General Election 2019

Based on what?

In the last 40 years all the elections have been won by the Conservatives or Tony Blair. I support Corbyn, but I'm also not mental, so never thought he'd win. But with the chaotic nature of the Tories I'd wager a centrist Labour party led by the likes of Chuka Umunna, or someone else from that now non-existent wing of Labour, would be heading No. 10.

What kind of a majority would Labour need to put its manifesto goals in to practice?

Chukka who set up a centrist party that everyone instantly thought was shit and didn't even last a year?

Depends how many socialism-free Continuity Blairites will retain seats as of Friday.

How would a centrist, business-as-usual, anti-brexit party, win over the brexiters tied to the Tories?

I find it very frustrating that the complex series of geopolitical events that led to the deaths of at least three million people (including a genocide of 250,000 Kurds) involving Iraq, Iran, Russia, Germany, the UK and the USA is so often distilled down to "Tony Blair is a war criminal" and accusations of warmongering by just one participant.

I'm not for a second saying that there is not a lot of blood on his hands but it does deflect the blame from a lot of people with far worse culpability.

I think it also insulting to the memories of the dead from those wars that "Tony Blair is a war criminal" has been used to campaign against Labour.

Unless they achieve a 1997 Blair-style victory in England/Wales it's going to be a coalition or confidence and supply. Given the way the last coalition went and that everyone hates each other, it'll surely be issue-by-issue support. So people's vote - yes, renationalisation and radical socialist stuff - maybe not (LDs, maybe SNP, won't go for it).

If the UK Labour party had gone the way of other European socialist parties and not elected Jeremy Corbyn, it would by now be in electoral oblivion. Look at the SPD in Germany, until recently still dominated by Schröderites like Nahles and Scholz, or the Parti Socialiste. Both have haemorrhaged support in recent years. (There are obviously some differences around FPTP, which obviously benefits the two major parties, but still.)

'New Labour' was supported by the establishment ('support' from Rupert Murdoch! Thatcher: 'Tony Blair won't let Britain down.'!) because it had subverted Labour and wanted the inevitable change of government without any policies that would adequately balance out what the Tories had done in the 80s and 90s. Corbyn has been attacked absolutely relentlessly and he's still in there with a fighting chance. (I'm not optimistic about the election, though.)

Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan are the other conflicts/wars - Kosovo and Sierra Leone I thought to be in order to protect civilians and Afghanistan was the first and only invocation of our NATO obligations - which leaves Iraq, and I totally agree that that was an illegal war.

But - wars suggests that the others were illegal, which I don't think to be true, unless I've misunderstood?

Yeah, I was more trying to say that Tony Blair only gets one chance to ride in and win things in the way that happened, and that now that he's done a "new Labour" and all that went with it, he, or others in his ilk aren't what the country needs or what can win an election.

You know all of this, but the focus on Saint Bambi is because he so obviously lied and because nobody expected much of Bush. There is also the assumption that the US wouldn't have started the Iraq war without the UK.

A lot of families have portraits of Blair hanging in their homes in Kosovo and Montenegro. He's their national hero.

Absolutely, I just feet frustrated that it's been made ALL about him by some people. To the point that the fact that the reasons for the intelligences failures have been sidelined, even to the point of some people glossing over the colossal shithousery by Saddam Hussein and Iran and the fact that we thought we knew he had WMDs because we (as in the allies) fucking sold them to him.

Another issue that bothers me is that nobody really seems to give a shit about the war Crimes committed by the Allies in Iraq in 1991 such as the burying alive of between 450 and 4,000 Iraqi soldiers using bulldozers. 450 being the figure that Cheney has admitted to, 4,000 being the independent estimate.

Edit: sorry, just feeling really fucking angry about western middle East policy overall and am easily triggered by the Blair thing. He was bad but not the worst and some of the worst people involved haven't taken one ounce of criticism yet by comparison.

Conversely, a lot of people don't realise that if Iraq hadn't at least maintained the illusion of having WMDs, Iran would have bulldozed in. And the last time that happened, 1.2 million people died.

I struggle to think of a more complicated shitshow.

I think SPD is a bit different to Labour. SPD still gets a lot of credit for the economic reforms under Schröder, which are seen as the reason for Germany's strong economy over the last ten years. Their issue seems to be that the CDU has moved much further to the centre and they have lost votes to the Greens. The German far left is not a credible threat anymore, so going that way does not seem like a solution. The SPD just got squeezed in the middle and they were unable to take the credit for their work in the coalition.

In a way Merkel pulled the same political trick on the SPD as the Tories pull on Labour. She was much better at capturing the mood of the country in a catch phrase and pushing her agenda. "Wir schaffen das" drowned out questions about costs and implications same as the three word Brexit slogans we have had over the last three years.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/07/tories-investigate-three-candidates-over-alleged-antisemitism?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Is anybody surprised that the Tory party is a festering hole of antisemitism? No me nether. So let’s see if Boris will keep to his word and kicks them all out, given that it’s anitsemitism rather than just Islamophobia which I can only assume is general encouraged for that all important tommy Robinson endorsement.

Yougov have conducted surveys of the prevalence of anti-Semitic views and the political affiliations of those people for at least the last four years.

I'm saying this off the top of my head but the results in 2017 were something like 40% of people with at least one antisemitic view were Conservative aligned, 32% Labour, 25% Lib Dem. Even if my recollection of the numbers is wrong, I remember that the conservative party has consistently been top of the anti Semite list for a while. Which is surprising considering that Yougov is Tory owned.

Ah, I was a fair bit off.

In 2015, 2016 and 2017, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) commissioned YouGov to survey British attitudes towards Jews.[89] The 2017 survey found that 30% of supporters of the Liberal Democrats endorsed at least one "antisemitic attitude", as defined by the CAA, compared with 32% of Labour supporters, 39% of UK Independence Party (UKIP) supporters and 40% of Conservative Party supporters.[89][90]

Yeah I’ve seen that too. what’s interesting in these case their candidate standing for election, rather than just members. I wonder if the timing has been strategic!

I’m looking forward to the chief rabbi statement on Monday morning.

If it’s handled the same way It was with Suella Braverman they’ll be packed off to the board of deputies over the weekend. which will be quickly followed by a statement from the board of deputies saying that’s there happy all the people involved are Good friends of Israel and the matter will be closed as far as the Tory party are concerned.

Lol, thanks, I needed a belly laugh

I'm wondering, if Labour swung back into the centre or wherever they were in the 90s, would the youth/momentum stick around as corbyn did or would they head off to the greens?
Really, some kind of compromise between the two "factions" in labour would hs r been nice, rather than over-zealous momentum and repeated leadership contests.

I'm wondering, if Labour swung back into the centre

They won't. The new MPs getting elected are from the left/Momentum backed. So the Labour parliamentary party after the election is more likely to back a left-winger, e.g. Rebecca Long-Bailey for new leader.

Surely there are some left though? And more "moderates" in the membership.
Interesting times ahead for both parties in the next few years.

450 being the figure that Cheney has admitted to, 4,000 being the independent estimate.

Whose independent estimate is this? I've never heard of any evidence of a figure anywhere near as high as 4000.