Corb Blimey!

[johnr]

Erm, Tubbs, look up - that's what we're talking about...

[johnr]

I genuinely don't know who would better be better than Leonard. I'm just think thinking of what people like Owen Jones were saying about Leonard around the time of the Scottish leadership election last year.

It's a bit hyperbolic, but I think the point he's making was that, if Slab chose Sarwar, it'd go the way of a lot of other centrist parties. Which might have been true, I'll guess we'll never know.

Since the election last year, most MSM (there, I said it...) have gone back to same old - same faces, same opinions, same 'look at the polls'; Corbyn (or Leonard maybe, for that matter, I don't know how it's presented in Scotland) won't cut through until there's fair rep.*, at a GE.

* Before anyone says 'he would if he came out anti-Brexit', that was plenty said before the last GE, and the Lib Dems came nowhere.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Ah, yeah.

[E10 Rifle]

Corbs's position on the national question probably isn't much of a support-rallyer either, at least among the kind of demographic that turned to Labour last year in England and Wales (and, to a lesser extent, Scotland)

[Lang Spoon]

Corbyn is pretty fucking clueless re Scotland, every time Dugdale tried to move to the doomed federalist position he’d say some bollocks like how you couldn’t have different legal systems in the UK (Scotland kept its separate legal system in 1707). Leonard’s whole tactic right now is demanding the Nats Do Something about issues that are reserved (and that Labour often ensured were kept reserved in the Smith Commission talks).

[E10 Rifle]

Yeah, Scotland and Syria are the two areas on which I've always been most critical of Corbyn, not that his position on either is a deterioration from those of his predecessors and rivals

[Lang Spoon]

Slab really have to become a proper separate party to Big Labour, rather like CDU/CSU. This branch office shit is doing them no good at all. Nothing that contradicts Westminster bollocks policy can ever be countenanced. The most successful party ever in Scotland was the loose Scottish Unionist party coalition that took the Tory whip in Westminster. Over 50% of the vote in 1955, even the Nats couldn’t manage that in 2015. But when they became full on proper Tories in 1965, they started a rapid decline, even before Thatcher.

The weird thing is that there seemed to be more differentiation between Scottish and UK Labour, for good or ill (usually for ill when it came to backward bigoted Old Labour views on social policy in Scotland) prior to devolution. No one in the first few terms of Holyrood was producing Firebrand left stuff like Gordon Brown in the late seventies /early eighties. When I say firebrand I mean mildly social democratic but distinctive from the larger Labour Party orthodoxy. What is there now, Neil fucking Findlay? The Glasgow MP that’s apparently a Deep Thinker?

[jeanmid]

I genuinely don't know who would better be better than Leonard. I'm just think thinking of what people like Owen Jones were saying about Leonard around the time of the Scottish leadership election last year.

That should have been an indication that having Leonard as a leader was a bad idea.

[johnr]

Who was the better option?

[Flynnie]

Crikey, that's a clanger about the legal systems. I knew that before I even came to the UK, it's one of the first handful of things you learn about the Act of Union.

[E10 Rifle]

Anyways, this is a very good analysis of where we're at, left-wise:
https://averypublicsociologist.blogs...-election.html

[johnr]

Indeed, was going to post that myself.

[Tubby Isaacs]

From that article about Leonard.

That’s why Leonard’s promises of industrial democracy are so welcome: for example, pledging employees would be granted the first right to take over any business that goes up for sale.

Is there anything stopping employees buying businesses now, besides having less money/credit than other people who want to buy them? I suppose there could be some enforced pause in the sale process, but will this make much difference?

Genuine, non-rhetorical questions, for once.

[NHH]

Yes - lack of quick access to capital, bias against the presumption from professional advisors, no tax bias towards it (unlike other countries).

There was a big review about 5 years ago on this under the coalition. The TlR version is that in a capitalist society in which welath is inequitably distributed, to be neutral on the position of employee or other types of ownership is to be in favour of the other types, because employee ownership, whilst meeting many, many objecitves of every governments industrial policy treads on the third rail of Thou Shalt not Impede the Free Play of Market Forces, and those market forces will always favour speed of dealmaking over better policy outcomes (and the same cash) of employee ownership. So, you have to balance the relative slower pace by incentivising the employee ownership option through fiscal policy and other nudges.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Thanks. The Government sure buried that one, despite "you should have seen me in there" Vince Cable's efforts.

It's an interesting idea to forgo tax if the company will perform better with employee ownership (and pay more tax as a result), but I get that it's about much more than that.

Good on Leonard for taking it up.

[NHH]

The best place for the tax is not in CT write-offs after the business has become employee owned, but in stamp duty and CGT write-offs for the existing owners.

[Tubby Isaacs]

That's a neat idea, very straightforward.

[NHH]

There's also the Marcora Law, a version of which is getting lots of support from McDonnell's team.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Am I remembering that you were involved with putting this stuff to McDonnell a while ago? Looks good.

[NHH]

No, not me guv, but McDonnell and his team are listening to the right people on this stuff

[E10 Rifle]

I went to that Labour conference on the economy last month that Corbyn was attacked for swerving the royal wedding for, and some of those ideas were touched on. I could only dip in and out of it, as me and Ms Rifle were playing tag-team alternating with watching the kids run amok in the Natural History Museum, but there was some good stuff on the Preston model (council leader Mathew Brown reminded me of NHH a bit) and the role of co-operative and social enterprise models in local economy-building.

Shame this stuff, and the thinking around it, gets no coverage.

[NHH]

It did get some in the Economist, where they take it seriously.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I really like this stuff. Anything being done on land value tax behind the scenes? I think the commitment at the moment is to look at it only. I don't blame them for being cautious at all- I mean nobody has ever done a revaluation for the council tax in 27 years in England (Wales did one in 2003). But it was interesting that the Tories didn't get too much traction with their "garden tax" talk in the election campaign.

[Duncan Gardner]

Andy Wightman (Green MSP) is worth reading on land taxation. His fringe on the subject at the Global Green bash in Liverpool hadn't room for all the audience

[E10 Rifle]

Tubbs, not sure on the land tax question. I know there's been a growing Labour Land Tax campaign group over recent years, and that predates Corbyn's leadership.