The Chairman Mao resembling, Monarchy hating, threat to Britain, Labour Party thread

[darrenm]

Just now, blandy said:

I suspect the time for that sort of thing is not now, personally

Really?

Come on mate, even I criticised Corbyn sometimes. You have to call out being crap when they're being crap.

[blandy]

4 minutes ago, darrenm said:

Really?

Come on mate, even I criticised Corbyn sometimes. You have to call out being crap when they're being crap.

Er, I dunno if he’s being crap or not. I’m not hearing anything about what he is or isn’t doing. I’m not a Labour supporter or member, I abandoned Twitter a while back...

Corbyn was, to me, utterly unfit to be Labour leader. Starmer is an improvement. He seems a bit staid, a bit clerical maybe. Smart too.

Beyond that I don’t have much of a view on him yet. It’s hard to form one when he’s not getting coverage because of the pandemic.

[Demitri_C]

I am surprised by the negativity towards starmer. I think he has alot of potential. 

Certainly conducts himself bettee than Corbyn and red ed. Both were terrible leaders

[OutByEaster?]

2 hours ago, blandy said:

Exactly. In the actual real world, there is stuff going on which renders what an opposition politician says way down the newsworthy list. He could do as you suggest and call Johnson a crook, but I suspect the time for that sort of thing is not now, personally. A brief headline would ensue, then back to the virus, easing lockdown, vaccination, vaccine clotting, travel bans...

Yep, it's a difficult time to be in opposition, but that's the job - at the moment, he's not appearing to be doing the job and it's a job based almost entirely on appearances.

If you want to decide the detail on policy, deliver on process things, do all the nitty-gritty that drives politics behind the scenes, then you don't become party leader - party leader is the shouty headline piece, it's the Barnum & Bailey, it's the Tom Cruise that carries the movie, people may not like that, but that's how politics is and has been since the Americans figured out you were better off getting an actor that looked like he could lead than a really good politician who couldn't work a crowd.

He has to find a way to stop looking like a silent over-promoted civil servant, he has to learn how to do this job, he can't afford to not do the job while he waits until it's easy, the job of a party leader is to get the good stuff about your party into the public eye and the bad stuff about the other party into the public eye in order to influence voters, every day, forever - that's the job, it's the senior PR position in politics. At the moment, he's tackling it like a man who's been on holiday for the last six months. 

What is there for voters to get behind right now?  The two cornerstones of Starmerism in so far as I'm aware are that he hates Corbyn with a passion and thinks Government Bonds are a good way out of the financial crisis caused by the pandemic - it's hardly "I have a dream" is it?

 

 

[Chindie]

Being NotCorbyns temporarily got the sensible power on side, but it seems it's not enough otherwise.

[darrenm]

I don't really have much of an opinion on Rachel Reeves because I don't know a lot about her. She's in the media a lot more than Starmer is. Saying the right stuff too.

I wonder if she's being lined up to be the next leader?

If the Labour right wanted to get her in the only impediment would be the left members who wouldn't vote for her. So they'd have to get rid of them by making them want to quit the party.

Ah now I get it.

[Demitri_C]

I think getting a new leader in for labour right now would just cause more cahos for labour. The public would think labours a mess and unstable msaning people wont vite for them.

They need to giver starmer more time. I think he would do better than corbyn did at the last election.

One of the biggest issue for labour is the SNP. They really need to try take Scotland back off the SNP

[darrenm]

12 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

They really need to try take Scotland back off the SNP

Absolutely no chance for the foreseeable. There's as much chance of them taking the 'red wall' seats back i.e. none.

[darrenm]

4 hours ago, darrenm said:

The Greensill scandal is a huge, gaping, massive open goal. This is good:

I thought I'd seen Keir Starmer tweeting about it himself but apparently not. 

It doesn't matter that it's Cameron and Sunak, Tories will all be tarred by it. At the very least if Tories are forced to sack Sunak it'll hurt them by removing a potential leader they have lined up.

You just know that Starmer's predecessor would have been all over this. The BBC would have been deflecting of course.

Grow some balls, man.

Good for him

 

[Demitri_C]

13 minutes ago, darrenm said:

Absolutely no chance for the foreseeable. There's as much chance of them taking the 'red wall' seats back i.e. none.

I havent really been following scottiah politics.  Is the SNP really that popular there ?

[darrenm]

2 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

I havent really been following scottiah politics.  Is the SNP really that popular there ?

Yep. ~50% up from 45% in the 2019 GE with the Tories and Labour on ~20% each

https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/polls_scot.html

[HanoiVillan]

I don't mean to be the ghost at the feat, but I don't think anybody is going to care about this Greensill stuff, or that the story has any real legs. I'd love to be wrong, but I don't see it.

I was actually interested in it last week, and looked for an explainer as to what the actual issue was. I eventually found a video that explained 'supply chain financing', watched it multiple times, including pausing on the graphic that illustrated it, and now a week later I couldn't tell you a word about what it is or how it works. There's no chance there's more than 3 or 4 journalists in the country who understand it either. What's more, the supposed 'weakness' here is the closeness between Conservative politicians like Cameron and Sunak and this crooked financier, but absolutely everybody, including their own supporters, already thinks there's an open door between the Conservative party and dodgy businessmen, it's already baked into their numbers and their perception.

Chaminda Jayanetti was pushing a financial impropriety story that had some genuine potential the other day, which was about Tory MPs renting out multiple properties, including properties in London, and still claiming housing allowances. This story has way more potential, owing to being more easily comprehensible to journalists, having echoes of the expenses scandal, and being about amounts of money that don't end in '-illion' and are therefore comprehensible to normal people. However, there's no chance of Labour pushing this story, since their MPs are absolutely up to their ears in it too, so

[ml1dch]

1 hour ago, Demitri_C said:

I havent really been following scottiah politics.  Is the SNP really that popular there ?

 

 

[Demitri_C]

4 hours ago, ml1dch said:

 

 

Feck me even the conservatives are even more popular than labour there. Thats mental

[dAVe80]

There are some major things happening in the trade union movement at the moment, and this would be the perfect opportunity for the leader of the UK Labour movement to embrace them and score some easy points... Not gonna happen though is it? 

[ml1dch]

14 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

Feck me even the conservatives are even more popular than labour there. Thats mental

It is and it isn't. It's the sign of a different political axis. If in Scotland you have both left / right and you have independence / unionism.

Put yourself in the shoes of a left-of-centre person in Scotland. You've seen your country vote majority Conservative zero times in the last 70 years, and yet all but of a handful of those years, that party has been in charge of you. I'd guess that the archetypal SNP voter is the sort of person who wants a Labour-style Government, but because England keeps voting for the racists, they never get one. So right now Labour are forced to trying to appeal to the rather niche demographic who both don't want the Tories in charge, but also think that it's still better than rolling the dice and trying a system without the Tories in charge. 

Scottish people who have unionism as their main priority basically have to flip a coin and decide whether Tory or Labour is going to be the stronger opposition to independence. And I expect that a number of factors (the SNP being on the left, the link to power in Westminster, the bizarre over-represenation of Scottish Tories in the "prestigious" media), mean that the Tory party is the much more natural home for anti-independence sentiment. 

Labour will recover heavily in Scotland under two scenarios, and I don't think before - either independence happens and things eventually settle into traditional left versus right, or another referendum takes the wind out the SNP's sails and Scotland settles back into accepting unionism, meaning the SNP die down for a bit. Until then, it's a fight where Labour are very much the undercard. 

[Swerbs]

Seems Labour are gearing up to make corruption a long sustained angle of attack. Glad to see they're finally doing something, probably wont swing any Tory voters to them but might possibly turn them into undecideds. 

[Chindie]

People don't care about Greensill. They should do, but they don't. It's intangible, and almost meets expectations of what politicians do (in the same way that 'politicians lie' became so accepted that the usual standard of lying which was mostly spin and avoiding questions, and where things escalated beyond that it had consequences - now it just gets fronted out). There's no chance of Greensill motivating anyone to do anything.

[darrenm]

8 hours ago, Chindie said:

People don't care about Greensill. They should do, but they don't. It's intangible, and almost meets expectations of what politicians do (in the same way that 'politicians lie' became so accepted that the usual standard of lying which was mostly spin and avoiding questions, and where things escalated beyond that it had consequences - now it just gets fronted out). There's no chance of Greensill motivating anyone to do anything.

I think it could become a real vote changer because it's dirty. You're right (and Hanoi above) that no-one understands or cares about the detail and they expect politicians to be bent anyway.

But people don't like to feel dirty by association. That's why Labour antisemitism was just a turn off for voters (and why it kept being pushed up the news cycle and mentioned constantly by Tory MPs, political opponents etc).

So if the dirty sleazy angle can get some traction then it could have a big effect. To get that traction it needs the media to not shut up about it. Photos on the front pages of a panicked looking Johnson, reporters camped outside ministers houses, BBC making it news story #1 that Laura K can't stop talking about, that kind of thing.

So, you're right, it'll just get forgotten about.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

9 hours ago, Swerbs said:

Seems Labour are gearing up to make corruption a long sustained angle of attack. Glad to see they're finally doing something, probably wont swing any Tory voters to them but might possibly turn them into undecideds. 

Tory corruption is not really a new thing though.  It wont get them any nearer to power in the long run I would guess.  If this sort of thing is such a help to Labour as a tactic then they should have been in power for the last 30 years.  

To rebuild their red base,  this sort of thing is not going to get traction with the voters I don't think.  Soon enough everyone will be vaccinated and the economy will open up and Boris will and the Tories will be fine.  Policies is the long term winner for them I think ?

Edited April 15, 2021 by Amsterdam_Neil_D