Labour Leadership 2016

On policy, it seems to me as if the policy-forming process that Corbyn trailed last year still hasn't got into swing--quite probably because of massive hostility from 'leading' figures within the party, but I actually have no idea why. It's very difficult to discuss policy when you know that there are entrenched views likely to make a quality discussion impossible. Look at the policy-lite stuff that Ed Miliband came out with every once in a while--'one-nation Labour', the 'squeezed middle'--who remembers those, even though they were heavily mediarised at the time? In the Tories, it seems the leader can just dictate policy and nobody objects, at least not in public.

I also always find the label 'Corbynomics' very puzzling. What Corbyn and McDonnell have so far proposed are very moderate, standard demands of European social democracy. They closely resemble things the German SPD, that hotbed of radicalism, stood for for a long time during its existence. There's nothing particularly radical about them, unless you have an extremely skewed world view, I suppose. Still, the 'hard-left' smear still seems to work like a charm.