Quote Bullseye="Bullseye"That's an interesting read.
I've seen my union have the same issues in the past. It used to frustrate me when extremists who see everything in black and white take over. It ends up turning people off and those that are doing the shouting end up doing far more harm than good.'"
I also read it. I'll be honest, I'm now deeply suspect when I read accounts of people being abused, MPs receiving threats and intimidation. There have been too many cases where the reports are demonstrably untrue, going as far back as the leadership campaign itself. It's a very easy thing to set up an anonymous social media account and start sending abusive messages to your own "side" purporting to be from supporters of your enemy. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that there are feisty meetings up and down the land in the Labour Party at present. Yet it's also true - as any policeman will tell you - that no two people's accounts of the same events are ever the same. A similar account written by one of those red-T-shirted Momentum types would probably read that they saw people in the meeting denouncing them and their work, and being hostile and abusive to them, making them feel unwelcome in their own Party. It's a bit of a conundrum, and I'm not sure there's a solution.
For me, the problem the right of the party have is that they have a good riff on why holding power is important, but they are offering almost nothing on what they would do with power. On the very rare occasions when someone from Progress offers a policy opinion, it is either frighteningly Thatcherite (more cutting of benefits, more "crackdowns" on this that or the other), or it's warm and apolitical "identity politics" of the sort which has a cross-spectrum acceptance from Cameroonian Tories through LibDems.
The Right of the party (which is some 80% of the PLP, in truth) would do better to start to lay out some hard policies which they can compare with both the Tories' and Corbyn's. Instead, all I've heard now for 9 months is that Corbyn is unelectable, and should go. Fine. But who would replace him, and - more importantly - what would they stand for? Not vacuous warm words about helping the working class, but actual concrete policies that I can think about and weigh up. Corbyn's got loads - nationalising railways and power, increased Keynesian public spending, higher taxes on rich individuals and institutions etc. He also has some foreign policy obsessions and ideas which I don't always share, but I'm mature enough to know I'm never going to find a political party which subscribes to all my personal views! So what do Progress/Blairites/PLP have to offer, other than a clear and transparent desire for "electability"? What would they actually do?
Until they start to answer that question, they won't shift many Corbyn supporters.
