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Khellendros, on 05 September 2019 - 12:28 PM, said:
Maark Abbott, on 05 September 2019 - 11:44 AM, said:
Khellendros, on 05 September 2019 - 08:18 AM, said:
Maark Abbott, on 05 September 2019 - 07:26 AM, said:
Mezla PigDog, on 04 September 2019 - 09:41 PM, said:
Yes you say that about the Lib Dems but in affluent yet kind of progressive yet staunchly anti-Labour constituencies like mine, the Lib Dems are the only party with a chance of beating the Tories. Last GE the combined Lib/Lab total was marginally lower than the Conservative total. To have a chance of beating them the Remain parties will have to club together, irrespective of previous taint. The sensible option here is to put all of your chips on Lib Dem because there are a lot of Remain Tories here who would never vote for Corbyn but could vote Lib Dem.
Maybe the Labour manifesto will be so awesome as to convince people but I think the media portrayal of Corbyn has done it's work here.
Maybe the Labour manifesto will be so awesome as to convince people but I think the media portrayal of Corbyn has done it's work here.
If they hate the Tories, why would people in your area vote for Yellow Tories?
Lib Dem MPs vote in line with austerity and in favour of Tory legislation. Let's not try to pretend that Lib Dems are anything EXCEPT Tories by a different colour, because their voting record betrays that they are just that.
The fact that left-leaning publications dislike a left-leaning socialist who by the European standard is very bog standard shows how far to the right politics in this country have gone; if they laud the right-wing Lib Dems, what chance does anyone who is actually on the left have?
We have to consider that this is just part of the smear campaign run by big press, because anything on the left is harmful to their owners. And that's at the baseline what Brekshit has been about from the start, so of course anyone who asks so much as a question about it must be vilified and besmirched.
In my area it's Tory or Lib Dem, there effectively is no Labour option, who get only a handful of the tens of thousands of votes. So yes, I do vote Lib Dem even though I don't support them. Whatever you might think about their record in government (which is terrible and they were punished for it at the ballot box), at the local level in my experience it has always been better to have a Lib Dem MP than a Tory one.
I also don't think it's as simple as 'harmful to the owners' as to why the media is wary of Corbyn. For example, the Guardian doesn't have an owner or shareholders - it's an independent paper, run through a trust set up decades ago. And Grief is right that Corbyn is hardly the ideal figurehead for a Brexit reversal, being a known Eurosceptic himself. I'm certainly not saying that he should not be criticised or critiqued for some things, and he has disappointed me in a number of ways since he became leader (though I still absolutely love the last policy manifesto), not least with the handling of antisemitism within the party and its supporters. But I do find that there is a palpable enthusiasm to pick up on any criticism and run and run with it.
Are we talking actual, palpable anti-Semitism, or criticism of a state (which is rightly deserving of said criticism given that they are perpetuating a genocide)?
I see one of the CUK squatters joined the lib-dems. I am unsurprised that they would accept, frankly - CUK were a party of politicians who only wanted the austerity status quo, as the LDs have shown they support.
Whilst it's always best not to have a non-Tory in power, a yellow Tory is only about 0.1% better. It would take a huge effort to cause me to trust that party or their representatives again.
Just because Netanyahu likes to conflate the two issues doesn't mean you should also from the opposite perspective! Yes, we are very much talking about real antisemitic behaviour and actions, as evidenced by videos of supporters making such remarks. For example, the MP you're referring to in your post who's just switched to the Lib Dems - Luciana Berger - has very much been the target of antisemitic vitriol (for those who don't know, Berger used to be a Labour MP and Corbyn critic before leaving to found a new, very unsuccessful party, Change UK, and has now defected from them to the Lib Dems). Now I personally dislike where Berger stands on a lot of issues, but you cannot deny that she has been the subject of a torrent of antisemitic abuse on social media by people who also claim to support Corbyn. While Corbyn and his team have publicly denounced this a number of times, they have been achingly slow to put words into tangible actions. When they have, they've usually followed it up with some foot-in-mouth decisions. Like when the respected rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti was put in charge of an independent investigation into antisemitism within the party: The report found that while there was a toxic atmosphere at times, racism and antisemitism was not endemic. Okay, fine, but then Corbyn went ahead and immediately after made Chakrabarti a Labour peer in the House of Lords! I mean, talk about looking like you're throwing impartiality out the window! Rightly or wrongly, that decision had the effect of utterly undermining the report's findings.
Is the issue of antisemitism being exploited to score political points against Corbyn? Yes. Does it mean that there isn't an issue to deal with? No. The two are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately the whole debate has become toxic, with both critics and defenders now just condemning whatever the other does or says before even really digesting it.
Oh, and I'm sure these same issues apply to all the political parties really (the focus in the Tory party is currently on anti-Muslim rhetoric), but just because "it's the same for everyone else" doesn't mean it isn't an issue which should be addressed and tackled.
I'm not conflating on my part - just asking if we are talking about actual anti-Semitism (as per your examples) or what we might want to refer to as Netenyahuisms to differentiate between the two. Too often I've seen the latter used and raised, so it's often tricky to infer exactly which wing a point falls under (especially online). I feel like the Terror State would probably warrant its own thread anyway so we'll leave off on that particular regime and its actions.
Back to the lib dems - their votes on policy perpetuated the issues that caused the 2016 result in the first place, then they switch to claiming to be anti-Brexit whilst continuing to vote in line with the Tories? How do people actually vote for them in good faith? Same with the ones who went to CUK - gravy train perpetuators.
