Jeremy Corbyn

Labour slashed the waiting lists in UK hospitals, at a historic high after Thatcher and Major.

1) It's not and 2) that has nothing to do with New Labour even if true

Bullshit. While its true that Blair's investment to the European average improved a system that had been struggling under the Tories it was New Labour who introduced widespread part privatisation in 2003, accelerated by the Tories and then combined with the slashing of the public budget. NL started this deeply damaging process and owns the results.

The key to improvement is restructuring under the principle of public ownership, not the introduction of predatory private competition.

It was private companies delivering a service for free within the structure of the NHS. Your argument holds water if you're talking about, say, cleaners. Yes, Matron lost her control and the wards are not as clean as they were in the 60s. The food is worse.

But in terms of expanding service? Dentists got privatised, but waiting lists went down, hospitals got money, they rolled out non-GP clinics. The ideology of New Labour was to save the public health care system and improve it for patients. The fallacy that they had a nefarious plan to privatise the whole thing is a crude and conspiratorial fantasty.

Cancer facilities had boom years under Blair and Brown.

The Heath, Baboon? I worked there for 2 years, I know all about their issues.

Ban Craner. He can't even follow a debate any more. He just repeats his talking points like a stuck record. He's completely lost touch.as I've said many times before he hasnt updated his intellectual software since 2001. Its disgraceful.
Reads the same books watches the same films makes the same terrible arguments. Nothing makes an impression since the twin towers. Nothing forces a reapraisal. Not the ghoulish situation in Iraq. Not trump. Not corbyn. He's like a man who never stopped wearing flares and tells the world hes waiting for the day they come back into fashion.
And so aggressive too. Chill out lad.learn to listen and take in whats happening.

Ha ha, yeah, I thought I said I was going to shut up!

baboon2004 said:

Which associates have been in the news enough to make any impact upon large numbers of people? I can't see this as being a big factor, tbh - important to some voters of course, but relatively few.

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Well for starters there's his appointment to comms secretary of Seumas 'David Irving of the Left' Milne. There's his endless prevarications about Ken Livingstone, his refusal to repudiate his crackpot brother, his insistence on associating with the racist cunts and rapist-enablers in SWP/StWC; these are not obscure people and groups that hardly anyone has heard of or cares about, and you're underestimating the voting public - especially the Labour-voting or potentially-Labour-voting public - by assuming that.

baboon2004 said:

And of course some trad Labour voters simply don't agree with certain of Corbyn's policies, either because they're too left wing, or in certain cases not left wing enough.

It's just that there was barely any discussion of actual policies in the media - outside of Brexit and Trident etc - until the Labour manifesto was leaked (so leaking it ahead of time was probably a masterstroke, to give Labour vital extra days of actual policy discussion before the election), and that was almost wholly down to the right wing media and their associates on the left.

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We've been here before so I'm not going to tread over old ground, and all I'll say is this: do you accept that some of the criticism levelled at Corbyn can, in principle, be warranted? Because unless you think it's logically impossible for him to make a mistake, then you have to accept that *some* of the criticism is justified, even if it's often greatly exaggerated and mixed up with unjustified criticism by the dreaded right-wing media (which these days apparently includes The Guardian (!), since Corbyn is the acme of leftiness, so any criticism is right-wing by definition).

Because the moment you put Corbyn on a pedestal and insist he is above criticism, you're no longer a supporter of a politician, you're a member of a cult. And it's precisely this cult-like nature of his core support that's helped to alienate many other potential voters. This is all so obvious it's ridiculous I'm having to explain it to an intelligent person!

Mr. Tea said:

Well for starters there's his appointment to comms secretary of Seumas 'David Irving of the Left' Milne.

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We have been here before and you have yet to provide a single coherent example of the nefariousness of Seumas Milne. When challenged you resorted to an hominems and IIRC, posted a John pilger article.

Mr. Tea said:

We've been here before so I'm not going to tread over old ground, and all I'll say is this: do you accept that some of the criticism levelled at Corbyn can, in principle, be warranted? Because unless you think it's logically impossible for him to make a mistake, then you have to accept that *some* of the criticism is justified, even if it's often greatly exaggerated and mixed up with unjustified criticism by the dreaded right-wing media (which these days apparently includes The Guardian (!), since Corbyn is the acme of leftiness, so any criticism is right-wing by definition).

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My previous post in response to this was clear. It was not simply the right wing press. There was almost universally negative coverage across the right-liberal divide. The LSE report (which I posted here when it came out) is also unequivocal in this regard.

Our analysis shows that Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate. This process of delegitimisation occurred in several ways: 1) through lack of or distortion of voice; 2) through ridicule, scorn and personal attacks; and 3) through association, mainly with terrorism.

All this raises, in our view, a number of pressing ethical questions regarding the role of the media in a democracy. Certainly, democracies need their media to challenge power and offer robust debate, but when this transgresses into an antagonism that undermines legitimate political voices that dare to contest the current status quo, then it is not democracy that is served.

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http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/Mainstream-Media-Representations-of-Jeremy-Corbyn.aspx

The fact that you are repeating many of these smears - even now, just goes to show how effective they have been.

craner said:

It was private companies delivering a service for free within the structure of the NHS. Your argument holds water if you're talking about, say, cleaners. Yes, Matron lost her control and the wards are not as clean as they were in the 60s. The food is worse.

But in terms of expanding service? Dentists got privatised, but waiting lists went down, hospitals got money, they rolled out non-GP clinics. The ideology of New Labour was to save the public health care system and improve it for patients.

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This is simply false.

To begin with, the Blair government’s approach was to “market-make”; and so, from 2003, successive waves of independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) were opened throughout England. Run by private companies for profit, ISTCs were contracted (often on very favourable terms) to provide solely NHS elective procedures, creating extra capacity in the system to bring down waiting lists, and at the same time forcing existing providers to polish up their act if they wanted to hang on to any of their more “profitable” work. In parallel, the best NHS hospitals were able to apply for the new foundation trust status, which freed them from public-service constraints to operate more like private businesses.

Out of this market-making grew a new logic: that as well as deliberately inserting private provision inside the NHS, the health market should be opened to external competition. In 2009, in what transpired to be its dying days, New Labour introduced the “any qualified provider” (AQP) initiative, which allowed the private sector to undertake NHS work outside the ISTC programme. It is under AQP that the vast majority of my patients who require elective procedures now choose to spurn both our local district general and the ISTC in favour of referral to the nearby private hospital run by Circle.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/how-labour-broke-nhs-and-why-labour-must-fix-it

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The fallacy that they had a nefarious plan to privatise the whole thing is a crude and conspiratorial fantasty.

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NL's plan may not have been to privatise the NHS, but once the (deeply unpopular) PFI path was taken the logical consequences are clear.

Mr. Tea said:

Well for starters there's his appointment to comms secretary of Seumas 'David Irving of the Left' Milne. There's his endless prevarications about Ken Livingstone, his refusal to repudiate his crackpot brother, his insistence on associating with the racist cunts and rapist-enablers in SWP/StWC; these are not obscure people and groups that hardly anyone has heard of or cares about, and you're underestimating the voting public - especially the Labour-voting or potentially-Labour-voting public - by assuming that.

We've been here before so I'm not going to tread over old ground, and all I'll say is this: do you accept that some of the criticism levelled at Corbyn can, in principle, be warranted? Because unless you think it's logically impossible for him to make a mistake, then you have to accept that *some* of the criticism is justified, even if it's often greatly exaggerated and mixed up with unjustified criticism by the dreaded right-wing media (which these days apparently includes The Guardian (!), since Corbyn is the acme of leftiness, so any criticism is right-wing by definition).

Because the moment you put Corbyn on a pedestal and insist he is above criticism, you're no longer a supporter of a politician, you're a member of a cult. And it's precisely this cult-like nature of his core support that's helped to alienate many other potential voters. This is all so obvious it's ridiculous I'm having to explain it to an intelligent person!

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1/ Ken Livingstone, agreed - he should have been thrown out of the party. I think the others are minor issues to most people (descriptive rather than prescriptive) - I just heard endless IRA and Hamas talk in terms of Corbyn 'associates'.

"racist cunts and rapist-enablers in SWP/StWC" - I'm a fan of neither - they've both behaved horrendously in individual instances, and might well merit those terms. But if you're using those very strong, blanket terms, then you must accept that the legal system in the UK is also a rapist-enabler, and the UK population is racist because many don't challenge racism? If so, fine, but I have the sense you might baulk at these descriptions. Strong terms have to be applied with equality across the board.

[Just as with the ludicrous anti-Semitism witchhunt vs Labour in the press - absolutely right to critique Labour on the issue, but to do so without so much as mentioning the vast sewers of racism within the Tory Party was just insane]

2/ I'm mystified as to how this follows from what I said. Obviously I've never said that Corbyn was above criticism (indeed, the quotation you cite explicitly acknowledges that some of his policies are open to criticism from the left as well as the right), but neither does this have anything to do with the point I was making about the media bias, which was chronic.

The Guardian allied itself with the right wing of the Labour Party in its bias towards Corbyn, therefore echoing what the right wing press was saying. It doesn't make the Guardian right wing, obvs, but it is worthy of note and of criticism. Precisely because the consistent criticism of the first actually left-wing leader to arise in 30 years in the UK was all couched in vague allegations of 'unelectability', and not a serious appraisal of Corbyn's potential (there were some excellent columnists who were much more balanced though). Put it this way, Corbyn's success owes very, very little to the mainstream 'left wing' media of the UK.

droid said:

We have been here before and you have yet to provide a single coherent example of the nefariousness of Seumas Milne. When challenged you resorted to an hominems and IIRC, posted a John pilger article.

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https://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/seamas-milne-on-stalins-missing-millions/

And here he is, chillin' with his buddies:

If I have time today, I'll see if I can find the article where he cheers on the Taliban. Then there's his calls for solidarity with North Korea and his dismissal of concerns about Russian war crimes in Syria as a "distraction" (from the by-definition absolute evil of the UK/USA, naturally). The guy is fucking pond scum and it's worrying that you're so keen to jump to his defence.

droid said:

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.

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Macron clearly is the candidate of Big Business. The fact that he is subscribing to the lightweight (cultural) leftism of "inclusiveness", "diversity" and being pro gay marriage is exactly what's been considered "centrist left" today. Civic liberties (because gay bashing/open racism would be harmful for business) coupled with rigid supply-side economics.

droid said:

The fact that you are repeating many of these smears - even now, just goes to show how effective they have been.

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SMH

Do you get than an accusation isn't a "smear" if it's, you know, substantially true?

Mr. Tea said:

https://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/seamas-milne-on-stalins-missing-millions/

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Right, so your evidence of his evil is his questioning of official propaganda figures the deaths of 25-50 million at the hands of Stalin, a questioning that is borne out even by the author of the piece:

“Exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but the total of deaths caused by the whole range of Soviet regime’s terrors can hardly be lower than some thirteen to fifteen million.”

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If, when taken at face value means that Milne was closer to the mark and the questioning was justified.

And here he is, chillin' with his buddies:

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Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

droid said:

Right, so your evidence of his evil is his questioning of official propaganda figures the deaths of 25-50 million at the hands of Stalin, a questioning that is borne out even by the author of the piece:

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He's not "questioning", he's outright whitewashing. His estimates are lower, by many millions, than those supported by any historian without a vested interest in rehabilitating Soviet Communism.