Lend Corbyn your nomination, Labour MPs – let’s have a REAL debate
Five-time Parliamentary ‘Beard of the Year’ – the likeable Jeremy Corbyn.
If any of you have been struggling to work out whether you know anything at all about Jeremy Corbyn, you are not alone!
This Writer has also been at something of a loss with regard to his personality and achievements.
So let’s all be grateful to Owen Jones, who knows Mr Corbyn well, for scribbling a few details into his latest Guardian comment piece.
According to Owen, Mr Corbyn is:
- The very antithesis of the negative caricature of an MP: he’s defined by his principles and beliefs, uninterested in personal self-advancement, and determined to use his platform to further the interests of people and causes that are otherwise ignored.
- One of the most likable MPs – and a five-time winner of Parliamentary Beard of the Year.
- A proponent of peace, a staunch internationalist (he was protesting against Saddam Hussein when the west was arming him), a fervent believer in workers’ rights, and an opponent of austerity whoever peddles it
Not only does he seem exactly what we’re looking for, he even seems to fit what people in this nation genuinely want, as Owen explains:
“According to the polls, millions of Britons support a living wage, a radical house building programme, public ownership of utilities and services and higher taxes on the rich… Given their widespread backing, these policies surely at least need a hearing in the leadership contest of the dominant, purportedly left-of-centre party in Britain.”
In conclusion, this blog can only echo the article’s final words:
“If Labour MPs deny the party and the country a genuine debate, it will reflect disastrously on them. It will do whoever emerges victorious no good, either. Labour has just suffered one of the worst defeats in its history. If the party doesn’t have the good sense to have a meaningful debate now, you might wonder why it doesn’t just pack up. So come on, Labour MPs. Put your future careers aside for party and national interest.
“Lend Corbyn a nomination, and let a real debate begin.”
Hear, hear.
Hear, hear.
Dear Mr Jeremy Corbyn
1) Will you fight to reverse, please, the rise in retirement age for men and women, by using the Statutory Instrument available in government that needs only a 28 day notice to amend published law?
2) Will you fight to amend the Pension Bills 2010-2014
so that no-one is left with less than the basic state pension now,
again by using Statutory Instrument (SI) 28 day notices to amend law published and about to come into force, like the Pension Bill 2014 brings in the flat rate pension law on 6 April 2016?
3) Will a Labour party you lead,
work together with 56 SNP MPs
to amend the above bills using Statutory Instrument 28 days notices please?
4) Will you fight to amend law for the state pension to comply with the amount it should be under the EU Social Contract,
when current state pension is now the lowest state pension of all rich nations bar Mexico (source OECD).
5) Will you fight to amend law so that the flat rate pension does not abolish Pension Credit (savings) nor make guarantee credit more complex conditional for all ages or denied to a couple if either are below the raised retirement age under Universal Credit.
6) Seen is the lowest forecast for flat rate state pension of just £8.39 per week
after 45 years in work, all opted out.
7) Will you amend law, please, so that the SERPs opt out and National Insurance history is not merged by the flat rate pension, so wiping each other out.
8) Will you fight to amend with a SI, the Pension Bill 2014 that brought in the flat rate pension law 2016 so that certain people are not left without state pension for life:
a) housewives
b) widows
c) divorcees
d) those under 10 years National Insurance record, when now get some state pension after 1 year’s NI record.
d) hits the lowest paid workers below the Lower Earnings Level not getting automatic NI credits, which also hits those suffering the Salary Sacrifice System.
9) There is, of course, the fact that a full SERPs pension is £276.10 per week.
SERPs was another name for the National Insurance Fund from 6 April 1978, and never was extra money paid on top of your full standard rate of National Insurance contribution in work, nor did your boss pay extra to that top up.
The reduced National Insurance contributions paid by the worker and the 3.4 per cent rebate given to the boss from their employer NI contribution, still meant both were paying into the National Insurance Fund.
But now each year of this mythical SERPs opt out, means one year less NI record.
Well over half of new pensioners not only will not get the flat rate £155 per week much promised, but will actually get less than the basic state pension paid today.
This is an austerity cut against pensioners.
When so many of the core voters for Labour, before Labour went middle class so lost so badly to the Tories, have huge numbers who have no other pension provision, other by being too poor.
Or lost works pensions when companies went bust.
And / or lost private pensions when such as Equitable Life went bust, when
three quarters of the compensation is still being held back by government to the victims, years later.
Answer on Vox Political, and find the way to claw back to winning in some by election that might be called over the next 5 years.
Because the 70 per cent who did not vote for any party are waiting and a heck of a lot are the grey vote.
Await with great interest.
Well said Chris. That 15 million who did not vote at the last election is the key for the labour party and they will only rally around a person who can get the country back into some sort of normality
I am 60 and well-travelled and this country in all of its form is a million miles from my younger days and is probably the worst of any country that I’ve ever visited in its diversity of politics and its people
I myself have met many world leaders over the years and I can assure you that Mrs Thatcher and David Cameron are by far the worst in my living history
They only ever spoke about money and hard work without ever understanding what that meant and having be born into families where profit was their god they knew no better and today with David Cameron a millionaire inherited he still knows nothing but has a gift of talk although anyone educated would see that’s all bull
Yet somehow, he gets to run this country?
How odd is that a man born into a wealthy family with no idea of the realities of life be it in the UK or world and sets to take the UK over and make a fool of everyone
Well as bizarre as that it that is the truth and the only thing you can be sure of is that he will fail the main trouble here thou is that many innocent people will die like they have over the past 5 years with austerity measures
When Harold MacMillan said you’ve never had it so good there again they were just words that he was told he never once undertook his own research as if he had he would have found out that half of London still had nothing and even today that’s still the case
Even if your Labour MP has already declared their backing for another Labour candidate your MP can back Jeremy Corbyn because nominations haven’t officially opened yet.
Email your Labour MP. Request that, as he/she represents you, you would like him/her to officially nominate Jeremy Corbyn. It’s not too late to get them to change their mind !
Let’s not moan and groan about it, get active and get your Labour MP to hear you !! Encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbours to email their Labour MP. Strength in numbers :-)
There’s an updated list of who’s backing who here;http://labourlist.org/2015/06/whos-backing-who-and-who-did-endorsers-vote-to-be-leader-in-2010/
This guy is not really a Labour supporter he is a idealist Labour supporter and you will never get the average Joe Soap to support a party at an election with a leader like that.
He is a Labour MP.
I hope Corbyn is elected as leader of Labour. He is even more unelectable than Foot, Kinnock and Miliband. It should ensure the Conservatives stay in for another 10 years at least. It has been very entertaining watching the Labour party tearing itself apart recently.
Translation: The Conservatives are scared of this new development.
Corbyn is too far left to get elected by the UK. You would think by now that it was obvious that the UK doesn’t want socialism or anything approaching it.
Translation: Conservatives are very scared indeed.
Bring it on!
Personally I think he would be as big a disaster as Michael Foot
Or indeed Ed Miliband?
We’ll see.