the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

Sheerman must be next, he's been on the counter-offensive to Momentum in the local rag and mysteriously an old racist tweet of his emerged the other day. Field was a mess on PM. He seems to think his massive majority in a Merseyside seat is down to him! Same with Sheerman, often people are saying he's just an old dodgy bastard that lives in a castle outside W Yorkshire, too busy with his lobbying/grifting income streams to gaf about Hudds. He pissed off the football fans by mistakenly cheering Sheff Wednesday's goal in the playoff game last year. And then he was criticising a proposed safe-standing area at Leeds Rd. Every time he opens his mouth something either completely wrong or bullshit comes out.

Field isn't entirely wrong, brand recognition counts for a lot amongst the bovine end of the electorate.

altho on his Five Live interview he didn't seem to appreciate the irony of complaining about people being allowed to rejoin Labour after standing against them in earlier elections, and threatening to run as an independent at the next one.

i'm high fiving TM on her latest dance moves, there's something there.

I feel a lot of empathy with socially awkward weirdos, but alas this one has long since crossed the rubicon, and would love to see her dancing off a bridge tbh.

simon danzcuk got just 883 votes when he stood as an independent against labour in 2017 -- field's been in place for a lot longer and probably will garner some residual personal loyalty but the "brand recognition" is as often as not the party rather than the person

I know in Hudds there has been a lot of ppl voting for the Labour brand, rather than the MP, and getting increasingly vocal about how the Sheerman brand makes entering that voting booth and voting in his name feel like an act of trudging through deep puddles of vomit.

Most people in Vauxhall have been voting Labour through very gritted teeth (I was going to say "for many years" but I don't know how many people who live in Vauxhall have lived there for a very long time. Vanishingly few, I'd imagine)

"Most people in Vauxhall have been voting Labour through very gritted teeth"

sometimes imitation is the most sincerest form of empathy :p

LOL @ Emily Maitlis' entirely balanced coverage of Frank Field's resignation on Newsnight.

great show of unity from the party members there "refusing to talk to each other directly"

tbf I'd refuse to talk to Chris Williamson directly.

what an absolute cunt he is. He makes me want to dance with Theresa May.

Has anybody ever seen Theresa May clapping on the backbeat? Thought not.

— Richard Williams (@rwilliams1947) August 30, 2018

tfw when you're being interviewed about swimming but really want to talk about making @jeremycorbyn PM 💖🌹 pic.twitter.com/L1L0UZ10bR

— Left Design (@UK_LDC) August 29, 2018

love this autistic guy and his companion!

Good work that man

fantastic.

The new centrist party, United For Change, has apparently split into two smaller centrist parties before launch.

Interviewee on Today just stated that Labour had "become the nazi party" and was not challenged at all about this.

ffs if journalists have to challenge interviewees' every self-evidently true assertion they'll never get anything done

Rusbridger's long read on who broke the news fleetingly making one nostalgic for ten years ago again :/

It does feel like we're trapped in a spiral where the media have cried wolf on Corbyn so many times that when something of substance crops up - as it did last week - you get a load of twats basically saying 'there is no antisemitism, it's all a conspiracy', which is just profoundly unhelpful. You only need to look across the Atlantic to see what happens when someone genuinely malevolent works out how to turn that to their advantage.

Like virtually every major institution in Britain has let people down over the last decade or more, and the current crisis is in a big way a crisis of institutions, and there are very good reasons why we're now such a low-trust society. The question of how those institutions rebuild that trust is a massive one, because some of the people that flourish in the wreckage are much worse.

I would 100% love to see a by-election in Field's constituency though, by all accounts he's just a terrible, lazy constituency MP, doesn't even live there etc etc. He would be comprehensively clowned and that would make this all worthwhile.

it doesn't help when everyone inc BBC is reporting that Field resinged because of AS - fact - when everyone knows he is so far to the right on immigration, that this holds no water at all.

resigned even!

The great thing about confecting a point of principle like that is that it's very difficult to prove it isn't confected. Plenty of people vocally oppose antisemitism when it suits them while also publically holding other equally right-wing views, but that takes us back round to the hierarchy of acceptable bigotry again.

Please please please Frank call a by-election and stand as Independent Labour. He won't though, if he's got any sense, he'll just sit there to the next election. Soooooooo much bilge being written and spoken about this trolling Tory wanker.

even Field was embarrassed by Tony Livesey repeatedly trying to get him to call Corbyn an antisemite when all he really wanted to talk about was nasty constituency bullies trying to deselect him.

Kate Hoey next? Maybe she can resign next Thursday so we can all enjoy our weekend a bit more.

Spread the joy.

Hoey shd've gone first, she could've organized this rabble into a proper marching band and they could've left together in the manner befitting.

Yes the weird thing from the interview I read is that Field isn't going round calling Corbyn an antisemite. Even said the comparison's to Powell were over the top.

And he's said Corbyn should fight the next election as he has won two leadership contests..

Not saying what he's expected to say is his whole raison d'etre.

that's why in many ways Sheerman is a much worse safe-seat waster than Field. Sheerman is a complete nihilist who doesn't even do politics, he's too busy taking lobbying donations from construction companies etc ..to get into that messy business.

I'm not sure many people outside of Huddersfield have heard of Sheerman whereas Field is pretty shameless at self-promotion.

Guessing that a big part of it with Field is that he spent most of his career voting alongside Corbyn and McDonnell, including on Europe, and he's getting all the shit thrown at him while they're running the show and (more or less) getting away with it on Brexit.

true, the sheer hatred is a very local phenomena. And even when his racist tweet popped up it didn't even go national. He probably prefers being under the radar, because any scrutiny is an existential threat to his cushy life.

Sheerman's not trying hard enough, look at John Mann, there's a guy who knows how to get his name in the papers.

his twitter bio puts his cards on the table: "Not scared to say it how it is."

i think commentators like field bcz for a lifetime he seemed the epitome of the english MP as difficult Burkean maverick: the constituency representative who firmly votesd his conscience come what may, his continued presence a sign of the "unique genius of the mother of parliaments working as it's meant to work" and so on… it helped them carry on tick a highly idealised and sentimentalised (and small-c conservative)* box in their grasp of the actual and proper shape of things

*i'd say that -- as so often with small-c conservative things -- it actually basically shored up a cap-C Conservative hegemony, but actually i think until events propelled him into a highly unexpected role, corbs also comfortably ticked this box for most commentators… which is why he initially found the full quota of supporters he needed to stand when he did

Not scared to say it how it is.

why people write this when "utter wanker" would save them characters

Not scared to say it how it is.

Definitely fails the 'would this have made them look like a wanker in the Big Brother house?' test. See also self-identifying as 'gobby'.

I'm scared to say how it is.

tempted to start a "How is it?" poll but Old Lunch'll get round to it eventually

Frank Field says Labour should be a 'champion against racism'

hey if you ban immigration that makes the task easier

can't be racist in a strictly enforced ethnostate

xxxp well i won't be voting in it

New centrist party backed by LoveFilm founder 'splits before launch'https://t.co/qy8PuoeN2o

— PoliticsHome (@politicshome) August 31, 2018

I have occasionally been thinking about starting a trend where Labour supporters pledge to protect the Jewish population - called “never through me shall you be overcome”, or something. But it all seems so stupid - no one can rationally believe that the Labour Party are more of a threat than the Right, right? How can we be simultaneously accused of being radical PC, taking offence at every anti-egalitarian statement etc, while being accused of antisemitism? (I mean, I know the answer, because the right considers all acts of ‘virtue’ so be disguised self interest and so on). It just sucks - I would never support anything that victimised Jewish people, and I’ve met a lot of Tories who would.

I mean, I know it’s mawkish, and seems overly sincere, but it’s maddening that anyone would claim that I (as someone who joined the Labour Party for its left wing movement) would be a threat to my Jewish friends, and Jewish people in total. There are problems with antisemitism on the left - and I’ve always called them out, I think - but for those few people to be the focus of anyone who is concerned about antisemitism is ludicrous. The people in the Tory party, the people who give them money, the people who see them as a vehicle to spread hate: they’re the ones to be worried about.