More United?

[T_i_B]

A new movement, launched last Sunday by Paddy Ashdown. It looks a bit like a cross between online campaigning tools like 38 Degrees and a US-style PAC. What do you think?

http://www.moreunited.uk/

We are not a political party and we won't stand candidates in elections. Instead we will drive change by giving financial and human resource to candidates, from all parties and none, who formally commit to support our principles.

By joining together the strength of thousands of ordinary voters, and unlocking the power of crowdfunding, we believe we can get more progressive MPs from all parties elected over time and shift the balance of Parliament away from extremism.

We are truly participative. The traditional political system no longer speaks for most people. MoreUnited.uk is going to change that by giving ordinary voters real power outside the party system. We want to empower you to create a positive and more open kind of politics.

http://www.moreunited.uk/beliefs

Inspired by a speech given by the late Jo Cox MP, More United believes in hope and unity, and rejects hatred and division. We have five fundamental beliefs that we will work towards:

A fair, modern, efficient market based economy that closes the gap between rich and poor and supports strong public services

A modern democracy that empowers citizens, rather than politicians

A green economy that protects the environment and works to reverse climate change

An open and tolerant society where diversity is celebrated in all its forms

A United Kingdom that welcomes immigration, international co-operation and a close relationship with the EU

[non sociopath skin]

1. "A fair, modern, efficient market based economy

that closes the gap between rich and poor " sounds straight out of the Theresa May playbook.

The Skin

[T_i_B]

2. Looks more like the Lib Dem playbook to me!

A lot of it is very vague.

[LeftishBrit]

3. In these times, anything trying to be constructive and inclusive is worth a look

However, I think it's quite likely that it will be either so vague in its purpose as to be unable to go further, or become just a campaigning group for the LibDems.

But in the almighty mess that we're in, anything that combats the UKIP mentality (which also exists among the Tories and to some extent Labour) should not be totally dismissed out of hand.

[T_i_B]

4. If Labour holds together it probably won't amount to much

However, that would require Owen Smith to beat Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership contest, and that much is looking increasingly futile.

So we are likely to have Corbyn as Labour leader and some form of split in the Labour ranks. Could be a full SDP style schism, or something far more informal. And don't forget the possibility of Corbyn & Co deciding on an Erdogan style purge of the ideologically impure. If that happens then this will suddenly become a lot more relevant and important.

[LeftishBrit]

5. I have less faith than you in Owen Smith's ability to lead the Labour Party to unity and success

Not that I have a huge amount in Corbyn either; but I think that the party's problems at the moment go beyond an individual; or at any rate, that the individual who could help to solve them is not yet in evidence.

As regards More United: I would strongly object to their founding a new political party - all we need at the moment is more parties splintering the centre-left than we've got already - or becoming yet another faction within Labour; but that seems not to be their aim at the moment. Their best role might be as a vehicle for citizens to lobby our MPs on certain key issues.

[T_i_B]

6. Let me put it this way

I don't think Owen Smith is some sort of messiah. Far from it. But I do think he would be more capable of getting the basic stuff right than Corbyn.

I agree that further splits on the left will be disastrous. The ideal situation would be a strong united Labour party making formal alliances with the Lib Dems and Greens to ensure that we are all working together.

However, Labour is in such a horrendous mess that a split may become inevitable. There are too many people in that party who clearly cannot work with each other, nevermind working with others from outside the Labour tradition.

More United clearly isn't founding a new party, but it does promise funding and resources for candidate's who sign up to their agenda. I suspect that it's intended as a way to gently prod non-Corbynite folk on the left towards working with the Lib Dems. Especially on EU policy. I also suspect that it's been created on the premise that a split in Labour is increasingly likely.

[Denzil_DC]

7. "Basic stuff" should include not demonizing a growing faction of his own party to try to win votes.

Like Eagle, Smith has fallen into the same trap.

Here's Iain Macwhirter, a Scottish author, newspaper columnist and ex-BBC broadcaster, drawing some parallels with the Scottish Labour experience:

Iain Macwhirter: Why Labour control-freaks fear Corbynites

...
In some ways, Smith is a sign of just how much the Corbyn effect has changed British politics. He insists that, despite the rumours, that he too is of "the left". Smith's top policy proposal - apart from kicking Corbyn upstairs into a fictional post of party president - is a £200 billion investment programme that looks suspiciously like People’s Quantitative Easing. This was the much-maligned economic policy unveiled by Jeremy Corbyn last year and rubbished by his then Labour leadership rivals as “economically illiterate”.

But Labour MPs seem determined to deny Jeremy Corbyn credit for having restored Keynesian economics to centre stage, or for having achieved what no Labour leader has for decades: restoring the party's mass membership. There is now well over 600,000 Labour members, supporters and affiliates. More than 300,000 have joined the party since Corbyn first stood for the leadership. They're dismissed by some Labour MPs as Trotskyite hangovers from the Militant 1980s. Yet most of these new members weren't even born in the days when the Derek Hattons of this world were trying to take over moribund Labour branches.

Most of the new members are millennials, without Marxist baggage. They just want decent jobs, fair taxation, free education, a strong NHS and no more illegal wars. These used to be core Labour values and it is a measure of how far the parliamentary wing of the Labour Party has departed from its own traditions that such ideas are seen as dangerously radical.

Labour MPs are running scared of their own shadows, accusing their own party members of being abusive, anti-semitic misogynists issuing hate on social media. Owen Smith claims that Corbyn is somehow responsible for all this even though hardly a day goes by without him condemning it. All of which is very reminiscent of what happened during the Scottish independence referendum of 2014.

...

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/14638742.In_Labour_demonology__Corbynites_are_direct_descendants_of_Cybernats__In_fact_both_are_just_activists___and_that__39_s_what_scares_the_control_freaks/

The Scottish post-Independence Referendum experience was summed up by Hardeep Singh Kohli on Twitter as:



Like the Independence Referendum, one day the current Labour leadership battle will be decided. People tend to have inconveniently long memories.

[T_i_B]

8. Looking at the Corbyn campaign....

...the stuff you see from Corbyn supporters online is full of demonisation of the "ideologically impure" factions of Labour.

In fact if we are honest, this leadership contest has rarely risen above the status of monkeys flinging poo at each other. It's not difficult to see why "More United" is trying to portray itself in part as an antidote to the open civil war in the Labour party.

[Denzil_DC]

9. You're talking about "Corbyn supporters" doing the demonizing.

I'm talking about Owen Smith (and Eagle) himself doing it. Hardly comparable.

[T_i_B]

10. Both sides are doing it

It's difficult to escape the conclusion that Labour is currently too busy fighting itself to engage with the rest of the population.

[Denzil_DC]

11. You're talking about "Corbyn supporters" doing the demonizing.

I'm talking about Owen Smith (and Eagle) himself doing it. Hardly comparable.

[T_i_B]

12. Corbyn hasn't reined in his trolls.

If anything, they are only getting worse and more extreme. For another thing, do you honestly think that people outside the Labour bubble care if it's Corbyn or his followers slinging the muck? All anyone sees at present is a ton of muck being chucked.

[Denzil_DC]

13. This is such BS.

Last edited Tue Aug 2, 2016, 07:59 AM - Edit history (1)

Read the MacWhirter article above for how the same "rein in your trolls" non-argument was deployed in the indyref, along with the double standards when it came to abuse from the Better Together side.

I'm talking about the Labour members Smith and Eagle and their supporters have shamelessly lumped together and maligned because it's blatantly obvious Smith is way behind in the polls, often with downright lies (such as Eagle's abiding myth that her constituency office was bricked, that homophobic slurs were hurled at a constituency meeting she didn't even attend, that she had to cancel a meeting because of Momentum's antics whereas it was the venue's management that didn't want her gathering held there, etc. etc.) - they've done this themselves. You evidently just want to deflect, hence my repeating my point above.

Corbyn doesn't do personal abuse, so in that sense he's leading by example. He's repeatedly called for all sides to quit it and focus on the policy issues. Perhaps you could suggest what more he could do to "rein in his trolls". Meanwhile, what's the next slur to come out the Smith camp, propelled by ever-eager media, going to be?

Let's try this: I'll set up a DU sockpuppet account called T_i_B_Lover, and I'll go on GD and post all sorts of immoderate lashing-out shit "in the name of" T_i_B.

Why don't you rein me in? When, oh when, will T_i_B rein in T_i_B_Lover? Shame on T_i_B for not doing more to distance himself from T_i_B_Lover. Will this abuse in T_i_B's name from T_i_B_Lover never end?!?!

[T_i_B]

14. Well then, why are Corbyn supporters repeatedly ignoring his calls to not act like twerps?

it says something when even a dedicated leftie like Owen Jones is getting it in the neck for daring to voice some construtive critisism like this?

https://medium.com/@OwenJones84/questions-all-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-need-to-answer-b3e82ace7ed3#.34uf3hq0i

Also, there has been far more focus on policy from Owen Smith, but I fear that people aren't listening no matter what he says. He can call for the railways to be renationalised and the Trade Union Act to be repealed endlessly and all he will be met with is a chorus of YOU RED TORY NEOLIBERAL BASTARD. Smith's platform is one that would have been unthinkably left wing for a Labour leader just 2 years ago, but I do suspect that the only way he could make any progress in this election is to publicly condemm most of his supporters from the Blairite faction. It's become a personal grudge match.

P.S. I was going to write an addendum musing on the possibility of Corbynites deserting the party en masse if Smith wins! It always seemed to me that the Blairites worked on the assumption that they could ride roughshod over left wing concerns because left wing voters didn't really have anywhere else to go. An assumption that has fallen apart at the seams in Scotland. It has become depressingly clear that there are lot of people in the leadership contest more interested in settling old scores than making this country a better place to live.

[Denzil_DC]

15. Why is your sockpuppet now rampaging on GD,

calling Bernie and Hilary supporters alike "f*cking useless Yankee shills" and seemingly settling old festering scores, sending abusive PMs to random members revealing that the sockpuppet is in fact T_i_B, this is The Long-Awaited Day of Reckoning, and the campaign will continue via a stack of dormant accounts and VPNs while admin and the mods are distracted dealing with other fly-by trolls?

Somebody has posted one of these DMs on GD to complain about it, and a number of others have chimed in on that thread reporting the same abuse, and before a jury could pass judgment, the thread was locked by a host saying "Take it to Creative Speculation, please." The OP, being somewhat new and naive, has done precisely that, the Creative Speculation thread is now alight with replies, and you're just sitting there, chatting away as if nothing is happening ...

WHEN WILL YOU REIN IT IN?!!1!

Seriously, what proportion on the hundreds of thousands of Corbyn supporters do you imagine are behaving in this way? And guess who Smith now has on his campaign team? - John McTernan, Master of Sockpuppets, whose utter disgrace in the Australian elections didn't stop him being employed on Better Together, and who's now participating in the Smith astroturf campaign - always a sign that a campaign's very weak online when it turns to complaining about the conduct of the "other side's" online presence. They need to do it better, as it's a giveaway when accounts tweet the same form of words more or less simultaneously.

Much was made in the media during the indyref, and since, about so-called cybernats, while vicious Better Together trolls like one "Brian Spanner" are adulated. A few months back, said "satirical" troll was revelaed to have sent a vast number of very abusive tweets to female politicians, favouring use of the C-word and casting aspersions on their sexual health, among other things. Making the excuse that the tweets were sent when his account had very few followers, he then tweeted out a long series of "apologies" to those he'd targeted, and is still going strong today, with public figures like J.K. Rowling and a number of Labour politicians and media types among his overt fans.

And as for Facebook, it's an even worse cesspit than Twitter at times - going so far as to facilitate the physical stalking of one of our future female SNP MPs - not least because it gives people the opportunity to extend their abuse over more than 140 characters.

This doesn't even touch on the large number of Unionist/football thug accounts that tweet abuse daily, nor the racist crap directed in bulk at the likes of the SNP's Humza Yousaf, but for some reason they seldom hit the headlines. Funny, that.

Twitter is a small platform in terms of user base. It has its uses, but also very obvious abuses. Most people wouldn't know anything about it if our newsrooms weren't so depleted and lazy that a copy-and-paste story about what whoever's said about whom so often serves as "news".

And as for online comments sections, if you've only just noticed they can attract some extremely strange and distasteful types, you must have been living a very sheltered online life indeed. This all didn't begin with Corbyn or Momentum.

[T_i_B]

16. I'd just posted an article from Newsthump in GD!

Quite a self effacing one at that. Beat you to it!

[Denzil_DC]

17. Blah.

Foiled again.

ETA: I looked in on the comments on that Owen Jones piece the other day, and one commenter lit into the author, berating him for ruining the Labour Party, being a total egotist, a shill for Big Pharma, detailing his various transgressions, being a lousy MP etc. etc.

It was a while before somebody else responded to him, gently pointing out that he'd confused Owen Jones with Owen Smith.

[T_i_B]

18. I have actually made the same mistake myself on DU!

In all seriousness though, Corbyn would do well replace Seamus Milne with Owen Jones.

[Denzil_DC]

19. I dunno about that. Jones needs to work on his own messaging and consistency first:

Last edited Tue Aug 2, 2016, 04:05 PM - Edit history (1)

Owen Jones
Verified account
?@OwenJones84

Being denounced as a Tory, Blairite and Establishment for pointing out Twitter has limited reach is a novel experience

3:15 am - 31 Jul 2016

Owen Jones
Verified account
?@OwenJones84

Barely anybody has called me a Blairite or a Tory, by the way, apart from a few eccentric oddballs. So can we drop that narrative. Cheers!

4:00 am - 1 Aug 2016

I've never rated Jones that much, and I've no idea why he's taken so seriously by some. This latest episode just confirms me in that attitude, and reinforces my earlier feelings that he has an over-inflated sense of self-importance and is surprisingly unaware of his own privileged position as a pundit - not that the vast majority of people will know who the hell he is anyway, let alone take him seriously.

I found quite a bit in his article to take with several pinches of salt. The idea that what McDonnell's proposing is identical to Balls' economic strategy for one, his assumption that anybody with any sense or experience of the world at all imagines that Twitter is 100% reflective of public opinion, let alone that activity on it alone can win political campaigns for another, and to boot, his proposition that Labour should waste any time or resources at all on trying to "win back votes in Scotland". The best of luck trying to do that while triangulating as he proposes.

[T_i_B]

20. People really do think their social media is reflective of real life!

All sides and factions are guilty of that error in my experience.

As to Jones, he's an excellent writer, increasingly showing a practical streak to his politics that is very welcome. He's a far better writer than I ever imagined he would be when he was a McDonnell staffer arguing on Labour blogs in 2007.

Have a look on the other post I did on the UK forum recently. It's an excellent and constructive article of his.