Woodcock wants to start a coup against Corbyn! Come on Corbynistas!q

[Jeneral2885]

Re-educate him! Throw Mao's Little Red Book at him!

Send this Trident Lover to the gulags!!!!

Momentum kick him out!

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/we-cant-go-like-this-7624375#ICID=sharebar_twitter

[T_i_B]

1. Thought you'd been tombstoned.

Last edited Sat Mar 26, 2016, 06:08 AM - Edit history (1)

No thoughts on the EU referendum and the likely consequences for international development if we leave then?

Nope, just more of the same old tired "yah boo poopypants" rubbish.

[Bad Dog]

2. The party needs unity.

Not division. Corbyn was elected with an overwhelming majority.

[Ironing Man]

3. ...

conversely, some 18,000 people voted for Woodcock in his constituancy, while - if we assume an equal distribution of votes over all UK constituancies, less than 400 people in that constituancy voted for Corbyn. is an MP there to represent his/her constituants, or to represent his/her leader in the constituancy?

party unity cannot exist while the person calling for party unity now they are leader was perfectly happy to ignore party unity whenever it conflicted with his personal views, and moreover when they went to great lengths to tell everyone how important it was that MP's should follow their conciences rather than party whip - it is the most rank, naked hypocracy, and whatever the Corbynites might want, that is never, ever going to change. it does not help that Corbyn has been missing open goals against the Tories on the EU, Benefits, splits and the Budget all in the one week.

if he was laying blows on them, but the effect was being diluted by the party infighting, they'd have a point - but he's not, he's not even touching them, and the whining about party infighting isn't about clearing the decks for battle against the tories, its about throwing a smokescreen over his appalling performance both as party leader and leader of the opposition and hoping people will concentrate on the smoke and not what its hiding.

to return to the issue - at the 2015 GE in Woodcocks constituancy, some 94% of those who voted (63% turn out) voted for candidates who support the retention of Trident and its replacement on a like-for-like basis with successor. thats 40,000 of the 43,000 who voted. makes that 400 Corbyn voters look a bit amemic...

[Bad Dog]

4. You are making a few leaps there.

I don't think people were considering minutiae like Trident when they voted, and Woodcock's constituency is just one.

I think Corbyn should be given a fair crack of the whip. He had an overwhelming majority and to try to overturn that so soon is unethical and would split the party.

I'm not overly impressed with his performance so far either, but he should at least be given the chance of May's council elections if not next year's too before any move against him could be considered legitimate.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

5. Corbyn had a bare majority, not an overwhelming one.

Admittedly, in a four-person election that's still a non-trivial mandate from the party membership, but to say "Corbyn had an overwhelming majority" is simply false.

I agree about not moving against him till after May, though. For what it's worth, while I despise Corbyn, and think he is the best thing to happen to the Tories since Foot, I'm cautiously optimistic that his strategy of energising the core vote rather than going for mass appeal may work reasonably well in low-turnout elections like the ones in May.

Of course, if Labour do well in the May elections it will mean he's more likely to still be in place in 2020, which matter far more and will be far less susceptible to that approach, so it will be far from an unmixed blessing.

[Bad Dog]

6. He romped home with over fifty percent of the vote in the first round.

Compared to Ed Milliband's election it was pretty overwhelming.

I think it's still too early to tell, Corbyn may galvanise the youth and win back disaffected and non voters, or it may be a return to the 80s. One thing is for certain a lack of unity will hand the election to the Tories. Corbyn should be given a chance. I didn't vote for him btw.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

7. I think your antipenultimate and penultimate sentences are at odds.

I do not think Corbyn will be able to unify the party - his history makes it impossible for him to demand that other MPs obey the whip without breathtaking hypocrisy.

I'm also far from convinced he *wants* to unify the party; I think he probably sees moving the Labour party back to the left as a more important goal than winning office, and he wants to defeat the moderates rather than conciliate them.

[Bad Dog]

8. I've been pretty consistent throughout.

You seem more concerned with internecine warfare than fighting the Tories. I wasn't just the left that was to blame for electoral failure in the 80s, it was also the likes of Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and David Owens.

[Ken Burch]

12. The "moderates" don't want to be conciliated.

None of them would accept anything short of imposing Liz Kendall as leader.

They all want internal party democracy permanently suppressed;

They all want to keep denying the party conference and rank-and-file party activists any real say in what the party stands for(and therefore force the party back to standing for nothing as it did all through the Blair years);

They want the party to not only renounce nationalization, but support the benefits cap AND the budget charter(in other words, to give up the only tools Labour could ever possibly use to help workers and the poor);

They want the party to unquestioningly support war against Syria and Ukraine...even though that would make it impossible for Labour to have any humane or social democratic aspects to its foreign policy at all, since compassion and the use of force can never co-exist and since no war anywhere can ever have non-reactionary results anywhere;

They all want all of the new party members driven away again-and they keep spreading the slur that only "Trots" support Corbyn(as if there were ever 250,000 "Trots" in the whole of the UK);

None would even accept Lisa Nandy.

They all thought Ed Miliband was too far left(never mind that there is no position on the issues to Ed's right that is distinguishable from Toryism.

If the moderates get there way, there will be no good reason ever to vote Labour again. The Third Way can never have anything positive to offer the people of the UK. War can never liberate anyone again and market economics cannot have a human face.

[T_i_B]

13. Er, no.

For starters, a lot of the Blairites chose Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper over Liz Kendall. Kendall ran a catastrophic leadership campaign, and that's the sort of thing Blairites tend not to forget.

For another thing, you don't need to be a dogmatic ultra Blairite to have issues with the current Labour leadership. The best thing Labour can do right now is to stop the infighting and work together. If they can't work as a team then there really isn't much hope for them.

[Ken Burch]

14. I'd be more persuaded of that if the "moderates" were willing

to make some efforts to reach out to Corbyn and his supporters and acknowledge the validity of at least some of what the Corbyn movement stands for.

None of them are, though.

As a bloc, the anti-Corbyn types have made it clear they will settle for nothing short of the complete obliteration of Corbynism, the permanent abolition of any possibility of internal party democracy and the imposition of a totally right-wing platform.

If they get their program in place(no nationalization at all, permanent acceptance of the budget charter, permanent acceptance of the benefits cap) they would make any Labour victory achieved on that program utterly meaningless. Nothing social democratic would ever be possible again. No other tools for creating social and economic change exist if you accept all of those constraints.

What possible reason would there be for the Labour Party to continue to exist?

[T_i_B]

15. Actually, plenty are making that effort

They might not get any credit or gratitude for it, but the likes of Andy Burnham and Toby Perkins are making some effort to reach out beyond the Blairite bubble.

[Ken Burch]

16. You wouldn't put Woodcock in that category, though.

And these people should remember that if Burnham or Yvette Cooper had been elected leader, Corbyn and his supporters wouldn't be leading a scorched-earth campaign to force either of them out of the job.

[T_i_B]

9. That's some desperate spin right there

Spin it all that you want, Corbyn has a huge leadership mandate, far greater than Blair had in 1994.

That mandate makes it extraordinarily difficult for the PLP to get rid of Corbyn. And the behaviour of many Blairites, who frequently eschew opposition to Tory policy, or any positive ideas of their own in favour of sectarian whingeing only makes matters worse.

You don't need to spin the leadership election numbers to oppose Corbyn. His virtues and faults are plain to see. What is required is for the moderate left to get it's own act together rather than bitching about everyone else.

[Ken Burch]

11. No one the anti-Corbyn types would accept as leader would stand for anything.

The moderates don't care about workers and the poor. You can't be for the budget charter and the benefits cap and the now-useless Bomb and against restoring internal party democracy and still want anything progressive or humane for the UK.

Going back to Blairism means making Labour meaningless.

There's no difference between being "moderate" and just being a Thatcherite.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

17. I'm curious - how much of that is just venting, and how much do you think is literally true? N.T.

[Ken Burch]

18. I read Labour List and the New Statesman online on a regular basis. Sometimes "Labour Uncut" too.

What is said in those sites represents the entirety of anti-Corbyn thinking.

The anti-Corbyn types not only demand that Labour stay pro-nuclear and keep backing the unwinnable wars in Syria and Ukraine they want the party to accept the benefits cap and the budget charter. And want to make sure that internal democracy is never restored. This is consistent among all the anti-Corbyn posters and articles I have seen there.

if Labour commits to all of those constraints, that gets rid of any possibility of a Labour government doing anything different from the Tories at all. There is nothing social democratic, progressive, or even humane that can be done while accepting the status quo on foreign policy, spending policy, the role of the state in the economy, and the role of ordinary party members within Labour.

Can you see how devastating it would be for Labour to commit itself to all of that? How utterly pointless it would make voting Labour?
What could a Labour leader who accepted all of the above do that even mattered, if that leader ever became prime minister? What reason would there be for Labour to even exist?

[Denzil_DC]

19. John Woodcock's constituency is Barrow-in-Furness!

You know, where the subs are built. What a massive surprise that people there overwhelmingly support Trident, let alone woodcock himself.

How on earth is that representative of more typical constituencies?

[Ken Burch]

10. Corbyn supporters haven't persecuted anyone.

Labour wouldn't be any better off in the polls if one of the Blairism Forever candidates had won the leadership.

The voters of the UK aren't demanding that Labour become indistinguishable from the Tories.