How will you vote in the Labour Leadership election?

He's on telly a lot, or certainly seems to be.

Fair enough.

I’m going to controversially suggest Jess will miss out.

Haha yeah probably. Maybe all those Did Not Votes were legions of disappointed people who signed up to vote for her. Or just prime Joining The Gym In January types.

Fair play to Boris for offering Keir Starmer "Minister for Coronavirus Strategy and Hospital equipment rationing", one of the great offices of state.

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) April 4, 2020

lol!

of the old bastards I could imagine Peter Dowd and Andy McDonald maybe being on the shortlist.

I imagine even Tom D might chuckle at that Hedges post!

Andy McDonald is a very solid, dependable performer. I don't think anyone outside the media takes Wes seriously. yep, sounds familiar!

also he's from a law background of course

Frances Barber will have to be bounced off for blatant and proud Islamophobia (there are loads of vile tweets) and she’s also a great big honking TERF.

Congratulations Sir Keir Starmer. New leader of the Labour Party. pic.twitter.com/1sqrTiL3Jm

— Balderdash (@notDcfcBoss) April 4, 2020

If you can't beat 'em join 'em

But it was worth it because they gave him pride of place on *checks notes* page 10, under the fold from some awful bollocks from Camilla Long. pic.twitter.com/6SVQbqkMLE

— jimmy mcnulty (@j1mmymcnulty) April 5, 2020

Lock thread:

The election of Sir Keir Starmer to lead Britain’s Labour Party is posing a pointed linguistic dilemma for the Persian media & Iranian gov. When written out in Farsi, ‘Sir Keir’ translates as “bell end” or “tip of the penis”. If Starmer becomes PM, Iran may have to blur him out?!

— Ali Alizadeh (@Ali7adeh) April 5, 2020

really hope that's true but waiting for confirmation from Rory

loool!

well-played

Print the legend imo

Magnificent.

Nandy gets Shadow Foreign Sec. Possibly where she will do the least damage, idk, but disappointing she has one of the big roles.

She seems more the Home Secretary type, so a good thing she hasn't been given that job.

Supported intervention in Libya iirc. How did that end up?

"Rachel Reeves Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster"

ugh!..fucking ridiculous, she shouldn't be anywhere near this cabinet. I'm never going to vote for a party with evil twats like her in front bench positions.

opened up huge new opportunities for entrepreneurially-minded human resource traders iirc, a real victory for the free market xp

fuck everyone trying to shame people into sticking with this dogshit party

Just really interesting the people appointed to more senior roles than RLB.

great screen-name/content synergy there

er, xp

I like the cut of this new poster's jib!

you’ll need to work harder than that to convince me that ‘left’ isn’t a calz sock

is it heck man!

I haven't got the energy for darning new tootsie warmers!

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2018-09/25/12/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web-06/anigif_sub-buzz-32722-1537894484-2.gif?downsize=700:*&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto

idk man calling the Labour party "dogshit" is the kind of savage bullying aggression that stops thoughtful Kier Biden fans from posting on UK pol threads

at last now we can return of nuance and civility to the political discourse, that is when all the fucking worthless melts come out of hiding!

when Fred starts haunting the UK pol thread every day without getting told to fuck off, you'll know the melts have risen!

Rachel Reeves: a sensible olive branch to the party's right - promotes someone long seen as one of their biggest brains (and who backed Jess Phillips), sends a signal to the PLP who weren't with him that there's a way back for them:

there seems to be a glaring contradiction in this S Bush analysis

depends who he's saying is doing the seeing tbh

"long seen *by the party's right* as one of their biggest brains" doesn't create a contradiction i don't think

If it's Wes Streeting he's quoting he should at least include scare astericks and someone being hailed as brainy and putting their weight such a hopeless candidate suggests a contradiction of sorts to me. Mr bloody sub editor!

Mr blobby sub editor

Sensible Rachel Reeves who enthused about Nancy Astor and who had a conference speech compared to Enoch Powell’s.

a: they're all v dim so their judgment is poor
b: she is their big brain = nevertheless still dim

weasely but logic is maintained

There's the manifesto title

A bunch of people whose political judgement I respect have quit, as has my wife, and I can understand why.

tbr, the ‘Labour left’ within the PLP is about twelve people and half of them voted for intervention in Libya and / or sent their kids to private schools. RLB commanding the vote of about 15% of eligible members doesn’t suggest they’re as unreflective as we’ve spent time telling ourselves over the last four years. It’s not a socialist party and hasn’t been since, at best, the early eighties. There is no good reason to stay a member unless you think the party can do good things at the local level and that the voice of the left, and the strength of left-wing ideas, can win over enough of the soft/centre-left members to meaningfully push the Overton window on policy in a better direction. At present, I lean towards thinking that those two things are probably at least partially true.

as a blobby sub i'm enjoying SV's first sentence there :)

Alas, she did not.

I suppose amongst the right, "brainy" is really just proxy for "one of us" and I'm not crediting Bush with being hip to this. Blobby sub edit accepted!

Xp Loooool

It is often the unintentional barbs that cut the deepest!

losing it trying to make sense of this whole “thank god we finally have a real opposition that’s willing to work uncritically with the tories” new party line, is there even a pretence of coherence here or is it just melt for fuck you

Look coherence is the old politics