have you quit the labour party yet?

I guess the herpetologists out there will be relieved that it works on lizards

I think, by this stage, any photos of Prince Philip should come with some sort of warning for those of a nervous disposition.

I got all excited until I got to the word "vaccine"

LOL SAME

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErVAexBXIAIDmqt?format=png&name=small

Sir Keir Starmer has declared Labour will become "the party of the family", as he calls on the Government to scrap an inflation busting rise in council tax in April which will hit household budgets....

from the latest paywalled Torygraph Kieth piece that thankfully fades as you hit the wall

Finally a party for normies

This has faded into insignificance now, but at the start of the Labour leadership contest Kieth obv identified Nandy as a main rival and went for his own gritty w/c Town's credentials in quite an embarrassing manner which i can barely remember now. But then we found out he was about as w/c as someone whose dad was from the factory management classes

He's probably closer to working class than Crombyn but so what, so are half of Blue fucking Labour

Sorry but you need multiple families to be PM now.

Corbyn was pure middle class to the core and never pretended to be anything else and also was the best Labour leader we will see in our whole sorry lifetime alas

I bet Corbyn's upbringing was more culturally middle-class and Starmer's more fiscally middle-class - that would seem about right.

until you take Piers into the reckoning!

Ah, the working-class factory owners of East Surrey, salt of the earth

— Juliet. (@zinovievletter) January 10, 2021

i suspect that jeremy and piers' parents were quite progressive inasmuch as it seems they both seem to have absorbed and been deeply affected by very different aspects of 1960s politics and culture (jeremy anti-war, civil rights, new left(?) piers techno-utopia libertarian bullshit) this is a very underdeveloped thought instinct

Asked whether he should apologise to unions on schools, Starmer says "we all owe them an apology" after they worked so hard over Christmas on preparations

— Sienna Rodgers (@siennamarla) January 10, 2021

Piers left the Labour Party over Iraq and to spend more time with his brain worms and his weather prediction company that after some early successes seemed to make a series of dud predictions!

He featured in a Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle in 2007; a scientifically reviewed complaint to Ofcom noted that he was introduced as 'Dr Piers Corbyn, Climate Forecaster' despite not having a doctorate nor any qualification specifically in climate science or environmental science.

lol he's a funny guy tbf!

Well we're all climate forecasters if you think about it

Piers was also Time Magazine Person of the Year 2006

Yeah but they give that shit to anybody, I got it one year

there might have been a point somewhere 70's-80's where Jez and Piers seemed almost ideologically/politically identical, but it seems like Piers went on a bit of a diversion off the beaten track.

So I'm obviously a casual observer here, but at this point, what distinguishes the Labour Party from the Tories?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/10/keir-starmer-accepts-end-of-eu-free-movement-in-brexit-reversal

Is the new ploy something like 'the Conservative Party, except with a less shambolic-looking leader?'

more like the Tory Wets Party with an equally shambolic leader imo

The Brexit issue was never a hard line between the parties. It would be unfair to guess what the differences are now because Kieth won't announce any policies until a general election is called, he'll just kvetch lamely in his silly voice

Don't even know why they bother, it's not like Tory voters will ever pivot to Labour. The other way round, yes. All they're doing is alienating their actual voter base.

I'm excited to read the first think piece about how mocking Kieth's voice is middle class privilege or something

It's funny really that just over a year ago Kieth was working an FBPE crowd as a people's vote advocate. Paul Mason was in that crowd chanting Stop The Coup! and looking like a total bellend. Now Kieth has once again shown he is a pure careerist and I think he might he might have pissed off enough ppl now that he will be facing a leadership challenge before the next election.

I mean, I am aware that ending freedom of movement was among the chief motivators of Brexit and immigration in general appears to have become a dodgy issue even for nominally leftier continental parties such as La France insoumise, which is one of the more depressing signs of the times. Nor am I *entirely* averse to compromise if it means ousting the Tories (with the proviso that this kind of strategy is extremely dicey to begin with), but even if we generously allow for that, how far do you take the not-Corbyn line before you suddenly turn into the Lib Dems? Starmer is repeatedly hitting the same ceiling in the polls despite how conspicuously disastrous Johnson's handling of the pandemic has been on pretty much every front save for the vaccination campaign (relative to the rest of the Western world, that is), so at this point, it's like, why don't you take a fucking hint? Sorry for stating the obvious, but every time this guy comes up in my news feed, I just shake my head.

Hopefully the challenge will come from Fozzie Bear

pom before Corbyn there were times when the Lib Dems were to the left of Labour on some positions, and not because the Lib Dems were good

Fair enough. I def wasn't paying attention to British politics during the Blair years, which all boiled down to complicity in the Iraq War when viewed from Canada.

Blair praised Thatcher, failed to address her assaults on the welfare state or trade unions and joined in several foreign adventures with death tolls in the millions which maybe offers some context to our feelings about Corbs

Starmer is auditioning for boris job, just not the way ppl would have imagined perhaps

Its not just that he’s terrible opposition at a time when opposition is easier & more needed than ever - I’m not even convinced he would have handled the pandemic much better in Johnson’s place tbh

The Leader of the Opposition should not be viewed as an audition opportunity, especially when there are elections in 3/4 years time. Why not press the government on what they are getting wrong on their response to the pandemic?

You could argue that national unity and all that rot had to prevail for the first couple months for purely strategic reasons but it's been almost a full year now, ffs. The death toll is staring you in the face.

Exactly, I thought I was going out of my mind when ppl brought up 2024 as a defence for “constructive opposition” bollocks. Kim there’s people that are dying!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErYM-eGXUAAWDdJ?format=jpg&name=large

Kieth you've really changed for the worst I'm afraid... I just don't love you anymore!

The free movement pivot is just milliband racist mugs b/w it was only ever about stopping Corbyn

80k dead is a larger amount than your average parliamentary constituency.

Size of constituencies by electorate

The number of people able to vote (the electorate) differs by constituency. The Office for National Statistics gives the average electorate across constituencies of about:

72,200 in England
67,200 in Scotland
68,300 in Northern Ireland
56,000 in Wales

he's alienating or taking for granted the support of young/BAME/putatively lefty/Remain voters (who make up the greatest number of the membership that elected him leader) to signal he's very conservative to people in so called Red Wall constituencies that mostly will just vote Tory or whatever latest Farage right-wing pressure group is called anyway.

it's outrageous that this week our health service is looking at breaking point in multiple regions and only last weekend Kieth and his melt-idiot shadow education minister were still insisting schools needed to open and Green was even engaging in some good old population blaming/shaming for how bad the rona is. Astonishingly forensic.

As Starmer has abandoned one part of this pledge, be very worth asking him if he still sticks by "Full Voting Rights for EU Nationals" who are in the UK , and the closure of Immigration Detention Centres #AnotherFutureIsPossible https://t.co/RrK81657oc

— Solomon Hughes (@SolHughesWriter) January 10, 2021

lol ofc he doesn’t. he’d take away my voting rights if he thought it would help him win over a racist pensioner in chingford

straight after winning the leadership of the party he said hated selling himself to the membership and was much more comfortable leading rather than campaigning. Another point where one's shady Tory-cunt warning system was ringing loud enough to deafen one!

Ha

1/ Think there are two ways of looking at Starmer saying there's "no argument for opening the [freedom of movement] aspects of the treaty".

— Paul Cotterill (@Bickerrecord) January 10, 2021

The first way is believe he's done a forensic reading of those aspects of the treaty and knows that it was worded in such a way that freedom of movement can return quietly in the next few years, and that it's best to let sleeping racists dogs lie in this respect.

can't tell if he's joking!

Chakrabarti’s Amendment 1 to the covert human intelligence sources bill in the House of Lords: content 153, not content 309. Chooses not to move Amendment 2. Labour told peers to abstain on the changes, which sought to remove the advance immunity proposed for undercover agents.

— Sienna Rodgers (@siennamarla) January 11, 2021

Tommy Corbyn Tweeted about "Keith" today and it made him seem like a bit of a knobber, really.

He was Tweeting about Starmer wearing a purple tie, which seemed (to Tommy) to be a terrible thing.

I do think there were better things to slag Starmer off for today.

It’s ‘Kieth’ - surprised Tommy got that bit wrong.

* checks *

He definitely typed "Keith". And his dad was definitely fond of a purple tie.