Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

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.

Yay good to see you Matt kudos to the apparatchiks for dragging you back

Bloody lovely coat that

🖼

(Great to see you Matt, hope all is well)

Love that coat.

Welcome back Matt!

Labour has told its community organising unit, introduced under Corbyn, that their contracts will not be renewed from May.

Another key moment in Keir Starmer's battle to transform the party and remove Corybnistas from HQ

And a lot of anger to have done it during the pandemic

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) February 3, 2021

thank fuck we're not in the middle of an unprecedented crisis in public health, housing, poverty, education and basic everyday nutrition where effective community organising would be a literally life-or-death proposition

dress smartly at your vaccination

As a journalist you are supposed to be tough and battle-hardened but I don't mind admitting I kept welling up seeing old men lining up to be vaccinated in their Sunday best suits and hearing the relief and gratitude of people who hadn't left the house since March.

— Helen Pidd (@helenpidd) January 31, 2021

Hi Matt its ok to admit its spurs has you fucked off imo

Lol was going to ask Matt what has been so enraging about the last week every week is bad.

Passing 100K deaths and the papers just going awwwww at Johnson's sorry sadness in his eyes was a new seething rage pinnacle tbf