ronmcd wrote:Hysterical. This morning we have various PLP people getting upset over Corbyn's newsnight interview, his calls for kinder gentler politics attacked as hypocrisy. Harriet Harman thinks being nice somehow drives a wedge between the PLP and the membership, or something. Another MP says Corbyn wanted to tell the MP's dad to speak to him and stop disagreeing with him, or something (corbyn says this is untrue), and Eagle claims Corbyn is stirring hostility against his critics. Whereas his critics are sweetness and light about Corbyn by comparison, presumably.

fucksake.

In other batshit labour idiot news, we have Muriel Gray, someone who hates the SNP *so* much, even she is blaming Corbyn for ... well, everything.

Well you've left Scotland behind. Now in the hands of single issue narcissists and Tory carpet baggers. Cheers mate.

https://twitter.com/ArtyBagger/status/7 ... 2271723520

Bizarro world has arrived.

There were 11 by-elections last night. So far, we have 10 full results in. Labour successfully defended three seats with an increased percentage of the vote. That included a whopping 21.4% increase in Southcote ward in Reading. In two of the 10 seats that Labour was standing in, there was no previous Labour candidate. Both achieved respectable results, showing that Labour can make inroads in supposedly hostile ground. In all but one of the 10 results in, there has been an increase in the percentage of Labour vote.

Owen Smith : "Party didn't behave like this before Corbyn." Yeah, because the PLP always had right-wing leaders they were happy with.

How David Cameron’s Plan To Screw Labour Cost Him The EU Referendum

Hidden in Thursday’s Government info-dump was a measure of just how much it backfired

In the last days before the EU referendum David Cameron and his team of Remain campaigners were still frantically trying to get young people’s attention. 18-34 year olds, the polls had said, were Britain’s great unharvested crop of Remainers. And everyone agreed that if enough of them turned out on June 23rd, it was in the bag.
.....
Despite what was actually a reasonably high turnout amongst young people who were registered to vote, they had not managed to swing the result. Remain lost by 4%. This was not meant to happen.

Yesterday, hidden within the cache of information dumped on the government website before ministers went to recess, was a clue as to what went wrong: a written statement by Gary Streeter, a spokesperson for the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, which showed a full nine percentage point drop between 10th June 2014 and 1st December 2015 in the number of 18-19 year olds registered to vote.
.......
Back in October 2015, amid all the fuss over the House of Lord’s rejection of tax-credit reform, Cameron slipped another statutory instrument quietly through the chamber, by just eleven votes. It was a motion to change the responsibility for signing up to vote from households to individuals.

The change had been due for December 2016 - plenty of time for voters accidentally left off the new list to get their act together and re-register. But Cameron had wanted to rush it through more than a year early. The reason? Those likely to be accidentally left off the new list were Labour voters.

These people - some 1.9 million of them - were mostly students (until last year universities could block-register student halls), people in big cities, and those who rent privately. In other words, not only were they Labour voters but also exactly the sorts of people Remain would later desperately seek votes from.

And the full effects of what he did in October are yet to be felt. Cameron did it to screw Labour in this year’s elections - those of London’s mayor, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh National Assembly - but also to skew an upcoming constituency boundary reform vastly in his favour. This redrawing of boundaries is to be based on a snapshot of the electorate from December 2015, thus - as least as far as yesterday’s figures indicate - permanently disenfranchising many thousands of Britain’s young, whether they re-register now or not.

Last year, as he prepared to rush the electoral roll change through, Cameron ignored warnings from the Electoral Commission, who said - breaking character - that it would be “hugely damaging to our democracy”. On June 24th, as democracy skidded out of his control like a broken trolley, he must have wondered what he had done.

His first remark was that: "The British people have made their decision. We must respect that result and Article 50 has to be invoked now so that we negotiate an exit from the European Union."

The claim: Jeremy Corbyn has performed a U-turn over when Article 50 should be triggered.

Reality Check verdict: Mr Corbyn's message has certainly changed, either because he has changed his mind or because he misspoke on 24 June and waited a month to correct himself.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-u ... u-36866170

Words like "unedifying" and "unpleasant" don’t even begin to describe the campaign that the British establishment have undertaken to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Try "sinister" and "malevolent" and "venomous" instead. Yet, when you assess the nature of the forces which are lined up against him and then observe how his very name brings them to a point where they begin to boil and froth, then you know Mr Corbyn must be a good man.

ronmcd wrote:

Words like "unedifying" and "unpleasant" don’t even begin to describe the campaign that the British establishment have undertaken to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Try "sinister" and "malevolent" and "venomous" instead. Yet, when you assess the nature of the forces which are lined up against him and then observe how his very name brings them to a point where they begin to boil and froth, then you know Mr Corbyn must be a good man.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/1 ... my_Corbyn/

TheMidnightBarber wrote:I found this an interesting read.

http://www.liliangreenwood.co.uk/lilian ... ty_members

The supposed Blairite conspiracy is seeming more and more ridiculous

Byron wrote:Nope, the Blairites (represented by the Progress crowd) are front-and-center, but as I noted upthread, it goes beyond them, into the moderates and run-of-the-mill careerists.

GrahamH wrote:

TheMidnightBarber wrote:I found this an interesting read.

http://www.liliangreenwood.co.uk/lilian ... ty_members

The supposed Blairite conspiracy is seeming more and more ridiculous

Thanks for posting that. It's the first thing I have seen that is specific and makes a bit of sense.
It doesn't seem like something that could not be remedied. Presumably someone manages Corbyn's diary who should have picked up the clash on rail policy dates. Did that happen and it was ignored, or not?
Did Lillian liaise with the leadership as her big date drew near?
Does Corbyn rely on people for this sort of thing who a are not entirely loyal? It would be easy to build discontent by subtle manipulation. We have seen a whip briefing against the leader.