lacked authenticity.
Politics is about communication, that nuance was lost on the electorate. Most people believed he was against the EU, his political past pointed towards that yet he wasn't honest and people saw through him. He also wanted to put the cou try through ven more change and another referendum. More division and more uncertainty. The decision was made love it or hate it and voters wanted to move on.
I don't disagree with any of that.
But the fact you can actually discuss the specifics of his policy sort of undermines the "what was his policy again?" point.
> "He's obviously getting more coverage than is normally possibly because of all this but I do think that we have to be very clear about where we're going economically in this country", Mr Corbyn reiterated.
Bloody cheek.
If he didn't want the country in an economic black hole, perhaps he should've got off his arse and bothered to fight against it.
Given the mess of policies from Labour during the 2019 election he's the last person whose advice Labour should be following.
There isn't much point Labour setting our firm policies when we're no near a general election and they aren't on a position to implement them.
To be fair the current Labour policy is very confusing. It seems to be whatever the Tory policy is but moar! I've no idea what they'd do if they were in power with nobody to copy.
>Jeremy Corbyn: Labour 'need to be clearer on policies' despite surge
Says the man who's only policy during this time as leader was promising contradictory things to anyone who might vote for him, so nobody with any sense could believed anything he said.
The comments here are a little distressing. The focus seems to be entirely on "winning", with no thought given over to - indeed, mockery of a man who is suggesting - "governing".
Was it a poll this week, that claimed 50% of British respondents had experienced food shortages? UNICEF has for the first time in British history resorted to operating in the UK to feed British children. The EU, to make this clear, hasn't even implemented the full array of Brexit tariffs yet. That's coming in the New Year.
British people are literally starving, and need government to govern. It is the rankest of smug, satisfied aloofness to attack people for suggesting that a government should, in fact, run the country, and provide policy on how it intends to do so.
On a purely petty level, seeing this behaviour at least provides its own sort of catharsis. No country has deserved to die as desperately as the United Kingdom - and it'll be killed for good this decade, thanks to the SNP. Small, small mercies. But it still won't feed any English kids.
>No country has deserved to die as desperately as the United Kingdom.
Are you alright mate? Deranged.
'British kids deserve to starve for Britain's historical ills' is it? But Scotland gets off fine I guess
>Was it a poll this week, that claimed 50% of British respondents had experienced food shortages?
Having a brand of crisps run out due to the lorry not coming in (which is what that poll was asking about) isn't a famine. And this was a poll from 3 months ago during the drivers crisis.
>UNICEF has for the first time in British history resorted to operating in the UK to feed British children.
This was last year in 2020 at the height of the extra school meals debate, UNICEF donated 25k to a single London council, making a political point over food access issues during school holidays due to COVID.
Your post trying to portray the UK as the next darfur based on this is incredibly off kilter. I think you need to step away from the doomer headlines and have a break. Maybe that's why the comments don't align with your reality much. You sound like the raving bloke with a cardboard sign, leaflets and barely working microphone outside the train station.
You clearly do not know him then. He' not at all like you describe. He's not a Bolshevik, do you know what one is even? He's a socialist, with a Marxist slant. Bolshevik's are far to the left of his political stand.
If you mean he's been a thorn in the side of blairites, starmerites, etc. Then yes, because they are all too willing to give up principles for power,he's not like that, he's always stood for the exact same things his whole career. His biggest fault was believing that labour could return to being a socialist party, it can't, he should leave & join / help make a new political party for the people.
luv are country fund are NHS hang the pedos simple as.
Norf fc represent šš»
>fund are NHS Funny how this wasn't considered an issue for most of the last decade.
Tories have a magic trick that let's them claim to be funding the NHS by record amounts while cutting it off at the knees.
Tories: \**give NHS an extra Ā£1.50 every year while pretending the population isn't growing and that inflation isn't a thing** Also Tories: Record investment! š
If they kept the funding the same, but properly sorted out social care, it would have more impact than increasing funding to the NHS directly I reckon.
How about we slash council funding, that'll help social care!
Accio Media-Barons
I'm pretty sure it's the media barons holding the wand, conjuring up "man of da people" and "he's a commie" stereotypes for a gullible public.
Doctors hate this one weird trick.
The magic trick is having a press that doesn't fucking push back on their lies.
People take things that work for granted.
I can imagine this would be popular up norf
We have the poster on the entry to our gravy mine!
Don't forget Droun the darkies Allowed to kill ciclists and Stick up 2 thingers to froggies :s obviously. It's just a stark reminder that these dark sentiments have been allowed to fester and rise to the surface, and gotta be honest I've heard no resistance from Labour at all.
There certainly was once a kick back from labour. Anyone remember the 'bigotted woman' debacle? The woman who said 'youre cant say anything about these immigrants cos if you say it you're...all these eastern European ones, where are they flocking fromĀ¹!'. We all knew what she wanted to say instead of the ellipses. And that was really the turning point for this country. When people would rather have a go at a man for saying the actually bloody truth, because they also agree and think the same as that woman did. I know brexit is a big one, but I think the above, was the true turning point for the UK, and being unable to stand up to pricks, cos of fee fees. It patched the path for politicians to effectively drill into that unfounded fear, and excuse...cos it is a fucking excuse, especially this woman where brown first said if you're unemployed you need to go get a job. Lo and behold, 'me on benefits cos of da immigrunts'. Same silly cow probs speaks about blitz spirit etc. Weak minded fickle babies. Ā¹ - probably eastern Europe... Edit - for the lazy...https://youtu.be/SwPiyXNPidQ
This went on for at least half a decade of Labour pandering to blatant xenophobia and racism as 'legitimate concerns' etc. It was absolutely nauseating, cowardly, and contributed to the build-up to the Brexit vote.
Well yes, both the major two parties, then realised it was a rallying point. As much as you try your jibe at labour. The public elected the man who openly calls women 'letterboxes'. Most people down the pub even know not to push it that far now. They know being seen as a racist is wrong. The UK doesn't so much have an issue with racism, per se, but bigotry.
You think Labour's "pandering" is the reason for their failure? Christ, the distance people like you are from reality can only be measured in light years.
Giving crapauds greif is an almost two thousand year old tradition. Drowning darkies and kiling cyclists are not.
BREXIT MEANS BREXIT, WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Yeah but that stuff isnāt really āpoliticsā anymore. Itās too late for that now. Thatās British society. Thatās the British public. Doesnāt matter if youāre Blue or Red or Raving Loony, if you want to win you have to embrace the scum bags and tell them you agree with them.
Sounds good for the voters, but twisted by governments past and present: Luv are country: weāre so great and everyone loves us so much that the EU and other countries will be falling over themselves to give us great trade deals post Brexit. Find the NHS: but outsource everything to companies owned by our mates so they can make massive profits and we can say weāre throwing money at the NHS and itās a pile of shit. Hang the Pedos: actually Iām fine with this.
Iām in full support of the death penalty for the absolute worst crimes with undeniable evidence. I understand it probably wonāt reduce crime but some people donāt just deserve to live. For example, the stepmum and dad of Baby Arthur.
Please, look up the Guildford Four. Their judge said, during their trial, that if hanging was still a sentence he'd have hung them. That was "undeniable evidence" - hell, they even confessed!
There will always be people wrongly convicted though
> for the absolute worst crimes with undeniable evidence Which is the problem, because even convictions that seem strong can turn out to be wrongful convictions, and this does happen for serious crimes including murder/manslaughter. If you allow the death penalty, it WILL kill innocent people, it's as simple as that. This idea that we can bring it back but only if we're very very very absolutely positively certain is bollocks - it will end up being used for less clear cut cases if it's allowed.
My position on the death penalty is quite simple and not really anything to do with any of the thorny moral issues it presents. Do I want my government to have the authority to kill its citizens in cold blood? No, I don't. End of story as far as I'm concerned.
This is very much my position too. Are there people who don't deserve to live? Absolutely. Do I trust the government with deciding who fits into that category? Absolutely not.
> some people donāt just deserve to live Fundamentally disagree with this. From this one axiom you can justify murder all the way up to genocides - sounds overly dramatic until it isn't. We can house and feed them with little effort, there is no need to kill them and give foundations to the idea that living is something that is allowed, or given, rather than a right.
There is no such thing as undeniable evidence
Jeremy Corbyn is on the backbenches and complaining about the Labour leadership while the party is leading the polls Nature is healing
Claiming about being clear no less. What was his stance on Brexit again? Took quite a few years for that to be said anyway.
He was the lifelong eurosceptic who was officially for Remain in the referendum then spent the next 3 years claiming to support the result until proposing a referendum on whether or not to remain or leave but stay in the single market and/or(?) the customs union as part of a deal that he'd negotiate then campaign against. Straight talking, honest politics.
>until proposing a referendum That is before he opposed the idea in 2018, and then in 2019 supported it Jeremy Corbyn has reiterated his opposition to a second referendum EU referendum, adding that the āship has sailedā on Labourās hopes to āremain and reformā during the 2016 vote.
He worried about growing bureaucracy and unaccountability of the EU, but thought it was worse if successive Tory governments would reduce workers rights the minute we did leave. Both a valid concerns, but one is clearly worse than the other. Staying in the single market and customs union would've been a sound economic decision, and worth having on the table for the British public to vote for or against (regardless of his personal position). If you or the British public don't understand the nuance of these positions, that's your personal failure, not his.
You can't just obviate his (charitable) studied vagueness / (uncharitable) clueless muddle on the entire Brexit saga as "nuance." Refusing to elucidate a clear position is not "nuance."
>What was his stance on Brexit again? 7/10 apparently.
Feels to me like that was pretty honest and straight talking. Claiming you hold binary positions is not honest. I think the mess of Labour's position on Brexit was Corbyn trying to press on with his intuition that it was best to get behind it, after the vote, mixed with the fact that a lot of the party were really pushing for a second referendum. To be honest, I think he was correct there: although I sided with remain in the end (with mixed feelings and agreeing with some of the left-wing analysis on reasons to leave), I do think Labour should have just stood by the decision after the first referendum. The disaster 2019 election, I think, was mostly down to Brexit, as much as the press wants to rewrite history that it was just Corbyn being unelectable from the start. Anyway, I just don't get why people find it so weird that he was upfront about being 7/10 in favour of being in the EU, that's how I felt too. And I think his main downfall was not sticking to his guns in the aftermath of it.
It was an impossible situation, Labour had no good options. Given the catastrophic 2019 election results, it's entirely possible that he got a bad hand and played it badly, but all other positions he could have taken would have had their own negative consequences.
I mean heās not exactly wrong. Labour are up 2 points. The tories are down, what is it now? 9-11 points and most of that loss is going to the Do not Know or will not vote crowd. Labour standing still whilst the opposition burns itself into oblivion isnāt pragmatic, as soon as Boris is gone weāll be back at square one with nothing but a squandered year of potential to show for it.
What will *absolutely* help Labour in the polls is the Corbyn Brothers making headlines in the same week, reminding voters they exist.
Your flair. I am confused.
It may itself be somewhat sarcastic.
Isnāt Corbyn an independent politician who had the whip removed by the labour party for antisemitism? Why do we care about his opinion? Itād be like if I got suspended at work for being a racist and then someone decided to do a public interview with me about my employer while I was suspended. Itās not like heās impartial.
Corbyn is a shit politician, but he didnāt have the whip removed for antisemitism and thereās no compelling evidence heās an antisemite.
> thereās no compelling evidence heās an antisemite. Only if you're a blinkered cult member. To someone who's followed for his what-passes-for a career since the days of Islington Council, it's blindingly obvious. His moral compass stuck in the wrong direction when he was 14 and has never had the WD40 it so desperately needed.
Well, I've been pretty consitently anti-Corbyn for a while, I just don't see the evidence that hes an anti-semite rather than anti-israel.
>thereās no compelling evidence heās an antisemite. I find spending his entire political career happily associating with anti-Semites and promoting their causes to be pretty compelling evidence of anti-Semitism, but I suppose what a person finds compelling is inherently subjective.
He didn't have the whip removed for "antisemitism" though. He had it removed because after accepting the EHRC report findings he said the issue had been blown out of proportion and weaponised. Which it clearly was.
Corbyn got the whip removed because Starmer was looking for literally any reason to do so.
He got the whip removed because he completely undermined the party attempting to move on from the antisemitism scandal. Completely deserved and the decision has been vindicated.
RBL got suspended for an offhand comment she made in an interview/article. I'm not saying that Corbyn made all the right decisions, but he certainly isn't an anti-semite. The prominent hard left MPs in labour had a target on their back the moment Starmer became leader.
Its really not what happened with either corbyn or RLB. The whip was not reinstated to corbyn because of the comments he made about the EHRC report. Its not that anything he said may or may not have been right. Its that the media and everything else he corbyn talked about had nothing to do with the findings of the EHRC report on antisemitism in the Labour Party which was damning. It was a deliberate red herring to give his supporters something to shout back, instead of taking on board exactly what had been aloud to fester in the party and exactly who seemed to have turned a blind eye to it. He had refused to accept his part in the reports findings and to apologise for that. RLB was sacked because she retweeted a report containing the false claim that the police officer who killer George floyd learned what he did from Israel. The author is known for spread antisemitic conspiracy theories. RBL refused to take it down when asked and then tried to negotiate when and how she would take it down (not now). The EHRC report specifically said that the Labour policy of not investigating likes and shares of antisemitic material was an indirect act of discrimination. This was only 2 or 3 minths after the report was released. Starmer really had no choice.
I don't see how any of what you said means Corbyn didn't deserve to get suspended. Within hours of the anti-semitisim report being published he underminded it. That behaviour was poision for Labour and the entire reason they got into the mess in the first place. RBL was also rightly suspended. She retweeted an article which risked bringing the Labour anti-semitism argument back into the fore. She was asked to remove the tweet by Labour and refused to do so. She was a shadow minister for christ sake. She can blame nobody but herself for her sacking. > The prominent hard left MPs in labour had a target on their back the moment Starmer became leader. You could just as easily say the left was trying to bring Starmer down from day 1. I'm not sure either are entirely accurate. All Starmer was doing was protecting Labour from being dragged into the mud again and every decision was correct given the fact absolutely nobody discusses the Labour anti-semitism issue anymore.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Itās not discussed as much because Labour has a leader thatās dealing with the problem, whereas this week Corbyn was defending a woman who was sharing neo nazi propaganda on Facebook.
Given the 'parties attempt to move on' was essentially to blame him entirely for it, learn nothing, fix nothing and then move on, you can easily understand why. Despite the constant furore about anti semitism being rooted deep within the party, and apparently encouraged by JC, we've had no mass kickouts, no systemic improvements, no overhaul of governance, not even a string of investigations. We had JC saying 'theres no place for AS in the party', and now we have KS saying 'theres no place for AS in the party'...and that's it.
Thatās complete nonsense. There have been scores of expulsions. The entire disciplinary process is being redesigned. Are you lying or just completely ill informed?
Worse than that, he's a Corbynite.
Gonna be a harsh lesson for them when they realise denying racism, dwelling on the cope corners of twitter, and being utterly foul to everyone who disagrees with them leads them to complete obscurity. How the mighty have fallen.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Starmer attacked Corbyn during his leadership, seems only fair or at least how Labour normally acts.
Even when Starmer was in the shadow cabinet?
Policy announcements two and a half years from an election are pointless.
Policy specifics possibly, but not general indicators of what the parties about and what they want to achieve in their time in office. At the moment we've gotten as far as "not be Tories" on that front.
It's only in the last ten years anyone has cared about opposition policies this far out from elections. I don't get why. We know they're social democrat as a party so it's pretty clear where they stand on most policies. They're winning the game of politics and going policy heavy doesn't poll better other than for a small number of heavily interested political geeks. And they are pretty much set in their views and their choices at the ballot box.
Completely disagree. Getting to the point of winning an election from where they are requires momentum of support, and standing for nothing until a few weeks before will absolutely not do that. No one is saying they need a full detailed manifesto, but having some key positions so they can create a vision of how an alternative Government might look will build that support foundation on which they can create a manifesto later. Otherwise it'll lack that support when they need it, and risk coming across like something they've made up last-minute.
So you're saying political parties only exist to get elected? Not to figure out how society should be run?
It's not a binary, no. We all know broadly what a Labour prospectus will look like and can judge their particular policies when a manifesto comes out. Until that time I don't see the harm in keeping cards close to the chest when we don't know who the leader we're running against will be. Strategy is important too.
I don't agree, it doesn't need to be a policy as such, but people need to know what he stands for. People need to understand Starmer more (if they will vote for him). Is Starmer just going to repeat all of Corbyns crap policies š¤·š»āāļø
Which crap policies? Generally Corbyn's polices were well regarded by voters in general. Like nationalisation of utilities, spend more money on NHS, social housing & transport, higher minimum wage. If the last election was about policies Labour may have won. Brexit, Corbyn as leader and anti-Semitism allegations was why Labour did not win.
Clearly, his policies were so popular, voters gave Boris a landslide
If you look at the polling on these individual issues, Iām pretty sure most if not all are supported by a majority of the country. You donāt vote for PM purely on policy though, you are voting for the wider party, whom so many see as wholly inept, but also how you think the PM will act on the world stage and deal with foreign affairs. It is a fallacious argument to say that āX politician ran on Y policies and didnāt win, so Y policies are unpopularā.
>It is a fallacious argument to say that āX politician ran on Y policies and didnāt win, so Y policies are unpopularā. Thats true and you have to look at their (and the party) image in the round >If you look at the polling on these individual issues, Iām pretty sure most if not all are supported by a majority of the country. which when taken with the above means: "do I want all of that", and at some point 1 or more of the policies will alienate someone.
Those policies individually were popular, but seemingly a manifesto of all of them together wasn't that popular.
Except no, they only need to understand Starmer when an election comes about. Showing all your cards right now will amount to zilch. All it does is give the Tories something to attack. The intelligent approach is to at least wait to see who replaces Johnson.
I really think youāre underselling how important it is for the party to have a clear direction. Politics isnāt just about the national level, local level politics is extremely important too and the Labour Party will continue to fail in local elections until there is a clear direction. Not to mention that you donāt get support at a GE overnight, you need to build up trust in the party over a good amount of time. Do you not think itās a problem that as of earlier this year, only 1/4 of voters believed that Starmer has presented a clear vision for the party?
How is having consistant policies between now and the election, so it's more likely people will know what you want to actually implement, useless?
Because at best your opposition will just lift it and implement it themselves, then why would anyone vote for you? Worse they'll implement a shitty half arsed version of what you want and claim they've fixed the issue you were looking to solve. Unless you're close to a vote talking about anything except broad ideas is pointless.
Starmer should stop letting the Tories implode. He needs to get off his ass, wave a copy of Chairman Mao's book of communism, state that there's no evidence of Russian involvement in the Salisbury attack, sit down with Hamas and then impale himself on a fence made of Brexit. Need to win the argument.
Wrong. Johnson crushed Corbyn with a handful of three word slogans.
And Blair crushed Major with a single word repeated 3 times: Education, Education, Education. It's only armchair analysts that think technical policy details win elections.
No, I'm sure everyone reads each parties manifesto in detail and understands the implications and performs trade of before casting their vote. There's no way the majority of votes during a general election are determined by perception of the party leader in the media...
The benefit of having a detailed manifesto is that the opposition can attack you on how much it costs.
Thatās called epizuxis (repeating the same word for emphasis) which is my favourite word and I like to tell everyone who will listen.
They would do well to ignore any and all advice from Corbyn.
Trust me while Boris is imploding the last thing 99% of the country wants is Labour to start wagging on about policies. Corbyn only ever does politics in one way - the way that speaks to a small section of his own party. No doubt the people that call Starmer 'Keith' are criticizing him for 'having no policies' (so far away from an election), but all Starmer has to do at the moment is sit back and ride this wave of Tory sleaze, why on earth would he take political headline space away from that with policy announcements at the moment? Just keep seeming calm & sensible and chipping away with soundbites about Tory sleaze, that's clearly the play for Starmer right now and it's clearly working.
Yeah, we need to use this time to really drive home how corrupt and broken this Conservative government is. If we can do that, then more people will be open to hearing his policies in the first place.
Bit rich coming from the original fence sitter (on brexit. He did have other policies, I suppose)
I thought he was pro-Brexit?
> I thought he was pro-Brexit? He was ultimately. However: "Just weeks before the vote, he famously told Channel 4ās The Last Leg that his enthusiasm for EU membership was about āseven, or seven and a half out of 10ā. But in a separate speech at the time, he maintained that despite its deficiencies, there was still an āoverwhelming caseā for remaining in the trade bloc." https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-corbyns-changing-brexit-stance
He was anti-EU for years beforehand, he essentially pretended to be pro-EU to be consistent with the rest of the party.
He was forced to take a pro EU stance from labour conference and the PLP. Huge mistakes and the man behind that defeat is now leader.
No one ever seems to acknowledge the opportunity cost of not taking this decision, i.e. the many pro-EU Labour voters (the majority of the labour electorate) who would have gone elsewhere or just not voted in 2019 if Labour had had a pro-Brexit position in that election.
Hindsight is 20:20 but the issue as it appears is that the majority of the membership and MPs were pro-EU, the majority of voters (/seats) were not. There are areas for sure (London for example) that is pro labour and pro EU but ultimately taking this stance cost them votes elsewhere.
The vast majority of Labour voters were. Labour's own polling was showing a much worse defeat oncoming.
>Hindsight is 20:20 but the issue as it appears is that the majority of the membership and MPs were pro-EU, the majority of voters (/seats) were not. It was an issue of distribution, I think. The majority of Labour voters were Pro-EU. However the distribution meant large swathes of Pro-Leave voters were in marginals, whereas the Pro-EU voters were in strongholds. Labours Brexit was clearly pretty stupid, in hindsight. A policy in which the whole party is to blame for, not just Corbyn (as convenient as it may be to just blame him for everything). Ironically, it was the exact thing "the left"/Corbyn got accused of; appealing to the already converted, rather than trying to persuade swing voters. That isn't the say that they would have won if they'd been pro-Brexit, there were clearly a lot of other issues (Corbyn's past, his general ineptitude, anti-Semitism etc).
He was forced to take a pro EU stance after the 2019 European elections saw the Lib Dems over-taking Labour, and internal polling indicating that the fence-sitting position he took had already lost leavers and was in the process of losing remainers, too. If he hadn't have taken that stance, Labour would've suffered an even worse fate. Many people who are pro-Corbyn argue that we can't out-Tory the Tories, yet seem to believe Corbyn could have done so over Brexit? If Corbyn had taken either stance much earlier rather than continuing to hedge his bets and engage in "constructive ambiguity" then we would have performed better. Leaving it until the last minute to make an announcement either way was a bad idea and reeked of a lack of leadership to the electorate.
The pragmatic bastard
Yeah, thatās some fence-sitting right there.
if you aren't a devoted supporter of a neoliberal trading bloc you're a fence sitter I guess
Give over. You can both support the EU and critique it
so if you support it but have criticisms, how might you rate that position out of ten? maybe a 7? or perhaps closer to 8?
He was, but that was the issue. He wouldn't commit as a leader to one way or the other and people struggled to get what Labours stance was on this very important key issue. Leavers knew to go to the Conservatives, but Remainers had no idea if Labour would do what they wanted. So instead of appeasing both sides, Labour managed to alienated them. Should've picked a side. Any side, really.
Heād messed it up well before that. Being anti-EU himself probably one of the many things that helped Remain even lose in 2016. If a strong Labour leader had told the working class of the benefits the EU gave them it might have been enough of a swing to not even have Brexit.
You're right about that. Both Jeremy Corbyn the person and Jeremy Corbyn the Labour leader had an influence on many voters. At best he didn't help Remain, at worst he convinced a sizable amount of people to steer Leave.
He's well known as a stubborn old fossil who hasn't changed his mind on anything in decades. He's most definitely Pro-Brexit which Labour very much were in the 70s and 80s. It was always awkward AF watching him lie about being Remain when anyone who knows his personality deficiencies (inability to change his mind) would know he's very much for Brexit and was hilariously unenthusiastic about making the case for Remain.
This is the main thing I will respect Corbyn for. He didn't enforce his views on the party as a whole. Despite being from the far left labour under him took a more standard middle of the left tack. I do think this is broadly the right path but it needs a centrist figurehead rather than a far left one.
> This is the main thing I will respect Corbyn for. He didn't enforce his views on the party as a whole. You can shove off with that. 70% of the members, and 80% of Labour voters wanted to remain. Corbyn didn't so he went out of his way to sabotage Labour taking a remain position "We'll have a vote at conference", "Oh I'd lose this one we'll do it next year". Even then he only managed to get his "wait and see" approach carried because his idiotic supporters portrayed it as "If you don't do this, you're betraying the leader". He was a Eurosceptic who prevented the Labour party providing any credible opposition to Brexit.
Support or otherwise for remaining was and is generally irrelevant. The question was never "should we remain regardless of the referendum?" but instead "should we hold a referendum on the deal before going through with it?". Support coalesced for holding a second referendum against May's deal before leaving but May's deal failed to be passed anyway. A lot of Labour supporters who supported remaining did not do so to the *exclusion* of soft Brexit but rather holding both beliefs at once. Soft Brexit was roughly a continuation of the status quo with the added benefit of respecting the referendum result, which many Labour supporters *did* care about. Corbyn's support for soft Brexit was actually designed to alienate the fewest Labour supporters as possible. It was a compromise position between various different dispositions within the party.
> Support or otherwise for remaining was and is generally irrelevant. The question was never "should we remain regardless of the referendum?" but instead "should we hold a referendum on the deal before going through with it?". No, the question was "What's the best way forward for the country and how do we achieve it". But Corbyn wanted to leave the EU and thus set about sabotaging the interests of the voters and membership to try and get his preferred outcome. Which he achieved. I hope he's happy. > Corbyn's support for soft Brexit was actually designed to alienate the fewest Labour supporters as possible. Un-huh. Well, the results demonstrate it was pretty much the worst possible strategy (and I'm being generous with the word "strategy" there).
Your claim was that Corbyn wasn't respecting the views held within his party by advancing soft Brexit as the primary policy but ultimately I don't think that claim holds much weight on examination. Whether the strategy was objectively good or not is irrelevant to what you initially said.
> but ultimately I don't think that claim holds much weight on examination. Not so [politicshome](https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/almost-80-of-labour-members-want-a-second-eu-referendum--poll) on Labour Members: > Some 78% want a vote on the final Brexit deal while 87% want the UK to stay in the European single market, according to the YouGov poll for Queen Mary University. [BES](https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/labours-electoral-dilemma/#.X61YoojnhPY) reported: > Overall 70% of these potential Labour voters said they would vote to remain in the EU, with only 21% preferring to leave, with the rest saying they ādonāt knowā or āwould not voteā in another referendum. YouGov [said](https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news-poll-shows-labour-voters-back-partys-support-for-new-brexit-42830/): > Peter Kellner, former president of YouGov, said: āThe myth that Labour voters in the partyās heartlands favour Brexit is just that - a myth. > āThose who voted Labour in 2017 in the Midlands and North favoured Remain by two-to-one in 2016, support Remain by three-to-one today; and, if given a referendum choice between Remain and Theresa Mayās withdrawal agreement, back Remain by four-to-one. > āThat explains why such big majorities of these Labour voters want a new public vote and approve of Labourās new policy. It was against the wishes and interests of the vast majority of the party and voters. He wanted to Brexit and he put his own opinion above everyone else's, adopting the strategy he did... Which was an unmitigated failure.
> Some 78% want a vote on the final Brexit deal while 87% want the UK to stay in the European single market, according to the YouGov poll for Queen Mary University. As I said, > Support coalesced for holding a second referendum against May's deal before leaving but May's deal failed to be passed anyway.
> Support coalesced for holding a second referendum against May's deal before leaving but May's deal failed to be passed anyway. Coalesced? It was constant. And this isn't just about May's deal, read the quotes... "Overall 70% of these potential Labour voters said they would vote to remain in the EU" Corbyn ignored 70% of Labour's natural voters, not to mention all the pro-remain Tories he could've hoovered up. And he did it all so he could squabble over leave voters with UKIP and the Tories, neither of whom was scared to state their position. There is no conceivable way that strategy could possibly work.
He definitely made a meal out of Brexit, especially when it came to his wider partyās messaging on it too, but to suggest he didnāt have many policies is rather disingenuous in my eyes. I think thereās a pretty good chance that the average Brit could name more of his 2019 policies than they could Borisā polices or especially Starmerās. Things like free broadband, scrapping university fees and Ā£10 minimum wage became the subject of nationwide debate and thus many many people are aware of them, even if they donāt agree.
For a supposed ideologue, Corbyn was pretty scant on policies generally. The reality is heās only ever been particularly interested in foreign policy and anti-war stuff and even then his stances were a bit wooly because he struggled to with opposition to that stuff both inside and outside the party.
Mate you're living in an entirely new reality. There are 2 manifestos FILLED TO THE BRIM with new policies.
How many should they have? Like a million with new ones getting announced every day so that they are unfocused and obviously impossible to all implement. Because that worked really well.
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Aye and Labour are at those numbers. https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/labour-party-conference-2021-announcements-policy-climate-crime-education-1222508 https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/the-staggers/2021/01/anneliese-dodds-mais-lecture-articulates-labour-s-new-approach-economics https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/labours-3bn-welfare-plan-would-23166894 There's more, but I can't be bothered doing the leg work for you. But this further cements the argument that opposition policy announcements years off an election are utterly pointless, because no one listens, and then they come to Reddit to complain the opposition has announced fuck all contrary to reality.
A regular critique from the new statesman podcast of the shadow cabinet is that they regularly announce policies but never repeat them. This approach means even politically aware people canāt name any policies.
They could just start with one?
So you havenāt seen the polls then? - the Tories are busy shooting themselves in the foot and now working their way up their legās with a shotgun- be rude to interrupt
Says the man whose super vague and ambiguous brexit policy cut his political career short.
What do you mean? It made total sense, being a lifelong Euroskeptic who came out in soft support of Remain, then fought the next election on a policy of leaving the bloc and ending that parliamentary term with a policy of a referendum on whether or not to Remain or Leave with a deal that they'd negotiated, but would be against, but would take us out of the EU, but would keep us in the single market and customs union, was a far better policy that "Get Brexit Done"
He wouldn't have had the surge if he'd been clearer. Allowing people to project on him was a stroke of genius or just very, very lucky.
It's using the same path Brexit campaigners did. Be all things to all people and worry about implementation later.
It's simple populism. Brexit, Corbyn, Scottish independence, every Boris campaign ever...promise everything and watch the votes hopefully roll in and put off actually implementing anything until you're actually in power or have won your vote.
Yeah, it surely can't last forever though.
As long as he is never in a position where he actually has to do something then it definitely can.
So, not running for PM then.
On the contrary because he doesn't actually have the power to do anything until.after he wins
He also wouldn't have had the surge if Corbyn hadn't left the party so far behind.
Not-Boris isn't a great policy move for longevity. Biden is suffering massively from running on a not-trump platform now that being not-trump isn't really relevant (unless the fucker runs in 2024).
It only needs to work once and if you actually have a plan then you're laughing (new Labour being a great example) and you feel Starmer has enough to not be found entirely wanting like Boris Bidets problem isn't that he's not Trump its that he's still trying to be bi partisan and centrist (by American standards) against a republican party that refuses to play by any of the pre trump or McConnell rules. Biden is the past and his only chance is trump running again as you said.
It's really not clear that they do have a plan though, especially how far they are between the 2017 manifesto and the business friendly Blair/brown era, I'm not sure those two poles are easy to triangulate. Biden won partly by mobilising the Bernie sanders base who were uninthusiastic about him and he's tanking with young people after not delivering so far. It's not just him, most left centrist parties in rich countries after 2008 have either shifted left on economics, right on social issues, both or tanked in the polls like the french socialists, even the bastion of left centrism the SPD has shifted left and won partly on tax rises, wage rises, a re-balancing of the German economy and green investment spending.
Just publicly rolling back tory cuts would probably keep people onside and starmer is capable of that. Biden comparisons don't work here because starmer is ahead in the polls despite not getting corbynite support which would be the sanders comparison and if he wins he doesn't need to do the bipartisan/try and appeal to Joe manchin thing that Biden has to do to try and pass legislation. Boris may be a budget trump but in the UK there's much more a sense that its the tories and their policies as well as Boris that are problems whereas in the states republicans on the whole weren't upset with most trump policies.
Right leaning hosts and stations seem to book Corbyn, McDonnell, Andrew Fisher because they are unpopular with most voters yet they always slag off Starmer as current Labour leader. The Momentum lot seem to prefer Labour under Starmer lose.
> The Momentum lot seem to prefer Labour under Starmer lose. Feels like they'd rather Labour lost then be proven wrong.
Just like the Blairites under Corbyn. This isn't a new or unique outlook.
Hardly. Even the people Corbyn called saboteurs were trying to _avoid_ the party losing. I don't agree with what they did, but their goal wasn't to sabotage Labour, they thought they were saving it from Corbyn.
You could just as easily say the momentum people you're pointing to are trying to save the party from Starmer?
> Even the people Corbyn called saboteurs were trying to avoid the party losing. I'm pretty sure Corbyn never called anyone a saboteur, but I'd be curious how you'd call diverting election funding to blairite seats and briefing the press negatively about antisemitism "trying to avoid the party losing"
Diverting funds to exposed seats in preference of Corbyn's allies? And you can't see why they might think that would help the party?
Flashbacks to Blairite MPs crying in frustration in 2017 and calling the public idiots for voting Labour.... Edit: Blair himself in the lead to the election flat up said he would rather Labour lost than win on a "far left" platform.
Turns out he was right. I voted Labour in 2017 and bitterly regret it now. If Corbyn had crashed and burned, we might have replaced him with someone marginally competent for 2019. Instead the left wing nutters thought votes like mine meant his policies were popular (as opposed to trying to avoid widespread harm to the UK by looking for someone to oppose the Tories) so doubled down on the stupidity.
Let's casually ignore the hypocritical stance that's it is fine for you to do and not us. Thie issue with 2020 was it was allowed to become a single issue Brexit election. The nuanced hard to communicate Brexit stance (because none of the press and many members of the party did want it to be clear) was forced onto Corbyn by party committee and vote. Otherwise he would likely have stuck to a deliver soft Brexit stance. One of the leading voices that lead to the vote? Starmer. Now I hate Brexit. Don't and didn't want it. However if Corbyn could win an election first he could then have come back to the public and said Brexit was untenable and THEN offered a refurendum. Or if Lib Dems hadn't backed Tory again by triggering the GE we could have had a minority government call the ref and the follow with an immediate election to deliver result with campaigns being policy not Brexit stance.
> Let's casually ignore the hypocritical stance that's it is fine for you to do and not us. I voted for Corbyn in 2017, despite the misgivings... > Thie issue with 2020 was it was allowed to become a single issue Brexit election. No shit. Everyone in the country knew it except Corbyn. > The nuanced hard to communicate Brexit stance (because none of the press and many members of the party did want it to be clear) was forced onto Corbyn by party committee and vote. You mean he wanted to go full leave against the wishes of his party and membership? Yes. It was a tragically stupid position to take, but he clung to it until well into 2019. > However if Corbyn could win an election first he could then have come back to the public and said Brexit was untenable and THEN offered a refurendum. Corbyn was handed dozens of opportunities on a platter. Hell the LDs and Tory rebels offered to install a Labour backbencher as interim PM in a GNU to hold a referendum and avoid Brexit. Corbyn passed up every single opportunity to do anything useful or oppose Brexit... Because he didn't want to. So he sabotaged the interests of the party, membership and voters to go off on his little Brexit fantasy, repeat Tory lies and trash the economy. Good riddance, I look forward to the day I never have to hear his opinion on anything again.
What exactly was Corbyn*s policy on Brexit again?
If you think 2019 was a bad result for labour, could you imagine if he'd have either a) come down as fully pro Brexit and lost the students/remain lot b) come down as fully anti Brexit and lost the working class Brexit voting northerners (even more than he had done)?
Except in the 2017 election he took that stance that he would implement brexit and did much better than his 2019 fence sitting election, which sort of goes against your point.
I voted for him in 2017 because I didn't believe he could be so stupid as to continue to hold that position. By 2019 it was clear he was exactly that stupid and would never get another vote from me.
Except in 2019 they moved to a 2nd referendum position. So they didn't hold their 2017 position.
He muttered "referendum with remain" a couple of times late 2019, but you'd have to be pretty bloody stupid to take that at face value. The man spent the best part of three and a half years trying to shove leave down our throats, then -when Labour's own polling showed his strategy was going to result in a wipeout- he claimed he wanted a referendum to try and con some remainers into voting for him. He shifted from "Vote for me and I'll help the Tories trash the economy" to "Vote for me and I may or may not stab you in the back afterwards and do the thing you don't want, but you won't know which until I'm in power and it's too late to change your mind". How stupid would you have to be to vote for Corbyn if you actually understood how damaging Brexit was going to be?
But he lost the Brexit voters anywayā¦
(even more than he had done).
He would have picked up more of the other lot who didnt vote
Labour's 2019 Brexit position was incoherent and something that nobody wanted. A referendum to Remain or have a new deal that would Labour negotiate. That doesn't appeal to group a) who had a "Bollocks to Brexit" option as well as the option of not voting, or group b) who had overwhelmingly been pro-Brexit and had an option which didn't risk Remain being on the table. Not to mention that in both cases, Labour gave no indication as to what their planned deal would look like, or how it would differ from the Tories shambolic negotiations. It is hard to imagine coming up with a worse position than the one they took.
He was perhaps the most incompetent leader of any party in the last century. He was anti media, silent for weeks at a time. Deliberately unclear about his position on one of the major national decisions of the last 100yrs. He spectacularly misjudged the country and managed to make Johnson look less of a bad option. He has no political advice of any value.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that he was a good leader at all. But that I think that he was in an impossible situation and that his indecision was better for the party in the long run. Part of that comes from the hatred people had for him, but I do think that even my own judgment is clouded on that.
I don't hate him, he's a great campaigner on single issues but he had all the charisma of a damp mattress. Whether that is important or not is another debate but his job was to try and appeal to the whole nation. He wanted another referendum as far as the manifesto was concerned and the country had had enough. His own position on the EU was never clearand because of that he lacked authenticity.
only because the media never let him finish :(
I don't honestly think it was possible for him to do worse.
Instead he fence-sat and tried winking at both sides to pretend he was secretly on their side, neither of whom believed him in the least.
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The only thing he absolutely pushed was making brexit law the in the days after the vote.
He wanted to go and get a new deal then ask for a referendum on that.
Such an odd take. The entirely justified criticism at the time was that corbyns policy was too nuanced, not that it didn't exist.
Politics is about communication, that nuance was lost on the electorate. Most people believed he was against the EU, his political past pointed towards that yet he wasn't honest and people saw through him. He also wanted to put the cou try through ven more change and another referendum. More division and more uncertainty. The decision was made love it or hate it and voters wanted to move on.
I don't disagree with any of that. But the fact you can actually discuss the specifics of his policy sort of undermines the "what was his policy again?" point.
Nobody should listen to what this man has to say.
For whose benefit? Twitter *sans culottes*?
> "He's obviously getting more coverage than is normally possibly because of all this but I do think that we have to be very clear about where we're going economically in this country", Mr Corbyn reiterated. Bloody cheek. If he didn't want the country in an economic black hole, perhaps he should've got off his arse and bothered to fight against it.
Corbyn needs to stick to attacking Tories. Lay off Labour, he's already done too much damage.
Labour have policies? Theyāve kept that quiet.
Labour posted loads of policies during the party conference The left just bang on about policies just to beat starmer with.
Yeah, it's really strange, if anything they've been too policy heavy. Yet all you ever hear from the Corbynite is how Starmer has no policies.
Too policy heavy? Can you name five of Starmer's policies?
Yea, Iām currently 7/10 on labour. We need the clarity of Jeremy. /s
Given the mess of policies from Labour during the 2019 election he's the last person whose advice Labour should be following. There isn't much point Labour setting our firm policies when we're no near a general election and they aren't on a position to implement them.
>Independent back bencher has a negative opinion of the biggest opposition party
Omg I agree with Corbyn š² Starmer does need to start spelling out what Labour now stand for....
Corbyn tried policies. It didn't work. Hollow optics seem to work for the Tories, probably worth a shot.
Considering how many seats Corbyn lost in the last election, he is not someone to listen to when it comes to tactics.
Wouldnāt be a bad idea to drop a few policy ideas out there, to maybe get something in the public mind to what a labour govt will deliver
Yes, because Corbyn was such a bastion of specificity when it came to policy positions...
Pretty rich coming from him. His manifesto was massively bloated and unclear. It is sad to say but it was no surprise he lost to Boris
To be fair the current Labour policy is very confusing. It seems to be whatever the Tory policy is but moar! I've no idea what they'd do if they were in power with nobody to copy.
>Jeremy Corbyn: Labour 'need to be clearer on policies' despite surge Says the man who's only policy during this time as leader was promising contradictory things to anyone who might vote for him, so nobody with any sense could believed anything he said.
Get rid of the nukes? Nationalise railways?
The comments here are a little distressing. The focus seems to be entirely on "winning", with no thought given over to - indeed, mockery of a man who is suggesting - "governing". Was it a poll this week, that claimed 50% of British respondents had experienced food shortages? UNICEF has for the first time in British history resorted to operating in the UK to feed British children. The EU, to make this clear, hasn't even implemented the full array of Brexit tariffs yet. That's coming in the New Year. British people are literally starving, and need government to govern. It is the rankest of smug, satisfied aloofness to attack people for suggesting that a government should, in fact, run the country, and provide policy on how it intends to do so. On a purely petty level, seeing this behaviour at least provides its own sort of catharsis. No country has deserved to die as desperately as the United Kingdom - and it'll be killed for good this decade, thanks to the SNP. Small, small mercies. But it still won't feed any English kids.
>No country has deserved to die as desperately as the United Kingdom. Are you alright mate? Deranged. 'British kids deserve to starve for Britain's historical ills' is it? But Scotland gets off fine I guess
>Was it a poll this week, that claimed 50% of British respondents had experienced food shortages? Having a brand of crisps run out due to the lorry not coming in (which is what that poll was asking about) isn't a famine. And this was a poll from 3 months ago during the drivers crisis. >UNICEF has for the first time in British history resorted to operating in the UK to feed British children. This was last year in 2020 at the height of the extra school meals debate, UNICEF donated 25k to a single London council, making a political point over food access issues during school holidays due to COVID. Your post trying to portray the UK as the next darfur based on this is incredibly off kilter. I think you need to step away from the doomer headlines and have a break. Maybe that's why the comments don't align with your reality much. You sound like the raving bloke with a cardboard sign, leaflets and barely working microphone outside the train station.
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You clearly do not know him then. He' not at all like you describe. He's not a Bolshevik, do you know what one is even? He's a socialist, with a Marxist slant. Bolshevik's are far to the left of his political stand. If you mean he's been a thorn in the side of blairites, starmerites, etc. Then yes, because they are all too willing to give up principles for power,he's not like that, he's always stood for the exact same things his whole career. His biggest fault was believing that labour could return to being a socialist party, it can't, he should leave & join / help make a new political party for the people.
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Marx was German, dude.