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

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?

(xp) Oh you just said that!

IT WAS ONE FUCKING EMAIL

Today’s ⁦@EveningStandard⁩ - new Labour bullying row pic.twitter.com/q4IZCfl53M

— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) July 3, 2019

this fucking country

anyway, light relief

I want, and I cannot stress this enough, to die. pic.twitter.com/F8EJyga7ob

— Samuel Thomas (@SamuelThomas92) July 3, 2019

is that the cheese woman?

(it is the cheese woman)

I can't believe she used that one again after the amount of ridicule she got last time, but she does have serious self-awareness issues.

I think Tom Watson should leave politics and get into the budgie breeding game like his current role model Desperate Dan Geoff Capes did!

Deliveroo is too fucking expensive now, no way anybody's gonna use it on Victorian wages

well if you are truly a freedom fighter you just need to go out and liberate some more money ... gimme your fucking wallet!

I'm just remembering the time she used "Joy Division" to describe these uber riding freedom fighters or whatever, with no idea where it comes from. Fuck knows how she managed to get through higher education.

TW presumably doesn’t believe a Corbyn government could win a majority - and a Corbyn government would need a big majority so Corbyn could ignore the TW faction the way Blair did Corbyn’s.

Overall though, this and the CW show that Corbyn isn’t good at disciplining people - though this is probably for numbers at this stage??? - the Nia Griffith thing mentioned upthread disgusted me then & still does and no Labour leader who professes to be a friend to Irish people should have countenanced that.

Two of the party’s most distinguished centrists have weighed in:

This has deservedly got news coverage Tom, but you should see some of the DMs I get. Some of them contain some very crude language and ad hominem attacks on my hair. And yet, where is the news coverage and outrage? Why are the media ignoring this?

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) July 3, 2019

Mr. Watson, I am Mr. Hedges' lawyer and I have seen some of these awful messages. What is the Labour Party going to do to prevent former members being so mercilessly abused and accused of wearing wigs by anonymous trolls with names like 'tories=nonces' & 'bbq_when_kinnock_dies'?

— Oliver Laughdugry #FBPE #ABTV #TBEU #AKFNLW #Peopl (@laughdugrylegal) July 3, 2019

i think the absence of discipline is primarily the whips' judgment that labour is an uneasily fractious delicately balanced coalition that could easily turn volatile, but firmed up with an additional helping of the habits JC personally learned on the far left (where he was always not bad at staying more or less in with the many factions that loathed one another), as applied to the much less far left (e.g. most of the PLP)

Yeah, definitely agree with that. But he could have disciplined some of these people & they would be no worse off than they are now. Remember the outrage when he sacked Owen Smith?

i think JC's caution is broadly speaking more of an asset than is often recognised but i think it as a strategy it often folds out into a (sometimes demoralising) tactical timidity

His approach to discipline seems to me to have its roots in the idea that Labour is a democratic organisation and it is up to the party to resolve disputes in democratic, or democratically mandated, ways. Making it a lot easier to deselect MPs is going to have more impact on keeping people in line (or in line with their local party) than any attempts to whip them centrally - which is why they are all crying about it in advance.

Watson was elected by the membership so I'm not entirely sure he can be sacked.