Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/02/labour-urged-to-focus-on-flag-and-patriotism-to-win-voters-trust-leak-reveals

lol

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/stressful-day-at-the-office-picture-id505640165?s=612x612

somewhere right now there are melts on Twitter explaining how if you hate nationalism you want the Tories to be in power for another 10 years

“They are the voice of the students. They have left real people, taxpayers behind.”

nothing like going to the focus groups to listen to the salt of the earth who all seem to conveniently talk like right-wing talk radio presenters

Jon Harris wearing a novelty fake moustache

"dressing smartly at the war memorial etc give voters a sense of authentic values"

are they still going on about Michael Foot's "donkey jacket" in 2021 or did Jezza turn up at the cenotaph looking like a bag o' rags cos I can't remember that.

Are they glossing over the way Boris Johnson looked in 2019?

are we fucking serious with this shit

No, they are very unserious and beneath contempt. Yet again this is personal prejudice and ignorance masquerading as electoral science

the thing with Boris is that his whole image is ridiculous and contrived but he's been doing it all his life now. When really bad Labour melts try their tryhard authentocrat moves they always look much worse than their Tory counterparts. Harold Wilson could pull it off because he was a crafty and complex sort of person who was much brighter than the *top brains* in the Labour Party right now.

hang on just a fucking minute

In a statement, his daughters, Hannah Ingram-Moore and Lucy Teixeira, said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our dear father, Capt Sir Tom Moore. We are so grateful that we were with him during the last hours of his life; Hannah, Benjie and Georgia by his bedside and Lucy on FaceTime.

yeah but he wasn't a mere mortal human he was a beacon of hope who could keep 737 Max planes airborne with the wind coming out of his arse, he was an immortal who was impervious to all diseases .. oh scratch that last one.

I mean they probably infected him, should be safe by that stage

Dress smartly, get votes pic.twitter.com/ODZs1peszo

— Liam Young (@liamyoung) February 2, 2021

does Operation Flag Shag still work if it's all over the news headlines?

you can't fake really feeling such hotness for a flag you want to fuck it, Kieth's flag has been making eyes at some of the Britannia Unchained crew - he's cold and unfeeling and just going through the motions.

the odious M Vaughan on Capt Tom: "he had a bit of a cheeky side to him as well"

that is one way of putting it.

Here ⁦⁦@chakrabortty⁩ demonstrates that she hasn’t spoken to many of Labour’s ‘core voters’.

Keir Starmer's patriot act risks turning off his core Labour voters | Keir Starmer | The Guardian https://t.co/LO91M1houn

— Toby Perkins MP (@tobyperkinsmp) February 2, 2021

"core Labour voters" listen to the state of this prick - Toby Perkins - how the fuck is this cunt a Labour MP. Stupid question I know. I'd never even noticed this prick before today but now Kieth has given license for a hundred more PLP dog whistles to fweet!

the stupid cunt's reading comprehension is so bad he's getting Aditya Chakrabortty and Shami Chakrabarti mixed up

I knew full well that @chakrabortty was Adyita not Shami, but the ‘she’ was a tiny typo.

Point remains that many Labour core voters love our country and are proud of it and want a Labour Party that is too.

— Toby Perkins MP (@tobyperkinsmp) February 3, 2021

lol a "tiny typo" is it?

Correcting my 'tiny typo' misgendering the author by spelling his name incorrectly.

I'm sure there are no assumptions about his views on race to be drawn from this totally meaningless slip of the fingers

Also Perkins giving the game away that this isn't really electoral strategy the PLP is just full of oblivious whitebread flagfuckers

I think that’s true up to a point but the Blue Labour faction seems to be much more powerful with upper management than in the PLP itself.

it could be easy to get the names mixed up but Aditya being about the only left-wing op-ed writer still standing at the Graun and Baroness Shami being one of the only likable Labour peers. I'd find it impossible to get them mixed up!

Loved the 2015 GE experience, let’s repeat it again except with the far right even more ascendant

if he'd have revealed all this in the leadership election then RLB might have won. I'm not naive enough to be shocked that a pol cheats and lies to get ahead in the manner Kieth has, but some lesson needs to be learned here but unfortunately maybe a lesson for 10-20 years into the future.

tbf you can't expect members of a political party to ask probing questions and hold candidates for office to scrutiny

in the future people that sneer at members as "purists" when they question the suitability of candidates to run for the leadership, then these cunts need to be shot dead on sight!

Perhaps i'm being overly generous but i think there's a decent chance Starmer is a rudderless, panicking coward desperately grasping at any straws he can rather than a committed flag-fucker. The fact that we're hearing about this at all suggests there's disagreement in the group he has built around him but, equally, that the hard-right element is in the ascendancy. The watered down presentation for MPs is an interesting touch. I can see this sitting badly with a lot of them.

I don't think he's a committed flag-fucker either, it's a harder than it looks to fake it.

especially to such a wooden performer as Kieth

Starmer isn’t a committed flag-fucker but it really doesn’t matter what his own beliefs are if they have his ear and are guiding policy

Yeah less a flagfucker than an ineffectual cowardly melt with no personal convictions, fair play to the lad

he's killed my enthusiasm so much for parliamentary democracy for the rest of my life. I won't even give a shit about where the leadership challenge comes from, because it won't be from Zarah Sultana - that much is certain.

Focus groups, branding, contractors, consultants...is a hard-coded mindset and there isn't going to be any way into the new until this stuff is binned or massively reduced.

Yes. Guillotined, if you will.

I know it's the nature of these threads to fondly consider Year Zeroing the Labour Party or despairing at its unsalvageability but this is never gonna happen is it? The Party is too entrenched in the culture of the status quo and I see no realistic way out.

it's such a shame that the conspiracy theory about Momentum deselecting Labour MPs and installing their own candidates was bollocks, imagine having 60 or 80 decent Labour MPs instead of 12 or so.

Corbyn's offer of hope within the LP might prove to be a 5 year sidetrack for reconstructive politics

Can't even decide on a single suitable word for intersectional postmarxian politics that wants radical economic change

Funny how quickly Occupy failed in the UK. Momentum's biggest problem is that it exists inside the LP

We all laughed at Chuka and his pals but the LP under Starmer has basically become Don't Change UK

Among the top recommendations is: “The use of the flag, veterans, dressing smartly at the war memorial etc give voters a sense of authentic values alignment.”

can't believe this one weird trick is what will give Labour the extra 3M votes it needs

dressing smartly at the war memorial

My favourite Smog track

Bloody lovely coat that

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/COs_bNuWcAAAVaT.jpg

lol nash

lol the best thing is the jaded bored-as-shit tone of it: "“The use of the flag, veterans, dressing smartly at the war memorial etc" yeah the flag, old war guys, all that bollocks,

Guess the plan to try and recruit Captain Tom has gone out the window lol

It's a very handy guide for any Conservative HQ types looking to strangle this thing at birth, you've got to admit. Love this Labour apparatchik trick of loudly thinking aloud, showing all their working and hoping no one will notice or take any steps to try and stop them.

(Hello everyone, I've been trying to be less online in general since the US election but the events of the last week or so have just been too enraging not to comment on. The less said about the Facebook ad the better).

hope you're well mdc, have missed you round these parts

(I'm fine, just busy with a few other things and trying to have fewer distractions more generally).

I'm sure I've said this before but a by-election scare in a metropolitan seat or student town would be pretty handy right now.