Jeremy Corbyn vs Angela Eagle

Sounds logical.
Would compensation of membership fees mean membership retained.
Wouldn't be very useful otherwise.

No, i think they'd probably have to give people the option of cancelling their membership and having their fees returned.

Yeah sounds like the opposite of desired result or at least extremely distant from it. I assume a decent lawyer would sit down with clients in initial meeting and outline likely outcomes. Not wanting to string clients along I also assume that those pursuing this case are people who want to stay with Labour but were just unhappy about lack of vote.

I've started following a bunch of Labour MPs on twitter and it's interesting looking at the "followers you know" bit on various accounts. afaict Owen Smith is the only Labour MP to follow @parisreview, Jamie Reed is the only Labour MP to follow @Full_KitWanker

Some controversy at the end of last week when it came out that the leadership announcement conference now clashed with the National Women's conference. I think both are happening just before the main labour conference.

& I would think that leadership might need to come out before the actual conference. Though both sides have asked that the announcement be delayed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02z3x45

Mealy mouthed condemnations from politicians have done so much to heal the sectarian rifts and stop the IRA from committing acts of terrorism in in the past of course. I can't even listen to the full clip because it has Stephen Nolan on it.

http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/images/localworld/ugc-images/276270/binaries/crowd%202.jpg

brown shirt and blue shorts on the right hand side = me

must've took that picture early on before it filled up

http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/images/localworld/ugc-images/276270/binaries/crowd%204.jpg

that's more like how it felt

hadn't been outside for a couple of days and got sunburn #thanksCorbyn

He was at the Royal Armouries in Leeds last night and was thinking of making the trip with Alex, but I started drinking too early...

for a helpless old man he's sure doing a lot of gigs

http://newstimes.augusta.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/superphoto/10914439.jpg

Ha

40,000 rejected and no refunds seems like an easy way to make £1m.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/02/labour-leadership-election-40000-registered-supporters-rejected/

Would be interesting to know if Samantha Cameron's sister was one of them.

THe Labour Party's fundraising structure is going to have to do something to clean up its image after recent events isn't it?
I thought the £25 thing was bad enough in itself without further restrictions.

& what is this about your vote being vetoed if you've voted for somebody else previously? Is that people registering more than once or people having their voting history checked? & if the latter what relevance to the current vote does that have?

I'd take 'a rival party candidate' to mean one from a rival party, but it's not the clearest journalism.

actually "previously supported a rival party candidate," sounds like a potential swing voter. Were they worried about people joining simply to disrupt proceedings. The Chattering classes vote or people joining from other leftist parties?

Also wonder how many people didn't think to check they were on the electoral register cos they'd sort it out before the actual vote happened. & because given an immediate deadline for registering for this and not being told it was an issue they didn't think about it anyway.

It was this way last year as well - paranoia about 'the wrong sort of people' joining, like they were the fucking Lib Dems or something.

Not refunding rejected members is straight lowlife behaviour and little more than a confidence scam. Christ, these fucking people.

do they really want to alienate all the disillusioned lifelong tories who have undergone damascene conversions since being exposed to owen smith's dynamite rhetoric and are eager for him to be their candidate for prime minister?

Wonder if there will be any more court cases against the Labour Party from people who would like to be involved in the Labour Party, but are just getting messed around by them.

Is the NEC election later in the summer or did that happen already. Would think getting the right people in there might be the first real step towards sorting this mess out. Instead of people possibly just being presented with the possibility of leaving and getting fees returned or what ever the outcome of this week's case is likely to be.

Surely the party's reputation can only suffer from pulling underhanded shortsighted crap like this and whatever floating voters walk away again.
Would think they'd be doing their best to entice people to get involved rather than playing childish games.

Also wonder if people are actually getting involved or being given the chance to really become so.

voting in the NEC election closes midday Friday

Surely the party's reputation can only suffer from pulling underhanded shortsighted crap like this and whatever floating voters walk away again.

The political events of the last year have been 90% shortsighted crap, why do you think we're leaving the EU in the first place?

Would think they'd be doing their best to entice people to get involved rather than playing childish games.

They don't actually want more people involved, or at least, they don't want people involved who are going to think the wrong way.

yeah, the naysayers in the PLP are not that stupid. they know that there aren't 40-odd thousand actual commie subversives who've been waiting to sneak in and wreck the party. that's why talk of entryism is just another piece of dishonest rhetoric from people who believe politics is the art of dishonest rhetoric. they have no real excuse for these exclusions. they are attempting to game the system and shut people who disagree with them out of the party. they are terrified of genuine democracy and genuine political change, for all sorts of reasons.

the influx of general left-ish hippies, peaceniks, communists, anarchists and kids who just want a different kind of politics is not conducive or useful to the running of the Labour Party as it currently functions. political parties tend to only be interested in the people prepared to devote their lives to the cause and play the appropriate bureaucratic games. there's a worry that a lot of the newbies attracted by Corbyn won't do these things. i think that's broadly true - the problem is that a party that relies on its hardcore nerds is automatically undemocratic, excluding people with too much going on in their lives to turn up to every committee meeting and every canvassing session. i don't think i need to spell out what socioeconomic groups tend to be excluded by this kind of ultraism because it's the same old same old.

Posting in a hurry:

https://jeremygilbertwriting.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/a-response-to-paul-masons-labour-the-way-ahead/

This is a good summary...what does a potential split look-like, the long game, fuck a 2020 etc. Has a link to that Owen Jones piece of questions to JC and supporters - big laughs all round.

Didn't mention earlier that the various leadership candidates for UKIP that weren't Woolfe were on BBC News this morning demonstrating why not to vote for them.

Sorry should probably have been on the Brexit thread not this one.

coverage of the meeting called by members of the suspended Wallasey Labour party here:

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/meeting-over-suspended-wallasey-labour-11696843

over 200 in attendance

This is a good summary...what does a potential split look-like, the long game, fuck a 2020 etc. Has a link to that Owen Jones piece of questions to JC and supporters - big laughs all round.

"Fuck a 2020" is short-termism purporting to be the opposite. I have my issues with that Owen Jones piece and he is often insufferable but he is right that there does need to be a proper strategy and vision for the next election and it's sheer complacency to pretend that it doesn't matter, or that you can't expect Corbyn and McDonnell to get their shit together after a year in charge and probably several decades of thinking about what they would do if they were ever to miraculously be put in charge of the Labour Party.

It's easy to say "well Labour wouldn't win under anyone in 2020" - firstly I'm not sure that true, but then again a victory by the Labour right probably wouldn't get us anywhere worth going anyway. But if you don't have a proper electoral strategy that takes into account the various demographic issues that they would prefer to pretend just aren't there, then you run a massive risk of being in an event bigger hole after 2020, one that turns your ten-year "social movement" plan into a 20-year one, or longer. If you're given a once-in-a-generation opportunity, you don't squander it by assuming that you have longer than you really have, and you certainly don't go "ner ner ner not listening" when someone tries to point that out.

The main response to that Owen Jones piece I've seen from a member of Corbyn's circle has been Diane Abbott approvingly linking to a piece that basically went "well it shows he's with Owen Smith really". It's understandable that a paranoid bunker mentality has built up but that sort of "you're either with us or against us" approached being turned on people who want you to do well is total bullshit.

Of the many criticisms that are thrown at Corbyn, there are two that stick most with me - one is that he's happier preaching to the converted than trying to win over other people. I suspect the hundreds of people turning up to support him feeds his vanity to an extent and fools people into thinking that the rest of the country can be dragged along in that irresistible slipstream. It probably can't, which is why having a proper electoral strategy is essential.

The other is that he's only interested in hearing what he wants to hear. We know what happens when parties only listen to yes-men. And we seem to be hearing from a parade of formerly supportive non-party experts who have been consulted, then ignored only for McDonnell to just make policy up on the hoof apparently without consulting anyone. Committing to "balancing the books", for example, despite that being manifestly at odds with any kind of workable anti-austerity approach.

The recapture of Labour from the right after the next election is a probability unless Corbyn's team get their shit together or radically change the leadership electoral rules (which may be outside their control anyway). It might already be too late. That Blairism 2.0 Labour Party may fail on its own terms, or it may narrowly win the following election against a by-then-detested Conservative Party, at which point either socialism will be off the agenda for a generation or the younger support will find its own, different outlet and full Pasokification will begin.

Great post

Fuck. That's like getting the Blair endorsement.

lol

the truth is somewhere in the middle still i think. so many of my old lefty chums that i talked to at the Corbyn rally seem both more optimistic and more paranoid than i am, but their paranoia is grounded somewhere at least in the vicinity of reality - there really are a lot of enemies in high places of any kind of move away from neolib economics and they really are prepared to do whatever it takes to undermine any movement that disagrees with them. so people dig in, whether its helpful or not.

Corbyn seems a good public speaker to me and damn straight he should be using that to preach beyond the choir. but he's operating in the narrowest of spaces to broadcast any message he has thru hostile media space.

but sure i think the left in its broadest sense needs to come to terms with the fact that they have to use the corrupt and broken mechanisms that currently exist if they want to put themselves in a position to repair anything. it's just that even put like that, it reeks of Mandelson to a lot of people, and they might shoot themselves in the foot rather than accept it.

Ultimately the neoliberal consensus, if it ever really existed, is broken and isn't going to magically put itself back together even if the Labour Party decides it should. And that's without taking the destructive impact of Brexit into account.

But it'll probably lurch on like a zombie until there's something to replace it is that isn't just visionless anti-austerity or pie-in-the-sky Paul Mason technobabble. And it could yet emerge from the right rather than the left, which is the big danger.

Corbyn in the early days sounded considerably more visionary than he does now, but a lot of his more interesting ideas seem to have been discarded. I don't really understand what happened there.

it's real simple: how do you persuade millions of people (or 200,000 vacant idiots depending on your stance on the electoral system) that the welfare state they've been told for 30 years is an evil and destructive thing is actually a very good thing we should bring back? and then how do you create millions of jobs with liveable pay and terms that make the world better rather than run it to the brink of annihilation?

should be able to get a start on sorting that before 2020, i honestly sort of agree.

Corbyn was still talking on Saturday about a national investment bank to begin to address the second part of that equation btw

That's true but it's an abstraction to a lot of voters, it may have a beneficial effect on them but it's several steps removed from their actual lives. It needs to be something that people immediately and emotionally understand, and something that the Tories won't just steal. And something that the public believes they can deliver. The last bit is the tricky bit in the current climate.

Corbyn and co could so worse than to try barnstorming populism at this stage. Actually pledging to do things for people, rather than stopping the removal of things that a lot of voters won't really miss until they're gone.

but you know how promises to spend get presented. not that i disagree.

he also talked about building council houses - maybe start pulling some figures together and presenting it as policy, sure

That relies on the assumption that May or Hammond will use the same tactics as their predecessors. And the bigger assumption that they will be able to sustain a broad enough coalition of voters in favour austerity for another four years.

I wont rescind my endorsement short of an obama instruction

One of the problems Corbyn has is that a very broad section of the media won't even report on his policies. It suits their agenda more/and probably gets more clicks just to run something like listen to this fucker on Trident/IRA/Royalty type shite. His "No Communities Left Behind" National Investment Bank stuff could be very popular out here in the provinces, and I'm sure he isn't willfully trying NOT to get his message out here.

http://redstartblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/a-response-to-owen-jones.html?_sm_au_=iVVLJ6fSTRnrDGF7&m=1

Good answers, but I don't really see the importance of Owen Jones, nor that of having his support. If anything having his support has a low to medium Eddie Izzard irritant factor attached to it imo. But at least that blogger has kept it reasoned and polite and obviously has a bit more of a clue than OJ!

I just had a skim to the Owen piece at the time. Diane's response wasn't dignified but really you look at how it begins with Owen showing his CV of work over the years for Labour, trying to demonstrate he isn't a Blairite stooge and the main takeaway is that a JC leadership was the worst thing that could've happened to Owen Jones. Like did you really just want a debate and then go to Yvette or Burnham?! Fuck me. There seem to be valid questions but the tone of "JC and supporters must answer this questions" needs a laugh track. Whatever the answers to the problem of a JC leadership, they don't lead to Owen Smith.

Mason and Gilbert are actually mapping out a potential strategy.

"It's easy to say "well Labour wouldn't win under anyone in 2020" - firstly I'm not sure that true, but then again a victory by the Labour right probably wouldn't get us anywhere worth going anyway"

Well if Ed had won we wouldn't have Brexit - but as depressing all of that is going to be its not like, as you say, neolibs won't stop being a broken basket-case of a project and that the continuous threats to the EU will go away (which may actually destroy the EU and make the whole debate we've had redundant). That's why we need this re-orientation from neo-libs as a beginning. Ultimately, the debate/war Labour is undergoing looks ugly and its risking destruction - but this is where I'd rather be.

There needs to be something like long-term thinking, which is why I like Gilbert's "lets not put all our eggs in one basket" to the 2020 question. Ultimately Labour left its constiuency and the argument is now about how do we get them back. Its a hard, long road (and in Scotland its 10x that effort), but again you won't get answers from Owen Smith - there are no possibilities with him. With JC - despite all the issues - there might be.

a lot of his more interesting ideas seem to have been discarded. I don't really understand what happened there.

Richard Murphy was the source of some of these interesting ideas IIRC - is it that Corbyn's not talking them up because now Murphy's "off the team"?