Blaming Labour

[InsanityRocks]

Time and time again I see here that the only reason people voted for the tories was because 'anti-semite/terrorist/bad dresser Corbyn' AIBU to think that all these people voted for the racist/misogynist/self-serving Johnson knowing he is all these things as all his views come straight out his mouth, yet the anti Corbyn stuff is hearsay from the press/Russian bots/SM etc.

I don't think Corbyn would have made a good prime minister necessarily, he is too passionate, too idealistic. However, for all those saying he should have stepped down: he won more people to join the Labour Party than ever before, there was the beginning of a movement for change, real change. But members of Momentum joined to deliberately sabotage, along with the constant hum of how evil this man is, how dangerous from the right-wing big business and newspaper owners along with a growing feeling of mistrust manufactured by Russian social media destabilisation all conspired to make sure he failed.

We are all hating what is happening in this country now, but for the moment, the best way to tackle it is through socialism and inclusion. People seemed so scared of socialism, is it because it gets confused with communism? For covid and climate change and unemployment and mental health support and education and the NHS and all the other major issues that face us as a society at the moment, we need to work as a team, surely?

Agree with @Newjez that all choices at last election were awful.
I wish our incumbent Government would show some form of social conscience though. As commentators have noted if Nigel Farage is sitting in judgement on them then its some VERY right wing policies they are peddling.

I don't think many people want their Government's policies to include:

1. refusing additional help to feed children during a national emergency
2. Sending elderly people with positive Covid tests into care homes AGAIN( after how disastorous that policy turned out to be in Spring)

But then when you have the leader of the House of Commons blaming the Grenfell victims for following instructions from the emergency services you know there's a basic lack of compassion in the Tory party.

The U.K. is currently in a very bad place, politically and economically. While there is no doubt that the Tory party must take the majority of the blame for that, as they have been in government for the last decade, Labour also has to accept a share of the blame for choosing a completely useless and unelectable leader in Corbyn.

For democracies to function properly, there has to be a credible opposition led by someone who is a credible candidate to be Prime Minister. Between 2015 & 2019, that was simply not the case. The Left were warned, loudly and repeatedly, that Corbyn could not win and they refused to listen. Now they know that we who warned them were right, and they were wrong.

Corbyn is too.communist for me.

You were asking for an example of a socialist state that has successfully managed to contain Covid. Is Cuba socialist enough for you??
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/cuba-coronavirus-success-contact-tracing-isolation

...or Vietnam?
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/20/vietnam-covid-economic-growth-public-health-coronavirus

I also gather that China refers to itself as socialist, and they seem to be managing rather better than the West, too

Corbyn passionate? I don't think he even knows the meaning of the word. He couldn't make a choice if his life depended on it, I wouldn't call that passion. Regardless of party, that man should have never been the face of anything!

@crackofdoom

...or Vietnam? www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/20/vietnam-covid-economic-growth-public-health-coronavirus

I also gather that China refers to itself as socialist, and they seem to be managing rather better than the West, too

Ah yes, that’s where western democracies have been going wrong, we should be aspiring to be more like Cuba and Vietnam, why not throw in Venezuela for good measure too? Is that new bar?

Cuba and Vietnam, is that what you dredged up
as shining beacons of socialism winning the anti Covid struggle?

@ChardonnaysPetDragon

Cuba and Vietnam, is that what you dredged up as shining beacons of socialism winning the anti Covid struggle?

To be honest I am surprised it took them so long.....usually these priceless references are thrown in much earlier in the debate.

I didn’t vote labour for many reasons - Corbyn being one of them. Labour changed under him and became a party of extremists. Momentum and John Macdonald. Some of the policies they were coming up with were absurd. I don’t like Johnson but saw him as the lesser of two evils. I would have voted Lib Dem but it was clear they didn’t have a hope in hell of getting in and I wanted to make sure Corbyn didn’t. I like Kier Starmer but it would depend on whether Momentum were still on the scene.

TBH, Sweden was the usual early contender.

Labour won’t get a look in because they largely lack fiscal and economic credibility.

Looks at how the UK credit rating has fared since Labour left office, when Moodys ranked it as Aaa, then looks at where it is now i - Aaa2 negative and thinks..er, right, if you say so..

But yes Corbyn was pants..........

I feel Labour failed the country at the last election by offering Jeremy Corbyn as the leader at the last election.

Although Labour has done better under Starker, I don't think they have too much strength in depth. The current shadow chancellor is abismal.

The Tories will probably have switched bro Rishi for the next election, causing yet more problems for Labour.

I voted Tory purely because a vote for anyone else was a vote for Corbyn and I couldn't stand him and his Momentum tribe. It was completely tactical and I have no loyalty to any party, I've never voted in this way before and hope I won't have to again.

@tttigress I agree about Sunak. He has something about him that makes him likeable which is definitely a problem for Labour. I'm undecided about Starmer, I don't think he's had a chance yet with everything being Covid related at the moment.

@PercyKirke

It always strikes me as odd that the "progressive" Labour party are always looking back (to Corbyn even sometimes Attlee) whereas the reactionary Tories never seem to do so, always talking about the country's future with only brief generalised references to the past.

Perhaps there's a lesson here for Labour?

This is more interesting. Why the concern about looking back? If you don’t look back then you don’t learn from experience. As we all know ‘those who don’t learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them’.

Could it be that if people did look back they would find that this common meme put about, that the left is ‘economically illiterate’, can be brought under serious questions?

I think most people are in agreement that there are indeed serious social and economic problems in Britain. Perhaps we should have a thread on those alone to remind ourselves that we are broadly in agreement. Then have a good look at all the options open to us, not dismissing half of them out of hand on the basis of meaningless labels chucked around like confetti, and see what has worked in the past.

I met Corbyn - he was a lovely man. I accept now that he wasn’t right to be PM because sadly his moral compass is too strong and perhaps he is if I’m completely honest a tad too idealistic for PM level politics but to the first poster who likened him to a serial killer - absolute bollocks 🤣

Corbyn destroyed the Labour party by piling up votes among students and the small number of areas where black or Muslim voters are a significant force. At the same time his brand of student politics was profoundly offputting to working class white voters who had voted for Labour for generations, leading to historic defeats and Tory MPs being elected for the first time in Northern/Midlands seats.

This realignment is much worse for Labour than for the Democrats in the US, in that the US has a large population of Hispanic voters, who are absent in the UK, and whereas the Republicans implemented overtly racist policies since the 1960s intended to appeal to white voters it left then with a serious demographic issue as the non-white population was already large, and rising, whereas the UK is much smaller and the black population is not an electoral force outside of London, and is not rising.

There does seem to have been an firm alignment between Labour and Muslim voters, which perhaps was not the case in the past (the Tories did well in Bradford in previous years), but that won't save Labour given that the Muslim population is not dispersed across the country but mostly in a few dozen seats.

A true US-style realignment where educated voters vote Labour and those with less education vote Tory does not seem likely in the near future, given the vast swathes of wealthy countryside where the Tories are incredibly safe, and the existence of the Liberal Democrats as a refuge for the middle class vote.

I met Corbyn - he was a lovely man. I accept now that he wasn’t right to be PM because sadly his moral compass is too strong and perhaps he is if I’m completely honest a tad too idealistic for PM level politics but to the first poster who likened him to a serial killer - absolute bollocks 🤣

For goodness sake - you met him ONCE. You don't know him. All his actions show that he is best suited as an activist. He should have been kept on the back benches, where he can happily shout "It's all shit!", with the rest of his cronies, but not be called upon to make sensible decisions, as that is beyond him.

And yes, I agree he is idealistic - like some 6th Former that grew old, but never up. His principles are one of the reasons that he was so wavy-navy when Labour really should have backed Remain. He has always been Eurosceptic - love how all the "well-informed" student Labour voters missed that!!

And forgot to add - I've met Boris Johnson. He was a perfectly nice, affable bloke and had a good laugh with us and the kids.

So he must be "lovely" too, right?

T/O I didn't know that Sweden put those over 70 under house arrest, while journalists were unquestioningly filming the rest of the population strolling in the sun.

To O.P. Someone probably over a century ago declared "A man of five and twenty who is not a socialist must be a knave. A man of five and forty who is still a socialist must be a fool."
The simple idea of wanting fairness appeals to any child. The realisation that fairness is extraordinarily complex dawns on any thoughtful adult. Every socialist government bankrupts the country. The theory is good, but corruption and a quasi religious suspension of critical re-evaluation are fatal.

The history of Trade Unions' hatred of women is shameful. They are now embedded and influencing government via the Age Hate Marxist Unions organisation which curiously calls itself resolution.

It must be obvious if anyone applies brain, instead of mindless sentimentality, that you cannot eliminate child poverty by pouring gold over a gambling or junkie mother. It must be obvious that everything humans need as children they also need as adults, especially when old or disabled, yet the clamour for the cute is unquestioning and overpowering. (And never, never challenged.)

It must be obvious biodiversity is what keeps the world going, yet although in recent years humans have caused half the species to go extinct, people still only want to 'save' cute pandas.

The 'footballification of everything' leads to people lazily taking a team's coloured scarf, or a religious dogma, or a political team, then suspending brain, and chanting, instead of thinking.

Oh dear, this thread on a forum which is largely left wing, doesn’t paint a good picture for Labour, does it? I’m gathering it’s a right wing media conspiracy, right? Nothing to do with the hard left being largely incompetent.

Every socialist government bankrupts the country.
And every government that fosters extreme unchecked capitalism by its nature leads to corruption and croneyism too. Leading directly to enormous social tensions, a growth in social divisions, identification into sub-groups which actually have something in common, those individual groups vying over power and eventually an inability to function as a single nation, leading to armed conflicts over land borders and resources. Side effects in the past have included destruction of local environments as their local custodians are ignored in favour of the profit of strong remote groups.

Europe’s history - at least Western Europe, with Britain tagging along grumbling as an outsider looking the other way - since the world wars has been all about trying to find a compass direction between these two extremes.

@sst1234

Oh dear, this thread on a forum which is largely left wing, doesn’t paint a good picture for Labour, does it? I’m gathering it’s a right wing media conspiracy, right? Nothing to do with the hard left being largely incompetent.

Because of course everyone on MN has posted on this thread. Again I can’t believe you can talk about Labour incompetence with a straight face when the last seven months has been a never ending display of political incompetence.