[Daley Mayle]

Time for Mr Smith to have his own thread.

I watched the launch of his candidacy on Sunday and seen him being lightly grilled by BBC and Sky hacks and despite their best efforts to trip him up he appears to be good in handling the media.

These are interesting days where May who would once have been portrayed as a typical right wing nut job and Smith being to the left of Karl Marx are both now seen as as fairly moderate.

I like the cut of Smith's jib, he is left of centre, personable and articulate and doesn't seem to have any Blair/Brown/Corbyn baggage. Sorry Jeremy, my vote will be going Owen's way.

[bluebellnutter]

It certainly could prove a struggle for Corbyn's team to try and paint Smith as the rabid Blairite they might be tempted to, given their previous efforts in support of Corbyn





He's also come out this morning and said he'd offer Corbyn a new "presidency" type role within Labour, which I think is a good idea. I suppose it works out in a similar way to the Party Chairman role in the Tory cabinet.

[mr angry manchester]

Mine too. Also, his political hero is Nye Bevan, and villain is Thatcher so that's good enough for me.

He reminds me a bit of Clive Jenkins in a way

[The Weeping Angel]

I'm voting for Owen

[Andy McDandy]

Hmm. Wanting to involve Sinn Fein (as representatives of Republicans in NI*) in negotiations is not tantamount to loading the armalite and passing it to the IRA gunner. SF arguably had a point. The PIRA committed acts of violence, but we do stray into terrorist/freedom fighter territory here. So did the loyalist terrorists, surreptitiously backed by both the Unionist parties and the British government. So by that logic wasn't everyone pretty much supporting terrorism of one flavour or another?

Anyway, yes, Owen Smith. As I've argued, right and left don't really matter any more. They're more insults than descriptors. My only fear is that in the age of personality politics, will Smith stand out?

*OK, there was the SDLP, but they were rather useless.

[D.C. Harrison]

Hmm. Wanting to involve Sinn Fein (as representatives of Republicans in NI*) in negotiations is not tantamount to loading the armalite and passing it to the IRA gunner. SF arguably had a point. The PIRA committed acts of violence, but we do stray into terrorist/freedom fighter territory here. So did the loyalist terrorists, surreptitiously backed by both the Unionist parties and the British government. So by that logic wasn't everyone pretty much supporting terrorism of one flavour or another?

I think that level of nuance is missed by some.

Smith? He may well have the politics, but not the personality. Stick him up there if you want for a few years to take the hits that nobody else wants to, and I'll see y'all on the "Smith has to Go!" thread in 2020 or so.

[Abernathy]

Owen Smith's early pledges.

[Andy McDandy]

Liking all of that, but on the last point isn't that what the NEC's supposed to be? Or does he want an oversight and scrutiny committee?

[mattomac]

He worked in Media, so he is going know how to play them in my view.

At the moment the attacks have been on the Pifzer thing, however in the same quote they are using he also rebuts that the sector should in anyway be privatised. It was very much of the era and the politics of choice. We've moved on I feel and I'm sure Owen has, I think Labour needed to discover someone like Smith, unknown, presents very well, his partner is a teacher, brought up in the Welsh heartlands and as a child was marching with the miners.

[D.C. Harrison]

He worked in Media, so he is going know how to play them in my view.

Hopefully he learned more than Gove did, when it comes to leadership tilts.

[bluebellnutter]

The thing with the Pfizer thing is that Corbyn has in the past expressed his support for homeopathy. Which is such an obvious come-back I'm surprised it hasn't been used more. At least Pfizer's drugs work.

[The Weeping Angel]

Hmm. Wanting to involve Sinn Fein (as representatives of Republicans in NI*) in negotiations is not tantamount to loading the armalite and passing it to the IRA gunner. SF arguably had a point. The PIRA committed acts of violence, but we do stray into terrorist/freedom fighter territory here. So did the loyalist terrorists, surreptitiously backed by both the Unionist parties and the British government. So by that logic wasn't everyone pretty much supporting terrorism of one flavour or another?

Anyway, yes, Owen Smith. As I've argued, right and left don't really matter any more. They're more insults than descriptors. My only fear is that in the age of personality politics, will Smith stand out?

*OK, there was the SDLP, but they were rather useless.

Not really, Corbyn wasn't interested in a peace settlement

http://labour-uncut.co.uk/2015/08/07/th ... l-fantasy/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

For the record, Corbyn’s involvement with Troops Out (the main Irish Republican organisation in Britain); his hosting of members of Sinn Féin in Parliament mere weeks after the Brighton bombing in which his fellow MPs were murdered; and his willingness to publicly talk and be associated with Sinn Féin whilst supporting their political goal of a United Ireland when the IRA had not yet implemented a ceasefire were, at best, without consequence in the peace process, and at worst, a spoiler. Corbyn’s talks did not produce anything of the framework upon which the Good Friday Agreement and the rest of the peace process was built.

More important than the political theatre Corbyn engaged in is the fact that Corbyn has not been consistent in his support of the efforts made by Britain to encourage dialogue and the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Most notably, he voted against the critically important 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, saying:

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that some of us oppose the agreement for reasons other than those that he has given [i.e. Unionist]? We believe that the agreement strengthens rather than weakens the border between the six and the twenty-six counties, and those of us who wish to see a united Ireland oppose the agreement for that reason.

This is not the argument of a lonely peacemaker, working to achieve dialogue with an intransigent IRA, but that of someone who deferred to Sinn Féin’s then-policy on Irish issues. Hence why Corbyn’s refusal to condemn the IRA this week was so worrying – it would be one thing if he was spectacularly naïve and earnestly did just believe that “all bombings were bad”, but the fact he opposed the peace process when Sinn Féin also opposed the peace process indicates he wasn’t interested in a “political settlement” which would have ended those bombings as soon as possible. Most objectionably, whilst nowadays Corbyn claims to be ahead of Thatcher in attempting a political settlement, he neglects to mention he opposed and voted against Thatcher’s most important contribution to peace when she negotiated the Anglo-Irish Agreement!

[Abernathy]

I'm delighted that the party has settled on Owen Smith as the candidate to challenge Corbyn's position. Angela never looked remotely credible, I'm afraid.

The acolytes of the Church of the Blessed Jez are fairly clearly very worried about Smith, as they appear to be working overtime to try to come up with anything - to the point of inventing imaginary conspiracies - to try and discredit Smith.

I saw a particularly nasty one crop up on one of the Labour FB groups (which have become like the wild west) earlier on. Can't seem to find it now.

[Andy McDandy]

The resident Rik the People's Poet (thanks for coining that, LJB!) on Zelo Street decided it was worth crashing a discussion about the hard right blogger Milos Yiannopoulos to have a rant about Smith and his ties to "Feizer". OK, that guy clearly has issues (every discussion will feature a rant on Murdoch, the tories, Blair, seemingly everyone in London, "the spooks at Vauxhall Cross", Mr Sweet Pants in Wormwood Scrubs* shower, "spivs" and "snake oil salesmen", and bewailing the lack of decency in public life while viciously abusing everyone who he takes issue with; and if the topic has nothing to do with any of those things, he will proudly declare that he doesn't care about the subject, then run his usual rant) but today's effort looked particularly cack-handed.

*Given that the anonymous poster there started contributing after Paul Thomas, another Scrubs fetishist with plenty of reason to hate everyone on the above list, was sacked, I wonder...

[mattomac]

There is one guy who posts the same thing on every Mirror Politics post on Facebook.

So you've got this support of Corbyn on anything from Turkey's coup to Donald Trump and his wife's speech.

Irony is the one piece on Corbyn yesterday he hadn't mentioned it.