Post Match Thread: Election 2017

[Damocles]

What I can't understand about the Blairites is why the insist on joining the Labour party in the hope they can drive it to the right. Why don't they join the Tory party and try to pull it to the left. Surely that would be better for the country.

Because you've misunderstood the argument.

The argument is about what wins elections and not what's the best policies. New Labour won every election they ever fought. Far Left Labour has lost every election it has fought in 50 years. You can argue all day long but those were the facts before Corbyn and remain the facts now.

People want a centre left Labour because they think doing some good is better than doing no good. I agree with them vehemently.

 

[Neville Kneville]

Corbyn's credibility deficit was just too great to overcome in one election. That has been corrected as the latest opinion polls are proving.
The next election will give us the answers. If I am wrong then I will happily admit to you that I was wrong. I hope you will extend the same courtesy to me.

Nope.

I don't give a flying stuff about Corbyn & neither will at least half the people who voted for him, they want her & her gang of two faced bandits out & don't care who does it. I suspect a fair number who voted for her would much prefer she wasn't there. Unfortunately that shower of pillocks made themselves so unpalatable to half the country, that she's still there.

A decent opposition would have won by a landslide. Corbyn & his fuckwit mates have let the country down. The problem they have, if elected in the future, is what happens if they actually get competent opponents running against them, when in power & everything then becomes their fault. That's their problem.

Ous is the cunts have left us with May & Boris fucking Johnson & whole other shower of shite.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Firstly how is the end in sight?
We have missed all the deadlines for reducing the defecit and the latest forecast is that while the deficit will fall this year it will grow again next year. The whole austerity plan was to eliminate the deficit and then reduce the national debt and its just not working.

The deficit has been reduced by over 75%. It's taken longer than planned because the governement was not able to cut as deeply as would have been needed to get rid of it by now. I'm assuming you're not suggesting the cuts should have been deeper still ;-) The country has recovered immeasurably from the depth it had slumped to by 2010. The Tories turned it around from deep and rising deficit and recession, back into growth and deficit reduction, and got more people into work than ever before.

I get it if you want to complain about the cuts. But suggesting the government's plans have failed is silly. They patently have not. They took a terrible situation in 2010 and got us back on track. This is what Tories do. Labour overspend, put unemployment up, put the country into recession and then eventually get kicked out. The Tories come in and pick up the pieces and turn it around. Rinse and repeat.

I take your point that not all public sector workers are welfare benefits, but a lot are. As those on welfare benefits dont make a contribution to savings, why not take them out of the pay freezes/reductions? Surely that would make it more efficient?

Maybe, but I can see a lot of problems with it. If everyone on say £8/hour was given a 3% pay rise whilst those on £9/hour and above only got 1%, I don't think that would go very well. But maybe.

You do know that the rule changes introduced in the past 7 years have artificially reduced the people counted as unemployed dont you? I would argue they were introduced to achieve just such a result.
For example. My 25 year old daughter was unemployed after the completion of a degree last year. She went to register as a job seeker in the July, she was toldher student loan covered July, so she went back in august. She was then informed it would take 3 months to process and there would be no backdating of any money awarded. During that 3 months she would be expected to attend 40 specific days at a job club and failure to attend would mean that her claim would fail. The closest job club is 29 miles away, there used to be one less than a mile away but that closed in 2011 and one 6 miles away but that closed in 2015. The minimum cost by public transport is £10 per day. She could have saved some money by getting a weekly pass but she was not allowed to change the days so they fitted into weekly blocks. Therefore the cost of travel in that 3 months was £400. Again there was no method to help with that cost. Jobseekers allowance is £73.10 per week for a 25 year old, so that would be nearly 4.5 months (3 months processing and 5.5 weeks of benefits) unemployed just to have received absolutely no net gain. If she had been under 24 the rate is £57.90 and it would been 5.5 months. She asked if she could register as unemployed and make no monetary claim, but was told no she could not do that.
She made the calculation that she would be likely to get a job in 4.5 months, so didnt bother and was magically not counted for the actual 6.5 months she was unemployed.
I would treat claims that unemployment has not risen with a huge pinch of salt.

I said employment levels are at an all time high. I've no idea about unemployment figures, but I'll take what you say on face value. Being unemployed myself.

You dont know what point I am trying to make here? You posted that if private care costs increased people would just have to pay it, you seemed to be saying that people could afford it if they tried hard enough. My point was that most people will not be able to afford to pay it so the government would end up paying anyway or just let people die.

Sorry, but I still don't know what point you are trying to make. So the government would have to end up paying. They do already. What's your point?

I would agree that farming is a special case, but then its not an industry and should not be treated as such and therefore should be subsidised but any profit made should be split between the farmer and the government to offset the subsidy.

While there are lots of low paid work we could transition out of what about the 2.5 million that we cant. Are those 2.5 million just destined to be poor forever and just get poorer compared to the rest of the population by the year? Thats more than 5% of the workforce you are allowing to be an underclass. When people lose hope, then society suffers. We need a way of raising the low paid up or at the very least give them a realistic pathway to escape. You pointed out that pathway is education but that is being eroded and is not being prioritised as it should.

I repeatedly said we cannot get everyone into highly skilled jobs, but that our aspiration should be to get more people into those sorts of jobs and less people in low-skill, low-pay jobs. I'll not repeat myself again as to why simply paying people more and more for unskilled work, does not work. It is not a viable solution.

That's it for me on this subject. Everything else is just going around and around the same houses. My position is summarised in the one sentence immediately above. I'll say no more.

 

[The perfect fumble]

What I can't understand about the Blairites is why the insist on joining the Labour party in the hope they can drive it to the right. Why don't they join the Tory party and try to pull it to the left. Surely that would be better for the country.

The Blairites learned the lesson of the disastrous SDP. What they did instead was hijack an existing party at a low ebb, they told the Labour Party that the problem facing the Party was the Party itself and they set about grafting a new party, New Labour, on top of the old one and assumed the graft would take, gradually taking over the whole party, it never did, but it did take over the PLP with Blair place men and Blair babes. But the whole New Labour project was so facile, so lacking in the essentials that make the Labour Party the Labour Party, such as a commitment to social justice, that the whole candy floss confection fell in on itself. But despite the setback of not getting David Miliband elected leader, the Blairites assumed that after a flirtation with soft left Ed the membership would fall behind a Blair clone. It is a testimony to their alienation from the membership that the tsunami that washed them away, twice, came as such a surprise.

Corbyn says he's an inclusive man and he is and the wayward Blairite sons and daughters will be welcomed back, but not straight away, a good number of people came on board when the party needed them most, he's not going to jettison them. Nevertheless, Corbyn needs the right wing of the Labour Party, they've always existed in this broad church, but the left is in ascendancy, to use the old phrase Corbyn has to tell the Blairites "we're the masters now".

 

[remember arthur mann]

The Blairites learned the lesson of the disastrous SDP. What they did instead was hijack an existing party at a low ebb, they told the Labour Party that the problem facing the Party was the Party itself and they set about grafting a new party, New Labour, on top of the old one and assumed the graft would take, gradually taking over the whole party, it never did, but it did take over the PLP with Blair place men and Blair babes. But the whole New Labour project was so facile, so lacking in the essentials that make the Labour Party the Labour Party, such as a commitment to social justice, that the whole candy floss confection fell in on itself. But despite the setback of not getting David Miliband elected leader, the Blairites assumed that after a flirtation with soft left Ed the membership would fall behind a Blair clone. It is a testimony to their alienation from the membership that the tsunami that washed them away, twice, came as such a surprise.

Corbyn says he's an inclusive man and he is and the wayward Blairite sons and daughters will be welcomed back, but not straight away, a good number of people came on board when the party needed them most, he's not going to jettison them. Nevertheless, Corbyn needs the right wing of the Labour party, they've always existed in this broad church, but the left is in ascendancy, to use the old phrase Corbyn has to tell the Blairites "we're the masters now".

TFFT !

 

[Chippy_boy]

Because you've misunderstood the argument.

The argument is about what wins elections and not what's the best policies. New Labour won every election they ever fought. Far Left Labour has lost every election it has fought in 50 years. You can argue all day long but those were the facts before Corbyn and remain the facts now.

People want a centre left Labour because they think doing some good is better than doing no good. I agree with them vehemently.

And I agree with you vehemently. Even I could be tempted to vote for someone like David Milliband, were he to espouse moderate increases in public expenditure (funded by moderate tax increases or debt increase) to stimulate growth and to restore our public services. These sorts of policies are reasonable, and gain very large support.

Nationalising the banks, the energy companies, the water companies; limiting exec pay to 20x; increasing corporation tax at a time we are about to go through Brexit and companies are considering their options? These are BONKERS policies that I and millions like me would never vote for in a decade of sundays.

Moderate Labour win because they are sensible and popular. Extreme left policies are neither.

Corbyn held back from his most potty policies, knowing they would render him ABSOLUTELY unelectable, instead of just unelectable. But once in, he'd probably swing further left still, to where his heart is. Nationalising the banks would be back on. Trident dropped in a heartbeat. etc. No majority is going to trust a would be marxist to run our country.

 

[goalmole]

Nope.

I don't give a flying stuff about Corbyn & neither will at least half the people who voted for him, they want her & her gang of two faced bandits out & don't care who does it. I suspect a fair number who voted for her would much prefer she wasn't there. Unfortunately that shower of pillocks made themselves so unpalatable to half the country, that she's still there.

A decent opposition would have won by a landslide. Corbyn & his fuckwit mates have let the country down. The problem they have, if elected in the future, is what happens if they actually get competent opponents running against them, when in power & everything then becomes their fault. That's their problem.

Ous is the cunts have left us with May & Boris fucking Johnson & whole other shower of shite.

By competent you mean people who would contort their beliefs to whatever they thought would get them into power. The electorate would see through them in an instant. It is conviction in what you believe that brings change, not a willingness to change depending on which way the wind happens to be blowing.

 

[Gelsons Dad]

The Blairites learned the lesson of the disastrous SDP. What they did instead was hijack an existing party at a low ebb, they told the Labour Party that the problem facing the Party was the Party itself and they set about grafting a new party, New Labour, on top of the old one and assumed the graft would take, gradually taking over the whole party, it never did, but it did take over the PLP with Blair place men and Blair babes. But the whole New Labour project was so facile, so lacking in the essentials that make the Labour Party the Labour Party, such as a commitment to social justice, that the whole candy floss confection fell in on itself. But despite the setback of not getting David Miliband elected leader, the Blairites assumed that after a flirtation with soft left Ed the membership would fall behind a Blair clone. It is a testimony to their alienation from the membership that the tsunami that washed them away, twice, came as such a surprise.

Corbyn says he's an inclusive man and he is and the wayward Blairite sons and daughters will be welcomed back, but not straight away, a good number of people came on board when the party needed them most, he's not going to jettison them. Nevertheless, Corbyn needs the right wing of the Labour Party, they've always existed in this broad church, but the left is in ascendancy, to use the old phrase Corbyn has to tell the Blairites "we're the masters now".

If you look at the Labour party from the moment Corbyn was elected leader to the moment the exit poll was published was it inclusive? Did it seek to draw from a broad church? There appears to be a lot of revisionism at the moment due to Corbyn's current popularity and a well crafted manifesto which let's not forget was debunked by the IFS.

 

[Neville Kneville]

By competent you mean people who would contort their beliefs to whatever they thought would get them into power. The electorate would see through them in an instant. It is conviction in what you believe that brings change, not a willingness to change depending on which way the wind happens to be blowing.

Yeah right, let's all hold hands.

Nothing 'changes' except one bunch of lying cunts, such as Labour, replaces another bunch of lying cunts, such as the Conservatives. Every now & then, one of them is particularly, incredibly shit & makes things much worse, then after a few years of utter shiteness, it writes irself into being the same old shit we usually have.

Unfortunately right now, we have Trump v Clinton UK version, & nothing but clueless, underhanded shit to vote for, so we'll be lucky to get away with it, especially seeing as various clowns have voted for Brexit at he same time.

We'll probably end up with some **** like Tony Blair, as a Lib Dem Prime minister in about 6 years time, to try & solve the crash.

 

[Chippy_boy]

By competent you mean people who would contort their beliefs to whatever they thought would get them into power. The electorate would see through them in an instant. It is conviction in what you believe that brings change, not a willingness to change depending on which way the wind happens to be blowing.

I agree with Neville about the reasons (if not his assessment of government policies).

Corbyn did much better than expected for 4 reasons:

1. The staggering ineptitude of Theresa May and her manifesto, put off huge numbers of would-be Tory voters from voting Tory. My wife for one; lifetime Tory voter, point blank refused to vote for her.

2. A Labour social media campaign that gained momentum with the young, greatly helped by a £28,000 incentive for the 50% of young people who go to university.

3. The terrorist attacks, given that May was Home Secretary for the last several years, played well into the hands of those moaning about Tory cuts.

4. Corbyn acquitted himself better than expected in the debates and interviews. He wasn't as bad as people thought, and starkly contrasted May, who was miles worse than everyone thought.

If anyone wants to argue that none of the above came into play, then they are deluded. Plainly those four things were factors.

Having concluded that, what is also therefore logically undeniable, is that were any of those factors not to have been in play, then the gap between the Tories and Labour would have been even bigger. Had the Tories not fumbled with the care cost proposals, more of the elderly would have voted for them. Had Theresa May not be dismal, more people would have voted for them. in my estimation, they'd have a comfortable majority now, irrespective of what Corbyn did or said. They lost because they fucked it up.