UKIP's future

[RogueTrooper]

Britain Elects tweeted this poll.

Westminster voting intention:
CON: 40% (+10)
LAB: 29% (-4)
UKIP: 12% (-8)
LDEM: 9% (+3)
GRN: 3% (-)
(via YouGov / 17-18/07) Chgs. from April

Whilst it is clear that the nativist Tory vote is flocking its way home it does beg the question what is going to happen to UKIP now that the referendum is over.

As somebody who is worried about their support in Labour's heartland constituencies I am, of course, keen to see them fail.

[TubbersUK]

1. Interesting question

but I don't know the answer.

On the one hand their central policy plank has gone, on the other, they and their fellow bigots are feeling empowered.

[T_i_B]

2. I suspect they will target white working class areas.

Places like Barnsley and Rochdale that have previously been Labour strongholds. The Tories cannot do anything in those areas but UKIP can.

[Ken Burch]

3. Labour needs to counter that with a proposal for massive state investment for reindustrialization

in those areas. If Blair, Brown, or Ed Miliband had ever proposed anything like that, UKIP would never have gained the strength it did.

That poll also clearly indicates the PLP needs to stop trying to Corbyn and expel Momentum and find a way to work with them.

Momentum is Labour's future. The PLP and "Progress" are the past.

Owen Smith isn't going to be elected leader and there are no polls anywhere showing that Labour would do better if he was.

[T_i_B]

4. I don't want the PLP to be the past

Last edited Sat Jul 23, 2016, 05:10 AM - Edit history (1)

I don't want my mediocre Labour MP replaced by a dreadful Tory MP. The decline of the British left may appeal to you but it doesn't appeal to me.

And a lot of the investment for reindustrialisation in areas like South Yorkshire came from the EU, but people in these areas still voted against it out of spite towards immigrants. So it's nothing like as simple as the far left would have you believe. Especially when those industries have to make money.

[Ken Burch]

5. I don't want your constituency to go Tory, either. Or any Labour seat at all.

What I meant was that the attitude of the PLP...the idea that the MPs and no one else should determine what Labour stands for and who leads it...is the past. The MPs have no greater insights than anyone else. If the MPs had had their way, David Miliband, Ed's much mre conservative brother, would have led the party in the 2015 election, and David essentially agreed with Cameron on every major issue.
If David M had been leader, the result would have been exactly the same. Nobody out there in the electorate wanted Labour to be even more elitist and even less distinguishable from the Tories.

What needs to happen for Labour to get back into power is for the Labour MPs to stop sabotaging and undermining their leader, and to listen to newer voices and newer ideas, to work with the activists rather than treating them as enemy invaders.

From what he's already shown us, there is no chance of Owen Smith doing better as leader than Corbyn is doing(between Corbyn and Smith, it was Smith who actually managed to be homophobic to Angela Eagle, and smith proved he's on the right wing of the party when he said "austerity is right&quot . So we've established that the anti-Corbyn campaign was and is a waste of time.

[T_i_B]

6. You said you want PLP to be the past

The only way that can happen is for Labour MP's to lose their seats en masse.

Come to think of it that seems to be exactly the situation Corbyn appears to be working towards!

The attitude of the PLP could be better, but the attitude of Corbyn cultists like yourself stinks even more. The Corbynite faction needs to stop acting like a big bunch of mardy arses and start working constructively with others.

You have failed (as per usual) to establish that the anti-Corbyn faction is a waste of time as you have failed to demonstrate that the Coorbyn is comptent and proved that Corbynite politics is nothing motre than sectarian bullshit. More interested in settling old scores than serving the common good.

[Ken Burch]

7. By wanting the PLP to be the past, I didn't mean I wanted Labour to lose seats

I meant the arrogance and vindictive conservatism of the majority of MPs in the PLP-the attitude that they should matter more than anyone else. They need to accept that they are simply one component of the party.

And I'm no one's cultist-again, I've said nothing personally derogatory to you-you don't have to worship Corbyn like a god(he doesn't even want THAT kind of support) to believe that he's done nothing to deserve the Portland Communications-orchestrated hate campaign he's been subjected to. I and the rest of those who back Corbyn simply because we respect and trust the guy. Is it that difficult to imagine people standing up for a person the admire when that person is under completely unwarranted attack?

Corbyn was not to blame for the Remain defeat...austerity in the North was to blame for that. If those towns hadn't been left to rot by Thatcherites, Blairites, LibDems and(thanks to the spending constraints they've imposed)the EU, xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment could never have taken root in those towns. Prosperous communities never vote for parties like the Front National, Golden Dawn or UKIP). And it was never realistic to think that more than 63% of Labour voters would vote Remain. This was the largest Remain vote possible and if he'd campaigned on the same podium with Cameron(as some demanded)it would have meat Labour ould no longer be seen as a separate party.

As to Momentum, the Progress crowd(I don't think Tribune have a problem with them)have never given them a chance to work with others, because Progress can't accept that Momentum aren't Militant. Momentum are non-sectarian left-radical democrats and they derive more from Occupy(I assume you'd admit that Occupy are non-sectarian and democratic). What they stand for is for democratic change from below. How can THAT be sectarian.

Finally, the anti-Corbyn crowd(led by the essentially Thatcherite Luke Akehurst) have said that if Corbyn wins this leadership vote, they'll keep challenging him over and over until he resigns. Would you agree, if nothing else, that THAT would be a senseless and destructive thing to do and that their insistence on doing it proves that the anti-Corbynites don't care about electing a Labour government?

[T_i_B]

8. Luke Akehurst is leading the campaign now is he?

The fact that you would make such a hilariously, blatantly untrue claim is proof (as if it were needed) that you have not got the slightest idea what you are talking about. Akehurst is a very junior figure in Labour who just happens to have written a few blogposts. He's also considered to be much too much of a sectarian Blairite even by most of the anti-Corbyn faction. If you really were the "expert" you pretend to be you would know this. Just a load of tin foil hat bollocks.

The central claim being made against Corbyn (which you never acknowledge) is that he is incompetent. I was hearing first hand stories about this during the referendum campaign. It's not a Blairite conspiracy, Corbyn just isn't up to the task of running a large organisation.

Also, your claim that prosperous communities never vote for parties like UKIP can be disproved by a simple visit to seaside towns like Frinton-On-Sea.

You really are just making up shite as you go along.

[Ken Burch]

9. The stories you have been hearing are all being spread by Portland Communications,

a Blairite-controlled pr firm that essentially created the anti-Corbyn campaign. Of course they're going to call him incompetent-they're throwing anything at the man that they think will stick.

It proves nothing that right-wing elitists like Hilary Benn and Yvette Cooper, people who never wanted Corbyn to be leader and never accepted him or showed him any respect AS leader say he is incompetent. They've practically accused him of deep-frying puppies by now.

And they've essentially FORCED Corbyn to battle for the leadership-I think he probably would have stood down if they'd offered him these guarantees:

1)That control over candidate selection would be totally restored to the constituency parties;

2)That control over policy would be returned to the party conference;

3)That there would be a left-wing candidate in the subsequent leadership vote;

4)That Momentum would not be demonized or expelled.

The anti-Corbynites wouldn't agree to any of those. They weren't going to stop until a right-winger(i.e., "moderate&quot was leading the party, until the Blairite party structure was imposed as permanent, and until everything Corbyn and his supporters fought for was erased from the party.

The problem is, if all of that were to happen, the Labour Party wouldn't BE the Labour Party anymore.

If they wanted Corbyn to resign, they should never have gone to war against his ideals or his supporters-they should have accepted both. They refused to do so-they refused to offer Corbyn and the left any compromise at all. What does that tell you?

[LeftishBrit]

12. While it's likely that the austerity and resulting disaffection may have tipped the balance

in a close referendum, it is not true that prosperous communities NEVER vote for parties like UKIP. Indeed, while some of their vote does come from low-paid or unemployed people who consider that immigrants are taking their jobs, quite a lot comes from retired and near-retirement people in rural, small-town and perhaps especially seaside areas, who dislike anything post-1950s and consider that Things Ain't What They Used to Be. Many of them are quite prosperous. Many UKIP politicians are former Conservatives, and quite often were originally elected as Conservatives in the same areas.

I think that it was wrong of the anti-Corbyn Labourites to choose this time for a rebellion, when the country is in such a desperate position, and unity against the Right is more important than at almost any time. However, they are not led by Luke Akehurst - he is anti-Corbyn no doubt, but hardly a leader of anything.

[Ken Burch]

13. OK, a handful of prosperous communities may have voted Leave.

But the margin of victory came from the poorest areas of the UK. I don't think there were any areas of high unemployment or poverty that voted Remain or even came close to it.

Yes, there are some Leave voters who are simply opposed to modern life, but there aren't enough of those people to tip a national referendum by itself. And there wasn't any leader in ANY party who could have persuaded the anti-modernist types to vote Remain. Even Blair couldn't have reached them, and Cameron never managed to for that matter.

Perhaps Akehurst isn't the "leader" of this putsch, but the things he writes do seem to get parroted word-for-word by the MPs. The arguments sound like a "party line", Leninist in their uniformity. That should make anyone suspicious.

As to the timing...from what I've read, the rebels had been planning this move since Corbyn was elected...but they needed a moment in which they could(even if unfairly)blame Corbyn for something. All the byelections in Labour seats had been won so far(there was one byelection in a Tory seat they didn't win, but they wouldn't have taken that one no matter who the leader was) and the local elections were not the humiliation some "moderates" insisted they would be, so it was probably the referendum aftermath or never. I think they figured if they left him alone, he could have used the Leave victory to present himself as a man for the new era-and they couldn't have that.

With the insistence that they will challenge him over and over until he resigns, Corbyn's opponents have no proved that they never cared about electing a Labour government(they have to realize that, even if they did eventually push him into resigning, no Labour leader elected in a leadership contest to replace him, a contest in which only "moderates" would be allowed to run(neither Owen Smith nor even Lisa Nandy would be permitted by the PLP-they'd insist it could only be people like Chuka Umunna or Yvette Cooper-could ever unify Labour and lead it to victory in the election that followed.

All of this has been about preventing Labour from changing as a party, and from making sure Labour didn't get elected on any program other than sectarian Blairism-that it would only stand as a party that supported war, benefits cuts, the budget charter and Thatcher's anti-worker laws-in other words, a party that didn't disagree with the Tories on any major issues, because no major disagreement and no real change is possible if you accept the benefits cap, the budget charter, more imperialism in the Middle East and the permanent suppression of the unions.

[TubbersUK]

11. Ukip must step up or be replaced by new party, says donor Arron Banks

Ukip must step up or be replaced by new party, says donor Arron Banks

Either Ukip, or his new movement, should now push for a “Swiss-style model of direct democracy, which allows citizens to propose their own laws and veto the schemes of the politicians”, Banks said in a comment article written for the Guardian.

“Now, more than ever, the country needs Ukip to step up, or for a new movement to step forward,” Banks said. “We won’t achieve anything by tempering ourselves to create another bland, centrist party.

“We need to lower the barriers to entry for politics, and reach out to new audiences online, as Beppe Grillo’s revolutionary Five Star Movement has done in Italy.”

Five Star Movement, created by the Italian comedian and TV personality, is a Eurosceptic populist group that has won a series of key electoral victories in recent years, including mayoral races in Rome and Turin, with the aim of establishing itself as the country’s official opposition party by the 2018 general election.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/23/ukip-donor-arron-banks-gives-more-clues-about-starting-new-party