love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

i was not his greatest fan but I did not have anywhere near calzlike animosity (I respected that he played ball on the Corbyn Shadow cabinet, I had a lingering affection for him from the mclibel film) I sometimes struggle to resolve my distrust and dislike of the EU (racist, imperialist, neoliberal) with my greater hatred for brexiteers. I hoped he might surprise his backers with a lefter than expected offering. I've been consistently shocked by how they seem to think that 2015 was their heyday.* my boyfriend who vaguely knows starmer through an ex and has always been in favour of him and thinks he's a decent guy all in all etc and refuses to engage my anti starmer naysaying all the time in the interest of not giving into total nihilistic depression (I sometimes see his point) has finally completely lost it with the defend Churchill thing. every day is a new fucking outrage though, I'm tired but I guess that's how they wear you into submission.


*maybe this is so partly because for so many of the current Labour right and their backers it was. creasey, Phillips, Hillary Benn, etc, these guys were too late for new Labour and got a short taste of being the centre of attention before momentum thugs yanked away their rightful claim to make 'difficult' decisions. think of that ed Milliband advisor who has made a huge career for herself as someone who we're supposed to trust has some clue what Labour is about and what the electorate want. maybe dinner plates that promise to curtail Trans rights or teaspoons engraved with pro-landlord sentiments. there's something so tragic about these creeps that reminds me of the most uncool people I went to school, always furiously aggrieved by their own defiant refusal to admit they'd missed the boat on everything. it's somehow linked to how embarrassing their taste in music is.

reading back thru the archives to remember when ppl wld speak fondly of starmzy I was struck this, the 8th mention of him, well before most of the praise:

keir starmer though a lawyer of some distinction and (doubtless reassuringly to the pr people) vaguely alpha in persona should not be taken for a civil libs type, any dpp is likely to be an authoritarian personality shithead and he is no different

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2012/mar/07/keir-starmer-guidelines-protester-prosecution

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jul/29/paul-chambers-twitter-joke-airport

― nakhchivan, Friday, May 15, 2015 7:39 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I didn’t have particularly high hopes for him and he hasn’t exceeded them. He has done the job he was elected to do with the minimum competence required. I don’t think failing to run into every brick wall the Mail has crudely painted a tunnel on the side of will hurt him much - the real arguments are going to come when he gets around to outlining policy and gender recognition is one of the canaries in the coal mine for how much he’s willing to pivot on what would have been considered core principles previously.

leader of the opposition, not prepared to oppose properly

we have the 21st highest population in the world yet the third highest death total from the virus, Labour should be trouncing them and being "the grown-up in the room" isn't going to make a real difference when 200 people are dying every day and no accountability is being challenged

Starmzy is too clever to get drawn into this showboating media bullshit, he understands that if the Labour Party is to thrive all policy needs to be focused on the 100,000 dithering Tory cunts that actually decide electoral outcomes in the UK.

it's not so much starmer himself I'm interested in as how this instructive experience might be interpreted by his supporters

you can criticise the faults of Corbynism and its pathetically weak legacy that has seemingly dissipated into dust in the space of a few months and some of the policy compromises made by his shadow cabinet. But this cunt is beyond defending and I've got absolute 100% certainty his regime going to deliver everything that was bad about Milibandism with some further pivots to the right because he is a tory law & order cunt to the core.

"any dpp is likely to be an authoritarian personality shithead and he is no different"

nakh otm as fuck!

Starmer fans aren't going to care as long as the poll ratings keep going up.

Still, ShariVari OTM - when the Mail phones up the Labour press office they aren't going to offer space for nuanced discussion of Churchill or Britain's colonial legacy. They're doing it because they want to splash 'FURY AS STARMER BACKS CHURCHILL THUGS', so defusing that is all you can really do. Loudly trumpeting Starmer's minimal 'involvement' in their 'campaign' is the next best thing they can do because it gets exactly the reaction it has today. Arguably the Mail wants a human rights lawyer in power even less than it wants a socialist - at least they can sell papers by shrieking about how terrible the socialist is.

The question really is not "what do my supporters want me to say" it's "what does my opponent want me to say right now?" Avoiding that is step one but it's the job of supporters - both enthusiastic and reluctant - to loudly signal "don't take my vote for granted". Hence my point about a by-election.

Yes it's borne of cowardice, but naivety doesn't really get you anywhere either. Jon Stone - who I think is excellent - was saying on Twitter that endlessly avoiding culture war traps leads successfully avoids the trap but also means they control the argument and leads to right wing hegemony. Which is right, but in all substantive terms we've had right wing hegemony since December anyway (and actually for 30 years grim lol).

good luck to him forensically trying to step over the culture war, but there is only so long you can maintain that until you end up applauding someone getting 10 years for having a dump on Enoch Powell's grave.

Enoch Powell isn't in his grave iirc

They'll get him with one of these eventually but they're holding off the big ammo for when Labour has a poll lead. Question is whether anyone will care because that'll be the point where the government has already burned down the house and killed your parents and shat everywhere.

xp

CCHQ should use his re-animated talking corpse in a propaganda vid to encourage people to go back into shopping centres, pubs, restaurants etc

I'm surprised anyone is surprised about starmer- haven't followed the party so I missed that brief period when he was talked up as a potentially credible corbyn-lite figure (which would have been bad enough)

as someone who never joined it disturbs me how the leftists who choose to stick with labour seem to find it way too easy to fall behind the leader and assume good faith which clearly isn't there. if people are getting off the train now I support it

Honestly he's either gradually succeeding by the yardstick that his supporters set out right at the start or he's letting people down in exactly the way he was always going to but either way I doubt there are many people who are disappointed in him per se, just because this is the course he was obviously going to take from the very start and anyone who expected otherwise is an idiot.

Not throwing shade on anyone here obviously but things that Owen Hatherley tweet are very much 'what did you think was going to happen?'

When you are highish profile lefty commentariat you have to put on a pretence of giving him a fair chance rather than calling him a cunt since January like mere message board fulez like me.

I think when Hatherley/left twitter express disgust at Starmer that is working through grief @ the way Corbyn ended rather than not knowing what Starmer was about.

Yes that makes sense.

I think that grief process started when that first YouGov poll showed his commanding lead over RLB, the denial stage.

while I have never been a fan I am still somewhat surprised at just how relentlessly starmer has pushed right and authoritarian, I imagined more cautious blandness. there's quite a discrepancy between his reaction to recent protests and racism and that ridiculous campaign video he produced

RLB being all constructive and friendly while Starmer's team doing sexist and dogwhistle attacks on here, they should have gone for his jugular then.

On her I meant

It probably wouldn't have been enough but better than doing such a bland campaign

not that I buy into the idea of some Real starmz that can be intuited by carefully reversing all the triangulation, or glimpsed in moments when he lets his carefully managed optics-shield down, it's just striking how immediately & starkly different LOTO starmz is from Leadership Campaign starmz & regardless of how obvious (hmmm) it was that this would happen, the labour membership are have either dropped basically all their beliefs in response to the last election, or they are some mix of disappointed/duped/naive

ofc I'm really just talking abt ppl who backed corbyn and then starmer

If he ran against RLB again tomorrow, do you think the outcome would be different?

if all the ppl who have left were still around to vote I think it might be closer, but this corbyn-starmer group is somewhat mysterious to me, hence my interest

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaenX3yWsAEtWyb?format=jpg&name=large

The writing was on the wall when told a load of Fabian wankers of course I'll lie to Scousers about boycotting the Sun.

I mean for the apolitical Corbyn and Starmer both nice misters crew

To see!

Does it really matter what Starmer does now?

Very little that he says or does at the moment has any real effect.

I don't have anything much against KS but I do tend to agree with this from plax (ico), upthread:

*maybe this is so partly because for so many of the current Labour right and their backers it was. creasey, Phillips, Hillary Benn, etc, these guys were too late for new Labour and got a short taste of being the centre of attention before momentum thugs yanked away their rightful claim to make 'difficult' decisions. think of that ed Milliband advisor who has made a huge career for herself as someone who we're supposed to trust has some clue what Labour is about and what the electorate want. maybe dinner plates that promise to curtail Trans rights or teaspoons engraved with pro-landlord sentiments. there's something so tragic about these creeps that reminds me of the most uncool people I went to school, always furiously aggrieved by their own defiant refusal to admit they'd missed the boat on everything. it's somehow linked to how embarrassing their taste in music is.

Speaking as a casual external observer who, for better or for worse, is unlikely to move back to the UK any time soon, I wanted to give Starmer the benefit of the doubt at first, but I didn't think he'd take his inflexible rhetorical posture to such caricatural heights. In and of itself his election was disappointing, but this latest episode has just been painful to witness, even on the most charitable reading. All I can say is: good luck, UK.

Can't believe that this politician is ignoring black voters*, SMH.

*That black person on Twitter whose views on all other subjects are identical to mine.

— Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) June 8, 2020

It’d be interesting to see some polling on Starmer’s approval rate vs Corbyn with voters from minority groups, tbh.

Which is not to say that it’s be positive, just that there are a lot of assumptions being made.

*it’d

if all the ppl who have left were still around to vote I think it might be closer, but this corbyn-starmer group is somewhat mysterious to me, hence my interest

This is more of an educated guess really but the majority of the Labour Party is probably loosely defined as soft-left/social democrat as opposed to either socialist or bleeding heart neoliberal, and I think this has been the case throughout both the New Labour and Corbyn eras, although clearly the size and influence of these groups waxes and wanes according to the era.

Even in the Blair era this group could be kept just-about-happy-enough with massive increases in health and education spending, tax credits etc. But when they were offered a straight choice between a group of austerity hawks and a socialist they went with the socialist hands down, and Owen Smith was so self-evidently dodgy that they stuck with Corbyn.

I think both the left and the right both misread the situation with those Corbyn victories - although clearly there was a big influx of left-wing members after 2015 that group wasn't big enough to win it for RLB in a completely different kind of leadership contest. I suppose there are a few Paul Mason types knocking about as well who did enthusiastically shill for both Corbyn and Starmer but Angela Rayner types are probably more widespread.

I suspect Starmer has also been infuenced by data showing there's a chunk of voters to be won with a mix of more redistributive economic policies while shifting right on law and order and that's territory on which the former Director of Public Prosecutions is going to be very comfortable, although he might be squeamish about going full-on Controls on Immigration. Labour has always felt to me like an authoritarian party at heart.

I've been thinking about when there might be a crunch point where lots of former Starmer fans suddenly start making bewildered and disappointed noises and it's probably going to be when he has to come up with a policy on Europe and it turns out to be something more equivocal than "rejoin the EU immediately".

The difference between Ed Miliband in leadership campaign mode and as LOTO was even more pronounced. Although Miliband was always the most left-wing person in his Shadow Cabinet whereas Starmer is somewhere in the middle of his.

there are sitting Tory mps to the left of Reeves, probably why he has put her in the shadow cab - to make him look slightly less of a reactionary arsewipe himself

If he ran against RLB again tomorrow, do you think the outcome would be different?

Taking the 16% of people who voted for Nandy into account the result would probably be a bigger margin of victory for Starmer.

Also didn’t a huge chunk of the membership simply not bother to vote this time? istr it was way down from 2015/16

Yup

I guess it's time to retreat to my garden

the people that joined under Corbyn and/or were engaged by Momentum was a more complex mix than just doctrinaire left socialists and contained a significant section of people previously wary of mainstream political parties and the Westminster process. they're the ones who are first out the door under Starmer and they're the ones who could've done most good in terms of reforming the party and eventually the political process. the most disspiriting thing about Starmz and his backers isn't his exact position on the left-right axes but the apparent return to technocrat wonk politics, the ultimate enemy of democratic change.

to a small extent this is why his positioning on grassroots activism like BLM does matter. i don't have a garden so i'm just gonna peer over ogmor's fence.

Percy Thrower will be smiling down on yers!

Whoever it was deep upthread who said Starmer was going for the Cameron moderate voters at the expense of the old left seems increasingly OTM.

This is what that approach is going to look like - depressing announcement after awful announcement while the poll numbers climb.

But the election is miserably far off and there is an awful lot for the Tories to fuck up before then. Avoiding basic invitations to shoot himself in the foot and move things back to the culture war is one thing; neglecting easy opportunities to show some clear water between the two is much less forgivable.

(And beyond Starmer the one-man-band thing is a worry, too.)

I had a simple thought today about KS and his new regime, media style, etc.

Unlike others I don't hate KS and I don't think that his policy positions right now mean anything much in the long term.

But what I realized that I don't like is ... Labour discourse with Starmer sounds stupider than before. Dull, bland, dumbed-down, thinned out to LCD PR speak.

In general it recalls Blairism (I have said before that I think he could be like mid-1990s Blair), but actually Blair in his 1990s prime wasn't that bland - he was at least, say, a good orator, had strong phrasemakers.

KS has sort of dragged everything down to a Rachel Reeves focus group level of banality - where you say things that are vaguely true, maybe too broad and banal to count as true, and show no real conviction in saying them.

And the reason it stands out is ... JC, and even more Johnny Mac, were not like that. What they brought to high politics was not just principle, great ideas, but actually, underrated -- INTELLIGENCE.

The first times I heard JC I thought: This is incredible - someone is talking to me; seriously; as an equal; telling the truth. He talks my language, it's real, it's unprecedented. It made much previous politics seem like a synthetic pretence.

Not only was all this underrated, but some people (Martin Amis one egregious example) actually mocked JC's intelligence, his lack of qualifications. That was BS. It's becoming ever clearer that JC spoke with more intelligence than any party leader - and yes, the incredible Johnny Mac with even more again. (JM must be the greatest intellectual among politicians in my time.)

The dull dumb way of talking that they broke through, the sense that no real thought or honesty is going on, the bland boring synthetic pretence, maybe, is what we're going back to.

100% otm

Yup and we are going back to it consciously in search of the 100,000.