Much as I think that the rest of the Labour MPs and staff acted like malicious fools while he was leader, I think even if his biggest fans would now have to agree that he may have been part of the problem.

Yeah, the leadership have a pretty tight grip on who gets to run. If they suspect Burnham’s coming back to Westminster in order to take down the leadership, they can just block him from the candidacy. That comes with its own risks, but it’s obviously the best way to protect the leadership, so that’s what they’ll do!

Also he’s relatively unknown outside of Manchester. So he’d have to have a big PR drive.

Within the party, he’s very well-known, and running for PM is its own PR drive! But yeah, you are correct that the obstacles are considerable.

I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t like, ‘I would marry her because I respect her like Ed Miliband respects a van’.

“Oh, what’s the point of keeping billionaires out of social media?”

I don’t understand who or what attitude this is supposed to be paraphrasing.

I’ve long thought twitter, by its nature, was corrosive to civil society, but unfortunately that won’t be fixed by replacing it with another short-form rage-machine.

You’re probably right, unfortunately!

I called them the ‘looney left’ in the exact same way that I called them the ‘real/actual’ left. Since it would make no sense for me, a left wing person, to describe some other group of people as the real left, that’s a clue that I wasn’t being serious, as was the overall tone of the sentence. In fact, you’ve been far ruder about the party’s left (however defined) than I have, in that the implication of what you’re saying must necessarily be that they’re all fools and dupes for having dedicated their lives to the party!

You’re under no compulsion to find me amusing, of course, but if you don’t like the way I post on here, I suggest not replying at all rather than bothering me with rude and patronising misinterpretations of my comments.

I think the rudeness and the wrongness may be inextricable. Either way, I’m not interested in discussing anything with people who can’t manage to be civil about it.

Don’t patronise me.

Oh, well. Do let us know when you conclude something.

Yeah, I’m wary of anything Lansman thinks is a good idea. Yet, as John McTernan argued, Momentum did have some genuine intellectual vibrancy - at least at the start. Question is whether its decay into typical boring shouty lefty group was inevitable or not.

Too busy listening to the sound of M’Benga’s voice to hear the words he’s saying.

No issues per se, but you might want to put a more detailed description in the sidebar and maybe a link to the official website. Both the (temporary) name ‘Your Party’ and ‘the new party in the UK’ are a bit vague.

No one thinks we shouldn’t utilise existing homes. Literally any strategy does so, including the existing, failing paradigm and anything along the scale to full state-ownership of all property would of course involve existing homes.

But the mooted upsides to the (vague) suggestion to ‘use empty homes’ are massively outweighed by the downsides: there aren’t enough of them; they’re usually ‘empty’ for a perfectly good reason (e.g., dilapidation); you simply must have some empty homes, under any system, in order to meet people’s needs; it’s difficult to create incentives that don’t already exist in the current system. Etc. And there’s the opportunity cost of time spent trying to make work a policy that cannot work! Governments don’t have infinite time so it’s vital that they focus on good policies.

Great, I’m glad we agree that we should house as many people as possible! So, obviously, you don’t support this bad idea that wouldn’t achieve that. Right?

The policy would fail for numerous reasons, some of which we have already discussed, more of which you can find in the article I linked, and none of which you have even attempted to refute, except to argue that your chosen policy would be less bad under a hypothetical non capitalist economic system. Which, maybe, I guess? But it still wouldn’t work, under any system, because ‘empty homes’ are not the cause of the problem. Even a system based straight up on immediate need would require some empty homes.

But the policy is not good, it’s bad, and it would be bad regardless of whether you implement it in a capitalist society or any other one you care to name. It fails to address the underlying issue, fails to solve the problem even in the short term and also makes the problem worse in the medium to long term. That is, by every definition, a bad policy.

You know what else is the enemy of the good? The bad! This is the bad.

Even if you abolish capitalism, putting people in empty homes still won’t solve the housing crisis.

The suggested policy is not good. Since the housing market needs some empty homes to function, it’s actively bad!

Focusing on something that won’t – indeed, can’t – work, instead of things that can work, is bad policy.

Jonn Elledge has written some good stuff on this question.

Short version is that, as the article tacitly acknowledges, even if you filled every empty home, you still wouldn’t house everyone on the waiting list!

It’s fine to blame individual people for bad choices, but not to then despair of ‘the people’ en masse. Ironically, people voted for Brexit because of a similar attitude to the one you’re taking - that everything’s going wrong, that you can’t trust anybody (these days), that we need a big change to avoid nebulous disaster. But, in fact, none of that is true, either then or now. Most people don’t support Reform, most people didn’t even support Brexit (and only a very narrow majority even of those who voted supported it). People (and countries) are a mess of contradictory thoughts and feelings, and we shouldn’t focus only on the negatives!

As to politicians, it is right to think badly of them, because elite opinion does effect mass opinion, whether we like it or not. So, traditional parties from both wings adopting accommodationist policies towards the far right has made the far right worse; that is the cause of our problems and so that should be the target of our anger.