Facts is awfully quiet.

Labour leadership candidates like 'family members taking jewellery off a corpse'

The Labour leadership contest turns nasty as former members of the shadow cabinet line up to criticise Ed Miliband and his leadership campaign

They are viewed as a party that is AGAINST everything, and FOR nothing.

Against wealth creation, against business success, against entrepreneurship - and for, only higher taxes, more spending ..

ED’S DEAD: WHERE THE BRITISH LEFT WENT SO HORRIBLY WRONG


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For a party established to defend working-class interests, Labour has remarkable difficulty relating to ordinary people. Of course, the primary reason is that the idea of a Labour Party is a strange anachronism in modern Britain.

There is really no place today for a party funded and effectively dictated to by the trades unions. But in seeking to reinvent itself and recapture relevance, the Left concocted a bizarre mixture of old-fashioned socialism and bleeding-edge American social justice, fomented in tired old Tory hatred and the politics of envy and grievance.

In other words, because Labour doesn’t have an interest group to protect any longer, it has reimagined itself as a party with a higher moral purpose. Yet the morality it aspires to appeals to few outside of the media and universities and its economic principles have not been deployed since Soviet Russia.

Of course, many ordinary folk not engrossed in the Guardian’s comment pages or Twitter won’t articulate their frustration with Labour that way. But they do see a party that no longer speaks their language or protects their interests – and they vote Ukip instead, tired of being told that their understandable concern about gargantuan immigration is “racist.”

That’s what Labour and the Left-wing press do, after all: call people names, instead of doing the hard work of rebuttal and research. When Labour leaders looks out at a country stubbornly refusing to elect them, they don’t seem to recognise their failure to relate to people, or to define themselves properly, as the problem: instead, they see a country full of racist, homophobic, xenophobic bigots who would of course buy into grievance culture and identity politics if only they were sufficiently educated.

That’s a far more obnoxious brand of paternalism than David Cameron’s Flashman-esque snootiness. And it comes with a side of staggering hypocrisy and a willingness to be friends with literally anyone who claims to hate the Tories (and/or Thatcher, obviously) but who dresses up their hatefulness in a Potemkin village of touchy-feely “diversity” and “inclusion.”

Take, for instance, two recently disgraced figures of the British political left: Johann Hari and Mo Ansar. Hari, a journalist, was busted for epic, career-long plagiarism – the only cardinal journalistic sin – and for slandering his enemies by editing their Wikipedia pages under an assumed name. One of his victims was a woman. It took years for him to apologise to Cristina Odone; he has still not apologised to Nick Cohen.

Yet, after a brief stint at “journalism school” and a perfunctory sorry-not-sorry interview in the Guardian, Hari has returned to the spotlight with a new book and guest spots in every newspaper in the country. He is the most dishonest journalist of his generation, but he has been welcomed back into the Establishment – even, shockingly, to the pages of our most respectable magazine, the Spectator. Why? Because he has the right politics, and because he claims to speak for victims, all the while being the most appalling bully and liar.

It is inconceivable that a right-wing journalist would ever recover from the revelation that much of his work and a slew of his high-profile interviews were either lifted from elsewhere or simply made up. But Hari appears not just to have survived but perhaps even benefited from his disgrace because his supporters put the word out that he was “depressed.” (Insinuating mental illness is a classic tactic of the Left, designed to absolve miscreants from responsibility for their actions.) Hari is, of course, still lying, and rumour has it he is back to his old ways on Wikipedia, too.

Then there is Mo Ansar, a monstrously comic fraud who claimed more than 30 professions in a few years and said whatever was necessary to get himself on television, pretending to be the moderate face of Islam (lots of talk of diversity, as ever) while silently approving of reactionary and backward bigotries like chopping off hands for theft. It had been obvious for years that there was something wrong with this charlatan, but Channel 4 and the BBC kept him on the air until it was simply untenable to have him appear any longer, because Twitter would erupt every time he showed up on screen.

Christopher Hitchens used to say that you could get away with the most appalling abuses if you only got yourself ordained first. These days, all you need to do is sprinkle your copy with a few lefty buzzwords and say sympathetic things about Muslims on TV and you can pretty much get away with murder. Even today, you occasionally see BBC and Channel 4 staff sucking up to Mo Ansar on Twitter. It’s that feelings-over-fact, look-the-other-way sort of hypocrisy that has now infested the Labour Party, too.

These are the sort of people making the case for the modern British Left, and whom the Left protects and makes excuses for. Is it any wonder that Brits, who are experts at spotting fakes, liars and self-promoters, and who hate unfairness, wanted nothing to do with Ed Miliband and his insipid, patronising, blame-everyone-else Labour Party and its supporting cast of liars, frauds, bullies, hypocrites and charlatans?

Voters care about the economy, and they want to vote for someone who can represent them abroad, too. Miliband can’t even eat a bacon sandwich without making a fool of himself. The British people voted overwhelmingly to ensure it was Cameron, not Miliband, squaring up to Putin and making the big calls, in part because he seems like such a distant, dorky weirdo.

It’s not that centre-right and Right-wing people don’t like oddballs, by the way. Katie Hopkins and Jeremy Clarkson are adored by millions because they represent two essential kinds of Englishness: gobby, eccentric iconoclast and blokey petrolhead. It’s that we don’t want an alien in Number 10.

The Left, despite its love of hurt feelings over facts, has always had a likability problem. Left-wing activists are often seen as petulant, hateful, childish people, with some justification. Look at Laurie Penny, darling of the Left, defending vandalism of a war memorial on Twitter. And Left-wing politicians too often come across like disingenuous, schoolmarmish, nannying prudes.

In addition to being populated by mediocre talents, the Labour Party has a gigantic credibility problem on the two big issues of the day, the economy and immigration, not because it has got things wrong in the past, but because it refuses to apologise properly for its misdeeds. The party still will not admit it spent too much in government. No one is buying any more; the next leader will have to prostrate himself before the electorate to distance himself from the last 20 years of mismanagement and arrogance.

Couple this with the emergence of the SNP and the near-inevitability of Scottish independence, and it’s tough to imagine Labour ever getting elected again. Some people will rejoice at that, but actually it’s tragic, because it would do the Conservatives no harm to have a serious opposition checking their figures and challenging their arguments.

Yet the entire Labour party seems only to speak to metropolitan London and the fringe concerns of a few anxious middle-class hand-wringers. If you only watch the BBC and hang out on social media, you might be forgiven for thinking that British people care about transgender pronouns, safe spaces and trigger warnings. Actually they care about the economy, immigration and having a strong leader who can represent British values throughout the world. Labour fails, horribly, on all three counts.

The next Labour leader will be more moderate, but not because Labour realises it got anything wrong, simply that its MPs know now that Miliband-style student politics make for an unelectable party. But whether the oleaginous, smirking, vacuous New Labour revival, represented today by smarmy estate agent types like Chuka Umunna, will resonate any better is an open question. After all, we tried it with Tony Blair – and look how that turned out.


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http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/05/11/eds-dead-where-the-british-left-went-so-horribly-wrong/

http://gawker.com/5890660/andrew-breitbart-big-deal-big-coronary-big-corpse

Excellent and honest analysis in that Breitbart copy/paste article. That article could have been describing the childish drivel that opened this thread.

What a brilliantly written article.

And if you ever needed proof of how utterly out of sync the Labour Party have become, just watch Mandelsons rants over the last couple of days.

Fuccking hell Alun don't do that to me. Big Tony was just about to ring your door bell when I got him on the phone. You'd have known all about it if he'd sat on your face with that septic boil on his nuts.

btw….Sorry I got your thread mixed up with Wellard's.

ignored and deleted

Christopher Awdry: why sour Lefties are wrong about Thomas the Tank Engine

The son of the creator of Thomas the Tank Engine has defended his father’s creation after critics labelled the lovable character 'sinister'

When the Telegraph revealed that the classic British children’s character Thomas the Tank Engine was a figure of hate among some Left-wing parents and academics, readers registered their astonishment – and irritation.

Opponents of the talking locomotive – who have branded the 70-year-old series authoritarian and conformist – were rounded upon by commenters for holding “bizarre”, “politically correct” views.
Now Christopher, the son of Thomas creator Rev W Awdry for whom the series was originally written, has also come to the defence of his father’s make-believe world.
Mr Awdry, 74, said the main moral of the stories was that “good triumphed over evil” and the principal values his late father, a railway enthusiast and a Church of England curate, wanted to instil in his young readers were a love of steam trains and an appreciation of what it meant to be a loyal friend and a useful member of society.

“He had a real affinity with children,” Mr Awdry told The Telegraph. “And he was a very good father; kindly, honest, generous and trusting.
“When those stories were first written [in the 1940s] it wasn’t a forelock-tugging age, but there were limits and you have got to have somebody in charge. I think he saw the characters as a family, in which the Fat Controller was the boss, the father figure, and all the engines were the children.”
• Eddie Redmayne's latest film: Thomas the Tank Engine
• Deep down, every man wants a giant train set
The Rev Awdry’s books – which tell stories about the adventures of Thomas and his fellow engines like arrogant Gordon and disobedient Henry - stick to a strict formula.
The engine at the centre of the story faces a problem or gets into trouble, usually due to some character fault such as selfishness or vanity, a lesson is learnt, the issue is resolved and the locomotive is then forgiven by the Fat Controller (or Fat Director as Awdry originally had it) and given another opportunity to become a ‘really useful engine’.
Although now owned by Mattel, the world’s second-largest toy manufactuer, and worth $1 billion in sales per year, the new books and TV episodes stay true to the original spirit of the series.

Yesterday marked 70 years since the publication of the first ‘Railway Series’ book, The Three Railway Engines.
But Left-wing critics have said the series – now called Thomas & Friends – gives liberal parents “the creeps” and teaches children to conform to society’s expectations and discourages them from expressing independent thought.
Christopher Awdry, who went on to write numerous Thomas books himself after his father retired in 1972, disagrees, arguing that the engines are punished for displaying “arrogance” or “naughtiness”, not initiative.
“Children are disciplined in a rather different way today than they were in 1945,” he said.

He also defended the series from accusations of sexism.
“A library banned the books for a while on those grounds,” he said. “But father simply saw steam engines as male and the carriages as female.” He added that the vicar did eventually introduce two female engines – Daisy and Mavis. Today, there are many more.
Dr Aric Sigman, a psychologist who has researched the impact of television on children, has suggested it is wrong to criticise Thomas & Friends for being hierarchical.
“If you are looking at the world of mechanistic things – the military, the police, the fire service – those things have hierarchy. People have uniforms and they have to know their place. Things that involve men and machinery normally have some sort of hierarchy and social order.”
And he has rejected the suggestion that children’s TV programmes should reflect modern-day concepts of parenting.

“People say, ‘Children are different these days, we’ve moved on.’ But that is a very arrogant position. It’s a popular position and media friendly, but actually it’s not children who have moved on, it’s adults.
• How Thomas the Tank Engine conquered the world
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“Children’s needs have not changed. It’s a very convenient way to explain away the growing gap between what parents are able to do and what parents feel comfortable to do, versus what children need during their early years.
“I see a lot of young children, and they like rules and boundaries. Not to be treated in an authoritarian way, not at all, but children feel comfortable when there are boundaries and there is a construct. It makes them feel relaxed and it’s very important for child development.”
He added that the fact Thomas the Tank Engine was still so popular said something about its fundamental appeal.

quite funny that it pointed out that blair is the only labour leader to win an election since 1974 ! lol

Labour's 'Ed Stone' found hidden at an industrial estate called Westminster


Ed Miliband's embarassing pledge stone - on which Labour carved its key election promises - has been traced to a south east London warehouse. And it turns out the owner of the firm which carved it is a Conservative

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/11609988/Labours-Ed-Stone-found-hidden-at-an-industrial-estate-called-Westminster.html

Labour could be out of power forever, leadership candidate warns: Liz Kendall says there is a risk party may never form a majority government again

The MP for Leicester West added that Labour should support a referendum on EU membership
The party should also stop advocating high taxation 'just to make a point'
Justifying her uncompromising language, she said 'I will tell it like it is'


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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3084058/Labour-power-forever-leadership-candidate-warns-Liz-Kendall-says-risk-party-never-form-majority-government-again.html

Edstone location revealed.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL7_A8F5SPk