I am not sure when you Tories are going to realise that Labour, as constituted, is not left wing.
Labour can’t win power with by-elections, but a shit performance there could be the end of Starmer.
Who again, is not on the left wing. So why the fuck we should want him I don’t know.
So Lord Cooper, a former advisor to various Conservative leaders who ended up as David Cameron’s director of strategy in No 10, responsible for austerity amongst other things, is now advising Keir Starmer. Lord O’ Neill of Gatley, the former Goldman Sachs banker who was a Treasury minister under George Osborne is now an adviser to Rachel Reeves. It really does beg the question, what is the fucking point of the Labour Party as currently constituted and led? Why on earth would anybody with even a remotely socialist point of view give these bastards their vote? They are working on the Mandelson principle that people who are sick of the current Tory government will automatically vote for them because they have ‘nowhere else to go’, their votes completely taken for granted. Well they can fuck right off, I really hope they get what they deserve and get royally shafted at the next election. Unless Starmer is challenged and replaced by a proper Labour leader that’s what will happen.
I think you answered your own question there.
Who would be a “proper Labour leader”?
Corbyn
He’s had a go though, and for whatever reason(s), it didn’t work out for him. I was just wondering who in the current Labour Party would be acceptable to @Nottarf-Krap as an alternative to Starmer.
To be honest I think it’s probably a moot point now because from the outset of Keir Starmer’s leadership he and his backers, ie Peter Mandelson, Blair and various New Labour and establishment figures have been picking off and kicking out thousands of members from the left, for various spurious reasons, who would have voted against Starmer in any leadership contest. To be honest I don’t think Starmer and co really care about or even want the votes of anyone remotely of the left, they are totally reliant on the votes of Conservative supporters and voters, banking on them being so disillusioned by the absolute shitshow and blatant corruption of the current government they will vote for him providing he promises Conservative policies, which of course is exactly what he is doing. If he becomes PM, which at the moment is pretty much a given, nothing will really change for the overwhelming majority of us, he clearly has no intention of taking the radical decisions necessary to even begin to start redressing the shift of wealth and transfer of national assets from the poorest in society to the richest that has taken place over the tenure of the Conservative government, ‘For the few, not the many’ could easily be his rallying cry at the next election! He’s clearly terrified of upsetting the leader writers of The Telegraph, Mail, Express et al, naively believing that when the chips are down in a general election campaign they won’t revert to type and spend weeks crucifying him and his Party.
As to your question, personally I like Clive Lewis, Andy Burnham would be a vast improvement on Starmer and he is the one they are frightened of as evidenced by the briefing against him from the Party establishment every time he pops up with any radical policy suggestions. It will upset the misogynists and have the Tory press and establishment’s heads exploding but I would love to see Angela Rayner in the job. Call me an old fashioned luddite but the leadership of the Labour Party should at least have a whiff of the working class about it, not as currently, middle class professionals and Knights of the realm who have never rolled their sleeves up and done a days proper work in their lives. Straight from a politics or economics degree to a researcher at Westminster to a safe Labour seat is not proper work IMO. But as I said this is all moot, Starmer and his establishment backers have made sure of that.
To my mind, the Labour Party has been a centrist party for about 30 years, aside from Corbyn’s brief reign and even then it wasn’t overly left wing (probably to try and unite the members), so i guess it aint gonna change anytime soon. It will be intriguing to see how left wing voters choose to vote next year, if indeed they do.
I’m glad you mentioned Burnham as an alternative as he seems to me to be the candidate most likely to be successful if he can be persuaded to launch a bid, although Starmer looks unlikely to relinquish power any time soon.
During Corbyn’s time as leader, I thought John McDonnell would have made a better chief, but just imho.
They’ve finally admitted it.
Quite.
Looking back to when Bliar got in power I remember the real buzz, and elation. People seemed really positive about the future ( except Tories obvs) .
It was Champagne Socialist time.
Conservatives with a social conscience?
I quaffed along with a lot of the population.
Then, eventually it all went sour.
If Labour get in again, the same thing will happen.
Just like the mess the Tories have created - OK, probably not as big a shit-show as we’re currently experiencing, but it’ll inevitably go wrong as complacency and the greed / arrogance of MPs sets in (cf Hubris)
There’s a parallel with that election, in that the tories are close to unelectable. But Labour aren’t carrying any sense of hope or optimism about themselves, their sole electoral advantage is that they aren’t the tories. Blair turned out to be the absolute mother of all wrong’uns, but he held out a genuine hope of a new political direction for the nation. Ok, it turned out to be about as ill-founded as it could have been, but the hope was there.
Exactly
That’s probably what I should have typed, but didn’t, obvs 
WTAF
Labour really don’t want to get elected
If not implemented correctly this will harm the future confidence of a lot of future voters- says me who now talks all day to clients/audiences but would have gone awol if it was stuffed down my throat at school - ooh, err 
Not sure “Labour wants better oral skills from children” is going to resonate
Dont normally have a lot of time for Owen Jones but i agree with him 100% here
Absolutely sickening isn’t it, and so disappointing to see the likes of Angela Rayner who has constantly described the two child policy as ‘obscene’, and Jonathan Ashworth who described it as ‘heinous’ defending Starmer’s position today. Clearly their personal ambition trumps everything else. It’s to be expected that the likes of Yvette Balls and Reeves will support it but these two? They need to have a long hard look in the mirror.
On a lighter note, I saw with amusement that a furious Starmer and his team are haranguing Twitter and ordering them to take action because ‘Sir Kid Starver’ is the number 1 trending thing on the site and has gone viral. I think his new nickname will stick, Sir Kid has shot himself in the foot. Emulating the Tories by moving to the extreme right wing, courting and drinking champagne with Murdoch as he was last weekend, wedded to austerity and privatisation, now adding a broad streak of deliberate cruelty by punching down hard on the weak, the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. There is no difference at all between the Tory and Labour leaderships, same shite, different tin. I fail to see how anyone with even the slightest hint of a social conscience and decency, never mind socialism, could possibly vote for this charlatan. All you will get is an authoritarian government with Blair and Mandelson lurking in the shadows.
Here’s a quote from someone who knew what he was talking about.
" If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce it’s Marxists, the media - having tasted blood - would demand next that it expelled all it’s socialists and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed out of the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years."
Tony Benn.
Just read the report on today’s PMQs, the last before our hard working MPs break up for their nearly 3 month summer holidays. It appears to have been absolutely owned by Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster.
“The two-child benefit cap has left 250,000 children in poverty. Does the PM take comfort from Labour’s support for this?”
Sunak says he welcomes Labour’s support for this. But Keir Starmer has never kept a promise he has made.
Flynn says Scots expect child poverty from the Tories. But not from Labour. A shiver is running along the Labour frontbench, he says, looking for a spine to go up.
LOL.