Think it's possible. He would be mental if it was a fight he thought would be good to have right now. I've long called for him to go but I think the people in his team are worse than he is.Sure, his chief of staff, his comms director, the leader of Momentum, Unite reps and Diane Abbott all went along with it without Jez hearing the slightest whiff.
Jeremy Corbyn - Not Not Labour Party(?), not a Communist (BBC)
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Guardian said:
Great, stuck with a cheerleader for a con artist paedophile and man who hasn't turned up to a meeting in months or even uttered a word in the aftermath of the Ben Stokes and Gareth Thomas front pages and the widespread condemnation from elsewhere, despite his brief being the media.
But hey, he'll get plenty of media time today so maybe we'll get that apology for his role in the Carl Beech saga and him doing his fecking job for a change.
But hey, he'll get plenty of media time today so maybe we'll get that apology for his role in the Carl Beech saga and him doing his fecking job for a change.
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Well yes a slide of one percent is within the margin of error fair enough but if you want to defend Labours showing of 22 percent instead be my guest.
So the attempt to oust him brings all the negatives from the press as to the intent and broad church versus narrow Marxist cult. Then they bottle it. Losing all the benefits of getting rid of the noises off message in the coming election and opening up the competence issue which is the real killer against Corbyn.
Well done momentum, well done labour leadership, proving your critics wrong at every turn I see.
Well done momentum, well done labour leadership, proving your critics wrong at every turn I see.
Yet another example of the strength of Momentum in trying to define Labour party policy.
Tom Watson is a moderate thinker and those more proactive Momentum activists must really hate him.
Personally I like him and if he gets kicked out then Labour will be the looser.
So close yet so far away.
He hasn't turned up to NEC meetings in months. Politics aside, Watson is really shit at his job.
Not defending anything. Just pointing out the flip flopping in your logic and reasoning when it suits you. Why only bring up ‘margin of error’ when a poll doesn’t show your preferred outcome... then quote a poll like it’s fact when it shows what you want it to?
Politics aside - but he is a politician.
Even if Watson politics were similar to the Labour Left, there would still be a argument to get rid of him because well he is doing feck all.
Whenever he goes, it will be no loss to the labour party.
That’s within the margin of error with the Lib Dems, a party that was practically dead very recently. Labour are nowhere near the Tories, which is utterly humiliating given the political situation.
And none of that is relevant to my point... but go ahead.
Yeah but Tom Watson is sabotaging the party from within dontyaknow
It is. And this is why I'm going to struggle to vote for them, because in my view they are badly letting us down. The Tories are cnuts, most of us know that, but where exactly is an opposition with a spine?
Because there's a difference between quoting a poll that shows an in-margin change as evidence for an improvement in a partys position, like so many do, and quoting a poll that is evidence of a continuing flat lining of support. Sure Labour falling behind the lib Dems is within the margin of error and doesnt mean much by itself. But the fact Labour is anywhere near the lib Dems at all, this close to an election, shows how abysmally weak they are.
In what sense? Can anyone actually define what they'd be losing with Watson? He's literally spent about four years in the role of deputy leader in a party where he actively doesn't like the leader. Which is baffling - if you want to occupy a senior position like that you should be behind your leader to some extent, and if you don't want to back your leader you should leave for another party. Instead he's coasted along with the benefits that come with being deputy leader and holding a senior office while sabotaging the leadership he's working alongside at every turn. Can anyone point to what he's actually done?
The polling is fairly volatile at the moment. No party is going to be winning a majority if a GE happens in the near future because voters are so torn over Brexit.
Brexit is in fact the only thing giving the Lib Dem’s any relevance whatsoever because by offering to revoke article 50, they know they can hoover up votes from a good number of remainers. Labour are actually now criticised for not taking an extreme position on Brexit which is a slightly odd state of affairs.
The eventual outcome of a GE will largely depend on how well Labour manage to steer the conversation away from Brexit... or whether it will basically be fought as a single issue election which is certainly what the media will be pushing for.
Either way, relying on current polling doesn’t really interest me because as history shows, things can change very quickly.
I mean...on current polling the Tories will.
I think it's fairly fantastical at this point to pretend an election will be about anything other than Brexit. And I'm not sure that's desirable either: it'd be fairly nonsensical for Corbyn and co to try and put forward a platform that basically pretends the biggest issues the country's faced in decades isn't actually a thing and can be ignored. I'm sure they're aware of that by this point.
It will largely be dominated by Brexit and I am not suggesting Labour try and ignore it whatsoever. They would be stupid not to try and push their whole manifesto though because they have a policy platform that is quite popular.
Any party only caring about resolving Brexit as the only issue are making a mistake in my opinion. It’s like seeing a doctor who is only interested in trying to treat the symptoms rather than what actually caused the problem in the first place. Any serious political party should want to fix the sort of societal conditions that caused Brexit.
I don’t agree regarding the Lib Dems. Brexit has made them relevant again (although going full revoke was a high risk position), but in the wider picture they are occupying a very enviable position.
For all the accusations of them being soft Tories, the simple truth is that Britain is a majority soft conservative country. A quick look over the last 40 years of elections tells you that. Now with Labour going hard left and the Tories hard right, the Lib Dems have pretty much free rein to scoop up the centre.
That’s not to say they won’t feck it up in their normal inimitable style of course, and if either of the main parties come back to the centre too quickly then they’ll be in trouble. Right now though they have a brilliant window of opportunity, which is why I personally think their revoke position was politically stupid. The last thing they need right now is to be scaring off moderates.
I feel like all the talk surrounding Watson's possible ousting kind of highlights a major problem in how Corbyn's critics approach him...they both simultaneously want to portray him as this soft, weak and naive leader who isn't ruthless or politically savvy enough to regain power for Labour, while simultaneously lamenting the notion that he's too ruthless with 'moderates' in his own party. Ultimately both don't work...if he's as ruthless as they say he is, then he's clearly got some political nous - at least when it comes to internal party matters. But again, if he is too naive and too weak, then surely moves to further cement his own power would contradict this notion?
It also highlights the 'moderate' wing of the party's hypocrisy insofar as they didn't seem to give much of a feck about party democracy being subverted back in 2015-16 when plenty of measures were considered to ensure Corbyn couldn't gain or retain power, and when the significant new membership was often downplayed because of its sympathies towards Corbyn.
Ultimately this is about holding power for both wings of the party...in that respect no one wing is holier than thou compared to any other, and no one wing can be seen as particularly competent or capable considering all their respective failures.
It also highlights the 'moderate' wing of the party's hypocrisy insofar as they didn't seem to give much of a feck about party democracy being subverted back in 2015-16 when plenty of measures were considered to ensure Corbyn couldn't gain or retain power, and when the significant new membership was often downplayed because of its sympathies towards Corbyn.
Ultimately this is about holding power for both wings of the party...in that respect no one wing is holier than thou compared to any other, and no one wing can be seen as particularly competent or capable considering all their respective failures.
I’m not sure I consider mild social democratic policy to be ‘hard left’... that’s more media framing than objective truth.
We don’t know how popular this supposed ‘centre’ currently is because we haven’t been able to test it. Lots of people self identify as being centre ground but I recall a large study a couple of years that showed in a blind policy test, most people were more aligned to the Green Party and Labour. The reality is that outside of Brexit, the Lib Dem’s would not be very relevant. This is very clear because if you asked most people to name a single policy of theirs unrelated to Brexit, they’d struggle.
Pretty much this.
Corbyn is both the worst leader of all time and the only person who can save Britain. But this view shouldn't come as a surprise anymore, ask Corbyn critics whats he's doing wrong and what he should do instead and they'll give a Keano like respond - ''Strong Spine'', ''A real opposition leader'' ''Destroying the Tories'' etc etc. Completely meaningless slogans, that don't amount up to anything. Ask them what they would do if put in charge of the Labour Party and again slogans reappear(The left wing politics seem to disappear, funny that) and the Brexit crisis is magically fixed.
The ''moderates''(Basically Liberals) are done, they don't have a answer to well the problems they in part caused. The crash in 08 and the reaction to it ruined them with the electorate but more importantly it killed their political ideology(Turns out it wasn't the end of history after all). Even if they were to win elections, all they will and can do is to further the crisis we are in(How the feck do Dems voters think a Lib Dem would help the country ?). So all they have left is to defend neo liberalism at all cost, to view the world as a moralistic HBO show and to write bad opinion pieces in The Guardian.
The party currently debating whether to abolish private schools is ‘mild social democracy policy’?
That study you’re referring to means very little in reality. If you poll Americans purely on policy they are far to the left of where they actually vote. Yet time and again they re-elect Republicans who hardly represent their policy positions in the slightest. People mostly don’t vote based on pure policy positions, and never have.
If you want to see where people are likely to vote, then look at how they actually voted for decades. Sure we may see some swings over time, but the idea that they’re suddenly all going to wake up and vote for radically different positions is naive. People in Britain tend towards moderate safe politics which is why fairly moderate Tories usually do very well and why Blair managed to sweep the board for so long.
You do know the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016, right ?
People in Britain have been conned for years.
Now they have to pay tab.
Now they have to pay tab.
Nothing wrong in principle with getting rid of Watson (does anyone really think the likes of Mandleson or Campbell wouldn’t do the exact same thing if their deputy leader spent all his time attacking his own party!?) but the optics of doing it now, and in the way they’ve tried to (by scrapping the position) falls right into the classic “same old dumb lefty factionalism” box and does them no favours.
Still, anyone claiming to be outraged by it is just outright lying. No one cares about Tom Watson. But it gives those inclined, and the media, ammunition to pretend to.
Still, anyone claiming to be outraged by it is just outright lying. No one cares about Tom Watson. But it gives those inclined, and the media, ammunition to pretend to.
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That wouldnt be my criticism of this move against Watson. Mine would be it's the wrong battle at the wrong time. Headline on day 1 of the pre election conference: Labour leadership split by internal war/ hard lefts war against moderates. That Corbyn let it get to this stage.. that he allowed the focus to shift away from the Tories and back towards his own sides problems... Thats the criticism of his leadership.
It's not the fact it's Tom Watson. The outrage comes from the motion to abolish the position of deputy leader to remove him, as opposed to going through the proper procedures to hold a vote on who should be deputy leader (I think it requires 20% of Labour MPs to pass).
Which.... is what I said?
Also, the conference would’ve voted on it (so hardly some undemocratic night of the tiny sporks, is it?) and it was removed anyway (apparently at Corbyn’s insistence) so it’s not like anything actually worthy of any outrage happened at all?
But we both know that’s not how anyone is going to report on or react to it. Part of which, of course, is on Lansman.
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My personal feeling differs because I feel like we are starting to get to a time where we are in uncharted territory for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the mainstream media are losing a lot of the influence they once had. For years, elections have practically been decided on media manipulation alone... but because of the growth of social media, they no longer hold the same power.
The idea that people are going to get more conservative as they get older might not be quite so true when you have a whole generation that have largely been left behind this country’s economic policy and austerity. A generation worse off economically than their parents.
Younger people are becoming more politically aware and starting to vote in greater numbers.
I’d say the longer term future prospects for the Tories actually look pretty bleak in my opinion.
A vote about a single issue, which is always a terrible idea, and doesn’t speak to the natural inclination towards moderation which is the hallmark of UK politics.
Yep. Johnson just removed 20 MP's but one change in Labour is a "civil war".
The polls have been so accurate recently too...
Does the fact that you are arguing on the nuance if Labour are the 2nd or 3rd party in the UK, in what is commonly regarded as a 2 party system, not ring alarm bells?