Keir Starmer's time is up

[ska invita]

Just out of interest, who do you think would become Labour leader if Starmer did quit now* and, just as importantly, in what way would that be an improvement?

* especially given that the person apparently favoured by 70% of members isn't currently eligible to stand, even assuming he wanted to right now.

It doesn't really matter who replaces Starmer at this point. The point right now is to punish Starmer and his ideological supporters.
With him gone there would be an election and the membership would vote on who is the best of the candidates who steps up.
The winner of that contest, if they have any sense, should learn lessons from Starmer's abject failures and the will of voters.
If they repeat the same mistakes they too will be binned. The more the Labour right humiliate themselves in failure, the better. If they have the next five leaders and they all are rejected by the electorate, so be it, thats a process that needs to happen.
This is how the occasional-vote democratic model functions.

National elections dont mean much at the moment - Labour is so far away from contesting it seriously - we are in an effective one-party state (as opposed to that utopia of a two party state!!), and for the forseeable. For a variety of reasons democracy in the UK is effectively dead. So on a voting level the most important battlefield is within Labour itself.

 

[Argonia]

It doesn't really matter who replaces Starmer at this point. The point right now is to punish Starmer and his political supporters.
With him gone there would be an election and the membership would vote on who is the best of the candidates who steps up.
The winner of that contest, if they have any sense, should learn lessons from Starmer's abject failures and the will of voters.
If they repeat the same mistakes they too will be binned. The more the Labour right humiliate themselves in failure, the better. If they have the next five leaders and they all are rejected by the electorate, so be it, thats a process that needs to happen.
This is how the occasional-vote democratic model functions.

National elections dont mean much at the moment - Labour is so far away from contesting it seriously - we are in an effective one-party state, and for the forseeable. For a variety of reasons democracy in the UK is effectively dead. So on a voting level the most important battlefield is within Labour itself.

I note there are still Socialists within Labour like Corbyn, Sultana and Momentum battling away but I just gave up the whole thing was such a sorry mess.

 

[ska invita]

This seems very likely

 

[Argonia]

View attachment 276192

The plot thickens...

 

[SpookyFrank]

View attachment 276192

This seems very likely

If so her abject failure to take a stand against Starmer's purges and government bootlicking will, and should, cost her.

 

[ska invita]

If so her abject failure to take a stand against Starmer's purges and government bootlicking will, and should, cost her.

shes definitely lost a lot of good will with the membership, but the general public dont know who she is, and even less about her record (my parents who get all news from TV has never heard of her, for example).
some people have defended her as having been "just loyal to the leadership". since that leadership also stabbed her in the back, she might've learned something recently. i doubt it though.

she's either been spineless this last year, or shes shown her true colours. based on people talking well of her in the past (including smokeandsteam iirc), it may just be that she's been spineless and trying hard to please. that would be a very generous reading of it. you have to question if she has any principles left, and if so what they are. i think we're about to find out. Surely Starmer is toast.

 

[Argonia]

shes definitely lost a lot of good will with the membership, but the general public dont know who she is, and even less about her record (my parents who gets all news from TV has never heard of her, for example).
some people have defended her as having been "just loyal to the leadership". since that leadership also stabbed her in the back, she might've learned something recently. i doubt it though.

she's either been spineless this last year, or shes shown her true colours. based on people talking well of her in the past (including smokeandsteam iirc), it may just be that she's been spineless and trying hard to please. that would be a very generous reading of it. you have to question if she has any principles left, and if so what they are. i think we're about to find out. Surely Starmer is toast.

I don't have a toaster in my council flat in Woking. I have a microwave only which broke twice. I had a small stove my mum sent me but it tripped the electicity so I had to bin it. I miss toast and strawberry jam like mad.

 

[Shechemite]

Potato cakes are alright in the microwave

 

[Argonia]

Potato cakes are alright in the microwave

I'll try them. I have even been told by my mum that I can cook pasta in one but I haven't tried yet. I think it takes ten minutes and I'm a bit nervous about it breaking yet again and having to get on to the Curry's website again.

 

[DotCommunist]

Yvette Coopers name ws doing the rounds yesterday, terrible idea (the welfare reform act damns her for start) but she ticks the right boxes for sensibles who get rock solid over select committees.

 

[Kaka Tim]

Step forward Owen Smith and his mr whippy van surely?

 

[emanymton]

Just out of interest, who do you think would become Labour leader if Starmer did quit now* and, just as importantly, in what way would that be an improvement?

* especially given that the person apparently favoured by 70% of members isn't currently eligible to stand, even assuming he wanted to right now.

He would be replaced by someone just as shit, but it would still be hilarious.

More seriously I don't think the main focus of Stammer and the upper echelons of the Labour Party at the moment is winning elections. Their focus for the moment is still on purging the left securing their own positions and making Labour be accepted as capital friendly again. I don’t think they are measuring their success by election results. However since their whole arguments is that this is the only way to win elections then a string of shit results must hamper their main project. I think.

 

[brogdale]

The right-wing press have these clowns jumping every which way...



Their messaging, rebuttals and media are just so shite.

 

[two sheds]

She been caught talking to Corbyn again?

 

[RileyOBlimey]

Just out of interest, who do you think would become Labour leader if Starmer did quit now* and, just as importantly, in what way would that be an improvement?

* especially given that the person apparently favoured by 70% of members isn't currently eligible to stand, even assuming he wanted to right now.

The mechanisms are a question for Labour bureaucrats.

The only people who like Starmer that I’ve met are London based Liberals. Everyone else thinks he’s, at best, empty. Burnham has demonstrated he can oppose Government policy and seems to have generated support for his efforts as mayor. His politics are underwhelming but he comes across as human. Being recognisable as being a member of our species is a pretty low bar but that‘s the state of the Labour party.

 

[RileyOBlimey]

Yvette Coopers name ws doing the rounds yesterday, terrible idea (the welfare reform act damns her for start) but she ticks the right boxes for sensibles who get rock solid over select committees.

She doesn’t pass the “Are the human” test.

 

[RileyOBlimey]

Yvette Coopers name ws doing the rounds yesterday, terrible idea (the welfare reform act damns her for start) but she ticks the right boxes for sensibles who get rock solid over select committees

If E.T. fucked a meercat and sent their offspring to Oxford to do PPE.

 

[brogdale]

She been caught talking to Corbyn again?

Nah, Murdoch initiated this story for B&S BE-day.

 

[Pickman's model]

Nah, Murdoch initiated this story for B&S BE-day.

View attachment 276259

i see you've taken that from the famous murdoch paper the guardian

 

[brogdale]

i see you've taken that from the famous murdoch paper the guardian

Yes, the Guardian reporting on a 'report'...who'd have thunk it?

The rather coy link was in red:

 

[DotCommunist]

She doesn’t pass the “Are the human” test.

would fail a voight-kampff for sure

 

[TopCat]

The Labour leader is expected to come out fighting after the byelection, with a string of public appearances and policy announcements. “We know we have work to do,” said a party source.

 

[steveseagull]

The Labour leader is expected to come out fighting after the byelection, with a string of public appearances and policy announcements. “We know we have work to do,” said a party source.

Is this the policy blitz which was promised about eight months ago? It's going to be more recovery bonds isn't it?

 

[steveseagull]

Just watched Newsnight. I want to be the first on record to state that Starmzy should go. Not only that, as a former leader of the party he needs to be expelled.

 

[two sheds]

Starmer will doubtless say that Labour doesn't deserve to be elected

 

[Puddy_Tat]

Starmer will doubtless say that Labour doesn't deserve to be elected

"if we tell people enough that they were wrong to vote for us in the past, they might vote for us in the future"

or something like that

and as i've said before, the blairites take a bad poll / election result as a sign that they aren't being right wing enough.

meh.

 

[steveseagull]

"Labour did not deserve to be elected last night. We are extremely racist, our fiscal policies cannot be trusted and no one should vote for us. We are going to change all that by having another reboot then we will not deserve to win the next byelection because we are extremely racist, our fiscal policies cannot be trusted and no one should vote for us".

goes on to blame Corbyn

 

[Wilf]

Well, all this is about marginal degrees of shitness in an overall sea of excrement for Labour, but sheesh... Rayner sounded okay on the way up and would have been an obvious foil to johnson, but then she's utterly uninspiring and nowadays has the look of a calculating politician. Burham? Uninspiring politics, to say the least, but probably has a decent mixture of 'northern', sounds fairly human whilst not frightening the middle classes too much. He might do all right if they could find a winnable by election to lob him into. None of that is about getting any kind of left advance or working class politics, it's just about the outside possibility of labour getting back in the game. Single digit poll deficits perhaps.

The over ridding issue for me is that Corbyn has been and gone without achieving anything. All the members joined, did nothing to build anything beyond the party and have left in droves. The Labour left was in retreat and that was what defined the coming of kieth. kieth's been a shitting disaster and no doubt disappointed the right. But that doesn't really swing things back to the left. Labour seems to be in a position of 'no politics' at the moment and there's no 'project' in play in the party. And we are still in a position where a party that was able to come up pro-public sector and welfare state policies might actually do okay.

 

[two sheds]

True enough, but the rules were made by the right wing. Not surprising that the left didn't take over.

Eta: that most of the membership, which was more left wing than the party apparatchiks, didn't take over.

 

[Gramsci]

In the case of my patch Lambeth the rules are definitely made by the right.

My experience of local Labour Party members is that they never were Blairites.

Somehow this Blairite faction managed to gain control of important things like who gets selected as a Council candidate. Despite new membership they made sure, with their tight control of the local party bureaucracy, that only candidates would be Progressives.

Only hiccup was choice of Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP candidate for Streatham. Council weren't happy about that.