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

[blandy]

2 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

I thought we'd agreed that it was okay for Starmer to pretend to be anything in order to get elected, because once he was in power he'd magically turn into the type of leader he's secretly wanted to be all along?

I know there's a lot of tongue in cheek stuff, but I think I posted about not scaring the horses. You (he) don't need to "pretend" anything. That's not right. But if he goes hard (PFK) on all the stuff that Corbyn pushed for, the same result will ensue. Labour needs to be and look like it's ready to be the next Guvmint. That means fewer "nationalise everything, give everyone free everything" and a more credible manifesto, slimmed down to key aspects that need sorting out. It means doing and saying things that voters you need to win will agree with  - framing things in such a way as to hone in on what people see as needing fixing. It's not pretending, it's coming up with (as a party) stuff for the world we're now in, (hopefully) post Covi-19, post Brexit and with whatever huge mess the Tories have created.

[Jareth]

1 hour ago, bickster said:

So Labour should be lead by a Brexity Whopper to get elected?

If Labour is serious about collecting votes from Brexit leaning folks, then they needed a leader who was pro brexit - and not like, the complete opposite to that. Assuming you can just pick up brexit leaning folks by donning a union jack and not contesting Boris on the issue is to take them for fools. 

[Jareth]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

It's interesting. I wrote something then deleted it before posting. But your comment makes me write it all out again

Basically apart from that London and a couple of other places, the rest of England (and Wales) voted for Brexit. That an awful lot of seats voted Brexit. Labour can't just ignore that if it wants to win seats. He's been smart in saying "Brexit's done, it's over as an issue, it's resolved, it's happened."

To me Labour seems to have this problem of three sets of potential voters - your lefty studenty, Corbyny, Londony types that seem to view Starmer as beyond the pale, then there's the Red Wall people - working class northerners who wanted Brexit and live in not the best places that have been ignored for decades and taken for granted, and finally there's potential centre-ish floating voters without a (political) home.

Labour won't win going after the student Corbyny types - they can't, there's not enough of them. SO they have to try and get the centre and others to vote for them. I dunno if that's possible with the party pulling in different directions, and they might just implode, who knows. He's got a very hard job, having inherited a massive defeat to the tories from the last election. Oppositions tend not to come back in one fell swoop from huge defeats.

Problem is, nobody believes Starmer won’t try to move the uk back towards Europe, he isn’t trusted. Wrong guy to front the current strategy. They need to change the leader or change the strategy. 

[blandy]

2 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Problem is, nobody believes Starmer won’t try to move the uk back towards Europe, he isn’t trusted. Wrong guy to front the current strategy. They need to change the leader or change the strategy. 

Change the strategy to what, @Jareth?

I mean they just changed leader, so....

If you're right about trust in Starmer on Brexit (and you may well be), the difficulty is that the vast majority of Labour folk (members, MPs etc) were anti Brexit. There were a very few openly pro Brexit, but TBH they're all mentalists (regardless of Brexit). 

[Jareth]

Just now, blandy said:

Change the strategy to what, @Jareth?

I mean they just changed leader, so....

If you're right about trust in Starmer on Brexit (and you may well be), the difficulty is that the vast majority of Labour folk (members, MPs etc) were anti Brexit. There were a very few openly pro Brexit, but TBH they're all mentalists (regardless of Brexit). 

Well I just read a Guardian piece on the internal polling Labour have done - only 40% of their own side in Hartlepool are intending to vote for them. HQ has lost all the small donations that came in under Corbyn but also apparantly the large donations - so much so they cannot pay their staff in that area past Thursday. I'd like to know what has happened to the large donations - it seems either way they are not getting backed by their voters nor by their sponsors. So agreed, they can't change the leader right now, but they sure do need to be honest with themselves and everybody else over who they are and what they believe in. 

[blandy]

6 minutes ago, Jareth said:

they sure do need to be honest with themselves and everybody else over who they are and what they believe in.

Absolutely 100% agreed.

I imagine they'll lose because of Vaccine and Brexit (as I said the other day). But they've taken too long to come up with exactly what you say  - who are we, what do we believe about the modern world and how do we tell people what that is in a way that they will understand?

The notion that people will vote Labour if they dislike Tories is gone. People need positive reason to vote FOR them, not just against Tories. At the moment and for a good while they haven't been given one. Folk think "they don't care about me, why I should I vote for them?" And they've been given too many reasons to not want to vote Labour, because Labour doesn't know what it is and what it stands for.

[OutByEaster?]

Will we have to wait until September for the Labour conference before we get a pointer on that?

This void that Starmer has been leading in hasn't been the slightest bit helpful to him. 

[fruitvilla]

I am removed a little bit from British politics these days ... but in my lifetime the Labour Party have had only two electable leaders: Wilson and Blair. What's going on? 

Has the country moved that much to the authoritarian-right?

[Jareth]

2 minutes ago, fruitvilla said:

What's going on? 

Scotland got pissed off

[darrenm]

11 minutes ago, fruitvilla said:

I am removed a little bit from British politics these days ... but in my lifetime the Labour Party have had only two electable leaders: Wilson and Blair. What's going on? 

Has the country moved that much to the authoritarian-right?

Wilson was 50 years ago and the other one was this

Every single PM since Wilson has been backed by Murdoch. The British public doesn't choose its government, Rupert Murdoch does.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

It will take a decade to get rid of the ghost of Corbyn IMO.

I think Labour will understand this on Friday. 

Unfortunately they have to plan long term which in itself gives them an opportunity to get it right if they accept they are completely **** for a while.

They are voiceless and don't really have much to say in a pandemic,  they cant even use Brexit or anything as the country is not working normally yet.

Like him or not,  in reality Starmer is no closer to No. 10 than Corbyn,  he might actually have drifted further away becasue of Covid.  He's punching in the dark.

[darrenm]

lol

 

[blandy]

This is good on where it's all at

Quote

...Even Jeremy Corbyn held Hartlepool, so if Starmer loses it, well, Starmer’s even worse than Corbyn, right? Ah, but hang on, there was the Brexit Party last time, and they got 10,000 votes, so even though Corbyn won it, he lost it, really. He just got lucky.

Ah, but hang on again, the Brexit Party only did so well because it gave Labour voters who loved Brexit but could never vote Tory somebody else to vote for instead. And now they’re all going to vote Tory, so actually, actually actually, it is all Starmer’s fault, so Starmer needs to go, to be replaced with, erm, I don’t know. Maybe Mikel Arteta?

Have you seen this poll, look? You see! Look! No one cares about corruption. No one cares who paid for the Downing Street flat, so why don’t you all just stop going on about it? ...The voters don’t care! It’s all just Westminster bubble nonsense. The only people who care about this are the sort of weirdos who actually understand how boring stories about potentially corrupt political donations work and this is why you’re all so out of touch and this is why Brexit happened.

Ah but the vaccine! The vaccine! Eventually, people will realise that Boris Johnson is a ruthlessly self-serving narcissist whose fecklessness led to tens of thousands of extra excess deaths from Covid-19 but for now, they’ve all had the vaccine and they think he’s great!

They love Brexit in Hartlepool. They are also quite old in Hartlepool, and now they’ve been vaccinated way before the French and the Germans, they think that Brexit has literally saved their lives. They think that Boris Johnson is their saviour.

If Labour loses on Thursday it will be in crisis! Crisis! Of course, Labour is already in crisis. That so very much has happened since December 2019 appears to be blinding people to the fact that it is not yet 18 months ago that Labour suffered its worst electoral defeat in 85 years. It has terrifying amounts of ground to make up. In those 18 months, Boris Johnson has first done an appalling job handling a new disease, but secondly a very impressive job in handling its cure. How much ground Labour should be expected to make up in such bizarre circumstances is not an easy question to answer.

Come 2024, it is highly likely that the range of ingredients before the pundit, and indeed before the voter, will be somewhat simpler. The terms of that election will be much clearer. It won’t be a Brexit election or a Covid election. Boris Johnson will have had five years to deliver on a much-repeated promise to “level up” the country, which currently does not amount to, or even mean, very much at all....

 

[blandy]

50 minutes ago, darrenm said:

lol

 

It shows the scale of the problem, too. Most people don't follow politics, they might catch a 30 second News thing and be aware Johnson is president or something - there was a pandemic and it was horrible then President Johnson invented the vaccine and saved us so I'm voting for him - labour just moan and hate Britain..

[darrenm]

12 minutes ago, blandy said:

It shows the scale of the problem, too. Most people don't follow politics, they might catch a 30 second News thing and be aware Johnson is president or something - there was a pandemic and it was horrible then President Johnson invented the vaccine and saved us so I'm voting for him - labour just moan and hate Britain..

Absolutely. And vox pops are stupid too because it could be literally anybody they pick.

[bickster]

27 minutes ago, darrenm said:

Absolutely. And vox pops are stupid too because it could be literally anybody they pick.

... and choose to show on TV. She could easily have been the 40th person Rigby stopped and the other 39 recognised him straight away.

Then you add to that she says, "do you know who that guy over there is" and points to a group of four people some distance away (Camera has to zoom) and doesn't even identify which of the four she's talking about to a woman who quite clearly just wants to get to wherever it is she's going. It's hardly a credible recognition test, its more of a "please say you don't know" and my jobs done.

[Jareth]

Possibly the only success story there will be for Labour after tomorrow is going to be Wales. Yesterday's BBC article about the party's chances in Wales was entirely dedicated to Starmer for some reason. 

[blandy]

15 hours ago, darrenm said:

Every single PM since Wilson has been backed by Murdoch. The British public doesn't choose its government, Rupert Murdoch does.

Wasn't Callaghan PM between Wilson and Blair?

Murdoch might have played a significant part in the past, but I think that influence he wielded on the public through the Sun has almost totally gone now. It's all social media now - Facepage and Titter and  Instagran and all them ones that the peoples have these days. 

[chrisp65]

12 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Possibly the only success story there will be for Labour after tomorrow is going to be Wales. Yesterday's BBC article about the party's chances in Wales was entirely dedicated to Starmer for some reason. 

Currently predicted to lose about 4 or 5 seats, lose overall control, and require a coalition with a party they’ve recently described as inherently right wing.

But yes, taken against other places, a relative success.

They undertook Labour Party membership polling and it came out as narrowly pro independence and strongly for more Senedd powers. So obviously they adopted a strategy of promoting unionism, calling independence ‘right wing’ and declining additional powers for the Senedd when they were offered.

You do wonder if they are on a deliberate strategy of long term managed decline. 

 

[bickster]

3 minutes ago, blandy said:

Wasn't Callaghan PM between Wilson and Blair?

And Heath was only elected about 6 months after Murdoch bought The Scum and he was far too preoccupied with turning it into a tabloid at the time, it wasn't at the time what it became