Maybe - but you miss the point - I doubt anyone voted for Blair who didn't at least want him to win more than the Tories (to do so would be irrational)- but a significant number of Corbyn's intending voters want the Tories to win - so they are only voting for him because they know he won't win. So if he started to look like he was winning a proportion of his support would peel away.

Only 23% of voters actually want to see a Labour majority (and that includes some intending LibDem and UKIP voters)

So he is even further away from electability than the headline poll figures would suggest.

I voted Tony Blair the first time because I hoped* he was only pretending to be so right wing.

Generally I think a Tory Lite labour party in power is far far worse overall even if it's better in the short term. Not enough to make me vote Tory but easily enough not to vote for Tony Blair again.

*I didn't have much hope

So things would have been better without the Labour governments of 1997-2010?

Probably. They shifted the centre rightwards dramatically and wasted most of the opportunity to take advantage of a thoroughly hated and mistrusted tory party.

btw I'm not remotely accepting any premise that we wouldn't have had Labour government if they had stuck far more to their values.

People throw around the tory light thing without ever bothering to qualify it or define it. When this is attempted, you normally find its just a casual insult rather than an accurate description.

Obviously you only have to deviate once from the one true path to be quasi fascist to the 1/0 crowd.

Not sure how they shifted the centre rightwards. They shifted Labour rightwards to encompass the centre imo.

I agree they wasted a lot of opportunities but did a lot of things that made a difference to people's lives. I work in the NHS and the difference in resourcing was dramatic and made a real difference to the service people received.

Your whole argument is no more than Blunkett said something. Your use of the word fascist above is just again hyperbolic 1/0 silliness reducing technical phraseology to absolute uselessness.

The argument they courted the tabloids is just historical revisionism gone mad. The tabloids/RWM hated on NL for their immigration policy, that is the historical fact.

Saying NL courted the far right is a simple nonsense statement, its internally incoherent.

This.

Anyone who thinks the New Labour administration is anything like the current one must have absolutely no interface with public and social services.

[QUOTE=O.A.F.K.1.1;52230139]People throw around the tory light thing without ever bothering to qualify it or define it. When this is attempted, you normally find its just a casual insult rather than an accurate description.QUOTE]

No. It's when Ed Milliband says 'we need to cut spending' ahead of an election. Tory-lite seems pretty accurate there.

4 terms of Tory rule, destruction of the Unions and mass nationalisation obviously had nothing to do with moving the centre to the right, it was all New Labour.

[QUOTE=tomj;52230211] If that is all you got try much harder.

One quote from a leader in the second decade of New Labour in a context of a massive financial crises that had blown a massive hole in Labour's economic credibility leveraged massively by an idiotic outgoing treasury secretary leaving a note saying there is no money left, is not evidence of anything.

Of course its just more damning evidence of your 1/0 thinking.

Said cut spending, no need for contextual nuance, is it pure(1) or unpure (0) .

I think it's pretty astonishing for someone from the left to think that we would not be in a better place if he had won in 2015

You seem to be stuck in a loop on this, unable to appreciate that Labour politicians were

a) under attack from the gutter press over immigration policy, yet also
b) making public statements blasting migrant workers for failing to integrate etc
c) adopting a policy of scapegoating immigrant workers, which is of course the oldest trick in the book, for Labour and Tory both. For instance in the late 60s the Labour Government responded to an Enoch Powell attack on British Kenyans with legislation to remove their automatic right of entry to the UK, despite holding British passports. Why did they do this? To undermine Powell of course. Powell's response? The infamous rivers of blood speech. All Labour did was inflame the situation and shift the debate to the right, and turn their backs on the people they should have been representing. 30 years on and not much had changed.

Hence the word 'light' (or 'lite', less fat but still kills you in the end).

this is just twaddle

[QUOTE=O.A.F.K.1.1;52230256] I haven't actually got unlimited time to spend explaining every last thing to you, only to receive a bunch of insults in return. Labour manifesto pre 2015 was less severe cuts than Tories, not too difficult to understand really.

I am sure some Labour members and MPs said some things about immigrants, but again this is evidence of nothing and is not close to evidence of such an extremely aggressive accusation of pandering to the far right. Not just the right, but the far right. Though of course differentials between right and far right are hard to conceptualise for the 1/0 mind. Not that they pandered to the right either. For every MP/Member who says something unpure, you can find more pure statements, there was no monolithic approach. Plenty of NL MPs argued the positive benefits of immigration and integration. I know you would probably like to, but you cant gag every member of the party.

Also how can you not see how the reference to the 60s is a counter point to your argument. New Labour not as pandering to the far right as old labour.

Once they allowed mass immigration from new EU member states (which they did not have to) they could never pander to the far right.

Eh? Yes I would prefer bacon sandwich man to Bullingdon boy. I'd also prefer a slow and painful death to a quick and brutal one. Wait...

[QUOTE=tomj;52230422] Administrations unarguably left of both NL and the Tories cut spending after the 2008 crash.

Its too difficult for you to understand. Tory said they would do it, so any corresponding economic policy from Labour (of which you will find examples in probably every manifesto going back years.) is tory light is simply a gross simplification that shines a light on nothing more than again your 1/0 thinking.

See this is where you are tripping yourself up by inventing a rule which says 'allow immigration, can't pander to far right or brain explodes'. My reference to Powell is exactly because he was on the right fringe of the Tories where the boundaries become blurred between right and far right. As for the gutter press, you know full well the murky history of the Daily Mail for instance.
As for the rest of it, I have already said that the point of triangulation is to encompass multiple positions so of course you will find contradictory statements, and Labour is of course a broad church in any case. The point is that cabinet members carry more weight, their positions and statements are knowingly going to be represented in the press. And on the specific point of immigration timely interventions were made to appease the press which gave space for the BNP to exploit. Which they surely did and the situation was incredibly dangerous in certain places.

And this is all not to mention the draconian attacks on civil liberties, 'shoot to kill policy', attacks on muslims. 'Iraq' wasn't limited to Iraq so to speak. The argument that Labour shifted politics to the left is utterly 1 dimensional btw, which is what I was trying to explain in the first place using racism as an example. But there's plenty more.

Tory lite was essentially taking the approach of getting very close to the tory polices while staying slightly to the left of them. It's the idea of taking for granted the left's vote because 'hey! were better than the tories so who else you going to vote for' while trying to grasp some middle ground. In doing so it conceded most of the arguments to the tories and shifted everything dramatically to the right.

[QUOTE=O.A.F.K.1.1;52230467] Yes, see I actually understand the impact of the global crisis on what is/was left of 'social democracy' though after Blair had finished with it you can scarcely term it that. You however seem intent on ignoring political reality and continue hoping for an extinct politics tp return.

1/0 dogmatist looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo l

That's what I mean by it anyway

The point I made about members applies just as much to Cabinet members, your whole thesis resting on a couple of Blunkett quotes is ridiculous. Its obvious he has some personal opinions about immigration as can be seen here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...st-communities

You seem unaware of the historical context of the immigration in the 90s which is why your reference back to the 60s is so misguided.

The triangulation you speak of, the pandering, is not possible once you are easily identifiable as the prime mover in a new wave of mass immigration that you could simply have deferred.

Whatever glad fly ephemerality you achieve by making alleged pandering statements will be and clearly was in reality washed away in the pounding flood of condemnation for ever having allowed the immigration in the first place, for being its cause and its agency.

Your accusation is an extreme one, and you really have to work so much harder if you are going to support it with evidence and deductive reasoning.