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

"This obsessionwith what one paper did in 2007"

crazy guys, but like wtf are they talking about?

I assume they mean Murdoch switching to support Labour in 1997, which you think a bunch of Blair stans paid for their political opinions might know.

You’d assume even the most thickheaded commentator might think “hmmm, weird how only the candidates Rupert Murdoch has endorsed get elected.” but instead they’re smuggling it up whenever that reason is presented with “well, a really good politician works with the obstacles they’re presented with,” or something similarly inane.

I think Brexit might just be a little higher up on the list of excuses why we lost.. than Murdoch or Iraq. *Curious* that their whole schtick is that they are remainers yet no mention of it here and it seems they are mainly driven to just to attack any potential Labour leader of the left, albeit in such a toothless idiotic manner they only embarrass themselves. DL always was a wanker - I used to love it when ilx poster Branwell kept giving it both guns to him for his insufferable patronising smug bullshit on here!

To all Labour MPs thinking about ‘lending their vote’ to candidates to get them on the ballot paper. Please don’t - unless you think they would be a good leader/deputy. Jo made that mistake and regretted it bitterly.

— Brendan Cox (@MrBrendanCox) January 13, 2020

quite a few times now I've seen this foul creep cynically using his dead wife to either shut down opinions or try and influence Labour members - he's the worst of the worst.

Think there were around 30 seats Labour would've held with no Brexit party candidate standing, not that they're necessarily all flipping back.

"no Brexit party candidate standing"

apart from the Conservative party?

oh christ, Nandy is sounding much more content free after hearing her latest media sortie. Using that old tired baseball metaphor and not saying much at all tbf and sounding quite vacuous. And Starmer is 1/3 fav now. I feel like fucking topping myself! Come on RLB you need to wipe the floor with these idiots/melts/racists or we are all going to die (no lol).

I bet they weren't referring to the good version, because it would be an insult to put it next to garbage like Homeland.

― calzino, Monday, 13 January 2020 12:33 (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Original house of cards is also complete horseshit

Fped!

I can understand how some of it might not have aged well to some of you young 'uns, But fuck that, it's fucking great and positively classic next to shite like line of fire or the bodyguard or whatever!

and Ian Richardson is just exquisite.

Which Tottenham is this lol https://t.co/k0joY32jrb

— Labour Towns Source (@judeinlondon2) January 13, 2020

jude otm, how on earth do have a meeting as a potential Labour leader with a 100% white turnout in Tottenham? Is it because the undercurrent is that you are basically a right wing candidate?

another thing that doesn't concern melts is that Corbyn energised and enthused lots of black voters that a total bullshit merchant like Starmer never will.

But why would melt-centric middle class people give a shit about previously disenfranchised black voters being won over by a Labour leader, of course. You are supposed ask their permission on what the political make up of the opposition party should be, i forgot that golden rule of electibility!

Whoa @ that Tottenham picture. Harringay or Stroud Green?!

the Stroud Whites i think!

The hashtag is extra ominous

#competenceatlast!

it's 20 odd years since I lived in London, but I know enough to know that isn't a Tottenham crowd.

xp

making me think of that Richard Pryor crack about Logan's Run.

Tottenham is 82% BAME, whoever organised the meeting should have invited social housing groups such as @TAGLoveLane or trade groups such as ourselves and @LatinVillageUK. We certainly would've given you a good constructive feedback

— Peacock Industrial Estate - Tottenham (@Peacock_Estate) January 13, 2020

people need to stop this reactionary tory cunt who is currently 1/3 to be the next Labour leader. Perhaps getting the backing of the Remainiacs could be a good start to his downfall!

Talking of Tottenham, how's Lammy voting?

that melt will obv vote for Starmer as sure as eggs is eggs!

I don't know Starmer's position on flogging children with a leather belt yet though!

xxp nominated Starmer

As calz says, that was a raging certainty.

my poor Uncle who is dying rn of prostate cancer and is a former Tottenham resident told me a few times in conversation that Lammy is a right wing reactionary with awful politics. He's an old commie gay who's had a tough life and done time for drugs possession and his sexuality. And i believe him more than the hot air that comes out of a mouth of a self-serving bullshit overrated pol.

I think i brought my uncle's take on lammy to this thread a couple of years ago and got some shit. But Lammy does have some awful politics, I know during culture wars everyone who isn't a nazi is supposed to be your friend. But tbh I think he's an absolute tosser.

Lammy has or had some socially conservative views but honestly I don’t really care too much about that when he’s the focus of relentless racist abuse!

I know and I get the same awkward contradictions with mayor Khan, but on the other hand I find them both cowards and politically abhorrent even though they probably do good work with their constituents ....

I admit nothing of the kind. The unfortunate victims of the Newham disaster died as a result of reckless greed and irresponsibility. A fourth-floor tenant who was disinclined to pay his gas bill decided to bypass the meter and tap directly into the main. He made a botch of it, and succeeded in killing or maiming seventy-two of his friends and neighbors. End of story.

The tory party's grenfell response as foretold in House of Cards.

Lammy's politics are seriously dodgy.

Cowardly is probably not the word I would use in a situation where you and your family need 24hr protection because the very fact of your existence in your job means that everyone from the President of the United States down to thousands of invisible alt-right internet vermin have declared its basically open season on you. He's probably one of the top five or so biggest targets for Nazis anywhere in the world.

I disagree with Khan on lots of things - I agree with him on plenty as well - but culture war cuts in more than one direction and one of those is this seemingly endless, grinding, exhausting mutually hostile factionalism. Trigger ballots, purges and deselections didn't exactly work out well and on balance that's probably a good thing since they could quite easily be used against left-wing MPs in the future. Like it or not these are the Labour politicians we have and we have to work with what we've got in order to at least try and protect us from the government. I'm worried about what will happen if the Labour Party concludes once again that, for some groups of people, they basically shouldn't bother, but whether Starmer or RLB wins another five years of infighting isn't going to benefit anyone but the Tories, who are at least actually good at purges and a result have a Parliamentary party more united than any time in the last 30 years.

Obviously just waving your hands in a happy-clappy way and saying "let's all unite to defeat the Tories" isn't going to work either but I wonder if the Labour Party is just pathologically incapable of preventing itself from infighting at this point. They've been doing it since Tom Watson tried to take down Blair and they just like the drama too much, from what I can see. None of the candidates looks capable of overcoming that.

The PLP and the membership are at odds with each other and there's not much that can be done to paper over the cracks. One or the other has to substantially change.

"Trigger ballots, purges and deselections didn't exactly work out well and on balance that's probably a good thing since they could quite easily be used against left-wing MPs in the future."

We don't have deselections or purges?

Factionalism and infighting are here to stay as long as we don't have deselections. Saying 'this is what we have' isn't good enough.

But the PLP isn't a monolith - RLB got more nominations than anyone who wasn't Starmer, and if Starmer wins reasonably comfortably can they really be said to be at odds in any meaningful sense? Obviously this depends on the policies Starmer adopts but he's been so policy-lite up to now we'll need to cross that bridge later.

There is a disproportionately noisy faction on the Labour benches who have barely stopped criticising their own party over the past five years and they mostly appeared to nominate Jess Phillips. I suspect most Labour MPs are as sick of them as we are, and this faction isn't going to stop even if a milquetoast centrist wins, because they were pretty noisy and disruptive even under Ed Miliband.

If RLB wins it really should be put up or shut up time from a lot of these people but good luck with that.

The only figure who does appear to be capable of gaining notional support from both Wes Streeting and John McDonnell is Angela Rayner and that is at least in part because she's only going for Deputy.

"The PLP and the membership are at odds with each other"

I'm more worried that growing numbers of the membership aren't as at odds with the PLP as previously. Hence the irresistible rise of the great white melt.

Basically if you can unite the left and the soft/centre left in the PLP then what the right says or does is irrelevant. (Edit - I'm putting the likes of Streeting on the right here, but there has to be a way to consign these people to a fringe without wholesale personnel changes that can't happen for years).

I didn't realise Corbyn actually unified as many various factions within the membership, now he's gone it all seems much more fractious and meltified.

I think we are seeing the defeat work itself through as well. Lotta melting going on!

RLB has yet to talk about deselections. I do think she needs to address it. We need to be in a situation where members are working in harmony with both councillors and MPs that many are going to canvass for in a few years.

I'm still feeling a lot delayed remorse about Corbyn. Especially as now it is much more apparent that some of those that think they can do a better job than him are clearly not even fit to lace his boots, and won't even have as broad appeal to the electorate as he did.

Hardly anyone is going to vote for Long-Bailey because she's promised deselections and even if she does then it raises the promise of several more years of civil war which is going to put off more potential RLB voters than it attracts.

One of the reasons trigger ballots didn't really take off is because constituency parties weren't at odds with their MPs as much as expected, certainly less than on the Tory benches. But you can't have a huge, national party without disagreements, deselections won't necessarily endorse unity because there's no guarantee that whoever comes in in their place won't have their own differences, perhaps even bigger ones (eg on immigration policy).

When Corbyn picked his first shadow cabinet RLB was seen as a soft left figure and in terms of policy that's still about right, she's only been repositioned on the hard left because doing so is useful to her opponents. Getting the Corbyn/McDonnell endorsement has probably done her more harm than good in this regard and she hasn't helped her own campaign with statements like that "10 out of 10" one, which have only served to hand attack lines to other candidates. The LW vote is going to be largely loyal to her whatever happens so she doesn't really need to firm it up.

Cowardly is probably not the word I would use in a situation where you and your family need 24hr protection because the very fact of your existence in your job means that everyone from the President of the United States down to thousands of invisible alt-right internet vermin have declared its basically open season on you. He's probably one of the top five or so biggest targets for Nazis anywhere in the world.

"Basically if you can unite the left and the soft/centre left in the PLP then what the right says or does is irrelevant."

I wouldn't be so confident here. And if Lab were to get in government would they vote for rent controls?

That's why we need pressure groups and campaigns among members and among the wider public, to move these issues into the centre ground and force the leadership to take notice to the point where they become inevitable. That has happened several times over the past decade on both the left (gay marriage) and the right (Brexit).

Btw Laura Smith, recently MP for Crewe and Nantwich, has been tweeting some interesting things recently. Wish she hadn’t lost her seat. Her article about this was really good.

I would encourage anyone with a burning desire for change to now throw themselves into the fight. If my two years in parliament has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t let the privileged few determine our future. https://t.co/4PljCjYQTC

— Laura Smith (@LauraSmithCrewe) January 12, 2020

Thread-When I was an MP I had working relations and friendships with people who perhaps disagreed with me on some political areas-i felt that they respected me and I respected them.

— Laura Smith (@LauraSmithCrewe) January 12, 2020

Barring a handful of exceptions is there even a difference between this soft/centre left and the right of the PLP? I just see them as one awful bloc - what is the meaningful difference here? There is a whole section of PLP who might do different styles of lip service but they are just as unreliable when you want them to vote correctly.