Be Excellent To Each Other

Yeah, I'm very surprised a couple of old-school Tory grandees didn't take Leadsom quietly aside and tell her what's what.

Don't they usually start off with a shit stalking horse style candidate to shake all the higher calibre folks out of the woodwork?

I'm sure I remember something like that from A Level Politics. Although I mostly remember the lass called Stephanie who I absolutely fucking fancied the arse off.

The ballot's now closed though. And they've taken enough runs at Corbyn so far that you'd think at some point they'd want to mount an actual challenge.

Also I think you're thinking of boss fights.

Maybe that is exactly what happened.

Maybe they've just realised that no one will beat Corbyn once it goes out to the party membership so there's no point even trying? He's made it quite clear he won't resign and he won't let himself be bullied.

The only reason I can see for them forcing the issue like this is because they thought they could force a leadership election where Corbyn would have to be nominated to stand, and that he wouldn't be able to get the MPs. That doesn't appear to be the case.

The thing is that even if they could do that the hostility from the party membership would be off the scale, I wouldn't be surprised if it led to mass resignations to an extent that the party would damn near be left without a viable membership base, which means no volunteers for election campaigns and suchlike.

Which is a problem. The electorate won't get behind him. Chief Momentum guy has said that wining election is second to challenging the establishment. Corbyn is doing neither. It's been own goal after own goal.

Your election's in 4 years time though. The Momentum goal right now is presumably to get rid of as many Blairites as possible, realign party strategy, then at that point look for a leader that can get the electorate engaged.

I don't believe this is viable. I don't think ceding the centre to lurch to the left will do any good at all.

But the Tories are ceding the centre to lurch to the right.

Come on LIB DEMS! There's a massive gap needs filling!

Given that the Labour voters charged towards the far right UKIP party (or the SNP in Scotland), I dare say left/right doesn't particularly matter to them.

ToYST

Labour tried the centre. It got them power for a number of years, but is irrevocably tainted by the Iraq war, the financial crisis, and various other unpleasantnesses.

Labour can be to the left of where it was during the Blair era without going unelectably nuts like Corbyn. Politics is a spectrum, not a binary.

I'd argue that New Labour and what we could call Blairism is outdated and ineffective, but Corbyn's ideas are even older and less effective.

Anyway, I want Corbyn and McDonnell gone ASAP, and I don't care who does it or how it happens. McDonnell supports ending freedom of movement and single market access, FFS! Someone like that, no, just no.

Unfortunately, so do most Tories, and 52% of referendum voters

I don't think it is irrevocably tainted. They won in 2005...

ToYST

With a much smaller majority, while the Tories were still an absolute joke - even Corbyn would have had a good crack at winning in 2005. The signs were already there that New Labour was failing, the global financial crisis just sealed the deal with voters.

Then we should be offered an alternative, not capitulation. It's obvious to all but the terminally naive that Corbyn and his cultists are just as eurosceptic as UKIP.

Well that's complete bollocks. Corbyn's no fan of the EU, and I could believe that if it were his choice, we'd come out. But it's utter nonsense to suggest he's as eurosceptic as a party whose entire reason for existance is to leave the EU.

Also, saying you have issues with the EU and that it needs reform doesn't necessarily mean you think leaving it is the right choice either. It's not a binary of love/hate the EU.

I support reforming the EU, many people do. For Corbyn claiming that was just a smokescreen for his euroscepticism.

And you know that because he's told you or... do you just believe what you read in the newspapers?

I think your anger at the Brexit vote is really clouding your judgement here.

*Bzzt!*
Oh pur-lease, don't tar the Tories with the same vapid idiot-brush as Labour (and to a lesser extent, the Lib Dems).
Say what you like about the Tories, but they/we are very, very clear about what they/we stand for, ta. It's Labour who completely abandoned all that they believed in, during 1997-2010, and yet again even now (2016 under Corbyn), and it is thus they who now (rightly) face total meltdown and existential crisis.

The Liberals had their own grass roots collapse in reaction to propping up the Tories in government in 2010. I totally supported Nick Clegg and thought this was a brave, and the right decision - but then, I would say that, I'm a Tory.


The Tories' ideological and political soul remains intact, precisely because it is this very ideology that has been empirically shown to *work*, and be effective. In stark contrast to Labour's 1960s/70s dinosaur-extinct ideology that ended up with an IMF begging-bowl, or their 1997 inept-Tory ideology that ended it unmitigated catastrophe, both financial and literal. Draw any line on a graph between 1979 and 1997, and again between 2010 and the present, and it's an upward, improving gradient. Do the same for 1974-1979 or 1997-2010 and the opposite's true. That's really all you, me and the rest of us need to know; the rest is all just so much in-denial padding, waffle, posturing and nitpicking bollocks.

So you think that the Conservative party hasn't said things purely to win elections, and then gone on to not deliver on all those promises?

All the major parties main aim is to get elected as many politicians as possible, by any means possible (legal or otherwise it seems in some cases!), they don't always stick to those promises though.

In the nicest possible way I prefer not to debate with you, Malc. That is not what I said.

If the Tories had a united political vision and knew exactly what they stood for, we wouldn't have just had a catastrophic referendum with top Tory figures leading both sides.

And what did they stand for in the late 90s/early 00s when voters abandoned them? Did IDS and Howard not try to reinvent them in different ways during those times considering Blair had basically captured the middle ground?

Sigh.
You accused the Tories (like Labour) of not standing for anything other than to win power.
As a Tory party member, I know otherwise; political strength and self-belief runs incredibly strongly in the veins of the Party and membership.

This is not the same as saying a party cannot be split on an issue, or that there are not big disagreements. With Labour, it is far more fundamental - post-Blair they are rudderless, utterly disunited and without belief, and they don't know or have the first clue how they are ever going to deliver anything anymore. Plus, as noted in that piece I posted earlier, and as I have been saying since forever now (just substitute 'swivel eyed' for 'cranks' ), the loons have now taken over.

Labour is in terminal, irrevocable decline, whereas by stark contrast, the Tories have arguably healed. The Eurosceptics have won and there's no going back now.

That's fair enough, not sure why, any way I was just responding to this bit mainly:



Which you backed up here with



And just to be clear I wasn't accusing you of saying those things, just asking if that's what you meant, a clarification if you will, because it looked to me like you were saying that, and I wanted to be clear.

I think, Cavey, you're confusing the clarity of Tory party members with the disunity amongst the Labour MPs. You'd find a similar clarity (with disagreements, of course) amongst Labour party members. Though there are, what, now 3x more of them than there are Tory members, so there's bound to be a little more room for disagreement.

Both groups of MPs, though, hold diametrically-opposed views. One of Cameron's triumphs (though it led to him looking like a lying twat) was to push through moderate things (like same-sex marriage) against his party, while keeping the loons quiet by promising more right-wing things (like really attacking the BBC) and then quietly not doing them.

True, it hurt them but:
And Corbyn et al have since rejected the analysis as to why they lost the last election and what they need to do, preferring to forge their own path. I said this months ago, and the list of own goals when they should have been making tofu burgers out of the government. But only now are people beginning to listen.

The simple view of it is "Stuff we need to do to make it all a bit less shit" vs Corbyn's unachievable utopia which will only allow him to bitch impotently from the sidelines.

Grayling was May's campaign manager so I expect him to get a decent job in government. Useless tosser.

Ruth Davidson's speech! I only just read some extracts but it's pretty funny.

Even the Tories in Scotland are ok.

Labour governing council decides Corbyn will appear on the leadership ballot.

Many lols

Oh dear.

I don't think they had any choice.

This course of action will possibly split the party, but not allowing Corbyn on the ballot would have pretty much guaranteed it.

Sheesh. The constitution I wrote for a student club didn't have such a huge gaping hole in it. Although, with hindsight, I did probably over-engineer the document, just in case a small proportion of the membership of 15 were going to stage a coup.

Christ, is that real?

Not even a little bit.

Jeremy Corbyn isn't real?

McDonnell really needs to work out appropriate times for 'jokes'.

It's disgusting. Him and Corbyn. The lot of them. All they want is the power in the party. They don't want anything else

That plus settling old scores. There does seem a hefty dose of "ha, you blairite bastards sidelined us for years, see how you like it up you!" rather than "what can we do to win power to prevent the Tories from doing bad Tory things"

I get that Corbyn may have infinitesimally shifted the direction of a couple of discussions on policy by saying "ooh, that's a bit bad", but that's a fecking pressure group, not an opposition party.

I find them utterly appalling on every level. Pro-terrorist scumbags.

Fuck me.

So you're going to vote for a warmongering scumbag instead.