If Corbyn is dumped, why should anyone who cares about workers and the poor bother voting Labour?

[Denzil_DC]

11. Ok, forgive the bluntness, but if he's a liar!!!!, you're a bullshitter.

I live in Scotland, I know what was behind the support for independence in the referendum. Having been a Labour Party activist and member in the past - like a lot of SNP members, probably the majority since the referendum's upsurge in SNP support, and some of our best new MPs - I think I have some insights.

Tory-liteness was precisely the spur that killed Labour up here. You can wriggle and redefine "the left" in terms of the allowable spectrum within UK Labour nowadays till the term is meaningless, but it won't help. That is the perception. Labour doesn't give any grounds to counter it because we're not stupid or blind or with the attention span of goldfish, and we got heartily tired of being treated like we were.

But, like the rest of DU when we try to talk about UK issues in the main forums, you're no doubt going to tell me you know better than somebody who lives here.

Good luck with that.

This is actually a potentially paradigm-shifting moment. On that, I couldn't agree with you more.

I lived through something similar up here in the desolation of the post-indyref resurgence that saw the SNP, far from being annihilated, energized and stuffed with a new intake of members who pay their dues and turn out to vote and talk to their neighbours and workmates, and have formed a new consensus. It's obviously not 100%, but it's firmly in the ascendant.

The worrying thing is that no amount of shifting the deckchairs at the moment is going to put Labour in a position to capitalize on that. Certainly, reverting to the situation a year ago, before Corbyn became even a candidate for the leadership, isn't going to do it. Nor is convulsing the party in yet another battle for its soul. So some other forces in our polity stand ready to benefit. Even if Scotland's out of Dodge in a few years, I don't want that as a neighbour!

Labour would have been well placed in the shitstorm that's erupted to be saying those ungratifying words, "Told you so." Not smugly, but with some air of exasperation, like, "So now you get it?"

Instead it's ranting at itself, as so often in the past, and wringing its hands and whining "Where did we go wrong?", "We must accommodate" like a bunch of chintz daleks - and seemingly unwilling to entertain some home truths about where it actually might have been going wrong.