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  1. #131
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    Default Re: UK General ELection 7 May 2015

    Edit: This bumped to the second page so I should specify I am asking this to Stavros.

    I am a little tipsy so if this isn't crystal clear tomorrow, I'll have to ask it when I am feeling better. But is part of the problem with Corbyn's views on the economy, housing, education, foreign policy and health-care that he has clear objectives but has not laid out how he plans to accomplish them? Or that he has proposed policies, but they are not as progressive as he tries to sell them as? In other words has he proposed policies but they clearly are insufficient to accomplish his aims, meaning that he isn't as committed to his stated objectives as he pretends?

    What would be a better anti-austerity package given the expectation of higher interest rates?

    If you do not like Corbyn or Labour, who are you liable to support?


    Last edited by broncofan; 09-14-2015 at 05:40 AM.

  2. #132
    Senior Member Platinum Poster
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    Default Re: UK General ELection 7 May 2015

    Quote Originally Posted by broncofan View Post
    Edit: This bumped to the second page so I should specify I am asking this to Stavros.

    I am a little tipsy so if this isn't crystal clear tomorrow, I'll have to ask it when I am feeling better. But is part of the problem with Corbyn's views on the economy, housing, education, foreign policy and health-care that he has clear objectives but has not laid out how he plans to accomplish them? Or that he has proposed policies, but they are not as progressive as he tries to sell them as? In other words has he proposed policies but they clearly are insufficient to accomplish his aims, meaning that he isn't as committed to his stated objectives as he pretends?

    What would be a better anti-austerity package given the expectation of higher interest rates?

    If you do not like Corbyn or Labour, who are you liable to support?
    To be fair to Corbyn, he has not put much flesh on policy, but we do know that on education he is opposed to tuition fees; that on transport he would bring all the railway companies (currently privately owned) into public ownership; that on defence he would not renew the Trident missile programme which would, in effect, mean the end of the UK's 'independent' nuclear deterrent capability; and that on tax the suggestion is a top rate of 60% on earnings of £100,00 a year and above (in the 1960s it was 99%).
    Policies on tuition fees, on worker's rights, on the environment, on equal pay for women, on diplomacy rather than war are popular but not new or even radical; but as I say his position on Europe is still ambiguous, and his defence policy on nuclear weapons is confusing because if the UK remains in NATO it will still be living under a nuclear umbrella. If the UK were to leave NATO it would bring into question the UK's membership of the Security Council of the UN, I would not be surprised if Corbyn were happy for the UK to leave that body, I assume the UK's place would be taken by Germany.

    The fact that governments borrow money is not remarkable in itself, whether or not, or for how long the UK can sustain its existing debt without a rise in interest rate is still an unanswered question; if interest rates rise, if the housing market goes into recession -well, if this, if that -predicting economic performance is always a risky business, but Corbyn has not even begun to address very real issues such as the low rate of productivity in the UK compared to the rest of the OECD countries, and there is no sign that he has a long term policy to deal with the fact that the UK has one of the largest cohort of low-paid workers in the OECD many of whom do not pay tax because Labour and the last government as well as this one have raised the threshold for tax deductions.

    I must confess, also to being biased, as I was a Labour party activist in the late 70s and 1980s and unlike Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, and John McDonnell (Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer) I watched Labour lose four general elections in a row and concluded we had lost the argument on key policies such as personal taxation, the public ownership of business, nuclear weapons, and housing. I could go on at length about some of these people as I am aware of their Trotskyist roots (it comes out of the London School of Economics in the mid-1960s and the divergence between the anti-party International Marxist Group and the entrist strategy of the Socialist Charter Group and CLPD) and because they have not changed their view that the Labour Party is the only vehicle through which to engineer the socialist revolution. I knew some of the Labour people in the sense that they viewed me as someone who actually knocked on people's doors and delivered leaflets, and crucially because I voted for them in the multiple committees the party had in those days. One of them (but not a Trotskyist), until last weekend one of the longest-serving front-bench figures in the party used to give me a lift home from the pub in his (or should it be her?) car, while on another occasion I had a very ugly exchange of words with, yup, John McDonnell who as far as I can tell has not changed his position on a wide range of policies in the last 40 years.

    I left the party for reasons too numerous and probably too boring to most people to relate, but they include endless meetings, and meetings about meetings; a failure/refusal to connect with the people they claimed they wanted to lead (note, not represent); and because of the attempt that was made by Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn to forge links with Provisional Sinn Fein c1983-84, at the time one of the most shameful acts that the left perpetrated on an increasingly irrelevant party. I spoke against a resolution inviting Gerry Adams to our constituency and was ostracised by several members of the party but in any case I left London later that year and never re-joined the party.

    My political views are now too eccentric to be accommodated by any existing party, I have lost faith in the present generation of politicians and believe they have no real grasp of what is of short, medium and long term importance, and have no policy ideas to address them.


    1 out of 1 members liked this post.
    Last edited by Stavros; 09-14-2015 at 04:58 PM.

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