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Poll: Who Should Be Leader of HM Most Loyal Opposition? This poll is closed. |
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| Jeremy Corbyn |
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95 | 18.63% |
| Dennis Skinner |
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53 | 10.39% |
| Angus Robertson |
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20 | 3.92% |
| Tim Farron |
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9 | 1.76% |
| Paul Ukips |
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7 | 1.37% |
| Robot Lenin |
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105 | 20.59% |
| Tony Blair |
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28 | 5.49% |
| Pissflaps |
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193 | 37.84% |
| Total: | 510 votes | ||
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ronya posted:
In The UK specifically, the electoral coalition that bought Labour to power in 1997 is now terminally fractured. Going from North to South: Scottish Labour voters: defected to the SNP in the wake of the independence referendum. Now see Labour as intolerably London-based and unwilling or unable to fight for Scottish interests. Working class traditional Labour voters in the North & Midlands: their support has been draining away since 1997, due to Labour largely focusing on middle class issues during this period. Ed Miliband and Corbyn have both tried to do something about this but have been hampered by the fact that these voters don't think much of them personally and see them as part of the problem. Liberal urban voters (a bit of a broad category this, covering everything from students, to poor inner city dwellers, to relatively well-off people in middle class professions. Concentrated in London and big, successful cities like Bristol, Manchester etc). The only group where Labour's support has held up pretty well. Conservative-minded, comfortably placed voters in the south-east, who generally go for the Tories but can be persuaded to vote Labour (as in 1997): sticking solidly to the Tories right now. Labour's problem is that society has moved on since the 90's and all four of these groups now want wildly divergent and often completely incompatible things. Take immigration, for example: Scottish Labour voters and urban liberal types tend to be ok with it, while traditional Labour voters and south-eastern conservative types are more likely to be very much against it. There's literally no policy Labour could come up with on immigration that all four groups would be cool with. Multiply this across every policy area and you start to see the scale of the problem that Labour has. If Corbyn stepped down tomorrow, these fundamental cleavages in the groups that sustained Labour in power for so long would still be as stark as ever. So, essay question: Could the electoral coalition that swept Labour to power in '97 ever be replicated, or was it a one-off event rooted in a specific time and set of political and social circumstances? Discuss.
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Mar 1, 2017 08:08
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Percipient Badger posted:Recent news wise there hasn't been anything in the last couple of threads about our dirty little secret - the failing prison system. Surprised as there has been a lot more coverage recently & the hidden (sorry, I mean prison) service typically gets bugger all press. After watching the eye-popping undercover Panorama documentary on the state of our prisons, it's pretty clear that the whole system could be engulfed in catastrophic riots at any moment.
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Mar 1, 2017 08:12
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Jose posted:is there any particular reason farage is starting a fight against carswell? It's what he does: he continues to see Ukip as his baby and can't tolerate rival power bases. He's done this repeatedly with individuals who became too prominent in the psrty.
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Mar 1, 2017 09:27
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Carswell strikes me as one of those clever but naive people. He defected to Ukip on what he considered a genuine point of principle and has spent his time since then in ever increasing dismay and disbelief at the snakepit of poisonous incompetence that he gullibly leapt into.
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Mar 1, 2017 11:07
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and i must meme posted:aren't ukip actually pretty far to the right economically? they describe themselves as libertarian, iirc There's a huge split between libertarian types like Carswell and the Little Englanders who want to see a more interventionist State and more public spending (but only on the right sort of people). They don't really have a coherent economic strategy, as far as I know.
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Mar 1, 2017 21:28
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Breath Ray posted:Would be fascinating to see what liz kendal would have achieved by this time. The food news for liz is that we now have a trailblazing childless woman PM so she will make a great alternative We'd have had 2 years of pitiful timidity, bland soundbites delivered by robots in suits and extraordinarily contorted triangulations on every conceivable issue. And Labour's standing in the polls would probably be better than where it is now.
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Mar 3, 2017 19:10
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As long as we abolish hill farming in the uk, I'm good. gently caress paying farmers to raise sheep at a loss that do nothing but maintain our highland areas in their current state of barren wastelands. Kill all the sheep and let the forests grow back!
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Mar 4, 2017 13:07
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hakimashou posted:The picturesque countryside is one of the last good things your benighted isles have left... forkboy84 posted:I kind of enjoy the stark, barren wasteland nature of the Highlands. It's pretty. I don't find eroded, ecologically devastated hillsides particularly pretty or picturesque myself. I think they'd be much nicer covered in forests, like they're supposed to be. There's a huge nature reserve in Scotland that they've replanted with native species, then just left it alone to do its own thing. I'd like to see more of that.
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Mar 4, 2017 15:01
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jabby posted:According to the Guardian Corbyn employed an accountant this year (for the first time) and his tax was deducted via PAYE anyway. If that's correct then there's probably a decent explanation for why his return doesn't seem right, the only question is whether his team will be able to find out what it is and get it out there. When you hire an accountant to do your tax return, the task of filling out the numbers is usually shuffled off on some stressed and overworked graduate trainee, who frankly knows as much about tax law as my cat. (Source: I worked in accountancy for a bit. Never again.)
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Mar 6, 2017 08:50
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Budgets never change anything much.
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Mar 6, 2017 23:31
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Rakosi posted:I mean, this is really kind of bad. Not one EU nation is going to give the UK favourable terms in negotiations if they know offering bad terms will get the whole Brexit thing voted against in parliament. It's completely hamstrung the government and the only thing worse for the prospects of the UK going solo in the future is a negotiating government now with no cards in their hand at all. lol if we endup shamefacedly knocking the whole idea on the head in 2019.
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Mar 7, 2017 20:46
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cosmically_cosmic posted:It won't win back Tory voters, just destroy whatever surge in membership occured under cobyn. Oh come on, all Labour need to do is return to the tried and tested stance of being a timid and unconfident version of the Tories and they'll SWEEP back into power!
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Mar 8, 2017 06:47
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Interesting profile of Teresa May in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n06/david-runciman/do-your-homework It really emphasizes just how strongly she believes in sticking to her word and the tenacity with which she attempts to make good on promises that she feels it's her responsibility to keep: quote:In post, she soon developed a distinctive governing style. The point of the coalition was meant to be negotiation between the two parties to find positions both could live with. May didn’t do negotiation; in the words of Eric Pickles, one of her cabinet colleagues, she is not a ‘transactional’ politician. She takes a position and then she sticks to it, seeing it as a matter of principle that she delivers on what she has committed to. This doesn’t mean that she is a conviction politician. Often she arrives at a position reluctantly after much agonising – as home secretary she became notorious for being painfully slow to decide on matters over which she had personal authority. Many of the positions she adopts are ones she has inherited, seeing no option but to make good on other people’s promises. This has frequently brought her into conflict with the politicians from whom she inherited these commitments. By making fixed what her colleagues regarded as lines in the sand, she drove some of them mad. So she might not be a Brexit believer herself but Parliament agreed to respect the outcome of the EU vote; the electorate voted to leave and now she's going to ensure that they get Brexit, good and hard, no matter what the obstacles may be.  Also lol at George Osborne,who clearly had no idea that his previous casual, throwaway insults and obstruction of her goals had engendered such deep and bitter hatred towards him: quote:Within twenty minutes of her arrival in Number Ten, May had summoned Osborne to sack him. Accounts of this meeting differ. Osborne’s people say it was cordial. But May’s people, who include Fiona Hill, now safely back in the fold, let it be known that the new prime minister gave him a severe dressing-down, telling him he had overpromised and underdelivered on the economy. What is clear is that Osborne had little idea how much she loathed him. He had thought that their previous disputes were just part of the cut and thrust of high politics and easily put behind them. That’s precisely what she loathed about him. She hates the idea that politics is just a game, which is what she suspects the Cameroons have always believed. She dispatched Gove with equal relish, telling him she couldn’t stomach his betrayal of Boris Johnson in the leadership contest. In truth, this was the least of it: what she really despised was Gove’s long-standing habit of making it up as he went along.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:57
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baka kaba posted:Hunt is very good at his job, which is being the NHS Terminator. He just keeps going He's really excellent at appearing gently bemused by interviewers who maintain that he should bear at least SOME responsibility for the current state of the NHS.
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Mar 11, 2017 09:45
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The UK public is currently living in a fool's paradise where they have no concept of what a fundamental change leaving the EU's going to be and just how much it's going to hurt them. With that said, what do you think people (i.e. me) can do to try and mitigate the damage to themselves? Save as much as possible? Spend like there's no tomorrow? Dig a bomb shelter? I mean, I'm thinking of buying a new place but if the economy's going to go to poo poo, I might as well stick where I am. Any opinions?
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Mar 11, 2017 18:21
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loving lol
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Mar 11, 2017 21:33
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Jose posted:journalists are salty as gently caress about the evening standard lol Lol Osborne still wants to be PM and he's mega-pissed at Theresa May. He's going to bide his time, sniping at her from the Evening Standard until the current government's hosed up Brexit badly enough that he can step up and say: "Ok, it's time to put the grown-ups (i.e. me) back in charge!" It's actually not a bad plan.
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Mar 18, 2017 10:46
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Abolish our standing army and have the government raise ad hoc forces whenever we launch a military campaign in my opinion, like they did in the middle ages. I'd happily sign up for 6 months for the opportunity to do some looting in the French provinces.
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Mar 18, 2017 13:48
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To have a proper nuclear deterrent you need a bit of everything: strategic bombers, mobile, land based systems and submarines. It's called the Nuclear Triad and it ensures that no matter what, you'll preserve enough of your nuclear forces to launch retaliatory strikes in the event of an attack. Britain's 'credible' deterrent consists of one poxy submarine floating around in the North Sea, operating from a single base. All the Russians would have to do is destroy that single active submarine, then nuke the spares at Faslane to render us completely defenseless against them. It's the usual British compromise: we don't dump our nukes completely, 'cos that'll make us look 'weak' but we're not prepared to spend the money to have something that'd actually be effective, either.
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Mar 18, 2017 16:56
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Getting rid of Corbyn and replacing him with somebody who holds much the same beliefs is actually a perfectly sensible plan. Polls show that most of Corbyn's policies are pretty popular: it's just that people don't want to hear them from Corbyn. So installing a fresh face at the top while continuing with the same policies would give Labour a huge boost. Yes this is monstrously unfair to Jeremy Corbyn but then, politics isn't fair, I guess.
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Mar 20, 2017 17:42
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I dunno, I reckon the PLP would get behind anyone who isn't Corbyn at this point. Being simultaneously in Opposition AND having most of your party membership disagreeing with you must be pretty draining: I bet most of the PLP would be relieved to be able to draw a line and move on.
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Mar 20, 2017 17:47
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spectralent posted:I guess this is the trustworthiness thing, because I feel like they probably consider Corbyn to have been solely at fault and don't consider any policies they hold or activities of anyone on "their side" to have anything to do with it, and probably believe that if they can lock out the lefties and go back to talking tough on immigration everything will be fine. There's a whole bunch of old Blairites who seem to think that if they could just get rid of Corbyn, it'd suddenly be 1997 again and Labour would be sweeping triumphantly back into power as the electorate sang along to "Things can only get better". They just can't comprehend that the social and political context of 2017 is radically different and requires a different approach.
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Mar 20, 2017 17:59
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If the membership had voted for Liz Kendell back in 2015, Labour would be storming towards victory right now.
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Mar 20, 2017 23:34
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vodkat posted:At every stage, they overpromise. At every stage, reality finds them out. At every stage, they spin the new bottom-line as something they half-expected all along and as nothing to fear. If the sun melted the northern hemisphere, they would hope to finesse these isles out of the generalised inferno with a bespoke deal. This is the kind of confidence that arouses the opposite of confidence in others. It is the confidence of a lost tour guide who cannot be seen to scrutinise a map in front of paying holidaymakers. Whenever I come from reading an article by an informed individual, a diplomat or an experienced trade negotiator about how insanely complicated and difficult Brexit is going to be and then see these characters and their naive, blind optimism that it's all going to be just fine, I get the same feeling of cold dread in my stomach that I had the day after the referendum.
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Mar 21, 2017 14:13
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Enthalpy, industrial shotguns... I'm learning lots of new stuff today! As far as savings go, I wouldn't fret too much. If you've actually got more than a few grand spare that you're not likely to need in the immediate future, best thing you can do is invest it in a range of funds spread around the globe and leave it to do its thing. Do some of these in other currencies if you want to get clever. People are poking fun a bit in this thread because investors in gold, bitcoins etc. are often... well, let's say naive, to be kind. Despite being obsessed with the performance of their investments and constantly fiddling around with them, they tend not to really understand the financial markets and fall back on these 'One Weird Trick to give you a massive return on your cash!' pieces of nonsense.
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Mar 24, 2017 08:29
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Gonzo McFee posted:Carswell is an impressive piece of poo poo. Carswell's always struck me as the 'principled but strangely naive' type. I think he joined Ukip genuinely believing it to be some bastion of British freedom and has been dismayed to find it's actually a toxic snakepit of lunatics. Funny to think it's only a few months since the press were pushing Paul Nuttell as the new working class face of Ukip, who were poised to seize the Midlands and North from Labour. In a year or two now, Ukip's going to be a squabbling remnant like the BNP.
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Mar 25, 2017 13:35
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Here is a long article by Dan Jarvis for discussion then: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/03/reuniting-and-renewing-kingdom-britain-beyond-brexit It's a good piece I think, trouble is, the looming problems that he sets out in detail are so horrible that I'd prefer not to think about them, in the hope that perhaps they'll quietly go away. (they won't) Nice to hear him calling for heavier taxes on wealth, greater redistribution from the rich to the poor and a strong State being a prerequisite for stability and economic growth, though.
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Mar 27, 2017 05:32
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The next global financial crisis will happen when the investors in Tesla, Uber, Snapchat & Twitter all finally realise that they've been a bunch of gullible idiots and simultaneously rush for the exit.MikeCrotch posted:Its the difference between the thread being complete garbage and mostly garbage so If you think this thread is poo poo, try paying the Middle East thread a visit.
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Mar 28, 2017 19:12
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