The Political Thread

[IndigoPrime]

Perhaps. But what was the alternative? RLB, who's basically Corbyn II, fighting for policies and ideology that was trashed — often by working-class Labour voters — at the last GE. Or Nandy, who said a lot of good things, but different things to different people, and who painfully went for the "both sides" argument when it comes to the UK's fucking awful immigration issues. And both of them pledged to never campaign to rejoin the EU. Because that makes a whole lot of sense.

Starmer isn't ideal, but I guess we'll see. Personally, I'm glad it's him and not one of the other two.

[Professor Bear]

RLB was far from Corbyn 2, but she is an Irish Catholic.  This is not aimed at you personally, IP, but one thing we've seen over the last few years is that the centrist class are rotten with anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment*, from the Guardian's John Crace decrying "fenians" at the heart of the shadow cabinet to Paul Mason's accusations that RLB had dual loyalties and answers to the Vatican.  If RLB was a Jew or a Muslim, we'd be calling the media campaign against her what it really is - or, given that we're still seeing "Dianne Abbott is thick" jokes on Have I Got News For You, maybe we wouldn't.

fighting for policies and ideology that was trashed — often by working-class Labour voters — at the last GE.

When the pundit class was high on the smell of its own farts in 2017 and followed purdah laws, voters supported those policies despite objections from the pundit gallery that this was "too far left" for the British working class, even though the famously Tory-disposed Yougov was bringing in conservative support for railway nationalisation at 60%.  The only things that were different in 2019 was that purdah laws were blatantly discarded by the media and Labour offered a Remain option on top of 2017's policies, so I can equally claim that what working class voters rejected in 2019 was Remain.

All of which is moot, as the Tories have implemented in the last few weeks most of what Corbyn was offering.  Centrists were not only completely wrong, but the Tories just went ahead and did it all anyway.  TBH, this is getting to be a pattern: the media spends years decrying some mild social democratic policy from the left, and then the Tories go ahead and implements some form of it, at which point it's suddenly a great idea.


* Ironically, the political right is more accommodating to Irish Catholics, to the point they'll even elect a member of the IRA.

[IndigoPrime]

Well, my family on my dad's side is Irish and Catholic, and so that isn't a problem for me. This issue is that the Corbyn project electorally failed multiple times, and the argument from a lot of places is "we just need to shout louder". It didn't work. Something needs to change. RLB, from everything I saw of her, was making the same mistakes (in much the same way the Lib Dems won't bloody learn, their overwhelming hubris with Swinson directly echoing Cleggmania — and after Cable had somehow made them electorally viable again, albeit as a medium-sized third party).

As for the Tories, it doesn't matter what they do now from a Corbyn standpoint. This doesn't prove he was wrong or right, because we are in exceptional circumstances. And we all know full well that the Tories will as soon as possible aim to "return to normal" and scream that this episode cost huge swathes of cash, forcing cuts, etc.

I personally liked quite a bit about what Corbyn's team offered in terms of policy. But it was too overloaded, too often gone deaf and incoherent, and was shambolic and silent at varying points on Brexit. It remains to be seen where Starmer heads.

[Professor Bear]

Well he's just said "I support Zionism without qualification" so it seems like he's made his heading pretty clear.

If there isn't a conference this year (which looks likely), Starmer can't stock the party administration with loyalists, so can't force through any policies (or carry out the purge of the left many media pundits have been masturbating over) without the backing of the largely-deadlocked NEC, so he'll lose parts of the loose and fragile right/center/soft left alliance he used to get elected while the actual left that lent him their vote will evaporate over the coming year as memberships organically lapse.
And all that's before you even figure in the media - most assume that they'll keep their powder dry and only go on the offensive against Labour when there's an election or a war vote, but this ignores that the government will soon need a scapegoat to distract from their disastrous Coronavirus response.  Starmer's honeymoon period won't last long.

the Tories will as soon as possible aim to "return to normal" and scream that this episode cost huge swathes of cash, forcing cuts, etc.

They'd have to be absolute fools not to denounce the coming recession as being caused by every socialist policy they've currently implemented here in the UK as an emergency measure, but this comes with the potential downside of admitting that there was a time when they weren't for it, reminding everyone why granny died and no-one could go to the funeral.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

Now the democratic primaries are basically over, I wonder which rapist the Americans will vote as their president?

[CalHab]

Perhaps. But what was the alternative? RLB, who's basically Corbyn II, fighting for policies and ideology that was trashed — often by working-class Labour voters — at the last GE. Or Nandy, who said a lot of good things, but different things to different people, and who painfully went for the "both sides" argument when it comes to the UK's fucking awful immigration issues. And both of them pledged to never campaign to rejoin the EU. Because that makes a whole lot of sense.

Starmer isn't ideal, but I guess we'll see. Personally, I'm glad it's him and not one of the other two.

Nandy also managed to lose Scotland (again) in a single speech, which is quite a feat, when she suggested that the Spanish government's treatment of Catalonia should be the model for the UK.

[IndigoPrime]

Yikes. I missed that doozy. Got a link?

Personally, I'm disappointed in a female-heavy line-up we've ended up with another white bloke. But looking at that final three, I'd sooner have Starmer leading the opposition than either of the other two. Whether he will have any impact and make good on his promises remains to be seen. Also, short of a massive change in England, we also need the Lib Dems to get their shit together and start polling in the mid-teens again — which after Swinson seems a very long stretch.

[CalHab]

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18165536.labour-leadership-hopeful-lisa-nandy-suggests-scotland-look-catalonia-deal-independence/

She later commented that she was referring to the efforts by the Spanish centre-left but by that point the damage was done, I think. It was completely tone deaf and showed a total lack of understanding of Scottish politics (and amply demonstrated why Scottish Labour is in its current state).

[Professor Bear]

Signalling the arrival of the long-promised stability in Labour that got him elected, Keir Starmer instructed Labour's lawyers not to submit the Labour Party Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014 - 2019 report in response to the antisemitismpocalypse, only for it to be leaked anyway.
TLDR: Starmer's current allies in the party deliberately caused the 2017 general election loss, and their efforts to combat antisemitism seem to involve shredding documents detailing antisemitic incidents in the party and harassing left-wing jews - which seems the wrong way to go about it to me, but then I'm not a big city politics scientist.  All of this was backed up by leaked Whatsapp chats and private internal party communications, and hilariously, the story was broken yesterday by Rupert Murdoch's Sky News, prompting today's leak of the entire document, in full, so anyone who voted for Starmer in the belief he'd be getting an easier ride and that we'd currently be in some kind of honeymoon period...

LOL.

And the thing is, none of this matters.  There will be no reckoning, no self-reflection on the part of the British liberal chatterazzi who gleefully boosted every anti-left story in between retweeting James O'Brien sound clips in which he clears the lofty intellectual heights of out-thinking an LBC listener, because we exist in the post-truth world where we know for certain that there is no revelation that can prompt change in our culture or reflection in our pundit classes.  An 860-page document detailing deception and borderline criminality in a UK political party may as well be the nattering of fishwives on the banks of the Seine as they discuss the distant intrigues of the palace.  Or whatever a good analogy is for an abstract soap opera.

[Leigh S]

Tom Watson broke the politics thread (amongst other things)

[CalHab]

I wonder what it would be like to live in a country with a functioning opposition and political scrutiny?

[TordelBack]

I wonder what it would be like to live in a country with a functioning opposition and political scrutiny?

No idea mate, I live in Ireland.

[Rately]

That Trump press conference. Christ.

The CNN headlines alone.

How goes the voting in of a racist moron on a wave of Nationalistic idiocy, during a crisis? No, wait...

[Professor Bear]

I wonder what it would be like to live in a country with a functioning opposition and political scrutiny?

We had a functioning opposition for two years but the Remain crowd gave it all up for a handful of Second Referendum magic beans.  I'm not sure what you mean by "political scrutiny" but if you mean the fourth estate, then theoretically we have the BBC, which despite my many criticisms of it, I must admit is probably doing about as well as one might hope of a news organisation populated almost exclusively with people from a privileged pro-capitalist conservative background who view the working class as (and I quote a former Eastenders writer) "zoo animals."

[IndigoPrime]

We didn't have a functioning opposition so much as a dysfunctional but independent parliament. So although by the end the government couldn't do anything, nor could the opposition agree on what it wanted to do. Every party messed up monumentally. The Lib Dems and SNP in particular screwed up by agreeing to an election, the Lib Dems in particular again believing their own press, like during 'Cleggmania'. (I felt rather sorry for Cable in this, given that he'd somehow made the party viable again, and now it's dead.) But Labour did plenty of wrecking ball moments too. It could have thrown its support behind Cherry's amendment to backstop Brexit with revoke rather than no-deal, but instead the party mostly sat on its hands because SNP —  while wittering that it'd stop no deal, despite having abstained in the only way to do so.

The entire mess about a unity government was absurd, too, with every side moaning about who would run the show, rather than recognising the danger. Frankly, they all screwed up in a big way — even the Greens played their part, for example running Molly Scott Cato in Stroud, more or less gifting the seat to the Tories (maj 3840; Green vote 4964). Of course, Labour dicked around there as well (there are plenty of accounts of resources being diverted to stop Lib Dems winning in London). About the only party that came out of this disaster well was Plaid Cymru.