Tag Archives: yvette cooper

George Osborne’s ‘confetti’ incident: what a lot of fuss over such a little thing!

Unbelievable: this innocent sprinkling of confetti at George Osborne’s wedding has been likened by former Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls to the murder of Jo Cox.

The furore stoked by politicians and the mass media over a smiling pensioner throwing confetti over George Osborne at his wedding must defy belief.

Confetti-throwing is a well-loved tradition that one may usually expect to see after any wedding ceremony.

Ah, but this confetti was orange, meaning it – and the lady who threw it – were instantly linked with climate protesters Just Stop Oil. And they’ve continued to be linked to that organisation, even after it denied any connection:

It said: “The lady who threw confetti in Bruton yesterday was upholding a tradition that is common across many cultures. We absolutely defend the right for people to throw confetti (of whatever colour) at weddings and other celebrations.

“If it was a form of protest – which is yet to be established – we applaud it and thank the person concerned. It was peaceful and not especially disruptive, but got massive media attention for Just Stop Oil’s demand.”

But it continued: “However, as much as we applaud the use of orange confetti at this wedding, we were not responsible.”

That seems as straightforward as it gets.

So why is the incident still being linked to the protest group, and why are politicians from the Labour Party getting on the bandwagon to support George Osborne who, together with David Cameron, is the most directly responsible for the austerity policies that have been destroying the British way of life since 2010?

Here’s Rachel Reeves – who, as Shadow Chancellor, should be intimately familiar with Osborne’s economic recklessness – ignoring the fact that if it weren’t for demonstrations of protest at highly-publicised events, she might not have the right to vote today, let alone the right to be a member of Parliament who’s eyeing the second-highest office in the land:

What are the “better ways” that Labour is using to tackle the climate emergency, after party leader Keir Starmer cancelled its environmental policy and told us all that he hates “tree-huggers”? It doesn’t have any – that are visible to This Writer.

How about former Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls who, as a co-presenter of ITV’s Good Morning Britainshouted down guest Owen Jones for daring to point out that Osborne’s austerity policies led to the deaths of many, many people:

Did you notice how Daily Mail columnist and GB News presenter Andrew Pierce tried to stop Jones being heard when he realised what the subject would be? “You’re losing the room, Owen” – he was saying the other people in the TV studio would not be interested in the mass deaths of many people who could have been watching their show today if not for the Tory policy that he (Pierce) supported then and probably supports now.

And then Balls opened his big mouth so Jones could not get a word in edgeways. And Jones – controversial though he may be – was the one in the right. Balls defeated his own aim by overtalking him; clearly the former Shadow Chancellor wanted to defend his former political enemy (leading us to question whether Osborne was ever really Ed Balls’s political enemy) and didn’t want the opposing view to be heard.

And wasn’t Ed Balls invited to George Osborne’s wedding?

Not satisfied with what he had already done, Balls made himself even more ridiculous by equating the practice of throwing confetti at a wedding with the murder of the late Labour MP Jo Cox. “Cremant Communarde”‘s comment is pertinent:

Again, Owen Jones was in the right: “It belittles [the death of Jo Cox at the hands of a far-right-wing extremist] to conflate the two.”

You have to question why Balls tried.

Was it because, as Aaron Bastani of Novara Media tweeted, “We have a political and media elite with no sense of proportion or common sense”?

He continued: “How can you start talking about Jo Cox in the same breath as someone throwing confetti? You can think both are wrong, fine, but this is obscene.”

Valid point.

Over on LBC, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy – in his actual day job (clearly representing his constituents is only for spare change) – bemoaned the fact that some confetti may have fallen on Osborne’s (latest) bride, Thea Rogers.

He considered it “unacceptable” that Ms Rogers (Mrs Osborne?) was subjected to this wedding-day tradition. Go figure.

And Pamela Fitzpatrick makes a much more valid point: Lammy was defending somebody who introduced measures that killed tens of thousands of people – hundreds of thousands, if you go with Owen Jones’s figures.

Those people can’t have weddings, or confetti; they no longer have lives. That is what’s unacceptable, in any matter concerning George Osborne and his ilk.

Why have we been subjected to this display of outrage by some of right-wing Labour’s most prominent flapping mouths? Is it because not only Ed Balls but also his wife, current Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, was at the wedding?

Knowing this, isn’t the real issue whether any of these right-wing Labour luminaries were ever really opposed to Osborne and his austerity policies?

To This Writer, what’s unacceptable in this situation is a current or former Opposition MP socialising with a person who is responsible for such mass death. As a protest symbol, orange confetti isn’t nearly strong enough.

And there are other controversies that the above has masked. How about this one?

So this One-Rule-For-Us Tory was happy to inflict poverty on millions, while gracing his then-paramour with an enormous pay rise.

And then there’s the so-called “poison pen” email that landed the night before the wedding. I won’t quote it here – look it up yourself – but it suggests that not only was Osborne romancing Ms Rogers while he was still married to someone else but also that he is a serial love cheat who had physical relationship with other women while he was with her.

If it’s true, then coupled with everything else we are presented with the history of a creature who deserves nothing but revulsion and rejection from any right-minded person. One questions the judgement of a Labour Party whose leaders defend him.


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If Angela Eagle or any other Labour MP is deselected, it’s because they’re NOT good at their job

Oh dear: Maybe Angela Eagle wishes she had spent a little less time falsely accusing Wallasey’s followers of Jeremy Corbyn of vandalising her office and more time standing up for the Labour Party.

Let’s get something perfectly clear: Labour’s reselection process is not about stabbing good MPs in the back; it is about getting the best possible election candidates.

If Yvette Cooper’s constituency party decides to let her go, then that’s the prerogative of the members.

That goes for Hilary Benn – he can’t dine out on his father’s reputation forever; Margaret Beckett; Jess Phillips; Margaret Hodge; Angela Eagle; Louise Ellman or whoever.

And if it means 70 sitting Labour MPs get replaced on the orders of their constituency parties, then that’s what will happen.

The fact that some Corbyn loyalists may also get the push shows that this isn’t some leftie conspiracy, despite what some of the sore egos in the party are telling the news-hacks.

Apparently, incumbents have until July 8 (Monday) to tell the Labour executive whether they want to stand for election again. One or two have already said they won’t – and it would probably be more dignified for some of the others if they did the same.

After Monday, the process moves on to the members; if one-third of a constituency’s branches vote to remove their MP, then the matter will be decided by a “trigger” ballot.

To be honest, many MPs who are “triggered” probably won’t lose their chance to be re-elected, because one-third of branches is not a majority of members; while incumbents may have to stand for re-selection, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

It seems some are trying to organise a way of manipulating the system to prevent de-selection. But in light of the above, this seems over-the-top.

So when the i online quotes MPs as saying

“It’s another example of how they [the Corbyn leadership]aren’t going to take their foot off our throats until they’ve choked us.”

or

“People are really angry about it. It could mean a lot of really good, hard-working MPs are affected.”

it’s likely to be hyperbole.

This is about clearing the wheat from the chaff – not about divesting Labour of talented representatives.

Source: 70 Labour MPs including Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn face deselection before next election

Tory rebellion inflicts historic defeat on government over ‘guerilla’ bid to stop no-deal Brexit

At last! They took their time about it but 20 Conservative MPs have finally shown that they have spines and rebelled against Theresa May’s threat to inflict a no-deal Brexit on the UK.

They supported Yvette Cooper’s amendment to the Finance Bill (that’s the Budget, isn’t it?) that means the government will have to seek approval from Parliament for tax changes in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

You can find their names here – and they include some high-ranking grandees, although Oliver Letwin and Kenneth Clarke are likely to have supported the Labour amendment for sharply contrasting reasons.

It might not seem like much, but it effectively means Theresa May would be unable to use any money to mitigate effects of such a departure from the EU that would harm her own interests, because Parliament would not allow it.

It is also hugely historic as the first time a government has lost a Finance Bill vote in 41 years. These are treated as “motions of confidence”, meaning that Parliament does not have confidence in the government’s ability to run the UK’s affairs properly, based on the conditions described in the legislation.

The amendment means that if the government wanted to use specific powers in the finance bill to implement “no deal”, it would have to give Parliament a vote first or apply to extend article 50. The amendment doesn’t affect the normal operations of the Treasury and government, but it does make it harder for the government to drift into no deal without parliament being able to direct it.

That’s why Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn turned around and applauded Ms Cooper when the result of the vote was read out.

It also shows that Mrs May’s government has its back against the wall. With 20 Conservatives so committed to foiling a no-deal Brexit that they would back a Labour amendment, she must ensure that her deal is passed by the Commons when it comes to the “meaningful vote” on Tuesday (January 15).

As matters stand at the moment, it won’t.

We have seen from the vote on Ms Cooper’s amendment that the government’s Parliamentary majority is tiny, and depends on all Conservative MPs voting for its legislation, along with the 10 members of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

The rebellion over the amendment shows there is not enough support for a “no deal” Brexit. But the DUP will not support her deal without legally binding assurances over the so-called Northern Irish border “backstop” – and the EU has already made it perfectly clear that those assurances aren’t coming.

Mrs May has no options left, it seems.

Of course she could let the clock run down without finding any solution to these issues. But that would be extremely irresponsible and would cement her place in history as the worst failure as prime minister the UK has ever had. She needs to find answers, or accept the fact that she will go down into posterity as a figure of ridicule.

And Opposition MPs are also said to be planning similar amendments to other crucial government legislation, such as the Trade Bill, and legislation on Fisheries and on Healthcare, to ensure that the only way for the government to take the UK out of the EU without a deal would be with the expressed consent of a majority of MPs. This is considered that start of a “guerrilla” campaign against “no deal” Brexit.

Theresa May is now at tipping-point. All her decisions, her cowardice and ineptitude, have led her to this.

She can’t do any more deals because nobody in Europe is interested and she has double-crossed all her possible allies in the UK, simply to get this far.

She can’t offer any more bribes because she has already given away peerages and other honours like sweets, to no avail.

So, what will she do?

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Immigration minister humiliated over information sharing blunder

Caroline Nokes: It seems she prefers horses to human beings.

Caroline Nokes – what a piece of work.

She tried to bluff Home Affairs Select Committee chair Yvette Cooper that she didn’t have the relevant information to deal with a case in which serious defects had been discovered in accommodation for seven asylum-seeking mothers with young children. The house was infested with vermin.

Here’s how the conversation unfolded:

“You didn’t need telepathy; all you needed was a telephone.” I’m no fan of Ms Cooper, but she was absolutely right there.

Ms Nokes’s response – that she “would be very pleased” to receive the information – was belied by her icy expression and body language.

And when Ms Cooper asked, “Might you not have wanted to make that call yourself rather than leaving it for us to do in this public way?” it was telling that Ms Nokes paused for a long time before adding: “I think that is a conversation I need to have with my officials.”

I think we can all tell what that conversation was going to be.

It wasn’t going to be about them failing to get the information she needed to help asylum-seeking mothers.

It was going to be about the fact that Ms Nokes had been made to look a fool in public.

She doesn’t care about those mothers, their children, or the rodent-infested house to which they have been banished.

She didn’t show the slightest interest in their plight, or in helping them out of it.

If she had been interested in such matters, then the problem would have been solved months ago (a damning report had been issued in July).

Remember: This is the Tory minister who defended a policy to accelerate the deportation of hunger-striking women at Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre.

This is the attitude typical of Conservative ministers in Theresa May’s government.

Their concern is for their own advancement – not for the provision of a service to the public.

They take after their leader in that respect.

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Brown’s speech – unintentionally in support of Corbyn?

Gordon Brown during his speech at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Image: John Stillwell/PA

Gordon Brown during his speech at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Image: John Stillwell/PA

At first, it seemed that Gorden Brown had agreed with Tony Blair for the first time in more than a decade – over the threat to neoliberal New Labour Blairites posed by Jeremy Corbyn.

Big deal.

Of course the other architect of New Labour was going to speak up against Jeremy Corbyn’s candidature to lead the Labour Party. Brown is almost as right-wing as Blair.

It doesn’t stop them both being on the wrong side of history.

The joy of Brown’s speech is that much of it was non-specific. He didn’t refer to any of the candidates by name, and advised that Labour must be “credible, radical, sustainable and electable to help people out of poverty, and that anger was not enough” (according to The Guardian).

Nobody would disagree with that, and Corbyn supporters would argue that the only candidate endorsed by such a statement was theirs; Burnham, Cooper and Kendall – by embracing the nonsense of austerity economics – will only make poverty worse while enriching those who already have enough.

The Guardian article continues: “In a clear reference to Corbyn, he said there was one camp whose own supporters even did not believe their candidate would win the next election” – but this is hardly a ringing endorsement of the others, whose policies (along with Brown’s own) have already lost not just one election but two.

“Brown said he was heartbroken and the party grieving after the general election defeat in May, but that it would be ‘even worse if we leave ourselves powerless to do anything about it’” – powerless as the party would be under a Burnham, a Cooper or a Kendall, whose policies would be so close to those of the Conservatives that the electorate would give up on any possibility of opposition and leave the Tories to it?

“Analysing some of the reasons people may have turned to Corbyn’s left-wing politics, he said people were feeling insecure about globalisation, which had left people ‘uncertain and unmoored’ and turned people to nationalism in countries from Greece to Scotland”. This was a clear miss. People aren’t insecure about globalisation; they know for a fact that it represents an attack on their wealth, security and well-being.

Globalisation helps the rich to get richer and pushes the poor down – the behaviour of the European Union over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership tells us all we need to know about it.

Attacking Corbyn’s foreign policy, Brown said: “Don’t tell me that we can do much for the poor of the world if the alliances we favour most are with Hezbollah, Hamas, Chávez’s successor in Venezuela and Putin’s totalitarian Russia.”

This is a deliberate attempt at disinformation. Corbyn has not indicated agreement with the views of any of those people or organisations. Instead, Corbyn is far more likely to put forward policy agreeing with Brown’s claim that Labour should form progressive alliances, especially within Europe, against “illiberalism, totalitarianism, antisemitism, racism and the extremisms of prejudice”.

Brown’s claim that it is “not an abandonment of principles to seek power” and that Labour members should see their vote not as a protest but a “public duty and sacred trust” also chimes with the Corbyn campaign.

It is only Corbyn’s opponents who paint him and his policies as unelectable. The wider Labour Party clearly sees his policies as preferable by far to the watered-down Conservatism that people like Brown, Blair, and their supporters like Alastair Campbell, Simon Danczuk and John Mann have been peddling for the last 20 years.

Indeed, the idea that a Labour vote is a “public duty and sacred trust” merely highlights the growing belief among the Labour Party and the electorate at large that New Labour, and Labour under Ed Miliband, betrayed that trust, abandoning their sacred duty to the people in order to embrace the profanity that is neoliberalism.

“The best way of realising our high ideals is to show that we have an alternative in government that is credible, that is radical and is electable – is neither a pale imitation of what the Tories offer nor is it the route to being a party of permanent protest, rather than a party of government,” said Brown, not realising that he had just written off the chances of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall in one sentence.

For those who do not understand: The three non-Corbyns don’t have any high ideals. Their alternative is not credible – otherwise Labour would not have lost the 2010 and 2015 elections. It is a pale imitation of the Conservatives and it has led Labour into the twilight of being a party of protest, rather than government.

Actually – are we sure Brown wasn’t supporting Corbyn? The Guardian continues: “People must vote not for the candidate they ‘like’ as they would on Facebook, but for the candidate who can make a difference, he added.” That’s resounding support for Corbyn.

In support of the policies Corbyn opposes, Brown quoted, among others, Gandhi asking: “Is what I am about to do going to help”, and Nelson Mandela saying the yardstick by which he would be measured was the ability to better the lives of all people. Against this, we need set only one of Brown’s policies: Employment and Support Allowance and its accompanying ‘work capability assessment’.

This single policy, begun by New Labour and continued by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition and now the Conservative Government, has led to more than 10,000 known deaths and possibly many tens of thousands that have been hidden from the public. Perhaps Mr Brown should be asking how that single policy was ever intended to help anybody in need.

In the end, Brown will probably be seen as having done more harm to the three stooges other candidates than to Jeremy Corbyn.

Brace yourself for a further surge in support – for the people’s candidate.

 

Guardian seems happy to carry on Corbyn-bashing. Why?

Look how hard-left he is! He's wearing a cap and speaking in the open air! But anti-Corbyn hysterics in the media are the one's who look silly.

Look how hard-left he is! He’s wearing a cap and speaking in the open air! But anti-Corbyn hysterics in the media are the ones who look silly.

Wasn’t The Guardian forced to analyse its own coverage, only a few days ago, amid complaints that it was overly critical of Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn?

The verdict was that some articles had taken an overly-‘anti’ tone – but they’re still coming. Today’s Observer (the Graun‘s Sunday sister) has three in a row.

Yvette Cooper: ‘You can be strong without being extreme’ begins with the tagline, “The Labour leadership candidate says she understands the frustration and anger of Corbyn supporters but warns against losing the wider electorate.”

It continues: “The wholly unexpected obstacle to Cooper’s ambition to be Labour’s first female leader is the hard-left Jeremy ‘Jez We Can’ Corbyn.”

So Jeremy Corbyn is “extreme”, is he? He’s “hard-left”? When was that decided?

Most rational thinkers in the UK now accept that Corbyn is absolutely not “extreme” or “hard-left”. He’s left-wing in the classical Labour mould, in line with most of Labour’s loyal membership. If labels like “extreme”, or “hard” are to be applied anywhere, they would more properly belong with fellow candidates Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and especially Liz Kendall, whose attitudes – in Labour terms – would be described most accurately as “hard-right“.

Here’s another article – no headline this time, just straight into the aggro: “With Labour fixated by Corbyn, the Tories have taken advantage of a feeble opposition. Here’s how they did it…”

The text itself makes no mention of Corbyn – he’s just a handy peg on which the sub-editors have hung a headline. The author, Daniel Boffey, accepts that Labour could not be at full strength while the future leader is unnamed and shadow cabinet members have no idea whether they are likely to remain in their posts.

Finally, we have Jeremy Corbyn suggests he would bring back Labour’s nationalising clause IV. Apparently we are supposed to think this is a bad thing but the text of the article betrays the headline once again.

“I think we should talk about what the objectives of the party are, whether that’s restoring clause IV as it was originally written or it’s a different one,” is what Corbyn actually said.

He’s telling the country that, as Labour leader, he would listen to the wishes of his supporters and work to give them what they want.

That’s better than Burnham, Cooper and Kendall rolled together – and much more than the likes of David Cameron, Boris Johnson or George Osborne would ever willingly provide (although we know that their offers aren’t worth the air used to speak them or the paper on which they are written).

This Blog is happy to support Jeremy Corbyn – if only for one simple reason:

He is the only Labour leadership candidate to have shown any support for the Early Day Motion calling for the Conservative Government to publish statistics on the deaths of Incapacity Benefit and Employment and Support Allowance claimants (EDM 285).

In fact, he co-sponsored it.

It was signed by 93 other MPs in the week or so between its creation and the day Parliament went into recess for the summer. I’ve been reminded that Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall cannot sign EDMs because they are members of the shadow cabinet and are barred from doing so. Why haven’t they spoken in favour of it, then? How many of their supporters have signed it?

What does that say about those other leadership candidates?

Does it not tell us that they are happy to collude with the Conservatives in keeping the casualties hidden?

And here’s another good question:

Why aren’t newspapers like The Guardian asking Burnham, Cooper and Kendall about that, rather than stirring up non-existent muck about Corbyn?

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Labour is a ‘headless chicken’ over tax credits

Open mouth, insert foot: Harriet Harman made her Tax Credits mistake on yesterday's (July 12) Sunday Politics TV show.

Open mouth, insert foot: Harriet Harman made her Tax Credits mistake on yesterday’s (July 12) Sunday Politics TV show.

Harriet Harman has softened her position on George Osborne’s ’emergency’ budget; while she still supports his tax credit cuts, she says she is “happy to be overruled” after a backlash from rank-and-file party members (including This Writer).

The statement follows another backlash against a local party official who wrote to others in an attempt to stop Constituency Labour Parties from giving their support to leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn, who currently has the second-highest number of CLP nominations.

The person responsible for the latest attempt to rig the Labour leadership election (the first being the ridiculous ‘Tories for Corbyn’ campaign) – Luke Akehurst – was taken to task by fellow Labour members (including, again, This Writer) on Twitter. Pressed to explain his attitude, he referred us to a blog piece he wrote before the general election which appears to explain much that is wrong about the current attitude of some of Labour’s leading lights.

It’s all about ‘triangulation’, rather than ‘dividing lines’, Mr Akehurst reckons.

He writes: “It involves adopting for oneself some of the ideas of one’s political opponent (or apparent opponent). The logic behind it is that it both takes credit for the opponent’s ideas, and insulates the triangulator from attacks on that particular issue.”

In the words of the late – great – Tony Benn, Mr Akehurst is calling for Labour and its leaders to be ‘weathercocks’ (triangulators) rather than ‘signposts’ (adopting dividing lines against their main opposition). Mr Benn said some politicians are like signposts. They point in the direction they want to travel and say, “This is the way we must go!” And they are constant. Others are like weathercocks; they lick their fingers, find out which direction the political winds are blowing and follow.

Mr Benn would have been witheringly opposed to a weathercock like Luke Akehurst.

Triangulation leaves Labour without any principles of its own – the party ends up wasting time, chasing other people’s policies like (to stretch Mr Benn’s “weathercock” analogy) a headless chicken.

This brings us back to Harriet Harman. Instead of defending tax credits as a way of ensuring a certain standard of living and encouraging people to be good parents – the position of the Labour Party when it introduced tax credits a little over 10 years ago – she thought the wind was blowing in George Osborne’s direction and decided to let it blow her along with it. Big mistake.

Osborne’s tax credit raid will make working people and parents significantly poorer than they are now – and this is even after five years of being hammered by cut after Tory cut.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said the rise in the minimum wage heralded by Osborne in his budget to offset his benefit cuts would raise £4 billion for families, while they would lose £12 billion in government help.

The freeze in working-age benefits, tax credits and local housing allowance will deprive 13 million households of £260 a year, on average.

And Harriet Harman supported it. That position does not correspond with Labour Party principles. It’s the position of a headless chicken.

Look at what has happened now: Harman has been forced to backtrack, with a spokesperson saying she had been “setting out an attitude that we are not going to oppose everything”. Headless chicken.

Sadly, Labour’s leadership candidates offered a mixed response. Liz Kendall fully supported Harriet Harman’s position – most probably because she is a closet Tory.

Andy Burnham’s spokesperson (!) said he did not support the tax credit cuts but added that he “will not offer blanket opposition and, where we agree with a government policy, we won’t oppose for the sake of it”. Headless chicken.

Yvette Cooper said she opposed the cuts because they would “hit working families, reduce work incentives and push more children into poverty”. On the fact of it, that’s good. However, she would be another extension of the New Labour disaster, which was all about ‘triangulation’, as Mr Akehurst’s article illustrates. Headless chicken.

The only ‘signpost’ among the lot of them – the only one with solid Labour principles – is Jeremy Corbyn. He said he was “not willing to vote for policies that will push more children into poverty” – and when he said it, he didn’t mean he might change his mind tomorrow, or whenever it becomes expedient. He means he is not willing to push more children into poverty – ever. Signpost.

We need more people like Jeremy Corbyn leading Labour – and fewer like Harriet Harman.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Frankie Boyle disparages Labour’s right-wing leader candidates – with uncomfortable facts

Frankie Boyle

There is a problem with criticising people for failing to say what they mean in a straightforward way. It arises when you do exactly the same thing.

Frankie Boyle’s critique of the Labour leader candidates in The Guardian is very amusing but falls prey to exactly this problem. He makes several good points, but they’re a long way down the page. Why? So people will lose interest and stop reading before they get to them? Let’s pull them out and give them a proper airing.

Political parties are meant to have guiding principles. Frankie mentions this way down in the fifth paragraph, after revealing: “We’re told that they are responding to the concerns of voters. Labour keeps saying: ‘We’re concerned about immigration because that’s what people say on the doorstep’,” which is guaranteed to stimulate yawns as we’ve all heard it many times before.

Labour did have guiding principles once. They were intended to improve prosperity for everybody in the UK by raising the people who did the work out of the poverty that the leisure class (the people who profit from unearned wealth) force them to endure. So Labour used to stand for cheap accommodation, cheap – but nutritious – food, affordable utilities (gas, electricity, water), nationalised healthcare, a living wage, good government – all the things that helped Jeremy Corbyn score so highly in Newsnight‘s televised hustings a few nights ago.

Ah, but Corbyn, despite being lauded as “one of the few decent politicians remaining in the Labour Party”, is talked down as a candidate who caused “the left of the party to get quite excited that it is still allowed to lose”. He’s saying all the right things, Frankie. People are connecting with him. Don’t write him off so blithely.

Can it really be easier to convert Tories than to reconnect with your own core support? Of course not, but Frankie hits on one of the largest elephants in Labour’s room. It’s just a shame he does it in his concluding paragraph. He reckons Burnham, Cooper and Kendall get their information on what voters want from what businesspeople say (they’re desperate to be pro-business without knowing what it means), polls (which Frankie rightly says can be misleading) and the media (which are, again, rightly labelled deliberately misleading). As a result, they end up campaigning on all the wrong issues and turn potential supporters away, rather than attracting them.

Why does being ‘pro-business’ have to mean being ‘anti-worker’? The three leading – actually they’re not leading anything at all in the eyes of the public; let’s call them ‘preferred’ – candidates seem determined to disappear up their own rear ends, trying to explain how they will support the kind of people who couldn’t care less about anything other than building their own wealth, even though this creates misery for the workers on whose efforts it is built. Frankie hits it on the head when he writes: “I’m reduced to imagining that ‘pro-business’ is simply a rhetorical code for ‘right-wing’, and that we are watching leadership contenders wonder aloud whether they are being right-wing enough.”

We end up with a leadership campaign aimed at a public who hate benefits, immigrants and shirkers. Benefits and shirkers are in fact the same issue, but Frankie is right to highlight it. Labour introduced the most punitive benefit-cancelling system in British history – Employment and Support Allowance – in 2008 and the party line is still to say that there’s nothing wrong with it in principle, even though its implementation has led to many thousands of deaths that the DWP has already admitted – and who knows how many that it is covering up (see Vox Political‘s many articles on the subject). The simple fact is that Labour is afraid of newspapers saying the party is soft on ‘shirker’ benefit claimants, and is instead forcing itself to persecute people who desperately need help, just to stay alive. That is a Tory Party attitude.

There is a very simple case to be made against austerity, but Labour doesn’t have the guts to make it. Jeremy Corbyn did.

Still, they must know that they are not going to win the next election. This is the most damning claim of all. A decade ago, the Conservative Party was finished, washed up; a joke. All Labour had to do was keep a steady hand on the tiller and the Nasty Party would have been banished to history.

But Labour couldn’t do that. It had been infiltrated by neoliberal might-as-well-be-Tories who pushed harmful policies including ESA and the failure to regulate the banks that eventually sucked the UK into the global financial crisis and allowed the Tories to create a myth that Labour had messed up the economy. If Labour is unlikely to win elections now, it is that party’s own fault for giving the Tories a chance – by being too much like the Tories themselves.

Now we have three ‘preferred’ leader candidates who want Labour to be different from the Conservative Party only in nuance.

Let’s vote for the one who wants Labour to be the Labour Party again.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Labour leadership: Campaign for ‘None Of The Above’ box on the ballot paper looms

It seems likely that the only Labour leadership candidates to appear on the ballot paper for ordinary members will be Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, depriving ordinary members of a socialist option.

Kendall might as well be a member of the Conservative Party and will turn Labour into a pale copy. Cooper and Burnham appear to be little better.

Creagh has too few supporters at the time of writing – as does Corbyn. The lack of support for his left-wing, anti-austerity option is a sad indication of the depths to which the Parliamentary Labour Party has fallen.

The Labour leadership candidates are engaged in a last-minute scramble for endorsements ahead of nominations opening later on Tuesday, although Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall already have enough supporters to get on the ballot.

The real issue now is what the grassroots Labour Party does about all this. Labour’s membership is now clearly far more left-wing than its MPs – as is the population in general, which supports the renationalisation of utilities, the removal of private companies from the National Health Service and the end of Iain Duncan Smith’s death penalty for people claiming incapacity benefits (all right, the last may be a slight exaggeration – but only a slight one).

The way the field looks at the moment, we could end up with a lame duck leader who will not command the support of the party in general – or the people of the UK.

Perhaps now is the time to demand a box on the ballot paper marked ‘None Of The Above’, for those of us who don’t believe in any of the candidates being pushed on us by the Parliamentary Party.

Contact interim leader Harriet Harman by emailing [email protected]

Source: Labour’s leadership race: nominations deadline looms | Politics | The Guardian

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Labour’s next leader must challenge Tories’ poisonous myths

Here’s Kevin Maguire, writing in the Daily Mirror:

Labour’s next leader will become trapped in a maze of Tory lies unless he or she challenges a string of poisonous myths.

I badgered Ed Miliband for years in this column to prove spending by the last Labour Government didn’t trigger the 2008 global financial collapse.

The national debt was a smaller proportion of GDP before the banking crisis than Labour had inherited from the Conservatives in 1997.

Failing to regulate the spivs and speculators was the catastrophic error, not reviving the NHS or putting money into workers’ pay packets.

Economists knew it, the Bank of England governor knew it and so too did David Cameron and George Osborne – but the Tory duo ­cynically pinned the blame for the crisis on Labour’s spending plans.

The problem is, of course, that many of the politicians who now claim to represent Labour values are quite happy to let this Tory lie go unchallenged.

Those of us who know the facts have been telling everybody we can for the last five years and more, but we simply don’t have the mass media clout needed to get the message across.

People like the right-wing Labour leadership candidates (everyone apart from Jeremy Corbyn) and Harriet Harman can’t be bothered to correct a ‘big lie’ that has been repeated so often that people now believe it automatically.

They’ve got their Parliamentary seats and pensions; they’re doing quite all right out of all this, thank you very much.

Maguire makes some more useful points, which are well worth repeating, if you have ignorant friends:

The whole welfare debate is skewed when we wrongly think £24 in every £100 of the social security budget is fiddled. In reality, it’s just 70p.

The Department of Work and Pensions pumps out these tales to justify deep cuts. The £1.2 billion a year benefit fraud is pennies next to a great tax robbery soaring to as high as £120 billion.

Yet the Treasury and HMRC prefer cosy private deals with wealthy dodgers while what crooked US socialite Leona Helmsley referred to as the “little people” are thrown to the hounds.

And how about this:

It isn’t just the economic debate that’s distorted by myths. Immigrants pay in more than they take off the system.

Only reactionaries and racists benefit when it’s thought 24% of the population are recent migrants when it’s 13%.

Standing up for decent values requires politicians to tell hard truths and never pander to prejudices.

That’s not going to happen in a Labour Party led by Burnham, Cooper, Creagh or Kendall, then.

Source: Labour’s next leader must learn from Ed Miliband’s mistakes and challenge Tories’ poisonous myths – Kevin Maguire – Mirror Online

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