Neil4Corbyn

The Green Party candidate for Gillingham & Rainham at the last general election, Neil Williams, has defected to the Labour Party. Williams cited Jeremy Corbyn’s recent victory as the main motivation for his decision.

Williams, who presumably only a few weeks ago didn’t ‘support the aims and values of the Labour Party’, hasn’t always been quite so happy with the way the party does things:

Still, it’s all happy families now, with Medway Labour leader Cllr Vince Maple saying “it is great to welcome Neil to the Labour Party”.

Medway Labour have apparently seen a surge in membership over the past few weeks, presumably inspired by Jeremy Corbyn. It’ll be interesting to see how well these new members manage to work with the more traditional members of the party, and if any other candidates from the Greens or TUSC decide to make the jump to the party.

Added 25 September:
Of course, we’ve been here before, and that didn’t exactly go well.

The French Radicals

I have started writing this piece several times, and played it over in my head several times. It’s about how I feel about the Labour party. My feelings have been confuzzled of late, not helped by the election result and the resulting leadership election.

It is about feelings of disappointment.

I don’t expect Medway Labour to care that I feel disappointment, or even if you care, but it’s how I feel, and I wanted to write it down before the result tomorrow, and my disappointment grows.

Disappointment = Expectation/Reality
Jeremy Corbyn will win the first round of the Labour leadership but I don’t expect him to win the leadership.

As we discussed with the Political Compass, the conversation has moved so far right, that post New Labour the argument is over a relatively small piece of political real estate. Corbyn, who is largely left of centre, is seen as extreme left, purely because how far right the conversation has gone.

There have been a ridiculous number of hours spent analysisng why Labour lost the election. It would seem to be without question that it was the #EdStone. It wasn’t allowing Conservatives to control the economic narrative, which made a global economic crisis there fault; it wasn’t allowing UKIP to take socialist agenda with regards the NHS, ground they had abandoned; it wasn’t losing Scotland (presumably because Ed was too left); it wasn’t failing to stop the narrative being about letting SNP run England if Ed was PM.

It feels now that there are elements that are angry that anyone gives a negative view of Labour – or anything remotely ‘left’ – but instead that we should just being grateful that Labour are there for us. And we shouldn’t question that.

Standing for winning and against the others winning.

There are, or seem to be, elements with Medway Labour that seem obsessed with public opinion when actually what they mean is media opinion.

“It’s worth remembering that in the press, public opinion is often used interchangeably with media opinion, as if the public was somehow much the same as a group of radically rightwing billionaire sociopaths.” – Frankie Boyle

There is an obsession with polling numbers, despite the last general election showing that the polls were very, very wrong.

As this West wing clip shows, numbers lie, and some members of Medway Labour are like the French radicals: