UK's Keir Starmer: Not the Leader Labour Needs

Labour can't gain any votes by telling socialists to go to hell or by supporting the bombing of Syria.   

 

If Corbyn stands down, it means the party is Blairite for the rest of eternity and it means Labour has no reason to exist.  There were clear votes in 2015 and 2017 to reject every part of the Blair legacy and Starmer would only represent the tiny, reactionary minority-virtually all of them MPs, since there is no grass-roots support for Labour not being socialist and not questioning militarism-who refuse to accept that Labour's policies and candidates should be decided by the people of the party, not by a discredited elite who haven't succeded at anything in fourteen years now.  There are no votes to be gained by Labour going back to the Nineties.  And there is no valid reason for anybody to still be obsessing about Brexit when it can't be prevented and when what matters is getting both the Tory party and Tory policies out of power.  Labour moderates aren't against Tory policies and should just stand down at the next election so their constituency parties can nominate candidates they actually agree with.

Labour lost the last two elections before Corbyn because it ran them the way the anti-Corbynites want Labour to run EVERY election.   Those outcomes prove that Labour can't ever win again running a bland, dismissive, centrist campaign that treats actual socialists like they're scum.

If it lost in 2010 and lost by a larger margin in 2015 doing things the way Corbyn's opponents want, why ever try running an election that way again?

And the plain fact is that soft Brexit-if it met Labour's five demands-would keep everything good in the EU while freeing the UK and Labour from everything bad.  There's no left case for staying in the EU and accepting its unchangeability.

NorthReport wrote:

UK Recent Election History

2017 - Labour only received 262 seats and lost with Corbyn as Leader

2015 - Labour only received 232 seats and lost with Milibrand as Leader

2010 - Labour only won 258 seats and lost with Brown as Leader

2005 - Labour won 355 seats and won with Blair as Leader

2001 - Labour won 413 seats and won with Blair as Leader

It's not rocket science. Either you want to win, or you don't. 

If you don't win, you don't get any of your ideas accepted.

If you win, no matter who you are, you will still only get some of your ideas accepted. 

Labour will not win with Corbyn. For the good of progressives he should step down. 

 

Labour would have won the elections Blair won no matter who led the party.  There never needed to be a renunciation of socialism and there never needed to be a commitment to be MORE militaristic than the Tories on foreign policy.  The voters were demanding neither.

Corbyn never deserved the sabotage campaign he has received from the MPs.  None of those who spent the last three years briefing against him or-as by campaigning against Labour in local elections and pushing for Corbyn's resignation during the 2017 general election even though it was impossible for a party to change leaders during an election campaign-Chuka Umunna did before finally admitting he wasn't Labour and never had been by helping invent a right-wing minor party.

Blair's approach was never the ONLY possible way for Labour to win.  And nobody would rally to the party if it kicked the socialists out again and its shadow cabinet started palling around with CEOs again.

Blair is the most hated man in UK politics, and he has disgraced himself by doing all he could to sabotage Corbyn, a man who never did anything to Blair and who only voted against the Labour whip on measures Labour had no good reason to be voting right wing on.  

And Brown and Miliband were carrying on exactly as Blair would have done, so their defeats were defeats Blair would have experienced, too.

There already was a Brexit vote.  How about implementing the voter’s decision?

NorthReport wrote:

I was just asking about Starmer because I want Labour to win.

Regardless, I fundamentally disagree with your opinions on both Brexit and the Labour Party because they are why the Left don't win many elections in the scheme of things.

Of course the other view is what is the point of winning an election if you have to give up the believes at the core of your party? Is the point to strut around as a winner or make fundamental change?

[quote=NorthReport]

I think Corbyn needs to step down if Labour for to have a chance at victory, because the objective is to win the election, as opposed to insisting that it is your way or the doorway. Politics is the art of compromise and one never gets everything one wants in any election. Some people would rather lose the election than compromise. Not me. 

[quote=NDPP]

Labour needs Starmer like a hole in the head. Of course some here have been conditioned by years of NDP allegiance to accept neoliberalist capitulation and servility to power, aka 'the art of compromise' lol. Not to mention whatever NATO, Washington or Israel wants as well. No Brit Labourite should seriously entertain any advice or counsel from their ilk unless they seek to fail even better.

Corbyn is a real Labour leader and not a watered down "democratic socialist/neo-liberal" like freaking "I love foreign intervention wars" Blair. I put Margaret Thatcher first on the list of vilest UK leaders of my lifetime followed by Tony Blair.

North, you are right and Ken is wrong:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/18/labour-panic-remain-voters-switch-to-lib-dems?CMP=share_btn_tw

nicky wrote:

North, you are right and Ken is wrong:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/18/labour-panic-remain-voters-switch-to-lib-dems?CMP=share_btn_tw

It isn't possible to stop Brexit.  The EU has made it clear they won't let the UK stay in now.  Soft Brexit is the best thing to work for.  Trying to stay in the EU when that isn't possible is a pointless and objectively right-wing fight, and the only reason the "stop Brexit" thing was invented was that it was another way for the Labour right to attack Corbyn.  There simply was never a left, or even "center-left" case for not letting this go once the referendum results were in.  Britain's status with the EU is trivial compared to the need to save the place from the ugliness of Thatcherism.  

NorthReport wrote:

Europe's Greens ready to be kingmakers in EU elections

Green candidates, on course for their best showing, could play a big role in a divided parliament

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/19/europe-greens-european-elections-kingmakers

In the European Parliament, there's no kingmaking to be done.  It's a parliament without a government and it's impossible to ever change any of the right-wing elements of the EU.  The budget restrictions and effective ban on nationalization are carved in stone in the EU for the rest of eternity.

And everybody knows it wouldn't be possible for Labour to put the unwinnable fight for a referendum with "Remain" as as an option at the center of its program and still disagree with the Tories on anything important.  It's enough that Corbyn has kept a referendum as a possibility if Labour is elected and that he did all he could to fight for Remain in the referendum, at a time where a Leave victory was always more or less a certainty.

There's nothing else he could have done during that referendum and everybody knows that Corbyn had to acknowledge, in campaigning, that people have legitimate grievances with the EU.  If he'd done what nicky wanted and pretended that the EU was Utopia as it is, he'd have had to give up his own policies afterwards and reduce his program to Blairism.  It isn't possible to be a committed socialist and be a passionate supporter of the EU as currently and eternally constructed.

Corbyn is being vilified on that because he wouldn't lie in the referendum campaign.  There is no speech of passionately expressed lies on the EU that would have turned a single Leave-leaning voter to Remain.  

Soft Brexit is a MORE anti-xenophobic position than the hopeless and essentially right-wing fight to push the Tories for a second referendum when we know they can never be made to call one.  It's dishonest to pretend that Brexit can be stopped at this point.

NorthReport wrote:

Ken

You keep avoiding the question:

Why do you ally with Forage?

Because you're slandering me in asking that.  I have never allied with Farage.  I want him gone from public life.  In the referendum campaign I'd have voted Remain.  I oppose the pointless and unwinnable fight for a second referendum because it's impossible to force the Tories to call one and because that issue is trivial compared to the need to free the UK from every vestige of Thatcherism, which is something that will only happen if Labour wins with a non-Blairite leader, with an actual socialist.       

Were it not for the idiots trying to stop Brexit when it can't be stopped, Farage would be out of politics and the UK would be free of his toxicity.                                                                                                                                                                         The reality is, the post-referendum stop-Brexit fight was invented by the Labour Right to attack Corbyn and that's the only reason it's still being carried on. 

Fighting for a second referendum when we all know it can't happen is not a progressive position, it's not a pro-worker or a pro-economic and social justice position.  It's a pro-austerity position and it's just about deposing Corbyn and making sure he's replaced by a quasi-Tory like Keir Starmer or Jess Phillips.

Nope.  Voters were told that their decision would be implemented by parliament.

The ones who are opening the door to Farage and Robinson are those who continue to refuse to abide by the vote of nearly three years ago.  They are driving people who believe, rightly, that their vote is not being respected, to support more extreme candidates.  

Why was it not enough that he was keeping that as an option?  Why did he deserve to be mercilessly on this?

It still goes without saying that the Tories will never allow a second referendum while they're in power and that that's the end of it until they are gone.   It also still goes without saying that nothing can FORCE them to have that second referendum.

None of the obsession on this issue was ever justified.