:labour: New Old Labour in trouble

Hasn’t this always been the case.

Unis have been a rich hunting ground for labour for as long as I can remember. Then they get into the real world and their attitudes change as the grow older and gain experience

I think what’s changed, both with the Leave position in the EU referendum and the Labour Party, is the expansion of the franchise. On June 23rd 2016, there were thousands of people at polling stations asking how it was you actually voted.

The same thing has happened in Labour. I joined for the first time in 2012, eventually doing the offs because they wanted to run a general election campaign without offering anything concrete on an EU referendum. The party then, in Wavertree Liverpool, was a mixed of wide-eyed Blair zealots and people that had their political views trampled on so many times they’d stopped caring. They knew how the party machinery worked. They knew they couldn’t change it.

The difference in the 2017 general election couldn’t have been more pronounced. Those Blairites were all over the party. We had the coup the year before, which couldn’t have helped. There were reports that the likes of Iain McNicol deliberately defunded marginal campaigning, and given the way the same party apparatus tried to keep Corbyn off the 2016 ballot, actually going to court, it would be no surprise whatsoever.

And do you know what? (as JC might say).

It didn’t matter. It mattered to the extent that we did not get a majority, but we did retain those marginals. While McNicol was busy defunding marginals, Momentum put up a site called “Where’s my nearest marginal?”. Labour members of all stripes flocked to them.

I’ll always remember where I was at 21:30 on June 8th. I was in a hastily-commandeered leisure centre, repurposed to serve as campaign headquarters. We’d had initial reports from the wards come in. Margaret Greenwood had a majority of 430 in 2015, and it seemed that we’d smashed it. Margaret herself was weeping genuine tears of joy.

That’s the difference scale makes.

Possibly a repeat, but this is a lovely thing to warm the dark winter nights.

As usual, the cover of Private Eye is loltastic

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Shouldn’t that be

“OOOOOOHHHHHHHHH Jeremy Corbyn”

Didn’t his missus give him a clip round the ear when he tried to leave the house looking like that. The Ayatollah certainly would have.

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Oops.

Haven’t we done this debate before?

I saw this on the BBC and thought you should see it: Jewish groups attack Jeremy Corbyn over anti-Semitism - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43536830

The guardian have been all over this for a couple of days. All the same people writing, quoting all the same MPs, again and again.

The only shocking thing is that there are people that don’t see through the agenda. How many articles did these supposed journalists write about the very antisemitic poster campaign carried out by the government? Unchanged 1930’s Nazi posters remember.

Just as well for them that there isn’t more important things to write about :lou_facepalm_2:

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Thing is, @saint-or-sinner - I think people do see through the agenda. The idea that Labour is a racist party of any kind is difficult to reconcile with my experience as a doorstep campaigner. If anything, Labour is seen by the voters as being too soft on immigration issues, too willing to accommodate the views and lives of others.

Still, it’s not long before a set of local elections. These concerns always seem to surface at this time for some reason. Peter will cry wolf again. I’m genuinely not sure why these groups are treated so seriously. Every time you hear from them, they’re warning that AS has gotten worse in the UK. They exist to point it out.

However, if one were to actually take all of their cumulative warnings at face value, the whole country ought to be racist jackbooted nutters by now.

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The Brexit thread would suggest that 17.4m are

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As are much of Poland, Austria, Hungary…

Or that’s just what the elite call anti Merkel version of the EU voters.

Do think Pap has a point. These race relations type boards have existed for decades and let’s face it never want to succeed as they’d put themselves out of a copy job

I’d like to think like that, but the last election and the fact that Corbyn is demonised continuously for his stand on intervention(mass murder for resources), does kind of prove how gullible even the people paying the price are.

If you doubt that just look up how much governments(particularly America) and big business(particularly American) spend on the science of manipulation. It’s not going up every year because it doesn’t work.

I’m not sure I would be so confident. You see, immigrants are mooslims, stands to reason. And mooslims hate jews.

It wasn’t a Muslim that I was referring to on the doorstep. Back in 2016, was campaigning for the local elections in Southampton. One of our number comes scurrying out of a garden saying “that bloke says he’s not voting for Labour. He says we’re the ones who let all the fucking Indians in”. That was a white Sotonian making the comment.

While we’ve seen this sort of attack on JC before, I genuinely never thought I’d see the day when The Guardian were running something potentially this damaging, and this untrue, about the fucking Labour leader.

I suspect your lack of confidence lies in a lack of confidence about what antisemitism actually is. I don’t blame you for that. The subject is deliberately conflated so that the only thing people are certain of is that they never want to catch the label.

I’m fairly certain in my definition. For me, a form of racism, in which people hate a specific sub-group because they _are _a specific sub group· If Corbyn’s accusers can find any instance of where either he or the Labour Party have promoted those ideals I’d both be very surprised and willing to change my current viewpoint, which is that it is a witchhunt brought to you by the same people that offered a 1m reward for dirt on Alan Duncan, just last year.

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You’re forgetting one thing. Despite all that, Labour’s vote share has been rising.

Good, the momentum lot need to be reigned in, won’t comment on Arab atrocities for correctness and using it as a vehicle to attack any establishment, Israeli land grabs must be brought into the light but then so should Egyptian totalitarianism and many other things.

Labour is a broad church, some of reactionaries and what do I always say? Tolerance isn’t acceptance and does anyone think a pro Israeli is going to be on the same page as a pro Palestinian even though they’re in a British politcal party?

We haven’t talked about as we’re British and shit scared of what truth we might find, heaven knows we can’t upset anyone, nevermind the rest of the World does it, weak that all it is, weakness.

You do realise that the leader of Momentum, Jon Lansman, is Jewish, right Bazza?

Also, since you’re pointing it out, would you like to illustrate some occasions that Momentum needs reigning in from? One would assume that a big racist statement has been made that would justify their need to be reigned in.

Deselection constantly which is tantmount to blackmail from young reactionaries who are liberals who have to pay for the education now after Clegg lied to them, entryism in its most basic.

Of course I realise who Lansman is, an opportunist which could split the party, old Skinner Labour will never die, momentum will however.

Think you may have misunderstood my point. The people you meet on your campaigns feel Labour are too soft on immigration. Often this is due to islamophobia (anecdotal but fair, I think). Labelling Labour ™ as anti-semite is a useful (yet dull) stick to hit them with - ‘they are pro-islam, they must be anti-semite, surely’.

However, when the leader states there is an issue with anti-semitism in the Labour party, it’s maybe time to accept it and deal with it. “I recognise that anti-Semitism has surfaced within the Labour Party, and has too often been dismissed as simply a matter of a few bad apples”.