Can we craft a stronger economic justice message WITHOUT throwing anyone under the bus?

[Ken Burch]

36. There's no one to Corbyn's right who'd have Labour in a stronger place in the polls.

Certainly not anyone who still defended the Iraq War or the Blair government's continuation of the Tory privatization program, OR Labour's refusal to repeal the anti-union(and thus anti-worker)laws passed by Margaret Thatcher. OR anyone who supported(as Labour's post-Ed Miliband interim leader, Harriet Harman)abstaining on Tory benefit cuts legislation rather than trying to fight it-in other words, anyone who supported Labour agreeing to support the Tory assault on the most powerless people in the UK).

Corbyn was elected leader because the overwhelming majority of Labour supporters(and even a majority of full PAID Labour party members)were horrified by the post-2015 election push by the Parliamentary Labour Party to move the party's positions on the issues even FURTHER to the right...far enough that no one would have been able to recognize them as Labour policies at all anymore-after all, all austerity is the same and all cuts and additional rules and hurdles imposed on benefit claimants are equally immoral and indefensible.

Half of the problem is that the Blairite wing of the party never accepted that Corbyn's victory in the Labour leadership contest was legitimate and have done nothing but try to undermine and remove him ever since.

After passing a meaningless and non-binding motion against Corbyn, the PLP(a group that hasn't disagreed with the Tories on much of anything since 1997) started simply demanding that Corbyn resign and be replaced in a contest in which only members of the party's right wing(that's what a "moderate" is in a social democratic party-an ultraconservative), and in which most of the people who voted for Corbyn would have been barred from voting. No one who cared about working people and the poor would have been permitted to win such a contest-the only sort of candidate allowed would have been a quasi-Tory like Yvette Cooper-the sort of person who would immediately have whipped the PLP into voting FOR bombing Syria and for supporting most of the Tory cuts(in other words, into ceasing to BE the Labour Party, since the party could never have offered any non-Tory policies again after supporting the bombing of Syria and supporting the continued bombing of Yemen).

Labour does not need to be a party that says "we love war and hate socialism" to get elected-and if it gets elected by saying that, what could it still DO that was Labour?

BTW. the people he has brought into and BACK to the party are not "riff-raff"-they're good, committed democratic socialists who were driven away in the late Eighteies and Nineties for no good reason, leaving no one behind but apologists for austerity and militarism, and they are the young who seek to create a better world. If people like that are made unwelcome in a "center-left" party(as you advocate)that doesn't leave anyone else, really. It's pointless to try to be the party of people who obsess about controlling spending and "projecting force"-one Tory party is enough.

Labour would be in even worse shape if were led by someone the Right would prefer, like Ed Miliband's right-wing brother David Miliband...a guy who not only slandered his own brother by refusing to condemn the lie that Ed "stabbed him in the back" by running against him for the Labour leadership-a slur that implies that David was simply ENTITLED to move into the leadership unopposed-essentially agrees with the Tories on everything but just wants to be slightly less brutal about it(and who still thinks there can be a "progressive" case for continued Western military intervention in the Arab/Muslim world). No significant group of voters wanted Labour to "stay the course" with the "just slightly not Tory" program it lost the 2010 and 2015 elections with, OR to move to the right of the program(as it would have if Liz Kendall, the PLP's favored candidate, had been elected leader).

Tell me Walter...do you want the "center left" to actually be DIFFERENT than the "center right"? Do you feel it needs to be to the let of the "center right" on any MAJOR issues? And if you don't, why do you think the "center left" should even exist? It's not as though the people are ever served by having a choice between two parties that are more alike than different.