Knives Out For Miliband As Labour Hopes Dashed

[brooklynite]

Source: Sky News

A Labour source has told Sky News "Ed Miliband won't make tomorrow lunchtime" after they suffered major electoral setbacks.

The difficult night for Mr Miliband began with an exit poll predicting his party's tally of seats would represent Labour's worst result since 1987.

Predictions of major defeats in Scotland have been borne out with both Scottish Labour Party leader Jim Murphy and shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander losing to the SNP.

"This, of course, has been a very difficult night for Labour," Mr Alexander said.

Read more: http://news.sky.com/story/1479583/knives-out-for-miliband-as-labour-hopes-dashed

[hrmjustin]

1. He should step down tomorrow.

The party needs to get a better leader.

[Nihil]

15. Done.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-32633388

Along with Clegg and Farage FWIW (not that any of them will be missed).

[iandhr]

2. He never seemed like a good leader

If watching Prime Ministers Questions on TV is an key I always saw Cameron ripping him to pieces.

[MADem]

3. He's been ripped to shreds on the UK comedy shows. nt

[shenmue]

4. We're screwed

[Drunken Irishman]

5. America circa 2004. A brighter day will come, tho.

[Ken Burch]

6. The knives also need to be out for any remaining Blairites in any influential role in the party.

Everything that went wrong for Labour tonight is due to the "nothing doing" position those people took towards the idea of Labour making more than cosmetic breaks with the Third Way.In particular, it looks as though Labour will be wiped out in Scotland tonight because Labour refused to take a clear and explicit stand against austerity. This refusal, which was justified by the supposed need to avoid offending more right-leaning English voters, has so far failed to do Labour any good at all in English constituencies, and Labour has also managed to lose some seats to the Tories in Wales (something that should never have been possible).

[Ken Burch]

7. Dear God, what the hell kind of strategy did David Axelrod come up with for Labour?

I thought Ax was the guy who knew how to win elections.

[iandhr]

9. Maybe because the US and UK….

are vastly different countries

[Ken Burch]

11. True. You'd think Ax would have thought of that before he took the job. n/t.

[geek tragedy]

13. Milliband ain't Obama. nt

[starroute]

8. Or could it be that Labour wasn't offering any alternative to austerity?

This from Paul Krugman's article of a week ago:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion

It has been astonishing, from a US perspective, to witness the limpness of Labour’s response to the austerity push. Britain’s opposition has been amazingly willing to accept claims that budget deficits are the biggest economic issue facing the nation, and has made hardly any effort to challenge the extremely dubious proposition that fiscal policy under Blair and Brown was deeply irresponsible – or even the nonsensical proposition that this supposed fiscal irresponsibility caused the crisis of 2008-2009. . . .

The closest parallel I can give from my side of the Atlantic is the erstwhile weakness of Democrats on foreign policy – their apparent inability back in 2003 or so to take a stand against obviously terrible ideas like the invasion of Iraq. If the political opposition won’t challenge the coalition’s bad economics, who will?

You might be tempted to say that this is all water under the bridge, given that the coalition, whatever it may claim, effectively called a halt to fiscal tightening midway through its term. But this story isn’t over. Cameron is campaigning largely on a spurious claim to have “rescued” the British economy – and promising, if he stays in power, to continue making substantial cuts in the years ahead. Labour, sad to say, are echoing that position. So both major parties are in effect promising a new round of austerity that might well hold back a recovery that has, so far, come nowhere near to making up the ground lost during the recession and the initial phase of austerity.

[Ken Burch]

12. Exactly. The Guardian nailed it there. n/t.

[47of74]

10. How do these parties map to the main American parties?

That's the question I have. How much do conservatives = Republicans and labour = Democrats?

[YoungDemCA]

14. Hard to say

There are different factions within both Labour and the Tories that don't neatly compare with the US.

Just taking Labour as an example, which has historically been a socialist party affiliated with the trade unions in the UK - you have traditionally had both Left-wing and Right-wing* variants of Labour; within the Labour Left, you had the "Hard Left" which was more Marxist and the "Soft Left" which leaned more towards social democracy. More recently, you've had Labour move somewhat away from its traditional left-wing political program of working-class advocacy in the name of "modernization" and reaching out to a growing number of middle-class voters in the UK (particularly in the public sector). Hence, "New Labour" as exemplified by Tony Blair.

*Right-wing in the sense that they were more traditional in social and cultural values, and that they opposed Marxism.