It’s pretty similar to how so many British folks go nuts for the Monarchy innit - dogmatic investment in whatever it is they’re brought up to believe represents the honour & truth of their nation
See also; all those adoring crowds for the Pope in Ireland last week despite laundries, abuse, pedophilia & complicit silence …just to give a recent example
Nah not really, there’s nowhere near the same sentiment towards the monarchy in ‘the centre’ of British politics as there is in the US for American institutions and big political figures. Sure, when the queen dies we’ll have an awful lot of bad tweets to wade through from those kinda people, but they’ll mostly deal in fake emotional tributes etc. And the nonsense above seems to involve non-elites in America - I don’t think that would happen anywhere else.
Here’s your sensible, solutions-based, broad church centrist saying the only thing that will satisfy them over an internal policy review that’s already known to be going their way is the leader themselves resigning. Doesn’t bother disguising they’re motivated by sheer spite for someone they’ve held a personal vendetta against for years because they know how it will be reported.
“It might have been enough three months ago, it might have just enabled us all to start talking to each other and bring trust again, but I think that moment has passed,” she said at the event in north London on Sunday.
i suppose they deserve credit for the long con. and the conclusion writes itself: if/when they force him out and install a glass of tapwater as leader, the membership tanking won’t prove how loathed they are, but how rife with antisemites the party was.
i’d like to believe this must be their last gasp, tbh. can’t imagine they’ve got much left in the tank now. they have thrown absolutely everything at him.
69 is not radically different to 62 but 72 is. That means there needs to be a replacement at some point in the next 3 years, they need to come from the current crop of MPs, and they probably need some time in post before fighting an election.
That’s the actual context for the leadership discussion, not Corbyn vs Cooper, but at a basic level it suits everyone to have the latter because the actual leadership problem doesn’t have a solution. Unplanned as it was, the Corbyn project isn’t cohesive enough to have legacy planning and the biggest names in the shadow cabinet are political allies not true supporters. There is no easy continuation for Corbynism regardless of what Progress and Co do.
This is the best case scenario as far as I’m concerned. The worst case is the full blown split. I know I’m too risk averse for the current political landscape so I fully accept I might be wrong, but surviving a change of leader ought to be more politically practical than splitting the party. Except at the moment we seem incapable of avoiding the latter and the former is coming anyway,
Maybe you should hold off from posting comments that paint me as some sort of uncritical fanboy of his?
Any regular on here will know that if I’ve linked to WoS, it tends to only be as part of a dialogue that’s already taking place, and caveated with the usual spiel to the point of tedium.
Since we switched over to the new forum I’ve been a fan of your posting. But this feels like a regression. WoS had done some bad posts. Wza has linked to it in the past. Gotcha!’ is a pretty weak line.
I’m obviously no fan of independence anyway, and sorry for coming across so antagonistic, but it does raise my eyebrows that people like him are still so influential instead of being regarded as some crank. I think if someone like that was on the (British) left he would be v much disowned by the majority and have no real influence on the movement (just a section of the older, more problematic generation).
His prominence also kind of feeds into my wider thought about the slightly messy marriage between ‘progressive’ politics and the independence movement
he’d been earmarked for the position of Shadow Defence Secretary but talks fell apart after he reportedly insisted on “a 30-minute conversation about what would happen if we had to invade Russia”