bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

clive lewis apparently saying corbyn should have backed remain

Clive Lewis says a lot of things

however we try to reassemble the wreckage i don't think Labour will come out worse from not going full FBPE

Clive Dunn(ce)

I often get strong Lance-Corporal Jones vibes off Clive

municipal pride ftw

The thing fascinating me most about visiting the US last year was the amount of US flags everywhere (homes and businesses alike at least) followed by Packers flags/banners (I was in smalltown Wisconsin) in second. I wanted less of those and more state flags (noticed none).

I think I hate municipal pride more than I hate national pride tbh.

not sure States Pride would be a thing you'd wanna see more of in the US

just wanna see more old fashioned pictures of animals around generally

Is there not an extent to which this is what Billy Bragg's been trying to make happen for a few decades?

England not Britain iirc

pretty explicity stated he wasn't looking for a new England

Whereas William Bennett...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Britain_(album)

pretty sure Bennett now feels comfortable joining the Conservative party

Seems par for the course for a middle aged antique dealer.

I must have got the lyrics wrong - I always thought that Bragg song's narrator was an ageing predatory paedophile complaining that he can't get away with hanging outside schools any more!

ShariVari OTM about the notion of being 'un-British' - although I might expand that to include 'anti-British'. It's one of the right's favoured attack lines and needs to be closed off as much as possible. Corbyn walked straight into that time and time again - we saw that in the Hamas 'friends' interview before he was even elected leader, he had no response other than over-explaining and getting tetchy and he never really managed to counter those kinds of arguments against them. And they were used time and time again - the Salisbury poisonings, oil tankers, Iran - he made it too easy for his opponents to paint him as taking the side of a nefarious foreign power over Britain. It doesn't matter that he was in the right on some of those occasions, as an attack line it worked. One of the issues with Corbyn's Labour was its inability to pick its battles and these were not hills to die on. And when it came to Brexit, too many of the people whose votes and trust he needed weren't prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

So there's a question of how Labour is supposed to win an election in *highly* jingoistic times without joining in that jingoism. Which leads me onto RLB...

This isn't a good article, it reads like too many of the vacuous, over-spin doctered pieces from various Labour right figures over the years. It feels like her team felt so confident of winning the membership vote that they could pitch directly to the country before winning the membership round, and I wouldn't be so sure about that. She's presumably had years to hone her leadership pitch and should have had more to offer than this cobblers.

TLDR I think she's fucked it.

I wouldn't go that far, she's still got how bad the competition is on her side.

From now on whenever RLB makes a misstep I'm just going to blame it all on Rayner, cos she is the one with the suspect voting record etc!

We’ll see how the debates go.

this is depressing and we haven't started yet

so much dirt on brylcreem boy from his cps days. Was looking earlier at how he's in the doghouse with rape support groups for fuckery towards legislation that meant less expert barristers on rape cases.

he's an utterly rotten character to the core, whose done a good job of keeping a low profile for the last couple of years.

he's the main competition - so that is a problem for the melts.

for me he's in the wrong party. And I can't see him winning over the membership either.

The second preferences are going to be unpredictable. RLB or bust still likely means having to pick the least worst alternative.

I'm not sure if I'm not getting the joke, but I didn't mean A New England, which was four decades ago. I meant stuff like England, Half-English, or y'know, his book "The Progressive Patriot".

I mean, I think this angle from RLB is soft-headed, but I don't know if it's nefarious, and it's not new.

yeah that Bragg book has been ripped to pieces on these pages before, he's a total Paul Mason style dolt iirc.

I'm just shoehorning Gapesy onto my ballot as my 2nd pref

"And when it came to Brexit, too many of the people whose votes and trust he needed weren't prepared to" ..vote for his 2nd ref policy basically. That obv did more damage in the lost marginals than him not being good at doing the standard bullshit hardman act whenever the UK got entangled in messy events involving other countries.

As I said, England not Britain iirc

I think Bragg was voting/stanning for the LibDems back in his progressive days.

what is the political make-up of the half million or so membership? I know there was a lot of 2nd ref pressure coming from a section of them, but are they all really buying into a candidate who was part of the reason Corbynism happened? It's all very well him paying lip service to anti-austerity now, but history shows he goes with the wind and basically has a right wing core. Just basically Yvette Cooper again.

Cooper afaict has made no concessions to the left / being wrong. Starmer’s positioning so far has been substantially to the left of the anyone who ran last time, other than Corbyn. He may not believe it, idk, but he seems to recognise that you can’t just have a return to Rachel Reeves et al hammering the Tories from the right. The key thing will be how much power / decision-making would be decentralised to the membership under the various leaders, though.

He has to put on this charade though SV, his track record is not good and there won't be much scrutiny from the press who probably love him. Even Thornberry was criticising his conduct as DPP at the time, that is pretty damning for someone trying to convince members he is going to pursue anything more radical than a lukewarm centre-left agenda.

when I say they love him, they will much more than RLB obv

my brain is melting right now, but not my heartfelt belief that he is rotten to the core and would be a disaster for the party.

I can remember Owen Smith making similar noises about his socialism with about as much credibility.

Starmer has one distinct advantage over Owen Smith though, he's not a total dumbass.

The debates will be different this time because Corbyn made mincemeat of Cooper because she was stilled doggedly gunning for fiscal conservatism/austerity and doing it very fucking badly.her gotcha was so bad the crowd we're dying in embarrassment on her behalf. But this time a seasoned barrister who basically has the same underlying politics but a bullshit line in left-wing posturing is much more dangerous for RLB.

RLB is also a solicitor, she’s not some kid!

Thanks for that positive RLB content G, needed some!

That Starmer isn't as thick as Owen Smith could be one of the dangers. But on the other hand it could still unravel badly for him. People with zero political conviction often do flounder in the white heat of battle.

he always seemed like a very a legalistic, personality free type melt to me did Starmer. very clever and impressive to other barristers and barrister lovers, and to lots of that Remain crowd. But couldn't see him winning over people that a uber campaigner like Corbyn couldn't.

Was messaging to an old pal that lives in Berlin last night. He was telling me landlords are fuming over there because some rent control bill has been brought in that restricts them from raising rents for a five year period. Then we took piss out of some German trust fund brat who was complaining about the lack of opportunities for landlords to make money. If that happened in London there would be martial law/a military coup imposed in minutes. Fuck this country - couldn't even get the fitness for human habitation 2015/16 bill through parliament.

As I was reminded when I had a friend who lives there visit over the Xmas period, they have rent controls in New York ffs.

The RLB piece was pretty strong on democratising the party.

Looked at in a calmer manner and putting aside the unfortunate choice of words a jumped on by shit stirring graun hack (and the bad history). Nothing wrong with anything else she said!

Yes, the Guardian framing has certainly been part of the defence.

I think she could lose because front-runners often lose. It wouldn't be because of this pitch. Anything with patriotism in it is pretty much against any kind of left politics hence the reaction, but as long as she doesn't get bogged down in it there have to be other factors to drag her down.

there is only so many blows I can take in a calendar year. if that fucking melt wins the leadership election then it is the end of the road with me for getting involved with parliamentary democracy. Might as well just give up.

Clive Lewis retweeting this doesn’t bode particularly well:

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/31/only-way-labour-win-ditch-labourism-corbyn

idk how long it’s going to take for people to work out that the Lib Dems are not a progressive natural ally, if the coalition and their steadfast refusal to countenance supporting a minority Labour government more recently, didn’t do it.

the penny won't even drop when they change their name to the Conservatives for EU membership Party. But of course if "lefties" like Gordon Brown and Ed Mili didn't run with such commie-utopian manifestos, then the LibDems would consider coalition.

I'm not sure there was a route into power even with the LibDems, who performed so poorly across so much of the country it wouldn't have made much of a difference, particularly in seats that are going to matter next time round. And that's assuming the LibDems didn't leak votes back to the Tories in that eventuality.

Labour can't do this without widening *it's own* appeal and rebuilding the 2017 coalition is only the first step. Hard to see how a few token LibDems would help them in Burnley or Sedgefield and it might actually make things worse.