Jeremy Corbyn is re-elected as Leader of Britain’s Labour Party

[forest444]

Source: New York Times

Jeremy Corbyn strengthened his grip on Britain’s opposition Labour Party on Saturday, beating back a challenge to his leadership by members of Parliament with increased support from the party’s rank and file.

The results of the summer-long leadership struggle were announced in Liverpool, in northwestern England, on the eve of the annual Labour Party conference.

Mr. Corbyn, a 67-year-old hard-left politician, won 61.8% of the more than 500,000 votes cast, up from the 59.5% he won a year ago, when his victory shocked and divided the party.

A revolt by Labour members of Parliament, who said they feared that Mr. Corbyn would lead the party to electoral disaster, came to nothing as their favored candidate, Owen Smith, won only 38.2% of the vote.

The result tightened Mr. Corbyn’s grip on the party and isolated many of its members of Parliament from a growing membership that is younger and more left-leaning, drawn by Mr. Corbyn’s policies to reduce inequality, make Britain non-nuclear and renationalize key areas of the economy, like the railways and energy.

The party has almost tripled its membership to more than 500,000, making it the largest political party in Western Europe, Mr. Corbyn said. But opinion polls regularly indicate that if an election were held tomorrow, Labour under Mr. Corbyn would suffer a historic defeat in the country as a whole.

In a victory speech, Mr. Corbyn called for unity, said that more held “the Labour family” together than divided it and vowed that the party would win the next election under his leadership.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/world/europe/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-leader.html?_r=0

[T_i_B]

1. Labour really are a dysfunctional mess.

It says something that the Labour conference isn't even debating the whole matter of leaving the EU.

The number 1 issue facing this country and they aren't holding the government to account.

[YOHABLO]

2. Too bad Bernie could not have had the chance to simulate.

[branford]

3. Corbyn wins and ensures Labour will remain in the political wilderness for the foreseeable future.

It was a political gift to the Tories beyond measure.

[Helen Borg]

7. That is what the establishment said about Sanders in the US.

[branford]

9. Sander did not win the Democratic primary,

is rarely discussed now except as a side note, is not the leader of the party setting strategy to try and unseat a relatively popular government, and his poll numbers among the overall electorate have not been consistently dismal.

It doesn't matter if you're a fan of Corbyn (or Sanders) and his policies, poll after poll make the political realities very clear. While Corbyn might be popular among a certain harcore left segment of the Labour Party, he's unelectable as a prime minister and dragging the downstream electoral prospects of Labour down with him. There's a reason why most Labour MP's, people who've actually had to stand for election, have publicly opposed him despite the terrible optics after the Brexit loss.

[Ken Burch]

19. The people who want Corbyn to be removed want Labour to agree with the Tories on everything

but a handful of trivial side issues.

They want to keep Thatcher's anti-worker laws, the benefits cap, the Tory spending levels, continuing slow privatization of the NHS, perpetual military intervention and the Bomb, nuclear power, the railways privatised, and corporate power totally unconstrained. And they want to out-UKIP UKIP on immigration(thus making it impossible to oppose racism in any way at all).

They want to keep internal party democracy suspended, too, so that most of the party has no real say in what the party stands for, no longer has a say in who leads it, and has no way of holding the MPs accountable so they don't perpetually slide further and further to the right without there being any way to deny them automatic-reselection-for-life.

If you keep all that, the tiny meaningless slivers of things a Labour government could still differ from the Tories on would be too insignificant to make any difference to anyone.

[JRLeft]

36. Corbyn is pulling the Labour party away from neoliberalism and bringing it back to progressivism.

[LanternWaste]

41. Clever little bumper sticker you've got.

Clever little bumper sticker you've got.

[branford]

42. Are you claiming anything I wrote is actually untrue?

I live in reality. While you may feel Corbyn represents your views or that the rest of Labour and the British electorate or not sufficiently to the left for your tastes, it's undeniable that Labour electoral condition and prospects are the worst they've been in a generation and Corbyn is actually the situation worse. If you really believe in progressive policies, how exactly will they be implemented in the UK if the Tories keep on winning elections?

[nikto]

4. If the Left is not allowed to find new solutions to aid the middle class in England ...

Then, as in this country with Trump, the far-right will make promises to the increasingly frustrated masses
and perhaps even get elected, with disastrous consequences.

It's an old pattern.

[Monk06]

5. If labour can't get rid of these creeky old post war Trotsiites then they'll have to depend

on extraordinary incompetance on the part of the Tories to get into power

They remind me of the caricature of labour depicted by Stan and Jack in On the Busses in the 1970s when the general strike was labour's answer to everything

They ruined the UK auto industry and closed down the coal industry which is not at all a bad thing really

Labour and Tory warfare and incompetence in the 1970s can be summerized in the rise and fall of British Leyland and paved the way for the post Thatcherite financial and real estate speculators who now run the country

[Helen Borg]

8. Refreshing to see somebody like Corbyn

Standing up for UK people. New Labour is essentially a bunch of Tory-lite traitors.

[Odin2005]

11. Nice right-wing red-baiting, there.

[Monk06]

16. From a guy who has read much Marxist Culture Theory and most of Marx's major works

The British Labour movement has a history of dogmatic historicism and parochial political organization

My former professor hung around with Brit Labour intellectuals when he was at the Courtauld in the 70s

I met one of them They are muppets The one I met in 1989 showed up in Vancouver wearing Maoist pajamas and spent his entire visit trying to hit on the women in our circle of friends

Orthodox Marxists are just an academic constituency with no public influence whatsoever

I don't know where the left should take it's cue from. Maybe Chomski

But looking to Brit Labour for guidance and inspiration would be a big mistake. Corbyn is the corpse of old labour that just refuses to die. Meanwhile the West Midlands and the rest of the North of England is being left behind by the London banking aristocracy

[T_i_B]

14. The destruction of coal mining "not a bad thing"???

Try living in an old pit village before spouting nonsense like that. It was utterly devastating for those areas as many places round here were heavily dependent on mining. Some of these old pit villages are still heavily deprived.

[Monk06]

17. I don't support an industry that needs tax breaks and subsidies to survive when the product is

of marginal economic benefit to workers and disastrous for the environment, as all open pit mining is

Mountain Top removal is an obscenity and is turning Appalachia into a toxic land fill

Just as open pit heavy oil is doing in Northern Alberta

Except for a few large automated mining operations in the world, mining workers live on poor wages, lousy job security and completely at the whim of the employers

When Thatcher privatized the coal industry and eliminated subsidies and mandatory production output miners were left to suffer a generation of unemployment But only because the government that closed the industry down did not step in with new job investment Quicker action would have avoided a generation of suffering

Now Wales has reclaimed most of the old pits and is creating a tourist and service economy where non existed before

The same should happen in Appalachia which has a lot of history and at one time was a natural treasure

[T_i_B]

18. Marginal economic benefit to workers?

Try telling an ex coal miner that. And don't come whining to me when they turn nasty on you for spouting textbook claptrap.

Coal miners in this country were the at the forefront of the Labour movement and at the forefront of campaigning for better working conditions and trade unions.

[Monk06]

24. By marginal I mean making subsistence wages in an industry the has broken unions through right to

work and buying state politicians

Modern coal miners are mostly non union and forced to work for what the contractor is paying in dangerous conditions. in underground ops at least Open pit is safer but environmentally devastating

Ex Cape Breton coal miners have the same nostalgia for their former professions which I find baffling due to the huge mining disasters that have occurred there. Personally I will be glad when all big coal is gone

The industry is run by criminals like Consol, Massey and Alpha. Large controlling energy companies ignore safety regulations and hide their fatality rates in spreadsheet reports

This is a totally corrupt industry that needs to die regards's of the unfortunate workers who are forced by economic circumstances to be part of the industry

[T_i_B]

44. British coal miners fought very hard to be "non-marginal"

In fact the miners were at the forefront of trade unionism, and pioneered much of what was 20th centry left wing politics.

As to your failure to understand why people are nostaligic for the era of coal mining, there's a lot more to it then you'll discover from an economics text book.

For starter's it's not difficult to imagine that there is a certain physical satisfaction to the work. If you manage to remove a tonne of coal from the ground in a day with your own hands you will almost certainly feel rather chuffed about that. For another thing, the mine was at the centre of many communities for centuries. And Britain's coal supplied were a major factor in the industrial revolution and the emergence of the British empire. For many years it was the most important industry in this country. Men grew up to be miners, as their fathers and grandfathers had done before them. These communities were very reliant on coal mining and the effect of their closure was calamitous. Mining is also a very tight knit industry, and there is a great deal of cameraderie in coal mining. Much more so than in other professions. although that also made a lot of mining communities very insular, which is something that far right groups like UKIP are now feeding off.

[Ken Burch]

20. The new left in Labour is post-2000, not post-World War II.

It's rooted in the anti-Iraq War movement and Occupy. It has nothing to do with old Trotskyites.

And the "free market" consensus of the post-1989 era is now totally discredited. Hardly anyone thinks you can let corporations run life and still have any progressive values in society.

[T_i_B]

23. I may have mentioned this before...

..but it was the old trotskyites who ran the anti-Iraq war movement in the first place! That wasn't an issue for most of us back then as there was a greater issue at hand (namely stopping an unjust war). Trouble is, the far left does have its limitations.

[Ken Burch]

29. OK, some of its leaders were "Old Trots". I'll give you that.

Although I don't think those people can be assumed to be holding the exact same views and using the same tactics that they used in the 1970s and 1980s. And from what I've read of the Eighties, most of the Labour Left(I'm talking Foot supporters and Bennites)actually mocked and despised the Trots. They may have stood with the Liverpool council because that simply happened to be the only decent municipal government that city had ever had and because Kinnock was using his fight against them to crush the left across the board(it still amazes me that some people today claim that Kinnock is "associated with the left"-he devoted his entire career as leader to stopping Labour from being a left-wing party or even a socialist party in any recognizable sense. Nothing remained of anything remotely radical in the 1992 manifesto).e

But that can't possibly account for the groundswells of support for Corbyn in 2015 and 2016.

And it's delusional to assume that no one but "Trots" would have questioned Labour's continued allegiance to Blairism(there were no meaningful difference between Blair's manifestos and Brown and Miliband's-it's just that the latter two had none of Blair's personal charisma) or resisted the post-2015 push by the PLP to move the party into a position of being just as pro-benefits cap and benefits cut as the Tories.

Do you personally believe that Corbyn only became leader because a Trot cabal somehow imposed its diabolical will on an entire major British political party? That if it hadn't been for the mighty SWP, Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper would have taken the leadership in a landslide? I'd prefer to think you don't believe that.

[T_i_B]

30. I went on a number of anti Iraq war demos

And when on these marches you are confronted with a constant stream of people leafleting and selling newspapers for these groups. It wasn't just a few trots at the top, there were trots the whole way through the anti-war movement. Ranging from the Socialist Workers Party right through to the Spartacists.

To be honest I don't begrudge them any of this stuff on anti-war demos, although talking to these people, and reading the large quantities of newspapers and leaflets they gave me did make up my mind about the far left.

[Monk06]

25. I should clarify to not take my reference to Trotskiites too literally Friends who studied in

during the 1970s called the left intellectuals they met and hung out with there the "London Trots"

They included Terry Atkinson the Art and Language pioneer in this group It was more of a whisker pull than a serious term of reference

Having said that I don't think of Corbyn as in the same mould as Blair obviously

Corbyn is a romantic anti capitalist IMO and Blair is just a Liberal Democrat who likes the posh Tory lifestyle

[Ken Burch]

28. During the last leadership campaign,

You could be stripped of your right to vote(and even have your party membership)just for calling a Corbyn opponent a "Blairite" on social media. By contrast, no one was stripped of their vote for calling Corbyn supporters "Trots".

I get it that you don't share this view, but why is it that some people in the Labour Party can't accept that Corbyn's supporters are simply non-sectarian democratic radicals of generally good will? Why do they pretend that Corbyn only won because of some sort of Trotskyite plot? Do the people who think that honestly believe that it's not possible to support Corbyn without being a member of one of the descended sects deriving from the Fourth International? Or is it just that they think that phrase is an insult that will stick?

[Monk06]

31. I don't track Briish politics closely enough to answer your questions I just thought Corbyn should

have taken a more principaled stand on Brexit rather than triangulating his leadership position

He justcame off like a cynical and parochial party politician

[Ken Burch]

32. Corbyn didn't triangulate-he spoke honestly and reasonably.

His biggest offense, according to the Labour right, was when he refused to promise to limit EU immigration if Remain won. What Corbyn actually did, however, was simply to point out that under EU rules, it isn't possible to limit EU immigration. They attacked him because he wouldn't make a promise that no head of government in an EU country could ever keep.

Leave won because the people who organized the Remain campaign did a terrible job and came off as Londoncentric scolds. Nothing Corbyn could possibly have said or done would have counteracted that, and he made more speeches for Remain than any other Labour figure.

[Monk06]

33. I had a conversation with a couple of Brit tourists just before the referendum

I was a bit conflicted and mentioned that there was a possibility that a leave win would revitalize Brit industry especially in automotive and aerospace

But so much capital is tied up in finance and media/entertainment which the Brits are naturally good at

Now I think it has just bunged up the EU and made a difficult polity even more of a tangle

I mean the French wanting migrant camps moved to Dover for fucksake It's absurd

And the EU is based on an unrealistic and possibly disastrous cultural premise, that being British or French or Italian and maintaining those cultural assets is somehow backward and obsolete

Oddly while Jeremy Clarkson is a bit of a right wing knob when you compare him to James May, Oz Clarke and to a lesser extent Marko Pierre White, you come to the conclusion that preserving English identity is important It's UKIP and the RW working class that give those values a bad name

[Ken Burch]

34. Uh...we're talking about Jeremy CORBYN here, not Jeremy Clarkson.

They are two utterly dissimilar people.

Jeremy Corbyn is the thin, bearded, soft-spoken but tough left-wing leader of the Labour Party. He supports peace, justice, full employment and an environmentally sustainable economy.

Jeremy Clarkson is the big, bulky, loudmouthed right-wing UK television personality who was fired from his job as the host of Top Gear because he punched out a guy on the crew(random thought: they could cast him and Thomas "Hotch" Gibson in a new reality show, now that I think of it).

[Monk06]

35. I mentioned JC and the rest as examples of Brit public figures who are also Euro sceptics

You may not like any of those guys and I'm willing to bet all of them are Tories but they serve to
illustrate the point the EU sceptics can be found at both ends of the political spectrum and economic scale

Of course I know who Clarkson is including his appitite for cheap Rose A habit he shares with Marco Pierre another rich media crank

Also everyone of those guys except James May list their addresses in tax havens like Wales and the Isle of Whight Oz probably Irland since he goes on so much about being Irish So they don't support their nationalism with their wallets

I don't think Corbyn appreciated how deep those feeling run throughout the political spectrum

That is my only point I was trying to make

[T_i_B]

37. All 3 Top Gear presenters supported staying in the EU

[Monk06]

38. Well JCs vocal complaints about Britain paying for Spanish highways implied otherwise lol

But yes in the circles they travel and the business they are in the EU would be viewed favourably

Also James complaining about French wine poncery

Not sure where Hammond is on the issue

Personally while being conflicted I think staying in the EU is in the best interests of Britain interms of political influence The fact that they kept the pound left them with butter on both sides of the toast

Should have left well enough alone

[Ken Burch]

39. I'm aware that Euroskepticism is not an exclusively left-wing OR right-wing idea.

UKIP, as a party, is deeply reactionary and xenophobic. At the same time, in the 2015 election, it was the ONLY political party in the UK that seemed to be taking the economic misery in the North and Northeast of England seriously. The Tories see Northerners as unproductive spongers, the LibDems refused to challenge the Tories on that because the LibDem leader insisted on fighting the election as unquestioning defenders of the Coalition they had joined with the Tories and Labour's pre-Corbyn leaders were too fixated on looking "fiscally responsible" and "pro-business" to challenge the misery neoliberalism had visited on the North or to even bother proposing anything that might possibly have created jobs in the region(a significant reduction in Northern unemployment and underemployment is the only thing that could ever make it possible to reduce xenophobia and bigotry there).

Corbyn was not to blame for the Leave victory. He simply happened to be leader of the opposition when it occurred.

[nikto]

6. Corbyn is up against a lot ...

"Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on..."


https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot


http://londonprogressivejournal.com/article/view/1463/margaret-thatchers-contribution-to-neoliberalism



"The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation."


" Those same powerful forces are still in charge, perhaps fighting a rearguard action in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, but using their power to entrench their advantage."

[Odin2005]

10. That sound you hear is all the Blairite whiners crying in the corner.

[Nye Bevan]

13. Because Labour spent 18 years in the wilderness prior to Blair

prior to enjoying 13 years in power under Blair and Blair's successor.

[Ken Burch]

21. Labour would have won under any leader and on any manifesto in 1997.

And this is 2016, so the fact is that the politics of 1997 are now extinct. Labour got 29% in 2010 and 30% in 2015 on policy offers indistinguishable from Blair's. The results would have been the same if the policies had been further right.

After 2015, there were no further rightward tacks Labour could take on any issue without simply endorsing the Tory program.

Labour can't go any further right than where it was then and still have any reason to exist.

What would you have them say "Vote Labour...it's enough that it will be US slashing benefits"?

[Nye Bevan]

26. Nope. It took Blair dumping Clause 4 and unilateral nuclear disarmament. (nt)

[Ken Burch]

27. It was actually Kinnock that saved the Bomb, not Blair.

And these days the Bomb is immoral and useless, so why insist that the UK keep it?

There can never be a non-evil use of a nuclear device again.

Not sure why getting rid of Clause 4 was that important. No Labour government had ever actually come close to carrying it out. And the Clause didn't even MANDATE state ownership. It could just as easily have been used to create cooperatives on a large scale, or to manage nationalized companies by turning them over to their employees. What was so sacred about traditional private ownership with a traditional hierarchal management scheme? Labour values can't really exist in a set-up like that.

And there was never any justification for Kinnock and Blair essentially abolishing internal party democracy...denying the party conference any role in policy-making, giving the party leadership control of the shortlists for parliamentary candidates(which essentially meant that constituency parties no longer had the right to nominate the candidates THEY wanted), and essentially denying the rank-and-file any real say in who was elected leader. Labour never had to become a party in which it was pointless to become a paid party member.

[Odin2005]

40. Blair was hardly any better than the Conservatives.

There is already a Neo-Liberal Thatcherite Party, the Conservatives. If the Brits want that they should vote Conservative. Having 2 Neo-Liberal Thatcherite parties is redundant and Labour should quit trying to be one. If that means them ending up in the "political wilderness" so be it, that's the voters' fault, not Corbyn's.

[Blue_Tires]

12. If only he fought against the Brexit as hard as he fought to keep his perch...

[T_i_B]

15. This is why I've turned against Corbyn

It became very clear during the referendum that he wasn't up to the task and is a more of a problem than an asset on the doorstep.

[Ken Burch]

22. It was impossible for him to do anything more.

He did everything he could without becoming a liar.

He knew it wasn't possible to further restrict immigration and still stay in the EU.

And he would have stopped BEING Labour if he'd done what his party's right really wanted and shared a podium with Cameron. If you speak at the same rallies with Conservatives, you can never fight them later on anything. That's why Cameron pushed Ed Miliband into sharing a podium with him.

It wasn't Corbyn's fault that none of the anti-Corbynite MPs ever made a credible case for Remain. It wasn't his fault that no one else in the party ever made any effective appearances for Remain anywhere in the North and Northeast of England, or made anything like Gordon Brown's "pledge" on the eve of the Scottish referendum(Corbyn wouldn't have been able to make that speech, because his own party would have refused to support the massive economic investment program that was the only possible way to swing voters to Remain in those areas).

Leave was certain to get overwhelming support in the North no matter who led Labour. Owen Smith, Angela Eagle, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper or Liz Kendall would have obtained the exact same result...because none of them would have dealt with the real issue-the crippling austerity and unemployment EU policies imposed on the North. Without addressing that, no one was ever going to be ableto swing any votes to Remain.

[pampango]

43. Jeremy Corbyn refuses to scapegoat immigrants as the Labour right hands votes to UKIP

Jeremy Corbyn has refused to “fan the flames” of anti-immigration rhetoric in his flagship speech at the Labour conference, stating there will be no immigration cap under a Labour government.

Meanwhile, the Labour right appears to be lighting bonfires. Rachel Reeves MP, who said she’d be tougher than the Tories on benefits in 2013, has warned that the UK could “explode” into riots if immigration is not curbed following the Brexit vote.

But Maya Goodfellow of Media Diversified has her own warning for Reeves and other members of the Labour right who are adopting such rhetoric:

…this kind of mealy-mouthed approach encouraged some to vote for parties that are aggressively anti-migration because they were seen as being able to deal with falsehoods Labour had legitimised.

http://www.thecanary.co/2016/09/28/jeremy-corbyn-refuses-scapegoat-immigrants-labour-right-hands-votes-ukip/

I am glad that the Labour Left (Corbyn) defeated the "Labour Right" for party leadership. In his speech he is sticking to his progressive principles rather than moderating them to appeal to those in the Labour Right. The article presents several Labour Right/UKIP arguments against immigration and the Labour Left's response to them.

The weird thing is that the immigrant population in the UK (11.3%) is lower than in Ireland (15.9%), Sweden (14.3%), Norway (13.8%) and many other progressive countries. Yet the anti-immigrant right (including the Labour Right) has been able to galvanize people by scapegoating immigrants.

List of countries by immigrant population