Labour and Tories were neck and neck on 32% in the Mail on Sunday Survation poll on 25 June, the day before the Blarites launched their coup against the “unelectable” Corbyn. Before Corbyn became leader, Labour were consistently between 7 and 12 points behind on Survation. That Corbyn has done so well in popular opinion and in elections, is remarkable considering the Blairites who dominate his own parliamentary labour party have been conspiring and briefing against him from day one.
The coup “rationale” is based on two lies – that Labour was struggling in the polls, and that an early general election is imminent.
Whoever becomes the new Tory Prime Minister, there is not going to be an early general election. No new Tory PM will throw away the 30 seat gain over Labour the Tories will get from the new Boundary Commission Review.
The new PM will have 3.5 years in Downing Street with a working Commons majority. As I predicted, the temperature of debate in the Tory party has cooled almost completely. Their leadership contest is genteel. People who were accusing each other of outright lies and appalling behaviour just one week ago, are now all chummy together again. The Tories care about power above all else. They have it and won’t risk it.
An incoming PM has never been under an obligation to call a general election; since the Fixed Term Parliaments Act they are under an obligation not to do so. By genuine coincidence, Theresa May just said almost exactly that just after I typed it.
Of one thing I am absolutely sure. The public contempt for the political class which was behind much of the Brexit vote, is growing into a still stronger movement as the unedifying naked power seeking of all the right wingers, Labour and Tory, unfolds in plain view. I suspect if Corbyn holds on there is a chance the public mood the mainstream media is unanimously attempting to whip up against him, may surge to support him strongly, due to intense dislike of the politicians and so-called journalists who are hounding him.
The latest, with Boris Johnson dropping out, appears to bolster this prediction. Under these circumstances, Theresa May will probably become the prime minister, with Gove considered too right wing. May says no election until 2020. It is also interesting that Angela Eagle now seems to be “delaying” the contest. Corbyn will need to get an organisation together to deselect Blairite MP’s and get more popular control of the party. I agree that the press is losing steam. What has to be prevented is a reboot on Brexit, and, if such occurs, Corbyn has to oppose it and ensure that the vote against is bigger with the left-wing critique being fully exhibited. If they manage to win on the revote, the power structure will become unassailable barring complete breakdown into revolution, and these corporate trade pacts replacing the remnants of the rule of law with arbitration tribunals become the ruling method. As far as the mainstream media template, a critique of Corbyn for criticising Israel as “comparing it to ISIS” is typical of the newspeak of the present era.
“AND he can’t control the party! AND he’s a friend to Marxists and the SWP! AND he doesn’t control the racism and anti-Semitism! AND he can’t make everyone vote for Europe!
AND he’s a scruffbag with a beard!”
Blimey.
” AND he can’t make everyone vote for Europe!”
Because his mentor was the late Tony Benn.
And we know what he thought of the EU and my thoughts exactly.
Oh yeah, base political views on how people look. That’s the educated approach!
Uh: that was actually intended as sarcasm. J
I see that the BBC’s paragon of partiality has been busy on Twitter, even to the extent of lying;
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmMMywAWQAAQsMK.jpg:large
There Will Be No Early General Election unless of course the Tory party loses its majority through the indictment (& conviction) of a number of MPs because of election fraud. I live in hope.
The Fixed Term Parliaments Act permits an early General Election in two circumstances: if there is a House of Commons vote of no confidence in the Government; and if two-thirds of the House of Commons vote for one. I suppose if more than one party fancied its chances in an early election, that is conceivable. The Act could also be repealed, of course.
Labour’s civil war South of the border has spread North, as Alex Rowley attacks Ian Murray for resigning at a critical time, and leaving no Labour MP North of the border.
To add to the anger and confusion Scottish Labour leader Kezi Dugdale has, said it will be difficult for Jeremy Corbyn to survive as leader, yet she has put herself forward, to see out the duties as Labour’s Shadow Secretary to Scotland until someone can fill the post. Remarkably Labour are considering Dugdale’s offer.
Ed Miliband has come forward and told Jeremy Corbyn he must quit as Labour leader, along with 200 Scottish activists, who’ve signed a letter telling Corbyn he must go.
These are very interesting and quick moving times we live in with regards to British politics.
Prepare for another round of Corbyn “anti-semitism” smears following the fuss started by Ruth Smeeth MP today.
She is a former director of public affairs at BICOM and seems to have enjoyed protected American status prior to her election from the American embassy, according to this from Wikileaks:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8304495/WikiLeaks-cables-Gordon-Brown-forced-to-scrap-plan-for-snap-election.html
She will doubtless soon be claiming to better know the mind of Labour voters than Corbyn and party members along, a superior knowledge shared with the other New Labour parachutist landing in Stoke, Tristram Hunt.
But this was the verdict on the persuasive powers of both of them last Thursday, according to the Stoke Sentinel:
http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/big-issue-what-were-the-underlying-reasons-for-70-per-cent-of-stokies-voting-to-leave-the-eu/story-29449850-detail/story.html
MODS
Grateful if you would assess the three comments from “Charles Drake” at 12h49, 14h32 and especially 14h35 in the light of couple of Craig’s posting guidelines.
hababa do you actually have a job or is your job word crime security : )
making threat is not cricket old boy certainly not british in this word regard
Do I have a job, Charles?
That is for me to know and you to find out.
But I notice that you too appear to have the time to post during normal working hours……
it would be so much simpler and less of a head ache if the owners of the economist the times and the men behind genie energy
just told us who we are to have the folks of this country are medicated enough to leave it to the vampyre folks who have been running this bad show all along.
pennies on the pound buy up oppotunity deconstruction controlled demolition needs kaos from the kaos will come a new order and a new jerusalem within oded yinon principles
Please could you take your anti-Semitic nutcase rubbish somewhere else. Thank you.
No idea whether Angela Eagle is Jewish or not. I certainly don’t take your word for it, and I don’t care. And I have not called for her deselection, resignation or anything else.
Now why don’t you get lost and make this forum a bit less toxic.
Thank you for your support, John. You see – I’m not all bad and neither are you! 🙂
I’m rather surprised that major international bank J.P. Morgan, has come out and predicted that Scotland will declare itself independent, and declare a new currency, before the UK leaves the EU.
Malcom Barr, one of the banks economists, produced a paper analysing the consequences of a vote to leave the EU. The paper warns of a myriad of uncertainties.
Listening to Nicola Sturgeon’s tone after her EU visit, it does appear as that a second indy ref will be on the cards, to safe guard EU membership in the long run.
http://www.thenational.scot/news/jp-morgan-planning-for-independent-scotland-with-its-own-currency-before-uk-quits-eu.19421
Re my above comment should read “as though” not, as that.
“The EU has opened a new chapter in Turkey’s EU membership talks, covering budget contributions to the bloc”.
“Under the March deal, Turkey was also promised visa-free travel to the EU’s Schengen area, if it complied with a series of demands”.
Can’t help think Boris n’ Farage are smiling.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36672242
James.
Turkey and for that matter Erdogan has been very busy of late, by renewing ties with Israel, and sending an apologetic letter to Putin, over the deaths of the Russian pilots, shotdown and killed near the Turkish/Syrian border.
According to the BBC’s World Service, Turkey spends a large chunk of its budget on aid, aid towards the displaced Syrian people. The World Service went on to say that Syrians, and Turks have an affinity with each other, and that most of the Syrians already in Turkey, will, stay there until they can return to their native country.
The BBC World Service added that thise fleeing Syria that ended up in Turkey, knew through the media that some EU nations didn’t want them.
“According to the BBC’s World Service, Turkey spends a large chunk of its budget on aid, aid towards the displaced Syrian people”
Translation: Turkey has been exposed as one of the leading sponsors of “ISIS”, providing funds, arms and trained personnel to attack Syria. It receives mercenary combatants fleeing from attack and acts as a fence for the stolen Syrian oil (courtesy of Erdogan’s own son).
The arrest of Alparsian Celik at a restaurant in Izmir, on the east coast of Turkey, did not generate much publicity. He is not a well known figure – but he is the man accused of a brutal act of violence in Syria’s civil war which has had widespread international repercussions.
Celik, a Turkish citizen fighting in Syria, led militia fighters who shot dead a Russian pilot after his warplane was shot down by Turkey. The missile strike on the jet led to a bitter confrontation between Moscow and Ankara with a furious Vladimir Putin ordering economic sanctions and rushing advanced weaponry to his forces on the ground.
ADVERTISING
inRead invented by Teads
A tale has unfolded since then of Russians seeking retribution for the death of Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Peshkov, and accusing the Turkish authorities of protecting the pilot’s killer.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-conflict-turkish-ultra-nationalist-suspected-of-killing-russian-pilot-may-have-ties-to-the-a6987376.html
Alparsian Celik is being held in Turkey incommunicardo,
he will not appear in court for at least a year.
probably because he will be found dead by hanging in his cell before he turns up in court to discredit the Turkish Regime before the whole world.
James
As Craig would be well placed to confirm, there is a tendency for the EU side to open the “easier” chapters, ie the less political and more technical chapters, first and -more importantly – while opening a chapter(there are around 31 chapters if I recall correctly) certainly marks a move forward in the overall accession negotiation process, there can be an awfully long time between opening of a chapter and closing it.
O/T.
Exiled Chagossian islanders lost their legal challenge yesterday at the Supreme court. The challenge aimed at expediting the return to their home they left 45 years ago.
The FCO, were said to be very pleased by the decision, one Chagossian, said I was born there yet I can’t live there, others not from my Island can live there, referring to the US military base, caught up in the rendition scandal.
No link I’m afraid.
Here you go, RoS:
http://www.crawleynews.co.uk/crawley-chagos-community-lose-supreme-court-bid-to-return-to-homeland/story-29461506-detail/story.html
Thank you Glenn for providing a link. ?
[ Mod: Caught in spam-filter, timestamp updated ]
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The Grauniad appear more desperate than ever to smear Corbyn. The online article is entitled “Corbyn appears to compare Israeli government to Islamic State”, (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/30/jeremy-corbyn-appears-compare-israeli-government-islamic-state-labour-antisemitism-review); but the actual quotation they include is: “Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those of various self-styled Islamic states or organisations.” Talk about clutching at straws . . .
There is no obligation for an incoming leader to call an election, nothing to do with the 5 year fixed parliament. John Major took over from Maggie Thatcher and Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blaire. With regard to Corbyn he has never been a supporter of his party and why he expects them to now support him is beyond me. The fact that his previous leader loaded the party with £3.00 extreme left wing activists is a disgrace that he will have to live with and even he has asked him to go. The country is more important than a back bencher with extreme views that represent the 1960/70 that died years ago. Wake up all of you and look to the future. I am not labour but you are destroying your party.
It’s held by the voters now and forever that there’s a definite obligation on an incoming chancer taking over control of government without the consent of the people they represent and lead, to call a prompt election, what you’re suggesting is normal monstrous, closely resembles the methods of fascism and totalitariansim. Fixed-Term sets the maximum-term, not the minimum, it doesn’t bind the people from not clapping the lot of them in irons, and their snivelling apologists.
Most benevolent of you too, to offer advice to the Labour Party, and that advice is to continue the neo-right policies embraced and implemented by a significant number of entryists who took over control of the party in the first place, resulting in ths debacle of an out-of-touch despised would-be elite made up of otherwise unemployable nut-jobs. The Blairites are nothing but opportunistic immoral shiftless scum, and a very large number of them are, in the judgement of a wide public war-criminals, as as very many of the Tory party low-fliers too. How dare you defend them without shame and traduce a man who stood again and again in their path, implacably opposed.
Send this one back for some tweaking, it has an gross insufficiency of credibility.
Why doesn,t Corbyn et al face down these traitors and tell them in public to their face to the cameras what they are really about,why this shying away?
It would seem most things are above your comprehension, particularly with regards democracy, democratic mandates, Party Constitutions and usurpation of all Party rules by PLP rebels – still, do keep up the tirade and remember many of these £3.00 votes you talk about are now full Party members, among them me and Corbyn gets my vote.
You wouldn’t happen to be a shill for the anti-Corbyn crown, doing a bit of astro-turfing, would you?
If not, you certainly could pass as one.
Would those “£3.00 extreme left wing activists” include all the reich-wingers, who fell over themselves advising fellow neo-con dupes to sign up, so they could have Emmanuel Goldstein, sorry, Jeremy Corbyn to throw a two-minute hate at every day?
Appreciate your sincerely meant, heartfelt concern though. It really touches my heart, seriously.
The logical measure of these events is the progress or retrogress of democratic power. Will Brexit provide the neoliberally conservative and conservatively neoliberal establishment in the UK the opportunity to strengthen the already existing neoliberal order under cover of (avoiding) referendum-induced chaos, thus further transforming the working class into a permanent precariat, distantiated even more from the possibility of enjoying genuine democratic governmental responsiveness and representation? Or, conversely, will Brexit reduce the likelihood of continued British involvement in ongoing American-led military interventions in the Greater Middle East and elsewhere (e.g. in Syria)?
Brexit was predicated, of course, on a fundamental questioning of the democratically-detrimental links between Britain and a supposed EU superstate, however, there was, for perhaps obvious reasons, no comparable/parallel questioning of Britain’s relationship to U.S. hegemonic policy, even though needless to say this also (as in the transcendentally important case of the Iraq War) has an inestimably reductive effect on the British government’s democratic responsiveness to an overwhelmingly anti-interventionist British public. A comparison of the largely coterminous (with the EU) undemocratic institutional power of NATO also immediately comes to mind. Ditto for the inherently anti-sovereigntist, anti-democratic makeup of TTIP (which makes the EU seem a paragon of democratic responsiveness in comparison). Already, anti-democratic ‘mini-coups’ are being set off as a direct consequence of Brexit: PM Cameron’s imminent departure (essentially a self-decapitated government and governing Party); the Blairite revanchist attempted “coup” (sic) against democratically-chosen, highly popular leader Jeremy Corbyn; the mystifying/poll-defying post-Brexit electoral setbacks experienced by anti-neoliberal/anti-austeritarian party Unidos Podemos in Spain: all of which seemingly conspire to cause one to wonder whether Brexit (improvisationally or otherwise) will prove to be the biggest neoliberal coup of them all.
Snippet on Angela Eagle’s candidacy, or not, in the catfight…
https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/uk/angela-eagle-leadership-website-registered-days-resigned/
Whoops.
nice one Ba’al, her and Hodge stoking the fire?
“As I predicted, the temperature of debate in the Tory party has cooled almost completely. Their leadership contest is genteel.”
Tory MP Jake Berry posted on Twitter: ‘There is a very deep pit reserved in Hell for such as he. #Gove’
And an aide is said to have texted a journalist: ‘Gove is a c*** who set this up from the start.’
How very genteel indeed. 🙂
I still favour David Davis but the window would seemed to have closed.
Why was the window open for such a short time?
…because, it is decided.
Grove will take the inevitable back-lash to Brexit.
And the public will have their blood (in both senses !).
The “vested interest” in remaining in the UK, will will the day.
The “long term National interest” could never win, as then there would have to be “other vested interests” that would need to “be” (or “come into being”) …and there isn’t.
The “Grove to the slaughter” is the on;y option.
And Boris is too bright (to “of value” to the Cons) to be in such a position.
If the UK was “littered” (and I mean “many, many” with Co’s like JCB, then I’d say “it could work”.
But it doesn’t.
If the UK was Germany ! Then it could do it (but why would it !).
It could never happen, in the “real world”. It’s a dream.
While I do not wish to disagree with your sentiments, whatever happened to the concept of free speech? You quite clearly accept degrees of censorship – “It is interesting to note that her recommendations on what areas (including holocaust denial and the Nazis) and what language to ban from discourse …. etc” . How can you not accept that once we accept any form of censorship of speech we have crossed the divide? Who decides what is acceptable? Who polices those decision makers? While one may agree with any particular example of censorship – anti-Semitism for instance – there is surely an equally valid argument to say that any form of attempted mind control is stupid and wrong. At best you simply drive opinion underground at worst you attempt to establish a surely dangerous ‘new think’ rule of totalitarian law.
Quite so clansaorsa,
not too long ago if you mentioned immigrants, you were a bigot.
The then Prime minister of the United Kingdom Scottish Gordon Brown
said “”You should never have put me with that bigoted woman. ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JZP-W0FAXg
Since the opening of the Referendum, you are now allowed to discuss the problem of immigration.
That is one of the reasons the U.K. voters voted OUT.
They do not want their speech dictated by the Elite of any of the parties.
Despite everything thrown at Corbyn over this appalling week, YouGov shows that he would STILL win if a leadership challenge were mounted. He has been very seriously damaged, but he would be estimated to beat his strongest challenger, Angela Eagle, by 10% of the votes.
Wrong not to resign, eh? I hope very much he has taken fresh heart from this.
Maybe the jokers are biding their time now because they are still terrified of a Corbyn victory, and maybe they think time is on their side. I think time is emphatically not on their side. The more time Corbyn spends as leader at the rostrum, the more statesmanlike he looks and the more they look like a bunch of spoiled, churlish schoolkids. It’s also starting to emerge just how deliberately planned this was and how far back it must have been prepared for.
He needs to do a good job on Chilcot, and then hopefully he will recover somewhat. In the meantime, if you are not affiliated to any other party, for goodness sake subscribe to the Labour Party and ask others to do the same and vote for Corbyn. He needs everyone he can get to make sure.
http://labourlist.org/2016/07/corbyn-still-in-commanding-position-with-members-despite-drop-in-popularity/
https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/uk/angela-eagle-leadership-website-registered-days-resigned/
Looks like Boris NotGodunov
has only de-layed his crowning.
It is speculated that Mrs.May is to get her turn first, the then end of this Parliament, then Boris will come bounding back, after he has had some ministerial experiences, chancellor perchance?
We used to think of a left/right wing splt that drew the fault lines in the Labour Party. Today, I see it more as a left versus a neo-liberal tendency split, with the former seeking a new form of economic and social policy platform tthat can confront the latter and globalisation. That is the challenge we face, and the battle for ideas is underway.
I think the same. If he can stick it out the anti-austerity and anti-Westminster/anti-Establishment feeling in the country will bring JC and hopefully a more left Labour Party to power when the next election comes around. Exciting and interesting times!
ps., really like your blog.