Interesting Links for 31-08-2016

[andrewducker]

What Killed the Jingle? (tags: advertising music history ) Needy robot babies may make teens more likely to have real babies (tags: children robots ) Why Failure Hits Girls So Hard (tags: failure girls gender psychology ) A fascinating poll of Labour members (tags: labour politics uk ) Gorgeous Photos Of Cats Captured In Black & White (tags:

Comments

[gonzo21]

One rather suspects the panic amongst the PLP has less to do with 'we cannot win an election under Corbyn' and more to do with 'De-selections are coming and under Corbyn we might lose our precious god given seats'.

[danieldwilliam]

I don't.

[thakil]

I mean, 80% of the PLP no confidence voted him! 80%! If one dislikes the current version of the Labour party so much that one thinks 80% of it are useless careerists then why would one join the Labour party? I suppose one answer could be a plan to replace it with a new, completely different party with different representatives. In which case, it's one way to do it, but I'm confident that said party (new new labour, or maybe just old labour I suppose) will be able to maintain a fraction of it's current seats in the next election

[gonzo21]

He's not the leader I would have picked either, but the problem is he's the only game in town. We'll never get another chance to reform the Labour party.

And if this fails, then the north of England will go the same way as Scotland, and the Labour party will be left chasing middle-england seats hoping that Tory-lite will work. And I don't think it will, the Blair victories were an anomaly we'll not likely see again.

I'm unconvinced by the evidence of Corbyn being such a bad leader though. Too much of it originated in the press offices of the New Labour machinery.

[simont]

I am obscurely disappointed that 'Mace' refers to a modern chemical incapacitant and not a mediaeval skull-crushing melée weapon.

[andrewducker]

I was too!

[bart_calendar]

That would have been "a woman holding an AK 47 and a mace" instead of "an AK 47 and mace."

[cartesiandaemon]

I interpreted it the way you intended, but now the question is raised, it seems like it could be "a woman holding a single instrument which is both an AK 47 and a mace at the same time" :)

[danieldwilliam]

I think there are going to be some bewildered and unhappy new (revised) Labour supporters come the morning after the next election.

I saw a comment based on another recent survey (so provenence unknown) suggesting that the great majority of Corbyn supporters thought he was going to lead the revised Labour Party to electoral victory in the next general election.

Which is a different question from - do they care much if the Labour Party doesn't win the 2020 election? - but it's easier to say you don't care when you think you are going to get the result you want and not e.g. be on the wrong end of a double-fronted landslide.

[steer]

I've pretty much run out of hope for left wing politics in the UK right now. 60-40% was pretty much my "as bad as it can get" result where Corbyn will in fact stay although having an approval rating among members something like that of Blair just before he left.

My remaining hope is that support will ebb away as electoral defeat looks completely inevitable and the new members leave returning some measure of sanity to proceedings. I agree with you that there's a large number of Corbyn supporters who are getting their worldview from memes within their own filter bubble and hence genuinely believe he is really popular. The problem is that they're sufficiently new to politics not to realise quite how divisive and awful a 60-40 vote for the incumbent leader actually is. (Because his 60% on the first election, when he was an outsider standing against several others, was declared a landslide.)

[gonzo21]

I think that's a rather unfair reading of where Corbyns supporters have come from. In my experience they are all quite highly politically educated people who abandoned the Labour party when it shifted to the right, and now it looked like it was shifting left again, they've returned.

[steer]

I fall into the "joined to support him as the party was to the left again" that you describe.