Ne'er get thee stitched til Booris be ditched: UK General Election 2019

Really good on the people lost to politics:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/12/labour-leave-voters-politics-general-election-brexit

Halfway through I got to thinking "hmm talk to John Harris about this?!" but the damage is done.

This is disastrous and grim and to be honest I just want to do something else and stop engaging for a while as it sinks in.

I don't think anyone can escape a share of the responsibility/blame here but my main worry is that the Labour Party takes this as a signal to dial up the anti-immigration sentiment again. Next Labour leadership election won't be fought on straight left-right lines or even on austerity, it'll be on attitudes to migration and Europe. It's the Blue Labour group than I'm worried about.

Reconnecting with these voters...not sure what it will take, or how long, or how...certainly bussing a load of canvassers to marginals for a day isn't it XP to the guardian piece

I'm joining the labour party today. fuck the wreckers. Andrew Adonis literally blaming "unaccountable activists" thousands of people who gave up their free time knocking on doors for no glory just the hope of making the world better. It's disgusting. Irony is he himself has never been elected unless I'm mistaken.

brexit is our bovine tuberculosis and there needs to be a cull

43% of the country voted for an organisation whose leader has made openly racist and homophobic comments and I genuinely don't know how to process that. Two in every five people actively went into a ballot box and put a cross beside the name of someone whose values align with discrimination against people like me. How are you meant to get on with everyday life knowing that these people are out there, in the world, shaping our society, thinking about you as something worth less.

[BUG REPORT] to the attention of the higher beings who programmed this simulation

Your human test subjects on project Earth have been stuck in the "it's surprisingly easy to get people to vote against their own interests" algorithm for about five years now, suggest you terminate the experiment, you've got your proof by now.

I have a six hour work Christmas lunch ahead which to be honest I am not in the mood for but being away from a screen/the real world for a few hours will probably help.

I don't think anyone can escape a share of the responsibility/blame here but my main worry is that the Labour Party takes this as a signal to dial up the anti-immigration sentiment again.

Australian Labor's response to losing the election this May was to start arguing that the existing concentration camps aren't harsh or full enough, actually

er xpost don't read that Matt :(

Also cosying up to the coal miners

I’m on the drinking end of this adventure. Also I have piss diamonds on the knee which is not helping.

Over 10 million people voted for Labour. Almost as many as their election winning share in 2001.

And if you want to see what happens when you shut Murdoch out of your city, take a look at Liverpool's results later tonight.

— Arjan 🌹 (@arjan____) December 13, 2019

I don't think anyone can escape a share of the responsibility/blame here but my main worry is that the Labour Party takes this as a signal to dial up the anti-immigration sentiment again. Next Labour leadership election won't be fought on straight left-right lines or even on austerity, it'll be on attitudes to migration and Europe. It's the Blue Labour group than I'm worried about.

No idea what the makeup of the PLP will now be, but the members and activists aren't going to go down this route. People just really like Brexit a lot and they don't care what it is as long as its called Brexit in an unapologetic voice.

do we need a new thread yet?

All the ‘moderates’ are doing what ‘moderates’ do and moderately baying for the blood of Momentum members. Which is totally moderate and reasonable of them.

So many of the problems with Labour hark back to Blair years, where candidates with zero local connection parachute in and speak to constituents in management-ese which doesn’t address their concerns at all - local people might be better placed to tell their friends and neighbours that racism sucks, for example, and to build solidarity in a patchwork style.

I thought one of the biggest blunders that Corbyn made came with the Salisbury poisonings, because people outside Westminster couldn’t fathom it not being a Russian thing - ironic when you consider the Tories are balls deep in bad Russian interference - and that report about it won’t see the light of day now.

a final indignity - piers moron being correct:

This election was the 2nd EU Referendum - and Britain just voted to Leave even more enthusiastically. Those trying to flog the ridiculous 'People's Vote' just got the People's vote.

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) December 12, 2019

Brilliant thread on the uselessness of Corbyn:

Exit poll

386 Tory
191 Labour

Tory majority of 81

So fuck it, I'm gonna risk this rant... it's been brewing for a while...

— Russ (@RussInCheshire) December 12, 2019

What can we do now? Pick up the phone, phone five people that you know, and tell them they’re all cunts

xp didn't find that particularly brilliant, sorry

People hate complexity. People hate nuance. People hate being told that things that aren't hurting them have to change. Everyone loves a simple solution "end of." That solution is, somehow, Brexit and that's what the Tories focused on.

Brilliant thread on the uselessness of Corbyn:

🐦[Exit poll

386 Tory
191 Labour

Tory majority of 81

So fuck it, I’m gonna risk this rant... it’s been brewing for a while...
— Russ (@RussInCheshire) December 12, 2019🕸]🐦

people with their Myers Briggs in their bio should be shot

otm

Realistically speaking, what should Labour have done differently to win this election?

No second ref, different leader (Corbyn isn't v popular)

my local coffee shop is playing rage against the machine rn, which feels like as good a step 1 as any

So many of the problems with Labour hark back to Blair years,

Further back than Blair, the reshaping of every countries left party away from the working class. There is already a structural issue and it doesn't matter whether you run Hillary Clinton or Jeremy Corbyn or The Moon, you can't undo decades of failure on the part of the 'left' to represent its core constituencies.

All the ‘moderates’ are doing what ‘moderates’ do and moderately baying for the blood of Momentum members

The well behaved kids blaming the naughty kid for the teachers punishment. At all levels there's a psychological acceptance that the bosses and lords are what they are and the best thing to do is not antagonise them too much.

think we need to let the post election roil on for a day.

a final indignity - piers moron being correct:

🐦[This election was the 2nd EU Referendum - and Britain just voted to Leave even more enthusiastically. Those trying to flog the ridiculous ’People’s Vote’ just got the People’s vote.
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) December 12, 2019🕸]🐦

Realistically speaking, what should Labour have done differently to win this election?

― pomenitul,

No second referendum - there was NEVER any feeling it would win other than magical thinking. I get that they thought they had to do it to head off the Lib Dems but the election wasn't being fought that day. Respect the result was a tenable position. You can't magic Brexit away, the public just never changed their mind on it

If they had backed Mays deal, brexit would be off the table as an issue. Why keep an issue thats not good for you on the table? Being frightened of lib dems was mistake

morning, commiserations and support and love to all on this thread; thank you for fighting the good fight, for the cruelly dashed hope, for keeping me sane this morning

I'm not sure I can face that Chakrabortty article yet, but among a small number of good things to come out of the past 3 years is noticing how good his articles always are (I'm sure they have been for much longer without me noticing too)

No second ref, different leader (Corbyn isn't v popular)

Not sure Morgan is correct, I’d guess pro-Brexit parties barely scraped over 50% in popular vote. Optics of first past the post skews it much more leave though.

i mean if you take vote share remain parties got 52%, leave parties 48%. but that doesn’t refute the central premise of the moron’s comment.

The leave parties are really into leaving. The remain parties kinda like remain but they're not in love with it

Realistically speaking, what should Labour have done differently to win this election?

― pomenitul, Friday, 13 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Lol they should've voted for May's deal, then fought the Tories on policy at the next election.

And I know it's a terrible answer but people wanted to 'leave'. The intricacies of were a non-starter.

I’m sure the press would have been fair had Jess Philips or David Lammy been leader.

Respect the result isn't a position, it's an intentionally vague smokescreen.

Why didn't Labour, Greens, LDs work harder to form some sort of alliance? brexit party worked perfectly as a spoiler party for the tories, but greens, LDs and labour just got in each other's way.

Are we going to pretend that this little Brexit matter* is all that stood between the UK and a socialist paradise? People didn't want what Labour were selling.

*fuck you

No second ref would have played into the hands of the Lib Dems. It made some amount of strategic sense to include it in Labour's platform, although I'm still not sold on Corbyn's pseudo-neutrality, which just made him look needlessly indecisive. As for all the cretins who want to rush headlong into a New World Empire Britain, there was no winning them over to begin with. Did Labour gain more than it has lost by catering to them?

And I agree with Andrew that there's a significant portion of the population (and not just in this country, mind you) that prefers sadomasochism to socialism: it's a matter of 'character' to them.

Are we going to pretend that this little Brexit matter* is all that stood between the UK and a socialist paradise? People didn't want what Labour were selling.

*fuck you

People voted for the simplicity of the message and resisted the idea of Parliament frustrating the referendum result, that much seems clear. It's over, Britain is leaving the EU and probably was all along.

Agreeing to the election was a catastrophic mistake from both Labour and the LibDems, and Labour insisting they wanted a GE all along was evidence of hubris.

Why didn't Labour, Greens, LDs work harder to form some sort of alliance? brexit party worked perfectly as a spoiler party for the tories, but greens, LDs and labour just got in each other's way.

xxp Europeans, apparently

I don't think I'll ever get used to this ridiculous pretence according to which Brits aren't European.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to thinking Europeans are the most at risk people in this brave new world. And I say that as one. Feel utterly despairing for black and Asian Britons.

Also re: the next Labour election, it's less a question of what the membership will accept and more a question of who the PLP allow onto the ballot. The make-up of the party is different from 2015 but I don't know if the votes exist to nominate a left candidate.

Obviously a lot of the country, egged on by the media, looked at Corbyn as PM and thought 'god no'. I don't think electing the closest thing they can find to Tony Blair is the answer either but god knows what happens from here.