for lefties too stubborn to quit
Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom took the top two slots in a crucial vote of Conservative MPs on who will be the party’s next leader.
Any bets on who will win through, given that the vote is put to the Tory membership?
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The Cedar Lounge Revolution
I think Leadsom is just the kind of headbanger the Tory base might go for.
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its not up to the Tory base though is it?
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It is. membership vote in the last round.
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My guess is it’ll be Theresa May. Her tough Home Office attitude should appeal to the rank and file. I note that both female candidates are devout C of E members, which should be a change from Thatcher who came from a Methodist family.(Many North of England Methodists tend to vote Labour.) I wonder how May will get on with the ‘liberal’ Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Wilby?
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That should make for an interesting meeting of minds or not. Speaking of Methodists, on the English side of the Wbs family , Labour inclined indeed, Birmingham based and Methodist and/or Cof E depending on branch there was a story that a great great great grandfather had been involved in establishing a named Methodist church there. I made a cursory search online but found no evidence of it.
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One is an admirer of Thatcher and the other wants to emulate Thatcher – I don’t see any change.
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So it could be muscular Christianity then?
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have a look at who Northern ireland’s lovely Secretary of State was supporting today and how she was doing it!!
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That we are likely to see women (Clinton and May) who have completely bought into the security-military-industrial complex at the head of two countries armed to the teeth is no comfort.
The liberal / essentialist idea that women in these positions are somehow more inclined to peace and cooperation is, I suggest, disproven by history.
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Whoever it is, will have a long period in office. A quick General Election in Spring 2016 should see a Con majority of well over a hundred, despite their internal travails.
This description of the goings on at a local level in the BLP suggests that there will be no safe seats. Elections are about forming governments and there is only one party offering that in Britain, the other offers itself as a protest movement. https://medium.com/@ruthie_dee/no-longer-welcome-in-my-own-home-4672dc7a08a5#.nwtiy52vo
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Spring 2016 was several months ago, there was no UK general election? Did I miss something? A Tory majority of 100? That’s wishful thinking. I think a Corbyn led Labour will run the Tories far closer than Miliband or Brown did in a general election. A good portion of those people who came out to vote for Brexit but who are turned off by conventional elections, may well be tempted back to the ballot box by a party setting out a clear anti-austerity platform.
The Blairite cry babies like Ruth Dee are, of course, insanely committed to attacking Corbyn and Momentum etc. But if these creatures could put a fraction of the effort into fighting, for instance, Tory council cuts, as they do into fighting the Labour Left, then there might be more support for Labour.
It’s funny that the likes of Dee are complaining about a ‘toxic’ atmosphere in a party that had witch-hunting Left wingers – the Militant above all – as standard operating procedure for decades. What party did they think they had joined? They are feeling a bit of heat from the Labour left and are clearly using any smear to hand to try and counter that, as they have no actual political arguments following following the disaster of Blairism.
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Oh the poor darling ‘felt threatened’. My default position is to assume that all of these stories about ‘bullying’ and ‘intimidation’ are lies or gross exaggerations until I have evidence otherwise, and it hasn’t failed me yet (a claim put about by the Blairites that Angela Eagle had been the target of homophobic abuse from Corbyn supporters in her local branch crumbled within an hour). There has been plenty of abuse, intimidation and threats in the Labour Party, directed by Corbyn’s opponents and their media cheerleaders against the man himself and his supporters. All the stuff in that account about the party ‘needing to come together’ is either head-spinningly naive or cynical and disingenuous – when there’s a full-blown putsch against the party leadership in progress, based on barefaced lies and intended to hand Labour back to the people who gave us the Iraq war, you need to pick a side. Either you support the putsch or you oppose it. The people trying to overthrow the party leadership weren’t offering any olive branches, they’ve been hell-bent on total victory at all costs (which now seems to be eluding them, thankfully). Corbyn’s opponents deliberately set out to do enormous damage to Labour’s prospects, at a moment when the Tories were in crisis and should have been put on the back foot; they shower down abuse on anyone who gets in their way, using the most hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric; but they still demand to be treated with immaculate courtesy in response. What a shower of hypocrites.
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An interesting read on how Angela Eagle got her start in the parliamentary Labour Party:
View at Medium.com
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A friend was at that meeting last night. What he says happened was that the Chair refused to take a vote on a motion in support of Corbyn. A Momentum activist then asked for everyone present who supported Corbyn to put their hands up and it turned out the majority of people there (about 250 present) supported Corbyn, and were opposed to their MP trying to shaft him.
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Thanks for that, Michael. That rule of thumb about not believing the stories until proven otherwise still has a 100% success rate.
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I’ll see if I can get my mate to give me some more details in writing.
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I had a look through the comments there, many of them giving the same account of things as your friend, with some details about the undemocratic chicanery from the chair to prevent a vote in support of Corbyn. I’m satisfied now that the author of this blog wasn’t just naive, but consciously setting out to deceive people with a fabricated version of events. What can you make of someone who would claim that “We are all fighting the same fight. We are a family, a team and a movement, and that doesn’t mean we agree on everything ”—Hilary Benn is fighting the same fight as Corbyn? Ian Austin, who heckled him boorishly, probably after a few lunchtime drinks, when he spoke about Iraq the other day? Angela Eagle? Give me a break. It’s a script that’s been drawn up to avoid engaging with the real political issues at stake—’bullying, shouting, intimidation, personality cult, poisonous’ etc.—and incidents will be fabricated to back it up. When one is refuted, another pops up in its place. Expect plenty more of this rubbish over the coming months.
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Aye, the comments on that piece are well worth reading. The most hilarious being the claim that ‘the heirs of Militant now run the party’.
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Along with the comments questioning her version of events, there are a few people claiming that any questioning of stories about ‘bullying’ or ‘intimidation’ is itself a form of bullying and intimidation. It’s an endless, self-confirming loop with these people. A very similar tactic to the bogus allegations of anti-Semitism that were being hawked around a couple of months ago—no wonder there’s an affinity between the pro-Israel camp and the Labour right
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View at Medium.com
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It’s troubling to see writers in the likes of the Guardian talking about how the progress of these women is a good thing! They make the pig lover look positively lovely.
There’s a tendency among liberals to look at the world through a lens whereby all would be well if we had the same system we currently have just with ethnic minorities, women and LGBT people at the helm rather than white men. It’s a fascinating mindset.
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Labour MP Caroline Flint was complaining yesterday about the fact that the Tories will soon elect their second female leader; the leaders of the SNP, Scottish Labour and Plaid Cymru well all women but, sadly, the English Labour Party was still led by a man (hint! hint!).
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For Flint and her chums, there’s a confusion between ‘women’ and ‘people like me’. Working-class women who are hit hard by benefit cuts that Flint refused to vote against don’t really belong to the gender as she understands it.
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One good aspect of the rise of Corbyn is that it is drawing out precisely those contradictions. Which explains, I think, the ferocity of the attacks on Corbyn and his perspective. Flint et al could cod themselves that they were ‘Labour’ because they were members of the Labour Party, regardless of what their policy positions were. That’s no longer and option.
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Highgate, yesterday.
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