I've just posted something on the thread about Lucy Powell's selection in which I commented on the improvement in the quality of debate on this site, since I first looked at it in its early days, and despaired. That was based on reading that thread. Then I read this one ...
Can I take it all back, please?! Apart from the contributions from one or two clearly sceptical participants, some of whom are evidently disillusiioned ex-Labour members or voters, the quality of the debate is so abysmal that it's a wonder Paul Ankers didn't win Chorlton by a huge margin. I can only assume that none of the contributors that I have in mind wrote any of Labour's election leaflets in Chorlton, or he surely would have done so!
I was never much tempted towards Labour in its glory days, such as they were, but I was often struck by the integrity, vision and commitment to a better society exhibited by some Labour people, even when I disagreed with them over what that was, or how to get there. Against that, there was always the counterbalance of pettiness, arrogance, nest-feathering and sheer blatant corruption that I saw when Labour was in power in local government in industrial south Wales, where I then lived, and which for years encouraged me to distrust all political parties.
But there at least the nastiness and corruption was usually on a grand .. sometimes even a heroic! - scale. This thread, at its worst, exhibits a primary playground level of debate and discussion. If I were a Chorlton Lib Dem, in every "Focus" I'd be advising electors to find their reasons for not voting Labour in a study of all the "yah boo sucks" stuff in this thread! It'd be more effective than any arguments they could produce themselves.
My sincere sympathies to all reasonable Labour members and disillusioned ex-Labourites. Though perhaps, as one who has never been tempted by Labour, and who has in more recent years become a card-carrying Lib Dem, I shouldn't intrude on private grief!
