Keir Starmer's time is up

[TopCat]

So after the racism on Thursday, it was homophobia on Friday as Forensic Kieth visited a church that promotes prayer as a "cure" for homosexuality.

They're really going for it this weekend, fuck knows what they're doing today

Forensic Kieth is volunteering for the Metropolitan Police today. They are deploying him with the TSG under Delroy Smellie’s command.

 

[killer b]

Just listening to Steve Richards, he does make the important point that Labour doesn't have a track record of deposing it's leaders. John Smith died of course but what other leader was forced out successfully?

Blair?

 

[tony.c]

Just listening to Steve Richards, he does make the important point that Labour doesn't have a track record of deposing it's leaders. John Smith died of course but what other leader was forced out successfully?

Corbyn.

 

[tim]

So after the racism on Thursday, it was homophobia on Friday as Forensic Kieth visited a church that promotes prayer as a "cure" for homosexuality.

They're really going for it this wenekend, fuck knows what they're doing today

You mean this visit, I presume.




But how could he have known he was hobnobbing with a charismatic homophobe?

Theresa May meets with anti-gay cleric

 

[Orang Utan]

Corbyn.

he lost an election and resigned

 

[butchersapron]

Closer to constructive dismissal then.

 

[JTG]

You mean this visit, I presume.




But how could he have known he was hobnobbing with a charismatic homophobe?

Theresa May meets with anti-gay cleric

Could have gone to literally any other church but had to be the same extremist one that May and CharlesNCamilla went to.

Literally 30 secs on Google is beyond them

 

[tony.c]

he lost an election and resigned

Because of the undermining and backstabbing.

 

[tim]

In visiting the exorcist Sir Sheith was following in the footsteps of giants

 

[tim]

Continued from above


]Ekklesia | Boris Johnson under fire over church that "exorcises" gays[/MEDIA]

This was about Jonson's first visit in 2009

 

[Orang Utan]

Because of the undermining and backstabbing.

And the terrible divisive leadership and failure to address antisemitism

 

[tim]

Obviously, Sir Keir's people didn't pick up this, either:

According to reports, the Pastor started by requesting for members willing to give £2,000 to come forward, after which he requested that those with £1, 000 come forward.
He eventually proceeded to say that anybody giving an offering of less than £250 will not be called forward as he doesn’t want to embarrass them due to the supposedly small amount.
According to Ono Bello, members of his congregation were mortified at his requests as there are personal stories of people struggling financially, with visa applications, to get on the property ladder and gain profitable employment and have not received any support from the church.
The Pastor, who was chosen in 2011 as “Britain’s Most Inspirational Black Person” allegedly pays himself and other senior Pastors in the church a six-figure salary in Pounds.

RCCG pastor Agu Iruku under fire for asking for £2,000 sacrificial offering

 

[tony.c]

And the terrible divisive leadership and failure to address antisemitism

I don't accept those smears, but even if people do it would mean he was forced out successfully.

 

[ska invita]

i once got into a conversation with a guy with jamaican heritage about singing, and i ended up asking if he was part of a choir. he said he had joined a church choir for a bit, but the church he went to was basically a shakedown factory, which badmouthed you unless you paid up. theres a reason why so many "black" churches keep popping up everywhere < theyve got a good business model going on ripping off the vulnerable.
there should be a law against it

 

[agricola]

i once got into a conversation with a guy with jamaican heritage about singing, and i ended up asking if he was part of a choir. he said he had joined a church choir for a bit, but the church he went to was basically a shakedown factory, which badmouthed you unless you paid up. theres a reason why so many "black" churches keep popping up everywhere < theyve got a good business model going on ripping off the vulnerable.
there should be a law against it

"a good business model going on ripping off the vulnerable" - well it certainly sounds like a religion

 

[Shechemite]

Time is almost up

 

[mauvais]

Time is almost up

I've spent all day cutting out letters from all kinds of different newspapers and periodicals to make my ransom demand but turns out they're all haunted so whatever I try and assemble it somehow always comes out the same:

 

[mauvais]

After hours of tense negotiation I somehow end up paying my hostage a million dollars to leave but then they refuse to go and I have to sign over my house whilst reading a statement about how much I value the police.

 

[Pickman's model]

I've spent all day cutting out letters from all kinds of different newspapers and periodicals to make my ransom demand but turns out they're all haunted so whatever I try and assemble it somehow always comes out the same:

View attachment 261545

The Tory party are showing themselves a remarkably effective force for change

 

[nino_savatte]

Just listening to Steve Richards, he does make the important point that Labour doesn't have a track record of deposing it's leaders. John Smith died of course but what other leader was forced out successfully?

George Lansbury, Angela 'Murder She Wrote' Lansbury's grandfather, was ousted in 1935 and replaced by Clem Attlee (whose grandson sits in the Lords as a Tory).

 

[Puddy_Tat]

The Tory party are showing themselves a remarkably effective force for change

and the Labour party is either supportive of, or abstaining on, most of those changes, so is also a farce for change...

 

[steveseagull]

So is our man a homophobe or just terminally stupid?

 

[19sixtysix]

So is our man a homophobe or just terminally stupid?

Just a back stabbing cunt

 

[AnnO'Neemus]

I've spent all day cutting out letters from all kinds of different newspapers and periodicals to make my ransom demand but turns out they're all haunted so whatever I try and assemble it somehow always comes out the same:

View attachment 261545

How do you define 'effective'? Because it seems to me that Starmer isn't forcing change, he's moving the party further right and, if anything, promoting the party on the basis of 'Vote for Labour, because we stand for lots of the same things as the Tories, we're not that different to the party you voted into power, so you should be able to easily switch allegiance, because you'll get more of the same, we're just a little bit less mean to people'.

That's not effective leadership. That's not effecting change. It's encouraging people to vote for the status quo with a different brand, like vote for Pepsi instead of Coca Cola.

Starmer's not saying vote for Irn Bru or Vimto or other regional offerings, he's not offering pumpkin spiced latte or kombucha or whatever the latest fashion trend is.

The choice is Coca Cola or Pepsi. Nothing new. No radical departures. No change really.

 

[mauvais]

I think you might have made the mistake of taking that post seriously.

 

[Puddy_Tat]

I think you might have made the mistake of taking that post seriously.

i think a few people might have made the mistake of taking kieth seriously...

 

[Humberto]

Has there ever been a more odious, talentless unspeakably myopic bunch than the present cohort of MPs?

It gives me hope.

 

[Humberto]

Thick shite

 

[vanya]

One Abysmal Year of Keir

A full year since Labour returned to the mean and elected a man in a nice suit. Looking back at the occasion , this blog met Keir Starmer'...

averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com

A full year since Labour returned to the mean and elected a man in a nice suit. Looking back at the occasion, this blog met Keir Starmer's election with a bouquet of scepticism. The power grabs and rolling back of internal democracy, a default to the bourgeois common sense of politics, a load of dishonest but politically convenient hand wringing over antisemitism - despite the leak of that report. As I wrote of the left's relationship to the new leadership, "We're going to have to live with someone whose first instinct is to praise the government when they're doing well, and keep quiet when they're not." Prepared? What I was expecting was a leadership not unlike Ed Miliband's, something that at least meant well which the majority of the left could support at a remove. Unfortunately, Dear Keir is yet to touch even this low bar.

In policy terms, he writes in Sunday's Observer about the failings of the Conservatives, and how Labour's "ambition for Britain must match the moment. Not merely fiddling with tax incentives or creating pots of money for towns to scrap over but creating an economy that works for everyone." One might point out this is exactly how Keir has spent his time in the Leader's chair. Attacking the Tories from the right over the minutiae of corporation tax rates, quibbling with the process and details of Coronavirus management, and only going on the offensive when either Marcus Rashford or teaching unions or SAGE have prepared the ground for him, this falls somewhat short of a functioning and effective opposition, let alone anything demonstrating ambition capable of rising to the occasion.

In terms of conventional politics, he's failing. But much more serious than poor parliamentary footsy is the potentially existential crisis the leadership and its right wing cheerleaders are dragging the party into. As this blog has pointed out enough, the main consequence of Jeremy Corbyn's time was the recomposition of the Labour vote. The core Labour supporter is now the immaterial worker, someone whose working life is bounded by the production of care, knowledge, and social relationships - typically, though not exclusively, for the profit of others. On top of this, the way Tory policy works to keep their voter coalition together by shielding older people, retirees particularly, from the (private) consequences of austerity, the fall out of the Brexit mess and the Covid slump, keeping the property market overheated and, indeed, subordinating crisis management to these ends, the Tories are underwriting the long-term decline of their support by raising a generation of anti-Tory voters. Jeremy Corbyn's clear anti-austerity message in 2017, plus the promise of a softer Brexit was able to cohere these emerging interests around Labour while keeping enough of the old core vote on board. As a new political consciousness in the process of emergence, there was a certain softnesss to it but, more importantly, conditionality. For it to solidify and identify with Labour the party needed to act consistently in their interests. Instead, there was more internal warfare and the stoking of Brexit - purposely by the right, including a certain Keir Starmer - as a wedge issue. The result was confusion, a panicky arse covering adoption of the second referendum, and a partial fragmentation of the 2017 coalition as a few hundred thousand defected direct to the Tories, and some two million migrated to the Liberal Democrats, Greens, the nationalist parties, and abstentionism.

The inescapable task of Labour strategy is bringing these people back, holding on to the new core that stuck with Labour in 2019, peeling soft supporters off the Tories, and looking at ways of energising the spontaneously socially liberal and small s socialist layers of younger workers. This is not just crucial for winning elections, but for securing the future of the party itself. According to the wisdom revealed by Claire Ainsley, Keir's policy guru and writer of matters on the new working class, this is what has to be done ... but thinks traditionalist appeals to flags and family would secure them. We have then an explanation for the plastic patriotism and similar embarrassing efforts, but from a position utterly ignorant of the relationship between the materiality of immaterial labour, social liberalism, and the constitution of new class identities. If this wasnt bad enough, something the dim wattage of Labourist thought should recognise - bread and butter issues, and how the Tories stymie them at every turn - is completely off the Starmerist radar too. It's almost as if they're not serious about power.

It gets worse. The loudest cheers for Keir come from the right of the party frothing at the purge of the left. Though, of course, they like to pretend it's a struggle against antisemitism, not least because they lack the arguments to contest the left at the level of ideas and strategy. As was pointed out last June, the problem with driving out the left, whether by adopting right wing positions or by simple diktat, is the party is ridding itself of the very people who were crucial to mobilising voters at the last two general elections. I'm not talking about campaigning, but those who did the unseen and under-the-radar work of converting friends, workmates, and family members into giving Labour a go. Those who, completely unbidden, were an influence in their online and offline networks and helped cohere support around the party. As dreadful as the 2019 result was, there's a reason why, bar 2017, Labour got the highest number of votes it had since 2001 and the greatest number of votes in England since 1997. In other words, Keir Starmer and his host are demobilising the party's support. Now, they might believe they can do a simple trade: putting the backs up of the new core vote in the big cities where Labour MPs sit on huge supermajorities doesn't matter if tacking right wins back support in the so-called Red Wall and soft Tories elsewhere. Completely forgetting immaterial workers are distributed across the land. Winning back the Brexit-supporting Tory switcher snack bar manager at a provincial railway station isn't worth it if the party does so on a prospectus alienating the younger, low paid precarious workers she oversees. Chasing after Tory supporters on a Tory-lite platform is less a matter of digging your own hole, but driving the spade into one's foot.

This is why Keir Starmer is doing abysmally. He's waging class politics alright, the class politics of the other side. As he waxes about our once-in-a-generation opportunity, the possibility of the party carrying on wanes that little bit more. "Starmerism" and its trajectory doesn't just risk Labour becoming less than the sum of its parts, but allowing it to fall apart completely. The polls have consistently shown upticks in Green support and faltering gains for the LibDems. The SNP are poised to sweep all before it, and Plaid Cyrmu is putting in a better showing. And thanks to the worst possible start to the Hartlepool by-election, a new party has a shout of coming from nowhere to take more support off Labour than the Tories. Might Keir be able to turn it around? Possibly, but in politics as with most things the best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour. He managed to repair Labour's polling position before crashing it, and having disaggregated the party's support he's not about to put it together again without a fundamental strategic rethink. Though, of course, having an impotent and useless party at a remove from the messy business of proper politics suits the Tories and the Labour right alike.

 

[hitmouse]

Counterpoint: what if Keir Starmer is Moses?

Harris enthuses: “Some PMQs I could literally cry at how professional Keir is, how he gets the tone right and how he gets Boris Johnson in a knot.”
... “He’s a bit like Moses, isn’t he?” suggests Carolyn Harris. “He’s taking us out of one place, taking us to another, and we all have to go with him.”