Verbal

One big problem with this patronising twaddle is that it's just that. How Corbynists love to portray voters as stupid - but this argument itself is ignorant. Studies of media influence in political science don't agree on much, but they do provide lots of evidence against the view that the media tells people what to think and that people "take what they read at face value". The famous chapel Hill study in 1968 found that the media do not determine what people think but set agendas for what they think. Since that study, the influence of the mass media has been studied intensely, and as the media have multiplied and diversified in the online era, agenda-setting by the so-called "mainstream media" has weakened. There are simply too many mediated agendas out there to have the influence that, say, newspapers did in the 1960s. So please do get off your high horse, from which you uniquely see the world with great clarity. Others have political opinions and they they are not invalidated by your equating them with stuff said in The Sun.

Regardless of your beliefs, the facts say otherwise. Despite all that's happening around us, we've never been more 'civilised'. Here's some weekend reading for you: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0141034645

There needs to be a more frank and honest discussion about immigration on the left. Migrants clearly do have an impact on GP surgeries, where waiting times for appointments have risen from hours and days, to weeks. And immigration does have an impact on housing (although the measures are complex) - but to say that building more houses is "an easy problem to fix" flies in the face of stark reality. What's missing in this list is primary and secondary education, which are facing huge pressures where population surges have taken place. (A recent example in London was a primary school whose catchment area was reduced to 92 metres from the school gates). It's also obviously rather glib to assume that east-European migrants will pull out of Britain as the tide goes out on the British economy. The impact of EU and other immigration is felt primarily in working class areas of cities - Glasgow, Sheffield, London, but also Peterborough, Northampton, etc. These are traditional Labour-supporting places in which UKIP has gained at least a foothold, partly because many feel abandoned by Labour. UKIP may have won only one seat in the last election, but the votes they amassed helped wreck Miliband's slim chance of becoming PM. I don't see things exactly improving under the new broom - and that will be reinforced during an EU referendum which will be read as an opportunity to vote no to immigration in many quarters.

I've known a lot of union leaders over the years, and most of them certainly do give a flying **** for their members. This guy is a Corbynist on speed. It's what happens when a far-left ideology takes hold of the commanding heights of the Labour party and spreads like cancer. The irony is that Corbyn's 'new politics' and its supposedly gentle, kinder voice finds expression in the vicious hatred uttered by the likes of Ken Livingston (who'd rather make sick jokes about the mental illness of a fellow Labour member than even question the selfless acts of the 7/7 bombers in "giving their lives") and this cretin. The 'new politics' bile aimed at prominent women in the Labour party also underscores the old problem of the relentless woman-hating among the supposedly enlightened ones.

I don't believe I've said anything about Sotonians, let alone anything negative, so I don't know where that comes from. That aside, you seem one confused mofo. With that voting record you're a natural doe-eyed Corbynist:consider your open-minded virtues well and truly signalled. Oh, and look up the definition of ad hominem: you either don't understand it or you don't read.

I know you claim not to be a Corbynist but this is another tiresome and alienating Corbynist trait - the idea that people who disagree with you, and especially the vast majority to the right of you, hold their beliefs because of some permanent or temporary delusion, reinforced by polluting, manipulative media, etc., to which Corbynists are singularly immune. How about challenging people's beliefs with an inclusive, better argument, rather than patronising the "uncritical" masses and their supposed group-think mentality? The attraction of the false consciousness argument is that it entitles those who say they're somehow above it to feel almightily superior. Engage in some proper argument, be as critical as you like (clue: ad hominem crap doesn't win people over), but don't set yourself as a paragon of wisdom against mass delusion.

Well one of the things you'll discover is that Deen was once a rabid extremist - he was a prominent member of Al Muhajiroun, the outfit run by Anjem Choudhary, who seems to find himself somewhere in shot whenever a picture is taken of a British IS recruit before they disappeared to Syria. This makes him an effective voice against violent and non-violent extremism (the distinction gets blurred) - but he's a deeply controversial figure among those Muslims whose paranoia means they see the intelligence services around every corner. Hence the ludicrous guff about Mossad stealing a "brother's" shoe.

It was rather troubling - not least Naz Shah MP trashing Quilliam, an anti-extremist organisation run by Muslims. She is a worrying presence in the Labour party, especially given that her views will not be challenged within the Corbynist hardcore. Adam Deen of Quilliam and the woman next to him (sorry, missed her name) shone, despite being constantly shouted down by the Salafists in the front row to their left - and they seemed to have quite a bit of support in the audience.

Not to mention finding reasoned independent thought in a USSR-puppet Communist Party of Great Britain, which sided with or turned a blind eye to the Kremlin's mass murder programmes of the Great Terror, and then, to top that, thought that British imperialism was a greater threat than the Nazis during the Hitler-Stalin pact. There seems a parallel, sadly, with his moral-relativist reasoning with the Falklands. The argument that the Argentine junta at the time - whose brutality against its own citizens, if it were detailed here, would make anyone physically sick - is thought to be capable of humanitarian restraint when invading the Falklands is bizarre. Aside from the fact that the Argentine navy fired 100mm guns at British troops on South Georgia, in a fiercely fought battle for the island (a dependency of the Falklands), the military occupation by one of the most vicious regimes on earth was clearly not going to end well for the islanders. And to lay the blame at the door of the British for misguided and incompetent diplomatic mixed signals, over and above the perpetrators of the military invasion, is also absurd. But then if your world view is dominated by an anti-Western self-loathing, as is the case here, you end up saying really weird stuff. Frankly, in probably forty years now I've not heard anyone - not even present or former Communists - talk in any way approvingly the CPGB of 1936-41. Nor have I heard an Argentinian post-1982 argue anything other than that the regime was ferocious and that no one in the way of its military campaigns against civilians would have survived intact. I suppose it's a measure the corrupting influence of Corbynism on the well-meaning but hopeless middle-class, moral-monopolist virtue-signallers, that the think they are being righteous peace-seekers but are actually inured to the worst of evils.

Confused? You won't be after this week's episode of...

Are we now in the era of post-modern threads? If you were to construct a model of a dull forum filled with dull threads, the dullest thread subject, right at the top of the list, would be one saying the dull forum is indeed dull.

I'm not sure how far you want to push this argument. "They started to change their minds" makes the CPGB sound like some carefully reasoned organisation making strategic decisions. In fact, it was a wholly-owned client of the USSR, and its activities, such as the publication of Daily Worker/Morning Star, were actually funded by the Kremlin. (In fact, the paper couldn't have survived any other way - no one read it and yet it had all the production and distribution costs of a national daily.) As for the CPGB pre-1939, this would be the same CPGB that supported or remained silent during Stalin's "Great Terror" of 1936-9. Cloaked by the outward aim of fighting fascism and counter-revolution, the NKVD destroyed lives on an industrial scale, executing roughly 1,000 people a day during 1937-8 alone. The number of people detained, imprisoned, tortured or executed was approximately 6% of the entire Soviet population. All the while, the CPGB toed the Soviet line that these people were indeed counter-revolutionaries, or in some cases fascists, and deserved their fate. And all this is aside from the roughly 30 million people Stalin killed throughout his reign. So we go from the CPGB turning a blind eye to, and even supporting, the largest peace-time massacre of the twentieth century, to falling silent about Hitler just as he invades Poland, having already swept through Czechoslovakia and the Baltics. Some record that, even for a puppet political party. So no, the Communist Party of Great Britain was never a "rallying point" for anti-fascists, except for a few delusional toffs in Cambridge who in any case were much more interested in the largesse of the Soviet Union itself. Besides, "anti-fascism" among socialists in the 30s really was about opposition to Franco, and this was much more widely based than the piddling CPGB. This does of course have a relevance to Corbynism, because Corbyn's chief of staff, a very influential character after the office-political games-playing recently, is a noted Stalin admirer, on record as believing that Stalin's downsides were outweighed by his upsides. His mindset would have fitted perfectly among the yes-men and women of the Soviet-puppet CPGB.

No it wasn't. Between 1939 and 1941, the Communist Party of Great Britain was a noisy opponent of war with Hitler, and it purged many of its members who thought otherwise. Somehow, the CPGB's appeasement coincided with the period beginning with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (August 1939) and ending with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941). For the CPGB the enemy was not Hitler but British imperialism.

Meanwhile, Corbyn's polling numbers indicate the scale of incompetence and denial at the Stalinist summit of Labour. Ipso Mori today put the Tories ion 43% and Labour 16% when prospective voters were asked which party had the bet team to solve the country's problems. Corbyn doesn't do much better on the question of which party has the best policies for the country as a whole: Tories 35%. Labour 25%. But he does worst of all when voters were asked which party is most clear and untied about what its policies should be: Tories 33%, Labour 13%. And all this at a time of maximum difficulty for the Tories - split on Europe, hopeless on the refugee crisis, unable even to understand that multinationals like Google are ripping off Britain.

I think your second sentence is tendentious. We don't know what Corbyn would have done - the Corbyn in this imagined piece of time travel is not the real one. However, it's certainly true that the British Left - by which I mean left of the 'Tory-lites" of the day like Aneurin Bevin - saw the same moral equivalence between the evils of hitler and the evils of Toryism. The Daily Worker - the newspaper Corbyn has written for in its more recent guide of the Morning Star - said this during the Blitz: On 18 October 1940, the Daily Worker was calling Churchill and his war cabinet (including a number of Labour MPs) 'Britain's Hitlers'. The Left took this view because Hitler and Stalin had concluded a non-agression pact and so the British left quickly fell into line with Russian tyrant. Prominent intellectuals of the British Left like Eric Hobsbawm and Raymond Williams argued that the pact was concluded, in reality, to protect Russia from British imperialism not Nazi fascism, and so it should be supported. Is there an equivalence between these sentiments and Corbyn? Not necessarily. Are there echoes of these sentiments in Corbyn's political positions? Absolutely.

This thread is becoming surreal. The point is Corbyn has a job (to put it mildly) to reach out beyond his/Labour's core vote. The Falklands issue sits along the line between completely irrelevant and certain to induce a nasty reaction among voters outside the core 25-8%. It is therefore utterly stupid to raise the issue - even worse to do it in the usual Corbyn way of muttering about how there must be a better way for us all to get along, etc, etc. Labour need to win an election. To do that they need to focus on core policy areas of the economy, the NHS, immigration. They need to be flexible and imaginative. And they also need to be principled - unlike Corbyn's craven idea of nuclear subs without nukes just to appease his mates in the unions. So could Corbyn and the Stalin/Putin admirers surrounding him at least make a start?

You won't hear anything from Corbyn or the hard-line Corbynists about using nuclear material to murder opponents in London. Or if you do it'll be the usual moral whataboutery asking how the American drone attack on Jihadi John is any different. Putin is a hero to him and them.

What the doe-eyed dimwits fawning over Corbyn miss completely is that the Falklands War had a hugely beneficial effect on Argentina. It was the catalyst in removing one of the most murderously psychopathic regimes since the Nazis (some of the most brutal of whom had taken refuge there). It was a regime that delighted in dropping its political enemies - people, many of them, who would be natural allies of today's Corbynists - out of helicopters and stealing their children. And only after they had been tortured almost to the point of death. I was in Argentina twice immediately after the war and encountered only warm reactions to Thatcher's counter-invasion. I was and am no supporter of militarism, and it was certainly no part of Thatcher's plan to usher in the democratic overthrow of the junta in Argentina - but sometimes, just occasionally, the unintended consequences can work in an oppressed people's favour. Of course, this is lost on the doe-eyes because of their cultish belief in the supreme evil of the West - in their minds, an evil that's far in excess of murderous dictators. As for the Falklands now, it is an all but dead political issue, revived only by desperate nationalists in Buenos Aires when, as often happens, the economy tanks. It will at some point need resolving, but it is so far off the political agenda as to be remarkably stupid for Corbyn to be raising such an issue now. It merely speaks volumes for his warped priorities and his desperate desire, shared by many of his acolytes, to signal his monopoly on morality. That Corbyn would raise the Falklands in the week of the huge threat to steelworkers' jobs, and not even raise the issue of the steel industry in PMQs last week, is staggering.

It's probably best not to follow the self-admiring buffoon down this rabbit hole of foreign policy. He regards it as his "specialism" yet has no demonstrable skill in international diplomacy (or indeed political history) whatsoever. The Argentinian embassy in London, by the way, have already declared Corbyn as "one of us". Regardless of one's opinion about the long-term future of the Falklands, it's completely irrelevant to reviving Labour's chance of electoral success in 2020. Why Corbyn persists in mouthing off about this stuff is beyond me, beyond the virtue-signalling that he so clearly revels in. It certainly does nothing but drive a further wedge between him and those among the undecided electorate who might be persuadable in some way to vote Labour at the next GE. Then again, sticking to domestic policy isn't much of an improvement either. His plan to stop dividend payouts in companies that do not pay the minimum wage wasn't even mentioned to Angela Eagle, the shadow business secretary, before his pronouncement on high. Incompetence unbound.

This is also brilliant. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-jihadis-next-door-muslim-man-responds-brilliantly-to-shocking-documentary-a6824776.html

You needed to see the film from the beginning, because the people who confronted the Salafists vociferously and in one case violently expressed their abhorrence. They did so by saying that, as Muslims, they rejected and resented the Salafists' cretinous campaigning on behalf of IS on the streets of London. Here's another example: two Muslim women withstanding sexist and potentially violent abuse in challenging Salafists campaigning in Oxford Street. They took not only immediate physical risks in confronting these idiots but longer term risks too, because when the case came to court they had to give evidence behind screens. They, like the Muslims in the film, deserve credit and praise for taking action they did. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/12116399/Muslim-doctor-and-sister-help-convict-Isil-supporters-after-confronting-them.html

Possibly, but there's a musical comedy of Corbyn the PM years that's going to open in the West End later this year. Can't wait.

More evidence of the "new politics" at the top of the Corbynist tree... Neale Coleman, Corbyn's "head of policy and rebuttal" (!) has resigned after losing some infinitesimally irrelevant "battle" with the Stalin-enthusiast and "director of strategy" Seumas Milne. Simon Fletcher, Corbyn's "chief of staff", is reportedly on the brink of leaving because John McDonnell has been plotting against him (and, by extension, against Corbyn himself) And the aforementioned Stalin apologist Milne has been so wrapped up in "struggles" against his own staff colleagues that he apparently hasn't even met all of his press team. All of which may go some way to explaining why Corbyn has been so spectacularly useless in holding the government to account. In the week of the junior doctors' strike, he didn't even raise the issue during PMQs, and this week, in the face of the virtual extinction of steelmaking in the UK, not a mention at PMQs. Even Corbyn's natural supporters at The New Statesman see a growing pattern of ineptitude: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/01/pmqs-review-david-camerons-bombardment-jeremy-corbyn-leaves-labour-grim The thing about the "Tory-lite" opposition pre-Corbyn was that it was, at least, an opposition. The Labour party now is reduced to a squabbling wreck, in which most of the squabbling is being done within the Corbynist camp.

This is from the latest YouGov poll. https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/01/19/corbyn-rating-fall/ Given that YouGov was one of the polling organisations that consistently over-played Labour's lead in the run-up to the general election, it might actually be worse that -39, if that's even imaginable.

Watching "The Jihadis Next Door" on Channel 4, it's interesting to see that the only people prepared to challenge the Salafist loudmouths on the streets of London are other Muslims.