I remember the eighties with clarity. I recall Margaret Thatcher winning election after election. I remember Michael Foot and that longest suicide note. I remember Militant Tendency. Now history is repeating itself.
And I remember when Tony Blair rose to prominence. Love him or loathe him, he was right about one thing – Labour does not win elections from the left, because England is not a left-wing country. It is, if anything, centre-right. Shifting Labour to the centre won Blair two elections. The first one was a landslide. But his own party hated him for it. Others hated him for other reasons.
It seems, though, that purity is more important than winning elections.
The Communication Workers Union has backed left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn in Labour’s leadership contest, saying the “grip of the Blairites” on the party must be “loosened once and for all”.
The union’s general secretary Dave Ward said Mr Corbyn was the “antidote” to the “virus within the Labour Party”.
Labour did not lose the election because it was not left-wing enough – despite what the deluded SJWs might claim. They are a minority, thank goodness. The majority do not want a left-wing government that steals the outputs of our labour and pisses it up the wall on pet projects, or favours for the party faithful. Jackart is right, I think, when he talks of the difference between what people say down the pub and what social media says.
Labour’s mistake is to take the lazy virtue-signalling on social media as what people actually think.
Also, Labour is determined not to learn from the mistakes of its past. Which, for those who shudder at the thought of another Labour government, is probably a good thing.
“what people say down the pub ” people have to watch what they say in case they get reported.
Many people who would like the UK to be back the way it was – white- but know they can lose their job if they say so.
T. Rex, The Sweet, Mott the Hoople, Mud… If you remove Tony Blair from the picture, the last time that Labour won an election was 1974, 41 years ago. Good luck guys.
Oh dear. Had you troubled to read them, you would discover that Corbyn’s policies are not remotely close to Militant’s. That the idiocracy bleats “extreme left wing” at ideas that are pretty run of the mill social democracy, just goes to show how far debate has been stifled amongst official purveyors of news in neo-liberal Britain. As for your stock objection to taxation as “stealing”, I think you’ll find that all governments do this to much the same degree. It is just that Corbyn thinks that the money would be better spent on public services rather than the mates of cabinet ministers.
Er, he wants to raise taxes. We do not need to raise taxes, we need to reduce the size of the state, stop pissing money away on charities and quangos and so on. Taxes may be a necessary evil, but they are still taking with force so are, in fact, theft. Miliband lost because he was too left wing. Corbyn is further to the left – that’s what social democracy is.