Wednesday, 10 August 2016

One Nation Labour: The Party That We Need

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17 comments:

  1. Anonymous10 August 2016 at 20:00

    You're honestly so out of date and resistant to evidence that it's almost touching.

    Like some unlettered dinosaur who still uses transistor radio or black and white TV, you still talk like Dennis Skinner, as if the divisions in the country or between Right and Left were still as they were in Alec Douglas-Home's day.

    Do try and catch up, dear.

    Public ownership of utilities and tariffs on imports were introduced by Nazi Germany so (to the extent that your political definitions are useful) Adolf Hitler was "to the Left" of Jeremy Corbyn.

    No?

    In other words, your political categories are utterly laughable.

    Charles II nationalised Royal Mail, Dwight Eisenhower nationalised the highways and Neville Chamberlain and Ted Heath nationalised Rolls-Royce.

    It hasn't been a Left/Right issue for decades.

    The modern Left exerts control over industry through "regulation" which gives it all of the same control as public ownership but none of the accountability.

    The Left has understood ever since at least Gramsci that social inequality manifests itself in hierarchies of power-not just wealth-between sexes, races, cultures

    The Equality Act, the most leftwing piece of legislation of modern times, was introduced by Harriet Harman and New Labour.

    It enshrines radical feminism, multiculturalism and secularism in law.

    That is also the party that outlawed new grammar schools.

    And that flung open our borders and destroyed our constitution.

    Yet according to your bizarrely outdated political categories, the party that did that wasn't "leftwing."

    You really do need to wake up.

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    1. David Lindsay10 August 2016 at 20:23

      Silly little boy.

      You must wish that you had lost the referendum. Whereas I am glad of that outcome, which brought attention to exactly the people who needed and deserved it.

      They are not you, and you know it. You may as well have lost. In practice, you did.

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    2. Anonymous10 August 2016 at 20:27

      Ukip basically dead, Theresa May elected (or not) Tory Leader and PM unopposed, but Jeremy Corbyn playing to tens of thousands everywhere he goes and getting supporting nominations from every corner of England, Scotland and Wales. We can all see who's out of date and who isn't. You obviously can and you hate it. As your hero Trump would say, tough titties.

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    3. Anonymous10 August 2016 at 20:30

      70% of Labour seats voted Leave. They'll all vote Labour in 2020. They sure as hell won't vote Ukip.

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    4. David Lindsay10 August 2016 at 20:34

      Or anything but Labour, on principle. UKIP comes second in Labour seats, because someone always did come second in those seats.

      If anything, UKIP in those seats has consolidated the existing anti-Labour vote there. But it won't even manage that in 2020.

      There was a referendum on the EU issue precisely because it existed and exists entirely outside party politics, as such. Nothing to do with elections can be extrapolated from it.

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  2. Anonymous10 August 2016 at 20:53

    This reads like a pitch for Leader of the Labour Party. A bloody good pitch for Leader of the Labour Party. You are probably older than the next one.

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  3. Anonymous10 August 2016 at 21:20

    A certain Ukip-voting, maybe Hitchens-reading tendency expected a Leave win to change the whole geography and architecture of British politics. Of course it was never going to and it hasn't, but they seem to be insisting it has because they want it to have done. It will be the second, Corbyn win that really does that. He has also dragged the Tories and the Labour Right hundreds of miles to the left and he has only just got started.

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    1. David Lindsay10 August 2016 at 21:22

      And to the left in the good, old-fashioned sense, about the role of the State in the economy in order to redistribute wealth and economic power.

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  4. Anonymous10 August 2016 at 21:33

    They look even more irrelevant now that No Article 50 May has put up the grammar schools idea in the certain knowledge it would be shot down by her own party, as it has been. The right are just figures of fun now.

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  5. Anonymous10 August 2016 at 22:12

    You are getting destroyed in the comments.

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    1. David Lindsay10 August 2016 at 22:17

      That's not the way I read them. Lucy is obviously Kamm, as is anyone else who comes out with that kind of thing. What a sad little stalker he is.

      One irreconcilable ultra-Leftist (I am very well used to those), two reblogs, and one comment asking "Was this article simply an opinion piece or is this backed by the main labour movement?"

      So, three out of five, 60 per cent. At least. And one of the other two is Kamm, so it doesn't really count, anyway. Three out of four. 75 per cent.

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  6. Anonymous10 August 2016 at 22:43

    Why would any journalist pay attention to you? You're not exactly famous, are you?

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    1. David Lindsay10 August 2016 at 22:47

      You are not a journalist, Oliver.

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    2. Anonymous10 August 2016 at 22:53

      Mr. Lindsay is famous enough, and more so all the time.

      Delete
  7. Anonymous10 August 2016 at 23:22

    When much of the British establishment was appeasing the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s Trotsky was denouncing Hitler from the rooftops and laying out a strategy for the Labour movement to defeat him.

    When many in the Labour Party, including the Labour right, were full of praise for Stalin's dictatorship Trotsky was opposing it in the name of the original democratic and socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution. Stalin had him murdered for his pains. Few in the Labour Party protested.

    Of course there's barely anyone in the entire history of the labour movement that could match Trotsky as a writer. Perhaps Orwell, perhaps not. Trotsky wasn't nicknamed The Pen for nothing. In the range of his writing-from literary and artistic criticism, to philosophy and intentional politics, only Marx and Engels had a greater reach.

    As an historian again only Marx and Engels were his rivals, as his unsurpassed History of the Russian Revolution testifies. As a revolutionary activist, the President of the Petrograd Workers and Peasants Council and the organiser of the Red Army, only Lenin excelled him.

    But what of Trotskyists in Britain?

    Well there's a fair amount of bickering, backbiting and sectarianism. But anyone who thinks these are only characteristics of the Trotskyist left hasn't been following recent events in the Parliamentary Labour Party, to give only the most pertinent example.

    And beside this a different record should be taken into account. The anti-Vietnam war movement, the student movement of 1968, the industrial struggles of the 1970s, the Anti Nazi League, the anti-poll tax movement, the Stop the War Coalition, the anti-austerity movement all owe a great deal, often at leadership level, to Trotskyists. Not least the idea of the United Front in which Trotskyists, as a matter of principle, seek to create broad working class responses to political events working alongside others from different labour movement traditions.

    Do Trotskyists think that the state can be reformed? No, they believe that a much greater social transformation is necessary to achieve socialism. Is this a vital argument about the ultimate fate of the Corbyn project that needs to be heard in every corner of the movement? Yes.

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