Seizing back control: The ILX lol brexit is how we're all gonna die thread.

the ex-crap Melody Maker hacks transition from ever so slightly miffed graun melt to domestic extremist is a text-book case of radical indoctrination.. he's a bloody anarchist now!

assuming the Netpol story is broadly correct than the first point of douche there is the teachers that dobbed the kid in

It doesn't seem true to me. I did a quick gs on "anti-fascist schoolboy Derbyshire" and it returned stuff about Farage's school teachers being concerned that he was a professed racist and a neo-fascist back in the early 80's. No flies on them ... no shit sherlock etc...

I'm not 100% sure about this but didn't UKIP MEPs do something similar at the start of the last European Parliament?

yes indeed https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28113979

labour going in on this civil service story. they must be worried that the BXP insurgency could tarnish their anti-establishment credentials

Your face when you've just had someone ask if you're lost & then you're told to leave, on your first day at work. 🤦🏾‍♂️

I know I'm visibily different. I don't have the privilege to hide my identity. I'm BLACK & my name is Magid. I don't intend to try fit in. Get used to it!
👊🏾💚 pic.twitter.com/HhWG63kE9U

— 🚀MΛG!D (@MagicMagid) July 2, 2019

to be fair bud you're wearing a sweary T-shirt

they’re sending useful shots across the bow of whitehall’s supercilious mandarins too - “we will expect you to implement this milquetoast european social democracy, guys”

All that's left for the Brexit Party to do is to burn down the European Parliament and pin it on some hapless boob.

no way to describe brave Nigel etc.

to be fair bud you're wearing a sweary T-shirt

― Rory end to the lowenbrow (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 2 July 2019

Yeah lol, it was more of an addition to my earlier link to politicians behaving in odd ways on their first day at the EU. Do we need another demonstration about what the EU is or is not.

It's basically Freshers Week, they're all signalling to the pricks not to bother trying to talk to them in the bar later.

this story is based on one email

A small group of members are trying to bully another pregnant MP out of the Party. This reprehensible behaviour cannot be tolerated. We will not accept bullying and threats in our ranks. The entire shadow cabinet will want to publicly condemn this too. https://t.co/7imry32iOP

— Tom Watson (@tom_watson) July 3, 2019

here's an idea Tom. Next time you've finished pumping some steroids up your arse and doing the workout to Polo G then maybe look for some dirt on the Conservative party rather than your own party, and maybe check if it is substantial before gobshiteing about it on twitter.

Williamson is way more likely to be deselected than she is but the responses to that tweet from people rallying around him are unhelpful to say the least.

calzino blazingly otm

never read the comments applies as equally to posts by blue ticks on twitter dot com as it does to below the line on CONhome

Yeah I'm guessing they're mostly non-Labour members with no connection to Lewisham in any case. Let's not pretend the Guardian doesn't know exactly what it's doing in giving undue prominence to this story as well.

i've not read the details because sanity but i'm sure Orwell would be proud of calls for deselection being described as "bullying"

clear any members of the PLP which face deselection will plough a similar furrow.

also wouldn’t be surprised to see them use the LD’s “we won’t support a corbyn-led labour” as the cassus belli for their next assault on the summit

“corbynism has proved its constituency in the country - it’s corbyn is the problem... pls ignore the fact we would never implement any of his already lukewarm programme”

Frankly I'm surprised Toby Helm hasn't already published an article entitled CORBYN WARNED: PROTECT PREGNANT MP OR FACE ELECTION WIPEOUT

https://www.google.com/search?q=guardian+labour+warned+referendum

Or to put it another way there's a noisy minority of Corbyn supporters who are apparently unable to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy dissent and all these people do is provide convenient ammo to people like Watson who, to put it mildly, is not acting in good faith here.

Watson doesn't need the 'some of the membership are cranks' excuse to act like this.

will provide him a well-socialised pretext to purge the party membership and ‘rehabilitate’ the brand though, should they ever succeed

Watson was responsible for knifing Blair as well - he doesn't have sufficient support from either wing of the party to become leader and can't be trusted by whoever does take over. If he wasn't the elected deputy he'd be gone by now.

Yes, he might talk a lot but he rarely ever achieves anything other than column inches in anti-Labour newspapers.

Is any of this having any effect whatsoever on the voters?

I get the primary audience for this is other Labour MPs not members or voters but still.

With 2003 electorate this kind of stuff woulmakes a lot more sense, but not with 2019s. I don't see what the end goal is, if there even is one other than clearing out prams of any toys

i think it's pretty clear that Tom gets the DTs if he hasn't been in the papers for a couple of days

Someone on Twitter noted that the Observer has used ‘command’-style front page headlines to “Corbyn’s Labour” 10 times so far this year. They don’t tell other parties what to do in this way.

Also, enough of this Corbyn’s Labour business, WE SEE YOU.

I take some considerable umbrage at this. When @ewangibbs and I organised a letter signed by more than 2,000 Labour members about Nia Griffith’s war crimes apologism, we couldn’t get anything out of the Guardian. https://t.co/ZfDj1BZK6x

— Michael Muir (@michaelmuir1997) July 3, 2019

No one has ever heard of Tom Watson, never mind Chris Williamson

Considering emailing my CLP secretary with a suggestion for a motion titled "Tom Watson is a poop head" to see if I can get into the guardian.

— just Cross (@DrStedx) July 3, 2019

I remember Rachel Reeves well as one of the most vociferous "we must be much tougher with austerity than the tories" campaigner in the early years of the ConDem coalition. Fucking horrid.

Rachel Reeves was one of the worst Miliband-era Shadow Ministers but I hadn't made the connection here.

In an interview in the Guardian, Reeves said: “We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, [as] the party to represent those who are out of work.”

She added: “Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.”

hey she knows the history

I was talking to an old bastard saying something similar the other day. She said she wouldn't vote for Corbyn because he's "only for people who don't work" !

tbh i don't think it was founded by and for reactionary Tory scabs either but maybe i missed that bit

they've certainly wormed their way in from day 1

Is any of this having any effect whatsoever on the voters?

She said she wouldn't vote for Corbyn because he's "only for people who don't work" !

This does contribute to negative public perception of the party, yeah.

So I can see, overall, how this would work, but I'm less clear how minutiae like this makes much more difference. At what point is it kinda priced in? People have made their mind up one way or another in both a) what they think, b) if they even care? Who's changing their mind over a Tom Watson tweet? Who's even reading this stuff, its boring af?

Why are they so bad at this? I guess is the real question. Unless I'm really misreading, this is a really bad route to power for TW, for a careerist (which I assume he is) I can't understand why he thinks this is a good path. What does he even want?

Looking at the US and they're falling over themselves to take some of Bernie's policies. Yes, whoever wins will ditch them as soon as they win, but thats not the point. It just seems a muddled strategy with no goal other than keeping Labour out of power while retaining own seat. If I was a centrist I'd be wanting a lot more than this 'Trump does a mean tweet' style nonsense, not convinced its having any real effect

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kgx9yyCzJ8

It's not about individual tweets or stories, it's about a constant drip-drip creating the general *mood music* of a party beset by toxicity, incompetence, prevarication and institutional antisemitism. The last of which is not without grounds and getting rid of Corbyn without solving the other issues won't solve that.

One of the reasons why the Williamson thing was so frustrating was that it was so avoidable, after all it's not your enemies that toxify you in the end, it's your allies.

It's possible that Watson doesn't actually want to be leader/PM and is agitating for regime change for other reasons, which makes more sense. I agree it's a terrible route to power in and of itself.

Totally get all that, I realize its about creating a general backdrop of individually uninteresting stories - and I can see how that works on the public, in a difficult to measure way (though beyond a certain point, public switches off - and negative messaging isn't the force it was a decade ago, I'm not super convinced its a useful tool anymore, for anyone)

CW is a balloon but I wouldn't have even heard of him if not for this thread, or at least not to any level of knowledge.

The last point is the most confusing, I don't know what Watson wants, what his purpose is. Its not clear at all - how does he propose to get this regime change. He just seems kind of dim. I'm not sure there's really anything going on up top

Could it be that Tom Watson just isn't very clever?