ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

Pubs round here have been shutting at ten anyway except maybe Fridays and Saturdays

As a bad but happy citizen, my first exposure to the incarnation of Harry Cole was as Lefou to JRM's Gaston:

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CeLkTWqgcu8/W-6_pNLmTJI/AAAAAAABGKM/dylDYkoPtMMKkARq8RJZwEDR9QPm0TJEACLcBGAs/s320/Cole465.png

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5f01cPS-Kso/W-6_qFFI6UI/AAAAAAABGKc/CrR9heXhXAgSY2sm3lA5QShjssOTi6i1gCLcBGAs/s320/Cole468.png

lovely to wake up to Lisa Nandy's delightfully Trumpian language, good reminder why I'm never going to vote for this shithole party again in my life.

it's amazing how fast Progressive Patriotism evolves into evoking the name of the UK's leading fascist party.

Ahhhhh pic.twitter.com/4e5dIFZSyJ

— Snark Maiden (@femsocialist) September 22, 2020

Not sure how he's going to combine singing "Marcus Rashford's Hungry Children" terrace-chant style with outflanking the Tories on capital-S Security for the edification of The Sun but excited to be along for the ride.

My cancelled direct debit should see my membership lapse out of being any day now. Stoked

Watched 3 minutes of KS's speech there. Seemed a straight lift from the early Blair playbook minus the fake dynamism and surface charisma.

Any progress in engaging the young left from Corbynism has been abandoned in favour of selling mature competence.

Not sure how he's going to combine singing "Marcus Rashford's Hungry Children" terrace-chant style with outflanking the Tories on capital-S Security for the edification of The Sun but excited to be along for the ride.

I don't think those things are remotely disassociated in the minds of a lot of voters, the dissonance will be between touchy-feely human rights Starmer and prosecute-em-all-now Starmer. I'm guessing he'll try and get over the former by just pretending it doesn't exist and hoping the Mail don't decide to rake it up.

The really pertinent question is why The Sun is playing along, why the right-wing press is giving him such an easy ride so far. It has to be more than 'well he's centrist enough to be acceptable'.

Starmer ending by stating the obvious - there was no point in putting policy in this speech if your first task is to win back trust.

“We’ve got a long road ahead of us. We’re not going to win back those we’ve lost with a single speech or a clever policy offer. Trust takes time.”

— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) September 22, 2020

The entire strategy appears to be to beam messages at people who are predominantly disengaged with politics on the assumption they won't think too hard about the contradictions, and on the assumption that any kind of vision of hope is frivolous shit that the public won't believe in any case.

Why give people hope when you can chuck some minorities under the bus for some Vichy shit

I can see Starmer getting to a point where the disengaged don't reflexively hate him and Labour, i have a harder time seeing him being able to motivate them to vote in sufficient numbers.

The right-wing press has no leverage over Johnson if he has a huge majority and their unwavering support. They need to make out they've got options.

Does Nandy not have any problems with using a slogan that was amongst the last words Jo Cox heard before she was murdered in Batley? I really hope her dad has completely disinherited her now.

Starmer isn’t just going to fail to motivate, he’s going to actively drive away chunks of the voter coalition and replace them with... what? Like modelling the party on the democrats where they seem perfectly fine to lose elections as long as their faction retains control.

xp fucking hell I didn’t even notice she said that, i want to be sick

fuck this party

Corbyn's Labour was demonised for championing internationalism and an inclusive collectivism, supporting migrant and minority rights. Now it seems Labour is going out of its way to disassociate from those values.

— rachel shabi (@rachshabi) September 22, 2020

The question of whether or not it's the right thing to do morally has been separated from whether it will work - there aren't many recent examples of politicians failing to prosper because they overestimated the stupidity of the discourse. In their minds a Labour victory IS the correct moral course and therefore the ends justify the means.

I actually get the trust argument (as in the Anvil 'he might be a cunt but at least he knows how to do it' sense), but you need to make sure you aren't incinerating the trust of the other people you need behind you in the process. It's a gigantic gamble on that front.

There's going to be a massive backlash over the Nandy thing and deservedly so.

Is the first of Keir Starmer's ten pledges – increase income tax for top 5% of earners, reverse Tory cuts to corporation tax – now gone? "I expect so," says Lisa Nandy #PoliticsLive

— Sienna Rodgers (@siennamarla) September 22, 2020

Quite something to chase this hard the 40k who voted Brexit Party at the last election.

Labour will take your vote but never offer you a fucking thing while they chase the spiteful pensioner vote already allied to the Tories. Weird how certain groups of voters get condescended to and told to shut up, isn’t it, and how it’s always their fault for not just handing their vote over unquestioningly to a party that despises and resents them.

I was thinking the other day about starting a "what's the best strategy for the left if the Labour Party's lost?" thread but I can't bear to look into that void at the moment

I've been wanting someone to start that thread for months

most of my answers involve the Rote Armee Fraktion redux so maybe let somebody else have a go

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/momentum-to-focus-on-resisting-evictions-during-covid-19-crisis?

Nandy's answer doesn't seem to acknowledge what a 'pledge' is. Or why it's bad to make one then break it.

The story Alphie linked to seems like the way forward to me.

My cancelled direct debit should see my membership lapse out of being any day now. Stoked

You didn't inform your branch secretary? No point in taking a stand if you don't ask to speak to the manager imo.

@ThangamMP
35m
WATCH! Keir Starmer's keynote #LabourConnected (virtual conference) speech as Labour Leader - introduced by my friend Ruth Smeeth.

Smeeth introduced the keynote WTF really?!

XP apparently it will take several months for lj's cancellation to get into the published membership figures. If he wanted to be kicked out sooner he should've just showed he was a green all along or shared his tactical voting preferences.

first the vote of confidence from The Taxpayers Alliance, now Harry Cole says best conference speech in a decade. Blue is the colour this season, baby!

supporting blue, whatever they do, a bit more managerially. what's not to love

If the orthodox Left in Labour doesn't like what we're now doing, they need to explain a) what they would do differently and b) give an explanation for the fiasco they presided over: I've not heard that on a single Zoom call - the replies are open, go ahead ✊🚩

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) September 22, 2020

hitler 'dangerously incompetent' says loto

also - and don't quote me - i'm hearing the fuhrer once took a trip to poland that was against the rules at the time

Creative use of "they" from Mason, as if he wasn't involved at all from 2015 onwards.

Stoya come to rainy fascist island

meanwhile don't go into the office, what idiot told you to do that?

My resignation got a surprisingly sympathetic phone call from my local branch and then months after that an e-mail of meaningless gibberish from Labour HQ.

fucking spice-zombie was plotting with Starmer during the December election campaign

Feel alphie and i probably as much on the same page as we ever are re future directions for the left lol

Absolute car crash pic.twitter.com/ziOPnYYrIa

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) September 22, 2020

Oh mister Wokeman, We will continue to take a stand against you and your anti-Britsh, anti-free speech agenda. Socialism is not the answer and time will demonstrate what a real idiot you are! #ProBrexit, #ProBoris, #ProTrump 🇬🇧 https://t.co/9VvWbnaJF3

— Andrea Jenkyns MP (@andreajenkyns) September 22, 2020

The @Conservatives are running FB ads promoting a ‘petition’ calling on Labour to support their proposed Overseas Operations Bill. https://t.co/R5OLknxow9 pic.twitter.com/3B8sbaJ4Wx

— Who Targets Me (Install our browser extension!) (@WhoTargetsMe) September 22, 2020

Interesting thread here shedding a bit of light on how this stuff works in practice.

what is much funnier than any shit melt-approved parody account is that when you search "Paul Mason People's Vote" Google Searches Related To.. also gives you Paul Mason Spice and Paul Mason Shitting In a Fountain!

xp nobody ever seems to want to go for the "all soldiers are bastards, especially the ones who do war crimes" demographic.

i suspect that every time Labour decides that they must woo the working class/petit bourgie fascist vote it's not really based on solid psephological analysis so much as personal prejudices and stereotypes. maybe i'm wrong, maybe the petit fascists are the deciding constituency, forever

i'd like to see their workings tho

Maybe somebody's already written something good about the proximity of the Party's blood and soil stakhanovite tendency and actual fascists, idk. Feels like a good historical subject

my workings on that would be

1. Most constituencies are in England
2. Most English people are petit bourgeois fascists by nature
3. That's pretty much it

It's not very rigorous tho, however right it feels

in fact i mean it's not very forensic