Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

If this is an invitation for doubters to step in the ring I think we should form an orderly queue

https://media.tenor.com/images/22fa505336a5c0bdd0226ca5c5cb341a/tenor.gif

He looks like he'd go down like a crumpled sack if a kid tapped him on the shoulder

fighting for every vote in the local council elections, which can have about as much potentially life-changing consequences in most people's lives as deciding that 0 is an o

this is the kind of ridiculous stunt that can even work, as much because of as in spite of the ridiculousness - if you're known to support actual causes, and are trusted to actually fight for them, by some people. so at least he has, um

Fighting for very vote, battered to a bloody pulp and spitting out broken teeth before the end of round one.

I feel like taking up boxing so I can match my dad's 100% record of winning one boxing trophy and never doing it again!

I used to look for signs in council elections that perhaps eternal toryism was unravelling, but knew there basically a very few instances where Labour were actually any good. Now I'm more looking for signs of the imminent death of the Labour Party.

This is NOT funny. Leaders of the opposition only do this sort of thing when they are VERY distressed. https://t.co/w25KL121DE

— Tom Whyman (@HealthUntoDeath) April 30, 2021

The word from Labour staff is the party is on the verge of mass redundancies because so many members have left there simply isn’t the money to pay them. In some places there’s no money for leaflets.

There’s no other way to describe it. https://t.co/NyvbY1AcRe

— Starmer Watch (@Starmerism) April 30, 2021

the local party sent me an email asking if anyone had any old signs they could stick up in their gardens, I have told them I'm not a member so many times but it's impossible to get off their email lists it seems. looking round Cambridge the greens and lib dems have shiny new signs, the Labour ones are a mix of different designs from different elections, some looking quite battered. (there are no Conservative signs here but that's Cambridge for you)

even when they supposedly had a strong ground game in my neck of the woods which was marginally Labour and went Tory there was fuck all Labour presence and Tory doorsteppers were like ants. I told a few of them to fuck off and threw mudballs at Vote Conservative signs, but alas it wasn't enough.

This is something I’ve been picking up from voters in other parts of the country when I’m phone banking, a lot still express anger about Corbyn, even when I explain he’s gone (and isn’t even a Labour MP anymore) they just express anger that we’d ever allowed him to become leader https://t.co/gMKcPpLyGF

— Tom Laing (@TomLaing14) May 1, 2021

hah hah they really are doing this

On May Day, I joined thousands of people to march against the disgraceful #PoliceCrackdownBill

The Tories are coming after our hard-won rights, from the right to protest to the right to vote.

Today we showed them we won’t let them get away with this #InternationalWorkersDay pic.twitter.com/0KRoAqdsP0

— Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP (@BellRibeiroAddy) May 1, 2021

This is quite something.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56624437

Like Steve Jobs

Yet what's suggested time and again is that the prime minister's attitude to the truth and facts is not based on what is real and what is not, but is driven by what he wants to achieve in that moment - what he desires, rather than what he believes. And there is no question, that approach, coupled with an intense force of personality can be enormously effective.

more like a pile of jumbo jobby. I almost feel embarrassed for Laura, but then I remember I'm helping to pay for her huge salary rather than the downing st comms dept.

A senior Conservative source told The Mail on Sunday that one donor had reacted angrily to an approach by responding: ‘Why should I have to pay for his baby’s arse to be wiped?’

lol no need for the faux naif here mate, you know the game!

Since Rome was lost in Nov. 2020, we're the Eastern Roman Empire is how I see it.

haha i came here to see if anyone had posted that bit of pravda puff what goes through kuennsbergs head. i do get the sense that she does convince her self this stuff is true, like it would be much more cognitively dissonant to accept anything that undermined her sense of the natural order of power

this does seem to be a particularly weird set of contortions though

Kunenssberg said that? That the UK PM's idea of truth is unrelated to reality?

Desperate times. As we know.

Perhaps I'll get fewer witless "Johnson is a fascist" replies if I put some of the argument outside the paywall pic.twitter.com/CdJUKQHDyu

— John Rentoul (@JohnRentoul) May 2, 2021

Desperate times etc.

i think you have to listen to a man who was there during the Putney Debates

very good

tbh we dont refer to the putney debates itt nearly as much as we should

there is loads of New Model Army threads on ilm tbf!

calzino please

Went to the London Kill The Bill protest last Saturday. From a purely personal pov I was surprised at how unfazed I was to be in a crowd after a year of isolation, and looking around me at all the little sub-groups - queer marxists, Jewish Voice for Labour, a very string sex worker contingent - I did feel a corny "we all made it"* relief.

* aware "we" did not

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0dH5bDXoAA8IyY?format=jpg&name=360x360

all those pints of lager and the John Lewis stunt and making lots of dubious claims about what Labour run councils can do ... all for nothing!

How happy Boris must be, to be running against Keir in UK popularity polls

"Don't resign, old chap! Don't resign..."

When you consider that Ed was often polling ahead and how well it went in 2015, then perhaps he needs to start offering something markedly different to the electorate than what we've already got. Because managerialist Nu Labour competence, platitudes and flags isn't cutting it.

Helen Lewis thinks he's doing a great job and was using Biden as an example of why he is still a work in progress and he should deliver his *radical* policies rather than talk them up to get onside with malingering lefties. Lets see how that works out for him.

Biden is bad but it’s utter bullshit to say that his 2020 campaign was significantly to the right of how he’s actually governing. if centrist observer columnists are saying that it’s very easily disproved.

HL was basically saying exactly that on R4. There might have been some surprise from some quarters at Biden's repudiation of trickle-down economics and attempting a far more radical tax and spend plan than has been seen in the US for decades but I thought he did campaign on a reconstruction agenda rather more of the same.

the lesson of biden is you must support your local mediocre white man because he might surprise you (?)

for HLew being a racist middle class liberal is synonymous with doing a great job, she should know

I'm not surprised that Helen Lewis would support KS and attack socialists.

But I struggle to see how even she can make out a case that it's *going well for KS*, when he is apparently doing worse than the socialist that he, she, et al, worked for years to undermine and repeatedly said couldn't be Labour leader because of bad polls etc.

Well KS tolerates the member for Canterbury and HL was losing her shit about Corbyn saying his pronouns on a video about lgbt+ rights once, so it is really just a question of one’s priorities.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0hY8ytWQAA5Xgm?format=jpg&name=large

oof bruising Hartlepool poll. And if Tracey Brabin wins the W Yorkshire mayoral election then there will be another "red wall" byelection in Batley & Spen to give Kieth further nightmares.

Brabin won unopposed after Jo Cox was murdered but in 2019 a lot of people voted tory, it's hard to predict how it would go post-brexit - but if Kieth decides to parachute one of his arsehole mates in like in Hartlepool - then its much more grimly predictable.

just checked + Brabin is the 1/10 fav to win the W Yorkshire Mayoral election

Hartlepool poll had 310 respondents. That’s not a poll, that’s a focus group.

and if there were 2100 respondents do you think it would be a much brighter picture for Kieth? I personally don't think it would!

some of the other polls have Labour slightly higher, but all of them predict a clear Tory win.

Keir Starmer was insisting again that Labour's result in 2019 was the worst since 1935. Actually 1935 was a good year for Labour. And 2019 was better than 1983, 1987, 2010 or 2015. Labour lost badly in 1935 because of the electoral system, not lack of support.

— David Edgerton (@DEHEdgerton) May 4, 2021

the day Kieth got schooled by the Prof!

just checked + Brabin is the 1/10 fav to win the W Yorkshire Mayoral election

― calzino, Tuesday, 4 May 2021 08:28 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

How come? I'd have thought the issues labour is supposed to be having in die rote Mauer would make West Yorkshire a very realistic target for the tories.

Kieth is on track to actually deliver the worst labour result since 1931 though lol