Natter for labour party members

[YeOldeTrout]

Who are you minded to vote for? How have you decided?

Leader & deputy leader.
I can't make up my mind. The commentators seem to say things about each candidate that are quite different from the impressions I get.

Ah I see, good luck!!!

I think a lot of my Labour friends who were voting Andy have been quite umimpressed. I just remember his "I don't like biscuits but I like GRAVY AND CHIPS because I am WORKING CLASS" moment on MN...

Moment - you're exactly right. And you've said it much better than I was trying to :p

Yeoldetrout - I think part of the reason Ed was viewed in the way he was, was because he was more left wing. It's a real pity as I agreed with almost everything he was trying to do, but I think the Labour party's challenge is to present the public with a centrist platform and get away with the more left wing stuff around the edges (as Tony Blair did very well IMO in the last govt...) once we get into power.

Thank you Alyosha! Now if I could just work out how to vote in the leadership election based on that...

It's a pity there aren't really inspiring candidates with fresh ideas (I don't count Benn 2.0 as that, btw!) or someone like Dave Miliband who had support across the party before being beaten by Ed.

I'm still voting 1st pref Liz Kendall, but only because I'm pretty sure she'll be knocked out my 2nd pref for Yvette Cooper will be the one that will count...

I like Yvette and thinks she's got lots of good sensible idea s- I'm just worried about her charisma, or lack thereof.

That's such a grim prospect "Alyosha*. Kendall (the most right-wing labour leadership candidate ever) and Yvette Cooper (horribly tainted by her association with Blairism, her pompous fool of a husband and the bizarre expenses scams they concocted together).

BTW your hero Blair, (the Conservative PM in Labour Party clothing), merely continued Thatcherism under a different name. Thatcherism and Blairism together have all but finished Britain off socially, economically, politically, diplomatically. This is the man who lied through his teeth to get the public to support his Middle East bloodbaths. But OK he kept schools and the NHS just about ticking over, despite the colossal sums he put into them after years of Tory neglect. Then watched as the money was squandered by meddlers and middle management. All he possessed was an outward show of dynamism which concealed a whole suite of malign objectives and activities. There was almost nothing of real substance to the Blair phenomenon - smoke and mirrors, vainglory, PR blather and hype.

Labour now need a principled leader who'll galvanise Labour voters. Not some Tory-lite to massage the sensibilities of Tory voters in a handful of marginals who maybe can sneak in a few tiny bits of centre left policy around the fringes when no one's looking.

Building a powerful case for our own values of investment in the future is what we need to be doing. A plan based on optimism, positivity, making the case that it doesn't have to be this way. Getting people into meaningful jobs that will turn them into consumers, that will in turn, create demand. That will come with shunning austerity and making the necessary investment. And we'll get that message across with a principled leader that really believes in those things.

That's what your hero Blair in '97 no?

Apart from the having principles bit - obviously..

OK xmas, so all of the tax credits, the child tax credits, the child benefit, the single parent support, the extra money for the NHS, the extra money for education etc. is a continuation of Thatcherism...OK! And actually health outcomes & education outcomes did improve as a result of the extra money. Not all of it was best spent but that's a lesson for a future Labour government to take to heart.

No, Labour needs a leader who can win! Not one who defends Milosevic, Putin & Gaddafi but wants Tony Blair tried for war crimes. I think the Iraq war was a huge mistake - but let's not give Corbyn a free pass for his support of murderous regimes here.

I think we'll win with centrist policies that appeal to voters on the Tory left, who see us being a sensible party of power, one willing to make hard choices.

Oh dear... "extra money" for the nhs, right, through PFI which has lead to nhs crippling under debt.
"Extra money" for education, ok if you believe bondage to a life of perdonal debt equates to a positive economic outcome. O.K.

The problem with these faux-Labour Blairites is your consern is purely how to dress up a disaster in PR spin and glib.

Labour needs to look past it's own skin to address the problem of a nation ripped to shreds by Thatcherite capitalism and private finance.

Corbyn does not defend putin etc. You obviously swallow the same press serum that you dish out.

I am not feeling particularly in bondage to my student loan (which totalled 24k by time I left University). I own a flat with my partner and my student loan repayments function effectively as a graduate tax, they come out of my salary like PAYE.

And yes, Labour did improve health & educational outcomes. PFI was a bad idea too - but those schools & hospitals needed to be built and I'm glad they were. They certainly wouldn't have been built under the Tories.

Do you think if JM had won another term, the outcome would have been no different?

Also yes - Corbyn has defended Putin: www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-972b-Nato-belligerence-endangers-us-all#.VbtA4PNVikq written by the man himself!

And he also authored an EDM supporting Milosevic.

Sorry signed.

Lucky you and your middle class white privilege!
Plus yawn your categorisation on Corbyn's perspective as supporting the entirety if something while taken out of specific context is typical Selective Blairite.

I don't think Aloysha grasps how a Labour party that is "credible to Tory voters" makes labour voters hate it.

Yes. I am very lucky, and very privileged. However no one starts paying back student debt until they earn a certain amount and it comes out of your pay directly - like a graduate tax, in fact. It does not have a huge impact on eligibility for mortgages.

How can signing an EDM in support of Milosevic be taken out of context? Or authoring an article essentially saying Russia has the right to do what it wants because of nasty NATO protectin the territorial sovereignty of other countries?

HA you have exposed your black-and-white narrow typical career politician agenda driven position.

Ok you have found one very specific niche area of policy where Corbyn agrees with political opponents. And with regards to these very specific areas of discussion he makesba very strong case.

Welcome to the real word where opponents can agree in one segment while retaining fundamentally opposing viewpoints.

The establishment are trying to taint Corbyn with "Another communist friend of Hamas and Putin" but sorry it's not washing.

Not one who defends Milosevic, Putin & Gaddafi. Wouldn't that be terrible if we had a PM who supports dictatorial regimes? You're trying to make very complex matters sound terribly simplistic Alyosha Blair's legacy is alive and kicking I see.

It's true Corbyn and his future foreign sec' have not yet sanctioned the sale of Hawk fighter-bombers to commit genocide somewhere like East Timor - not yet anyway. Or maybe he'll keep silent as Blair did when America sanctioned every move at the UN to reign in the Israeli war machine. Or get to have the blood of over a million Iraqis and countless Afghans on his hands.
Maybe Corbyn will sell billions of £'s worth of arms to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt among many others, (all nations with diabolical human rights records) as Blair did.

It remains to be seen if Corbyn also starts believing he's been sent by his creator to fight evil. What do you say to the fact that senior UN diplomats resigned in 1998 and 2000, describing New Labour's policy on Iraq as "genocidal" BTW?

Two wrongs don't make a right. Tony Blair was wrong, and so is Corbyn. Tony Blair did immense damage in Iraq - but I supported Nato's intervention in Kosovo, and it worries me that whilst TB at least paid lip service to defending human rights, Corbyn cares more about supporting self described "socialist" dictators. And not just that: he supported TB being indicted for war crimes but not Milosevic - at least be consistent!

TB at least paid lip service to defending human rights That's OK then! Well perhaps for you it is...Problem is, most people like their politicians are to be honest ! . You've surpassed yourself trying to put Corbyn on a par with a lying, war criminal like Tony Blair, you really have!

Wrong Indeed? That's putting it rather mildly. Over a million dead in Iraq. I call it a war crime of massive proportions myself. Yes I agree, Corbyn ought to hang his head in shame for not resigning alongside Robin Cook back then in '03, but it remains to be seen if Corbyn will lie to his cabinet and parliament with the same sense of messianic glee about WMD coming at 'our boys' in 45mins. About the French blocking him at the UN because, er, they’re just like that! About links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. Remember that lie of Tony's? Quietly dropped of course, as the truth started to emerge.

You may have bought into his earlier lies over Kosovo. But Corbyn didn’t, and he opposed Nato’s ’99 air assault on Serbia as it had absolutely FA to do with a concern for human rights. It was Yugoslavia's resistance to political and economic reform that was used as justification to drop cluster bombs on Belgrade, killing hundreds of people in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and the state TV studios. More wrong for you!

The plight of Kosovar Albanians as the liar Blair tried to argue was irrelevant as well as grossly exaggerated. In fact if anyone was involved in ethnic cleansing it was the KLA. Blair’s tales of a Holocaust-style, Serbian genocide prior to bombing were porkies every bit as big as Iraqi WMD three years later were.

In Kosovo, Western politicians and generals knew, publicly predicted in fact, that military intervention would generate a massive increase in atrocities and suffering, as happened. Corbyn isn't quite in that league yet.

While I like Corbyn, I think he was completely wrong on Kosovo. Even Michael Foot, one of the founders of CND, agitated for UK intervention (although he supported air strikes, he wanted fewer and supplemented by boots on the ground in Kosovo and Bosnia).

Spot on, misspriggy. Corbyn was right over Kosovo, along with Tory Alan Clark and George Galloway. Corbyn is right over Putin too. His Morningstar article is amazing in its clear analysis of world events, of China, BRICS, Russia etc. If Corbyn makes it, he will be so different to what we have had that it will be unrecognisable. His clear thinking courage is quite amazing.

Corbyn really is left wing. He's not making it up, he's not like the rest of Labour, he won't compromise his principles and beliefs. Amazing.

Ah so I imagine you were on the side of Marxism Today and have resolutely ignored the copious mounds of evidence for Serbian war crimes? Are you a srebenica denier too?

And it doesn't make it OK that TB paid lip service to human rights, any more than it excuses Corbyn for defending a dictator bent on racial and religious purity.

Claig - we all know where your loyalties lie. Corbyn's hatred of the USA blinds him to Russia's invasion and proxy control of countries it thinks it should run.

This thread makes me want to tear up my membership card. I can't be in a party with a group of nasty people who have so little respect for each other.

The first election I was eligible to vote in was 1983 and I voted Labour, as I did in subsequent elections up until Blair decided invading Afghanistan was a good idea, completely ignoring both public opinion and history. The only leadership candidate that would or could inspire me to vote Labour is Jeremy Corbyn. His political views of nationalisation and more equality coincide with my own. Nationalising everything the neoliberals sold to foreign governments and massive corporations would save the country billions in the long term and even the short term as the motivation to turn a profit is taken out of the equation.

The system we have now of socialism for banks and corporations, of transferring their losses and failures from them to us, the public, to pay for, is unsustainable. Gidiot is busy building bubbles in housing and the stock market and it's going to end badly, as all Ponzi schemes do.

Do get a grip Alyosah. So I’m a Srebrenica denier ? Coming from someone who defends of the 78 day, indiscriminate bombing of defenceless Serbians because their leader wouldn't submit to Western capitalism, that really is a bit rich!

There were crimes on all sides but strangely only the ones of Gov’ts unfriendly to us, are remembered for theirs.

The FBI and a Spanish forensic team, descended on Kosovo after the conflict, and didn't find a shred of evidence of mass graves or massacres of any kind and went home. They even spoke out and angrily denounced the NATO bombing as unnecessary and hypocritical afterwards. So they're all Marxism today subscribers too I suppose?

Carla Del Ponte, (another loony lefty and 'massacre denier') as well as the then chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, held a tribunal and put the final death count in Kosovo at: 2,788. Terrible, and 1 dead person would be too many, but not really a "holocaust". Especially as the dead included combatants on both sides, plus Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide in Kosovo. The "holocaust" was a lie. So Blair's grooming of public opinion and The Nato bombing ~ all fraudulent.

Del Ponte said the KLA kidnapped hundreds of Serbs and transported them to Albania, where their kidneys and other body parts were removed; these were then sold for transplant in other countries. She also says there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the Kosovar Albanians for war crimes, but the investigation "was nipped in the bud" so that the tribunal's focus would be on "crimes committed by Serbia". She says the Hague judges were terrified of the Kosovar Albanians - the very people in whose name Nato had attacked Serbia.

Doubtless you recall Blair's Bob Geldof-esque tour of "liberated" Kosovo? As he was enjoying his photo ops with the grateful civilians. The KLA was ethnically cleansing more than 200,000 Serbs and Roma from the province. In 2007 the "international community", led by the US, recognised Kosovo, which has no formal economy and is run by criminal gangs trafficking in drugs, contraband and women. But it has one valuable asset: the US military base Camp Bondsteel, described by the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner as "a smaller version of Guantanamo". So all worth it would you say?

Corbyn's defending a dictator. How terrible? But he hasn't yet supported (at the UN and by selling arms to) the Israelis sending in helicopter gunships to flatten civilian infrastructure particularly schools and hospitals, in Gaza? Or given diplomatic and military support to the world's greatest terror state Saudi Arabia, closely followed by Bahrain? I wonder if he’ll enrich himself by giving the President of Kazakhstan PR tips after his Police went on the rampage slaughtering unarmed protestors? Or to JP Morgan?

Well said DoctorTwo Good points..