Corbyn and feminism - is this guy for real?

[RoyRants]

I'm a leftie but no fan of Corbyn - his ideas seem well out of date, and kind of weak, and as for his stance on feminist issues, they seem a little conservative to me

what do you guys think?
first post by the way

I thought Corbyn was ambivalent about the EU The only thing that jumped out at me was the 50:50 split in cabinet. If there will be elected cabinet (how?) then it's going to be tricky.
He has the appeal to grass roots Labour and possibly the disillusioned.
In 4 years I dtread to think what the press will do to him :( But they'll do the same to any decent person :(

Question to everyone.
Is it more important to see a strong left-wing leader such as J C in charge of Labour even at the cost of losing the next election and getting another 5yrs of Tory policies.
or
Is it more important to get Labour back into power even at the cost of having a weaker (as seen by some) mainstream leader that will push less left-wing policies than J C would have, once in.

Stones

Personally I think the latter. I understand the arguments about opposition but if the electorate find Labour's leader unpalatable, then the Tories will win and continue implementing their policies.

Roy

Yes, we know about the Green Party position on prostitution, thanks - it was discussed extensively on here pre election with the general feeling being it was a disappointing and surprising stance for them to adopt

suppressing gender pronouns? that's just a gimmick, does absolutely nothing, and is prob counter productive and quite absurd too

We have done it to a certain extent. If two candidates are up for election we no longer say, "may the best man win" even if it is two women. We also don't use the pronoun 'he' menaing he or she any more as in the above two candidates, "I'm sure the best candidate will win whoever he is" just isn't said, now it is more likely to be, "who ever they are".

Have a look at old news reports, 1960s and 1970s when 'he' meaning 'he or she' was standard English.

We have done similar with professions now, people are (usually ) chefs, nurses, firefighters, police officers/constables, flight attendants, chair of a committee, spokesperson, actors etc etc.

'PSHE - what is it exactly though?'

Something that's been taught in primary and secondary schools for decades.

PSHE - what is it exactly though?

PSHE

stones a couple of weeks ago I'd have gone for option B

Now I can't see much of a difference between option B and the govt we have at the moment

I'm confused by OP. I don't see anything "conservative" about his policies on women. They all seem like really sensible things that feminists have been calling for for years (except his line on prostitution but that's not in his policy paper as far as I can see). I think he has a good voting record on abortion rights too.

I am fed up with Corbyn bashing from the other contenders. I want to hear what they stand for, what they will do. I don't want to be patronised and told why I shouldn't listen to the competition, even though he is the only one who actually seems to have a consistent personal and political ethos that guides his policy.

None of the candidates are up to the job they are all too backward thinking and too busy playing politic and trying to be clever. They are too 'Westminster Village'.

Stones I'd go for the first option. You can't have an effective government without an effective opposition. The austerity bill wouldn't have passed with an effective opposition but the current 'workers of the world - abstain' policy is completely pointless. The government majority is too small to force through everything they want, the fox hunting bill was shelved, for example and the austerity bill would have been defeated if labour had voted against it. If I wanted to vote for right wing policies then I'd vote Conservative anyway, I'm not sure who a right wing labour party are for.

yy, what Captain said

this old tosh here made up my mind (Jonathan Jones, Guardian's art critic )

I am fed up with Corbyn bashing from the other contenders. I want to hear what they stand for, what they will do.

MissFenella this would be my stance if it wasn't for the candidates' voting record on the Welfare Bill. All the Labour candidates abstained except for Corbyn who voted against.

All the policies and hustings speeches in the world could not make a stronger statement than that single vote.

If you didn't give enough of a shit about ordinary people to vote against that Bill you're not fit to be standing, let alone win leadership of the Labour Party.

You see Corbyn as conservative but think Tony Blair made the Tories move to the left?

Interesting.

Or not.

Harriet Harman explained in her interview in the Graun the other day the reasons for abstaining www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/09/harriet-harman-i-think-ive-done-my-bit

“George Osborne put that bill forward with the sole purpose of trying to cause splits within the Labour party.” It’s no coincidence, she says, that, in the same bill in which he introduced cuts to “the benefits of people who can’t work because they’ve got cancer or Parkinson’s”, he also introduced 3m apprenticeships, and, at the same time as abolishing the child poverty targets, cut council rent by 1%. “Basically, he put in one bill things he knew we didn’t want to vote against and things he knew we were against, just to give us a problem.”

Can she really blame the Tories’ dastardliness for her own failure to oppose the bill? That has always been the protocol, she says – if you agree with some things but disagree with others, you abstain.

Harman always tends towards the earnest, but never more so than now. She prickles with angst as she talks me through the process. “What I did was listen very carefully to the shadow cabinet about what we should do about it.” There was a show of hands. “Eight people wanted to just abstain, 11 wanted to have a reasoned amendment and abstain, and four wanted to vote against.” She decided to abstain with the amendment, but says she could not have won anyway. “There was never going to be a right answer, because the only right answer was not to have the Tories in government and not have the flipping bill in the House of Commons.”

I've heard all the excuses spouted by MPs for abstaining on the Welfare Bill vote. None of them add up, none of them ring true. Actions speak louder than words in this case.

LongandHard, snap.
These faux-labour Blairites come up with enough shite for landfill. H.H??

"Poor us it's so hard we need our 10% payrise, boo hoo it was a decision we had to make and we had no PR consultant at the time so we just had to turn our backs on the majority electorate"

But this is feminism chat, so I would say his policies are bang right on in that respect.

Plus by the way be dubious of anything in The Guardian. Since 2008 they have sold their soul to the Right-of-Left devil.