Wow, this site is becoming well niche
So the Labour Party needs to put Jeremy Corbyn before everything else? According to the report, he failed to deal with anti-semitism properly within the Labour Party. I am ploughing through the report now and it is hard to see another conclusion. Starmer is. If Corbyn had chosen his words differently he would not be where he is now. This has nothing to do with sweeping anything under the carpet.
I don’t think anyone said anything he said was racist. What he did was to play down the findings of a report which were pretty damning about how claims of anti- semitism were dealt with under his leadership. Trump could get away with it. Someone in Corbyn’s position really should have chosen his words more carefully.
I voted for Corbyn in two elections. To lose to Johnson so comprehensively takes some doing.
I think people have very short memories about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, especially before the 2017 election. He’d not been leader two years, had most of his Parliamentary Party trying to do him in, alongside what was initially a Blairite NEC for Labour.
The Labour leaks reports suggest that if anything, Corbyn wanted these cases addressed with more urgency while the party machinery of the day, for their own factional aims, sat on them.
Going back to Ken Livingstone, I don’t think it was Corbyn’s call to keep him in a state of perma-suspension, only to have his case become a story again every time it was up for review.
It’s civil war
The Tories can’t make the goal any bigger and any more open and Labour are going to fuck it up again
And it seems they’re too stupid to realise it. It’s so farcical that I get the feeling Labour are being played but then again I like a good unsubstantiated conspiracy theory
Politics has turned to shit here and in the US. Trump has long been a farce and his refusal to concede is just the cherry on the cake. Over here we have an inept government with one opposition party more determined to pull itself apart rather than get elected and the other has disappeared up its own collective backside. I’m still wading through the 130 page report but it seems the obvious thing to do when this was published was to apologise for any shortcomings and to put into place measures to deal with those shortcomings. Job done. By effectively saying that the report was inaccurate he just dug himself deeper into the hole that swallowed him up in the election. Livingstone isn’t the Labour Party. Corbyn isn’t the Labour Party. Starmer isn’t the Labour Party. The infighting has to stop if the party are serious about getting themselves elected again. During the last election it was said that a faction in the Labour Party would rather see Johnson as PM than Corbyn. Now it looks like there is a faction who would rather see Johnson than Starmer. What the fuck is going on? The party I voted for for years, the LibDems, have managed to make themselves virtually extinct. The Labour Party are sadly heading the same way.
You know I’m a big Corbyn man, but I am also realistic enough to know that period is over. Shame, because I think he had a lot of good retail policy that would appeal to families of either stripe.
Starmer and his cohort are not the answer. Blue Labour might be.
I had never really given Blue Labour much time before. I assumed that they were going to be worse than the Blairites purely on account of their name, but that’s not what they’re about.
Basically, they represent a strand of Labour that wants to meld social conservatism with family and community based policy, aimed at addressing the exact voters that switched sides in 2019.
I think that Labour would be a Labour I could vote for. I reckon you probably could too.
As constituted, it is fucked up beyond all recognition, and as much as Keir Starmer wants to differentiate his tenure from Corbyn’s, he has already made more mistakes in his first year than Corbyn did in five.
He’s reneged so much on his pledge to seek party unity that the Oxford Dictionary team are having to find a new word stronger than “renege”.
Labour needs clearing out and repopulating with real people.
Parliament needs clearing out and repopulating with real people
The problem is that there is no real mechanism for it. I would be a big fan of giving England its own Parliament and reducing the scope of what Westminster can do, a sort of federal Parliament with a lot less policy remit.
That would probably be easier than trying to get these bastards out. They’ve got it sewn up.
At the moment we have a corrupt government who are stripping the nations assets in plain sight and handing them to various friends, donors and cronies, literally billions of pounds. A kleptocracy. A government, who due to their total incompetence in the handling of the Covid crisis, wrong headed decisions made for purely political reasons are responsible for the premature deaths of thousands of people. People are crying out for a proper opposition to this, for an opposition leader who isn’t frightened to take the gloves off and call it for what it is. But we appear to be lumbered with a leader of the opposition who may be very effective in forensically questioning Johnson, showing how clever he is which is all well and good in a court of law, but in the long run is totally ineffective against a pathological liar like Johnson. Sir Keir is establishment through and through, a safe pair of hands who won’t frighten the horses with left wing policies, and will expend energy purging socialist ‘troublemakers’ from the party. He is more concerned with not incurring the wrath of the Mail, Express and The Sun and their readers.
We have been here before of course, with the advent of Tony Blair. The similarities are striking, Blair gained the leadership with promises of a New Dawn, a sitting Tory government mired in corruption. Which very quickly unraveled once he gained power and became just another right wing conservative control freak, in thrall to consecutive US Presidents and their murderous foreign policies. People need to be offered a proper alternative to this, a proper opposition, a clear ideological choice. They certainly won’t get this with Sir Keir Starmer.
A couple of days ago i read something that sums it all up, published by someone who’s job it is to keep a record of such things. Do you know what is Starmers most repeated phrase at PMQs and in interviews given since assuming the leadership? “I support the government”.
He did when he was DPP too.
He boasted about his part in getting the sentencing changed for benefit cheats upped to a maximum of ten years, utterly in line with the government’s anti-claimant agenda.
I’d never heard of Blue Labour before so I googled it. It lost me at suggesting links with the EDL.
Re agreeing with the government, isn’t it the grown up thing to do? If you agree with something, say so and don’t just argue against it for the sake of it. Starmer is picking his fights and comes across, to me anyway, as a formidable adversary. By opposing every single thing they do, you lose your objectivity. Of course there will be things you agree with, so why not say so? At least then, when you disagree, people will take more note of what you are saying but it means something other than being contrary just because that is your job.
Starmer comes across as infinitely more Prime Ministerial than Johnson. Ok, that is not difficult, but he is exposing his incompetence far more expertly than Corbyn used to.
Can you fish that our for me please?
One of the dudes behind Blue Labour is Maurice Glasman, a Jewish mush.
Can’t imagine the EDL would be his cup of tea.
Indeed! I’ll see if I can find it again.
If the nonce reference concerns the non prosecution of Saville, that was not down to Starmer directly. The Chief Crown Prosecutor for the area would have made that decision, not the DPP. The call would have been made on the amount of evidence they had at the time and the prospect of a successful prosecution.