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

she should have done a video like Starmer where he revealed his radical past: he was the uncredited lyric writer who wrote r wyatt's Shipbuilding for him and during the miner's strike he once clawed out a copper's eyeball and ate it like it was a juicy lychee. And in the 70's he was thrown out of the UK communist party for for trying to raise up armed worker brigades!

sorry i've literally been sniffing glue (trying to fix a bin lid) and it seemed funny until I pressed post!

I enjoyed it, you forgot his key role in the Angry Brigade tho

he was Angry Brigade- Codename: Bomb Stormer!

We should start a melt provocateur cell called The Tetchy Brigade

RLB seems to be racking up the CLPs today.

yeah about 6 in the last few hours innit?

Don’t think she’ll need the CLPs with one more affiliate

Another one just now - Wirral South

looking a lot better than it was yesterday. I mean she obv has to make the ballot for this fucking Starmer procession!

Kinda want it all over now and the managerial class to take back control so I can stop caring

it would save me a another direct debit for the next few months. But remember.. hardly anything plenty could happen in that time other than the media doing the find the most "Irish" (wi' the red rosy cheeks of a true IRA colleen f'sure) looking pics of RLB every day challenge. While all the might of Toynbee/Dunty/Cohen/Graun/Stoya all fighting to chod on Starmer's dick like a nest of baby pterodactyls on a feeding frenzy.

I shall have such lovely dreams tonight

the heading of that hilarious Freedland piece: "Without the BBC we could be facing a post-truth dystopia" is probably a bit too on the nose for The Onion. Just over a month passed since the election and already there is a collective amnesia amongst the media classes on the BBC's shitting all over Purdah and putting out outright lies that were reported completed unchecked as news on the Mail and Graun sites.

completely unchecked/ uncorroborated I meant to say...

Freedland is on quite a tear this week:

https://www.thejc.com/comment/columnists/when-corbyn-insulted-me-what-did-he-mean-1.495769?fbclid=IwAR3jlr67JPnPJYSvxvUec3nI5Dg3wF-9pQSVkqFKZsXMTnd-hSr6rUgzovo

Part of it was a vague journalistic scruple that no matter how interesting we might find ourselves, we journalists are never the story.

Say what?

One last thing: it was curiously out of character. Corbyn rarely attacks anyone in acid language. He barely took aim at Theresa May or Boris Johnson, and certainly not in personal terms. But he took aim at me that day.

Corbyn attacked his Guardian piece it wasn't an "acid" ad hom attack on him, but that is Freedland for you - he steals a living talking utter shite.

Some of these writers seem to have become quite emotionally invested, unaware that the goal has been achieved. To be fair this may be true of readers too but its difficult to see Corbyn Derangement Syndrome continuing to get enough clicks to justify itself beyond spring

A reallocation of council funding could redirect hundreds of millions of pounds from so-called left-behind communities in the north of England to the leafy southern shires, analysis has found, leaving many newly Conservative voting “red wall” areas facing fresh cuts to local services.

Under a review of the local authority funding formula, £320m a year could be shifted out of councils in England’s most deprived areas while Tory-controlled shire councils mainly in the south-east gain £300m.

I'm glad tbh. These fools need to suffer the consequences of voting for a Tory slogan rather than a chance to end austerity, and for the next 5 years most of them won't learn shit tbh!

No idea but my bias tells me it's Keir:

Obviously we cannot know for sure. However, instinctively it feels right. Hard to imagine there's a huge pool of people who didn't join to vote for Jeremy Corbyn but are doing so to vote for RLB. Seems likely that phalanx was maxed out in 15/16.

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) January 24, 2020

(xp) The Tories will still find a way to make it seem like it's local governemnt's fault and people will believe them.

... or immigrants' fault or people on benefits' fault.

It's just as important for Lab members to fight for deselection of right wing councillors who collude with this government.

Another 5 years of cuts heaped upon cuts might be harder for the tories to finesse and the councils might have run out of things to sell in some districts but they'll still largely get the blame rather than central govt cuts.

This is something the next Labour leader (lol) needs to be shouting loudly about.

The figure I read for new Labour meltbers joining was something like 50/60000.

luv too hate-vote

They've got their own party why don't they stay the fuck out of mine?

Some probably joined to do something anything I wouldn't even say they want to vote for Keir.

I joined the party the day after the election and am not a melt entryist

Remember when Freedland libelled a PPC and got away with it completely? Great times.

On councils this is basically my thinking:

Yep. Of course, the other problem Labour have is that far too many of their councils absolutely refuse to be militant, and often end up willingly accepting the blame by being so fucking incompetent. https://t.co/p9QoMPnlZk

— Labour Towns Source (@judeinlondon2) January 25, 2020

you can only assume the voting intentions of new members until those wizards at YouGov confirm they are 94.7% damnatorum meltus!

What does it mean for councils to be militant in this context? Serious question.

Also how can it be done constructively in the way that actually benefits people in the face of a government that will happily heap all the blame on them before taking an axe to them. I'm not especially familiar with either Islington North or Preston, the two that Jude mentions.

Basically 90% Labour councillors here, and most nominally on the left, but the ingrained institutional misremembering of Militant leaves them shit scared to try anything big beyond ‘invest to earn’ projects that don’t create much in the way of returns

— Grim Royle (@harvey_bone) January 25, 2020

This is one of the replies. And I certainly don't have the answers but there is an unexplored militancy. If we don't tap into it the Tories will always own the narrative.

if they all just refused to reduce services and sell their crown jewels and just went bust (like Tory Northampton did iirc).. wouldn't it bring the government into absolute crisis VONC territory, rather than slowly killing people off over a decade? But of course lots of the most vulnerable could end up dying if they all just went bust. idk the answer to be honest!

There haven't been any 'militant' Labour councils since the 1980s and I don't see them coming back any time soon. Councils, and councillors, just don't have much weight to fling around anymore. Actively not cosying up to property developers et al would help though.

As an aside on Preston, in some ways it functions more like a mini-city than a town. Its proportion of working age people is increasing not declining, its transport links are very strong, solid vocational university. Preston has a lot in its favour. It isn't one of the left behinds

"Actively not cosying up to property developers et al would help though."

That would be attacked as 'militant' btw.

https://t.co/jZUdR7NzGi pic.twitter.com/d1lsTMC29w

— Matt Zarb-Cousin (@mattzarb) January 25, 2020

I've really gone off Rayner. I take back anything positive I said about her before, she's basically just a quite thick and nasty racist who has done a good job of keeping this element to her well out of sight for years.

Clearly what Labour needs right now is more Byzantine policies that no one understands and can't be communicated clearly and easily to anyone other than committed policy wonks.

Yesterday I announced that, as president, I’ll establish a student loan debt forgiveness program for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities. https://t.co/ldwuC9RiIE

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 28, 2019

hah!

but even she manged to avoid any absolutely barmy lottery/logan's run elements tbf!

just currently vomiting all over that Catherine Bennett piece that basically says Starmer's feminist credentials are stronger than RLBs. These people will literally make any old shit up to smear a left candidate. Apparently Starmer's record at DPP (with a lol Thornberry quote backing this up) saying he improved their record in domestic violence and rape cases, well I've read the exact opposite of that from very credible people who say he made it much easier for rapists to actually fucking get away with it scot free. And of course RLB must be a pro-lifer as a left footer. oh fuck these jokers.

she also brings up the poor handling of the mass of complaints made against David Prescott. That happened under Corbyn's watch and is nothing to do with RLB.

Starmer, moreover, supports women’s reproductive autonomy. Long-Bailey favours restrictions on abortion (and likewise opposes assisted dying). Both politicians having chosen, like Thornberry, to serve Corbyn, they are contaminated, as Lisa Nandy is not, by the party’s documented misogyny; its ineffectual approach to sexual misconduct.

Honestly the whole column is more of a vague handwavey gesture in the direction of an argument. Even on the assumption that everyone who has served in the Shadow Cabinet recently is "contaminated", it's what they do moving forward that matters.

Contamination cuts both ways, if we are going to accept that serving Corbyn was akin to being in the Iron guard or something then Starmer is also contaminated and also doubly contaminated by his bad voting record and some of the wretched shit that happened at the DPP under his watch, yeah I know he no control and was merely good cop in a bad cop job etc ... blah blah blah!

She is saying that Starmer is also contaminated but doesn't follow the argument through to its conclusion, or indeed any place where it might be interesting.