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

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.

Stephen Bush has weighed in on the JC health shite btw, and it’s pretty good as you’d expect. Just pouring one out for the NS finally fixing the Safari workaround, which means no more unlimited free articles for me! Maybe he really does go here...
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/07/corbyn-s-unlikely-last-hope-boris-johnson

watson will be sacked by the membership next chance we get.

he should also be moved on from his culture brief - his should be one of the most central and inspiring for the corbyn project. and what has he done with it? diddly zilch

From that NS piece:

His eyesight is worse than it was when he became leader in 2015 – he occasionally texts Diane Abbott, a close ally, in shadow cabinet meetings, and the size of the text on his screen is now large enough that nearby officials and MPs “don’t even have to try” to read the messages.

Also I feel like the TW deputy leader campaign was dependent on support from Unite, which ofc he doesn’t have now.

His approach to discipline seems to me to have its roots in the idea that Labour is a democratic organisation

i mean this is true at an ethical level and JC takes this dimension of politics very seriously, and what you go on to say is a good example of how his approach is about bringing ethics and strategy into alignment with one another -- but i still think his team's distaste for the blair-campbell approach to win-the-day tactics is sometimes a weakness or shall we say a drag

(and not just because it means they often seem to lose the day, which i don't think is as much of a problem as many believe)

what has he done with it? diddly zilch

not true!! his last FM cognomen and selection continue to bring gaiety to an exhausted nation

(or it would if i could remember it, like mbaggy or something?)

baggymp

lol my version is better and also makes less sense

if you were to itemise all the days won in the past few years you’d only have those from inside the GE17 purdah

honestly it has been mentally fatiguing being a “labour supporter” these past few years. I had to rejoin twitter just to get access to some balance and perspective

just listening to Ed Davey's clunky metaphor of describing having a son with disabilities as "going on holiday to Italy but the plane get's diverted to Brussels" what a horribly bizarre metaphor and what a fucking prize pumper.

https://www.autreat.com/dont_mourn.html

Always worth a revive, that

I'm sure Ed Davey's son won't even need a ehcp plan and will get everything he needs privately. But fucking hell .. what a staggeringly reductive and evil thing to say about your own kid on the radio ffs! Fuck these LibDems forever.

Christ, imagine hearing your dad say that about you. “Not what we wanted but we made the best of it.”

I can!

You deserved a better dad!

That’s horrific - I can only hope he gets dragged by every decent person for this.

He won’t be. George Osborne got booed at the Paralympics and nobody cared.

this wasn't a live gaffe either, it was a pre-recorded interview with oily Nick Robinson.

As I say, sadly it's one of the cliches of a certain kind of disability patronization.

"You know, it's like going to open an account at LK Bennett and finding the company's gone into administration"