Corbyn is in the lead in the Labour Party leadership election according to data seen by the New Statesmen. I am aware that this will send many into a state of apoplexy. It also means that sensible economic policies will be discussed,
I dunno, can you get apoplexy from laughing too hard? Which, if it is possible, is indeed what will happen to a great many people if Corbyn actually wins. I might keel over from it first though: the idea that anything to do with Corbyn is going to be a sensible economics policy……
Don’t jinx it. It’ll be hilarious if he wins.
Whoever did the “widening the ballot” has probably lost the election for Labour. The whole point of parliamentary selection is that you keep the crazy candidates that activists like off the ballot.
If the lights go out this winter it won’t be Labour who are blamed. Be careful what you wish for.
the entire TajXustice blog is hilarity at the moment – apparently there is *plenty* of money available to build alternative energy sources – preumably it’s just those evil capitalists stopping it being spent with their pettifogging obsession with reliability and cost-competitiveness. And if there *isn’t* money available, the government just has to print it and it won’t cost anything! Isn’t life dandy and grandy!
In the long run this also spells danger for the Conservative party. I believe most Tory voters vote that way as it’s not labour and they marginally have more sensible economic policies that don’t rock the vote. If Corby wins this could spell the end of the Labour Party as we know it, the foil that puts the Conservative party into power. Without the labour bogey, how many people will vote Tory because they support the party.
Not many I imagine.
It is not apoplexy, but I have been known to pass out when laughing too hard. Kate Winslet talking dirty on Extras was one such occasion.
I dream briefly and then wake up. First time it happened with MrsBud, I woke to find her in floods of tears and me covered in floods of red wine. She insisted I go for tests which discovered I had a great sense of humour. Nowadays, when I start guffawing, she just grabs the red wine glass.
DocBud – Extras was brilliant.
Maggie’s Boyfriend: So all that stuff about your husband “polishing his Oscar”, was that supposed to mean wanking?
Kate Winslet: Yep.
Maggie’s Boyfriend: And your basement meant?
Kate Winslet: My fanny.
But the best episode ever was with suicidal Les Dennis and the now sadly departed Gerard Kelly as grotesque panto director “Bunny”.
That one wasn’t close to the bone, it sawed through it with gleeful abandon.
To quote my Ladbrokes betting slip:
” Next Permanent Labour Party Leader
Corbyn/Watson 12/1
Stake £40.00 Pot Rtn £520.00
Next Permanent Labour Party Leader
Jeremy Corbyn 8/1 Stake £20.00 Pot Rtn £180.00
”
I’ll be laughing, all the way to the bank.
But suppose he becomes prime minister?
Much as I would enjoy Corbyn taking the Labour party to the left of Michael Foot, it’s not going to happen – the Labour party is far too practised at stuffing the ballot boxes to allow it to happen, unfortunately.
Thanks, Steve, now I’ve got to explain to hotel housekeeping why there’s a big red stain on the duvet. I’ll leave it to MrsBud, her fault for being in bathroom.
Flatcap Army
The thread from yesterday ‘The end of the German Dream’ is simply comedy gold if one looks at the comments section! Highlighted some historical figures I hadn’t thought of in years – every one an equivalent of Richard Murphy if he ever got a toehold on power! ….
I never wanted to go to Venezuela.
I sure as hell don’t want it to come to me.
Possibly, in my wildest dreams. More likely Corbyn will serve 3-years and then get ousted as “unelectable” and “worse than Miliband”. Then there will be a period under a Milburn type “type leader”, during which time the leadership rules will be re-jigged to stop a similar hard-left candidate coming through.
The real problem here is that the rest of the field are both moderate and political pygmies. While Mr. Corbyn has no great name recognition, his integrity as one of the hard-left is clearly displayed.
He will be a disaster for Labour’s chances of electoral success in 2020.
Excellent! (as Mr. Burns from The Simpsons would say)
“In the long run this also spells danger for the Conservative party. I believe most Tory voters vote that way as it’s not labour and they marginally have more sensible economic policies that don’t rock the vote. If Corby wins this could spell the end of the Labour Party as we know it, the foil that puts the Conservative party into power. Without the labour bogey, how many people will vote Tory because they support the party.
Not many I imagine”
That is the second benefit of ZaNu’s demise. With no chance of the “official” left getting back in then the harsh spotlight falls on the provisional left ie BlueLab. They only get in cos of fear of ZaNu. No ZaNu anymore= BlueLab gets a well deserved kicking. The people of this country have a chance to not only examine the evil of politics but do something about it.
“None of the above” on every ballot paper would be a small but excellent start.
It seems very unlikely that Labour with Corbyn as leader could win an election, so the nightmare scenario of his actually being Prime Minister is not something to get too worried about. But people are acting as if he is just some slightly daffier version of Miliband. Be under no illusions: Jeremy Corbyn is a vile and wicked man. He continues to cleave to the most barbaric ideology of the 20th century, despite (or maybe even because of, who knows) all the tens of millions of deaths it has brought about. You cannot support a planned economy, forced nationalisation and all the rest in 2015 and expect to be treated as anything other than scum. This stuff kills people and immiserates the rest. It needs to be more forcefully combated, just like the deep Green eco-fascism of the back-to-nature crowd. You cannot have Corbyn’s views in good faith, not after the last hundred years. The only apt comparisons are pure Godwin-bait and do not need to be listed.
What dearieme said.
Labour will be able to shrug off any culpability for the CCA (and the whole tsunami of cockwombling, incompetence and corruption that has issued from it) because of Dave’s ineffable stupidity in supporting it.
That there are enough of Stalin’s “useful idiots” in the Labour party should speak volumes about how detached they’ve become from mainstream society.
The only other alternative is that vast numbers of Tory infiltrators have spent £3 to help choose next Labour leader.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/18/labour-leadership-election-fee-harriet-harman
Van Patten
I’m so glad you directed me to that German Dream thread and the rogues gallery of comments, given that I don’t visit there any more. I can’t believe he is missing this mass piss take (and his camp followers too). May one perhaps entertain the delicious thought that early onset senility is setting in?
@VP/BF
Ha ha – you need to go there now.
He has pruned some of the fakery, thanks to the below alert from our friend ‘Lawrence from Guernsey’ aka ‘Arnald’ aka failed musician Lawrence Aegerter (‘All of the music is created by Lawrence alone’ – quelle surprise.)
The beauty of this is that the snivelling little sneak prefaced his snitchery with ‘Please don’t publish’ and has been ignored.
I copy and paste in full below:
Please don’t publish
Hello Richard
I’m on troll duty again.
A poster above used Lavrentiy Beria for their moniker. Easy to guess that it’s Worstall reader. Beria was a particularly nasty Stalin cohort. Developed the secret police and had an inordinate amount of power in the darkest days of the USSR.
The posts are usually short, comically gushing, and always ‘courageous state/government’.
Well they think it’s funny. Advise delete. Not that I have right to do that!
Regards
Lawrence in Guernsey
– See more at: http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2015/07/15/the-end-of-the-german-dream/#comment-area
Arnald – you clearly don’t know who Manuel Pineiro and Markus Wolf were. First google, then run along and tell your hero.
“The End of the German Dream” has been purged. Marcus Wolf, the great East German spymaster, alone remains among the unrumbled commenters and you can now expect him to disappear into Murphy’s Lubyanka.
Hahaha it doesn’t matter because tomorrow there will be a new bunch of historical nasties he has never heard of gushing praise at him.
Surely the darkest days of the USSR for Arnald and Ritche were around 1990, long after Beria’s time???
Meanwhile on his ‘support the rioters’ post he’s deleted me.
All I did was ask why, after touting Syriza’s democratic mandate he isn’t prepared to accept his vote it has won in its parliament. How is democracy supposed to function if you don’t accept parliamentary votes? What was the democratic thing for Merkel and Schauble to do given the express democratic will of the German electorate?
These things should not disturb the reveries of his gang apparently. They are busy constructing a narrative they can use to accommodate the disappointments of reality. Usually narratives of death cults lead logically to mass suicides in the jungles of Guyana; nothing so worthwhile from Tax Research UK I’m afraid.
Fact is, Murphy only scans the comments because he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. He thinks it’s all workable by him from first principles, and he doesn’t mind switching the principles if necessary.
The funniest thing is that, in Beria’s time weasels like Arnald were the first to go in the show trials.
Squeaks Arsenald on his little blurb on that website: “Please like my music. It really is quite easy to play. And I’m a good bloke.” That’s as beta-male a cri de coeur as I’ve ever seen. What a nasty little lickspittle.
Arnald: beta than you.
@BICR
“please Sir, he was naughty he was, Sir, Sir, tell him off, Sir, please Sir, not like me, I’m a good boy, Sir, please Sir.” – Arnald.
@ironman
Surely the strapline which Murphy should be using on his blog?
“busy constructing a narrative to use to accommodate the disappointments of reality.”
Interested/ Dongguan John
I agree with everything you say about Arnald – Sadly he might rumble some of the references to the Khmer Rouge but as of this evening he still hasn’t pulled down Pineiro (who I mus admit I had forgotten about!) and Wolf. It does make me chuckle, though both at Arnal’d craven lickspittling and Murphy’s total lack of historical knowledge. Oddly it’s a measure of the health of debate here that if someone popped up (for example) using the Taglines like say, Joachim Ribbentrop or Hans Frank – it would be spotted in seconds. Maybe they both need to get out more
A show trial is the nearest Arnald will get to musical success.
How about that ? Why not hold future show trials in the West End with a full cast. Next time a Yewtree stitch-up comes along it could run for years. And produce about as much justice.
“Beria was a particularly nasty Stalin cohort.” What sort of ignorant tosspot thinks that a “cohort” is an individual rather than a group? TW is not the only one who shoulda gone to Ampleforth.
Figure this out; Corbyn’s advisers are saying a vote for Corbyn is “anti-Labour”.
Yes, the people who want Corbyn to win think that people voting for him is anti-Labour.
Wow. Just wow.
Mad as a box of kulak frogs
If a far-right loon had challenged for the leadership of the Tory party it would be 24/7 on the BBC. You’ll have to dig deep to find Corbyn on their news website.
@Rob: thats because to the BBC Jeremy Corbyn seems like a nice sort of chap who has some very sound ideas………..
dearieme: pace Terry Pratchett, aren’t cohorts some sort of shiny Assyrian armour, like wot that bloke Sennacherib used to wear?
VP: It’s not so much the lack of historical knowledge that makes me laugh (half of them I had to look up although Beria should have been obvious I’d have thought), it’s the lack of awareness. Some of those names obviously don’t belong to readers of an obscure British tax blog (That North Korean general the other day for example) and he’s been told before what ‘Worstall readers’ are up to but he just doesn’t think to check. As long as the post is sycophantic enough up it goes without a thought.
If I actually supported the aims of the Labour party, I’m not sure I wouldn’t end up voting for Corbyn.
Kendal is the only one of them that appears to have the faintest clue about why they lost the last two elections, but currently her support is at rock bottom, and likely to remain there as the medicine she is likely to prescribe will be too bitter for the party to swallow (basically it means admitting the public don’t believe in magic money trees, or unlimited immigration).
Burnham – he be like a barely competent middle manager who accidentally got promoted to CEO. Could he be trusted to eat a bacon sandwich, or not to agree to pose next to a massive tombstone covered in vacuous promises? And none of us know what he believes in, as he appears to have no principles whatsoever.
That leaves Cooper and Corbyn as possibilities.
Cooper seems competent, but devoid of principles, vison etc – and appears to be running a fairly dirty campaign compared to the others.
She’s not very likeable, and I suspect would bring back all the era of plotting, smearing and other dirty tricks from the balls/brown era.
That leaves Corbyn. He’s wrong about almost everything, but does appear to believe it, and has done for years. Listening to him in the BBC leaders debate he came over as much less dull and PR driven than the others. He might make the party unelectable, but at least he would be doing it because he thinks it the right thing to do, rather than because a focus group told him to.
So, if I was a labour supporter, I’d probably vote in the order Kendal, Corbyn, Cooper, Burnham.
As it is, I’m not a labour supporter – if I really wanted to kill the Labour party I’d go for Burnham – imagine another 4 years of kicking Miliband, and I imagine that’s about what we’d get!
Burnham dyes his hair and it’s quite obvious. That alone should, for anyone who has made the decision to be a member of the Labour party, make him unelectable.
It doesn’t much matter who they elect – the damage these people have done to this country is real and profound and eternal.
and now the ‘Jeremy for Labour’ campaign has “realised” that Tories are signing up to Labour for the purpose of voting for Jeremy. And the ‘Jeremy for Labour’ campaign is determined to help Labour stop these bad people attempting to destroy Labour by voting for Jeremy.
Labour Through the Looking Glass.
Ironman,
“and now the ‘Jeremy for Labour’ campaign has “realised” that Tories are signing up to Labour for the purpose of voting for Jeremy. And the ‘Jeremy for Labour’ campaign is determined to help Labour stop these bad people attempting to destroy Labour by voting for Jeremy.”
James Kirkup had a rather funny article about this madness. I think what they’re trying to do is to make sure that Jezza’s win is seen as legitimate. But it is anyway. Hardly anyone is paying to vote in this election. It’s just that Jezza’s the sort of person that party members likes.
Anyone see Corbyn being interviewed by Krishnan Gurumurthy on Channel 4 about calling Hamas and Hizb’Allah “our friends”? Fantastic stuff. Total inability to keep his cool or to defend himself or to make a reasonable argument. But I don’t think the New Left will see any of that; they’ll just see the anger and think he’s sticking it to The Man, and vote for him in droves.
Of course, they’ll also all agree with him that Hamas and Hezb’Allah are friends. And we know why that it.
Dearieme: What sort of ignorant tosspot thinks that a “cohort” is an individual rather than a group?
That was my first thought too but then I thought I’d seen it somewhere used to describe a single sidekick or assistant so looked it up. Lo! The OED has this meaning as the fifth of five definitions. Still, a tosspot for all that and a sly and sneaky one to boot.
@BraveFart – and he appears to wear eyeliner
The Prole missed out the worst thing about Cooper – she sleeps with Ed Balls.
How is that a bad thing? It means someone else out there doesn’t have to.
” It means someone else out there doesn’t have to.”
Have to? I knew Labour were authoritarian but that is going a bit far, even for them.
“OED has this meaning as the fifth of five definitions”: the rules of writing a dictionary require you to record a use favoured by ignorant arseholes if enough such use it. Alas the rules nowadays seem to prohibit the lexicographers saying that a particular use is favoured only by the dim and unlettered.
Almost every word in the language comes from the dim and unlettered. Maybe get over it.
Liz Kendal is an awful speaker. As a Blairite she has the views most likely to get Labour elected, but she’s a non-starter as leader.
Andy Burnham, “Mascara man”, is a better speaker than I remember him being, but is a man with no principles having gone from Blairism to the left in a single bound and with no real reason other than a love of power. A not very impressive minister. A slight improvement on Milicret. (very slight)
My personal pick of the Labourites is Cooper. She’s reasonably sensible on the economics, is a decent speaker and would probably be a threat to Cameron. Yes, her campaign is dirty, but that is probably because of Balls. (I dont really understand the point of the Liz Kendal attacks – since there appears to be no chance that Kendal makes it to later rounds, why bother?)
Jeremy Corbyn is a moron. That he is even being taken seriously is just laughable.
@theProle: since when has the sincerity of one’s beliefs mitigated the vileness of their content? I could really, sincerely believe that what society needs is for me to plunge a kitten into a pot of boiling water every now and again and the fact I genuinely believed that would not make me any less of a cunt. To repeat myself from earlier: Corbyn’s views are evil. Not misguided, not impractical. Evil. Fucking Godwin’s Law has a lot to answer for because it takes all the rhetorical heft out of the only comparison that is truly apt when it comes to revolutionary socialists.
@BICR
I’m not saying I like the bloke.
It’s more that if I’m going to chose between a bloke who murders kittens because he honestly (if stupidly) thinks it’s the right thing to do, and a bloke who does it because a focus group told him to, I’ll take the one with principles every time.
That’s bullshit, a false dichotomy. You don’t choose either of them. You reject them, you hold them up for what they are, and you fight them tooth and nail. Choosing the lesser of two evils means choosing evil withal. And I think if anything principled evil is more dangerous, because the unscrupulous chancer can be persuaded to change his mind but the true believer will never change tack.
Davey Gillies squawks “Squeaks Arsenald on his little blurb on that website: “Please like my music. It really is quite easy to play. And I’m a good bloke.” That’s as beta-male a cri de coeur as I’ve ever seen. What a nasty little lickspittle”
Oh for bleeding sake. Have you heard the music? All the tracks? Maybe I’ll send you the output from 30 years of playing live in bands, for who the creative process and subsequent expression of that dedication and constant attention to our particular subset of an art form is a satisfying result in itself. I’ll await your review on how easy you think it is to play. Maybe youtube your analysis of , say, the juxtapositional concepts of sound and context. “please like my music”, “it’s easy to play”, “I’m a good bloke” are simply minimalist deconstructions of the usual accompaniment to self-advertising. A logical reduction of a CV. But then, like so many on here, the face-value mis-interpretations are considered currency.
Oh dearie me, “What sort of ignorant tosspot” ^^ is such an ignorant fucking tosspot. Or even an ignorant-fucking tosspot. Gawd bless the poor other half, he (yes that’s deliberate, before Interested uses the internet to look up what ‘he’ means then copies and pastes a link to He-Man as proof) must question his existence.
Oh yes, so Interested in Arnald, that she (and yes, that’s deliberate, before Mr X organises a show trial for a gender swapping crime in his Realm of Zimbabwe-Referenced Conspiracy Theories, probably hiding in a tree with berries in his hair) googles my name and copies and pastes a link to a newspaper website. What a star. Maybe if you delve a bit through your saved favourites you find a kid that looks a bit like I did, in that paedophile chat-room.
How can a “failed musician” write music?
And the inferred presumption that a “successful musician” is one who makes lots of cash and ‘creates’ a perfume and wears red carpet on the soles of their feet, is as close to the Thick.Stupid.Prick singularity as only a Thick.Stupid.Prick can
I’m not quite sure why I’m repeatedly referred to as a communist. [citation needed]. I certainly don’t lick any spittle and I happened to offer my very basic knowledge of L. Beria (as an example of the type of hilarious wiki-found famous communist anony-handles) when I was happening to be paging down on a thread i was disinterested in and the name jumped off the page. So what?
Oh and Interested, “switchery” isn’t a word. and even in context it’s a shit makeuppery wordery.
Bunch of half-wits.