The Disappointing Jeremy Corbyn - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14911283
I don't really care about domestic politics in the UK. That is none of my problems. But I do care about the UK's threat to peace and stability in Europe.

Now that a Labour victory has become a real possibility, I want to know whether Jeremy Corbyn will continue neocon policies in the footsteps of the British empire like previous Labour leaders, or will he make a difference?

It's still 319 days until Brexit and I'm counting every one of them, hoping that the Brits aren't going to have a change of heart. Their potential for causing conflict in Europe will be much reduced once they are gone.

The Disappointing Jeremy Corbyn

We all know what a disappointment Theresa May has turned out to have been. Her purported energy price cap has been scarcely worth mentioning, while there is no sign of workers’ and consumers’ representation in corporate governance, or of shareholders’ control over executive pay, or of restrictions on pay differentials within companies, or of an investment-based Industrial Strategy and infrastructure programme, or of greatly increased housebuilding, or of action against tax avoidance, or of a ban on public contracts for tax-avoiding companies, or of banning or greatly restricting foreign takeovers, or of a ban on unpaid internships, and of an inquiry into Orgreave. Instead, we have had the bombing of Syria in the Saudi-backed jihadi interest. It is immaterial whether or not that had parliamentary approval. The wars in Iraq and Libya both had parliamentary approval, but so what?

And the emphasis on that technicality, instead of on the wrongness of the bombing itself, points to the fact that, as a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn who is not a member of any political party, he, too, has given me some cause for disappointment. He has overlooked his supporters by appointing his enemies to frontbench and other positions. He permitted a free vote on Syria. He whipped an abstention on Trident. He has never brought the arming of the Saudi war in Yemen back to the floor of the House of Commons for another vote. He has failed to make the trip to Iran that would certainly secure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, thereby making it highly unlikely that Abbas Edelat would have been arrested, either.

Corbyn’s housing and transport policies go nowhere near far enough. He supports the Government’s indulgence of the ludicrous theory of gender self-identification. He sides with neoliberal capitalism on the issues of drugs and prostitution. He has hinted at support for the Customs Union, which, in a crowded field, has a reasonable claim to be the worst of all the many bad things about the EU. He has accepted some of the Government’s baseless and collapsed claims about Salisbury and Douma. He has acted against the social and ethnic cleansing of Labour Haringey, but not to secure justice for the 472 Teaching Assistants in Labour Durham.

Corbyn has met the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council without having waited for the local election results in London to establish whether or not they spoke for anyone very much at all. He has failed to prevent the Labour Party from suspending or expelling distinguished Jewish activists for purported anti-Semitism. And now, under Corbyn’s Leadership, Labour has expelled Marc Wadsworth, the man who introduced Doreen and Neville Lawrence to Nelson Mandela. It has done so on the say-so of one Ruth Smeeth, who is notable for nothing apart from having made an allegation of anti-Semitism against Wadsworth, an allegation that she has since withdrawn. Yet she and some 50 other white MPs marched through the streets to demand his expulsion, in a scene reminiscent of a lynching. They all remain members of the Labour Party, as does Tony Blair of Iraq infamy, yet Wadsworth is expelled for having “brought the party into disrepute”. If Labour has not done all that well after all in the London local elections, then this will have been the reason why. Whether or not those MPs know who Wadsworth is, or why he matters, an awful lot of otherwise Labour-inclined London voters do.

Like many people, I yearn for Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister. But we must reserve the right to pursue that electoral objective outside the Labour Party.
#14911287
Atlantis wrote:Now that a Labour victory has become a real possibility, I want to know whether Jeremy Corbyn will continue neocon policies in the footsteps of the British empire like previous Labour leaders, or will he make a difference?


I doubt he'll live up to expectations, but he'll certainly be better than the alternatives.
#14911292
Sivad wrote:I doubt he'll live up to expectations, but he'll certainly be better than the alternatives.


I don't believe he is going to take the UK out off Nato and he will probably make you pay for modernizing the Tridents. But will he continue to fund Islamist extremists to topple Assad? Will he continue to use British military assets for supporting the illegal wars in Syria and Yemen? Will he continue to push British arms on Saudi Arabia? Will he continue to suppress UN investigations of Saudi human rights violations in Yemen? Will he continue to protect tax havens in the British territories ...?
#14911296
A lot of that will depend on the level of popular support he has and what his priorities are. Smart politicians don't squander political capital on unpopular policy initiatives.
#14911302
Atlantis wrote:I don't believe he is going to take the UK out off Nato and he will probably make you pay for modernizing the Tridents. But will he continue to fund Islamist extremists to topple Assad? Will he continue to use British military assets for supporting the illegal wars in Syria and Yemen? Will he continue to push British arms on Saudi Arabia? Will he continue to suppress UN investigations of Saudi human rights violations in Yemen? Will he continue to protect tax havens in the British territories ...?

He's going to remain in NATO and keep the Trident program because they're supposed to be self-defensive, but the rest will go. His premiership will be like civil war if he gets elected, by the way.
#14911306
Beren wrote:He's going to remain in NATO and keep the Trident program because they're supposed to be self-defensive, but the rest will go. His premiership will be like civil war if he gets elected, by the way.

I'm looking forward to it. :)
#14911307
Beren wrote:He's going to remain in NATO and keep the Trident program because they're supposed to be self-defensive, but the rest will go. His premiership will be like civil war if he gets elected, by the way.


The deep state would never let him into Downing Street if there were any risk of him actually leaving Nato or scrapping the Tridents. They probably wouldn't stage a military coup, but they would stage a provocation to destroy him in one way or another. That Jewish attack on him was a deliberate provocation to start destroying him.

But I'm not so sure that he would be able to put a halt to the secret machination of the British deep state. These people change from the private to the public sector, and vice versa, while remaining true to their agenda. And the intelligence community in the UK has grown so big and powerful that it is a state within the state outside of government control.
#14911323
I'm well up for The Wars of the Three Kingdoms 2: This Time It's Personal if Corbyn wins. It'll save us all from the mind-numbing tedium of the Brexit negotiations.
#14911331
Going by today’s results, he is unlikely to win. There is no nationwide movement towards leftist radicalism.

Any moderate labour leader would be owning the torries right now. He is too radical and too incompetent to unite the country. Something that is needed because it is too polarised to get anything done.

So, even if he does win it will be a tiny minority which couldn’t much through his radical ideas, therefore ending up something similar to hollande in France. Everyone will hate him and his aloof, irritable and righteous manner will start to grate.

As per usual, the radicals spend more time insulting the other side then trying to persuade. There will be little shift and so no major change in foreign policy either.

He can of course choose not to bomb anyone during his term which will be an improvement of sorts.
#14911396
layman wrote:Going by today’s results, he is unlikely to win.


:eh:


Freedom No More
As I write, with over 75% of all yesterday’s English local election results in, Labour has a net gain of 55 councillors compared to the high water mark of the 2014 result in these wards, while the Tories have a net gain of one seat against a 2014 result which was regarded at the time as disastrous for them, and led the Daily Telegraph to editoralise “David Cameron Must Now Assuage the Voters’ Rage”.

Yet both the BBC and Sky News, have all night and this morning, treated these results, in which the Labour Party has increased by 3% an already record number of councillors in this election cycle, as a disaster. What is more, they have used that false analysis to plug again and again the “anti-Semitism in the Labour Party” witch-hunt. It was of course the continuous exacerbation of this mostly false accusation by Blairite MP’s which – deliberately on their part – stopped the Labour Party doing still better. The Blairites are all over the airwaves plugging this meme again today.

What is more this Labour result has been achieved despite the complete collapse of the UKIP vote, which collapse had been expected to boost the Tory Party. In fact the net loss of over 100 UKIP seats has not resulted in overall net gains for the Tory Party, even though those ex-UKIP voters demonstrably did mostly split to Tory. The very substantial UKIP voter reinforcements simply saved the Tories from doing still worse. The Liberal Democrats are showing some signs of life.

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and the tendentious media misrepresentation of the election results reminds me why I could not get excited about it. A media with the extremely concentrated ownership we see in the UK can never be free, and certainly does not represent a wide spread of political opinions. Even the views of the official Leader of the Opposition are almost entirely deemed to be outside the Overton window. In Scotland the Scottish government is subject to unreasoning mediaattack, day in and day out, which contrasts strikingly with the treatment of Westminster ministers and issues.

There is a seriously worrying example from Leeds of the decline of free speech, where disgracefully a meeting discussing the bias of the corporate and state media has now been banned by Leeds City Council because of its content. We are not allowed even to get together to discuss media bias. Retired Ambassador Peter Ford, Professors Piers Robinson and Tim Hayward, Vanessa Beeley and Robert Stuart were to address the meeting at Leeds City Museum entitled “Media on Trial”. I cannot sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it is right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers, because it is questioning the government and establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead.

British society truly has changed fundamentally if a former British Ambassador to Syria is banned from speaking in public premises on his area of expertise. What is still worse is the tone of this sneering report from Huffington Post, now firmly a part of corporate media, in which Chris York libels the speakers as “Assad supporters”, interviews none of the speakers and nobody to make the argument for free speech, but does manage to interview the “founder” of the jihadist “White Helmets.” In terms of banning dissent while simultaneously ramping up the official narrative, York has won himself top establishment brownie points. The man – and I use the term loosely – is unfit for polite company.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/37463/
#14911503
It's been a year since the general election. Unsurprisingly, the local elections demonstrate that nothing much has changed since then: Labour has made a few gains, the Tories a few losses, UKIP has been wiped out (why does anyone need them now the Tory government acts far more like UKIP than UKIP themselves?), and the Lib Dems pretty much remain irrelevant.

Since the Tories will cling to power until the bitter end, we still have another four years to see how or if the situation changes. Time probably favours Corbyn: his absolutely solid backing in the party's grass roots means he can see off any leadership challenge, allowing Momentum and other Corbyn allies to slowly deselect the most truculent Blairites. The Tories, on the other hand, will have to endure ever-more public splits in the Cabinet and party over Brexit policy while Theresa May, an extraordinarily weak and incapable leader, soldiers desperately on in a grim bid for political survival. And, once Brexit goes through in the next four years, the Tories will have the unenviable job of explaining why very few of the promises about Brexit will come to fruition.
#14911590
I hope he wins. He won't attempt to carry out his more looney leftie plans and I agree with whichever member posted that he's better than any of the alternatives.

I think he'll be pretty good, actually.
#14911640
Momentum will deal with the Tories and the Bliarites, we will leave NATO and enter a new alliance with Cuba, Belarus, Venezuela, Vietnam and North Korea, all homes and businesses will be nationalised. It will be glorious.
#14911653
Decky wrote:Momentum will deal with the Tories and the Bliarites, we will leave NATO and enter a new alliance with Cuba, Belarus, Venezuela, Vietnam and North Korea, all homes and businesses will be nationalised. It will be glorious.


What about the rapists? How you will deal them, giving 80% of that community vote Labour?

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Labour policy will probably be more White Guilt

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