Jeremy Corbyn

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
With good reason, though. I am not part of the new fragile unity in Labour. The whole thrust of the Corbyn gang's agenda is more to do with transforming the internal make-up of the Labour party to ensure that the Socialist Left will have a lock down on constituency nominations until the end (or "the beginning"), rather than winning now. Although they are starting to have the delirious dream that this is in sight sooner than expected, which indeed it is. Either in the longer or shorter term, though, this is still a rolling nightmare for Labour, immediate shock and certain ambigious and untested benefits this election might deliver aside.

Huh? Corbyn's agenda is not about winning now, despite getting the 3rd best number of votes of any Labour politician since Attlee (after 97 Blair and 66 Wilson; and apparently ahead of '97 Blair in England according to something I read today, though I haven't yet seen the stats)?

If getting 12.9 million votes is not about making a pretty damned good attempt at winning now, then Lord knows what Labour was about before Corbyn took over. He has just run one of the best electoral campaigns ever seen in Britain, and saved the fricking Labour Party from a permanent redundancy. Of course only time will tell if he can finish the job, and predicting anything is a minefield, but it's the opposite of a nightmare for Labour - it's a rebirth. It is now relevant to a generation that isn't on its deathbed.

With Podemos attempting to oust Rajoy from government (though I don't rate their chances), it's looking like a pretty seminal week for the Left in Europe.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
That manifesto was as big a stab in the dark as the Labour manifesto in 45, when nobody in the Labour PLP expected to beat Churchill and produced a reckless fantasy list. The difference being, in 45 Labour had the intellectual and political heavyweights to make it an effective and transformative programme for reshaping Britain once they had power. Plus the circumstances helped them: strong support from the electorate, the apparatus of war-time planning already in place, the momentum and enthusiasm for the Beveridge report which built a welfare state from practically nothing. Even so, it caused major problems, deforming the UK economy and Labour were out of power pretty quickly. But it transformed the narrative and the Tories accepted most of the changes that Labour made in those years, all of which were basically bank rolled by US and Canadian injections of capital to keep us solvent after WW2.

None of this exists now.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
With Macron securing his position in France, maybe it's the shoots of a rebirth of the centre left?
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Of course everything is different, agreed. For example, we actually have an NHS and a welfare state; they don't need to be built, just not destroyed. And unlike 1945, people are being rationed food not by necessity, but due to ideology.

Not quite sure which part of Labour's manifesto counts as a reckless fantasy list outside of the masochist community (which admittedly is still a large constituency).

Re Macron - not sure France can act as an indicator of anything, tbh, given the circumstances of the election and France's general peculiarities. Spain seems a better comparator in terms of political set-up at the moment (though obviously the social situation is massively different) - an incumbent corrupt party of the right propped up by old people* (in a country where the far right has only ever made limited gains in the past few decades) under sustained attack from a left wing party born of rage against austerity, while the dying centre left party looks on mutely and shuffles its leaders.

*Rajoy finished third/fourth once you take out over-65s. Would be interested to see how much Labour won by among under-65s.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
Yes, but the NHS is not functioning well because it has massively outgrown the expectations of its founders (Bevan predicted that it would have a "spike" as all the people who couldn't afford health care would use it, after that he expected demand to go down as the population got healthier, which didn't happen, to say the least). Labour threw money at the NHS in the late 90s, and it got lost in beaurocracy. Nobody has worked out how to sustain the NHS as a world class health service with pure public funding as yet. It's the most ambitious public health care service in the world but nobody can quite work out how to match public funding with service and quality. It's such a totemic institution that the debate about it devolves to soundbites by politicians and childish rhetoric by everybody else.
 

droid

Well-known member
Thats completely insane. The Tories took 7 billion out of the NHS which accounts for much of the mess thats there now. Granted there are problems due to demographics, but speaking as someone from a country with a hugely dysfunctional health service, the pre-Blair (or certainly pre-Cameron) NHS is one of the few things Britain can be proud off - also performed very well against European and Global indicators in terms of patient outcomes and value for money IIRC.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
@craner: Blair's Labour expanded PFI! That's not throwing money at it, that's throwing bad debt, which continues to hobble the NHS.

Though agree that bureaucracy and consultancy no doubt swallowed up loads and has done for decades - internal corruption of various sorts definitely an ongoing problem. But the intrusion of the non-specialist private sector (ie Br*nson, Capita etc, rather than smaller private firms who specialise in health issues, who should definitely be part of the process) is a disaster

On Branson: https://www.ft.com/content/297e7714-089f-11e7-97d1-5e720a26771b there should be an emergency law passed to feed this man to sharks.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
Food banks do not = food rationing. Most genuine food bank users are there because of specific Tory welfare reforms, such as punitive ESA and JSA sanctions, changes to the appeal process for ESA and PIP decisions, New Universal Credit claims and the effect of the benefit cap on large families. It's not general poverty in the UK but very niche social policy changes which Labour (and me!) oppose that have driven the food bank surge. There are other factors too: those who take advantage of their existence tof subsidise chaotic lifestyles or addictions. This is not me being right wing: any food voucher supplier will tell you the same.
 

droid

Well-known member
With Macron securing his position in France, maybe it's the shoots of a rebirth of the centre left?

Macron is planning on ditching 120,000 public sector jobs and slashing corporation tax. Im not sure in which universe these constitute left wing policies. Its just more neo-liberal managerialism.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Food banks do not = food rationing. Most genuine food bank users are there because of specific Tory welfare reforms, such as punitive ESA and JSA sanctions, changes to the appeal process for ESA and PIP decisions, New Universal Credit claims and the effect of the benefit cap on large families. It's not general poverty in the UK but very niche social policy changes which Labour (and me!) oppose that have driven the food bank surge. There are other factors too: those who take advantage of their existence tof subsidise chaotic lifestyles or addictions. This is not me being right wing: any food voucher supplier will tell you the same.

? Er, I was just making the point that there's enough food to go around now, unlike in 1945. As part of the general point that any comparison between 1945 and now doesn't work. All the conditions of the good life exist in the UK already.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Brown injected massive capital into the NHS in 1999. It was swallowed.

I agree that the NHS is something to be proud of, but proud enough to accept when it is not working?

Labour looked to private practice to deliver services for free - they switched the debate from just shoring up the NHS itself to looking at what was actually being delivered to patients. They tried to square the circle: keep it free, improve the quality. They did it badly, but they had a realistic attitude in regard to what was achievable and what could be improved.
 

droid

Well-known member
As I said, by global indicators the NHS is working. New Labour's attempts to 'improve' it is leading down the road to a US style system or a hybrid private/public system where private interests cannibalise the public elements and freeze out those who cant afford to pay.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
I mean, this was a live debate within Labour in the old days of serious debate, before Labour canvassers were programmed to go out and repeat "we are the party of the NHS" like robots.

Remember Gaitskell vs Bevan, or the Barbara Castle "pay beds" controversy.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
(2015) "Britain’s biggest health trust, Barts Health NHS Trust in London, which was placed in special measures last month. It is £93m in debt – struggling under the weight of a 43-year PFI contract under which it will pay back more than £7bn on contracts valued at a fraction of that sum (£1.1bn)."
Then it gave Serco a £600m contract in 2016. Haven't checked how that's going, though. Could be good.

The problems of the NHS aren't that complicated.

From recent personal experience, in terms of care some NHS hospitals are catastrophic (the one I'm thinking of is in Wales, as it happens), and some are delivering outstanding care (south-east and London).
 
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droid

Well-known member
Your welcome to visit and give our hospitals a shot, think 4 months wait is bad? Try 3 years.
 
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