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

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.

Have I even heard Dodds say anything, come to think of it?

I'd argue that the unknown quantity thing isn't necessarily a bad thing in a Shadow Cabinet because people haven't had the opportunity to form a negative opinion yet - of the lot of them it's only really Ed Miliband and maybe Lammy who have any real profile outside of people who don't follow politics. And it's a particularly difficult time to be building a public profile in any case.

If they're still anonymous in two years' time then there's a real problem.

Oh Thornberry as well probably.

I heard Reeves rudely + loudly talking over RLB's brief the other day, don't want to hear any more from that right wing arsehole, heard enough in her 2014 welfare speech to last me a fucking lifetime.

Thornberry is hated by racist thumbs obvs.

I saw Dodds on something the other day... she seems kind of earnest and sincere? No idea what her politics are like.

The numbers in this piece tell you that -- unfortunately for Starmer and Dodds -- that staying quiet to the clusterfuck coming might be genius only if there's a country left, and that's looking doubtful atm.

https://notesfrombelow.org/article/crisis-has-only-just-begun

Interesting note on the potential for social movements working outside of Labour that could then perhaps go into Parliament. If any of that takes off that's Labour version of "where will they go" for the left.

Going to tell my grandchildren this was Sir Keir Starmer QC pic.twitter.com/FfPA3ubdDM

— Juliet. (@zinovievletter) June 14, 2020

Good points in that piece about the Left needing to exercise some long-unused muscles here. The stats are hard to comprehend, and just a few months awahy

the Left are dead in the parliamentary democracy game, wouldn't judge anyone retreating to their garden right now. The game is finished.

What I was trying to say on my phone earlier was that the RLB campaign should have been run like a desperate factional war, because that was what it was. But it was run in a respectful "Labour family" bullshit way, even though Starmer was his running his campaign on a war footing.

Anyone invoking family in a professional setting is fixing to rinse the other family members.

even if RLB's campaign should had targeted the discrepancies between his bullshit video and his DPP record it might not have been enough, but at least they should have made a fist of it ffs!

Matt Zarb-Cousin is to blame there I think

Corbyn put loads of distance between himself and Yvette cooper and pwned her in the debates on austerity and made her look wooden and rather ridiculous. There weren't any proper debates about what Starmer represents, it was just purely apolitical and showboating bullshit.

there isn't really a debate on Starmer, he is quite simply a reconstructed Tory cunt. But his campaign team did a cracking job on avoiding that kind of awkward scrutiny and keeping it about him being male and not a lefty!

sorry I meant barely reconstructed Tory cunt.

An Open Letter to all MPs in Parliament...#maketheUturn

Please retweet and tag your local MPs pic.twitter.com/GXuUxFJdcv

— Marcus Rashford (@MarcusRashford) June 14, 2020

^
And Big McD has just retweeted it too, and given it his full support. Starmer could learn a lot from him.

hope some of his property developer, shy tory, older colleagues associated with this great club agree with him here!

damn

That's brilliant from Rashford.

Meanwhile - the UK is now in the deepest lockdown in Europe.

I've mapped Google's excellent mobility data. It shows changing workplace activity levels across Europe in relation to a normal working day
The U.K. lockdown is deepest of major economies pic.twitter.com/LqJ8CtPZtX

— Dan Cookson (@danc00ks0n) June 14, 2020

(Believe me I'm as surprised as you are)

Work it
Make it
Do it
Makes us
Harder
Better
Faster
Stronger
Deeper
Harder
Better
Faster
Stronger
Deeper

The animated version does suggest that something is extremely up with the data.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ql9nnxf020ihap3/COVID%20Lockdown%20EU%20Map%205th%20June%20v2%20mp4.mp4?dl=0

Marcus Rashford for Labour leader.

lol I cycled through Notting hill yesterday and Portobello road was mobbed with young white people

it seems slightly barmy that the UK govt can't safely get the schools out of lockdown but the bookies are all open again today.

Credit where its due, Lammy's "why haven't you implemented all this shit that's already been recommended?" has been good.

it seems slightly barmy that online bookies have been allowed to relentlessly target people stuck in the house with too much time on their hands thru constant tv advertising but i realise i am a joyless calvinist