Corbyn faces no confidence motion

[muriel_volestrangler]

Labour MPs Margaret Hodge and Ann Coffey have sent a letter to John Cryer, chair of the parliamentary Labour party, submitting the motion.

The letter calls for a discussion at the next meeting of the PLP on Monday. The ballot has no formal constitutional force, but would be a significant expression of the lack of confidence of Labour MPs in their leader.

It is up to Cryer to decide whether or not to accept the motion and allow it to be debated.

If it is accepted, it would be followed by a secret ballot of Labour MPs on Tuesday. It would require a simple majority of MPs to support the motion for it to be passed.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2016/jun/23/eu-referendum-result-live-counting-leave-remain-brain-in-europe?page=with:block-576d14eae4b0be24d34f5df3#block-576d14eae4b0be24d34f5df3

Previously in Game of ThronesLabour party politics:

Tony Blair said the referendum result has made him “sad for our country, for Europe, for the world” and he turned on Jeremy Corbyn for a “lukewarm” and backward-looking Labour campaign.
...
Blair praised Cameron for not immediately invoking article 50, as Corbyn demanded. “We really need to think our way through this. What’s important now to stabilise our situation,” Blair said.

On Corbyn, he said: “I think the leadership of the Labour party was pretty lukewarm in its support for remain. I don’t think we mobilised our supporters to understand that this was not a protest vote against the government or indeed against the establishment. Those people in Labour areas ... can see cuts to local services, they can see pressure on local industry and jobs. These are the big challenges that country’s around the today world face. Unfortunately the right answer is to leave the largest commercial market and biggest political union in the world and I don’t think we really explained that to our voters.”

He added: “One of things I heard from Jeremy Corbyn was this notion that successive governments have let down the people in some of the Labour areas that are voting leave. We invested massively in those areas, we introduced things like the minimum wage, we signed up to European social chapter. The way to bring these people back to a sensible view of politics is to go and provide them with answers to the problems we face. It is about the future not in taking our country back to a time that doesn’t exist in the world anymore.”

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2016/jun/23/eu-referendum-result-live-counting-leave-remain-brain-in-europe?page=with:block-576cfd31e4b0f43038109948#block-576cfd31e4b0f43038109948

There's nothing like using a crisis to settle old scores, is there?

[Denzil_DC]

1. There is no major potential catastrophe afflicting the Tory Party or the country

that isn't improved by a hearty dose of good old-fashioned Labour in-fighting!

[T_i_B]

2. Labour hasn't stopped infighting once in this Parliament

Corbyn has done very little to resolve this quite frankly.

I do think Labour needs a leader who can unite the party and the wider Labour movement. Jeremy Corbyn is not that man.

[Denzil_DC]

3. I don't want to be entirely negative,

especially not today, but I seriously doubt such a creature exists. Balancing the wishes of the Blairites/Milibandites who got voted in with the wishes of the influx of new members under Corbyn isn't a circle I can see any way of squaring.

Actually, that IS entirely negative. Sorry. It sucks.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

5. I think it's certainly a hard circle to square.

The distribution of opinions among the Labour membership and the British electorate are very different.

Broadly speaking, Blair thought that what was important was a mandate from the electorate, and was willing to ignore or fight the membership, whereas Corbyn thinks that what is important is a mandate from the members, and doesn't care much about the electorate.

I think that the selection of an electable leader will be met with rage and disgust from a large section of the membership, many of whom will leave. I think that's a big problem, but a price worth paying - winning the electorate is non-optional.

[Denzil_DC]

6. Well, in fact it's a triangle that can't be squared.

Point 1: The old-guard (mainly non-Corbynite) MPs elected under Miliband

Point 2: Those members who joined after Corbyn took over the leadership

Point 3: The electorate at large

Both Points 1 and 2 have their own problems relating and representing to Point 3. I include Point 1 because otherwise Miliband would have won the election.

A major problem is that if you chase popularity/"electability" as an end in itself, the electorate can be very fickle. They may have moved to a point beyond your triangulation by the time you establish your ground there with enough consistency and doggedness to be credible.

It may be an old-fashioned idea, but here's something to be said for being a signpost, not a weathervane, in the words of one Labour old-timer.

[T_i_B]

7. There's something to be said for working as a team!

Sadly, I don't see much of that from Labour. From the decision to fight a separate referendum campaign to the ongoing internal fighting Labour is pretty awful at the moment at getting people to work together.

[Denzil_DC]

8. There certainly is!

I was going to n/t that line, but I might as well admit I've given up on the idea of working today (self-employed) and cracked my last bottle of Peroni. I should probably stop posting soon ...

[Ken Burch]

13. "Electable" here being a euphemism for "in lockstep with Tony Blair for eternity"

It wouldn't be worth electing a Labour government if it was exactly like what those years were like...or, worse, if it meant policies to the right of that, which is what accepting the benefits cap, the budget charter and more bombing of Syria(in other words, endorsing the entire Tory manifesto for all practical purposes).

The only reason to work to defeat a Tory government is to get completely different policies and a humane, democratic, egalitarian government. There can't be a social democratic militarism or a social democratic austerity.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

17. Electable here meaning "capable of winning the next election".

Corbyn isn't. Many others - Benn, Burnham, Cooper, Eagle, Jarvis, Starmer, to name but six - probably would be.

They would also all be good prime ministers - almost certainly better than Corbyn, who, while left-wing, is also incompetent, unrealistic, self-indulgent, uncharismatic, and frankly not very intelligent.

[Ken Burch]

10. It's not Corbyn's fault that the PLP has never accepted him as leader.

This is just about people whose star rose with Tony Blair refusing to accept the reality that no one wants the Third Way back and that the party has voted for change.

They whinge about the possibility of being deselected as candidate in their constituency means they are entitled to reselection until death, retirement or resignation-in-disgrace do us part.

If Corbyn is dumped, it goes without saying that whoever they PLP would prefer as leader would be a cynical, principle-free hack.

If the PLP has its way, Labour will reduce itself to what it would have been if Liz Kendall as leader...a party which, having accepted perpetual bombing of Syria, perpetual military involvement in the Middle East, perpetual continuation of the budget charter and the benefits cap, wouldn't be different than a Tory government on any issue that actually made a difference in anyone's life.

If you are right wing on all of the above, there is nothing else you can still be left-of-center about. Any other issue is a meaningless triviality.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

18. It absolutely is Corbyn's fault.

The reason they haven't accepted him is that he has demonstrated over and over again that he is utterly incompetent and has no chance of winning the next election.

The PLP would happily fall in line behind a far-left leader they thought could lead them to victory (it's not obvious such a thing could exist, but with enough charisma many things are possible). But the choice now is a new leader or annihilation.

[Ken Burch]

12. If he acted strongly against his right-wing opponents in the party, people like you

would be calling him a Stalinist.

Corbyn has never caught a break from the anti-democratic, anti-socialist(and for that matter anti-social democratic) wing of the Labour Party.

If the PLP gets its way, the party will never stand for anything again.

[T_i_B]

14. How about Labour stops bickering and starts working together?

Labour cannot turn itself around, idealogically or electorally if the party is more interested in fighting each other than fighting for Britain?

[Ken Burch]

15. Working together is good-but the anti-Corbynites have to do that, too.

The effort to remove Corbyn the PLP launched this morning is NOT "working together".

Corbyn has reached out to his opponents in the party many times...for once, they need to reach out to him and stop trying to undermine him.

[T_i_B]

16. Actually, a lot of them have made the effort to work with Corbyn

The trouble is that whilst Corbyn may well be a decent and honourable man, he just does not have the skills nessessary to run a major political party. And that's something that has managed to turn off a lot of people who were previously sympathetic to him, and remain sympathetic to much of his politics.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

4. At last, a silver lining.

Removing Corbyn is nothing to do with settling old scores, it's about trying to create a future for the Labour party.

This *has* to succeed - it's the only realistic chance at a Labour election victory in 2020, and 9 more years of Conservative government would be even harder to come back from than 4.

One of the arguments advanced by Corbyn's supporters when they elected him was that, while even many of the people voting for him thought he wouldn't win an election, they did at least think he'd provide effective opposition.

In general, the position of leader of the opposition is largely ceremonial - you get a megaphone, but no actual power. The one situation where that megaphone is really meaningful is a referendum, and Corbyn's use of it has been unmitigatedly appalling.

Given the narrowness of the lead, the unexpectedly high leave vote from Labour supporters, and how hard it would have been for a Labour leader to not be less ineffective than Corbyn, I think it's hard to argue that we probably wouldn't be staying in if Burnham or Cooper had won.

There may be another chance to fix the catastrophic mistake of entrusting the only chance we have to get a left-wing government in 2020 (or possibly even sooner) to Corbyn, but we can't rely on it - please, please, join the Labour party if you haven't already, and vote to elect an electable leader.

[Ken Burch]

11. By "an electable leader", you mean, of course, another sectarian Blairite.

That is the ONLY sort of leader the anti-Corbyn MPs(most of who are mainly driven by making sure that ordinary Labour members are kept totally powerless in terms of shaping Labour policies and strategy)would ever accept.

No leader the anti-Corbyn would support would lead a government anywhere close to "left wing" in its values.

Certainly not anyone like Chuka Umunna or Yvette Cooper.

The MPs who want him out want the party to accept the budget charter and the benefits cap, continued membership in the now-obsolete NATO alliance(there is no reason anymore for European security to be based any longer on eternal, unquestioning acceptance of a massive American nuclear stockpile on European soil over which no one outside of Washington D.C. has any say)perpetual and doomed-to-be-pointless bombing of Syria(bombing that we already know can never do anything to help protect the Syrian people from Assad or ISIS), continued acceptance of Thatcher's anti-worker laws, and a continued lack of internal party democracy within Labour.

Nothing left-wing can be done by a Labour Party that puts all of those constraints on itself. Not much of anything at all can be done that is in any way distinguishable from a Tory government.

Anything still permissible after agreeing to all of the above is too trivial to do anyone any good.

Another Blairite government is doomed to be a failed and right-wing government...yet that is the only kind of "Labour" program the anti-Corbynites would ever allow.

Why bring back yesterday's women and yesterday's men?

It's time to get permanently shut of both the Third Way and the Euston Station Manifesto.

What Labour actually needs is a serious reinvestment strategy to reindustrialize the North...and yes, that will probably have to involve something like nationalization and the encouragement of worker cooperatives, since nobody who believes in "market values" gives a damn about the North or about anyone who isn't a software billionaire.

[chapdrum]

9. Yep, leave it to "Bliar."

"There's nothing like using a crisis to settle old scores, is there?"

Glad to see Cameron leave, but assume someone as or more odious will replace him.