Diane Abbott

[Trevor Hockey's Beard 526]

[quote user="Crafty Canary"]This has nothing to do with how much goodness or community spirit the adulteress hypocrite has, it is to do with her unsuitability for front bench politics. Excusing incompetence by excusing it because she is a nice person, something the first Mrs Corbyn might dispute, is the same as the case made for Russ Martin being a first choice CB.[/quote]

Ah, back on topic. On balance I feel that Russ Martin is a better CB than Diane Abbott and we shouldn''t bid for her, but it is definitely an area we need to strengthen.

[Crafty Canary 495]

What I find really amusing is the lefties utter anguish that after the worst Conservative campaign in living memory, a truly unexpected but excellent performance by Jeremy Corbyn, a massive turnout by the youth voters in response to Jezzer''s bribes they still LOST by around 50 seats.

Yes, the Conservative campaign was awful but when the Sinn Fein seats are discounted as they never take their seats, Mrs May missed out on an effective majority by ONE seat. Poor old Jezzer, he got nowhere near, Hurrah!

[Crafty Canary 495]

Labour Head Office have just disclosed that the reason Mr Cornyn is under the impression he won is because the votes were tallied by Mrs ''Do as I say, not as I do'' Abbott.

[Herman 9,717]

Weren''t you supposed to get an overwhelming majority?

As I said, pyrrhic victory.

[TIL 1010 4,722]

All this buster by City1st surely means we are due for a name change ?

[ncfcstar 287]

Crafty, you realise that for Labour to get a majority of just 1 seat it would have had to have been the equivalent of a landslide.

To recover the ground they did is astounding. I''m unsure why anyone would think differently, they may not have won the election but they performed well beyond anyone''s wildest expectations back in April.

[Crafty Canary 495]

I agree completely that Labour''s performance was spectacular. My point is that despite this and the Conservative''s total cock up they still fell far short of victory. Assuming Mrs May is not allowed to lead the Conservatives into another election I question whether Labour will do as well. Jeremy Corbyn will no longer be a surprise package on the hustings trail and it is unlikely that the youth votes would be significantly higher. This gives the Conservatives the chance to be a majority government again.

On a separate issue I read today that John McDonnell has said that Labour will now support leaving the single market. If he and the Labour Party are serious on this then how about the Conservatives and Labour forming a joint Brexit negotiating team under the leadership of David Davies? After all any future government will have to live with the agreement reached so it is both parties'' interest to get as good a deal as possible. I also believe the country at large would welcome such a move.

[Van wink 2,994]

Yeh "leaving the single market but with tariff free access to the single market", I think he means stay in the single market Crafty.

[Hairy Canary 668]

Think he was saying that technically we couldn''t be in the single market as that was only available to EU members but that we would look to agree a deal to access it without tariffs. Presumably that would mean accepting free movement of goods, services and labour.

[Van wink 2,994]

Indeed

[spencer 1970 207]

I''m not surprised but happy Labour didn''t win as that''s a poisoned chalice come 2019...I was however surprised how close it was though, obviously because of the Ozzie cock-munching sheeple out there (like a few rant''ers on this thread above) I''m am absolutely delighted I was able to vote for a left wing party again...time will tell on how that turns out. All the Crafty-types sitting on a hillock playing their banjos will find out why in about 2 years time...wake up sNorfolk (Norwich people not included). Thank fcuk I live in London...my wide vision is on (as well as my tin-hat). ;)

[Crafty Canary 495]

Ah yes, vote left wing and a happy return to the winter of discontent, the efficiency of British Rail, the productivity of union led British Leyland etc. The socialist utopia is so wonderful it is staggering that the Soviet system ever collapsed.

[Herman 9,717]

Are you not in the slightest bit embarrassed at what your boys are currently doing to the country?

[Crafty Canary 495]

No! I don''t own them so have no need to be. Now I would be embarrassed if the pseudo-Marxists got elected.

[king canary 7,580]

In a died in the wool Labour supporter and even have a couple of friends who''ve worked for the party and thus can give a pretty informed opinion of some of the mps.

The general feeling is Abbott is she''s not front bench material and a bit of a liability on the national stage but also a bit of a trailblazer and someone who has done quite a bit for her local constituency.

However the abuse she gets on a daily basis is so far out of whack with the level of her ''gaffes'' (certainly compared to other mps who aren''t black women) that it''s difficult to believe that race and gender doesn''t come into it.

Oh and Crafty, when you start bringing terms like ''adulterer'' into it you get into dangerous ground. John Major and Edwina Curry? Boris Johnson?

[Crafty Canary 495]

I''m not on dangerous ground as I have never condoned the behaviour of these Tories. There are many other MPs who have similar skeletons in their cupboards no doubt and are equally deserving of public opprobrium.

[Guest]

Isn''t it about time you stopped with the history lesson from 1979 (are you a Smashing Pumpkins groupie).

Go back a further 38 years from that and we are talking WWII. How far back shall we go? Chamberlain''s appeasement of the Nazi''s that led to millions dying?

The fact is that the last seven years have been a complete waste. Plenty of time to clear up the "Labour mess" and introduce some policies that suit us all.

So stop with the history lessons and concentrate on the shambles this bunch have created.

[Mr.Carrow 376]

Crafty, the "May was dreadful and Labour still couldn`t win" line favoured by those who don`t understand what just happened in our country is blown out of the water by the fact that May increased the Tory vote share by 5% to one of the biggest Tory votes for decades. Labour inspired hundreds of thousands of young people and former non-voters to come out, as well as attracting scores from UKIP, Liberals, Greens and, yes, even Torys. To go from 22% in some polls to over 40% in seven weeks is astonishing.

As for your seventies references, given that the Sun and Mail were pounding that line right up to the election and had, if anything, the opposite of the intended effect shows that that it has had its day. To be fair the Torys clamping down on the unions has in some ways done Labour a favour. When they return to power (which will happen within two year) any increase in union power will be largely symbolic.

[Captain Birdseye 0]

Back on topic do you see her as a centre back or an attacking left back

[Nuff Said 5,089]

I think on her back is most likely.

Re the "going back to the 70s" jibes. If Labour want to go back 40 years, where the hell do regressive policies like reviving grammar schools and fox hunting take us? The 50s?

We''ve seen the biggest load of nonsense spun as political dialogue since Alastair Campbell with the Tories in this recent election (and the referendum). If a party isn''t prepared to debate seriously but relies on robotically repeating meaningless slogans like "strong and stable" and "Brexit means Brexit", it''s a fairly clear indicator of the feeble nature of either their policies or their honesty.

[Crafty Canary 495]

Mr.Carrow wrote the following post at 13/06/2017 9:38 AM:

............To be fair the Torys clamping down on the unions has in some ways done Labour a favour. When they return to power (which will happen within two year) any increase in union power will be largely symbolic.

Given that the Unite Union is Labour''s biggest financial backer I cannot share your optimism. He who pays the piper calls the tune and Len McClusky doesn''t strike me as the sort to be slow in coming forward. If you doubt this then consider how he got his man selected to be the candidate, and ultimately the MP, for Liverpool Walton when the local Labour constituency didn''t want him.

The reason I recall the situation in the ''70s is because this extreme old Labour leadership would take us back there in double quick time. It''s all in their manifesto and costings documents.

[Mr.Carrow 376]

We are a million miles away from the Seventies Crafty, to bang the same old discredited drum is borderline delusional.

One of the big factors in this election i believe was the number of professionals within the health service, education and even the Torys old allies the police, who spoke out against the continuing cuts crippling their services. Perhaps you should ponder what is happening right now rather than worry about what happened nearly 50 years ago.

[Guest]

The reason I recall the situation in the ''70s is because this extreme old Labour leadership would take us back there in double quick time. It''s all in their manifesto and costings documents.

If you want to refer to the 70''s, then public ownership of the railways, communications, NHS, etc was not about considering the shareholders before the customer.

I don''t think you know anything about Trade Unions and you just get your opinion from the Mail.

Maybe you should read up about why the Labour Party was formed.

[Crafty Canary 495]

I don''t know anything about trade unions? So my years as a shop steward doesn''t count then. I have worked with trade unions from both the management and trade union sides. As a manager I had twice to manage and implement significant redundancy programs. I achieved both these without a single tribunal case being brought because of the relationship I had built with my shop stewards and the works convenor of shop stewards. Indeed in one tribunal case brought by the union over a redundancy program implemented in another department I was called as a witness by the union to describe how I had tackled the process that the union presented to the tribunal as an example of how to manage such a program.

Equally as a shop steward I had an excellent relationship with both my members and local management. This was because I was not driven by ideology but what was best for both the organisation and my staff, as a manager, and the organisation and my members as a shop steward. This allowed me to save some members facing dismissal from being sacked and where I did have to sack the odd individual as a manager, not redundancies, to do so with the backing of the relevant union''s regional official.

So yes, I do know something about trade unions. What do you know?

[PurpleCanary 5,554]

[quote user="Mr.Carrow"]Crafty, the "May was dreadful and Labour still couldn`t win" line favoured by those who don`t understand what just happened in our country is blown out of the water by the fact that May increased the Tory vote share by 5% to one of the biggest Tory votes for decades. Labour inspired hundreds of thousands of young people and former non-voters to come out, as well as attracting scores from UKIP, Liberals, Greens and, yes, even Torys. To go from 22% in some polls to over 40% in seven weeks is astonishing.[/quote]There is another point here. One of the purely political motivations for this entirely unnecessary election was to blow Labour so much out of the water, leaving it with so few seats, that it would effectively guarantee another Tory victory in five years'' time. Now, although Labour didn''t win, it is certainly easily close enough to overhaul the Tories next time and form a government, either by itself or perhaps with the LibDems.

[Guest]

So yes, I do know something about trade unions. What do you know?

I was National Secretary/Treasurer of the New Zealand Printing and Related Trades Union of Workers. A Union where secret ballots had to be taken wherever stoppage of work was proposed.

Member of New Zealand Apprenticeship Panel.

Negotiated with Prime Ministers, Murdoch and British Government among others.

Slagged off while giving speech to 12,500 at a rally for begging people not to strike for political reasons as the first rule of industrial life was not to deny people earning their wages. Threatened by FOL (TUC here) Secretary for not ordering my members, newspapers workers of course, to strike thus blanking out much of the news.

Person responsible for the introduction of Paternity leave.

Offered job by USA Printing Union but decided didn''t want my head thumped by a baseball bat when entering a printing premise. Their negotiating ideas would make your eyes water.

So all this crap about 70''s unions is Daily Mail crap. The majority of unions and their members are educated, controlled and understanding. And invariably, any action

that has been taken has been politically motivated by members not unions. And of course governments. Thatcher provoked that fool Scargill into the action he took to try and bury the trade union movement.

In printing, we knew what was happening and were as guilty as the miners as we were paying £10 a week to keep them out.

And all the blue rinse brigade and Tory newspapers depicted the union movement as evil, baby eating monsters who were holding the country back.

[Crafty Canary 495]

As a former senior official in the printing industry what was your opinion of the U.K. print chapels encouraging the clocking in of totally bogus print workers hence embezzling millions from their employers. Now wonder Eddie Shah started the computerisation of newspaper production and Murdoch took on the print unions by opening up a new print works in Wapping.

The unions in the seventies were much too powerful and it needed a hard nosed PM to take them on. Had the unions worked for the prosperity of their members and the organisations they worked for much of the industrial strife of that time could have been avoided.

[Guest]

As a former senior official in the printing industry what was your opinion of the U.K. print chapels encouraging the clocking in of totally bogus print workers hence embezzling millions from their employers. Now wonder Eddie Shah started the computerisation of newspaper production and Murdoch took on the print unions by opening up a new print works in Wapping.

The unions in the seventies were much too powerful and it needed a hard nosed PM to take them on. Had the unions worked for the prosperity of their members and the organisations they worked for much of the industrial strife of that time could have been avoided.

To know what went on is to understand the printing, but mainly the newspaper industry.

Newspapers were not there to make money per se. They were the mouth piece of very powerful and wealthy men. Their editors were the conduit for these men to control governments if necessary.

Newspapers were the only media apart from radio. And the ratio of adverts to text was not an issue. So here was the greatest vehicle at that time for political and social views to reach the masses.

The cover price was low as so many were sold and advertising was not crucial.

On the production side, journalists carried out their tasks and opinions were left to the editorial staff.

Printing was controlled by the union. A closed shop. The local chapel (opinions vary on the name as a derivation of chapeau, printers wore hats or from the monks who were the only producers of books originally) decided who worked and who didn''t. Yes Al Capone probably worked on the Daily Sketch and Mr M Mouse on the Standard. Not right perhaps but nobody cared. And managers and journos were taking their wives and girlfriends away on expenses as well.

And like Ricardo or myself, many were not time served and especially for the production of weekend papers, taxi drivers, etc worked or moonlighted. Technically this was wrong but the rest of the country was scared of London and a big percentage of union members worked within 20 miles of Big Ben.

Newspaper owners did not want problems producing their papers so were quite happy to afford the workers such leeway as was necessary to ensure production.

As time marched on and the media expanded with television and deregulation of radio, newspapers had to become more parochial and in fact their power as a voice was less immediate.

But new moguls appeared on the scene. Men more concerned with profits as much power. And the trick they had up their sleeve was technology. No other industry was hit as early as printing.

The unions knew there would be problems as it was obvious that things would have to change and jobs would be lost. (In NZ we decided progress is inevitable so we negotiated massive redundancy payments which employer s embraced as the cost savings were enormous.

The main unions in the Wapping dispute underestimated their own kind. The Electricians union were negotiating at the same time to take over should the two main unions stall. And of course they stalled, London was losing its power base. But they had never met this challenge before.

So they lost Wapping and that signalled the beginning of the end of union power in the printing industry.

In New Zealand, we merged with several other like Unions and concentrated on getting the best wages and conditions for those left.

Unions were not powerful, people were powerful. Whether they were wrong or right is not the issue here. It was their ability, as social change enfranchised them, to question and not believe or accept any answer they didn''t think was correct.

Some people took advantage and they will always be dragged up as "the unions" who got too powerful.

But isn''t the manipulation of the Libor rates just people taking advantage?

Isn''t insider trading just people taking advantage?

Wasn''t PPI just people taking advantage?

Isn''t Philip Green just someone taking advantage?

So you might believe that unions are responsible for so many problems but that is just the version that you want to believe.

[Crafty Canary 495]

KGD, thanks for a very insightful reply. What strikes me about it is that in NZ the unions took a pragmatic view of the future and took a course of action that protected the future prosperity of their members who remained in the slimmer workforce, the future prosperity of the employing organisations and, through negotiated generous redundancy terms, the prosperity in the short term of those who left.

That is in sharp contrast to the approach of the chapels in the UK.

The NZ approach was much more in tune with how I saw employer-employee relations than what we saw at British Leyland, the coal industry and others in the 70s. Hopefully we, as a nation, will never return to those times.

[Bill 1,788]

[quote user="Crafty Canary"]As a former senior official in the printing industry what was your opinion of the U.K. print chapels encouraging the clocking in of totally bogus print workers hence embezzling millions from their employers. Now wonder Eddie Shah started the computerisation of newspaper production and Murdoch took on the print unions by opening up a new print works in Wapping.

The unions in the seventies were much too powerful and it needed a hard nosed PM to take them on. Had the unions worked for the prosperity of their members and the organisations they worked for much of the industrial strife of that time could have been avoided.[/quote]Nonsense, unless you were there.Almost all of the strikes cam from a defensive position. Look at the coal strike. Stocks of coal were built up before industrial action and it has been openly accepted now that the strike was about breaking the NUM, rather than moving the industry forward.Unions were only as good at negotiation as the profits would allow.What is totally over looked is the real cause in the 70''s. The quadrupling of the oil price which saw inflation rocket. Workers were merely fighting to retain the same value to their wages.That was the battle with the Heath government and the Callaghan government. The strikes were about attempting to retain the value of their wages, not as the pantomime stuff as put out by the right wing press.The same press that told the numpties that Gordon Brown personally caused the world wide crash in 2008.As with football the idea of educating people to be coaches/managers was poo poo''ed.  You had silly ar ses appointed to junior management jobs because of who they were connected to. Those who know their job, working there man and boy, were being over ruled by someone whose experience of administration was having a fag at Eton.When Nissan set up in Sunderland those hoorays were out of the door. The comapny sat down WITH the union. Future management were expected to have had suitable training and qualifications.But then why do I know, I only lived it and don''t read the Mail or Express ?