Posts by nzlemming
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Tamsin6,
Things are getting even odder. Boris will not now stand as Tory leader
Ahahahahahahahahaha! That is so Boris. Complete twatcock.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to John Palethorpe,
Here's a collection of background thoughts and future thoughts on Corbyn
Well said, John, and far more eloquently than I.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to David Hood,
But I honestly doubt the PLP can focus on Boris.
That is the metaphor in the woodpile, yes.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Russell Brown,
But can we get past the idea that the only people who don't have faith in Corbyn any more are Blaire dead-enders? It's plainly not the case.
There are a lot of Blair dead-enders, though, and a lot of people who've come into the Houses since Blairism started to rise. They can't imagine politics as any different than it's always been. Their desire is to be elected (never mind that they have little idea of what to do if they are) and they have senior members of the PLP (who are definitely Blairites) telling them that they can't get elected with Corbyn leading them. Of course, they're voting against him. For now.
And yes, I see the joke.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Russell Brown,
Although those representatives aren't elected by the party membership, but by millions of constituents.
And it's the constituents who should be putting the most pressure on, but it's the membership who decide the selection process. The PLP has alienated itself from both.
Yeah, but Roy Hodgson has resigned.
Cute quip but missing the point.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Russell Brown,
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.
While he has the allegiance of the membership, he's safe as leader. What the membership need to do is put pressure on their elected reps to get their shit together and actually do their job. It's the same problem the NZ Labour party faces - too busy dealing with internal squabbles and unburied hatchets to actually present a coherent ideology and message to give us something to vote for. Currently, I have little doubt that Corbyn won't win the next general election for Labour because the party is too fractured and fucked up to be something that the membership wants to vote for. That's actually not Corbyn's fault - it's the party's fault.
You're right in that a leader can't lead unless the followers let him, but the followers need to get over the fact that the party as a whole selected a man they don't like and actually become an opposition. He can't do that by himself anymore than Hodgson could win against Iceland - it's the team that's got to do the job.
The problem for Labour, both here and there, is that they keep courting the mythical centrist vote. They regard the electorate as a standard statistical distributed curve with a big bulge in the middle, but ignore the fact that the tribalisation of politics has meant that the extreme wings of the spectrum have grown and the general wings have become more entrenched. "My party, right or wrong". The big bulge doesn't exist anymore. And guess who's accentuated the tribalism of politics (in NZ at least)? People like Farrar and Slater. Do you think that's an accident? If so, I've got a bridge to sell you. I'll even throw in a flag.
Tribalism and centrism plays into Tory hands because they never shift there (regardless of what they say) but they tend to pick up more votes as Labour moves the goalposts rightwards. The centre of the political spectrum are the swing voters (I'm one) who vote on issues rather than party lines, and there are never as many of us to start with that can determine every election, but our numbers swell as conditions get worse. Labour (here and there) are waiting for those numbers to get big enough to topple the government. They're counting on a protest vote that hasn't eventuated.
And they're ignoring the fact that the electorate can see them being bloody idiots in the House and fighting with each other and potential allies) instead of the government. Labour's alliance with the Greens (here) gives me more hope than Labour alone has given me since the end of Clark's second term, and that's because the Greens give them credibility as a left wing party, something they haven't let themselves be since Helen fawned over Blair's Third Way. We didn't go as far as Blair's government did, but that may have been because Labour was still feeling the burn from Lange's government. But the right of the party still had a huge amount of influence over what you could laughingly call policy (more reaction than strategy, much of the time) and set the stage for the general arseholeness of Key's miserable bastards.
Labour (here and there) needs to give the voters something to vote for rather than count on us voting against the government, and it needs to be something other than "more of the same, with different coloured ties on".
Whew!
ETA I'd like to note that I have never voted National in my life and cannot see myself doing so, but I definitely have not voted for Labour on occasions.
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Let me amend that. I expect to see a different Corbyn. You may see what you will.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Russell Brown,
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?
A party grouping that has swung to the right and is nervous about an actual left-wing leader because they have been inculcated with the idea that the centre is the place to be. Now he has abandoned the appeasement, wider-tent approach, expect to see a very different Corbyn. It's impossible to put your stamp on anything when everything you say gets contradicted by the people who are supposed to be your primary supporters, as Gordon Brown and Ed Milliband found out.
What's his plan? Have them all deselected?
Whether he's planned it or not, I suspect that's going to be the fate of more than a few of them.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to nzlemming,
I think Corbyn is a lot closer to the traditional Labour voters and their beliefs in what a government should do than Greenslade is willing to give him credit for
The Labour party on the other hand, has a lot of 'splainin' to do, Lucy.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Rich Lock,
I think you'll find that Caleb said the first paragraph. I added a comment that I did not think it accidental that we were talking about Corbyn. Somebody wants it that way. The dead cat distraction is most definitely one of the weapons that CT employ. Its use is well known. It doesn't mean that everyone who uses it has CT on the payroll.