have you quit the labour party yet?

i remember the electric billboards stationed everywhere in south london looking for people who stole a toaster from currys during the mark duggan protests and the all night courts etc so the pieces were easily there for me to put together if I had been minded to. I feel like on this endless endless thread this sentiment was close to the norm (? - apologies to anyone with more foresight) probably in part due to the demoralising exhaustion of 2019.

i thought at the time that calz was being over-sceptical and i probably said as much. i'm (un)happy to admit i was very wrong and he was right. tho tbf it took less than 24 hours in post for Kieth's mask to come off iirc

and plax i think you're right about exhaustion, when the leadership election was happening i guess a lot of us were still trying to cling onto some kind of hope

that was a really dark time but it feels like we've just acclimatised to the darkness

I'm not a particularly prescient fuckwit but Corbynism improved my focus on how wretched the rest of the party is. The flashing red signals from his DPP days were burning very bright to me, like the summary justice doled out at the night courts. The enthusiasm for extraditing vulnerable autistics into a US supermax hellhole (and he succeeded with one of them). The enthusiasm for giving longer custodial sentences for benefits fraud. All this stuff was expanded on in more grisly detail later in the Eagleton book to also reveal other rotten layers of his character like his embarrassing kowtowing to Pentagon officials and indifference to racist lynch mobs who burn effigies of GRT children.

Apparently Starmer told one Muslim Labour MP that the party are waiting for the US to call for a ceasefire before they endorse such a position.

i'd given up on the Labour Party well before 2015, i feel like the mistake was allowing myself to believe again for those 4 years

my first ever vote was for Ed in 2015, because I wanted to mitigate the evil of austerity by 1.2% lol

I joined Labour in Dec 2019 in order to vote for a halfway decent new leader (was in China in 2015 or would have done so then) - I then had a phone call from Kieth's team asking whether they could count on my vote, when I said "definitely not" the canvasser seemed to be flat out astonished.

it wasn't a mistake to take advantage of the space that briefly opened up - I hope people can remember not to take what seems possible at face value because what happened (even though it "failed") didn't seem possible until it did

I was trying to do an "anti-anti- but not pro-corbyn" thing during that time which was probably a mistake because it got lost in the noise and I just came off as a hater to some and a corbyn stan in denial to others

I don't think anyone predicted accurately how terrible Kieth would turn out, not just politically but also tactically and regarding the media facing side of the job. He still could have been a conservative reactionary cop and not reneged on every single leadership pledge and alienated *checks notes* almost the entire UK Asian community from the party. And there was this illusion that he was competent and a tenacious lawyer type character around him in his early days, which was very quickly revealed to be 100% projection by the UK commentariat, lol very quickly.

and plax i think you're right about exhaustion, when the leadership election was happening i guess a lot of us were still trying to cling onto some kind of hope

I remember being puzzled at the time that starmer could provoke the level of vitriol that calz heaped upon him. I have long since reconciled myself to the fact that he has been proven correct. I didn't even have high hopes for starmer and tbh expected nothing much good or challenging to the way things have been for the last decade+. but he and his cronies have genuinely surprised me with the depths they have sunk to.

the one thing I felt early doors that would locked in with this cunt - no matter what he said to the contrary - he would hold the Labour Right line on austerity even if it wouldn't necessarily be advantageous to the party or popular with the membership to do so. It's just what they do and he near enough admitted it the day he was elected and when he said something like: I don't like all this campaigning to the membership malarkey - I much prefer leading by decree. Obv paraphrasing there but it wasn't that much different.

lol just remembering a minor forgettable poster who has since gone, challenging me to have the temerity to talk to Starmer to his face like how I'm posting on ilx. Tbf I was probably quite tedious on the subject at the time and deserved some pushback, but just not that kind!

lmao I don’t remember that at all

My memory (which qed is slippery but that dismal winter did leave impressions) is that starmer was seen as kind of a bland placeholder who prob wouldn’t even be around by 24

Also that his election was less the membership being taken in than them mostly not being arsed to vote? I did, & most assuredly not for him, but I was pretty “whatever who gives a shit at this point” for a while. By the time the pandemic truly hit it was clear he was a disaster & I think the authoritarian austerity loving stuff had sunk in even before then, probably helped in large part by your tapping the sign!

there was the question of who was funding his campaign even during the election i think, that may've been the first real warning klaxon

he wouldn't disclose who was funding him during the election and iirc he delayed any public disclosure of campaign donors until it was all over.

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:640/format:webp/1*KOzaFJ3VxLL83LcspMkpqg.jpeg

It is obvious that Keir and his advisers exploited parliamentary rules so that Labour Party members were prevented from knowing that his campaign was largely bankrolled by multi-millionaires with a history of opposing Corbyn from the right, and in some cases of backing political parties that stood against Labour.

As Rebecca Long-Bailey’s communications director Matt Zarb-Cousin argued, the list of donations Keir had published on the parliamentary website at that point couldn’t possibly have covered the money he was spending. “That all-member mailshot alone would have cost their campaign in the region of £300k”, Zarb-Cousin tweeted. “That’s the basis of questions about funding, the campaign appears to have spent a potentially unprecedented amount.”

apologies, just reliving the year that participating with parliamentary democracy became completely fucking pointless again

it's so funny that we had years of waffle about Starmer and Reeves bringing decency and integrity back to politics in contrast to Boris Johnson, given that the two of them have proved themselves every bit as shameless and disingenuous as the big dog. This

Asked if the errors were a result of her being too busy, she said: “Obviously I had research assistants on the book, but I take responsibility for everything that is in that book.

“What I wanted to do was to bring together the stories of these women, and if I’m guilty of copying and pasting some facts about some amazing women and turning it into a book that gets read then I’m really proud of that.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/26/rachel-reeves-labour-denies-plagiarism-new-book-female-economists

It's interesting how they're both incapable of saying "sorry, this was a mistake" or "I've changed my mind" even in situations where that would look much better than blatant gaslighting lies that make them look psychopathic

whether this is a facet of current political culture in the UK or whether they are in fact deeply psychopathic people who should be kept as far away from political power as possible is kind of a moot point

I think even if the donor thing had been more widely known at the time it may have had diminished traction in context.

There was a perception that Brexit had been damaging for a lot of people with big wallets and that there was an elitist schism. I think many were ready to believe that there were donors for whom the Tories were now 'going too far' in the sense that throwing red meat to Murdoch had overtaken the fundamental task of lining the pockets of the rich (this was over two years before Truss) and would be willing to countenance a watered down postwar consensus (and I don't need to remind anyone here that corbynism though contextually novel was little more than this) if it looked a bit blander and wore a suit.

I think there was a fantasy of 'reasonableness' circulating in spite of all we had witnessed in the preceding four years. I think this now looks insanely naive but on the face of it wasn't totally mad, the animus and ideological extremism that means austerity drives economies against the wall again and again without any sensible basis weren't so evident to voters who felt that the rich would be more complacent about benevolent prosperity where we all did well. They're also mad vengeful drives and difficult to mesh with the utilitarian economic and political fairy tales we are told.

I mean tldr but I think the false optimism many felt was 'reasonable' but 'reasonable' is built on quicksand.

Relatedly though in a slightly different vein, what has shocked me is the scope of that animus within the party itself, encompassing knee jerk revulsion of the poor, disabled, etc. But also everyone who told Wes streeting he was a cunt at university. All that wandering id is detectable everywhere, the deranged narcissism of reeves primer on Wikipedia, the endless photoshoots of starmers sweaty head with three concept words captioned on it ('balance, poise, discernment').

I hate them.

(Sorry for long post, my bus is stuck in traffic).

Britain Trump 2.0

xp identify very much with the visceral feeling of your last paragraph

I’m not sure there are any people who hate ordinary voters as much as the Labour right. The notion that any political interest at all might exist among such people - absolutely not, there’s no way they could understand the nuances of bombing a load of Afghan weddings the same way as someone who was involved in student politics. Caring about poverty? That’s playing politics (in the disapproved way). Standing up for anyone marginalised that the government might be targeting? Might turn off AN Voter, who is universally considered to be no more than a hole for food that belches out racism and is suspicious of elitist fancies like coffee. Certainly nobody from a working class background could be left wing - they must be automatically privileged because only the privileged would choose the politics of caring for the poor over feathering their own nest.

yeah. it's not just their right wing politics and their servitude to the interests of the rich, it's the aggressive hatefulness of them as individuals. so vicious that they can't dissemble their contempt even if they wanted to

a lot of it is the archetypal prejudices of the petty bourgeoisie - the foremen and head prefects and small business types who've climbed over the heads of their peers and need to hate and despise those peers to reinforce their own sense of worthiness and superiority

Otm that’s exactly it

The wellspring of fascism in other words.

a kind of floating disgust

This is explosive and comes from a Tory Baroness.

Have a listen. pic.twitter.com/6q6aA6DhyT

— Tory Fibs (@ToryFibs) October 27, 2023

Baroness Warsi ov Dewsbury might be a tory peer but she seems more angry and more uncompromising than anyone in the Labour Party on Palestine.

she resigned from the Tory cabinet over their Palestine policy in 2014 and then we have Lammy saying do you mind not asking any pertinent questions, it might affect my career prospects.

Baroness Warsi has been consistent in calling out the Tory party’s Islamophobia for years and the Tories have been just as consistent in not giving a single fuck.

I used to hate her in the 2010's - the spoilt brat daughter of a local bed factory magnate and looked like she was going places in the Cameron days. But rather than playing the game she publicly stated this is a racist party with racist foreign policies. I think without going all Good Tory - I almost have a crush on her at this point!

for me it's just https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/027/791/Screen_Shot_2018-12-03_at_4.04.53_PM.jpg

I don't really post on politics threads anymore because lol given up hope, but seems like every month Labour find a new way for me to think "well fuck it, I'm staying home or voting Green or something". I think I've become the opposite of those people who claimed they were lifelong Labour voters but Corbyn had lost their vote with all the "this you?"s of them voting Tory or Lib Dem before (I have voted Green and Lib Dem before (Charles Kennedy Lib Dem in my weak defence))

Oh dear

https://twitter.com/patrickkmaguire/status/1718028584261136454/photo/1

why would a party whose conference was sponsored by an arms manufacturer who are supplying the weapons that are killing thousands of Palestinians call for a ceasefire you might ask. Even Khan knows as well as being electorally damaging, it's the only correct position to take because effectively being ... erm pro-genocide is also not fucking good.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F9ep5ATWAAAvuhO?format=jpg&name=900x900

the hilarious thing is that nobody in the world gives a shit about what kier starmer says about gaza in october 2023 so there is literally no downside to doing the right thing if he wanted to

he picks the worst battles, it's almost like he'll take any ridiculous, morally repugnant position as long as it is the opposite to what Corbyn would have done.

Indeed.

Andy McDonald has the whip suspended for saying Palestinians have been deprived of basic human rights for far too long and all people, the Israelis and Palestinians need to live in peace from the river to the sea. So calling for a 2 state solution is enough to get you suspended now. This fucking grotesque party is no place for decent human beings.

He was on borrowed time as soon as he spoke up tbh.

surely this can't be a response to the Tories removing a PPS for calling for a ceasefire? like Starmer is worried about losing ground in the genocidal hardman race?

yet again a shit stirring Sky News presenter (Adam Boulton this time) misquoting what he said and repeatedly asking some Labour robot if he's going to have the whip withdrawn that possibly kicked this off. But yeah he was on borrowed time anyway because he's a bit finnicky about genocide. But now you've got Murdoch news deciding who can or can't be a Labour MP, and Starmer will react immediately.

There can be no place in the Labour Party for anyone who parrots the dangerous extremist rhetoric of the UN

Happy Halloween. Who needs movies when the Labour Party is a horrorshow every single day. Seriously. I have developed a visceral Pavlovian reaction to reading about the latest antics of Starmer, Akehurst, Reeves, Mandelson etc.

i'm finding it hard to think anything good about the people who've chosen to stay with the party, especially the cowards and feebs in the Socialist Campaign Group

the muppet is speaking! right now! the world has waited for him to finally pronounce on the palestinian conflict, to show what kind of stuff his leadership is made of… let us listen in….

*muppet squeaking intensifies *

can't believe what i'm seeing, his entire speech is just him reading the lyrics to Culture Club's "The War Song"