Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

we need more small business tyrants with regional accents that pretend to be working class and alternate between voting Tory/UKIP. Yes, I see Kieth's path to no 10 much more clearly now, what a great political strategist - he's like a cross between Eddie The Eagle and Roy Cropper.

Sienna Miller just said the main reason Labour is dead in Scotland because most voters there don't believe they could win power in Westminster rather than just say the damage caused by a decade and a half of smug indifference from New Labour. I know it's her job to make them sound good but come on ffs!

laying down the Law

Edinburgh budget latest - a Tory/LibDem/Greens coalition, organised late last night, has defeated the SNP/Labour administration and won a rent freeze for council tenants.

— Joseph Anderson (@janderson_news) February 18, 2021

lol wtf!

xp

sorry I meant Ginger Rogers!

Labour will look after your money, Keir Starmer pledges in bid to build trust

Labour will be the party of "financial responsibility" that thinks twice before spending people's money, Sir Kier Starmer will say today in a speech setting out his approach to the economy.

In an effort to rebuild trust in his party's ability to manage public finances, he will say: "I know the value of people's hard-earned money - I take that incredibly seriously - and I know that people rightly expect the government to look after it too, to invest wisely and not to spend any money we can't afford. Those are my guiding principles."

It's a hard old station when Joseph fucking Biden is the wild-eyed socialist firebrand across the water!

re: ‘British Recovery Bonds’, the question is what are they for? If the answer is ‘to fund state investment’ then why would govt want to borrow at above market rates? If it’s to give people interest on savings, fine, but they don’t help finance recovery, they add to debt cost

— Jon Stone (@joncstone) February 18, 2021

xp

ordinary Joe is a fucking lefty radical firebrand next to this joke.

apparently his live stream started with 2.7k and finished with 1.4k hardy souls still listening

that's the magic of starmermentum right there

purple backdrop and purple tie as well. beyond pathetic.

Amazing that this was trailed as an 'ambitious new policy agenda to rival the Beveridge reforms'. It almost feels like someone is stitching him up.

lol Labour Press retweeted that withering Jon Stone tweet from above about the paucity and wretchedness of actual policy content in Kieth's speech, fuck knows how you could read it any other way tbh!

I would like to set ideology aside to consider whether Kieth is actually any good at what he's setting out to do but I assume that's a no-brainer.

Would be interesting to see anybody who hasn't swallowed the Blairade making a case for him.

if they were going to be completely honest they would have to concede that Corbyn was a much more talented and skilled communicator of his ideas, at least give him that.

you need a lot more charisma and a gift for bullshitting to try and dress up a paucity of ideas and policy commitments as *something*. This lad hasn't got a fucking clue what he is doing, he's just embarrassing himself.

I don't see anybody from the melt posse of the PLP who would be much better than him either tbh

obv he is not really enjoying himself and is just trying his best to make Burnham look good before he get's sacked. He's that crap and polling so badly he must know he's on borrowed time.

Starmer repeatedly saying key words like 'business' , 'family', and 'patriotism' all in the hope that the media will be nice to him again like they were when he was clearing the Left out of the party.

"I thought we were friends! You called me forensic!" he yells into the abyss.

— Elaine Scattermoon (@scattermoon) February 18, 2021

there was an absolute prize pumper on PM who was an enthused Kieth fan and used the term "evidence based" to explain his successful approach to opposition, but thankfully there was also a grumpy Scottish guy and a woman with a NE accent who totally ripped into how useless he is.

"evidence based" is a hugely useful verbal tag so you know that whatever the person is saying will be reactionary bollocks

hey you better watch out, I'm packing evidence!

" a year ago people were asking me is the Labour Party even going to exist in a year. Now people ask me when are we going to be ready to win an election. So some significant progress has been made"

^^^
the wise sayings of evidence based Kiethucius

no they weren't. no they don't. no it hasn't.

am i naive for thinking this is no way for anybody to make a living?

if i was a career politician i would simply not spout blatantly untrue platitudes in public for piss-weak rhetorical effect, idk

Conservatives seized on the similarities between Labour's plans and their own. Jake Berry, the MP for Rossendale and Darwen who chairs the party's Northern Research Group, said the recovery bond plan was similar to another pushed by his own organisation earlier this week.

"Labour criticised the Northern research Groups ‘Big Bang’ report on Monday - now the ‘recovery bond’ we brought forward is the centre piece of their economic plan," he said.

Tory MP Amanda Milling, co-chair of the Conservative party, said: “Keir Starmer said this speech would deliver his big vision for the future of the country, a ‘policy blitz’ with ideas to rival Beveridge and relaunch his failing leadership.

"But there are only two new policies – one taken from the Conservatives and the other from the CPS, the think tank co-founded by Margaret Thatcher.

“After ten months of Keir Starmer all Labour has to offer is others’ ideas, empty rhetoric and calling for things the Government is already doing."

things are getting bad when the LOTO needs members of the ruling Conservative party to hold him to account!

'@AndyBurnhamGM will be happy about that, there's no doubt about that'

Sir @Keir_Starmer reacts to the views of people in the former @UKLabour seat of Leigh about his leadership so far pic.twitter.com/euTdVGOpyq

— ITV News Politics (@ITVNewsPolitics) February 18, 2021

christ looking at his face there is horrible, this is like when i started feeling sorry for Teresa May

slashing my odds on him stroking out btw

there is a rare bit of touching emotional awareness from kieth when he nervously nods in agreement while the first vox pop is dismissing him as a "weak personality"

christ looking at his face there is horrible, this is like when i started feeling sorry for Teresa May

He’s just manifestly unsuited to the situation he has found himself in. A man waiting for his Steve McClaren umbrella moment.

putting aside all ideology and just doing Pol Top Trumps. The Maybot might have been a very limited performer when it came to interacting with plebs and operating outside of the calming predictability of scripted coordinated situations in Tory safe-spaces.. lol like the BBC. But still a fucking dynamo of charisma next to Kieth. I'll never feel sorry for this conservative useful idiot arsehole because he has played a major role in disenfranchising millions of people from parliamentary democracy for maybe decades and I wouldn't cry if he did stroke out tbh. He's a fucking horrible man.

i’m waiting for his georgi markov umbrella moment tbh

I heard Kieth loves a bit of fried ricin with his chips!

obv only joking for the benefit of the undercover GCHQ ops with ilx socks

I can't imagine there's any undercover cops in this thread tbh

one is left to ponder

left is special branch

https://images.radiotimes.com/remote/images.atlas.metabroadcast.com/pressassociation.com/webANXSpecialBranchSer.jpg?quality=60&mode=crop&width=700&height=422

left, left

oh well nothing doing today. Might as well join a EXTREMIST ORGANISATION and commit some TERRORIST atrocities against the British State just for the sheer fun of it and then make a sandwich.

really getting into the spirit with our new champions of free speech

This Policy Exchange report by Simpson and Kaufmann polled people on whether they agreed with Cardiff University's decision to de-platform Germaine Greer. The problem is that she wasn't de-platformed. pic.twitter.com/rBBMZWZaMw

— alexandre afonso (@alexandreafonso) February 18, 2021

talking of free speech

Someone did a study of 10,000 university speaking events and the only one that resulted in an actual cancellation was a guy recruiting for a pyramid scheme.

"I believe I can quadruple your investment in just four weeks, debate me you cowards"

Odd how Starmer talks about a moral crusade when he accepted £50k for his leadership campaign from the co-founder of Bet365, a company Starmer's *own PPS*, Carolyn Harris described as "morally abhorrent". https://t.co/A7sBaG54MR

— Mr Demos of Pnyx (@gem_ste) February 19, 2021

guy who tried to hide his donors until everyone had voted in a leadership election which he had funded a very expensive and dishonest campaign with donations from dodgy as fuck property developers and bet365 has the fucking gall to talk about a "moral crusade". Wilson might have been a bit of a slippery character, but he was a political giant and a saint next to this pathetic loser.

The idea of Harold Wilson leading a moral crusade would have provoked plenty of guffaws from friends and enemies alike tbh. What did Anthony Crosland say after Gaitskell died when Wilson and George Brown were the main candidates to replace him, "What a choice, a crook and a drunk"?

yeah I think I've read most of the same Wilson book as you and remember that passage, lol George Brown was a very thirsty lad!

Dunno, but you can guess what I'm still waiting for...xpost obv

I mean what passed for a "crook" of an MP in the 60's would be in the top 5% of clean as a whistle pols in Westminster today.