And now the next kerfuffle - the Labour Leadership

[Beskar]

Would a mod like to weigh in on whether or not this is Spam?

I would say it was posted in the wrong topic than spam. Probably meant for the Democrat one.

[Montmorency]

I would say it was posted in the wrong topic than spam. Probably meant for the Democrat one.

It's at least as pertinent to UK politics as it is to US politics.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Labour sees a 20% surge in membership off the back of the election race: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51245211

I wonder if this is people returning because Corbyn is on the way out, whether its people wanting to vote in another Socialist or people wanting to wrest the party back from the Hard Left.

we shall see.

[edyzmedieval]

With regards to the post - it's somewhere along the line between wrong post and correct post. There are parallels to be drawn between the two political systems but not so much in this case.

[edyzmedieval]

Labour sees a 20% surge in membership off the back of the election race: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51245211

I wonder if this is people returning because Corbyn is on the way out, whether its people wanting to vote in another Socialist or people wanting to wrest the party back from the Hard Left.

we shall see.

I read a well balanced article recently in GQ UK about this - https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politi...neral-election

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

With regards to the post - it's somewhere along the line between wrong post and correct post. There are parallels to be drawn between the two political systems but not so much in this case.

I don't see how a Democrat adopting the rhetoric of a failed Conservative Prime Minister has anything to do with the Labour Leadership election. This is not a "general" UK politics thread and most of us agreed a few years ago that those "mega-threads" aren't really very useful - they're just a mess.

I read a well balanced article recently in GQ UK about this - https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politi...neral-election

So, I read that entire article. The author seems extremely harsh on both sides, and it's worth noting that they reduce both to being essentially morally bankrupt husks. It reads very much like a "call to action" for the moderate Left and centre-Left.

Speaking of Corbyn's supporters, it looks like Len McClusky is trying to have his cake and eat it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51255529

Speaking to the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, Mr McCluskey said: "I'm absolutely convinced that there were those individuals who opposed Jeremy Corbyn's election right from the beginning, used the anti-Semitism issue - which I think is quite despicable that they did this on such an important subject - to undermine Corbyn, there's no doubt about that."

But he said that the party had "never handled the anti-Semitism issue correctly", adding: "We should have done things quicker."

Now that he's in Power Boris Johnson is going to be rather difficult to remove - he's not unpopular, he's not stupid and he's not a bad political campaigner. None of which makes him necessarily the right person to by Prime Minister, though I think he probably was the right person to handle Brexit. Kier Stammer is the centrist candidate with the best chance of beating Johnson, but he's a bit boring and therefore difficult o differentiate from, well, anything else.

[Montmorency]

I don't see how a Democrat adopting the rhetoric of a failed Conservative Prime Minister has anything to do with the Labour Leadership election. This is not a "general" UK politics thread and most of us agreed a few years ago that those "mega-threads" aren't really very useful - they're just a mess.

I should have posted it in the general thread.

[edyzmedieval]

So, I read that entire article. The author seems extremely harsh on both sides, and it's worth noting that they reduce both to being essentially morally bankrupt husks. It reads very much like a "call to action" for the moderate Left and centre-Left.

Which is a sensible way of putting it - instead of having extremists on both ends capture the majorities, we need the moderate centre of which many are part of to also take part in the political process.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Which is a sensible way of putting it - instead of having extremists on both ends capture the majorities, we need the moderate centre of which many are part of to also take part in the political process.

True, although if people refuse to mobalise there's not a lot you can do. Boris Johnson is really a centre-right politician who has pivoted more to the right because that's where the votes are - rather like Mitt Rommey in 2012. That being said, if Labour continue towards the hard left the Conservatives will become more moderate as people turned off from Labour gravitate to the "other" party and exert an intellectual gravity that drags them back to the centre. Eventually Labour will either concede to a new, more moderate, left-wing party or they will become more moderate themselves.

Ramsey Macdonald and Clem Attlee must be ashamed, though.

[Furunculus]

Which is a sensible way of putting it - instead of having extremists on both ends capture the majorities, we need the moderate centre of which many are part of to also take part in the political process.

which is what FPTP is supposed to achieve, because you can't achieve power without appealing broadly across the geographic and political divide.
the 'common ground' in short (which is a different thing to the centre ground).