2020 Labour Leadership Election

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Why isn't Watson running?

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bring back Ed Balls!

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Ed Miliband as shadow chancellor would be more than decent

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If I were in the UK, I'd be a Burnham/Corbyn/Nandy voter- don't know how much of those exist.

Northern moderate trade unionist.

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The leadership election really shows how out of touch the Labour Party is to it's working class base.

Hard Remain FBPE London millionaire Starmer vs hard-line corbynista Long Bailey. I guess labour is fine losing the working class and the next election.

Of Keir Starmer & Jeremy Corbyn, only one of them was actually born into a working-class background, & it wasn't the latter.

Neither of them are particularly good candidates, Corbyn is a pure ideological socialist who cares more about PALESTINE and ANTI-IMPERALISM than trying to further worker's rights.

Long-Bailey is a fycking corporate lawyer who is stupid enough to say 10/10 on the corbyn leadership.

Starmer represents a hardline middle-class FBPE liberal tendency which turned out so so well in the 2019 election!

Awful choices.

Agreed. And though the take that started this topic off was pretty bad, there's a grain of truth to the argument that Keir's election represents a retreat from a more radical and transformational attitude among the Labour leadership when it comes to privilege in British society and institutions. Regardless of childhood or upbringing, the incoming crew is far less hostile to (read: contemptuous of) the elitism and patronage of the British ruling caste - private schools, Oxbridge, BBC/commentariat, military brass, the monarchy etc. Corbyn and his crew were anathema to this caste, so it was easier to monster him; Corbyn returned the favour by resisting some of the niceties of decorum and offering a much more comprehensive rebuttal to the status quo in economic and foreign policy than 'respectable' politicians were supposed to.

Folk like Keir are much less hostile to that caste and the institutions/assumptions that have so far sustained it. He's quite literally one of them, hence the knighthood. That said, with circumstances being what they are now Starmer may find himself proposing - and enacting, if he wins the next election - a more revolutionary set of proposals than even the most wide eyed Corbynite would have ever dreamed of.

This isn't true really.

The two people running the show in the Leaders Office where Seamus Milne who went to Winchester College (one of the most prominent public schools in the country) and then became a bigwig at the Guardian and the other was a multi-millionaire ex-communist Andrew Murray who is descended from Scottish Nobility.

I also find myself baffled about how Corbyn himself is any different; well in fact he's different in the sense that he's much more middle class that Keir ever was. We all know someone like him in the Labour movement- went to a prep (fee paying school) dropped out with no qualifications, went travelling for 3-4 years and then got a job with a trade union before getting a council seat and then becoming an MP in his 30s! I don't particularly care but I feel it's something that should be mentioned when people try and sh**t on others for petty factional reasons (not a reference to the poster I'm quoting, but the armchair revolutionary who spouted nonsense about capital as if this was a first years seminar)

Keir is a working class guy who was the first in his family to go to university; in rather a similar vein to the generation of Labour politicians like Harold Wilson who went to Grammar Schools and then did well because they were extremely talented.

Keir is one of the most respected human rights lawyer of his generation & spent his career fighting Mcdonalds over libel claims of green activists, defending striking pit workers & those at Wapping and set up the gold standard for human rights law in Doughty Chambers.

The appointment of Keir to the DPP in 2007 was a huge middle finger to the traditional legal establishment (more specifically criminal barristers) & was specifically about Gordon Brown wanting to change an institution- yes it's what the Labour party does, works inside the system & changes it.

It's called getting sh**t done; if you wish that he just became a councillor in the 1990s and spend 30 years supporting Milosevic and pushing other bizarre causes in a fight against the 'establishment' then great but frankly those opportunities aren't offered to everyone.

Milne is the the prime example of London elite. he went to Oxford and faked a Palestinian accent...his name is Seamus

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Milne is the the prime example of London elite. he went to Oxford and faked a Palestinian accent...his name is Seamus

Lmao I just read his wikipedia and it's hilarious:

he stood in a mock election in 1974 as a Maoist Party candidate,[13] and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, and Economics at Birkbeck College, London University. While at Balliol, Milne was so committed to the Palestinian cause that he spoke with a Palestinian accent and called himself Shams, Arabic for sun.

Do you have any other source to his story? It sound like a fun read.

NS had a big piece on him after he rise to dominance with Corbyn circa 2016. They had all that funny info there