Politics

[Rayvin 4981]

Great, we now have the potted history of the man behind the theory... and your counter argument is?

[Rayvin 4981]

In truth, there are plenty of counter arguments to Keynesianism as I said earlier. This video is a good look at it and it actually criticises Keynesianism in a rap battle between Keynes and Hayek to make it approachable.

 

 

I'm not convinced personally though, and am prepared to listen to arguments. The theory is logically sound.

Edited September 26, 2016 by Rayvin

[PaddockLad 14995]

Ok let's bottom this once and for all with some history rather than rose tinted glasses.

 

 

John Maynard Keynes put it best: 'Madmen in authority who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.'

 

He could hardly have suspected that, 70 years later, that academic scribbler would be none other than Keynes himself.

 

For as the global economic crisis continues to unfold, the economist's ideas of borrow-and-spend government have come back into fashion with a vengeance.

 

And yet, in the rush to embrace the new Keynesianism, we are in danger of missing the point about the old version.

 

For Keynesianism did not, as is often imagined, put an end to the Great Depression.

 

Indeed, the record of big-spending governments during hard times is not one to be proud of.

 

John Maynard Keynes was, at first glance, an unlikely candidate to become one of the great icons of Left-wing politics.

 

Born in 1883 to a Cambridge economist and social reformer, he was brought up in an atmosphere of high-minded privilege.

 

Eton and Cambridge, where he got top marks, gave him social gloss and academic distinction.

 

He was no scholarly drudge, though, but a lover of beauty and pleasure. (Asked on his deathbed, in 1946, whether he had any regrets, he was said to have remarked: 'I should have drunk more champagne.')

 

By 1925, Keynes was building a reputation as the most brilliant and controversial economist in the western world.

 

After advising the Government during World War I, he seized attention in 1919 with an attack on the Treaty of Versailles, arguing (correctly, it turned out) that its punitive terms were bound to provoke a terrible German reaction.

 

And during the Twenties he cemented his image with a series of onslaughts on economic orthodoxy, chipping away at the three pillars of the old order - the Treaty, the gold standard (the system whereby bank notes were literally exchangeable for gold) and laissez-faire government, the economic ideology which advocates minimal state intervention.

 

But one of the great myths about Keynes is that when the Wall Street Crash sent shockwaves through the world economy in 1929, politicians seized on his ideas as a solution to the Depression. They did nothing of the sort.

 

For although Keynes' brains were highly regarded, he remained a heretic.

 

His trademark notions - government borrowing and spending on public works to boost demand and alleviate recession - were unpopular on both sides of the political divide.

 

Although Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government brought him on board in 1930, it did not take up his prescriptions.

 

For as a Whitehall joke at the time had it, if you asked five economists for their opinions, you would get six replies - two of them from Keynes.

 

And when a major committee asked his advice on solutions to the Depression, he gave no fewer than seven different answers.

 

In fact, it was only at the margins of British politics than Keynesianism, as it eventually became called, really caught on.

 

Then, the most distinguished champion of government spending in hard times was the former Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George, one of the most dynamic and charismatic speakers in the country.

 

But Lloyd George was a political pariah, his image besmirched by a cash-for-peerages scandal and his private reputation damaged by a string of sexual misdemeanours.

 

Even many Liberals hated and despised him. 'The Goat', as he was called, was far from the ideal person to sell Keynes's radical economics to the political establishment.

 

Yet Keynes's biggest political admirer was even less salubrious. During the Twenties, he had met a dashing young Labour politician, Sir Oswald Mosley, and it was he who made the most determined effort to introduce Keynes' ideas into British economic life.

 

As early as 1925, Mosley was arguing for nationalised banks, an economic council and centralised planning for full employment.

 

And in 1930, Mosley, who was then a minister without portfolio outside the Cabinet, presented his famous Memorandum to the Labour Cabinet, recommending £200 million of public works and social spending to kick- start the economy into recovery.

 

This was Keynesianism pure and simple - and the Cabinet rejected it. To most Labour ministers, borrowing money to throw at public works during tough times smacked of profligate irresponsibility.

 

Mosley promptly flounced out of the Government and ended up founding the British Union of Fascists, horrifying his old friends and colleagues.

 

He remained an admirer of Keynes's ideas, though - as did his great friend and mentor, Adolf Hitler.

 

Indeed, if there was one government that did embrace Keynesianism enthusiastically in the Thirties, it was Hitler's Germany - where borrowing, spending and public works were the foundations of the Nazis' economic appeal in a country ravaged by the Depression.

 

In Britain, meanwhile, Keynes remained a prophet crying in the wilderness.

 

When the Labour government fell from office in 1931, ripped apart by the economic crisis and replaced with a National Government run by MacDonald and Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, Keynes was not impressed.

 

He thought the Tories' ideas were 'medieval' and despised Baldwin's 'stupidity'.

 

And he was even less impressed when the first thing the National Government did was the exact opposite of what he recommended - slashing spending and ruthlessly pruning unemployment benefits to impress the markets.

 

And yet the common image of the National Government, supposedly a cabal of rich, hard-faced men watching with callous indifference as millions of workers in flat caps trudged through the streets looking vainly for work, is complete nonsense.

 

Indeed, the very idea of the Hungry Thirties is largely a myth. By comparison with most countries, Britain escaped the Depression relatively unscathed.

 

Unemployment did rocket, hitting a terrifying 23 per cent in January 1933, but then it quickly fell back to pre-Crash levels.

 

Wages remained high and, for those people still in work, life was better than ever. And as early as the end of 1933, while Germany and the U.S. were suffering the worst throes of the Depression, Britain was already in recovery.

 

What was the key, then, to Britain's escape? It was certainly not Keynesianism - for Keynes's ideas were never tried.

 

The key economic figure in the National Government, Chancellor Neville Chamberlain, was a strong believer in protectionist tariffs and tight money.

 

Despite this, he was a keen reformer, setting aside cash for unemployment benefits, health and housing, but he drew the line at borrowing millions of pounds to spend on public works.

 

And although he approved a programme of aid to depressed areas, notably the coalfields of South Wales and Tyneside shipyards, it cost a tiny £2 million - a hundred times less than the programmes Keynes and Mosley had envisaged, and nowhere near enough to make a major impact.

 

In fact, the real key to Britain's recovery was probably the moment in September 1931 when the pound, battered by speculators, was forced off the gold standard.

 

Until then, the Bank of England had been compelled to keep interest rates high to maintain the ludicrously elevated value of sterling.

 

But as investors lost their faith in the pound at the height of the Depression, the Bank finally gave up the fight and abandoned the gold standard.

 

Now there was no need for the cripplingly high interest rates and by June 1932, bank rates were down to a barely noticeable 2 per cent - the ideal level to stimulate a recovery driven by private enterprise.

 

For while industrial areas, especially in the North, Scotland and South Wales, were suffering from the collapse of international demand in the Depression, the paradox is that many people had never had it so good.

 

As even a socialist like George Orwell was forced to admit, when contemplating the popularity of the cinema, gambling and High Street fashion in Wigan, Britain in the Thirties was an increasingly affluent society.

 

'It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, silk stockings, salmon, cut-price chocolate, the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution,' he grumbled.

 

As a result, as early as 1935, the Depression in Britain was virtually over. By contrast, the U.S., where government intervention - in line with Keynesian thinking - was much more pronounced, did not begin to recover until the outbreak of World War II.

 

While President Franklin D. Roosevelt's innumerable government schemes and unprecedented welfare spending undoubtedly protected Americans against the ravages of poverty and unemployment, they certainly did nothing to bring recovery.

 

In many ways, the New Deal, with its obsession with government control over the economy and money supply, intervention to control prices and agricultural production among myriad social projects, was a terrible advertisement for big government.

 

For when businesses should have been investing for the future, they were defensive and angry, their confidence shattered by Roosevelt's attacks on them.

 

The great myth about Keynesianism, in other words, is that it was tried in the Thirties and proved successful.

 

In fact, Keynes did not publish his landmark General Theory until 1936, and his ideas did not take hold among senior Tory and Labour politicians until the Forties.

 

And in the years after the war his complicated theory of demand management was gradually diluted into a recipe for government spending, with prime ministers such as Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson printing money rather than facing up to the realities of Britain's industrial decline.

 

By the mid-Seventies, the result was rampant inflation, soaring unemployment and a bloated, bureaucratic public sector, prompting Labour's Prime Minister Jim Callaghan to issue a famous repudiation of Keynesianism.

 

'We used to think you could spend your way out of recession by boosting government spending,' he told his party in 1976.

 

'I tell you, in all candour, that option no longer exists.'

 

Callaghan's words marked the end for Keynesianism in Britain - which makes it all the more surprising that it is making a comeback.

 

But while even Keynes's critics, such as the monetarist Milton Friedman, acknowledge that he was a brilliant economist, it would be a dreadful mistake to turn back the clock to the theories of the Twenties and Thirties.

 

In fact, as a die-hard Liberal who hated socialism and supported capitalism, Keynes thought of government intervention only as a last resort.

 

He never envisaged a public sector on the scale we have today and would be horrified by the current regime of welfare entitlements.

 

What is more, he never anticipated the problems of soaring world commodity prices and massive inflation, which is why Keynesianism collapsed in the Seventies.

 

His admirers insist that he would have tackled the problem of inflation had he not died in 1946 at the age of 63 - but this only hammers home the point that, at best, his theories were a work in progress, not the definitive answer to the world's ills.

 

Above all, Keynesianism was the product of a world of national tariffs, protectionism and jealously guarded economic sovereignty.

 

In a globalised world when governments badly need to win the confidence of international exchange markets, the idea of heedlessly borrowing and spending your way out of recession is as outdated as the films of George Formby and Gracie Fields.

 

The crowning irony, though, is that Keynes himself would have been the first to mock his new admirers.

 

A daring nonconformist who loved to poke fun at conventional wisdom, he would have shuddered at the thought of dusting down the orthodoxies of the past instead of thinking up solutions based on changed global realities.

 

In other words, Keynes would have been no Keynesian. For as he rightly put it, politicians are never so ridiculous as when they make themselves 'the slaves of some defunct economist'.

 

Word Bro

 

"History is written by the winners"

 

Who is the author of this version of history may I ask?

[Happy Face 29]

It's from the daily mail

[Christmas Tree 4005]

"History is written by the winners"

 

Who is the author of this version of history may I ask?

Some Oxford university historian.

[Rayvin 4981]

Better video with better rapping

 

 

This was the follow up one which I think is better and shows why there's no easy answer.

 

Keynesian spending pulled the US out of recession but the counter argument is that you just get booms and busts.

[PaddockLad 14995]

Some Oxford university historian.

 

Quite partial then I expect seeing as your not naming him/her

 

Rubbishing Keynes btw after Osbourne borrowend more in 7 years than New Labour did in 14, all thrown in with a huge cuts to public services... if this is what you mean by "sound economic policy" then it pretty much amounts to  "lying plausibly to the gullible then using the soft as shite media to get away with it".

[Dr Gloom 20232]

CT blatantly googling frantically for critics of Keynes.

[ChezGiven 0]

Ok let's bottom this once and for all with some history rather than rose tinted glasses.

 

 

John Maynard Keynes put it best: 'Madmen in authority who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.'

 

He could hardly have suspected that, 70 years later, that academic scribbler would be none other than Keynes himself.

 

For as the global economic crisis continues to unfold, the economist's ideas of borrow-and-spend government have come back into fashion with a vengeance.

 

And yet, in the rush to embrace the new Keynesianism, we are in danger of missing the point about the old version.

 

For Keynesianism did not, as is often imagined, put an end to the Great Depression.

 

Indeed, the record of big-spending governments during hard times is not one to be proud of.

 

John Maynard Keynes was, at first glance, an unlikely candidate to become one of the great icons of Left-wing politics.

 

Born in 1883 to a Cambridge economist and social reformer, he was brought up in an atmosphere of high-minded privilege.

 

Eton and Cambridge, where he got top marks, gave him social gloss and academic distinction.

 

He was no scholarly drudge, though, but a lover of beauty and pleasure. (Asked on his deathbed, in 1946, whether he had any regrets, he was said to have remarked: 'I should have drunk more champagne.')

 

By 1925, Keynes was building a reputation as the most brilliant and controversial economist in the western world.

 

After advising the Government during World War I, he seized attention in 1919 with an attack on the Treaty of Versailles, arguing (correctly, it turned out) that its punitive terms were bound to provoke a terrible German reaction.

 

And during the Twenties he cemented his image with a series of onslaughts on economic orthodoxy, chipping away at the three pillars of the old order - the Treaty, the gold standard (the system whereby bank notes were literally exchangeable for gold) and laissez-faire government, the economic ideology which advocates minimal state intervention.

 

But one of the great myths about Keynes is that when the Wall Street Crash sent shockwaves through the world economy in 1929, politicians seized on his ideas as a solution to the Depression. They did nothing of the sort.

 

For although Keynes' brains were highly regarded, he remained a heretic.

 

His trademark notions - government borrowing and spending on public works to boost demand and alleviate recession - were unpopular on both sides of the political divide.

 

Although Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government brought him on board in 1930, it did not take up his prescriptions.

 

For as a Whitehall joke at the time had it, if you asked five economists for their opinions, you would get six replies - two of them from Keynes.

 

And when a major committee asked his advice on solutions to the Depression, he gave no fewer than seven different answers.

 

In fact, it was only at the margins of British politics than Keynesianism, as it eventually became called, really caught on.

 

Then, the most distinguished champion of government spending in hard times was the former Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George, one of the most dynamic and charismatic speakers in the country.

 

But Lloyd George was a political pariah, his image besmirched by a cash-for-peerages scandal and his private reputation damaged by a string of sexual misdemeanours.

 

Even many Liberals hated and despised him. 'The Goat', as he was called, was far from the ideal person to sell Keynes's radical economics to the political establishment.

 

Yet Keynes's biggest political admirer was even less salubrious. During the Twenties, he had met a dashing young Labour politician, Sir Oswald Mosley, and it was he who made the most determined effort to introduce Keynes' ideas into British economic life.

 

As early as 1925, Mosley was arguing for nationalised banks, an economic council and centralised planning for full employment.

 

And in 1930, Mosley, who was then a minister without portfolio outside the Cabinet, presented his famous Memorandum to the Labour Cabinet, recommending £200 million of public works and social spending to kick- start the economy into recovery.

 

This was Keynesianism pure and simple - and the Cabinet rejected it. To most Labour ministers, borrowing money to throw at public works during tough times smacked of profligate irresponsibility.

 

Mosley promptly flounced out of the Government and ended up founding the British Union of Fascists, horrifying his old friends and colleagues.

 

He remained an admirer of Keynes's ideas, though - as did his great friend and mentor, Adolf Hitler.

 

Indeed, if there was one government that did embrace Keynesianism enthusiastically in the Thirties, it was Hitler's Germany - where borrowing, spending and public works were the foundations of the Nazis' economic appeal in a country ravaged by the Depression.

 

In Britain, meanwhile, Keynes remained a prophet crying in the wilderness.

 

When the Labour government fell from office in 1931, ripped apart by the economic crisis and replaced with a National Government run by MacDonald and Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, Keynes was not impressed.

 

He thought the Tories' ideas were 'medieval' and despised Baldwin's 'stupidity'.

 

And he was even less impressed when the first thing the National Government did was the exact opposite of what he recommended - slashing spending and ruthlessly pruning unemployment benefits to impress the markets.

 

And yet the common image of the National Government, supposedly a cabal of rich, hard-faced men watching with callous indifference as millions of workers in flat caps trudged through the streets looking vainly for work, is complete nonsense.

 

Indeed, the very idea of the Hungry Thirties is largely a myth. By comparison with most countries, Britain escaped the Depression relatively unscathed.

 

Unemployment did rocket, hitting a terrifying 23 per cent in January 1933, but then it quickly fell back to pre-Crash levels.

 

Wages remained high and, for those people still in work, life was better than ever. And as early as the end of 1933, while Germany and the U.S. were suffering the worst throes of the Depression, Britain was already in recovery.

 

What was the key, then, to Britain's escape? It was certainly not Keynesianism - for Keynes's ideas were never tried.

 

The key economic figure in the National Government, Chancellor Neville Chamberlain, was a strong believer in protectionist tariffs and tight money.

 

Despite this, he was a keen reformer, setting aside cash for unemployment benefits, health and housing, but he drew the line at borrowing millions of pounds to spend on public works.

 

And although he approved a programme of aid to depressed areas, notably the coalfields of South Wales and Tyneside shipyards, it cost a tiny £2 million - a hundred times less than the programmes Keynes and Mosley had envisaged, and nowhere near enough to make a major impact.

 

In fact, the real key to Britain's recovery was probably the moment in September 1931 when the pound, battered by speculators, was forced off the gold standard.

 

Until then, the Bank of England had been compelled to keep interest rates high to maintain the ludicrously elevated value of sterling.

 

But as investors lost their faith in the pound at the height of the Depression, the Bank finally gave up the fight and abandoned the gold standard.

 

Now there was no need for the cripplingly high interest rates and by June 1932, bank rates were down to a barely noticeable 2 per cent - the ideal level to stimulate a recovery driven by private enterprise.

 

For while industrial areas, especially in the North, Scotland and South Wales, were suffering from the collapse of international demand in the Depression, the paradox is that many people had never had it so good.

 

As even a socialist like George Orwell was forced to admit, when contemplating the popularity of the cinema, gambling and High Street fashion in Wigan, Britain in the Thirties was an increasingly affluent society.

 

'It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, silk stockings, salmon, cut-price chocolate, the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution,' he grumbled.

 

As a result, as early as 1935, the Depression in Britain was virtually over. By contrast, the U.S., where government intervention - in line with Keynesian thinking - was much more pronounced, did not begin to recover until the outbreak of World War II.

 

While President Franklin D. Roosevelt's innumerable government schemes and unprecedented welfare spending undoubtedly protected Americans against the ravages of poverty and unemployment, they certainly did nothing to bring recovery.

 

In many ways, the New Deal, with its obsession with government control over the economy and money supply, intervention to control prices and agricultural production among myriad social projects, was a terrible advertisement for big government.

 

For when businesses should have been investing for the future, they were defensive and angry, their confidence shattered by Roosevelt's attacks on them.

 

The great myth about Keynesianism, in other words, is that it was tried in the Thirties and proved successful.

 

In fact, Keynes did not publish his landmark General Theory until 1936, and his ideas did not take hold among senior Tory and Labour politicians until the Forties.

 

And in the years after the war his complicated theory of demand management was gradually diluted into a recipe for government spending, with prime ministers such as Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson printing money rather than facing up to the realities of Britain's industrial decline.

 

By the mid-Seventies, the result was rampant inflation, soaring unemployment and a bloated, bureaucratic public sector, prompting Labour's Prime Minister Jim Callaghan to issue a famous repudiation of Keynesianism.

 

'We used to think you could spend your way out of recession by boosting government spending,' he told his party in 1976.

 

'I tell you, in all candour, that option no longer exists.'

 

Callaghan's words marked the end for Keynesianism in Britain - which makes it all the more surprising that it is making a comeback.

 

But while even Keynes's critics, such as the monetarist Milton Friedman, acknowledge that he was a brilliant economist, it would be a dreadful mistake to turn back the clock to the theories of the Twenties and Thirties.

 

In fact, as a die-hard Liberal who hated socialism and supported capitalism, Keynes thought of government intervention only as a last resort.

 

He never envisaged a public sector on the scale we have today and would be horrified by the current regime of welfare entitlements.

 

What is more, he never anticipated the problems of soaring world commodity prices and massive inflation, which is why Keynesianism collapsed in the Seventies.

 

His admirers insist that he would have tackled the problem of inflation had he not died in 1946 at the age of 63 - but this only hammers home the point that, at best, his theories were a work in progress, not the definitive answer to the world's ills.

 

Above all, Keynesianism was the product of a world of national tariffs, protectionism and jealously guarded economic sovereignty.

 

In a globalised world when governments badly need to win the confidence of international exchange markets, the idea of heedlessly borrowing and spending your way out of recession is as outdated as the films of George Formby and Gracie Fields.

 

The crowning irony, though, is that Keynes himself would have been the first to mock his new admirers.

 

A daring nonconformist who loved to poke fun at conventional wisdom, he would have shuddered at the thought of dusting down the orthodoxies of the past instead of thinking up solutions based on changed global realities.

 

In other words, Keynes would have been no Keynesian. For as he rightly put it, politicians are never so ridiculous as when they make themselves 'the slaves of some defunct economist'.

 

Word Bro

 

Thats a load of shite. Keynesian ideas arent fixed by the publication of the general theory, scholars examine the history of economic policy going back way before 1936 and award Kenyes credit for his theory fitting not only historical patterns of economic activity but its predictive power too.

 

Then that whole loads of bollocks you've just posted falls apart because when the writer says 

 

"But one of the great myths about Keynes is that when the Wall Street Crash sent shockwaves through the world economy in 1929, politicians seized on his ideas as a solution to the Depression. They did nothing of the sort."

 

He is historically and factually so incorrect it makes me cringe as to think who could write it. There is economic policy thing. Called The New Deal. Its quite famous and anyone wirting that 'they did nothing of the sort' is an ill educated polemic spewing twat of the highest order. Have a read about it. Its filed under 'history of the great depression'. 

 

Keynes doesnt get credit for the New Deal, Keynes was writing from the perspective of the writings of the Cambridge school. Economists like Joan Robinson, Alfred Marsall and Arthur Pigou had been developing the 'demand management' theories of neoclassical economics for 20 years. Their ideas are imbued into the fabric of 30s economic policy. Keynes just brought it all together into the bestseller in 36. 

[ChezGiven 0]

He is right about the Nazis and Hitler though and what better proof of the relevance of the economic model than transforming Germany into an economic super power in a decade. 

 

Am just getting to the depression in the UK being over by 35 (the jarrow march is in 36) and how the Americans needed the second world war to recover  

 

Fucking hell.

[ChezGiven 0]

Thats the wonder of the internet. Any cunt can post anything. No wonder people talk about 'the age of post-truth politics' as a thing.

[Howmanheyman 27878]

Thats a load of shite. Keynesian ideas arent fixed by the publication of the general theory, scholars examine the history of economic policy going back way before 1936 and award Kenyes credit for his theory fitting not only historical patterns of economic activity but its predictive power too.

 

Then that whole loads of bollocks you've just posted falls apart because when the writer says

 

"But one of the great myths about Keynes is that when the Wall Street Crash sent shockwaves through the world economy in 1929, politicians seized on his ideas as a solution to the Depression. They did nothing of the sort."

 

He is historically and factually so incorrect it makes me cringe as to think who could write it. There is economic policy thing. Called The New Deal. Its quite famous and anyone wirting that 'they did nothing of the sort' is an ill educated polemic spewing twat of the highest order. Have a read about it. Its filed under 'history of the great depression'.

 

Keynes doesnt get credit for the New Deal, Keynes was writing from the perspective of the writings of the Cambridge school. Economists like Joan Robinson, Alfred Marsall and Arthur Pigou had been developing the 'demand management' theories of neoclassical economics for 20 years. Their ideas are imbued into the fabric of 30s economic policy. Keynes just brought it all together into the bestseller in 36.

Sure, there'll always be arguments about how successful keanes was, for every fan there's a doubter, but your average punter knows that when it comes to the economy, it's the same old Tories who'll sort it out. And they just aren't interested in Keane's & Ian's economic theories and there's no point in going round in circles about it.

/CT

 

[ChezGiven 0]

Finally, just got to the conclusion, the most advanced and theoretically complex models are now clearly showing that when real interest rates are at the zero bound and there are no expectations of inflation, the multiplier on government spending is much higher than predicted by Keynes. These funky new models coming our of the brightest minds at Harvard, the Federal reserve etc are at the cutting edge of probabilistic economic modeling, exactly where a thinker like Keynes would be today if he were alive. 

 

If he was a non-conformist than standing against the orthodoxy of monetarism is where i'd bet he'd be today.

[PaddockLad 14995]

It's from the daily mail

 

Sorry, I missed this earlier. All I can say, in tribute the near fatal kicking Chez has just given the Boldon burger botherer, is "quel fuckin surprise"

[NJS 4026]

"But managing a country's economy is just like running a household budget"

[Renton 18220]

Corbyn being interviewed by Laura kuennsberg just there are on the news. Fucking hell man, embarrassing. How anybody, over the age of 16, can imagine a pacifist can be pm is beyond me.

[adios 717]

What are your thoughts on Sanders nearly getting in in the US, @@Renton?

[Rayvin 4981]

Corbyn being interviewed by Laura kuennsberg just there are on the news. Fucking hell man, embarrassing. How anybody, over the age of 16, can imagine a pacifist can be pm is beyond me.

 

Dunno like, can you recall any wars we've been involved in within the last 50 years that actually had our national security at stake?

[Christmas Tree 4005]

Corbyn being interviewed by Laura kuennsberg just there are on the news. Fucking hell man, embarrassing. How anybody, over the age of 16, can imagine a pacifist can be pm is beyond me.

Should watch McDonnells hapless interview on Mondays newsnight. Has literally no clue.

[Renton 18220]

Dunno like, can you recall any wars we've been involved in within the last 50 years that actually had our national security at stake?

That's not really the point though is it? Corbyn thinks he can sit down with a cup of tea with the likes of ISIS and come to a peace deal. He also reiterated he would never use Trident under any circumstances, thus rendering it useless as a deterrent. What do you think the likes of Putin will make of that. He's also showing contempt for the party position and the PLP. Completely unelectable.

 

 

As for Sanders adios, honestly don't know enough about him to pass comment. If his nomination had guaranteed Trump's success though it's probably a good thing he has bowed out. Like Corbyn, he's also too old anyway. Of course I'd love the US to swing to the left but it's not going to happen without civil unrest imo.

[NJS 4026]

Little imperialism. Why should the UK "sit down" with ISIS?. They've got fuck all to do with us at that level as they're a grubby bunch of terrorists in a region that's got nothing to do with us.

 

I'd imagine Putin thinks the same of the UK as he does about Germany and their nonexistent nuclear weapons - absolutely fuck all.

 

I find left wing imperialistic cock waving as nauseating as working class royalism - you need to stop thinking it's the 20th century and wake the fuck up.

[NJS 4026]

And by the way polls showed Sanders beating Trump by more than Clinton. No surprise to see you supporting the corrupt centrist rather than a genuine left winger.

[Gemmill 36061]

Corbyn being interviewed by Laura kuennsberg just there are on the news. Fucking hell man, embarrassing. How anybody, over the age of 16, can imagine a pacifist can be pm is beyond me.

I'm gonna go ahead and suggest that you didn't go into this experience with an objective viewpoint.

[Renton 18220]

Little imperialism. Why should the UK "sit down" with ISIS?. They've got fuck all to do with us at that level as they're a grubby bunch of terrorists in a region that's got nothing to do with us.

 

I'd imagine Putin thinks the same of the UK as he does about Germany and their nonexistent nuclear weapons - absolutely fuck all.

 

I find left wing imperialistic cock waving as nauseating as working class royalism - you need to stop thinking it's the 20th century and wake the fuck up.

Fuck off man. I've never supported any military intervention by the west in the Middle East ever. The point I was trying to make, which might become clear if you watched the interview, was that Corbyn was projecting himself as some peace broker as if you can reason with these people. He came across as utterly ridiculous.

[Rayvin 4981]

I'm just going to agree, essentially word for word, with NJS here.