Tories win Copeland b-election.

[Len Rum]

Tinted specs? That's a laugh coming from you.

Labour cause the deficit (running at 3% BEFORE the financial crash) and it's the Tories fault for not completely eliminating, only partially eliminating it???

And the "solution" according to you is that we should have spent MORE and cut less???

You really could not it up. Only a deluded fool could think such false logic made any sense whatsoever. It's thinking like that that will see Labour in opposition for 20 years. It was exactly this sort of nonsense that kept Red Ed out of office.

LOL, funnily enough the Tories have now adopted Red Ed's austerity lite programme plus his proposals on infrastructure spending and regulating the energy market ( not forgetting Red Ed would have kept us in Europe , you'd have been happy with that mate?).
Anyway putting that to one side I deliberately wasn't suggesting any "solutions".
Just simply pointing out the Tory's appalling record on borrowing since 2010. Yes they inherited a difficult situation but they set targets on borrowing and have failed abysmally to meet them due to their own poor decisions and actions. Nothing to do with what Labour did in the sixties,seventies, nineties,noughties or whenever , nothing to do with Red Ed, nothing to do with Liam Byrne's note to the Treasury,nothing to do with the financial crash of 2008 and everything to do with their own failings to meet their own targets.

 

[Dave Ewing's Back 'eader]

no offence taken, and I am not an advocate of jezza, he's a fucking plank, but the labour party has no credible leader in waiting, the ones you mentioned are not going to placate the memberhip and are (bar maybe Jarvis) gonna be seen as usual political establisent types, the one I mentioned are local from their comunities co-op labour chosen and from backgrounds outside of westminster.
I am saying they are too green to leader at present, but the old new labour straight out of uni into a pps role groomed for parliament and then parachuted into a safe seat types are dead wood.

Basically labour if it survives has no chance of winning until it's next generation of MP's are ready to lead.
If a viable leader was out there I would get rid of corbyn tomorrow.

Clear evidence that there isn't another John Smith out there that the majority of the electorate from the middle and centrist ground would vote for. The country, despite rather short political memories. still remember Bliar and Brown as being self-serving dissembling bastards, and anyone of that ilk would never get the votes - just yet!

 

[Chippy_boy]

LOL, funnily enough the Tories have now adopted Red Ed's austerity lite programme plus his proposals on infrastructure spending and regulating the energy market ( not forgetting Red Ed would have kept us in Europe , you'd have been happy with that mate?).
Anyway putting that to one side I deliberately wasn't suggesting any "solutions".
Just simply pointing out the Tory's appalling record on borrowing since 2010. Yes they inherited a difficult situation but they set targets on borrowing and have failed abysmally to meet them due to their own poor decisions and actions. Nothing to do with what Labour did in the sixties,seventies, nineties,noughties or whenever , nothing to do with Red Ed, nothing to do with Liam Byrne's note to the Treasury,nothing to do with the financial crash of 2008 and everything to do with their own failings to meet their own targets.

I think criticism without a suggestion as to how it should have been done better is empty and non-constructive criticism.

You are right the Tories inherited a difficult situation (bit of an understatement there), and yes they didn't get the deficit down as fast as they had hoped. But the criticism from most on the left was *against* the cuts, and if that advice was followed the deficit would not have been reduced at all, so we can discount that criticism as being nonsense. The fact is the Tories took the economy in a terrible state and whether they've achieved the deficit targets or not, they have managed to get the country growing, kept inflation very low, increased employment AND have reduced the deficit quite a lot.

This "failure" doesn't seem too bad actually, and the electorate in 2015 agreed enough to give the Tories a second term.

 

[Chippy_boy]

I like Chuka and he'd be very electable.

I don't like his policies much, but I agree he'd be very electable. I made this point on another thread, but it is imho sad but nevertheless true that what you look like and sound like - rather than just your policies - has some bearing on your popularity and therefore how electable you are. The evidence for this is quite stark really:

Neil Kinnock - pig ugly, buck teeth, strong Welsh accent (i.e. not readily identifying with a very predominantly English electorate) - Fail
John Smith - ditto. Replace the buck teeth with the boz eyes and the Welsh with Scottish - Fail
Tony Blair - no obvious deformities, some might say a bit dashing in his younger years, English sounding - 3 times PM
Gordon Brown - The Full House. Boz eyed, wobble chin, fat, scruffy, Scottish - EPIC FAIL.
Ed Milliband - Pig ugly, speech impediment - Fail.

These sorts of things should not matter. Only policies should matter, but the reality I think is different. How "charismatic" and "attractive" you are, is a significant factor and yes I think Chuka fits the bill of being very electable.

 

[bluemoonmatt]

I don't like his policies much, but I agree he'd be very electable. I made this point on another thread, but it is imho sad but nevertheless true that what you look like and sound like - rather than just your policies - has some bearing on your popularity and therefore how electable you are. The evidence for this is quite stark really:

Neil Kinnock - pig ugly, buck teeth, strong Welsh accent (i.e. not readily identifying with a very predominantly English electorate) - Fail
John Smith - ditto. Replace the buck teeth with the boz eyes and the Welsh with Scottish - Fail
Tony Blair - no obvious deformities, some might say a bit dashing in his younger years, English sounding - 3 times PM
Gordon Brown - The Full House. Boz eyed, wobble chin, fat, scruffy, Scottish - EPIC FAIL.
Ed Milliband - Pig ugly, speech impediment - Fail.

These sorts of things should not matter. Only policies should matter, but the reality I think is different. How "charismatic" and "attractive" you are, is a significant factor and yes I think Chuka fits the bill of being very electable.

No one can say with any surety but I believe John Smith would have won an election had he not died

 

[Chippy_boy]

No one can say with any surety but I believe John Smith would have won an election had he not died

He may have done to be fair. He had that one most important thing - charisma. He used to make people laugh out loud at PMQ's and that's a rare and very desirable quality.

 

[bluemoonmatt]

He may have done to be fair. He had that one most important thing - charisma. He used to make people laugh out loud at PMQ's and that's a rare and very desirable quality.

I think we'll agree though even with the aesthetically displeasing Theresa the appeaser if looks win votes jezza is onto another hiding, the scruffy rat gobbed prick

 

[blueparrot]

He may have done to be fair. He had that one most important thing - charisma. He used to make people laugh out loud at PMQ's and that's a rare and very desirable quality.

It was also the tail end of a long tory government and the Labour party had been modernising for a while there were probably a few people that could have won the 1997 election including Smith and Brown as well as Blair, but probably wouldnt have won another two elections.

 

[Chippy_boy]

I think we'll agree though even with the aesthetically displeasing Theresa the appeaser if looks win votes jezza is onto another hiding, the scruffy rat gobbed prick

Theresa is minging, I am sure we all agree. But on the plus side, she has no obvious deformities and she is English. Anyway, I am not saying looks and accent and stuff are the be-all and end-all, but it makes imho a few percentage points difference, which can sometimes be significant. Less relevant, when you are up to 18% behind in the polls and all hope is lost.

 

[cibaman]

Name the labour leader that could achieve such a swing in england in the foreseeable future? The only way labour will get in again is when the Scots have had a belly full of the SNP, and we've had a couple of decades of Tory rule as per 97. A different leader will make no difference to labour.

It could make 5 years difference. Its unlikely that a different leader would win the 2020 election but they might stop the rot, give them a chance in 2025. If Corbyn leads Labour into the 2020 election the damage will be so great that 2025 would be an impossibility.

Labour actually need an improved version of Kinnock. Someone who can bridge the gap between madness and sanity. Someone that both wings of the party can live with, temporarily. But hopefully ony lose one election before handing over to a genuine contender for PM.