So which is worse ... President Trump or Prime Minister Corbyn?

[GuidoLS]

It's official - Trump is the worse option, as there's now rumors that he's considering Jesse 'The Body' Ventura, former pro-wrestler, ex-governor of Minnesota (and by all accounts, a poor one), and current resident of Mexico as his Vice Presidential partner...

And to think that I used to think European politics were both funny and frightening at the same time....

[TeePee]

What's really interesting is the public opinion surrounding Jesse Ventura isn't great amongst the ignorant redneck segment of the republican party, who trump really appeals to.

About a year ago Ventura won a lawsuit against the estate of a deceased marine and author of 'American Sniper' called Chris Kyle. Because they never let facts get in the way of the outrage Fox News tells them they should have, the redneck segment of America was irate that he had sued the wife and child of this war hero, etc. There's no love lost between Ventura and the spectacularly ignorant, who, of course, make up 100% of Trump's potential voting base.

[Saracen]

There's some talk about misinterpretation and misrepresentation. The biggest in this thread is trying to somehow tie together Corbyn and Trump. Corbyn's ideas are moderate in the scope of a socialist ideaology. Compare him with Bernie Sanders by all means.

The original question was very deliberately wide open to interpretation, though. There is a tie between the two - both are seeking the leadership of a political party that could lead to them them running their respective countries. The inference of the question was people's relative opinion of the implications of both succeeding. It might be both are dire, but one worse than the other. It might be one good, one bad. Technically, the possibilities include both being great, though I struggle with the mindset that might endorse both - it'd be akin to supporting both Karl Marx and Attila the Hun.

[opel80uk]

The original question was very deliberately wide open to interpretation, though. There is a tie between the two - both are seeking the leadership of a political party that could lead to them them running their respective countries. The inference of the question was people's relative opinion of the implications of both succeeding. It might be both are dire, but one worse than the other. It might be one good, one bad. Technically, the possibilities include both being great, though I struggle with the mindset that might endorse both - it'd be akin to supporting both Karl Marx and Attila the Hun.

This goes back to what I had said earlier in the thread; there is an effort to paint Corbyn as, as there was with Ed Miliband, as wacky and as dangerous as possible, despite his policies being reasonably moderate in reality. Trump is a genuine wack job who is ignorant, misogynistic and racist, with policies specifically tailored around those views. Corbyn, for all his faults and, whether you agree with him or not, comes across as decent and principled, with a refusal to engage in the personal. The connotation of asking which is worse, is IMO clear; You don't get too many conversations starting with 'which footballer is worse, Messi or Ronaldo.'

I understand what you say above regarding what the intended inference of the question was, but the inference I took from it was that that they were both, potentially, as bad as each other, with the question really being which one should we (presumably leaving aside whether we are from the UK or the USA for the discussion purposes) be most be worried about. To consider Corbyn, even if the Prime Minister and President had exactly the same amount of influence and power, potentially as bad a leader as someone who, for me, is a genuine loon is grossly unfair, IMO.

That said, it's all academic anyway. Corbyn, cannot win a general election; He is unelectable.

[Saracen]

On it being academic, people thought he couldn't conceivably win the Labour leadership election either. There's a few Labour MPs now wearing embarrassed or chagrinned expressions over that. People also thought there was no way the Tories could get an outright majority in the last GE, and I'm still waiting for a certain Mr Ashdown to fulfill his pledge to eat a hat on live TV. Though he certainly ended up eating a large portion of 'crow'.

Suppose (as seems eminently plausible, maybe probable) Corbyn wins the Labour leadership. Suppose, then, that first, Labour don't split over it, and further, nobody successfully organises a putsch berween now and the next election, so he remains leader. Finally, suppose some economic, or even political, disaster befalls the Tories in late 2019 or early 2020. Maybe a horrendous slease scandal, or MPs expenses v2.0, or an economic meltdown. Or something as electorally 'popular' as re-introducing the Poll Tax. Whatever.

The point is, IF Labour is lead by Corbyn, and IF the Tories badly step on their collective doodah's, we MIGHT face a situation where Corbynite Labour win by virtue of being the least disliked of what's very likely the only two realistic contenders, at least, as head of the largest party in a left coalition.

Personally, as might be self-evident, I'm not a fan of Corbynite policy. I've nothing against the man, but I think he's an atavistic throughback to bygone problems, just not living in the modern political world, and with potential to do this country great harm. Seeing him win the Labour leadership would be kinda funny, but if he goes on to win, or even threaten to win, a general election, it'd wipe the smirk right off my face, and a good number of others finding the current fiasco amusing.

The actual question, though, has been largely ignored, which was about a president, and PM. The inference of that was that both Trump and Corbyn won, and which one was "worse". I.e. relative to each other. That could, as I said, be that one's great and one's less great, though I struggle to see how anyone could see both as good/great results. One, or t'other yeah, but both?

So while good and better are possible, I grant you, it's unlikely. Good and bad are possible interpretations, either way round, as are bad and really bad, as are dire and utter catastrophe, etc. That's why I worded it vaguely. It's for people posting to interpret what they think of each winning individually, and then relative to each other.

[scaryjim]

... Suppose (as seems eminently plausible, maybe probable) Corbyn wins the Labour leadership. Suppose, then, that first, Labour don't split over it, and further, nobody successfully organises a putsch berween now and the next election, so he remains leader. Finally, suppose some economic, or even political, disaster befalls the Tories in late 2019 or early 2020. Maybe a horrendous slease scandal, or MPs expenses v2.0, or an economic meltdown. Or something as electorally 'popular' as re-introducing the Poll Tax. Whatever.

The point is, IF Labour is lead by Corbyn, and IF the Tories badly step on their collective doodah's, we MIGHT face a situation where Corbynite Labour win by virtue of being the least disliked of what's very likely the only two realistic contenders, at least, as head of the largest party in a left coalition. ...

The interesting bit of all this for me, is that if we were looking at a realistic possibility of Corbyn leading a united Labour to a general election victory, it would imply that he'd managed to keep the Labour party united under his leadership for 5 years. The only way I see that happening is if he is able to balance his own lefter-leaning politics with some of the more centrist elements in the party. Hell, if Corbyn *is* the leader of a united Labour party in five years, I wouldn't be at all surprised if that shape of that Labour party was something that could win a general election. It'd certainly suggest an immense amount of political savvy on Corbyn's part to stay in charge that long...

[GreenPiggy]

This is not Telegraph stories. It is ONS official, FINAL data, not even the preliminary data tgat, as usual, led to newspaper reports of recession.

What I said was successive claims of double dip, and even triple dip recession were wrong. They simply did not happen.

Yes many apologies, I do recall that Q1 2012 was originally estimated as a contraction which would have been a recession, however I don't think that because the 4 quarterly contractions/stagnations were non-consecutive, that suddenly makes it any less of a disastrous performance - wouldn't you say?
I'm not interested in what Ed Balls says, i'm not a Labour voter and am wildly happy that he's been gotten rid of, he's almost as annoying as Michael Gove.
What I *am* saying is that the economic record of the Tories is abysmal.

And that is to misinterpret two other things.

First, that GDP is below 2008 levels, still. Yet it is. But why? Because those 5 successive quarters, during the credit crunch, peaking at -2.8%, knocked about 8% off GDP. That was while Labour were in power. Now, thee's an argument to be had about the extent to which, despite being in power, Labour were to blame for that. At a minimum, a fair bit of it was imported and outside their ability to influence, mitigate or avoid. What you can't do, with any credibility, is to blame the Tories for a reduction in GDP that occured two years before they took (shared) office.

I'm failing to understand why you would say this, of course the recession happened under Labour, i'm saying that the ridiculous cuts that happened afterwards destroyed the recovery and flatlined the economy for 2 years?

And, having inherited (whoever was to blame) that hole, a whole of that magnitude takes time to fill in, whoever is doing it, Tory or Labour.

A hole of what magnitude? - the last 4 quarters before George Osborne moved into no.11 were :
2009 Q3 0.2
2009 Q4 0.4
2010 Q1 0.5
2010 Q2 1
So with an economy growing at a 4% annualised rate(or 2.1 if we average the 4 previous quarters), we are now claiming that it took three years to turn this round? - I wasn't under the impression that to continue growth you were under an obligation to stop it for 2 years first.

Next, "George Osborne has added" more to national debt than every Labour Chancellor in history. Do you understand the implications of deficit as opposed to debt?

When the coalition took office, the debt was at about £800bn, and even with "austerity", the emergency budget predicted it would hit about £1.4tn to £1.5tn, because of the deficit. And so did Alastair Darling's forecasts.

Every year of a deficit inevitable adds to that debt. The rate of increase of debt is determined by the size of deficit. Labours policy was to reduce the deficit slower. Remeber the argument, too far, too fast? Again, we can argue about the social impact of faster deficit reduction, but what's not arguable is that slower deficit reduction, as Labour wanted, leads to larger debt just as night leads to day.

You can't gave it both ways, blaming Osborbe for the size of national debt, then arguing deficit reduction was too fast.

Nicely patronised.
The point to the warnings of too far, too fast here is that it is meaningless to look at debt as a number, rather than as a percentage of GDP.
There are two ways to solve your dept problem,
1 is to reduce it directly by running a surplus - something I believe we were due to have by now, by the way?
2 is to grow your way out of it, if growth % is greater than deficit %, then over time you reduce the national dept simply by growing your economy faster than your debt(and also letting inflation eat away at it)
Now there are specific circumstances in which 1) is appropriate or 2) is appropriate and if you listen to any competent economist, the approach to take during a post-recession slump is overwhelmingly 2)
Alastair Darlings predictions may have been the same but I ask what is better, 1.5 Trillion or 1.5 Trillion with a GDP that is 5% higher?

All of which explanation will i'm sure lead to the inevitable 'but you only have one choice, spending cuts or tax rises?' which is the general howl from the right wing press when it comes to talking about cuts, and of course the explanation is that obviously not all spending is equal - let's for a second delve into how George Osborne decided what to cut when he was on his spree:
In his growth calculations, he assumed that all public spending had a fiscal multiplier of 0.5(for the uninitiated, a fiscal multiplier is a measure of how much money is returned to the economy for each pound of spending, essentially a 'return on investment') - if it sounds like making an assumption that all government spending(or investment) is 50% wasted sounds remarkably stupid then you'd be correct, it IS completely stupid.
So we ended up with indiscriminate spending cuts instead of targeted spending cuts(or alternatively, target tax rises)
Here are a few examples of (retroactively studied by Moody's and/or the OBR) for specific areas of spending or taxation(some of these are US policies)
Cutting Corporation Tax: 0.3
Extending unemployment Benefits: 1.64
Increase provision of food stamps: 1.73
Extending Bush tax cuts(mainly higher income tax cuts): 0.29
UK Construction Spending: 2.84
What did we get from Osborne? Indiscriminate spending cuts(since everything was assigned as 50% waste), Massive corporation tax cuts and small tax cuts for everyone(personal allowance) plus extra(BIG) tax cuts for top earners(45% rate) - all of which are pretty poor measures for producing growth.
As you can see, certain things are really beneficial to economic growth, others are not, and an IMF study concluded that the things George Osborne cut actually had fiscal multiplers of (on average) 1.3 - so he basically vandalised the british economy for no measurably good reason.
To quote the report:
"Our results indicate that multipliers have actually been in the 0.9 to 1.7 range since the Great Recession. This finding is consistent with research suggesting that in today’s environment of substantial economic slack, monetary policy constrained by the zero lower bound, and synchronized fiscal adjustment across numerous economies, multipliers may be well above 1."

Some references:
George Osborne spending cuts wiped 5% off UK economy:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/george-osbo...-niesr-1486866
IMF report:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/.../02/pdf/c1.pdf
Here's a critique of Osborne from a Nobel-prize winning economist:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/op...urse.html?_r=0
Also a good critique(with graphs!)
http://benjaminstudebaker.com/2015/0...david-cameron/
Why the personal allowance raise is bad economics:
http://www.economist.com/news/britai...-bad-economics

[Saracen]

The magnitude of the hole was determined by those 5 successive quarters around 2008/09. We knocked, IIRC, about 8% off GDP in that. Monthly/quarterly performance since then has fluctuated, quite a bit, from more or less flatline, to batter than anyone predicted.

In the meantime, debt was inevitably going to rise hugely, as predicted by Osborne, as forecast by Darling and as forecast by Balls. That would have happened with either Tories or Labour in power.

And yeah, growth is one way out, but it wasn't going to happen overnight. And the core argument was which set of policies was better. Truth is, whether you're left or right leaning, we can never know, because only one route got enacted. We can, by definition, not know what would have happened had Labour been in power. Maybe better, maybe worse. We cannot possibly know.

Nobody in their right mind is going to claim things are now, or have been for the last 5 years, all sunshine and roses. The Tories, you'll note, have certainly not been claiming that. A year of flatlining, in absolute terms, ain't great. The one thing it is is better than one possible alternative, that being further recessions.

I agree on Ed Balls having now gone, but his views over the last 5 years have relevance in the context that had the Tories not been in power, it's very likely Balls would have been Chancellor in a Brown government. it was widely thought that Darling only lasted to the election because zbrown couldn't dump him before it, and no secret that they weren't soulmates, whereas Balls was one of Brown's principle economic advisors. It's therefore suggestive of the accuracy of Ball's predictions for what he'd have done when he predicted doom and gloom for the Tories, such as vast extra unemployment and double, even triple dip recession, and none of it happened.

However, a rehash of what might have been in economic results over the previous 5 years is of limited relevance to this thread, and I've done it all in the past anyway.

[Quinnbeast]

Just one sub is enough to level all the important cities in Russia.....

It isn't about a deranged leader, it's about rational mutually assured destruction. Ensuring that the cost of aggression is too high to bear. I think Putin is a dangerous man, I don't think he is a nutter at all, far from it, it's hard to not admire his accomplishments in a Machiavellian manner.

People argued that closer economic integration would prevent the great war. People insisted that the German literary building up wasn't happening. Idealism does not prevent war.

Having your entire nuclear arsenal carried by one single active submarine is also a primary reason that the whole system is borderline comical. Better hope it doesn't break down eh? Not to mention that the scrapping of the Nimrod program has left the submarine fleet hopelessly open to foreign surveillance. There were reports earlier this year that the MoD had to ask for surveillance assistance from two US P3 Orions with regards to one of the Vanguards subs departing from Faslane.

There's also the question of whether a sub could actually land a missile on a designated target of any real importance; the presence of the ABM-3 Gazelle system on Russian soil suggests that's it's really not very likely. And let's not also forget, Russia already knows the UKs exactly nuclear capability in fine detail, after the Obama administration signed an arms control deal in 2011 that guaranteed exactly that. The Trident system couldn't really be any more redundant, and everyone knows it. As a former Vulcan squadron commander (previous delivery system) once said, it's a “stick-on hairy chest”.

[TheAnimus]

Having your entire nuclear arsenal carried by one single active submarine is also a primary reason that the whole system is borderline comical. Better hope it doesn't break down eh? Not to mention that the scrapping of the Nimrod program has left the submarine fleet hopelessly open to foreign surveillance. There were reports earlier this year that the MoD had to ask for surveillance assistance from two US P3 Orions with regards to one of the Vanguards subs departing from Faslane.

But it's 4. Not 1. One or more are active at any given time.

There's also the question of whether a sub could actually land a missile on a designated target of any real importance; the presence of the ABM-3 Gazelle system on Russian soil suggests that's it's really not very likely. And let's not also forget, Russia already knows the UKs exactly nuclear capability in fine detail, after the Obama administration signed an arms control deal in 2011 that guaranteed exactly that. The Trident system couldn't really be any more redundant, and everyone knows it. As a former Vulcan squadron commander (previous delivery system) once said, it's a “stick-on hairy chest”.

This reminds me of the FUD that was been thrown around by the anti-defence lots during the Scottish referendum. Apparently anti basaltic missile defence systems are easy and simple now, regardless of MIRV and the like.

I love the idea that people think a rocket at Mach 17 will accurately intercept multiple targets with a teeny little 10kt blast.

Even the Iron Dome thing which is a remarkable achievement took a lot of practice to get to it's efficiency level, that was just dealing with slow rockets.

[The Hand]

On Corbyn:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33991920

It's funny how these revelations materialise when people are deciding how to vote isn't it?

[neonplanet40]

BBC likes discrediting politicians it doesn't want to win

[peterb]

There's also the question of whether a sub could actually land a missile on a designated target of any real importance; the presence of the ABM-3 Gazelle system on Russian soil suggests that's it's really not very likely. And let's not also forget, Russia already knows the UKs exactly nuclear capability in fine detail, after the Obama administration signed an arms control deal in 2011 that guaranteed exactly that. The Trident system couldn't really be any more redundant, and everyone knows it. As a former Vulcan squadron commander (previous delivery system) once said, it's a “stick-on hairy chest”.

The whole point is that a weapon with such destructive potential doesn't have to be accurately targeted. It doesn't really matter if it is only accurate to (say) 5km, the destruction would overwhelm the civil powers in any city, and if pointed at a military target, again absolute accuracy is immaterial.

[Quinnbeast]

Re: TheAnimus

Four subs are the current minimum requirement to have one sub on active duty at any given time. This was stated in Labour's Strategic Defence Review from the late 90s, and as I understand it, nothing has changed since then. If anything, the level of personnel and the number of warheads available has dropped steadily. Typically, one or two subs will be docked for repair or routine maintenance, one or two will be on training or test maneuvers, and one (and only one) will be at sea with the capability to go to full alert with live warheads. Even then, it can take several days to have all weapons armed once the word is given.

And while it wasn't my intention to suggest that anti-MIRV technology was an I-win button, the effectiveness of the UKs highly limited arsenal remains fairly dubious. I assume that you consider the chronic lack of anti-submarine surveillance to be inconsequential? Given that Russia can pick and choose between it's sub, bomber and land based fleets for delivery of a missile, our one active sub looks hilariously open to interception. Oh, and it's nice that you dropped in the FUD reference as a pro-trident individual. I laughed. Thanks.

[Lanky123]

30 years on with Trident, the times change but the arguments don't...

https://youtu.be/XyJh3qKjSMk

[adidan]

Corbyn didn't even want to enter the race at the start, he saw himself as the proverbial left wing candidate whose turn it was to have their name put forward to be ditched at the first opportunity.

The thing is there is no denying that he has struck a chord with people, particularly with the young, who are fed up of listening to random same-old same-old guff that spouts from politicians. Many people are also fed up with being told that they have to suffer austerity as, indirectly, it's their fault anyway when it was, for the most part, the direct fault of financial institutions and the major political parties in general.

Even Mervyn King admits as much

The former Bank of England governor Mervyn King has denied that the previous Labour government was responsible for the financial crash, saying there was a shared intellectual responsibility across the political parties and financial institutions for failing to foresee the problems.

clicky

It's certainly made it interesting, if nothing else, and you can see why a politician who appears to be speaking what he truly feels has gained support.