A big topic for the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn

Hasn't everybody been quite clear on what strategy they want?

We want Corbyn and Labour to come out in full support of remain. To campaign to stay in the EU via a second referendum. It's still possible. Many, many more Labour voters voted Remain than Leave, so why are we more worried about the Leave ones?

What it all boils down to is that the party is being lead by people who want something vastly different from their own MPs, members and voter base. It's arrogant, it's horribly short sighted, and it has to align immediately, otherwise they will suffer significant losses in the GE and potentially be permanently burned by the refusal to at least TRY to reverse Brexit. And worse, we will be stuck with Boris and crash out of Europe in horrible economic circumstances.

The only strategy anyone wants is Labour to do the right fucking thing and campaign to stay. That's it. It's so simple.

I’m worried about the Leave voters because I don’t want Labour to be wiped out in the North and the Midlands.

Nigel Farage is eyeing these places up with a very effective message – people vs politicians. It worked in 2016 and it’ll probably work again.

Moving to a full Remain position would be suicidal here. Losing these seats won’t just affect Corbyn’s chances, it’ll make it harder for the next man too. The voters won’t come back, the Lib Dems will.

I’m trying to argue my own position and defend Jeremy Corbyn’s position at the same time, so I’ll stop after this because it’s tiring and feels pointless, but the difference between the leadership and the membership isn’t vast. Corbyn recognises that the people have to decide this.
 
If anybody, anywhere, still believes that Labour are going to both win a general election AND get a Brexit deal through, I have some lovely magic beans to sell.
 
The obvious route is to promise a referendum and fully endorse remain. Nobody believes for one second that Jeremy Corbyn will get a better Brexit deal than what the Tories have. (Under May, not Johnson, obviously). It's just an exasperating waste of time and it strikes me that the idea that we need to pay lip service to the 'four million Labour leavers' to avoid scaring them into Nigel Farage's arms is just patronising and totally transparent.

A Labour government AND Brexit just ain't gonna happen. So those people need to decide what matters more to them, and the party needs to give them an actual argument to change their minds, not a shrug and more kicking of the can down the road.
 
If they fully endorsed Remain the tories and Farage would whip up such a shit storm in the right wing shit rags. It would be suicidal.
 
As opposed to now, when the right wing shit rags are totes in love with Labour and Corbyn?

My point is, nobody really believes voting for Labour = Brexit. It's ludicrous. And pretending otherwise makes them just look disingenuous at best, and hopelessly confused at worst.
 
So whats the solution? If only they were proposing some radical social policies we could focus on instead...
 
So whats the solution? If only they were proposing some radical social policies we could focus on instead...
Easy to propose radical social policies when you don't have a cat in hell's chance of getting elected.
 
I don't think it's right to campaign to remain when the country voted to leave, but giving the public a binary choice between a deal and remaining at least protects us from the disaster capitalists who want us to leave without a deal, and if the public vote to remain, at least there's democratic legitimacy to the decision.

I voted remain, I want the UK to remain in the EU, but I think just pretending the whole thing never happened risks enabling the rise of the extreme right.
 
Bottom line is Labour are the only party offering an actual democratic solution, but because it doesnt fit the narrative of extreme polarised opinion its being dismissed.
 
Offering a referendum is a democratic solution. I’m not suggesting they take the Lib Dem route of going full withdraw article 50.

Owning that the situation has evolved since 2016 and no form of leave will benefit any but the few he loves to pit himself against would be a great way to show some actual leadership.
 
Meanwhile Boris is taking the fucking piss but lets all focus on Corbyn because we arent getting our own way.
 
Yes, and by pretending he can somehow magically negotiate a deal that’s in any material way better than Theresa May’s, Corbyn is effectively lying to them.

But of course he could. The Labour Party never had any of the red lines that May claimed she had, which ultimately bound the kind of deal she could strike.
 
But of course he could. The Labour Party never had any of the red lines that May claimed she had, which ultimately bound the kind of deal she could strike.

Do we know where they stand on freedom of movement now?
Last thing i read was it was open for negotiation...
 
Meanwhile Boris is taking the fucking piss but lets all focus on Corbyn because we arent getting our own way.
This is such a crap argument. We can never critique Corbyn when Boris is in power! Being a lesser evil is not IMMUNITY.
 
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Meanwhile Boris is taking the fucking piss but lets all focus on Corbyn because we arent getting our own way.

Yeah, if we can agree on nothing else can we at least retire this ridiculous non—argument? He’s the leader of the opposition, not a fucking baby.

Boris undergoes plenty of scrutiny. Sadly, ‘Tory MP is a lying, self-serving shitbag’ isn’t exactly groundbreaking news.

I’m only so critical of Corbyn because I actually care about Labour succeeding.
 
In what world is a man who wants to improve the NHS, care for the elderly, end austerity etc evil? Get a fucking grip.
 
Who says he’s evil? I just think he’s arrogant and incompetent.

You disagree, that’s fine. But if you think people like me are the problem because I criticise him, then I’m afraid you’ve fully bought into the personality cult that makes him so problematic. Why the fuck should he be protected from criticism when he’s

A) a senior politician

and

B) empirically failing at his job?
 
Because the Tories are so blatantly evil, the only option the Tory press have is to try and make it look as if Corbyn is too, partly in pursuance of the "they're all the same really so better the devil you know, eh?" trope and partly because of the money a Labour government might cost them. The result is a media braying about "balance" when what they actually mean is "stop pointing out how utterly self-serving and venal the government are, please - look! Ed Milliband can't even eat a bacon sandwich! Corbyn tried to stop/reduce terrorism in a way that was fine when John Major did it! DIANE ABBOTT HAD AN ALCOHOLIC DRINK!!!"

It's fuck awful.
 
I think if he'd handled the antisemitism shit better I'd be more willing to listen. But they've lost me at this point. There is a pretty much 0% chance I'll vote for them under Corbyn.

You can offer all the nuanced arguments on earth (please don't) but he's just not for me.
 
Jark did, 3 posts up.

I'm bored of this cyclical argument. I don't think he's immune from criticism at all and I haven't bought into any 'cult' - but I'm once again going to post this and leave it - maybe it's not me thats being brainwashed?

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/o...the-most-smeared-politician-in-history/18/07/
I do think there's a sense of underlying evil to anyone who uses his power brokers in the unions to attempt to stamp out democracy by having the party deputy removed in an underhand plot because his views represents those of the party voter base and not the party leadership, yes.
 
I'm watching his speech right now and his policies are very appealing. However they're still a fucking mess.
 
Corbyn talks a lot, but says very little.

Sure, the press have definitely got it in for him. But he definitely contributes to that perception of him as muddling.

I gather he’s quite good at rallies, etc. Which is fine, but not much good to Labour if he can’t translate that into the mainstream media.
 
There are a lot of appealing policies but where is the money going to come from? Whats to stop the top 5% emigrating? Higher spending is good but there needs to be much more detail as it all comes across as pie in the sky.
 
There are a lot of appealing policies but where is the money going to come from? Whats to stop the top 5% emigrating? Higher spending is good but there needs to be much more detail as it all comes across as pie in the sky.
Much like the Tories recent spending plans.
 
Much like the Tories recent spending plans.

Labour spending is on another level though. I doubt we could afford a tenth of what is being promised without rapidly increasing borrowing costs.
 
Whats to stop the top 5% emigrating?

The fact they all supported the end of freedom of movement?

That's a really shit argument these days anyway; we've all seen behind the tax-dodging curtain now. "I'll emigrate" says rich newspaper owner. "Cool" says the UK, "you pay fuck all tax anyway, fuck off and take your shitrag with you".
 
I'm not wholly opposed to Labour's brexit approach and in some ways I think it seems quite sensible and coherent. I certainly think it would seem a bit counter-intuitive to go into a renegotiation with the EU saying that whatever deal was reached would be campaigned against and given that revoke (much as I'd love such an outcome) would also be politically problematic I think their options are limited. The alternative, so far as I can see, would be to pit May's deal against remain in a referendum. This would have the advantage of avoiding further delays for renegotiation and would also allow Labour to take an unambiguously remain stance, but it might also look like a bit of a stitch-up given the unpopularity of her deal. I think the biggest issue they're going to have with the approach as it currently stands is how sellable a proposition it is - it's something I can live with but everyone's so exasperated with/polarised by Brexit that the prospect of further wrangling and another vote may struggle to look attractive when up against simpler proposals.

In summary, FUCK KNOWS what I think really, but I'm not convinced there are any easy choices for Labour here.
 
Yeah, considering she's one of their most vocal antisemitism critics it's a fucking PR nightmare. And it's another sign that Labour are heading down a really dangerous road in how they operate internally. Dissenting voices have to be heard. Especially when what they're saying is fucking right.
 
It doesn’t make sense to me to keep an MP in the party who has personally smeared Corbyn as a bigot (despite being quite credibly accused of “pandering to racists” herself), launched the no-confidence motion in 2016, and said last week that she wouldn’t stop until Corbyn was no longer leader. Hodge has also been facing rumours of deselection by her CLP for more than a decade.

Compassion does not equal weakness. And there’s really no excuse not to have a younger, left-leaning MP in a London constituency with a safe majority, regardless of “optics” or things being “not a good look”. In this news cycle, her deselection will only matter to the people who really want it to matter.
 

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