Tough-nut ex-miner has experienced poverty, understands solidarity, can carry a crowd – and takes no s***
The prospect of Ian Lavery as a candidate in the Labour leadership contest – he has said he is ‘seriously considering’ a bid – has the Labour right and their allies in the media scurrying.
The right is attacking Lavery’s accent, his background, his family, his history as president of the National Union of Mineworkers – and anything else they can think of – and he hasn’t even announced he’ll stand yet.
If you’re wondering why the right is so worried, watch this short video for a good idea of it:
In just a couple of short segments, it’s clear that Lavery:
- is genuinely working-class
- knows personally what poverty is like
- understands solidarity and has an impeccable track record
- can express himself
- can speak in public and carry a crowd
- is a fighter
- will take no s***
If Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters had any issue with the Labour leader, it was that they would have liked more ruthlessness from him at times. They would need to have no such concerns about Lavery – yet it’s clear that the big northerner’s heart is just as big as the leader he has backed impeccably from day one.
Lavery also has a track record for confronting Boris Johnson – and Johnson’s usual tactics to try to dominate a conversation made the Tory look like a spoiled child by comparison:
A tough-nut, working-class ex-miner who’s lost none of his fire and knows how to communicate it. And Labour supporters appear to believe by a ratio of three to one that Lavery – who consistently stood up for the leave vote of his constituents and warned the party of the consequences of not doing the same – is best placed to win back the leave towns Labour lost last month.
If any MP in the frame for the leadership frightens the right inside and outside the Labour Party, it’s Lavery – and with good reason.
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I can’t wait to hear from our resident Tory-enablers. I’m sure the only reason they haven’t started picking on him already is that the Brown Trouser Shop is closed for the holiday.
Ian Lavery is undoubtedly a working class old-style trade union-based socialist – an old bruiser, well able to stand up to the bluster of a Boris Johnson. He would therefore have my grudging vote as Leader. But how would the pro Brexit old style socialist ideology of Ian Lavery have fared if he, not Jeremy, had been our Leader for the last four years ? He would have been hounded by the press and our Labour Blairite Right in the PLP too, and of course would have been fenced in on our Party’s Brexit position by the overwhelming Remainer beliefs of our Party activist membership – from Right to ‘Left’ in just the same way that old Bennite Eurosceptic, Jeremy , was. So we would still have adopted our suicidal second Referendum and Remain, position – and lost our heartland voters ! Lavery might have had more ruthlessness than the far too gentlemanly and compromising and conciliatory Jeremy on mandatory re-selection though
Our Party’s fundamental problem is its COMPOSITION, in the PLP, local government , and our mass membership , ie, full of careerist, corrupt, right wingers asPs and councillors, and a disfunctional, non-socialist, Left-Liberal ‘radical’ member wing , not the very important, but still secondary issue of who is the Leader. Getting a nominally ‘Left’ Leader is important – but will simply repeat the disaster under Jeremy, if more socialists aren’t created or drawn into the Party, and a mass movement of politically aware militants built to support that Left Leader. Without that, and I can’t see how that can be built, given the dreadful failure of Momentum, an isolated Left Leader, in a Right wing opportunist sea of Labour MP’s and Shadow Cabinet, will be able to achieve nothing.
Lastly, Left wingers on here need to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ on Lavery’s past in the NUM. Blind hero worship of Left candidates is for children if it blinds us to weaknesses in those potential leaders’ characters and past record. Blind hero worship like that on the Left has provided, for instance, that Left posturing rogue, George Galloway, with a huge meal ticket for life from a gullible Left ! I challenge Lefties on here to actually justify Lavery’s conduct vis a vis his funding from the last remnants of the defunct NUM when he was its General Secretary. I know the Certification Officer said the paperwork was largely in order . But just read this and honestly tell me you see nothing wrong (morally, and as a trades unionist, not legally) with Lavery’s personal financial deals via a dead in the water NUM union (with TEN members) . https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/oct/20/labour-party-chair-received-165000-from-union-watchdog-finds
Despite that I would still vote for Lavery – as the best of a hopelessly terrible pack of ‘Left’ candidates – but let’s not kid ourselves that he hasn’t left himself open to attack from the mass media , on an issue of personal gain most ordinary people will see as ‘well out of order’, despite the formal clearance from the Certification Officer. To ordinary people it looks like the procedural formality of ‘the Law’, has failed to recognise and punish a blatant rip-off of a dead union’s funds – in the same way that the rip-off of £40 million by the four Directors of Rover Cars (‘The Rover Four’ – look it up ) when it collapsed turned out to be ‘perfectly legal’, but to ordinary people stunk to high heaven, and rightly so.
It is early days yet in the contest for a Labour leader to replace Corbyn. but, tentatively, I would say Ian Lavery has the needed qualities.
If he has any sense, if/when elected as the new leader, he will threaten and follow through with a legal challenge on any allegation, be it from the Tories or the Blairites, that he was guilty of any irregularity with regard to NUM funds.You stated that ‘the certification officer said the (relevant) paperwork was largely in order’. This means that no allegation of impropriety against Lavery has been proven. Any challenger will get the short shift they so greatly deserve. I am surprised that you give a link to the so-called ‘liberal’ toilet paper known as “The Guardian”. Readers of this blog will not need to be reminded of the dirty role their so-called journalists played in the downfall of Jeremy Corbyn. Electors will soon be able to pass judgement on whether Lavery has integrity. They will surely endorse him when they see that he has the sound, social democratic politics of Corbyn coupled with the instincts of someone who knows when to take off the velvet glove and become an attack dog in defence of the many.
I would agree that Lavery has by far the best chance of recapturing Labour’s lost voters in the former ‘red belt’. He is a northerner and a former miner – he therefore has personal experience of living and working in one of these communities. He is also a Eurosceptic of the Left. Such people are worth their weight in gold. If Labour had advanced a socialist argument for leaving the EU in 2016 (not progressive institution, but a neo-liberal capitalist cabal that is no friend of Europe’s workers by hand or brain) the narrative would not have been dominated by the Johnsons, Farages, and (jheaven help us!), the Yaxley-Lennons of the nation. Corbyn may well now have been PM and a progressive deal to leave the EU have been agreed and be up and running.
I agree that we need more genuine democratic socialists in the LP. We need proportional representation and mandatory reselection of Parliamentary candidates. Both of these should be put forward to the LP Conference in September this year and vigorously fought for.
Waiting for the perfect leader is a frustrating and ultimately unrewarding occupation, as proven by two millennia of Christianity. It ain’t, realistically, gonna happen, and any decent Labour leader will have to servants of our ‘free’ press on his or her doorstep from Day 1. That’s a given.
The foundations of the project are laid, and Corbyn has made great progress towards returning the organisation to Labour values. Sure, there’s more to be done, but consolidation is rarely as hard as the first steps in forcing change.
And I frankly don’t understand your criticism of the members. Most of those who joined since 2015 have done so because they believed in Corbyn’s values and vision, and the changes begun by Corbyn have been with their support. They may not all be graduates in socialist theory, but they have proved that they support a socialist manifesto. That’s democracy in action, more than can be said for certain previous leaders, who only felt the need to convince the Westminster bubble.
I’m quite sure the tory press will do their best to press the ‘NUM case’ – but if Lavery accepts a nomination, he’ll have weighed up the consequences, and he’s no fool.
Worth pointing out the the NUM situation was created by the tories, no-one else. No-one on the Left sought it.
J penny…. Nothing is perfect and people more so.That said if Corbyn cannot launch a clearout before leaving,then we vote for a more ruthless kick shit left wing fighter who can do the job that corbyn was warned about so often.We have no choice other than a vote for lavery to retain any chance for socialism and for Britain.We cannot retain the largley Corbyn supporting membership if we allow the chancers in.I only hope that lavery can get enough supporters inside our treacherous PLP to launch a bid.I left my councillor position in the Blair years and I and many others will not have the Labour party turn back the clock.And I am very sad 😢 and deppressd at the thought of what could happen to the Labour party we all loved under the hammer of more of the past returning.I compromised my beliefs more than many for a Labour government and in doing so have pushed the party into the clutches of the right wing shambles.I can only hope that enough sensible members realise that the fight for the soul of the Labour party is now under threat of destruction.
I penney….Yes I challange your version of what you call a rip off funding by the miners union of miners funds.The union was not dead and the funds were made available for laverys fighting fund(political donation)not to Ian lavery personally.And whats wrong with using money to fund a Labour party fighting fund that had been left rotting away in a bank account.Do you suggest that better to leave the money to devalue or be grabbed in some legal action against the miners union.The fund was never a part of miners pension funds and to compare it to the rover rip off by directors is a disgrace.You sound more like the opposition in your petty smears.I have defended your position in the past ,and cannot understand why you should spread gossip and innuendo that will no doubt appear in the toilet paper and be used to attack the Labour party,the miners,and socialism….disgusted of international Labour.!
Joseph OKeefe, you should actually try READING the full accounts of the various forms of funding from the NUM which went to Lavery personally – not the selective, myopic, Left media gloss put on them – before claiming it was all going to some fighting fund . Look at full accounts ( in that Guardian article for instance in my earlier post) re the mortgage money, and a large ‘redundancy payment’ when Lavery had simply departed a by then entirely dead union for a very well-paid job as an MP, with no paperwork whatsoever in his union’s records to support that supposed ‘redundancy ‘ . It’s no good hiding from this problem – it has been all over the press for years – and will come up constantly if Lavery becomes leader. Denial of real problems with our Left leader potentials is naïve and short-sighted.
And as I stated in the same post, getting a good Left Leader is still irrelevant if our Party, at PLP and local council levels remains totally dominated by the corrupt neoliberal Right – and our activist membership remains dominated by middle class Left Liberals with no socialist politics whatsoever , who can never build bridges with our lost working class voters with their posturing identity politics , and ludicrous belief that the EU is some sort of internationalist benevolent entity. An excellent article in the Morning Star online today discussing precisely this key issue for Labour and the Left going forward. https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/lefts-recovery-must-begin-workplace. The Morning Star is correct that our only hope is to re-build Let activism in the industrial and wider working class workplaces, but the middle class workplace situations of most of our Left Liberal members leaves them ill-equipped to be a part of that essential re-building task.
J penny…yes I did read the article if you can call it that But I already know and have read other veiws,and don’t think that spreading propoganda for the other side against lavery or any other socialist is a good idea and corrosive to the socialist revival of the Labour party.Now you may think that negative comments will help,..I don’t and I have listened to Ian lavery and am satisfied with his explanations.Again lets have more positive discrimination against the right w and less against a
… decent human being like lavery.
No hesitation, Ian Lavery would get my vote too.
Ian Lavery is giving the establishment media exactly what their soft, celebratory pro-Toryism warrants – a fighter defending our manifesto, our leader and our values.
In calmer, less vitriolic times, Ian Lavery has been – and will be again – a calm, plain-talking and highly committed Labourite. Always his sincerity is strong and obvious.
Just as Lavery has been unflinching in his loyalty to Jeremy and is massively respectful to him even when he thinks the leader might be making a mistake (on the tories’ deliberately divisive and bad brexit plans), I strongly believe that Jeremy would be proud to follow and serve Lavery as Labour leader.
That could not be said about any of the candidates who have already decided to stand.
I hope Ian Lavery decides he WILL stand for election as Leader of Labour.
I think we need to ask why Ian Lavery did not participate in the 2016 Commons vote on Trident renewal.
And after Theresa May said in the debate that preceded the vote, that she would be willing to kill 100,000 people in a nuclear attack, Keir Starmer and Jess Philipps voted for replacement!
The prospect of slaughter on such a vast scale did not put them off at all.
Well if anyone could galvanise the northern voters it’s got to be him, like.
Liked, like! 😀
He clearly knows more about solidarity than some patronising southerners.
‘northern voters’ as a single entity don’t exist any more than ‘southern voters’ or ‘western voters’ or ‘middle class voters’ or ‘working class voters’.
Lavery is actually old time right-wing machine politics NUM (often self-identifying as ‘left’). He’s the past tense (and, of course voted against the whip in support of the Tories on crucial occasions)
…. and it begins ….
Like the class clown trying to wind up the teacher to impress his classmates, but not far enough to get bent over a chair for a caning.
The two grown-ups both talked over him when he tried to interrupt.
I laughed out loud when he went up on his tippy-toes – he looked like a runt puppy being ignored by two big dogs circling each other – and he knew it 🙂
The way Ian looks down at Johnson’s jabbing finger as if to say “if that finger touches my jacket, I’m breaking it off” is promising, but the funniest bit is the last second where Boris is reduced to blowing Ian a kiss! Lavery would absolutely annihilate him at PMQs. No wonder they’re shit-scared of him. Can’t wait for him to be leader of the opposition.
Go go Lavery!!!
I would back him all the way despite him being a Mag AND I am a life-long Sunderland supporter
Might be nice for LP to have a forceful leader after Corbyn, with similar ideology to Corbyn. Burgon deputy? Sorry ladies/women but you don’t have what it takes or you cannot be trusted. As an outsider I think RLB and Raynor shouldn’t contest to give Lavery a decent chance of getting on the ballot. LP still has a long way to go sorting out the internal rot and pro establishment clique especially in PLP.
“Sorry ladies/women but you don’t have what it takes or you cannot be trusted”.
Well that’s you out of the sisterhood, Maria! 😂 But as an old chauvinist I quite agree!
Well blokes/men like Starmer don’t even come onto my radar as suitable leadership candidates. Majority of PLP are a shower, those that are capable, experienced politicians are generally self serving, pro establishment warmongers.
Still I’m sure LP will get the leader it deserves.
I just feel confident that he is authentic. He also called it right on Brexit which has been crucial in the election result. At a rally in Brighton parallel to the conference he said – “for the first time in my life, Labour has a manifesto I can be proud of.” Perfect.
I will vote for any candidate endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn.
On a different note I see that Ruth Smeeth is calling on members not to vote for anyone in the Shadow cabinet including Emily Thornberry and Keir Starmer as they did not oppose antisemitism openly/strongly enough.
I cannot recall any instances when Ruth stood up to oppose the vile racism Diane Abbott has to deal with every day of her life.- Diane is routinely called a N***** , receives death and rape threats etc.
While Ruth is very vocal about one particular form of racism her comparative silence on others forms of bigotry indicates she is more concerned about the abuse she and other Jewish people are subjected to than the abuse that e.g. black or gay or Muslim people routinely receive (people from these groups have been beaten up, some have been killed in recent years).
Ruth needs to realise that there is no hierarchy of abuse victims. The use of threats or the calling names or the use of other derogatory language is equally disgusting and dangerous and can lead to violence and in some cases death irrespective of the race religion gender sexual orientation disability etc of the victim.
Smeeth (why the comradely ‘Ruth’?) is part of the Israel lobby, not the Labour Party. She was responsible for the fabrications against Marc Wadsworth.
the less “air ” we give to Smeeth and her Israeli friends the better , the facts are there for all to see regarding her lies over Marc Wadsworth , glad she lost her seat ,,, it was worth it .
At the moment I favour a tough nut to crack the heads of the PLP , not worried re the MSM as I have said previously whoever we choose they will get slaughtered by them so fuck em , lets sort out the shit that is the Blairites PLP . Push on with democratising the party , get mandatory selection thro at this yrs Conf and hopefully we can expel one or two Blairite MPs along the way … any trumped charge will do , after all they are past masters of that !
Totally agree, except for the ‘trumped up charge’, but I’m hoping that was a joke!
Thank you. I am glad that somebody has finally brought that out into the open.
The disgraceful treatment of Marc Wadsworth is a stain on the party that needs removing.
In this article the writer points out that according to the census white ethnic western Jews are 05.% of the population or 1-in-200 people. BAME groups are 12%. As summarized…
“(I)it bears repeating that for every Ruth Smeeth in the room and those supporting her, there should have been at least twenty-four Marc Wadsworths. Also the Telegraph Newspaper is managed by Telegraph Group Limited owned by the Barclay brothers who are the children of Scottish Catholic parents. The previous owner was Conrad Black who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. So even if Wadsworth had known Smeeth to be Jewish – which he categorically denies – it can hardly be conceived that he’d made a Jewish conspiracy accusation. Just why Smeeth was working with a newspaper that has an historically entrenched policy of favouring the Labour Party’s Conservative enemies is not a question she has yet answered, nor has the rest of the corporate media chose to put it to her. Marc Wadwsorth was though, suspended from the Labour Party, not for anti-semitism but like others for ‘disrepute’ or conduct “prejudicial … or in any way grossly detrimental to the party”.
see link – https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/hijacking-victimhood-and-demonizing-dissent/
Put simply – as in the era of slavery and colonialism – the establishment can’t have Black activists talking back to more class elevated white individuals.
Smeeth is a disgusting creature. I agree with your points, but you make them as if you believe she has any honour, which she demonstrably has not. She was challenged by Marc Wadsworth, because as a Labour MP, which she was at the time, she was colluding with a right-wing toilet paper to discredit the Labour Party’s social-democratic turn under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
For his pains, Wadsworth, a veteran fighter against racism, was himself accused of racism. Smeeth accused him of suggesting that he was using an antisemitic trope against her when he called her out on her association with right-wing media. Wadsworth replied, and why should we not believe him, that he did not know she was Jewish. However, even if this had been known to him, it would not absolve her of her choices and actions, and she did and does have a case to answer. Any kind of racist trope should be vigorously challenged – this goes without saying. But it remains true that individuals, regardless of identity, may make choices and/or undertake actions that make them a legitimate target of challenge. The long and the short of it is that Smeeth, as a Labour MP should not have been colluding with the class enemy.
The antisemitism issue has been weaponised against the Left in the Labour Party, a position with which most self-identified politically progressive Jews concur. There have been many and varied Jewish voices raised in defence of Corbyn and Labour. However, (surprise, surprise), their comments, both spoken and written, have been largely silenced and too many of them have themselves suffered investigation, suspension and even explusion from the Labour Party where they are LP members, for ‘conduct detrimental to the Party’, i.e. antisemitism.
Across the pond, Bernie Sanders, who if elected would be the USA’s first Jewish President is now facing the same barrage of condemnation as Corbyn faced because he is critical of the actions of the Israeli state. I notice that, on a similar basis to ‘Labour Against Antisemtism”, there is now “Democrats Against Antisemitism”. There are no prizes for guessing who will be first in the crosshairs of this dubious collective.
Sorry, the second sentence in para 2 of my contribution about Smeeth/Wadsworth should read:-
“Smeeth accused him of using an antisemitic trope…”, not, “Smeeth accused him of suggesting that he was using an antisemitic trope…” Whoops!
I saw the incident concerning Marc Wadsworth on live on TV and saw nothing to suggest he was being antisemitic. He challenged Ruth Smeeth about her exchange of papers with a journalist and she walked out. I was absolutely horrified when he lost his membership as a result. I am also aware of Marc’s anti racism campaigns in the past and I understand that he was at the antisemitism launch to highlight the under representation of BAME members at certain levels within the party.
In relation to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict I do not believe criticism of the Jewish state is antisemitic. If that were the case then it follows that support for it is Islamophobic ( the vast majority of Palestinians are Muslim) ,
I am absolutely sure Jeremy Corbyn has not got an antisemitic bone in his body. However he has condemned the mass killings of Palestinians by the Israeli army in eg April and May 2018 and stated he would recognise a Palestinian state if he became PM . This was enough for him to be unjustly branded an antisemite by Ruth Smeeth and others who share her views on the Israeli.
It is worth remembering who Smeeth has worked for : Israeli-backed organisations. She is nowhere near a neutral commentator.
Of course criticism of Israel isn’t ‘antisemitic’. It’s a nonsense charge, and having to re-iterate that statement is an indicator of how stupid the whole scam has become – but a stupidity that is adopted by almost the entire media.
Apart from Palestinians being largely Moslem, they are also – remember – a semitic people in the original sense of the word. The term ‘antisemitism’ is, in fact, more appropriately applied to antagonism towards them as a group. We should, perhaps, point this out more, given that the Palestinians are the more injured party in this conflict.
Opposition to Starmer as a leadership candidate has missed out on one important deficit : he has gone along with the breast-beating about the myth of excessive antisemitism within Labour.
I’m not prepared to back any leadership candidate who kow-tows to members of the Tory establishment or Israel Lobby hiding under an assumed cloak of ‘Jewishness’.
Opposition to Starmer as a leadership candidate has missed out on one important deficit : he has gone along with the breast-beating about the myth of excessive antisemitism within Labour.
‘LOOK OVER THERE!!!’
What another shithouse trick from the thoroughly reprehensible rh – Once again proving beyond doubt that he’s slimier than a couple of hagfish doing anal in a barrel of elephant snot.
Nobody gives a fuck about starmer’s antisemitism sentiments because next to nobody remembers him as a Corbyn basher as anywhere’s near to the likes of screeching or mann or the other lowlife-low rent backbench-to-middling labour MP’s.
Starmer was more interested in fucking Corbyn up through labour’s EU policy and assisting watson passively through the antisemitism skullduggery, while watson colluded (In a far more aggresive manner than starmer’s antisemitism ‘murmurings’) with the downright fucking odious, greasy twunt over the EU.
So don’t even fucking attempt to detract and distract from starmer’s shithousery over the EU which was BY FAR the biggest reason for the electoral shitshow than antisemitism EVER was, you fucking RAT.
‘Toffee’ – You really are an illustration of the term ‘Total Tory Twat’ kicking up dust.’
Leeching off the working class with pretended sympathy, making up socialist credentials,whilst actually working for the Tories. Fake sweariness as a representation of ‘the plebs’. The intelligent here worked out your trolling role a long time ago as you caricatured the Tory image of the ‘working class’ – suddenly appearing again when the leadership crops up. Not very bright timing.
You’re sussed. I claim my £25.
Smeeth is largely irrelevant at this point and even the “moderates” know that they have to dampen-down the A-S rhetoric if they are to avoid another five years of the same nonsense we have just had.
We shall see if they choose to continue the civil war or fight the Government instead.
We can’t do both.
Mark Locket Their will be no dampening down of the smears and lies if a socialist leader is elected .Why would they drop a tried and tested method of character assassination when it actually worked.?….We have to elect a socialist Labour leader so we need to get used to it.On the positive front we will have a few years to get rid of the blairites and by that time the country will realise that letting the Tory dogs out is too great a price to pay even when a democratic vote was ignored by the Labour party.
Glad to see Ian Lavery was never a solicitor………….I thought that was the first thing you had to be B4 you could become a Labour MP.
Steve, in TBC – time before Corbyn, a prerequisite of being a Labour MP was usually that you needed to be an ambitious ladder climber with Blairite tendencies.
Welcome back Comrade Jack So if I read this correctly, when the Guardian’s choice Sir Keir Starmer becomes leader, your prophecy will be complete. The Labour Party will embrace Blairite Liberal ideologies & constantly campaign to Remain or negotiate re-entry, thus successfully alienating the working classes who voted Leave & permanently losing their vote. The bourgeois Blairite elite will be delighted with this outcome as traditionally the one thing the middle-classes despise the most are the ‘deplorables’, the great unwashed aka the working class. The Lib/Lab Blairite pact back up & running.
Steve Richards……it was the men in wigs and gowns who got me with a cost of One hundred thousand plus at the high court in the strand.. Although in football ⚽ terms we got a draw I felt badly let down.Tony Blair was a smart mouth and we all know what happened there.Yes avoid the legal profession like the plague .
Confused.com
Mandatory reselection does not get rid of Pantomime Dame
Mandatory sacking of those who stab us in the front, works for me
You make a good point. I’m in favour of reselection as a matter of course – as said, it’s been common practise in local government, and no-one bats an eyelid. But it isn’t a magic solution to problems in the Party.
Lavery would be a gift to the press.
But hey if he can take the flack for a few years go for it.
We all need to get it through our skulls that fighting the Tories in government is more important than fight the moderates.
Give up the ego’s and petty grudges and lets get back to being an opposition that works!
You cannot run a government with a divided party and somthing has to go.Its not egos its common sense.
Both major parties are irretrievably divided, No Deal and catastrophic debt levels will destroy cheap and nasty Tory/Brexit/BNP party
Time for a once in a millennium realignment of British politics,
I know which party I belong to,
Say it again, JC and Ian Lavery need to get on with clear out, then hand over to 2nd generation superstars
Just reading more propaganda from the toilet paper and its Sir knightly starmer clear favourite amongst a poll of Labour party members? Well its a case of the rigged polls again and seeing if the smear campaign goes with Labour party members as well as the gullible public.that fell for it…..Lavery looks to be worrying some before hes even got the backing he needs.maybe its a warped endorsement if they are that worried?
Joseph – Do give over on the idea that everything that doesn’t match your preconceptions is ‘rigged’. It just throws up smoke that hides those things that *really* are ‘rigged’.
I’ve no idea about the validity of this YouGov poll – I have doubts that it is particularly well designed or valid. But it’s conclusions are much what I might expect.
Those ‘rigged’ opinion polls actually turned out to be fairly accurate, remember.
RH…you know its rigged and you contradict yourself in your reply.I know you think everything is ok the your English country garden,but somthing stinks of manure and its not to keep the garden healthy.
“.I know you think everything is ok”
Joseph – Once again you betray an amazing ability to falsify obvious reality in line with your perceptions, and in the face of logic.
I think the term is ‘delusional’.
Joseph…..manure is good for the garden; the problem is there is too much. May I suggest blood & bone; maybe a little fish?
Steve Richards,….Blood and bone maybe the only solution for Richards country garden in his green and pleasant land.!
I think Lavery would be my first choice and for Deputy Richard Burgon but conscious this is 2 male socialists unless we create a male and female deputy and get RBL in the other post?
I agree with much of what JP says, it should have been grassroots, bottom up, participatory left wing democratic socialism but (a) Momentum got under the control of top down bourgeois socialists and some of their cronies saw this as a Left wing career route plus they failed miserably with political education and (b) the majority failed miserably lacking a socialist analysis voting not to honour the 2016 Leave result and led by the Right snatched defeat from the jaws of victory; only the minority was correct.
So what can be done, well firstly get out amongst the poor to offer Political and Practical support to rebuild including in Leave areas alongside the left behind.
Secondly, Read! Read! Read!
My favourites have been Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, Capital, Marx, Paul Frolich’s Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, and Paulo Friere, Cultural Action for Freedom, plus subscribe to The New Left Review and Red Pepper etc.
Labour also needs to remember it is a political party and can politicise the public as long as we do this in straight forward language and in as few words as possible.
We need to transform WITH not FOR!