Brexit

Whilst I don't share some of his political views, McDonnell has more organisational nous in his little toe than Johnson, Williamson, Grayling, Hancock, Raab and Patel could muster between them on a very good day. He'd have had properly functioning track and trace systems in place months ago.

It's incredible that we are six months into the pandemic and we are nowhere near having properly operational systems, let alone the 'world beating' ones we were promised.
What makes it even worse is that the expertise has been there on the ground all along, in the form of local government public health and sexual diseases teams, but this illusion of a government refused to use them, along with all the small testing labs that offered their services and got no response. They preferred to dish out lucrative contracts, without competitive tender, so their serial failure friends like Dido Harding and Serco could make a total Horlicks of the job..

 

At the time you voted you voted Corbyn. You could have abstained. But clearly chose not to. So don't give us this big Starmer lecture.

 

I repeat, I voted for the Labour Party. I actually voted for the Labour candidate in Shipley. We don't have a presidential system in the UK. You vote for the party not the leader.
What purpose would abstaining have served? It would just have made a Tory government more likely to be elected. I had severe reservations about Corbyn as a leader, but I was in no doubt that a Labour government headed by him would be preferable to the utter shower of shit that we are saddled with now - the most incompetent government in living memory, by a country mile.

 

Good story except you were voting in a GE not a local by election. So you were supporting Corbyn and his neutral Brexit policy.

 

No I wasn't. In a general election you vote for a party to be the government. That means you have to consider all aspects of a party's proposals. I was opposed to Corbyn's Brexit fence sitting, but GE's are not single issue votes. Brexit was only one of the issues. The prospect of five more years of incompetent Tory rule was more than enough to make me vote Labour, regardless of my disagreement with Corbyn's Brexit stance.

 

Go on @Keefly Bantam , I new you'd come good.....eventually..

 

And yet he couldn’t get a functioning Labour head office together in the years him and Corbyn were in charge

 

Unfortunatly Steve brexit was the main issue and was always going to be the deciding factor of why the likes of myself and many voters in Labour strongholds in the past thought neither the Labour party or any other parties would/could deliver.
I do agree with your comment with regards voting for a part rather than an individual.

 

McDonnell was so incompetent when in office in London he was fired by a LABOUR leader to save the council from bankruptcy, He had to be be removed to save the council, But hey ho he would be your choice which says a lot about your judgment

 

As usual, your description bears no relation to what actually happened in the real world. McDonnell was not sacked by Ken Livingstone for incompetence; nor was it about bankruptcy. When head of finance at the GLC McDonnell delivered a string of balanced budgets, whilst delivering improved services and free public transport. Thatcher hated the GLC because it was so popular with the public and gave the lie to her governments loopy monetarist economic policies. So she imposed punitive rate capping to stop Labour councils funding the services that people liked. McDonnell cooked the books to make the impact of the rate capping look even worse than it already was.

It was not incompetence, nor a failure of organisation - it was a deliberate political act, albeit a reckless and foolish one, by a young radical politician (he was only 34 at the time). Livingstone, quite rightly, sacked him, but has acknowledged that McConnell was a brilliant head of finance.
McDonnell has various faults, but incompetence isn't one of them. He's a born organiser who would have had test, track and trace running efficiently months ago if he'd been responsible for them.

 

HaHa good on you, stick by him but he was sacked for financial incompetence despite the excuses the left always have that it is always somebody elses fault,
BTW, Thatcher imposed rate capping to stop councils massively spending money they did not have burdoning rate payers for years to come on dodgy spending

 

Nope. There was no incompetence about it. It was a political act. He had five years of balanced budgets. There was no question of spending money they didn't have. The policies that he and Livingstone pursued in London were so successful that the only way Thatcher could stop the GLC showing up her moneterist economics for the nonsense it was, was to abolish it.

 

From the Daily Mail,
John McDonnell 'misled the public over the finances of Greater London Council and ordered civil servants to destroy evidence'

• John McDonnell is accused of lying and literally shredding secret budgets
• In the Left's looniest heyday, he was the Greater London Council's 'Chancellor'
• The Mail’s dossier shows disturbing evidence of his approach to taxpayer funds

in the documents, both Livingstone and senior GLC civil servant Reg Race directly accuse McDonnell of ordering that papers which set out the council’s true financial position be ‘shredded’.
A former GLC official, who witnessed many of the events detailed in the confidential reports, told the Mail: ‘This man must never be allowed in charge of public finances.’
As part of the campaign, McDonnell repeatedly claimed the Tory proposals would mean £140 million worth of cuts and huge job losses in London.In fact, GLC officials calculated that government spending limits would result in a gain of £25 million
To McDonnell, his boss was too ‘middle of the road’. It was McDonnell, not Livingstone, who suggested that the GLC Labour Group hold open talks with the IRA in the week that a nail bomb at Chelsea Barracks had killed two pedestrians.
In three disastrous years as chairman of the finance committee, McDonnell took London to the brink of ruin
Livingstone wrote about the rate-capping dispute in his book You Can’t Say That and recalled that when he found out about McDonnell’s bogus budget, he told him: ‘We’re going to look like the biggest f***ing liars since Goebbels.’

 

Apart from the last two paragraphs that piece says exactly what I said - it was a deliberate political act by McDonnell to make Thatcher's cuts look worse than they were. Livingstone sacked McDonnell, not for incompetence but because his subterfuge was politically disastrous.
The bit about 'three disastrous years' is just pure Daily Mail propaganda. McDonnell delivered balanced budgets. He did not in any way take London to the brink of ruin. That's just lies, intended to discredit the wildly popular GLC policies, which Londoners kept voting for, much to the fury of Thatcher and the Mail. The GLC was abolished, not because it was a failure but because it was so successful at delivering the kinds of policies that Thatcher hated.

 

LOL...

 

LOL...

 

You and your Daily Mail propaganda LOL ...

 

I see you've upped your game in the Constructive Discussion Stakes.

 

Yeah, but you are so daft that it is all you deserve.........

 

"He became the GLC's chair of finance and deputy leader to Ken Livingstone, who described him as having an "absolute grasp for detail and every year he produced a balanced budget, no borrowing"