George Monbiot on Corbyn and the Labour Leadership Race

Really liked especially this bit from George Monbiot in the Guardian, and intended posting it with the title 'QOTD'.

To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.

But re-reading the piece again, there's too much that needs repeating.  So...

On one point I agree with his opponents: Jeremy Corbyn has little chance of winning the 2020 general election. But the same applies to the other three candidates. Either Labour must win back the seats it once held in Scotland (surely impossible without veering to the left) or it must beat the Conservatives by 12 points in England and Wales to form an overall majority. The impending boundary changes could mean that it has to win back 106 seats. If you think that is likely, I respectfully suggest that you are living in a dreamworld.

In fact, in this contest of improbabilities, Corbyn might stand the better chance. Only a disruptive political movement, that can ignite, mesmerise and mobilise, that can raise an army of volunteers – as the SNP did in Scotland – could smash the political concrete.

To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.

As the social philosopher Karl Polanyi pointed out towards the end of the second world war, when politics offers little choice and little prospect of solving their problems, people seek extreme solutions. Labour’s inability to provide a loud and proud alternative to Conservative policies explains why so much of its base switched to Ukip at the last election. Corbyn’s political clarity explains why the same people are flocking back to him.

...

Nothing was more politically inept than Labour’s attempt before the election to win back Ukip supporters by hardening its stance on immigration. Why vote for the echo when you can vote for the shout? What is attractive about a party prepared to abandon its core values for the prospect of electoral gain? What is inspiring about a party that grovels, offering itself as a political doormat for any powerful interest or passing fad to wipe its feet on?

In an openDemocracy article, Ian Sinclair compares Labour’s attempts to stop Corbyn with those by the Tories in 1974-75 to stop Margaret Thatcher. Divisive, hated by the press, seen by her own party as an extremist, she was widely dismissed as unelectable. The Tory establishment, convinced that the party could win only from the centre, did everything it could to stop her.

Across three decades New Labour strategists have overlooked a crucial reality: politicians reinforce the values they espouse. The harder you try to win by adopting your opponents’ values, the more you legitimise and promote them, making your task – and that of your successors – more difficult. Tony Blair won three elections, but in doing so he made future Labour victories less likely. By adopting conservative values, conservative framing and conservative language, he shifted the nation to the right, even when he pursued leftwing policies such as the minimum wage, tax credits and freedom of information. You can sustain policies without values for a while but then, like plants without soil, the movement wilts and dies.

...

Rebuilding a political movement means espousing what is desirable, then finding ways to make it feasible. The hopeless realists propose the opposite. They assemble a threadbare list of policies they consider feasible, then seek to persuade us that this package is desirable. If they retain core values, they’ve become so muddled by tacking and triangulation as to be almost indecipherable.

So great has the damage been to a party lost for 21 years in Blair’s Bermuda triangulation that it might take many years until it becomes electable again. That is a frightening prospect, but the longer Labour keeps repeating the same mistakes – reinforcing the values it should be contesting – the further to the right it will push the nation, and the more remote its chances of election will become. The task is to rebuild the party’s values, reclaim the democratic debate, pull the centre back towards the left and change – as Clement Attlee and Thatcher did in different ways – the soul of the nation.

Because Labour’s immediate prospects are so remote, regardless of who wins this contest, the successful candidate is likely to be a caretaker, a curator of the future. His or her task must be to breathe life back into politics, to recharge democracy with choice, to ignite the hope that will make Labour electable again. Only one candidate proposes to do that.*

One might also note that by trying to take the more centre-right (at best) ground formerly held by the Tories, that Tony Blair helped force the 'Conservative' Party further to the right as well, such that, as has already happened with the Republican party in the US, it is become increasingly a radical party, an extremist entity.  In fact, I'd suggest that Tony Blair had almost as much to do with the Tories' disgusting transformation as Keith Joseph.  And that arseholes like Liz Kendall & her supporter David Miliband also deserve much of the blame in their complicity for what England has now become.

Was watching part of an LBC interview with Liz Kendall earlier, till I got to the point that I wanted to vomit.  She said something about not being able to bear seeing 'fifteen years in total of a Tory government.'  Strange.  If we're talking about right-wing rule generally**, and New Labour are arguably to the right of what the 'Conservatives' once represented even in my lifetime, then I'd say the number would be more like forty-six.***


* As a non-partisan, I find it interesting that Monbiot seems to be only talking about Labour regaining power in the context of an outright victory, rather than considering the possibilities of a broader progressive coalition, but then this is an article in the context of the party's leadership-election after all.

** And frankly, who gives a shit more about the names of the parties or their members than actual policy ?

*** ie May 1979 to May 2025

Religious Certitudes

Rowson is frankly a fuckin' god in terms of his visual skills...but he can't be everywhere at once.  And with Bell struggling with that obsession with a certain condom, there may be room for a new number two...somewhere

Just Do It Already

Go right ahead, then:

A Tale of Two Tours

Here's the Indy's latest daily cartoon online:

And the day before:

I don't know if this was a editorial choice or a coincidence, but it is somewhat unfortunate, and doesn't exactly put the more recent publication in a great light.  Both 'toons are themed almost identically, even to the degree of Corbyn turning to his left.  But the earlier work spares us the labels for 'Left' and 'Right', spares us the actual labelling of the bicycle as 'Labour Party', and spares us the cliché of riding off a cliff.  Instead we get the socks up over the trousers & the old-fashioned bike with the basket, versus the Blairites in their spandex.  And yes, we also get a labelled Das Kapital, not that that really hurts the piece overall.  And I'm assuming that's Prescott rooting Jezza on besides an apoplectic Blair.

To juxtapose two such similarly themed, but unequally executed works side-by-side is just cruel really.  Oh right, I just did that myself, didn't I ?  Whoops.

Tone' the Tempter Needs More Souls

Did Tony Blair actually say these words (my reading of the video) ?

I've known Jeremy going back many over many, many years.  I think we both came into Parliament at the same time together.  And it's not about...And it's not about an individual, it's about a platform, that, in the end, wouldn't work for the country.  And I want to stress that.

It's not that it wouldn't win power.  I personally think it's unlikely that we would win power.  But, even if you did, it wouldn't be right.  Because it wouldn't take the country forward, it would take it backwards.  So, that's why it's not the right thing to do.  It's not the right thing to do, because, you know... this is why, when people say, y'know, well my heart says I should really be with that politics...well, get a transplant, because that's just done.

Because that sure as fuck sounds to me like an argument to vote Tory.  Oh, and one thing for all politicians to remember, whether they identify as 'progressive' or not, is that 'forward' movement need have no correlation with actual betterment of one's circumstances whatsoever.  Moving 'forward' is just carrying on in your existing established direction, even if you just accidentally stepped off a cliff.  Or, for that matter, on a landmine.

And as for this question of whether the other contenders for the leadership would serve in the shadow cabinet under Corbyn, well, for myself, not that you probably care, I'd say that right here Liz Kendall just invalidated her case for the leadership bid altogether.  Cooper may have equivocated, but I don't entirely blame her, and Burnham comes across, to me, as the only one perhaps* genuinely concerned with something more than his own political career.

Jeremy and I so fundamentally disagree, with Jeremy's approach, that...And I think it would be disastrous for the party, it would be disastrous for the country, we would be out of power for a generation.  I don't want to be a party of protest.  And I wouldn't be able to stop myself from making that case.

Do you even think about how this sounds, when you say these words as a career politician ?...  I personally do care what happens to the UK, but I'm not that greatly invested in Labour, and I don't give a shit about Liz Kendall, or any of these assholes' personal political careers.

There is, I suppose, an argument to be made, that had New Labour not been in power when it was, that the Tories would have done even more damage even earlier, but there's also the counter-argument to that, that we might be now seeing the reaction against 'Conservative' radicalism, were there an actual mainstream opposition for voters to support, and had Tony Blair not completely sold out generations of non-right-wing-extremists.

One other thing, I don't at all understand is the acquiescence with the stupid Fixed-term Parliaments Act, let alone the idea that the party is somehow married to a particular leader for five years.  Deciding your leadership in the 2015 elections in 2010 and your leadership for the 2020 elections in 2015 is just frankly insane.  By rights, Ed should still be Labour's leader, and they wouldn't have to be worrying about who would take them into the next elections till 2018 at the earliest, were it not for the idiocy of fixed-term parliaments.  At what point did the choice for leadership become some sort of suicide-pact ?


* The eyebrows bewitched me, sorry.

And So Labour Pushes Itself Ever Deeper into Irrelevance

Welfare vote will 'haunt' Labour says SNP

The SNP has said Scottish Labour will pay a heavy price for not voting in greater numbers against planned welfare cuts by the UK government.

The prediction comes after plans to cut £12bn pounds from the welfare budget passed their first hurdle in the Commons on Monday night.

Forty-eight Labour's 232 MPs voted against the package.

SNP MP Hannah Bardell said Labour's position was a ''shambles'' which would "haunt" them at the Holyrood election.

The Commons backed the Welfare Reform and Work Bill by 308 to 124 votes.

The SNP voted firmly against the UK government's controversial proposals in the Welfare Reform Bill.

There were 48 Labour rebels but most, including Scotland's sole Labour MP Ian Murray, abstained on the orders of acting leader Harriet Harman.

Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham said his party made "a mess" of its approach and was "crying out for leadership".

He said he had agreed to abstain on the key vote because he was "not prepared to split the party".

...

"Labour have completely abandoned any pretence of being a party of social justice and progress - just as they did when they so shamefully voted to support George Osborne's £30bn more austerity cuts."

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she was "sadly not" surprised by the party's decision to abstain.

The SNP leader added: "Labour seem to have lost any sense of purpose or any sense of direction."

"It really does beg a fundamental question, if Labour is not about opposing a Tory government that is waging an ideological assault not on skivers who don't want to work, but on people who are working hard on low incomes, if Labour is not about opposing that, what is Labour for?

"Last night just proves that Labour has lost any sense of purpose and it will be the SNP who increasingly will form the real opposition in the House of Commons."

The SNP really aren't doing themselves any favours in terms of public support or sympathy south of the border, when they partake in childish stunts like this, but they do have something of a point about being the 'real opposition' when the Labour party continually stakes its flag just slightly to the left of wherever the Tories are at any given point in time, and when they keep declining opportunities to actually oppose the Conservatives, begging time and again, what the hell are they for ?  There are other actual leftist parties in the UK, and the Lib Dems can claim to be the party of civil liberties, but Labour ?

Short of a personality to dominate the party, someone with the magician-like qualities to successfully convince the public that they are a centre-left party whilst pushing time-and-again centre-right (at best) policies, there is no future in 'New Labour.'  'New Labour' was Tony Blair, and worked solely because of Tony Blair.  There may or may not be much of a future in a principled 'Old Labour', but 'New Labour' is done, and it is the likes of Harman, Cooper, and Kendall that are clinging to the past, not the new intake of MP's who voted their conscience.

Which leaves us with 'friend of Hamas' Corbyn (who did vote against) and Brave Sir Andy, who really really wanted to oppose the Conservatives, but didn't want 'to split the party and make the job of opposition even harder' and so boldly abstained from voting Aye or No.

He added: "It was a mess, wasn't it? The run-up to this vote was a bit of a mess. It is quite clear that this is a party now that is crying out for leadership and that is what I have shown in recent days."

Um, yes it was.  Yes it does.  And no, you haven't.  Actually, I suspect that this could have been a crucial breakout moment for Burnham had he taken the lead on strongly opposing the Conservatives' plans.  As is, voters in the leadership-contest for Labour, have their Blairite candidates already, have their Old Labour candidate, and then have poor Andy Burnham, who like the party as a whole, stands for what exactly ?, and, whose bold efforts to not split the party will merely undermine his own appeal, whilst doing nothing to prevent the split of the party.

I find myself wondering, what if there were no Labour party ?  What if it were left to the Liberals and the likes of the SNP and the Greens to define the opposition to the Tories, and to provide alternative votes at the ballot-box ?  Would the UK be any worse off if Labour simply ceased to exist ?  But then the hypotheticals of how we might have come to a world without Labour lead me to 'A Wonderful Life'*-style musings about what the world might look like had it never had a Tony Blair.  And so tempting as that line of thought is, I'm not sure I want to go there at the moment.

* à la Fry & Laurie obviously.

Because the Finances of Government(s) are totes like a Kitchen Table Budget

I just...No, not even gonna.  I don't trust myself.  No.  Are you still speaking, Liz ?