A much weakened Parliamentary Labour Party, yes. The problem for the Parliamentary Labour Party is.. the non-parliamentary Labour Party! Not the one personality whom they voted for as their representative. The party proper is principled (whatever you think of their principles) and Socialist, while the PLP is neither. One of them has to give, and the Labour membership, who’s numbers have doubled since Corbyn, are a pretty immovable object.
Clearing out the parasitic rubbish wetting themselves over policies that aren’t aligned with the Government is the best thing that could happen, regardless of political colour, if one supports democracy. Even if it means a split.
Tony, you didn’t get my point. It is not about making a mark on the world. Have we all lost the plot here? Why on earth do we need another bloody General?
MP’s get voted for by the public. Corbyn doesn’t chose them. MP’s don’t like it when they are then expected to stand for something other than bland acceptability.. understandably, for they fear losing their seats. Fine, let them defect to the Tories, or if the have the b*lls re-stand as independents. It remains democratic. We will get a true picture of how the nation feels about anything other than Conservative thinking, and yes it will show the (now genuine) Labour party to be a minority group. But it will be the alternative voice – as will all the new independents who will be free to stand for what they now want to stand for.
Saying ‘he has little support from MPs therefore he isn’t needed’ is dubious logic when the majority of MPs are just trying to keep their bit of power, not change anything for their own version of ‘better’ as they might be in a functioning democracy.
It might be just as valid to argue that because the majority inside the Westminster ‘bubble’ don’t want him, British democracy needs him.
No, he will never personally lead a triumphant army. He knows it, he is not Wolfie Smith. But I guess it’s a different way of thinking to suggest that that’s not what proper long-term democratic process is about.
Is there any left-wing press apart from the Grunaida?
It will only work if the likes of Corbyn are allowed to remain an opposition voice. The PLP are proving quite immensely stupid – they have lost the race to the centre. The Conservative party are already there (to a degree the centre moved to meet them), no-one is going to vote for second-rate and inexperienced imitations of them. But still they clamour for some of that popular mediocracy, only ever achieving less popular mediocracy.
Even if a genuine alternative view is only popular with 10% of the electorate right now, it has a place as the alternative voice. This is what I have always been getting at in other threads. While it exists democracy is working regardless of the public’s vote on the matter.
Think Ukip.. where would leavers be now without it?
Agreed Bruce, our new Prime Minister represents the only logical evolved outcome of a drive towards pragmatic Centrism among career politicians – essentially a one-party state. Is it a good thing? No idea. It’s going to be interesting.
They could just rename themselves ‘the Government Party’ and just hold referendums on how separate we want to be from European democracies every now and then. Then we can all stop thinking and worrying our little heads about “Politics and Stuff” and concentrate on the telly.
I am sure Mrs May has been waiting eagerly for your correspondence, John.
No, I absolutely agree it isn’t.
Absolutely. When it comes to education, you can lead the horses to water.. etc.
The fact is universal democracy is what our forefathers fought for. A binary-choice referendum in the age of YouTube highlights the true nature of democracy, not some newly-developing flaw. There were always the ill-educated.
Whatever the morality of the guy filming and posting this, it serves a purpose here when taken as part of the wider Brexit conversation. It reminds us all that this lady had a referendum vote, as do all shades of ignorance and misunderstanding in between her and Laura Kuenssberg – and so those who are moved to debate the issues as we see them should never take such a close democratic result as evidence of the rightness or wrongness of their own specific points. The person in front of you at the polling station might have been voting for exit from the Eurovision song contest, or to keep pizza legal.
There’s a flaw there, You have just essentially said it’s not a left-right thing (and I agree). So the ‘unthinking left’ as you call students (spot the oxymoron) who protest have little or no bearing on this, surely?
Cards on the table, I was a student (a long time ago when you had to work academically to become and remain one) and I had some nasty arguments with the ‘unthinking left’ over them spending my (compulsory) union subs on coaches to London to protest about something, without any ballot. So I know who you mean. I still find those people more palatable than racists, on balance. Not that they would have come down unequivocally as remainers anyway, as we have established.
I get a different message from the remainers I talk to, which is that all rational debate aside the vote was swung by a small element of the ignorant and racist. To be clear, not that voting leave was ignorant and racist at all. Some of the ignorant and racist believed it was a vote for them but that ain’t the same thing at all! Just what I am picking up on this side of the border.
The ‘new parties’ thing was interesting. Labour is a busted flush because it used to represent both the progressively-inclined and the working class at the same time. Now through an insidious process they have ceased to represent either. Quite a trick.
All together now “…tomorrow belongs to meee”
Well, her, anyway. I am looking forward to my Good British Eggs, when we have exited.
How to insult a progressive.. dunno.. confuse them with a regressive?
Whatever, that regressive chap does seem to have issues. He’s getting steadily purpler, and there’s a little vein starting to pulse in his forehead. “Grr! I hate progressives! Them and their book-learnin! What’s wrong with good old-fashioned bigotry? It makes me so angry I need to make a you-tube video…”
Stu, I don’t disagree with keeping the uncivilised mobs out – I hope you don’t mind me ‘making excuses’ by saying they can’t help it, they know no different as that’s the ‘culture’ (for want of a better word) they come from, etc – but still, they have no place in our country, our society.
But this is not the same as branding all foreigners, all Muslims, or all people with brown skin as ‘criminals’ or even lesser human beings than you or I. I know that is not where you are coming from – but it does seem to be behind some of the stuff you’re posting?
Thanks to Gove’s hated ‘experts’, the UK is not in the Eurozone. For a while there it looked like we had the best of both worlds.
Don’t listen to Brian Cox, he’s an intellectual, and we all know how bad they are for the Reich.. I mean Britain. Burn those books! We’ve had enough of experts!