Jeremy Corbyn vs Angela Eagle

Putting the socialist back into National Socialist?

So the appeal is going ahead and is actually in court now. BBC News court reporter was reporting from outside the court.

Also just read SWP denying that they are infiltrating Labour or even joining labour. They claim they're offering to work beside Labour in some places

So verdict on the membership thing expected tomorrow around 3pm.

& apparently according to a coup member legal guy who was interviewed on BBC this afternoon you can't tell if a judge is right without an appeal. Which makes the whole legal thing pretty questionable dunnit?

& if you need to legally define the term define in the first day of a court case does it mean that people are being extra thorough or wasting time?

swp is historically (and as far as i know currently) hostile to entryism

(also they're not trotskyists)

umm, since when are the swp not Trotskyist?

Counterfire are the Trotskyists, right?

swp (i'm talking abt the uk one) always used to insist they were neo-leninists not trotskyists -- one i was/am close to once said to me "trotskyists are MONSTERS" (he q

i imagine the reasons for this also apply to counterfire, though the need for the distinction has more or less entirely vanished, and i doubt they get into many fights about it (two of the key figures are neighbours, so i could possibly ask them) (but i probably won't)

oops, posted before completion: the guy who said "trotskyists are MONSTERS" quit abt ten years ago, and refers to the current swp leader as stallinicos

Tony Cliff wrote extensively about Trotsky, including a 4 volume biog, and his theoretical work (lol) was heavily based on Trotsky's ideas. his ideas did depart from mainstream (?) Trotskyism to some extent and thus i guess they maybe aren't "Trotskyists" but are a Marxist-Leninist party that sees itself as being in the same line as Trotsky.

yes to all this! nevertheless…

Going out on a limb here but I suspect Watson is not especially bothered by the nuances of whatever flavour of commie he chooses to label people as.

I keep wanting to make the Crick&Watson Trot DNA joke

also LOL WURZEL

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/11/trotskyists-on-the-march-chaos-ahead

John Harris has impressive Trot-spotting skills for someone who has spent the last couple of years travelling the length and breadth of the country talking to angry white people without ever once discovering a racist.

I'd have to be forced at gunpoint to ever read anything by JH again, I can't do hate-reading any more.

If you ever need a perfect encapsulation of the near-universal mediocrity of everyone in the political and media class who came up during the 90s, just look a John Harris, he's a one-man box-ticking exercise.

"John Harris visits an unemployment blackspot whose football league team failed re-election sometime in the sixties, and finds people don't trust politicians"

Are they showing each of the hustings. Had people on the BBC News morning show today discussing what had happened in the discussion last night. Guess they must have shown bits and I missed it.

Are the meetings very different town to town or are the same things being trotted out.
Surprised to see a Smithite this morning referring to Corbyn as trotting out slogans when Smith comes out with the same soundbites all the time.

Apparently Smith was a very professional seeming performance. & all the booing was by naughty Corbynites.
Does Smith have any charisma, cos it isn't coming through my tv set.

The juxtaposition of sub-header and photo make it look like Harris is claiming to have been involved in the Russian revolution.

His idea of an epoch defining moment was some idiot troglodyte from a shit rock band brown-nosing a PM, and that hackneyed bollocks was probably his finest work!

Harris is another classic moderate, relatively wealthy and privileged and wearing his bullshit as normative, antagonistic to any challenge to his own conservatism, so maddeningly bourgie that he turns the mildest-mannered actual lefty into a screaming radical within 2 minutes of contact and then he can point his figure and go "told you so"

The JH shtick is that he is the angry opposite of privileged, at least background-wise, and hence stuck out like the sore son of a miner's thumb at Queens, Oxon, etc. Just looked this up and his parents are both nuclear scientists! So LOL worst powerpuff girl evah.

(Also the PM was kinda brown-nosing the troglodyte there, not vice versa?)

Not that there's anything wrong with nuclear scientists, literally some of my best friends are children of etc etc

Are you a rock writer or something? You really seem quite an expert.

I've got nothing personal against anybody's privilege, it's the claim that your circumstances are "normal" and that therefore your fierce resistance to disrupting the status quo is normative rather than class antagonism that grates on me

xp

haha my specialist subjects are revolutionary splits on the left and what went wrong with the UK music papers (which is a kind of subset of the first)

anyway i will try and stop yapping digressively on this thread, apologies

Those aren't digressions, they're observations!

i can't work out why owen smith would endorse the prevent strategy other than...not knowing what it is, how it was received or anything about counter-terrorism? it's not well-known enough that it functions as a dog whistle surely?

Just looked this up and his parents are both nuclear scientists!

"Her husband works in Jodrell Bank,
He's home late in the morning,
Had he been a lawyer,
He wouldn't work for pennies"

... I know that has nothing to do with nuclear scientists but that was literally the first thing that came into my head on seeing that post.

XP trying to sound tough on "crime" whether yo've got a clue or not is standard nu labourism, just like nuke fetishism

Also: BONUS looking tough on brown people, while knowing Corbyn is not a fan of PREVENT, can be spun by Smith as 'Jeremy is naive about a security issue'.

^^^ Is the real reason.

reading JH's wiki page and can't decide if the following was written sarcastically by a non-fan:

He believes Britpop was a shining moment for the UK's music industry, and possibly the end of an era, with (manufactured) music now deliberately catering for the lowest common denominator. He presented a BBC Four documentary on the musical movement, The Britpop Story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harris_(critic)

it's a startling indictment of our society that after john harris decided he was a political commentator now we just kind of accepted it

Marcello was right all along then.

Blame that damned Britpop book for easing his transition. If you think that book topic was JH's big idea, stop it immediately. The publisher had been trying to fit a writer to the topic for AGES (they asked me at least 18 months before him to have a go, but none of the popstars were ready to speak/off Class A's at that point in 1996) and let's just say I'm the only non-Oxbridge person who was encouraged to mull it over.

Labour wins its appeal to prevent new members from voting: I'm not sure that this is a good thing anti-Corbyn forces, most likely result is surely that Corbyn still wins and the impression that the Labour right are double-dealing fixers with contempt for rank and file is further entrenched?

Pricks.

xp "a good thing *for* anti-Corbyn forces", rather

if Smith does win somehow, all this will do nothing to help him function as the (lol) "unity candidate", will set up an ideal betrayal narrative that will be repeated for years to come etc

Ugh, these people.

No permission to appeal either.

I'm not even sure where the basis of "Corbynistas are flooding in" gets traction from tbh. They claimed it last time, and none of those people are excluded, so is the whining and expensive court action to stop it being a complete humiliation for the Blairites and only a massive humiliation?

I also struggle with Trot entryism and 'form your own party rather than change this'. Surely Blair should have had the courage of his convictions like David Owen in that case rather than fundamentally change the Labour Party and formed a new SDP?

In theory, they probably haven't won too much - lots of the new members will have signed up as £25 registered supporters and the optics are terrible. As Soref says, if Smith wins, his victory will be seen as compromised. That may be the point though - alienate enough of the supporters and they might leave the party.

Apparently 50k people who signed up through the Saving Labour portal are also in the 130k so possibly an Owen goal.

LOL Labour are pursuing members for 30K costs

LOL as in fkn tragic

Truly they are the people's politicians

this seems relevant wrt to the Labour right's gift for alienating the exact people it needs to win over if it is going to remove Corbyn:

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/reluctant-corbynism.html

BBC News just said something about the appeal getting through on an obscure clause taht allows the NEC to make things up as they go along. I was thinking it was something in the small print.

& that there will have to be closer looking into things since it does disenfranchise a lot of people that they should be wanting to include.
But then again at least 60 of those are trots, innit?

I think even without the new members he will still be likely to get about 60%+ of the vote, I can't imagine many of those that voted for him last time will have since changed their mind - even with Smith's dazzling sermons. And he might have even won a small percentage of Burnham/Cooper voters since.