The Labour Party

Nuttal is a cunt and UKIP will go down the swanee under him so alls well there !
I’m at a loss to understand Copeland however .
The problem with Labour is the disconnect with what would in the past be its core voters .
The general public hate blairites but they don’t yet trust our leader particularly on immigration .
Its something the party needs to address if it wants them back !11

quite right too ,their fucking shit

The problem with politics in this country is that there has been a big shift to the right.
I hear people talking about Cameron as if he was a Liberal and the Tories as if they are a middle of the road party.
Since the rise of UKIP, and the Brexit vote, as well as the Liberals becoming a joke party, there is no party for people who want a centre left option.

We have a situation where it’s UKIP or the virtually unchallenged Tories, and this means they can pretty much do what they like, because there is no viable opposition.

It doesn’t matter how much sense Corbyn talks, or that he could make the country fairer, the fact is, he is unelectable.

As much as I didn’t like Blair, he was exactly what we needed after successive Conservative Governments and the greed culture, and although he turned into a control; freak he was electable, and took the middle ground rather than the left, which not many wanted.

Corbyn will never be Prime Minister, simply because he is tarnished with the same brush that Livingstone, Foot, Harman etc were, by the media, and unless Labour get a more charismatic leader, with more centre left policies, they are going to see more losses like they just have.

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I think Labour were in the wilderness long before Corbyn, and I think the general idea in the country now is let’s all get behind May and hope this works out so he’s naturally going to be out of the spotlight. The idea of a Labour SNP coalition scared the shit out of people and once that was off the table and the SNP became legit a Labour majority seemed impossible so from there I think it’s fair for people to look at alternatives.

The question is would any of the 4 opposing leadership candidates have Labour in a winning state now? I doubt it very much. There was never going to be a 2020 Labour win without some kind of revolution and Labour MPs didn’t want to give that a try. I fear Labour becoming that club that changes coach every year but still can’t get out of the Championship because the problems are more than just who the coach is.

Until UKIP fall Labour will be in trouble (Nuttall hopefully the man to deliver this). There’s this false concept of the “Traditional Labour Voter” that they’re losing when in fact a lot of those people are what I would call traditional UKIP voters that never had a party before.

I think there’s been this false idea that if you’re poor then you’re anti-Tory (well that bit may be true) and from there I think there’s the assumption that you must therefore be left wing. In my life the most right wing people I know are the poorer working classes. People with a bit of money and education are more liberal and then people with a good amount of money are a bit more right wing (from my personal experiences, it may be different for other people).

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I think you’re right.

In fact it must be true because if the working class and under paid all voted Labour the Tories would never get in.

Most people I know that vote Tory, do so for the wrong reasons.
The main reason why people are either under paid or unemployed is often because the Conservative policies are made to help employers rather than employees.

As the biggest funders of the Tories are generally right wing, capitalists, who are the biggest employers, it is likely that they are more than happy with high unemployment, because it means lower wages for unskilled jobs, and low inflation.

The irony is that the very people that would benefit from a Labour government are the same people who vote Tory.
But if you have a right wing press owned by people like Murdoch, Rothemere and Desmond, that are constantly telling you that the Tories are for the working classes and that anything on the left is taking your money away in taxes, then you start believing it.

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We don’t have credible alternative to the Torys at the moment because of Cornbyn and his left wing nutters.
That is why the Torys have been strutting their stuff and shoving it up folk.
Corbyn is left wing and i have never met a left winger yet who wants power. How can you slag the purse managers off and shout power to the people if you are in power.
Corbyn needs to go. Soon!

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We dont have a credible alternative to the Tories because of the PLP’s refusal to let their democratically elected leader Jeremy Corbyn do his job and sabotage his every move .
Without Corbyn Labour are unelectable !

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@Craigie sums things up pretty well. Labour were fucked long before Corbyn, and any chance of him turning things around quickly have been scuppered by the coup, and the Blairite wing. This is being played out at all levels, with a handful of right wingers, controlling machinery, and destroying any chance of success, hence we end up with awful pro-EU, Blairite candidates being offered up in places like Copeland. The Tories are unbeatable at the moment as a result and they are using every dirty trick in the book to create a lock-out for decades to come. It’s very depressing. What makes it all the worse is that Labour don’t even have a potential unifier waiting to take over from either wing. The media have been a disgrace as well. @lengooner if Corbyn goes you’ll get Keir Starmer or someone similar and that will mean trying to block Brexit on one hand, and then agreeing with the Tories on most other things on the other. How can that be appealing to you?

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For me this is the key point.

I was very supportive of Corbyn up until around the time of Brexit/Trump. At that point I decided that the best thing to do was to get even a centrist Labour Party candidate into power because despite my ideological objections they’d at least not fuck the NHS and public services to the same extent that the Tories are. These things are so essential to people’s very existence that I feel that we have to help preserve them, even if it means tolerating a Blairite. I thought that Corbyn represented the left’s best chance of reclaiming Labour and perhaps even mainstream politics. But at this point it’s clear he’s completely incapable of that, and I think it’s a mixture of him simply not being cut out to be a leader of a major party and a shit load of misrepresentation from the media. But at this stage it doesn’t matter whether it’s misrepresentation or ineptitude that is preventing him from effectively leading the party, the reality is that he can’t do it, therefore change is needed. Which brings me back to your quote, the party is yet to offer up a solid and viable alternative who could beat the Tories in 2020.

As a left wing person it’s depressing as fuck, I can’t even offer up a hypothetical that realistically stops the Tories in their tracks.

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Their is a part of me that thinks it’s prefrible to have a proper left wing opposition than having labour in power with a centrist leader

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Brexit. Give it time.

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Could you please elaborate a bit for me mate?

Tories are making themselves the party of brexit. They have firmly shown where their loyalties are in that respect.

If brexit turns out to be a massive clusterfuck (when?) then Tries will hopefully get the blame and lose support.

For that to happen though, smart opposition must be in force.

The sort of people that voted for Brexit are the same that would vote Tory, so even if they were blamed, they are still going to get their votes.

The people who are going to have to pay for the Brexit vote aren’t the bankers or the rich, it will be the working and middle classes, who also had to bail out the bankers in the banking collapse.

The rich always get everyone else to pay for their greed and stupidity, and yet the party they fund, still gets elected.

Not necessarily the Torries won in '92 after leading us into a recession because of the ERM. IMO they won partly due to an add asking the electorate what they would have to sacrifice to have Labour’s promise of increased spending. A holiday, a new car etc etc. People never point to it but I remember, I was 11 at the time.

This just isn’t true, the white working classes voted on mass for BREXIT.

I thought Brexit would ruin the tories, but they’re surprisingly holding up quite well. Besides, any disaffected tories by Brexit wouldn’t vote for Corbyn anyway, they’ll either reluctantly vote for the party or potentially vote for the Lib Dems in protest.

Quite a large percentage of working class people have always voted Tory for the same reason they would have voted for brexit and now vote for ukip

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But as I said before, it is the white working class that are voting Tory.
If they didn’t, the Tories would never win an election.

If the wheels come falling off after Brexit and people are suffering more than they are now then people will want to issue blame and whoever the government is at the time will get it. People will forget we’ve gone through a massive black hole, it’ll just be things are shit, get these bastards out.

I think in 2020 though people will vote Tory to not rock the Brexit boat and let them follow through on “the plan”. The same way Cameron convinced everyone only the Tories could be trusted with the economy since they’d already done such a great job on the recovery and deficit and we couldn’t risk jeopardising that (lol).

After that I think people will probably be sick of Tory rule for 15 years and want change anyway (as long as there is electable opposition of course). After 15 years of government nobody ever says this government is amazing, long may it continue. They’ll fail to reduce immigration to the levels they promised and at the moment everything is somehow being cut and at the same time receiving record levels of spending so it’s already not adding up.

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