Keir Starmer's time is up

[Smokeandsteam]

Alternatively, find a way to persuade them to vote Labour in future? Which probably does mean developing a credible Socialist alternative to the Tories; but probably doesn't involve calling them scabs, scum and vermin.

Nah, calling people scabs, scum, tories, racists is working out really well in my view.

 

[planetgeli]

Dan Carden (who I had not heard of till yesterday) resigns from the shadow front bench over the CHIS bill. An MP to watch.

This reminds me, I keep meaning to ask who is Keir Starmer?

I mean, I hear his name occasionally but nothing of any substance...

 

[MickiQ]

Unite should cut to 100% until Labour ditches the revisionist Starmer clique and develops a suitable revenge policy to enact against all the scabs and scum who participated in the anti-socialist uprising of December 2019 (i.e. tory voters). All those traitors who let the Tory nationalist scum breach the Red Wall must be made to the pay the price for their treason. Fucking vermin.

Running on a platform of "If we get in, we are going to punish you for not voting for us last time" is unlikely to get many votes

 

[Jeff Robinson]

How likely are Unite to follow this advised course of action Jeff? Also, what price is it we want the ‘vermin’ to pay?

(1) moderately likely I’d guess
(2) 2 hour self-criticism sessions for the genuinely regretful, three months national service for the unrepentant

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

Running on a platform of "If we get in, we are going to punish you for not voting for us last time" is unlikely to get many votes

Talking like that is definitely a paddlin'.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

(1) moderately likely I’d guess
(2) 2 hour self-criticism sessions for the genuinely regretful, three months national service for the unrepentant

I knew I could rely on you Jeffrey...

 

[JTG]

Huge fan of him reprising the Kinnock speech in the House today to troll the Labour right

 

[MrSki]

Huge fan of him reprising the Kinnock speech in the House today to troll the Labour right

He made a bloody good speech yesterday about the corrupt covid contracts which I posted on the covid thread. That was the first time I had heard him & then this pops up.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

I knew I could rely on you Jeffrey...

it’s Jefferson, but thank you all the same.

 

[Lord Camomile]

And another.

 

[Lord Camomile]

Oooh, aaaaand another:

 

[SpookyFrank]

Fair play to all those MPs who have shown some backbone on this.

Notably absent backbones include that of Angela Rayner

 

[co-op]

Laura Kuensberg will doubtless be tweeting about nothing except these resignations for the next week and will make it the lead item on the BBC news, possibly arranging a live on-air resignation.

 

[Streathamite]

Oooh, aaaaand another:

View attachment 234502

Does this mean Angie Rayner had two PPS's?

 

[MrSki]

 

[Chilli.s]

Good, at least some of 'em have some scruples.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Eternal glory to those 8 MPs!

 

[strung out]

My wife is involved with an NFP organisation Sarah Owen has been advocating for in parliament recently, so really pleased to see she's one of those who voted against.

 

[belboid]

PPSs aren’t really ‘front bench’ but fair play to them

 

[ska invita]

this story is getting no coverage

 

[teqniq]

No indeed it is not. I wonder why?

 

[chilango]

Nobody posted this yet?

 

[teqniq]

Hmmmm, the knives are out:

Keir Starmer Has Launched an Unprecedented Crackdown on Rebel MPs | Novara Media

As dissent mounts on Labour’s front and backbenches, Keir Starmer is fast-tracking disciplinary action against rebel MPs. Many see it as an attempt to cow the left. Rivkah Brown and Aaron Bastani report.

novaramedia.com

 

[platinumsage]

PPSs aren’t really ‘front bench’ but fair play to them

All it means for them is less work - it's not like they had bright career prospects under Starmer, so I wouldn't attribute their resignations to any kind of moral rectitude.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Nobody posted this yet?

The Iain Duncan Smiths are pure brilliance

 

[JTG]

Hmmmm, the knives are out:

Keir Starmer Has Launched an Unprecedented Crackdown on Rebel MPs | Novara Media

As dissent mounts on Labour’s front and backbenches, Keir Starmer is fast-tracking disciplinary action against rebel MPs. Many see it as an attempt to cow the left. Rivkah Brown and Aaron Bastani report.

novaramedia.com

Going after your own MPs for... opposing the government. Forensic stuff

EHRC report appears to have got lost in the post so this is probably the fallback position to try and destroy the left of the PLP

 

[vanya]

Why Did Labour Abstain on the Spycops Bill?

And the latest reading of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill cleared the House of Commons. 313 voted for it, 98 ...

averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com

And the latest reading of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill cleared the House of Commons. 313 voted for it, 98 against. Hold the front page, something's amiss. Lots of votes from honourable members are missing. The bulk of the opposition in fact. 200 MPs abstained, including most of the Labour Party under orders from Keir Starmer himself, while 34 did the principled thing and opposed - several resigning their front bench positions in the process. A New Leadership indeed.

The government's bill is a crappy, authoritarian piece of work. As Shami Chakrabarti rightly notes, the bill gives licence to undercover agents, be they coppers, spooks, armed forces personnel or from food standards and Gambling Commission, to commit crimes in the discharge of their duties. What could possibly go wrong? It's not like policing, for example, hasn't been hit by allegations of the most disgusting abuse committed by spycops. Naturally, the right are happy to handover power without accountability and shows Boris Johnson's fulsome praise for British freedoms to be piffle, but Labour? What can possibly be gained by enforcing abstention?

Writing for LabourList, Conor McGinn has had a stab. He suggests undercover work has disrupted so many terror plots, but requires a clear legal framework with appropriate safeguards to prevent abuses now and in the future. Okay, and does the bill accomplish this? No. Conor notes how the bill says state agents would be subject to the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. Okay, but the Tories are explicitly committed to rolling back the HRA and wriggling out of ECHR commitments. Second, how have these already curbed abuses and ensured undercover rule breakers were brought to book? As matters stand the rules are tissue thin now, and even this is too much as far as the Tories are concerned.

The second argument is even more specious. Conor suggests if the bill falls either the security services would be prvented from operating, or would operate without any oversight, which are terrible outcomes. Evidently, the leader's forensic skills aren't catching. Had the bill fallen, Johnson would have been forced to compromise with the opposition to try and get something through as, um, the history of government defeats over the last four decades suggest.

The rest of Conor's piece is overlong waffle suggesting he and Keir Starmer will take no lectures on spook abuses thanks to their records around Orgreave, blacklisting, Northern Ireland, and others. Clearly the leader and the shadow security minister do because nowhere does this piece explain how abstaining on the bill helps these issues come to a resolution. If anything, Conor's piece reads like something defending it.

Then we come to the final paragraph, and the cat jumps out of the proverbial. He writes, "... we have to deal with the legislation this government brings forward, and do so in a way that shows we are a responsible government-in-waiting." And there you have it. Keir and friends have determined opposing this bill would make them look soft on security issues, which contributed to Labour's toxicity among voters who went over to the Tories last year. Okay, if that's the case why not follow the logic of Conor's argument and critically support the legislation? Well, no, because this would weaken Keir's standing among the swathe of recently-won LibDem voters. As for existing Labour supporters, who cares? They have nowhere to go.

Let's see where this gets you. Labour supporters and liberals expecting Keir Starmer to take human rights matters seriously are pissed off. And those who thought Jeremy Corbyn was soft aren't about to conclude Keir is any better by parking 160-something backsides on the fence. Nor is this going to make Tory attacks any easier to fend off. "Refusing to support our security services" does not distinguish between outright opposition or abstention, unless Keir thinks Johnson's jousts are about to assume a gentlemanly aspect and he'll order his spinners to respect the nuanced difference. Literally no one is going to notice the so-called careful calibration of the abstention in the real world. Clever, clever politics becomes stupid, stupid and no one is satisfied.

Why then? Who is Keir trying to appease or, at the very least, impress with his reasonable, responisble government-ready opposition? The only ones left are the Tory papers. Carrying on his charm the press round, offering measured, process criticisms of the bill over tout court rejection, and the mandatory, effusive praise for the "vital tool" of the security services is telling them his criticisms come from a place of fundamental loyalty to the system, not outright opposition a la Corbyn and Corbynism. In return, the hope is they'll continue going easy on him, ensuring the next election is a more benign environment for Labour than the last four contests.

If this is the game, the leader, his office, and all the people he listens to are more naive about the character of British politics than I feared.

 

[JTG]

Absolutely. The Tory attack line stays the same even when they abstain so it's the worst of all options

 

[teqniq]

Frank observations from Dianne Abbott here:

 

[oryx]

'I blame his mother for calling him Keir'.