Politics

[Gemmill 44398]

1 minute ago, Renton said:

 

 

I cant prove an alternative future. Madness. Point is my predictions of Corbyn, that he would lead ultimately to a large tory majority (and many others), have been proved right. But it's not his fault. Yes, let's leave it. 

You couldn't prove dough, Captain Soggybottom

[Rayvin 5183]

4 minutes ago, Meenzer said:

 

So there's no way of knowing how many Labour voters looked at Corbyn's half-hearted stance towards the EU and chose to shrug their shoulders too and not vote.

 

 

You could. You could look at the 65% as an actual number, push it to 100% and then you'd be able to identify how many dropped out. But then you'd have to make assumptions on which way the dropouts voted. You could perhaps apply the same percentage breakdown and suggest that 65% of dropouts would back Remain.

 

I don't think it would materially change anything, and i also think you would have a tough time making a convincing argument that voter turnout for a referendum is Corbyn's responsibility any more than it was anyone else's.

Edited January 16, 2020 by Rayvin

[Rayvin 5183]

4 minutes ago, Renton said:

 

 

I cant prove an alternative future. Madness. Point is my predictions of Corbyn, that he would lead ultimately to a large tory majority (and many others), have been proved right. But it's not his fault. Yes, let's leave it. 

 

I suggest reading that article I linked to a couple of pages back. Might be painful but it might also help you process all of this a bit.

 

And I know you can't prove the alternative future. What boggles my mind is why you keep talking with all these absolute truths when, as you just make clear, you can't prove shit.

[ewerk 30266]

6 minutes ago, Gemmill said:

Show some respect for the next PM. 

It's never going to happen, again.

 

[Renton 21311]

6 minutes ago, Rayvin said:

 

I suggest reading that article I linked to a couple of pages back. Might be painful but it might also help you process all of this a bit.

 

And I know you can't prove the alternative future. What boggles my mind is why you keep talking with all these absolute truths when, as you just make clear, you can't prove shit.

 

Oh come on, where have I spoken of absolute truths? Beneath you to straw man like that. I and others made predictions that tumed out to be true. The outcome of a Corbyn led opposition is objectively the worst for labour result  in a lifetime  (1935).  I think it's almost impossible anyone could have done worse. That's just a subjective opinion, not a fact. I do think saying this was inevitable is both wrong and pathetic though. 

[Rayvin 5183]

11 minutes ago, Renton said:

 

Oh come on, where have I spoken of absolute truths? Beneath you to straw man like that. I and others made predictions that tumed out to be true. The outcome of a Corbyn led opposition is objectively the worst for labour result  in a lifetime  (1935).  I think it's almost impossible anyone could have done worse. That's just a subjective opinion, not a fact. I do think saying this was inevitable is both wrong and pathetic though. 

 

42 minutes ago, Renton said:

 

It only needed a 800,000 reversal or more people to get out. And in your analysis, you're assuming Corbyn has no appeal to voters of other parties, or can make a strong argument that can persuade the general population. Can't reach the people Blair did. Which is actually true and one of his many, many problems. 

 

It's not one of the points I was arguing with you about, but you asked. I mean once you factor in Blair never had to deal with Brexit, and 10 years of Tory austerity which Labour has been perceived to have done absolutely nothing to mitigate. Lets have Blair back now then, and see if he can still win over those same people, since apparently that's all it takes.

 

Also, we aren't - or at least I wasn't - arguing about Corbyn's election performance, which was strong in 2017 and dismal in 2019. I was just talking about the EU. I mean you're laying the blame at Corbyn's door even though Cameron was pro-EU and was the sitting prime minister. Could he not have appealed to the Blairite centrists (who almost all will have voted Remain anyway) or the right wing working classes? Corbyn presumably had the left sown up.

 

I think Meenzer's point perhaps comes closest to a solid counter on this - maybe another leader would have secured a higher turnout - but I think that could only have been achieved if that leader had actually put him or herself front and centre of the Remain campaign as a whole. Which would have been a strange move for an opposition leader, given that it would have meant they were fronting a government backed stance on the government's behalf. With or without Corbyn, on the EU situation, we were fucked. The damage had been done by the centre right, aided and abetted by the centre left.

[NJS 4371]

41 minutes ago, Renton said:

 

A big problem though, the biggest in fact, has been a lack of credible opposition which is Corbyn's fault 100%. His strategy even was shit  Johnson was on the ropes yet Corbyn let him get away with it by granting an election and then not turning up. Oh, and that election was no endorsement of Brexit btw, it was a judgement on Labour. 

 

You're still not recognising the issue, hence my pessimistic stance. 

No, polling shows that in the leave areas it was very much a confirmatory brexit vote. Corbyn was also a large factor but the leavers fundamentally wanted to leave and didn't give a shit about much else. 

[Rayvin 5183]

13 minutes ago, NJS said:

No, polling shows that in the leave areas it was very much a confirmatory brexit vote. Corbyn was also a large factor but the leavers fundamentally wanted to leave and didn't give a shit about much else. 

 

This is really not being recognised by people who despise Corbyn.

 

That article I posted, which no one will read, makes the following case (as to why people -specifically some of his MPs- might despise him):

 

Most sitting Labour MPs had begun as Labour youth activists themselves, just as most centrist political journalists had begun their careers as leftists, even revolutionaries, of one sort or another. But they had also risen through the ranks of Blair’s machine at a time when advancement was largely based on willingness to sacrifice one’s youthful ideals. They had become the very people they would have once despised as sell-outs.

Insofar as they dreamed of anything, now, it was of finding some British equivalent of Barack Obama, a leader who looked and acted so much like a visionary, who had so perfected the gestures and intonations, that it never occurred to anyone to ask what that vision actually was (since the vision was, precisely, not to have a vision). Suddenly, they found themselves saddled with a scruffy teetotaling vegan who said exactly what he really thought, and inspired a new generation of activists to dream of changing the world. If those activists were not naive, if this man was not unelectable, the centrists’ entire lives had been a lie. They hadn’t really accepted reality at all. They really were just sellouts.

One could even go further: the most passionate opposition to Corbynism came from men and women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. They represented the last generation in which any significant number of young radicals even had the option of selling out, in the sense of becoming secure property-owning bastions of the status quo. Not only had that door closed behind them; they were the ones largely responsible for having closed it. They were, for instance, products of what was once the finest free higher education system in the world—having attended schools like Oxford and Cambridge plush with generous state-provided stipends—who had decided their own children and grandchildren would be better off attending university while moonlighting as baristas or sex workers, then starting their professional lives weighted by tens of thousands of pounds in student debt. If the Corbynistas were right, and none of this had really been necessary, were these politicians not guilty of historic crimes? It’s hard to understand the bizarre obsession with the idea that left Labour youth groups like Momentum—about the most mild-mannered batch of revolutionaries one could imagine—would somehow end up marching them all off to the gulag, without the possibility that in the back of their minds, many secretly suspected that show trials might not be entirely inappropriate.

Edited January 16, 2020 by Rayvin

[Dr Gloom 21813]

17 minutes ago, NJS said:

No, polling shows that in the leave areas it was very much a confirmatory brexit vote. Corbyn was also a large factor but the leavers fundamentally wanted to leave and didn't give a shit about much else. 

you sure about that?

[Dr Gloom 21813]

brexit was a huge part of the story but it certainly wasn't the only reason labour were slaughtered in the socially conservative red wall seats. people up there couldn't stand corbyn. 

we have to learn from this election. this isn't about despising corbyn - i voted for the useless cunt twice - it's about electing a new leader capable of winning back these voters. 

Edited January 16, 2020 by Dr Gloom

[NJS 4371]

4 minutes ago, Dr Gloom said:

you sure about that?

I've seen similar ones with a reverse order of the top 2.

[ewerk 30266]

You sure you weren’t looking at it upside down?

[Rayvin 5183]

4 minutes ago, Dr Gloom said:

brexit was a huge part of the story but it certainly wasn't the only reason labour were slaughtered in the socially conservative red wall seats. people up there couldn't stand corbyn. 

we have to learn from this election. this isn't about despising corbyn - i voted for the useless cunt twice - it's about electing a new leader capable of winning back these voters. 

 

I think they're gone mate. I think that's the problem now actually - those voters aren't coming back. And if they do, we will have had to go so far to the right as to lose the young and idealistic left.

 

Don't really think there's any way forward but to stick to our guns on socialism and wait for them to die/come around off the back of years of the Tories.

[NJS 4371]

6 minutes ago, Dr Gloom said:

brexit was a huge part of the story but it certainly wasn't the only reason labour were slaughtered in the socially conservative red wall seats. people up there couldn't stand corbyn. 

we have to learn from this election. this isn't about despising corbyn - i voted for the useless cunt twice - it's about electing a new leader capable of winning back these voters. 

I agree and admitted earlier in the thread that I underestimated the national anthem/nuclear button/IRA sympathiser bullshit. 

 

I just thought people wouldn't let that get in the way of improving their lives. Sadly they do. 

Edited January 16, 2020 by NJS

[Renton 21311]

Come on man, a good proportion of this bubble of a board only voted for Corbyn through gritted teeth. Of course he was the problem. 2017 was part May, part fluke. The fact he couldn't beat a party who has governed the last 10 years of austerity is all you need to know. The fact that some people can't see this or admit it is also telling. 

[ewerk 30266]

2 minutes ago, Rayvin said:

 

I think they're gone mate. I think that's the problem now actually - those voters aren't coming back. And if they do, we will have had to go so far to the right as to lose the young and idealistic left.

 

Don't really think there's any way forward but to stick to our guns on socialism and wait for them to die/come around off the back of years of the Tories.

You can’t be that stupid.

[Rayvin 5183]

1 minute ago, Renton said:

Come on man, a good proportion of this bubble of a board only voted for Corbyn through gritted teeth. Of course he was the problem. 2017 was part May, part fluke. The fact he couldn't beat a party who has governed the last 10 years of austerity is all you need to know. The fact that some people can't see this or admit it is also telling. 

 

Telling about what?

[NJS 4371]

I don't think anyone's claiming otherwise tbh. 

 

I think blaming him for brexit is a bit strong though. 

2 minutes ago, Renton said:

Come on man, a good proportion of this bubble of a board only voted for Corbyn through gritted teeth. Of course he was the problem. 2017 was part May, part fluke. The fact he couldn't beat a party who has governed the last 10 years of austerity is all you need to know. The fact that some people can't see this or admit it is also telling. 

 

[Rayvin 5183]

Just now, ewerk said:

You can’t be that stupid.

 

I said that if we lose this, we were done for 15 years come what may. I stand by that. We can go over to the centre if you want but we're going to achieve fuck all on that front too.

 

If we're going to lose anyway, I'd prefer to lose without compromise. Die on my feet, as it were. So yes, I am that stupid apparently - although Starmer as spoken positively enough about socialism that I think Corbyn won the battle for the heart and soul of the party anyway, so I'm comfortable voting for him.

[Dr Gloom 21813]

5 minutes ago, Rayvin said:

 

I think they're gone mate. I think that's the problem now actually - those voters aren't coming back. And if they do, we will have had to go so far to the right as to lose the young and idealistic left.

 

Don't really think there's any way forward but to stick to our guns on socialism and wait for them to die/come around off the back of years of the Tories.

nandy can speak to this voters, i reckon

[Renton 21311]

2 minutes ago, Rayvin said:

 

I think they're gone mate. I think that's the problem now actually - those voters aren't coming back. And if they do, we will have had to go so far to the right as to lose the young and idealistic left.

 

Don't really think there's any way forward but to stick to our guns on socialism and wait for them to die/come around off the back of years of the Tories.

 

Why do you think this? The situation is not that different from 82 really, it's worse, but there are a lot of similarities. I think what you're saying is you don't want a centrist like Blair in power. Which is fair enough, but in that case you will have  to live with the alternative. 

[Dr Gloom 21813]

8 minutes ago, NJS said:

I agree and admitted earlier in the thread that I underestimated the national anthem/nuclear button/IRA sympathiser bullshit. 

 

I just thought people wouldn't let that get in the way of improving their lives. Sadly they do. 

the next leader needs to be a bit racist too. 

well, not exactly, but you get what i'm saying on immigration. that's what brexit was ultimately all about. we need to win back the bigots - yay - sorry rayvin 

Edited January 16, 2020 by Dr Gloom

[Renton 21311]

3 minutes ago, Rayvin said:

 

Telling about what?

 

About their powers of perception or true motives. 

[Rayvin 5183]

Just now, Dr Gloom said:

nandy can speak to this voters, i reckon

 

I think she'll be shot with shit from the get go, the LDs will opine that they could work with Labour if not for Nandy, they'll find something in her past that equates her with Stalin ideologically, and will brand her reckless and a danger to the country's finances.

 

And then we'll lose again and rinse and repeat.

[Rayvin 5183]

Just now, Renton said:

 

About their powers of perception or true motives. 

 

Ok so, people who voted for Corbyn are stupid or secretly Tories.

 

We've come full circle.