Demiurge4 posted:

Long term renting sucks, landlords who own lots of houses they rent out suck. If you rent a lone standing house for +3 years you should be able to force a buy on it. Landlord can't force you out early unless a court finds you criminally negligent or you commit a serious crime while renting. I'm more ambivalent on apartments.

Pissflaps posted:

I want a centre left labour government. That's not out of kilter with the ideology of the Labour Party.

Pissflaps posted:

I like the police policy but I'm concerned that labour are going to harm their credibility if they keep trying to use the same source of funding for multiple spending commitments.

jabby posted:

To be fair it sounds like Abbott initially misread the headline cost as £300,000 (instead of £300 million), got flustered and stumbled over several other figures before finding the bit of her notes with the cost breakdown and reading it out.

Awkward and embarrassing and will obviously be pushed by other parties, but the fact that she got it right in the end and that Corbyn instantly had the correct answer to hand will be a bit of damage limitation.

jabby posted:

This is indeed what happens when the majority of MPs fail to back their leader. The difference between you and me is whether you blame the leader or the MPs.

jabby posted:

For one, interviews with him and John McDonnell where they both refused to say anything negative about the then leadership, despite being heavily baited by the interviewer. Corbyn may have been a serial rebel but he never tried to undermine his party.

Breath Ray posted:

I assume it's because she's jewish and corbyn is pro Palestine. Same with peston. Hope this isnt unworthy of me but seems to make too much sense to ignore.

ukle posted:

Hes not a prospective Councillor, hes going for the job of Mayor of a region that has 100's of thousands of people in it i.e. the role actually has a bit of power. Its really bizarre that their is still someone in the Tory party of any significance that hasn't fully drank the Thatcher kool-aid.

forkboy84 posted:

Saying "Bernie would have won" is funny because it makes mad Hilary cultists combust with rage but other than that, it's just huge question marks. It'd have been a very different election, Bernie had a problem reaching out to a lot of minority voters, so maybe he does better in West Virginia & Michigan but does worse in somewhere like North Carolina, but without knowing what dirt they'd have run against him it's actually impossible to say. Clinton had a lovely campaign, but the odds are that Sanders, to win, would have had to try & work within the Democratic Party, but you have to ask if the Democratic Party would have been willing to campaign & work with him. Just too many questions.

ukle posted:

Turnout is up about 5% on 2013.

Turnout is only low in the mayoral elections.

TACD posted:

Corbyn's policies have always been popular, it's his character that gets attacked. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people don't really know what his policies are.

MikeCrotch posted:

I think the big difference will be turnout - people usually get out in bigger numbers for the GE which is good for Labour & the Lib Dems compared to the current round of locals.

Unfortunately that's going to be an uphill battle considering that the Tories are energised while the left and the liberals are feeling pretty demoralised. Going to be very interesting to see what both parties can do with their record memberships and whether that can actually get people out to vote for the GE.

MikeCrotch posted:

If labour was going to split they'd have done so already. Were seeing the biggest detractors purge themselves instead of standing, I think the most we'd see would be defections to Tories and Lib Dems.

Undead Hippo posted:

Sadly, yes. Looking at this from the perspective of building a winning coalition, it's largely Corbyn's fault. The Tories feel safe on the centre, so have rhetorically gone after the right wing voters who had been choosing UKIP. Early indications are that this is working really loving well. If Jeremy Corbyn wasn't Labour leader, then the Tories would have to contend with the possibility of their centrist voters deserting them if they went too right wing. But as it stands, the Tories have maintained their centrist coalition and cannibalized their right wing rivals. It shouldn't have been possible to do both, but Corbyn (and the anaemic Lib-Dems) allowed them to by not presenting a credible centrist alternative.

This would all be fine if the big initial hope of Corbyn, that he would energize a mass of disengaged and disenfranchised, had come up good. There's a large enough quantity of non-voters that large scale changes in engagement patterns could warp the electoral math considerably. But that dream died in the 2016 local elections. When that became clear, Corbyn became at best dead weight, and at worst an active electoral danger.

There's a bigger danger lurking beyond. If the Tories succeed in turning UKIP into a stub, they're sitting pretty in the future. Because instead of a split right and a split left, we'll see a united right and a split left. The Tories can ignore the right wing, pander to centrists and marginals, and continue their low key campaign of wanton civil destruction for fun and profit, unable to be opposed effectively by the half dozen left of centre opponents who are also competing with each other.

El Grillo posted:

forkboy84 posted:

I sure can't wait for the election to be over. Oh wait, then we'll have another leadership election.

So UKMT will be readable again by September at this rate. Though I suppose a lot of the experts who've dropped their tuppence worth the past couple of days will have gotten bored well before then at least.


Was certainly the moment where I gave up any hope of a surprising come-from-behind victory. And that aside, it was just the wrong thing to do. I get he doesn't like the EU but for fucksake, the Tories being in charge of Brexit and all the new trade deals we'll need to sign is worse than continuing in the EU.

I'm still somewhat sympathetic to him, but between that and the total failure to do anything about reforming the party's internal democracy, I've gone from very much pro-Corbyn to "best of a bad bunch" to "oh my god we're absolutely hosed in June's election, and he'll probably win another leadership contest"

cosmically_cosmic posted:

The Labour party itself is a socialist party, the idea that a socialist running it is some sort of extreme case of entryism is a compliment to Tony Blair and his lot.

Gonzo McFee posted:

It's worth bearing in mind that when the Labour right, Blairites, Blue Labour, Progress or whatever you want to call them say "Hard Left" they're not talking about us Marxists right here in the good old UKMT. They're talking about the mild social democratic reforms that Corbyn's running on. Constant attacks on Corbyn's personality or leadership abilities are only a fig leaf covering up a deep, burning hatred for anything to the left of a 2010 Tory manifesto. Even Tony Blair's 1997 manifesto would probably be too left wing for the press these days.

jabby posted:

So you think Labour in 2015 should have embraced austerity with more 'conviction', and appealed to 'aspiration'? How the heck is that any different from what the Tories were offering?

In other news, Corbyn has attacked Theresa May again for refusing to debate and hiding. He's offered to debate her "anytime, any place, anywhere" and said "If [she] wants to make this election about leadership then let’s make it about leadership".

It's a strategy I think that can only go well, since the more she refuses to debate him the more it reflects poorly on the 'strong leadership' angle she bases her whole campaign around.

LemonDrizzle posted:

https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/861167745559392256

Irony Be My Shield posted:

This thing is demonstrably happening but I think it's silly. Therefore it is not happening.

Miftan posted:

My parents basically 'd at me when I told them I wanted 100% inheritance tax.

Kurtofan posted:

https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/861326539388071936

who wants to break it to him

forkboy84 posted:

Part that isn't talked about, if Corbyn does go after a humbling election defeat in June should Watson also step down? Or at least put himself forward as a forward in a new deputy leadership contest? It's not as if he's done much of note in his position. Try to stab the leader in the back but manage to drop the knife.

forkboy84 posted:

Maybe he is. I could believe it for the first 8 or 9 months of Corbyn's term as leader. Certainly not the impression he's given for the past year though. His falling out with one of the biggest backers of the party (Unite might be the biggest? can't be arsed looking it up right now) and yelling about conspiracies to takeover the Labour Party certainly doesn't seem to imply the work of a steady hand holding the ship together though. Unless you view "holding the party together" & "getting rid of the twice democratically elected leader" as compatible.

forkboy84 posted:

Bloody good job that only a disingenuous fuckwit would conclude that those 2 things have been the extent of the policies announced by Labour then eh?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-39852719 posted:

Mr Corbyn will also claim that "the tax cheats, the press barons, the greedy bankers" would celebrate a Conservative victory, adding: "We have four weeks to ruin their party.