What should they do? I suggest this agenda:
1) Form a national government, or at the very least, a loose coalition of the willing to keep the far right out. It is not clear that it needs a Labour leader, but if it did, Ed Miliband is the person to do it.
2) Do electoral and parliamentary reform to prevent Reform from taking power.
Democracy means changing the system of the bastard peoples vote for anyone I don’t like.
To think that he calls us fascists…..
Do electoral and parliamentary reform to prevent Reform from taking power.
He hasn’t thought this through, has he? Suppose this tactic doesn’t work & Reform gets a majority at the next GE. If they’re the fascists he says the are, having rigged the electoral system against insurgent populist parties, how’s he get them out of power at the following GE?
BiS, dear boy. Socialist ideas always work. We all know that.
As I’ve said here before, whatever system you use changes the incentives. Like FPTP leads to tactical voting, lower turnout in some places.
We know what happened with an All Nation poll. People voted to leave the EU. We lean more against The Guardian than towards it.
It’s also a very simplistic view of politics, that there are “anti reform” parties and that’s all that’s going on. Lots of Labour people in Wales don’t want what Plaid Cymru are selling. They don’t want completely mental Green policies. And at the margin, might switch to Reform if you did that.
And there is no system known which can capture preferences such as liking
Reform 40% cos they’ll repeal DEI and net zero, Cons 30% cos I like Kemi, and Greens 20% cos they’ll legalise drugs and brothels, and Lord Sutch 10% for the lols. You only get one vote under any system.
Which is why foreign development aid, giving a room to an asylum, cash transfers to people with 3+ kids should be kept away from government with much else too as you can capture a wide range of preferences in a minarchic system.
There are systems with transferable votes, in which you rank parties in order of preference. But Arrow has proved mathematically that given 3 pretty reasonable requirements, there can be no voting system that satisfies all of them.
Quite… if there was a party I believed to be fascist with a significant possibility of getting power, “normalising abuse of the levers of power to keep opponents out” would probably not be at the top of my list of good ideas.
He could call it an enabling act. And he should write a book about his ongoing struggle with reality. We can suggest a title.
Mein Kampfy Chair would be a good one
To be in the spirit of democracy, electoral reform can not increase the likelihood of power for those instituting the reforms.
I had the misfortune this morning to hear Clive Lewis, MP for Norwich on 5Live this morning.
He was describing Reform as far right and authoritarian and then called for a more socialist approach ( he denied that it was left-wing ) involving nationalisation. He was complaining that New Labour was just an extension of Thatcherism.
These Labour MPs really have the most naive and childish beliefs. That Darren Jones is similar. We live under the boot-stamping-on-face style of authoritarianism now. Socialists are so dense that they cannot recognise their despicable beliefs when out into practice.
Lewis is an unrepentant Stalinist – may be on a par with Murphy in terms of his evil. Certainly runs him close.
It all boils down to the friend-enemy distinction. ‘ Everything for my friends; for my Enemies, the Law.’
This is a beaut from Spud.
“This is what I mean by establishing national government.
At its core, there must be respect for the fact that difference is an inherent part of politics and of life.
That is why the two UK political parties that have altogether rejected centrism must be excluded from this. They are, of course, the Conservatives and Reform”
Or put another way…
“Difference is an inherent pert of politics but we must exclude anyone whose views I disagree with.”
“This is what I mean by establishing national government…”
He certainly seems to be advocating a one-part state. How very totalitarian of him.
That’s impressive. We know he can express two completely contradictory views on adjacent days, but I think that’s the first time I’ve seen it in adjacent sentences.
Many people don’t understand the law of contradiction: x cannot be F and not-F, at the same time. So the Great Quantum Political Economist is not entirely alone…
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Centrism and the Conservative Party policies are effectively synonyms: that is why the Conservatives have been described as the most successful democratic political party in the world. [“Successful” in this phrase relates to winning honest elections rather than to Mrs Thatcher’s (and before Supermac’s) success in raising the living standards of the poor several times faster that of the least bad Labour governments]
“before Spermac’s” should read “before her, Supermac’s” – my fingers cannot keep up with my brain
Maybe too much spermaccing.
So… that would be a national government that is socialist, then?
Possibly, but given this leadership I would see it less socialist and more of a gibbering loon coalition.
The comedy is the delusion that if such an arrangement occurred, he thinks he’d have a seat at the top table to decide who stays and who goes to the gulag.
Wasn’t it known as Kip’s Law? That those advocating central planning always assume that they will be one of the planners.
But Google isn’t finding it for me, so perhaps I’ve misremembered. Don’t know who Kip was either.
I think it’s one of those often made observations about socialists that has yet to be attributed to anyone in particular. Another variation of it is “Socialists always assume they’ll be in the Politburo, not the gulag.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/1go4am/ftc_kip_esquires_law_states_that_every_advocate/
“Kip Esquire’s Law”
As I recall it Kip was a gay, Republican, lawyer. Otherthan that not very much information I know no more…..
Thank you
Not sure it’s quite true, mind you, but they certainly assume it’ll be someone just like themselves.
What? He wants Moron Milliband in charge? The guy whose brother has done interesting financial arrangements and visited Epstein island allegedly?. The same guy that believes that there’s no bid-offer on the energy markets and has no idea of the electronic auction system that operates? Has no idea that old gas turbine owners on old NCB sites get paid hundreds of thousands to sit on standby? Has no idea that wind farms get paid millions to be feathered? Who thinks that costs and tax don’t affect internal sell prices, or at what times energy firms choose to buy and sell internally and externally, that the same factors directly affect whether there’s going to be a grid collapse tonight or not? That moron Milliband?
Ed Miliband is not a moron, so that is not a good enough excuse for his actions.