The Chairman Mao resembling, Monarchy hating, threat to Britain, Labour Party thread

[Davkaus]

6 hours ago, Xann said:

Starmer may be trying to sneak past the media into office by not thrreatening the wealthy parasites' gravy train?

Otherwise he's a prick.

He's positioning himself as close to the left of the tories as possible, to persuade them and the media "see, I'm just like you, it'll be the same, but I won't be so incompetent at it".

Labour in name only.

[bickster]

4 hours ago, picicata said:

Really? I kind of took from the speech the other day that they will look at becoming much closer to EU without actually joining again. Basically the Norway model.

Norway is effectively in the single market (EEA) and has FOM

Starmer ruled both those options out

[picicata]

7 minutes ago, bickster said:

Norway is effectively in the single market (EEA) and has FOM

Starmer ruled both those options out

Did he? I obviously missed that bit!

[LondonLax]

Anyone who went into the next election offering to bring back freedom of movement for Eastern European migrants to Britain would be slaughtered.

It will take a generation or more to get that back. 

[Jareth]

Labour are absolutely stuffed now. Ben Wallace for the sake of argument, looks likely to be the next PM - all those by election voters going yellow instead of blue will no longer be doing so. Labour can no longer depend on the Lib Dems to take enough seats off the tories, for them to get in. Also Starmer now needs to win a battle of ideas - not his strong suit. 

[blandy]

19 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Labour are absolutely stuffed now

No, they're really not. regardless of who is or isn't leader of any party, there's a ton of bad news coming on the cost of living and energy prices, pay rises, strikes, war, and all the rest of stuff and there's been a Tory government for 12 years. Labour might not win the next election outright, but they're not looking stuffed to me. There's still the issue of the process of picking the next Tory leader dragging on and there being in-fighting and more which will benefit Labour further.

[Jareth]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

No, they're really not. regardless of who is or isn't leader of any party, there's a ton of bad news coming on the cost of living and energy prices, pay rises, strikes, war, and all the rest of stuff and there's been a Tory government for 12 years. Labour might not win the next election outright, but they're not looking stuffed to me. There's still the issue of the process of picking the next Tory leader dragging on and there being in-fighting and more which will benefit Labour further.

I don't disagree with that forecast of misery - but the guy they just took out was riding high not long ago with tory voters. Whoever the tory membership pick next, if it is a clear favourite then all those tories out there are going to be merrily voting blue, even as the world is burning. Starmer has defined himself as not Boris - what on earth is he going to do up against a competent Tory leader? 

[blandy]

1 minute ago, Jareth said:

...Whoever the tory membership pick next, if it is a clear favourite then all those tories out there are going to be merrily voting blue, even as the world is burning. Starmer has defined himself as not Boris - what on earth is he going to do up against a competent Tory leader? 

I don't see it the same way. I think Starmer has defined himself as "not Corbyn" rather than "not Boris" and he had to, because all the polling and analysis strongly showed Corbyn was a massive negative for labour at the last election, in terms of influencing the overall outcome.

Of course Starmer isn't like Johnson, you're right (no one is). Whoever the 90,00 odd headbanging pensioners of the tory membership eventually pick out of the 2 they will be presented with, well they'll be picking a headbanger Brexity type, I imagine. So more of the same, but without so many lies, basically. In the same way that Corbyn was a negative for Labour, it's been the case for a while that Johnson is/was a negative now for the tories, so him going does offer some potential bounce back for them, but I don't see it lasting or surviving the coming storm.

[KentVillan]

20 hours ago, Davkaus said:

He's positioning himself as close to the left of the tories as possible, to persuade them and the media "see, I'm just like you, it'll be the same, but I won't be so incompetent at it".

Labour in name only.

He's just trying to win an election and not gift the Tories anything to attack. Think he's done a pretty good job of it, even if he's a crap public speaker with zero charisma.

IMO he's more left-wing than Blair and Brown, and will have a more left-wing front bench than they ever did. New Labour were traumatised by 18 years out of power and Thatcher completely reshaping the economy. I think Starmer would be more confident that he could actually do "Labour" things (e.g. winding back Brexit, redistributing wealth, deprivatising, etc) without facing another decade out of power.

I might be wrong, maybe he'll freeze if he wins an election. But the way he has quietly gone about reshaping the Labour Party post-Corbyn suggests he's a more ruthless figure than he comes across. And if temperamentally he is a true social democrat, then I think he'd have the conviction to implement stuff that New Labour shied away from.

Could all just be wishful thinking on my part, but I think there's little bits and pieces of evidence there that he is more serious and capable than he gets credit for.

[OutByEaster?]

13 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

He's just trying to win an election and not gift the Tories anything to attack. Think he's done a pretty good job of it, even if he's a crap public speaker with zero charisma.

IMO he's more left-wing than Blair and Brown, and will have a more left-wing front bench than they ever did. New Labour were traumatised by 18 years out of power and Thatcher completely reshaping the economy. I think Starmer would be more confident that he could actually do "Labour" things (e.g. winding back Brexit, redistributing wealth, deprivatising, etc) without facing another decade out of power.

I might be wrong, maybe he'll freeze if he wins an election. But the way he has quietly gone about reshaping the Labour Party post-Corbyn suggests he's a more ruthless figure than he comes across. And if temperamentally he is a true social democrat, then I think he'd have the conviction to implement stuff that New Labour shied away from.

Could all just be wishful thinking on my part, but I think there's little bits and pieces of evidence there that he is more serious and capable than he gets credit for.

I agree on everything that's about competence on here - he seems to be an effective politician - albeit one that lacks a little charisma.

I disagree with your rather hopeful assessment of his political position though - he's shown absolutely no will to wind back Brexit, redistribute wealth or deprivatise anything - and in fact has taken every step possible to remove those ideas from his Labour party - they were in the pledges he made when he pitched for the job, but he's jettisoned those since he got it and he's now working very hard to make sure he has policies and ideas that the press barons and the banks will like and support. 

He's an opportunist, not an idealist and he'll do what power tells him to in order to achieve power.

He's still a damned sight better than some of the appalling dross on the other side of the house though.

All that said, he now faces something of a challenge - he'll need to come out of his shell and who knows maybe there is a bit of the social democrat in him and we'll see it as he faces the challenge of needing to be something and someone that stands for something politically rather than just be a much better human being than the human sh*tstack opposite.

A big day for Starmer this - the proper job starts here.

 

 

[KentVillan]

21 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

I agree on everything that's about competence on here - he seems to be an effective politician - albeit one that lacks a little charisma.

I disagree with your rather hopeful assessment of his political position though - he's shown absolutely no will to wind back Brexit, redistribute wealth or deprivatise anything - and in fact has taken every step possible to remove those ideas from his Labour party - they were in the pledges he made when he pitched for the job, but he's jettisoned those since he got it and he's now working very hard to make sure he has policies and ideas that the press barons and the banks will like and support. 

He's an opportunist, not an idealist and he'll do what power tells him to in order to achieve power.

He's still a damned sight better than some of the appalling dross on the other side of the house though.

All that said, he now faces something of a challenge - he'll need to come out of his shell and who knows maybe there is a bit of the social democrat in him and we'll see it as he faces the challenge of needing to be something and someone that stands for something politically rather than just be a much better human being than the human sh*tstack opposite.

A big day for Starmer this - the proper job starts here.

 

 

I genuinely think the gravitational pull of the EU means that unless it’s a hard Brexiteer, whoever wins the next election will slowly reintegrate Britain with Europe. Starmer is just “scraping off the barnacles” - getting rid of pledges that won’t win him many votes, but will give the Tories and their outriders targets to aim at.

[blandy]

51 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

He's an opportunist, not an idealist and he'll do what power tells him to in order to achieve power.

That’s what political leaders who get to the top are and do. Rigid idealists get nowhere near power. The whole way politics works in democracies is about having to make compromises, having to read the room, having to tack this way and that, having to persuade the unpersuaded, having to pull in votes and voters who are not your natural supporters and to pick a small number of things to stand for or against that make “you” a clear sell to the voter. Then when you get the chance to be PM, you have to deal with “well I wouldn’t have started from here”. The economy might be trashed, so spending options are reduced, or there may be any number of limitations on what you actually like to ultimately do, but you can only spin so many plates.

Pretty much every human being has an outlook, key things they believe and have as their values. Starmer will be no different. If he ever gets to be PM the country won’t be as it was in 2020 when he campaigned and got to be leader, it’ll be (probably) 5 years down the road from then.

[chrisp65]

Attlee, Bevan, and Bevin weren’t opportunists.

They came out of the turmoil of war and created the NHS and ended British rule in India, were committed anti communists and kept the British nuclear weapons programme going etc..

Now, I know that was a very long time ago and the world was a very different place. But, we’ve come through 10 years of austerity, covid, and Brexit.

Now we have politicians with no bigger ideas than being a bit like the others but just different enough to get in to power.

The only big idea in play right now, right or wrong, is Scottish independence.

[hippo]

5 hours ago, Jareth said:

Labour are absolutely stuffed now. Ben Wallace for the sake of argument, looks likely to be the next PM - all those by election voters going yellow instead of blue will no longer be doing so. Labour can no longer depend on the Lib Dems to take enough seats off the tories, for them to get in. Also Starmer now needs to win a battle of ideas - not his strong suit. 

It was always a tall order for labour to overturn an 80 seat majority. Whatever the polls are showing 2 years before any election.

The fact he has got the labour in with a shout shows to me he's done a good jab.

Sadly, whipped up by the media - we are encouraged to have a noisy, bombastic, quirky character as our PM.

Personally I hope we go for more stable leaders (of either party)

[bickster]

Starmer and Rayner cleared in Beergate by Durham Police

[choffer]

Starmer off the hook for beergate then. What a surprise that what looked and smelt like a confected diversion turned out to be exactly that. 

[chrisp65]

2 minutes ago, choffer said:

Starmer off the hook for beergate then. What a surprise that what looked and smelt like a confected diversion turned out to be exactly that. 

…and less than 24 hours after that bag of lying sex custard ‘resigned’.

But luckily, our police don’t do politics.

[Wainy316]

Oooooh inject some right wing Twitter into my veins right now

[Jareth]

Pity - was hoping for maximum chaos

[hippo]

"The police have completed their investigation and have agreed, saying that there is no case to answer."

Daily Mail are running with story saying the above really means he is guilty - and the head of Durham police is a communist.