Those Labour Posters ….. May 25, 2012
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Irish Politics.trackback
Labour had a press launch of new posters today. Strikes me as odd that they are attacking Sinn Fein over the bank guarantee. To me it just draws my attention to the fact that Labour may have opposed it but they seem to be making sure every bondholder be they secured or unsecured are taken care of.
I’ve posted the rest of them here
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Can’t see this being a clever tack for precisely the reason you mention. Then there’s the thought that they’re actually raising the prominence of SF – by admitting they exist. The other point is that given some ex LP voters have headed to SF in the last year they’re attacking the choice of people who they might want back.
I guess they’d argue that they’re changing the focus from the Treaty to SF. But…
LikeLike
Shame there was no room for the names of the two parties they’re campaigning alongside eh?
Labour blew their moral high ground on that score the week they were tripping over themselves to get the 2011 Finance Bill over the line and themselves across the chamber, even going so far as publish their own proposed timetable for it’s passage through the Oireachtas.
Same week the opposition were called to a meeting in the DoF.
Pearse Doherty was thrown for opposing Lenihan, Burton later left for Ballymount for her infamous outing on Vincent Browne with Joe Higgins where the masked slipped and much of her contribution could have came from a Fianna Fáil minister.
LikeLike
The Labour Party: scum then, scum now. Vote NO!
LikeLike
This website used to be worthy reading and analaysis for Labour members. WBS’s analysis on things like the 2008 US Presidential Campaign was actually much better than most things you read in the papers and media. Now we just get a lot of anti-Labour diatribe.Of course I will be accused of vitriol and cyncism but I just want to point out I used to acutally read this website for pleasure.
LikeLike
I trust it is not lost on you that this thread was sparked the Labour party directly attacking another. Straight up man not ball and ironically enough attempting to tie the bank guarantee to the treaty when the leadership and their handlers have spent the last three weeks shutting down any debate of the wider and ever changing Irish and European issues surrounding the compact.
LikeLike
Ian, just to echo Oireachtas Retort. Here’s a poster which directly attacks another political party (that some of us, myself included, consider of the left). Of course that’s grist to our mill.
TBH, look at threads that deal wtih SF, or the ULA or PBP or indeed SP or certain Independents and you’ll see the CLR is very much open to critique, sometimes robust critique, sometimes very very robust critique, of whoever.
Now as it happens I don’t think LP members are scum, indeed there are those who I hold in the highest regard and admiration for their leftism, but… it would be perverse for a site which is about politics and Irish politcis and of the broad left not to be exercised, infuriated, use whatever term is appropriate -and deeply so – by the policies of the current government and its constituent self-described left element and simply wax lyric about say the 2012 US Presidential election while ignoring what was happening here and how that impacts on the communities and class which we live and work in.
LikeLike
You are being too nice, WbS. Labour have been a disgrace and have no intention of deviating from this current tendency. Someone complaining about this would be better off taking it up with the Labour Party.
Not that Sinn Fein get an easy ride. Or, if you want to see real daggers, bring up the Green Party.
LikeLike
I’ve just returned home after being out this morning. I drove along a road like I do every day. Yesterday there were several ‘No’ posters from left political parties and no Labour posters. This morning the road was plastered with Labour posters and the posters for the other parties had been turned around so that they couldn’t be read. I’ve been told by other by others that the Labour party in our town have been seen interfering with ‘No’ posters.
LikeLike
People read political websites for pleasure?
LikeLike
Grow up, Ian. I presume you’re a member of the Labour Party? That poster, as others have pointed out, is a direct attack on another party. Nobody was in a position to know immediately after 28 September 2008 just exactly what consequences would flow from the bank guarantee. We now know that it was disastrous in the extreme. While I’m loath to defend SF under any circumstances, their position at the time was dictated by the limited knowledge available to ALL political parties. Labour happen to have taken the right stance at that time. It was lucky dip and they made the right choice.
However, the Labour are now in government and administering, doggedly, faithfully and remorselessly, the policies whose genesis are in the decisions made on that night in 2008. SF, on the other hand, while getting it wrong in 2008 are now, at least at a rhetorical level, trying to oppose the policy orientation deriving from the bank guarantee.
Labour party members are committed to paying off bondholders, to the last cent, for the gambles the latter made on Irish banks. They are also simultaneously pushing through an austerity agenda that will hobble this society for generations, shorten the lives of tens of thousands of Irish people, coarsen Irish life, and compromise the live chances and, yes, the dreams of millions of Irish people (I know Labour party members will cringe at the thought that ordinary Irish people might have dreams of a better life). In that context the term ‘scum’ is entirely appropriate and I don’t and won’t apologise for using it.
LikeLike
Sadly, Labour are anti-labour.
LikeLike
There’s a bond payment of €2.25 billion from Allied Irish Banks on Monday May 28 – the 100th anniversary of the successful proposal of James Connolly and Jim Larkin to the Irish Trades Union Congress AGM to form a 32-county All-Ireland Labour Party.
Would Labour Party members like to join campaigners against the Austerity Treaty doing something positive about this – for example, stopping payment to the international vultures?
While James Connolly is long dead, executed by the British State, there is a chance he might approve of this
LikeLike
Is James Connolly’s advice relevant to the present day? :
“Let us not shrink from the consequences. This may mean more than a transport strike, it may mean armed battling in the streets to keep in this country the food for our people. But whatever it may mean it must not be shrunk from. It is the immediately feasible policy of the working-class democracy, the answer to all the weaklings who in this crisis of our country’s history stand helpless and bewildered crying for guidance, when they are not hastening to betray her.
Starting thus, Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last war lord.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1914/08/dtycrsis.htm
The above passage was published on August 8 1914, as the First World War began. Fortunately today we are not on the eve of a comparable global catastrophe, but the financial collapse which started in 2008 is a dark warning sign of capitalist crisis, contagion, and lower living standards. We have time to start fighting now, to ensure things do not get worse, and to achieve a better more humane society.
An immediate step towards that goal is to protest very loudly against another huge bond payment – this time €2.5 million next Monday.
Let us agree with Labour backbench TD Dominic Hannigan that Sinn Féin should not have voted for a bank bailout in 2008 – OK, Wrong Then.
Labour Party voting for an AIB Bank Bailout in 2012 – Wrong Now.
LikeLike
the children of ‘real’ free staters are brought up to fear republican boogy men. the same mentality behind this poster is the same mentality that sparked the idea that enda should have an address to the ‘nation’ tomorrow to counter act anything adams say’s. there is one tendency in SF that try’s to move away from this critisism. think they could have a lot of fun if they imbraced it.
LikeLike
Is it just me, or does that poster call to mind this
Click to access sectarianism3.pdf
LikeLike
Kind of similar. Very definitely so.
LikeLike
What way did FG vote?
LikeLike
Jim, that’s brilliant! 🙂 Someone should put that up on a mock version of the poster above…
LikeLike
did one yesterday
LikeLike
Really nice job.
LikeLike
is it not appropriate to have that picture of Dominic Hannigan swinging from a pole when the labour party proved they couldnt even hang a poster
LikeLike
[…] Austerity Treaty Labour Party Posters – Taking Care of All Bondholders […]
LikeLike