Corbyn: what an utter, utter clown.
Three days it took him.
Not only was this the New Longest Suicide Note In History but commentary on it was live-streamed around the world 24/7. What a total incompetent, he hasn’t a clue about leadership. He couldn’t run a bath.
Here’s GP and the Rumour to help lift (y)our spirits.
Yesterday evening I saw that one of the papers was running the memorable headline:
“Sacked Shadow Minister Turns on Corbyn”.
I have to say that I think it’s a terrible abuse of power for the kinky bastard to be deriving some kind of frisson from giving people the heave ho.
Much like m’Lord Goddard.
Absolutely brilliant comment, Jeff.
Thanks Ian, I appreciate that. I knew you’d be one of the people who got the reference.
A check on the internet reveals that this was a senior judge who ejaculated every time he sentenced someone to death. Knowing it would happen, a spare pair of trousers was necessary on those days.
Good grief.
Turn me on dead man.
Jeremy Corbyn couldn’t run a bath – laughing my fat arse off.
There are things about JC that I really admire but he is still very naïve in this media savvy world. For now I’m prepared to give him some room to grow into the role but what pisses me off more is that whatever he does he is a dead man walking as his fellow MPs will never accept him and neither will the mainstream press. So I guess in a year’s time Labour will have another faceless dullard in charge and normal service will be resumed – how depressing.
The Tories think he’s perfect (so far).
There are a number of good candidates. Unfortunately, the membership will need to get over their emotional spasm first.
The price of people enjoying opposition politics as a hobby is that the least well-off are being comprehensively fucked over by the Tories. This will make no difference to the hobbyist left, other than giving them the opportunity to tut loudly and feel self-righteous.
Be reasonable. They have to spend lots of time posting those fake Photoshop outrage pics on Facebook and Twitter. This takes time, you know.
I like him
I am sure he is a nice enough chap and holds to his beliefs.
Unfortunately he is 30 years behind the times politically.
More than 30. His like has not been seen since Henry Hyndman’s Social Democatic Federation, which left the Labour Party in 1907.
Given that I would like to see a Labour government, I find the ongoing farce heartbreaking.
I’m not sure that being up-to-the-moment politically would be much of a recommendation these days.
Yep, I like him too.
Had too many arguments about it over the holiday period with kith & kin (nice couple) though to argue the toss on the internetty.
Word. Kith is a stand-up guy in a tight spot but he’s way off-beam on nationalisation.
The depressing thing for me is that the Labour party are completely wasting the time given to them to find an electable leader before the next election. By the time they realise that Corbyn offers no hope whatsoever it will be too late. The thought of another 8 or 9 years of this leadership is perplexing in the extreme. For the Labour party to press the self destruct button is alarming – aside from the fact he appears to be a nice bloke, who is going to vote to get rid of our Nuclear deterrent in the urgent climate?
Cuurent climate obviously but urgent climate kind of makes sense too.
This thread is giving me a very strong sense of deja vu.
*cue I’m-no-fan-of-Peter-Hitchens-but* I thought this was admirable: http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/01/letting-rip-against-all-this-reshuffle-garbage.html
It’s important not to take one’s cue from the meedja, I feel. (Except when it suits me, obviously.)
I think Hitchens has gone the full con-trails there. Mad as a badger.
So three shadow front-bench MPs who I wouldn’t recognise in this street or any other have quit. Meanwhile, across the House, Cameron and his Tory friends make jokes and bray like imbecilic children when Corbyn is pushing him for any semblance of an answer for the government’s shameful policy on flood defences. I’m sure the people in ‘that north’ who are shovelling buckets of stinking mud out of their front rooms will be appalled by Corbyn’s handling of the reshuffle.
The foetid ramblings of some bitter Westminster no-marks is unquestionably the most important thing that’s happening in the world right now.
We’ll see if this is still the case when Tory backbenchers really start putting the boot into Cameron during (and after) the EU referendum.
If I was shovelling buckets of stinking mud of out my front room I’d actually be livid that Corbyn is so utterly ineffectual that he can’t even lead or organise his own group, let alone land a glove on Cameron about flood defences or anything else. And that’s because he has not a shred of credibility in either Parliamentary or political terms.
He has achieved absolutely nothing in his 30-odd years as an MP, he will achieve nothing as LOHMO, and he will never achieve anything in Government because he will never get there. He is pointless, useless, a 5th wheel made flesh.
Your opinions on JC are yours, obviously, and I’m not questioning those – they’re just opinions after all, but I can assure you that the flood victims couldn’t give a tuppenny f*** about who is/isn’t in his shadow cabinet. They want the government held to account over broken promises about flood defences; Cameron’s inability to tell the truth or even come close to answering JC’s pointed questioning on the matter paints him as the man without a “shred of credibility” on any front. That is pretty much the view of the York/Hebden Bridge/Mytholmroyd/Carlisle/Whitby/Tadcaster/Leeds jury and hopefully will be reflected in the polls when that balloon-faced moron next dares stick his head above the political parapet.
You’re absolutely right that Cameron has failed miserably to answer questions about flood defences and has gutted his previously much-vaunted environmental policies without a backward glance.
But a competent leader of the opposition – one who knows how to play the media, how to hold a government’s feet to the fire and who understands that his primary duty is not to preach to the choir but to change minds – should have been all over this. No Labour spokesperson should be able to open their mouth til February without trashing the Tories’ record on this matter. Corbyn should have been thigh deep in the River Ouse pretty much from Boxing Day to the present, shouting “CAMERON’S FAULT”. Of course people in the flood areas know, but they represent a tiny fraction of the electorate. Corbyn’s job is to communicate with the rest of us.
But because he began by antagonising every news organ in the country in his acceptance speech and continues to behave very peevishly with journalists, he can’t get his message out (and seems to have no way of coordinating one anyway, since the people who count, his MPs, won’t follow him). And because he seems perfectly content with his “mandate”, he forgets that his wider responsibility is to the whole electorate, not his party membership (who again are a tiny fraction of the voting public).
Have to violently disagree – you’re all buying the media spin apart from mikethep and (good grief!) the usually appalling Hitchens, who I normally disagree with on principle. The Tories are messing up massively in all areas and all the media seem interested in is going for Corbyn. As PH points out this does not make sense unless he really is a threat. The Labour centre were and are useless, as we saw in May, and Corbyn is not ’30 years behind’, he talks sense, but we are so brainwashed we cannot see it. But soon we will. Whether or not he ends up PM is obviously in doubt but the ideas are very much of the moment. What goes around comes around. New Labour, centre ground politics, corporate capitalism, right wing conservatism, is dead, people! Of course Labour are behind in the polls, now! The polls tell the required story. Thought the Afterword was better than this.
“He talks sense but we are do brainwashed we cannot see it”.
Sounds like an excellent campaign slogan.
If they got the spelling right maybe
I blame the media.
Of course Corbyn is news. Car crashes generally are.
And I have to respectfully disagree with you, @Jayhawk. I’m not buying any media spin whatsoever, but what I see is the media going for Corbyn because he is utterly failing to do his job. His job is to provide meaningful and effective Opposition to the Government, to embarrass them, expose them, and undermine them, and so give floating voters enough cause to begin doubting them. He’s not doing any of that, at all. None of it.
I’m a Labour supporter / member of some 35 years standing, so lived through the wilderness years when we were led by dreamers and nutters. I went toe-to-toe with Militant and most of the other Leftist groupuscules, and because of them it was often very hard work defending Labour to people whose votes we wanted to secure – but throughout those 35 years I never experienced anything like the despair and excruciating embarrassment that I do when I watch Corbyn at the Despatch Box or, God help us, in front of a TV camera.
I completely see your point Jeff. My nephew is chair of Exeter Labour party and we don’t see eye to eye on this at all. I just feel as does mikethep that Corbyn doesn’t play the game and that is a good thing. If you watch PMQs carefully they really don’t know how to react to him – tories actually laugh when he quotes the public’s opinions and questions and Cameron simply repeats his standard line on everything and does not provide answers. Watch the tory front bench closely – I think they’re worried. What other explanation for the relentless attack, even from the Guardian? Blair’s labour totally bought into the Neocon view of the world, I mean – Mandelson, did we seriously vote for a party run by him and Blair? What was I thinking? The policies, for me, are great; maybe Corbyn won’t be the guy to bring them home to the public, but will the person with the correct image (that’s what it’s about surely) for you be honest and not controlled by the corporations? I doubt it.
You think he’s got the Tories *worried*? Have you seen his poll numbers?
Not sure how relevant it is at the moment. How likely is Cameron to go to the country in the next 3 years?
If he’s not managed to make a dent in the polls now, it’s unlikely to happen closer to an actual election.
I just hope there’s enough left of the Labour party post-nutters for it to make a serious pitch in 2025. That’s right, nearly another decade of the Tories stretching ahead. Still, as long we lose for the right reasons, eh?
In one of the dreariest posts of all time on this site, I must point out that David Cameron can’t call a general election. The commons now has fixed five year term, unless the government loses a vote of confidence. There are however a lot of other elections this May, in London, Scotland, Wales and the English regions. I guess Labour politicians will use this in different ways to establish their relationship to Corbyn. From what I’ve seen in London, Sadiq Khan is distancing himself, in fact not mentioning Corbyn, although he put his name forward in the leadership election to “broaden the debate”.
Ohhh, I’ve just “done a Goddard”!
As an aside, some may have read the laughable last-ditch Times and Torygraph media attacks on the BMA, labelling ’em all trotskyite lunatics for worrying about the state of the NHS. Funny, tho’, how most people who actually work in the frontline of the public sector: medicine, social work, teaching, seeing and dealing with the carnage of policies enacted, tend to lean leftward. And suddenly it’s a crime?
Just as a matter of interest, @jeff, where’s the problem in a reshuffle (particularly an opposition reshuffle) taking three days? The press were yelling, ‘Come on, get on with it, man!’ before he’d even started, but why should the rest of us care?
3 whole days?
Johnny Chilcot could teach the old beatnik a thing or two.
Thanks for your question @mikethep. I’m contemptuous about the way he’s gone about this because he ineptly allowed the story to become one of “process”. That’s unforgiveable. Only political groupies care about process.
The re-shuffle was Corbyn’s opportunity to re-present the Party in a really emphatic way, one which would resonate with exactly that “rest of us” that you refer to, ie everybody in the country outside of politics and the press. It was his chance to say to the public, crisply and unambiguously, “This is my team, not a legacy team, and this is what we’re about. We all believe in the same thing. We’re going to crack on now”,
It should have been decisive, clear, and quick, so that “the rest of us” could read a single short article about it or watch a single brief news item and, regardless of our level of interest in politics, think “Ah right, ok, got it” and then know instinctively where to file “Corbyn’s Labour Party” nice and tidily in our too-busy and frazzled brains, and then move on to thinking about something else. Instead, he dithered and drifted, and bits and pieces started dribbling out here and there, and that was a nuisance as it was hard to fit them together with what came out the day before or even earlier on the same day. And it began to look like the re-shuffle was reacting to the emerging story rather than defining it. And I think he just looked totally inept, and that’s just done more damage to the credibility of the Labour Party, and that’s unforgiveable.
In short, in terms of confidence-building and effective news-management, this was an absolute dog’s breakfast of a re-shuffle.
Ah bollocks: apologies for the missing .
Ah bollocks again, I meant the missing HTML tag to end the italic text.
[Looks like a dog’s breakfast of a post to me. What were you saying about inept news management? Ed.]
Well, I can’t argue with that, even though your html leaves something to be desired.
I don’t have the same personal stake in Labour as you do, I drifted away years ago apart from a brief flirtation during the Blair years. I doubt I’d have signed up this last time if I’d been in Blighty, unless out of sheer mischief. I voted Lib Dem until the coalition happened, after that Green (gaspo!).
What I like about Corbyn is absolutely that he doesn’t play the game, doesn’t do what politicians are supposed to – and doesn’t play the media game to any great extent. He sticks doggedly to the matter in hand, doesn’t engage in showboating or playing to the gallery (unlike some PMs I could mention). I find this immensely refreshing. I may be exaggerating here, but it’s as if Chauncey Gardiner has suddenly become Labour leader. (This may not be an original thought.) Cameron is always very sleek and plausible (I’ve just watched PMQs for my sins), every inch the top Tory politician, but I wouldn’t trust him an inch to look after my interests.
For the time being JC may have made Labour unelectable (though I wouldn’t bet my house on it), but I don’t see him as any less electable than any of his defeated rivals, and who knows how it’ll go over the next couple of years. For reasons of its own, Fleet Street has made it its mission to bring Corbyn down, by fair means or mostly) foul. You were very quick to diss Hitchens, but I think he made a good point: if Corbyn is such a loser, why do they bother? Even by their standards some of the stuff has been laughable at best, deeply sinister at worst.
The reshuffle may have been a fiasco by usual standards, but I really don’t care. It’s not as if any of them were well-loved National Treasures. Talking of which, you may enjoy this.
http://eveningharold.com/2016/01/06/outrage-as-corbyn-sacks-man-no-ones-heard-of-from-job-that-wasnt-real/
Would it be something if it turned out the media had been manipulating this whole thing. Oh hang on, Laura Kuenssberg may have not played it fair… http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tCufUeYIpA4J:www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/collegeofjournalism/entries/82a00c77-c0cc-4e79-99ca-25e9c21d01a7+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
As I read that, the BBC manipulated nothing – a willing and excitable Shadow Minister gifted them the story.
If she’d done this to a politician who wasn’t Corbyn this would have been front page news questioning the BBC’s impartiality and putting their future into question – their job is to report the news not fabricate opportunities to sensationalise it.
I sort of know what you mean, but to my eyes this is a guy who was going to go anyway, had already told LK he was thinking of going and jumped at the chance to do it on the telly when the opportunity to get in front of a camera presented itself.
I don’t think anyone comes out smelling of roses, but the responsibility is Doughty’s, not Kuenssberg’s.
And anyway: what the Corbyn fans seem to refuse to engage with is why the man should expect loyalty. He has no right whatever to expect it.
Every time Corbyn spectacularly cocks something up we hear all about how the media is against him. Of course they’re bloody against him – he’s a politician and his first act in the job was to tell them to do one.
Besides which, he’s receiving exactly the same treatment that all the leaders of the major parties get. Ed Miliband took an absolute hammering off the press (and it wasn’t because he was a dangerous maverick who threatened the establishment – that’s pure wishful thinking, and an item of spin worthy of Alastair Campbell in his pomp). Last year the media spread an uncorroborated, single-source rumour that David Cameron shagged a pig’s head, to much whooping and cheering both on here and elsewhere. Clinton was a murderer. Blair a war criminal. Bush a simpleton. It’s part of the game, an unfortunate part, but certainly not particular to Jeremy Corbyn.
Nonetheless, it’s the excuse that will be used by his fans when he crashes and burns at the polls. According to Yougov he is in the unprecedented position of not having enjoyed a positive approval rating since taking office, and his numbers are materially worse than Miliband’s were at the same stage.
All of which only matters, of course, if you actually engage with reality, rather than existing in a glorious fantasy bubble in which the only thing keeping Jeremy Corbyn from power is a shadowy cabal of establishment figures, desperate to prevent the true voice of the people from fulfilling his glorious destiny.
I’ve got a mate I often go to watch football with. He’s convinced that the refs are biased against our team, and that there’s some sort of FA conspiracy against us. It’s bollocks, obviously, but when passions flare sometimes that’s how it feels to all fans. The world isn’t against Jeremy Corbyn, he’s just a really poor political leader who stands no chance of being elected.
This is a fascinating and very important lesson in the difference between protest politics and actual get-elected-and-change-things politics. Corbin has to be given a chance, if only to prove to his supporters that being valiant in opposition is an admirably useless stance. My concern is that he, and they, would rather go down in flames as principled victims of a rabid media and a selfish electorate than represent the views and wishes of enough people to get them elected.
In the end, though, it’s not going to be the Labour leader that decides who wins in 2020 – it will be the economic crash that’s coming our way, the EU vote, the unpopular wars and whatever unknown unknowns are lining up. So let him bumble about for a while longer.
The latest is a Corbynite petty sideshow about the BBC letting a minister resign on air. Because that’s the priority, another distraction from government activities, another spotlight on Labour’s divisions, another failure of judgement. Still, nice chap, makes some good points.