How will you vote in the Labour Leadership election?

All evidence suggests it is his resemblance to a pickled egg with with a few coconut hairs glued on top is why he failed, nowt to do with the objectionable politics and Blairite love imo

Tbf you would expect to be given a goldfish in a bag prize if you slammed a wooden ball hard into his head and knocked the cunt onto the deck.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERuTWcrWAAAUHTq?format=jpg&name=large

even this fucking clown has stopped pretending Starmer is a left candidate now victory is imminent.

The Labour Party can go fuck itself. I happily never had anything to do with them until 2015, if they want to return to that wretched 2015 consensus they won't get a vote off me, any more money, my support, the steam off my piss etc.. for however much time I've got left on this rock. I won't take delight in watching them repeatedly getting wiped out in elections in future, but won't particularly want to slit my wrists either.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERuIxCHXUAABV5I?format=png&name=large

Paul Mason is an absolute clown of a boy

it isn't even about politics and improving people's lives to that cunt, it's all about about getting revenge on a faction that have mercilessly ripped the piss out of him for years.

calzino you’ll probably never watch ford v. ferrari but I’ll always imagine you as ken miles as portrayed in that film.

especially preparing for the first race that’s in the movie.

Feeling some minor regret about slagging off Burgon quite so much when I see insufferable music writer and ex-ilxor slagging him off on twitter. There’s something absolutely vile about the way centrists carry on and there always has been. Especially when you consider how successful they were at winning over people to the Remain view.

xp
probably will watch it at some point I have a screener of it! But I'm not trying to become some stuck record, but this is a really shitty time in UK politics - it's literally the 2nd major death of hope incident in 3 fucking calendar months. it's too much to fucking take.

xp yeah that fucking shitty slimeball makes me a friend of Burgon as well. he's the absolute pits. And his George Orwell books - what a real life parody!

What makes a man turn centrist? Lust for gold? Power? Or was he born with a heart full of centrality?

you are just born with the innate knowledge that the establishment is fucking whizzo, just might need some minor tweaking in the next 500 years though.

You’ll find absolutely no mentions of Windrush, or deportation flights, or black citizens in the past two weeks but absolutely tons of Burgon dunks in the same period. But when you’re yuk-yuk-yuking it up with Corbyn apartheid arrest truthers and patting yourselves on the back about how clever you are, it’s to be expected. And yes, it’s extremely depressing. And again, reminded of how very shallow “we-love-immigrants” liberals are, esp fbpes. If you don’t stand up for brown and black fellow citizens, you can hardly be expected to stand up for foreigners.

calz brings the rage, I bring the...despair? Surely there is someone who’s better at despair in these threads than me.

Pretending that 1984 is a centrist classic is just mean

xp
I'm not really good at anything gyac, you though are an excellent poster!

Burgon's a clown regardless of who hates him or his doctorate from Tony Benn University.

Having said that, Blobby himself could be Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and it wouldn't matter a jot.

xps who else has an endless supply of incredible family stories, cute dog stories and can shift immediately to colourful violent language about liberals on a whim?! you undersell yourself! and ty, I wouldn’t even say that myself!

I always say that leaders are a product of wider historical factors that would have put someone like them in charge sooner or later - that's as true for Thatcher or Blair as it was for Corbyn. But that 57% of new joiners voting for Starmer is telling a story definitely.

Depends how many of them there are, so it's either an influx of disgruntled centrists but I'm wondering if it's a more general pro-European vote or maybe a lot of ex-Lib Dems. There's a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram obviously.

A lot of people in the media piping up in right now saying that Labour absolutely have to form a pact with the LibDems but they probably have more to fear than anyone else from a Starmer victory.

I've totally failed to notice whether there's even a LibDem leadership contest going on at all.

I guess there is per that Graun article but yeah I'd forgotten. Jo Swindon we hardly knew ye.

I’d guess there are quite a few people who left over the last few years who are rejoining.

I prefer to think of it as slinking back.

It might be, it might not. While the membership are overwhelmingly pro-Europe, he still wins on pre-15 members. Idk about you but a decent chunk of leftish people I know have been absolutely traumatised by the election loss - and in my case, several of those were people who only got interested in/involved in politics in the last few years. They didn’t see 2015 as the same, 2017 gave everyone hope, and if you’re on the left I suppose it’s very difficult to see light at the end of the tunnel. That’s why we’re all hoping for Bernie!

But the Keir Starmer factor is less anything about him as an individual and more about “who can ensure I never have to feel this devastated again”. This, I think, is why you see a lot of younger people melting - they might not have been that interested or involved a few years ago but they are now and this is really difficult, esp if they were canvassing. Whereas if you look at the stats, he’s much less popular between 25-49 - people already crushed by 2015, Brexit, the awfulness of Ed Miliband’s leadership etc. The oldest ones who were angry about the Iraq war and indefinite detention at the time, who probably marched against Iraq and went all in for Corbyn because he wasn’t that.

But...just my barely awake thinking. And my ballot still hasn’t come!

Yeah that's OTM about the voter base, definitely. Worth mentioning that a lot of people who weren't natural lefties voted for Corbyn in 15. Most left candidates would have won - in fact anyone prepared to stick their hand up and sincerely oppose austerity would have been a lightning conductor for votes in 2015. Their politics could have been closer to Gordon Brown and they would have won. Corbyn won in large part because of a vacuum that the other candidates created as well as a swell in the young left vote.

Perhaps a more centrist Labour might have been able to end austerity and the hostile environment by now. But it's very difficult to see how with the candidates that were available and the constraints of Brexit. All the candidates this time look less inspiring than Corbyn in 2015 but they look a lot better than Owen Smith or Andy Burnham.

There was some research a while back suggesting that an Owen Smith-style challenger to Corbyn would have been much more successful at the time, had it not actually been Owen Smith.

I don’t think RLB has come close to doing enough to winning over anyone wavering, tbh.

And as well as that, I’m thinking about the pre-2015 party. Your young person who’s got housing issues and is broadly left looks at the Labour Party and what do they see? Ghouls like Chris Leslie, Simon Danczuk and Rachel Reeves telling them, basically, that life is shit and change is incremental at best. What kind of a message is that? Who would go out and canvass for those people in the rain?

I think this applies to outside party structures too - recently read about Wes Streeting in his NUS days censuring Bell Ribeiro-Addy for protesting a BNP speaker at their university. If you’re a young left person, what message are you taking from that? That you’re nothing more than a vote and your concerns don’t matter. Why would you ever want to get involved in a politics that doesn’t give a shit about you, especially when it’s your own fucking side? Thankfully Bell is an MP now, but absolutely shithousing like this and 99% of Luke Akehurst’s contributions to the party have been like this too.

And Corbyn hoovered up a load of Green votes - you’ll probably see young people drift back to voting Green unless Labour go as hard on climate change as Corbyn did.

Adding to that that anyone still believing in a mythical era called "the centre ground" where "most voters" can be found is likely to be in for a nasty surprise over the next few years.

Fwiw I think climate change stuff wins way more votes than it repels so it's going to stay. Even Cameron draped himself in the green flag for years in opposition.

I'd love to know what difference between Starmer and Smith/Burnham is tbh. He might have served (or collaborated as a famous sex pest would have it) under Corbyn but I don't there was ever any illusions over which wing of the party he belongs to. I bet their voting records are practically identical and they are all in the same WhatsApp groups etc. The only thing that is different this time is the cowardly bunch of melts in the membership imo.

Like there appears to be a presumption that a Starmer victory means a return to a Miliband approach but I can't see that happening - in large part because of what an electoral damp squib the Miliband era was.

Worth mentioning as well that Johnson and the Tories have barely seen fit to mention Labour since the election. Cameron and Osborne were hammering Labour and banging on about them every day, setting up the austerity narrative. That gives Labour the opportunity to create a more hopeful and less defensive narrative than during the Miliband era. Especially given that Johnson's own narrative is going to be about Britain bouncing back and splurging cash everywhere.

Problem is as much with the special advisers they have around them - Labour's have been useless for a decade at least and the likes of Luke Akeshurst should probably be binned en masse.

Most Starmer supporters aren’t bad people, they’re just people utterly devastated by the election, and a lot of them will have campaigned for the party. It’s better for the left to shut the right out - and the right is absolutely where almost all of the Nandy support is coming from - and Starmer needs the left too. You don’t get that % of votes without a good chunk of left voters.

Bin the Lukes, the Ayeshas and anyone who only bothers to mention poverty when they’re using Sure Start centres to tell the left that Iraq didn’t matter.

Starmer's 10 pledges do commit him to most of the 2019/17 manifesto, including Green New Deal. i expect the devil to come out in the deal. i have to assume that even his terrible advisers aren't stupid enough to revisit the EU in the next 5 years.

in the detail, obv.

I'm guessing the split between Starmer and Nandy among people who really wanted Big Jess is two thirds to one

she should get a key Shadow Cabinet role, Minister for Brummagem or something

Smith's biggest problem, other than his big pharma history, was that he was so personally obnoxious / clownish.

Akehurst has always been a fairly fringe figure, however much he wants to see himself as a major player. Labour First members do have a role in Starmer's inner circle but idk if they're directing it, rather than hitching their wagon, temporarily, to the guy who's going to win. Starmer's presumably smart enough to realise that undiluted Milibandism won't work either with the party base or the electorate. I'm pretty sure Miliband also understands this now.

I wonder which of the money behind his campaign he is delaying disclosure of until next week.

Is Bernie Ecclestone still alive?

Miliband has repeatedly said he wished he followed his own closer to 2017 instincts before, rather than be steered by advisors to the right of him.

Ayesha Hazakaria can get in the sea and while there, find out that the Controls on Immigration mug she rode in on doesn’t float.

Labour First might not be steering him now but the pressure on him from the right of the party will increase as time goes on. When people from the right are emboldened enough to talk about Reeves coming back to the shadow cabinet, as unlikely as that seems right now it does show how the imminent Starmer victory is increasing their confidence. And I wouldn't make any assumptions about the makeup of the membership any more. If most of them voted for *this* then I wouldn't assume they have any political conviction or principals at all tbh.

I wld vote Burnham over Starmer, he's another one who's been better & stronger over the last few years

I don't think Burnham would happily vouch for a lock up minor benefit fraudster reform tbf on him.

For example I'd be worried about commitments to scrap UC would become a compromised Reform UC. There would be so much compromise going on in the direction of the party it will end up Miliband-lite, even though much of the electorate are burnt out on austerity, the Right of Labour have historically got that "they've got nowhere else to go" arrogance to work around right-wing compromises. I don't see green shoots of recovery anywhere, just fucking invasive weeds choking the party to death.

xxxp I think that indicates that the right have the party have very little to do other than to chat shit, tbh.

*of the party