Posts by Russell Brown
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to nzlemming,
Let me amend that. I expect to see a different Corbyn. You may see what you will.
I had no strong feelings either way about Corbyn, but what I'm seeing now is a man whose day-to-day job is leading the Parliamentary Labour Party. And 80% of those he is supposed to lead have formally declared no confidence in his leadership.
Even Liz McInnes, who voted for him in the confidence vote has now resigned her shadow Cabinet post and called for him to step down.
Your confidence that, having been overwhelmingly rejected by his MPs and had his shadow Cabinet wrecked to the extent that he's struggling to fill it with supporters, he will soon display hitherto unseen qualities and lead Labour to victory (or even run an effective Opposition) is admirable, but I don't share it.
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Speaker: The Government you Deserve, in reply to Adam H,
I think this is the fundamental flaw in the neo-lib agenda. It uses the mathematical equivalent of homeopathy to justify focusing these decisions down to a point that our social system struggles to cope with – it ignores the social imperatives.
It’s like the branding around ‘realism’ – people kinda rolling their eyes and while proudly saying they are realists. To me, what they are saying is “I don’t understand how people feel so I’ve going to pretend they are machines”
Good explanation. People mostly use "neoliberalism" as an all-purpose boogeyman, so it's nice to see the problem actually described.
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Speaker: The Government you Deserve, in reply to Jim Cathcart,
I suggest that you read Matt Ellis ‘The Left should celebrate Brexit: UK just kicked Neoliberalism in the nuts’ to understand the reality.
Hmmm. There’s a lot of stating of self-evidence here:
Extant political expressions of racist views are in no small part due to the economic hardship and falling living standards inflicted on Europeans by the neoliberal agenda and the resulting GFC. What to speak of the military adventurism that is a key facet of the EU’s role within the Western power structure, and its creation of a global refugee crisis following more than a decade of military intervention in the Middle East.
There can be no mistaking the fact that the EU itself and its undemocratic policies and actions are largely to blame for the contemporary rise of racism on the continent. That is the depressing irony of majority leftwing opposition to the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. The unsavoury elements of the Brexit campaign are largely caused by the results of EU membership.
And:
... its embrace of austerity economics in service to financiers and rent-seekers, and its embrace of Russian/Chinese isolationism in service to US hegemony and neoconservative warmongering.
The EU aligns with an orthodoxy, but the idea that this orthodoxy will magically reform itself when the EU is destroyed seems quite fanciful. It seems at least as likely things will be worse.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to David Hood,
So Corbyn lost a non-binding no confidence vote among MPs 172 to 40.
From The Guardian’s story. When the party rules were revised in 1993, making such a vote formally binding was not considered necessary:
David Ward said John Smith, the previous leader for whom he was chief of staff, had told him that any leader would have to resign after a vote of no confidence. “You cannot survive,” he said, arguing that it was the only mechanism in the party to force a leader out.
I imagine Smith would have supposed that a Parliamentary leader who lost a confidence vote by any margin would pack it in, let alone by 130 votes.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to nzlemming,
From Labour’s perspective, it is. The Blairites are the right wing, Third Way, centrists so beloved of Blair. I’m not saying Benn et al are being advised by CrosbyTextor, but it’s a classic CT ploy, and well publicised, and I doubt that they aren’t being encouraged by their “friends” across the aisle to seize the moment and dethrone Corbyn, which serves to distract the media from over-analysing how the real Tories got it so incredibly wrong.
Is the more straightforward explanation not that a leader who has now lost a caucus confidence vote 172-40 simply does not have the support of his Parliamentary colleagues?
What's his plan? Have them all deselected?
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Russell Brown,
I would add that there's pretty clearly a cynical Blairite gambit going on. I just don't think that's all it is.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to simon g,
Corbyn has been attacked constantly by the right-wing tabloids, by Blairites, by all manner of opponents, in bad faith. AND …
Corbyn has shown himself to be pretty bad at his job.
This is precisely my view, with added essence of Momentum anti-semitism (a distressingly common trend in the modern left-Left). The email received by anti-Corbyn Labour MP Jess Philips might have come from a mass-mail tool but it was creepy as fuck.
And tbf, a New Zealand party leader facing that kind of abandonment by Parliamentary colleagues would have been gone by yesterday’s lunchtime.
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Hard News: Starting the cannabis…, in reply to Worik Stanton,
That is nice, be safe and be nice to police officers, because you have to.
I try and be nice to everyone!
But let’s try this: in the past five or six years, Police have been using their discretion to decline to bring a criminal prosecution against a growing number of people they arrest for minor drug offences. They appear to be doing this independent of any government direction, or the law.
Happy?
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Hard News: Starting the cannabis…, in reply to Worik Stanton,
It is not any sort of decriminalisation.
Nearly half of all people apprehended and processed for drug offences in Northland last year weren't charged with a criminal offence, and nearly all of them of them received pre-charge warnings. The warning doesn't constitute a criminal record and isn't viewable by employers etc.
PCWs were introduced as a Police initiative in 2010 to cut the number of petty cases going through the courts. There are about 1300 of them for drug offences every year. The cops (bizarrely) don't record diversions, but they seem to be increasing for drug offences too.
Of course that's not ideal – as I noted, it's selective and that's dangerous. We still also see the high-PR-value stunts like this year's cannabis recovery operation, which ruin people's lives.
It's emphatically not a substitute for reform of the law, but I do think it's the police doing what what the politicians lack the moral courage for.
The thing the police can't do, of course, is actually change the law – so, as the Law Commission noted, there is no statutory basis for either PCWs or diversion. The LawComm proposed a form of decriminalisation, in law, based on "mandatory cautions", which you could collect a few of (more for Class C drugs) before the prospect of being charged. It's a pretty weak form of decriminalisation, but even that was rejected by the Key government. (The cops didn't like it because they like the control implicit in exercising discretion.)
So I'm happy enough with the phrase "de facto decriminalisation".
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to nzlemming,
Or do I need to have text in the post as well as attaching an image?
Yes, that's the issue.
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