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Related: About this forumIs UKIP's Paul Nuttall Britain's ultimate "post truth" politician?
Last edited Sat Feb 18, 2017, 09:34 AM - Edit history (1)
The man's record of porkie pies is staggering. Paul Nutall is a complete fraud and totally unfit to hold public office at any level. If he wins the by-election in Stoke then we really are in trouble.
http://www.itv.com/news/2017-02-17/paul-nuttall-apologises-for-hillsborough-claims/
Nuttall made his apology at the Ukip spring conference on Friday after it emerged that an article on his website said he had lost "close personal friends" in the 1989 disaster.
Speaking at the conference Nuttall said: "I take the blame for the fact that I failed to check what was put up on my website under my name, that is my fault".
Nuttall's colleague Lynda Roughley has said she was "entirely responsible" for the website post and offered her resignation after the mistake was discovered.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/paul-nuttall-claims-about-hillsborough-ukip-stoke-2017-2
Taken together, there is a clear pattern of behaviour here. False claims are made and when confronted about them Nuttall denies all knowledge, before blaming junior members of staff for the "mistake".
There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that he is the victim of repeated mistakes by a series of completely incompetent, yet strangely imaginative employees. The second is that he is just making things up.
TubbersUK
(1,439 posts)SwissTony
(2,560 posts)He claimed he had served on a board of a charity. The charity says no, he didn't.
Of course, he blames someone else for all these "errors".
T_i_B
(14,734 posts)...for my OP to become out of date thanks to new revelations of Nuttall lying!
Even if it does fit the pattern. Who will Nuttall force to carry the can for this lie?
LeftishBrit
(41,192 posts)Walter Mitty was a model of truth compared with him.
mwooldri
(10,291 posts)Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The most anti-oppression thing anyone could do in the UK this week would be to doorbell for the Labour candidate in Stoke-on-Trent.
Stopping Nuttall matters more than anything else.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,154 posts)UK DUers have probably already heard this, but US ones might not have:
Adam Heatherington and Stuart Monkcom handed in their resignations from the party this week after the Ukip leaders admission last week that assertions on his website about losing close friends in the disaster were false.
Victims families reacted with dismay to Nuttalls admission. Margaret Aspinall, the chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, whose 18-year-old son James died in the disaster, described it as appalling.
The resignations will come as a blow to the Ukip leader, days before he attempts to unseat Labour in the Stoke-on-Trent Central byelection on Thursday.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/20/merseyside-ukip-officials-quit-paul-nuttall-hillsborough-controversy
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)There was nevand ever anything so intolerable about Jeremy that could possibly have justified making UKIP's work easier, and everyone knew he wasn't going to resign while the byelections were underway. What should have mattered was stopping UKIP and the Tories nothing BUT stopping UKIP and the Tories.
Mandelson's statement that he worked "every day" to undermine Corbyn should get him expelled from the party.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)That's the only good thing about this evening.
The Tories took Copeland largely because the anti-Corbyn plotters NEVER stopped.
T_i_B
(14,734 posts)If anything, that's an advantage for a politician in the current climate.
Labour retained Stoke Central because their main opponent was shown during the campaign to be a serious, pathological liar. That much is a turn off regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum. I dread to think of how that by-election would have turned out if UKIP had selected a better candidate.
As to Copeland, Labour were never in such luck and at times it did seem like the pro and anti-Corbyn factions were more interested in blaming each other for the inevitable defeat. In all honesty, I think the pro and anti Corbyn factions are equally to blame for the loss of a seat that's been Labour since 1935.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)Time to accept reality that Corbyn is not a good leader of the party.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)They should agree that a left-wing candidate will be on the leadership ballot to replace him(no non-left wing candidate could present a program that was actually non-Tory), they should revoke all suspensions and expulsions of Corbyn supporters, and they they should agree to restore full internal party democracy.
It would be inherently unjust to have only non-left candidates on the ballot and to preserve the Blairite party structure.
It shouldn't be about erasing everything the Corbyn movement stands for with Labour. That would leave the party with nothing at all.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)the person for the job. It doesn't mean they have to go reflexively center all the time but going reflexively left is not the answer either.
Remember that elections in the UK are won in the middle and Corbyn is not appealing to o them. Perhaps another progressive can make the case without his issues.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)during the 2016 leadership revote.
Virtually all of those who were suspended or expelled were Corbyn supporters.
They did this because they're in league with the Labour MPs, most of whom, before Jeremy Corbyn was overwhelmingly elected leader, were trying to push the party to the right of the program on which it fought and lost the 2015 election...and there were no major issues on which Labour could move to the right of that program without simply agreeing to the entire Tory manifesto.
The MPs wanted the party to support almost as many cuts in benefit as the Tories, wanted to fully back the Tory benefits sanctions regime(in which benefits claimants, including the severely disabled and housebound, are required to repeatedly prove they should be ON benefits, and are required to travel to the benefits office to do so, even if they ARE severely disabled, housebound, even if they are paralyzed and incontinent as a result of their disability).
The MPs also wanted the party to continue its commitment to preserving Thatcher's anti-worker laws, to support punitive anti-immigrant measures, and to back the bombing of Syria, even though it is impossible for such bombing to have any positive results.
They want to preserve the complete lack of internal party democracy and grassroots control over party policy imposed by Tony Blair-despite the fact that there is no longer any such reason for such iron-fisted control from the top.
They've refused to ever accept the Corbyn's election as leader, even though the party rank-and-file has twice elected him to the post by landslide margins...the second time by an increased margins.
Finally they persist in making the absurd claim that anyone who supports Corbyn or supports any significantly radical policies at all, is a Trotskyist...this despite the fact that in the UK, Trotskyists are the least effective and most hated people on any part of the left-of-center political spectrum.
Even if Corbyn himself has flaws, wouldn't you agree that that kind of arrogance from the MPs and this sort of ugly and anti-democratic tactics need to stop?
Jeremy isn't an ego-driven figure...the reason he has insisted on staying on is that there's no guarantee, if he just stood down, that anyone to the left of Tony Blair would be put on the leadership ballot(the Labour MPs, most of whom are massively to the right of the Labour rank-and-file, control access to that ballot).
At this point, all they've ever offered to Corbyn, in exchange for standing down, is a meaningless and irrelevant job a "party president"-a position in which it goes without saying he would have no say in policy and would be expected to unquestioningly support every punitive, vindictive move the "moderates" ever made against the Left.
This is why he has stayed on, in my view...he's being asked to betray his supporters and acquiesce in their silencing. That's not a reasonable request to make of anyone.
The issue should simply be the leader...not his supporters and not what they stand for.
This matters, because if Corbyn's supporters were all driven away or silenced, it goes without saying that Labour would never stand for anything different than the Tories again-and would never be worth anyone's support again.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)Millions more voted to elect Labor members and I think if the labor caucus wants to get rid of Corbyn it should be allowed.
Denzil_DC
(7,188 posts)The mechanisms for doing so are clear.
And this time, instead of the lame stalking horses who ran last time, let one or more of the "big hitters" show some guts and stand for the leadership against Corbyn (if he even chooses to run again) rather than carping from the sidelines like spoilt brats.
And this time, let the NEC not disenfranchise and smear a vast swath of the party membership and ban constituency branches from meeting on wafer-thin pretexts.
Don't get me wrong - I piped up at length over the anti-democratic way Corbyn was challenged last time, but he's stretched my patience. His "brand" over the years has been principled stands. I see nothing principled in the accommodations over the last few months, especially to do with Brexit and the frantic chase for supposed "lost" Labour voters to UKIP. Here's John Curtice on this:
...
Labours share of the vote has now dropped in every single byelection since the Brexit referendum. From leafy Richmond to windswept Copeland the message has been the same: the party is struggling to hang on to the already diminished band of supporters who backed it in 2015.
The partys problems were, of course, in evidence long before 23 June last year. But the vote to leave the EU has exacerbated them.
Labour seems to have decided in recent weeks that its first priority is to stave off the threat from Ukip to its traditional working-class vote, much of which supposedly voted to leave in the EU referendum.
But in so doing it seems to have forgotten (or not realised) that most of those who voted Labour in 2015 including those living in Labour seats in the North and the Midlands backed remain. The party is thus at greater risk of losing votes to the pro-remain Liberal Democrats than to pro-Brexit Ukip.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/24/stoke-copeland-labour-remain-richmond-copeland-ukip
Curtice conflates "supporters" with "voters" there, but anybody who imagines that Labour's problems would be solved merely by appointing a new leader is in for a rude awakening. The rot runs a lot deeper than that.
If you can get to the stage where the right wing of the Labour Party has fixated so much on demonizing Corbyn as the root of all evil and successfully sold that far and wide through the eager media, it's no surprise that you end up with situations like this, reported from last night's Copeland by-election:
When it came to voting, however, many said they believed lifelong Labour voters turned blue in the hope it would trigger Corbyns removal and save the party from perceived electoral oblivion.
This week Ive spoken to a lot of people, lifelong Labour voters who Ive known for a very long time, who voted Conservative because they want Jeremy Corbyn out, said Mike Starkey, the independent mayor of Copeland.
Starkey said he believed the Labour revolt would claim further scalps in the partys heartlands if Corbyn remained in charge.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/24/the-view-from-copeland-lifelong-labour-voters-want-corbyn-out
Read it. By all accounts, there's not an ill some people won't now pin on Corbyn, no matter how outlandish (and bear in mind that the MP who resigned, triggering the by-election, was a very vociferous Corbyn critic, as was no doubt widely reported in the local media over the last couple of years).
It's a grim irony that the drive to oust Corbyn may lose many of the plotters' own seats because they've been so successful. And once lost, it's hard to see how Labour claws its way back to credibility - as I've witnessed myself here in Scotland, where they're a joke and haemorrhaging voters, and that's been a continuing process that began well before Corbyn took over the leadership.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)Denzil_DC
(7,188 posts)More than it knows what to do with, apparently. But it seems they're the wrong sort of members as far as some are concerned!
I don't know about making membership free. The party apparatus needs funding, and if it doesn't get it from the grassroots, you can imagine where it'll have to be found. We have an ongoing barely spoken-about scandal at the moment of the likes of deputy leader Tom Watson's funding from shady sources - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/22/tom-watson-given-500k-in-donations-by-max-mosley-in-past-year - and he's not alone. We don't want to go even further down the American route. The Tory cabinet is rife with dirty money that could sink our NHS, among other things.
I usually only briefly read comments sections on articles like the ones linked above for the lulz, but I was quite taken with this one (it's a reader comment so I don't think the four-paragraph rule applies, but if I'm wrong, hosts/mods, I'll edit it down):
...
People do like the policies of Corbyn/Labour but, only when they don't know they are attached to Corbyn/Labour.
"Nearly half (45%) of people surveyed by YouGov said they want the government to increase public spending and raise taxes for the wealthiest people - both of which are policies called for by Labour.
Only 13% supported the current levels of cuts taking place under the Conservative Government, and 22% thought the cuts should continue but be scaled back.
Yet, when asked directly which party they think has the best policies on spending and taxation, 30% said the Tories while 16% said Labour."
From earlier YouGov polling, they found strong support for renationalisation of the railways (around 60+%, even 42% of Tories support it). Strong support for 75% tax on income over 1m (56%). Strong support for a convention banning nuclear weapons (64%). Strong support for rent controls (56%). Mandatory living wage (59%). Scrap tuition fees (49% support, 31% oppose). The majority also support Corbyn's view on intervention in the ME (Iraq and Syria in particular).
Huff Po 2016
Indy 2015
Unfortunately, the media, particularly early on when he was first elected, went on a full on assault of Corbyn. Again, backed up by study/content analysis.
The LSE content analysis showed consistent bias against, misrepresentation of, undermining and character assassination of character of Jeremy Corbyn going far beyond what would be considered a "watch dog" role of the media. Not unprecedented but not seen since the 70's.
The Media Reform Coalitions study showed 75% of stories about Corbyn antagonistic, undermining etc, to a degree not seen for decades.
Fuelled by this media frenzy, members of the PLP itself sought to join the undermining - the Progress/Blair wing for the most part.
This has clearly severely damaged the party and public perception of it. Of course, it's the media that (mis) informs people. They aren't going to hold their hands up and go "sorry, went a bit far. We got it wrong". Their narrative is set now and, public opinion with it.
Corbyn isn't blameless but the fact is, he never had, and was never going to be given, a chance.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/24/stoke-copeland-labour-remain-richmond-copeland-ukip#comment-93773876
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)I think he is the wrong messanger. They need someone with leadership qualities that can appeal to the left and center.
Denzil_DC
(7,188 posts)is that people are forever waiting for Godot - some charismatic figure who'll lead us to the promised land without our having to do much except turn out to the polls and get on with our lives.
We had Thatcher, for far too long, with resounding majorities (our UK polity doesn't work well with those because the policies of the party in power never get decent scrutiny, so bad laws get passed, till eventually factionalism sets in and wrecks that party), and later Blair (ditto). In their time, they both had wide appeal across traditional party lines. Then it collapsed.
I can't see anyone in the current UK Labour Party who'd fit the bill. And anybody who did pop up might have a brief honeymoon, but they'd soon be as pilloried as Corbyn. And the anti-Corbyn party leadership has nobody but itself to blame because it's been happy to feed the beast when it's suited it.
The media smell blood in the water, but for some reason they're all in shock after the Brexit vote, so the nonsense the Tories and May keep coming out with and the wreckage being inflicted on the country while they flounder may get some scant reporting, but the full roar of hatespeak is reserved for the opposition, and Corbyn's a handy hate figure.
I see that in Scotland, too, where we have a gutsy, surprisingly charismatic and thoughtful First Minister with wide popular support, a party in power that includes a large number of very competent and serious politicians at all levels (they're recently knocking spots off the Tories in making diplomatic inroads with the rest of the EU and trying to deal with Brexit in a responsible fashion), but she and they are portrayed as ridiculous "Jock" and "Jockette" caricatures in the RW media, and especially that outside Scotland.
I look across the Atlantic at the moment, and for one of the few times in my life, I actually envy you your media compared to ours!
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)I get your point of the media as well. Your political media go for blood.
Denzil_DC
(7,188 posts)on past experience, some folks here might not agree with you about that!
Hey, it's been good talking with you. Sorry for rambling on. I guess I had some stuff I needed to get off my chest, but I think it's time for somebody else to have a crack at it, and I should go do some reading elsewhere or hit the hay or something.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)T_i_B
(14,734 posts)...where you register as a supporter of one party or the other when you register to vote. To join a political party in the UK you do have to pay your subscription fees.
I should also mention a gripe I have with the Liberal Democrats on this point, which is that their website does not tell you how much it costs to join. That's a hugely important consideration for any product or service.
For me, the challenge in our system is to make membership of a political party more attractive, appealing and enjoyable. People are not going to be inclined to sign up if they think it's going to be lots of drudgery and little else.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,154 posts)Membership starts at £12 a year - but we hope that you might consider donating a little more - the recommended amount (as decided by members like you at our conference) is £70.
You can join online by paying with either a credit/debit card or direct debit, its up to you, you can choose your preferred method when you join:
We also have a few concessionary rates too, students can join us for £1 for their first year of membership.
And if youre under 26 and ore are entitled to receive state benefits (other than the state pension or child benefit) then membership starts from just £6 a year.
http://www.libdems.org.uk/membership-faqs
T_i_B
(14,734 posts)Like here for instance? https://libdems.secure.force.com/LiberalDemocrats/NewMemberRegistration
I did ask this question of my local branch on Farcebook and was advised that "membership starts at £1 for students" which I didn't feel was much of an answer, especially given that the Lib Dems track record with students hasn't been great in recent times and I haven't been a student for many years.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,154 posts)and the £12 is specified on the next page after the one you linked to. OK, it might be better to mention the £12 on the page you linked to, but that's a bit of minor preference about web design, rather than a beef with the party. Your local branch should have said "... and £12 for those in work" or similar. The page I gave was the first google result for '"liberal democrats" "member" "fee"'.
T_i_B
(14,734 posts)Last edited Sat Feb 25, 2017, 06:25 AM - Edit history (1)
That much was made clear from the last general election, where Labour lost votes to Tories and UKIP on the right, and absolutely hemorrhaged votes on the left to the SNP in Scotland. There's something bigger that's wrong with Labour than where they position themselves on a theoretical spectrum
However, people on all sides of the Labour party seem unable to grasp this point, and if anything Labour is getting worse at the basic stuff. And that's why I've become deeply disillusioned with Corbyn. Not because of how left wing he is, but because of how badly Labour is being run.
If anything, they were lucky that in Stoke Central they had an opponent in Paul Nuttall who is even worse at the basic stuff. If you behaved like Paul Nuttall in any other profession you would find yourself fired or out of business.