Andy Burnham is Labour’s best hope | Steve Coogan | Comment is free | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... gan-labour

Laughable? Every picture of Burnham somehow looks like he's wearing eyeliner! He's about as sincere as David the cyborg in Prometheus ffs.

Serious question : Why should any one care what Steve Coogan thinks about politics?

This is interesting

When shown all the candidates being interviewed by Andrew Marr, people though Corbyn the best, regardless of which political party (if any) they were sympathetic to. The reaction to Corbyn is not a political reaction, it's a human, emotional reaction. Possibly why the other candidates have been unable to deal with it - it's something no number of SpAds and spin doctors can help you with. It also raises the question about how much of his popularity is 'personality politics' as much as 'issue politics' and whether that's a good thing.

Well, apparently, they'll be wheeling out Gordon Brown AND Ed Miliband to remind the Labour Party what a bad person Corbyn is.

The general public just do not engage with politicians.
The most telling is if you ever watch Pointless, the topic receives very low scores, laughably low.

What Corbyn has done is to set himself aside from the mainstream by staying true to his principles ( take note Lib Dems) and even more tellingly, refusing to engage in the ad hominem barrages which have backfired so righteously on his opponents/colleagues.

His policies may invoke the ire of the party but who are they anyway? A political leet that don't listen to their electorate? Or a feeble reactionary tool of the tabloid press and banking sector?

Thats my assessment, I hope he wins and wins an election, so we may see how a principled man can get f***d by our sad excuse for a democracy.

I voted Green by the way.

It's quite amusing all these Labour Party 'big beasts' who simply don't realise how utterly indifferent the general electorate are to them. Nobody really liked Gordon Brown that much when he was in power for pity's sake (remember all the stories about bullying), then he figuratively jumped off a bridge in Scotland by coming out pre-referendum and promising all sorts of things the Conservatives have then pretty much refused to deliver (hah! who saw that coming...). He's the man who was at the helm when the economy crashed. Not his fault by any means but he did contribute to it with the regulatory regime he instigated when he was Chancellor. This the man who claimed to have eliminated Boom and Bust, then led us into the biggest bust in nearly a century.

He's a political dinosaur, genuinely. Whatever political capital he had is long gone. The only people who still give a crap what Gordon Brown thinks are the core of career politicos in the PLP so of course they're going to wheel him out. They just don't see the fact that pretty much everyone else is just going to ignore him. It's one further indicator of how disconnected the PLP is from anybody outside Westminster.

It's desperate and frankly a little sad. If the primary emotion people feel towards the bloke you're wheeling out to scare people into doing what you want them to is pity, you really have got problems.

Corbyn wants to use monetary policy to pursue fiscal objectives.
What percentage of the population can say why that is a terrible idea?

I dare say it is less than 10%.
And I agree, in simple terms the two are not compatible.
I imagine we get what we deserve ideologically.

i have got a bit sick and tired of labour blue and conservative blue
about time for a little bit of red, as happened in Scotland

i will not fully agree with them but if they can upset the apple cart i am all for it ...

David Miliband: electing Jeremy Corbyn risks creating one-party Tory state | Politics | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... tory-state

To anyone who thinks they picked the wrong brother... Kendall?!

Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper trade blows as leadership contest intensifies | Politics | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... er-contest

It's like Game of Thrones with idiots.

Surely, there is room for a string national party between the greens and centre right? But maybe that's not labour


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In any normal democracy, yes.

However, the FPTP voting system promotes the UK's frankly obnoxious binary politics wherein anyone leaving the Labservatives is not seen as standing up for their own ideals but rather as traitorously sheep-stealing from a now-weakened whichever.

This perhaps explains why nobody knows what Labour or the Conservatives stand for. They don't stand for anything because their vastly bloated ranks preclude anything other than the lowest common denominator policies they currently espouse. We thusly have ended up with two parties that exist solely to encompass all those that dislike the other party. The Conservatives hate the Labour party et v.v.. The fact that neither party has, nor is capable of, a vision for the betterment of the nation is, to my mind, merely a consequence of having to hold together several mutually incompatible factions that, were it not for their common enemy, would scarcely be able to inhabit the same building, let alone a single party.

There's definitely a degree of that - the system creates the need for disparate but vaguely associated interest groups to band together, so you essentially you end up with large conglomerate parties in which virtually nobody is actually happy. I don't think it's fair to say they don't stand for anything though. The Torys stand for things that are fairly clear - private markets over state intervention, capitalism over socialism, less integration with Europe. The Labour Party stand for things which are clear too - most of the same things as the Torys, while claiming to be nicer than they are.


Indeed. Discordant parties end up having discordant visions of what to do, and tend to get less done. However the bare fact is none of the parties have a 'vision' because currently very, very few of the politicians in them have any vision, or in fact see the need for one. They're just not of that calibre. Career politicians don't want to change the world, they want to keep their job.

Jeremy Corbyn to apologise for Iraq war on behalf of Labour if he becomes leader | Politics | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... our-leader

Love the bit about our snivelling little sh1ts at the end there.