Keir Starmer

A plagiarised rewrite of the 2015 tory manifesto. The surmoun of the nowt

 

central theme is one nation conservatism. Strivers versus Skivers directly lifted from Cameron. More privatisation

 

To be honest one of the worst things about all this is that... it isn't divided. The Labour Party now almost entirely consists of so-called 'centrist' neoliberal capitalists. The vast majority of the left have already gone, because Sir Keir had made it clear we're not welcome. He's banking on our flawed FPTP voting system to win the left vote purely on the grounds of 'get the Tories out', while doing everything he can to distance the party from the left in an effort to emulate Blair. He can't do this though, because he has no charisma.

Corbyn had the party at record high numbers of membership and left the party in very good financial health. Starmer has driven out so many people that they're now struggling to pay the bills and are having to lay people off.

The Labour Party is supposed to be what it says on the tin: a labour movement. The faction currently in charge are capitalists, which is inherently opposed to this mission. The Lib Dems exist for softer, kinder capitalism of Starmer's ilk.

I think Corbyn was a very effective leader. Not perfect (who is?) but he inflicted record numbers of defeats on the Tory government in the Commons and came very close in 2017 with a huge number of votes. The very reason he didn't end up winning an election was because to the capitalist class he was simply too dangerous to their endless, greedy, interests. They pulled out all the stops. Billionaire press in absolute overdrive, false allegations of antisemitism, BBC depicting him with a Soviet background and hat on primetime news, coup attempts by Starmer's very faction, a Brexit position he didn't believe in forced on him against his will, etc etc. He was blatantly sabotaged. And the public swallowed it whole. He became the 'antiseptic terrorist synthesizer' bogeyman, because he's the only leader in recent times who actually questioned capitalism, and the establishment did not like it one iota.

 

Couldn't like this enough.

 

The whole thing just depresses me. Seeing how hoodwinked the masses are, fighting against their own interests and defending an economic system which separates the wealth they create through their labour from their own pocket, and into some rich bloke's pocket somewhere else. Turkeys voting for Christmas, with either of the two main parties now. I have very little political morale at the moment.

 

Nor did the electorate!

 

Last election was the gift of Brexit, the numbers from 2017 say different. Corbyn inspired the youth, a once in a lifetime leader who, by the very nature of the onslaught he endured by the right wing media to discredit him, would have changed the UK for the better of us all, not just the elite. The most honest politician I can ever remember bar John Smith...

 

Totally agree Gravy. That's 2 pints I'm buying you if I see you on Sheff Rd.

 

If you're using this stat, then it has to be said that the same 'experiment' brought in Labour's biggest vote since 1945 in the 2017 election.

 

As Peston says almost indistinguishable from Johnson.

 

Not sure in what parallel universe Corbyn was an effective leader. He couldn't quite beat the disastrous May in 2017 and delivered an 84-year low performance in 2019. He gifted Johnson an 80-seat majority and left Labour as unelectable. The damage he did will take a long time to pull back. Giving succour to anti-semites is just pretty much as bad as being anti-semitic in my book. All Labour leaders have the media to contend with. He is one of the few politicians in the world that didn't believe that Russia was culpable for the state-sponsored attempted murder on foreign soil in Salisbury. To blame Starmer for Labour's position on brexit is simply incredible. Corbyn was leader FFS. If he was such an effective leader he would have called the shots on the party's brexit policy. If he had used a little more guile and agreed a leave deal with May he would likely have still been at the helm and would have had another crack at May instead of ushering in Johnson. I really fear for Labour, because if they ditch Starmer in favour of another far left leader then Johnson will enjoy many more years in power and Labour will become utterly irrelevant.

 

The choice at the moment is between Johnson and a Johnson lite. Starmer is for tories who are ashamed of being tory.

 

Who is the anti semite ? Starmers behaviour towards ‘ the wrong sort of Jew ‘ is reprehensible
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-labour-senior-member-jewish-pressure-group-suspended
He’s not winning the argument with the left he’s expelling them and driving them out , bankrupting the Party and making the party electorally redundant in the process . Where’s the report into the Election defeat and the behaviour of the anti Corbyn cabal , buried along with Labours future

 

It's pretty obvious why there was such a defeat. Johnson and the Tories made it all about Brexit. They had their mate Farage changing his party name to the Brexit Party. The newspapers had front page after front page covered in asylum seekers etc. Other front pages saying Boris was 'getting it done' and 'Rule Brittannia' and all that nonsense.

I don't believe Labour would have won regardless of that. But that's certainly why the defeat was so large.

The challenge then is, where do all the Brexit Party voters go now? Who they voting for? For example, in Dan Jarvis' constituency, he got 14,804 votes. The Brexit mob got 11,233, from nowhere, just like that. This was replicated all over the place. That's a lot of people to win over.

Do you believe Labour with Starmer as leader will win the GE? Simple question.

 

But he came very close with the entire United Kingdom's press, TV, and radio libelling him. My main criticism of Corbyn is that he didn't defend himself against baseless slurs aggressively enough.

After internal sabotage from Starmer and his fellow 'centrist' conspirators.

The damage to what? The status quo?

The status quo has given us a planet literally on fire, resources scarily finite, homes unaffordable to the younger generations, endless war, countless species going extinct through human influence, workers losing more and more rights, and is basically marching us merrily into our great filter.

Corbyn was one of the biggest defenders of Jewish people in our nation's history, but too many people conflate anti-zionism with antisemitism. This is hideously wrong.
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/fifty-times-jeremy-corbyn-stood-with-jewish-people/

True, but the more they actually try to address the issues the majority face, the more the billionaire press comes down on them. Because it's against their interests (their interests being shafting us all to line their pockets).

He never said that. He said it wasn't proven. Prime Minister at the time Theresa May said the exact same thing in the same week, but that gets conveniently ignored. He didn't say it wasn't the Russians, he said it was extremely important to get proof, after a previous New Labour prime minister went to war and killed countless innocent people because "it was obvious" there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Corbyn was elected Labour leader by normal working class folk in an unprecedented f*ck you to the political establishment. The parliamentary Labour party are a different animal, with many people on general election day feeling an obligation to vote for them simply to keep the Tories out, even if they dislike the Labour candidate. That doesn't mean these MPs represent real people, it just means they don't have a blue logo on the ballot form. But the PLP have enormous power in the running of the Labour Party, and left Corbyn with no choice but to fence-sit after they'd cashed in their collective potential collateral.

The pressures of an election cycle always mean comprimises have to be made, and delicate balancing acts have to be weighed in every which way. He knew Labour's traditional support was basically 50/50 on Brexit depending on region. He also knew the PLP was ardently Remain, so he had to offer something to them. For context, I'm also a remainer, but from his position this was an impossible decision to make either way. This was Labour's Achilles' heal in 2019.

He would have lost half the Labour party and 75% of the PLP, which would only give more ammunition to the billionaire press.

I disagree. Firstly, Corbyn wasn't far-left. He was centre-left at most. The Overton window has moved so far to the right in recent years that right-wing policies are seen as left-wing and centre-left policies are seen as hard left 'communism'. When we go to the polls the majority of the time, we're voting between different flavours of the same economic system - capitalism. They say that every generation becomes more right-wing and conservative as they age. This isn't infinite. Millenials and Gen Z are finally bearing the brunt of decades of unrelentant capitalism. Factoring in inflation, a house now costs double what it did in the 70s/80s. It's unaffordable to young people. And inflation keeps prices going up while wages are completely stagnant - all while the 1% double their incomes every few quarters.

We're now entering late-stage capitalism. Its days are numbered, because it simply isn't sustainable. I'm going to pull out the Marxist card now, but only because I want people to understand what Marxism actually is and stop seeing it as a defined totalitarian economic system.

Marx was a philosopher, not a politician. He didn't make a book of rules saying what was okay and not okay. He made observations and published these as a theory describing what would likely happen to humanity, in what was to him a distant future. It's a myth that Marx hated capitalism in his time. He actually said capitalism was absolutely necessary. Marxist theory is that humanity has to progress through various systems to be its most efficient and to deliver the best lives for the people living here. In his time, humanity was progressing from feudalism to capitalism. Marx predicted that capitalism would lead to great increases in efficiency and technology. This has come true.

He then predicted that capitalism would eventually eat itself after a hundred or two years. This is where we are now. The working class is finding it increasingly difficult to survive, while the richest among us are creaming it in at our expense. Automation is slowly taking over many roles, and whilst we aren't there yet and won't be for a while, the logical place for us to end up eventually is a post-scarcity society where work is optional and everyone has what they need to live a fulfilling life. We need significant technological advancements to get there yet, but this is humanity's end goal. Capitalists are preventing any progress toward this for their own benefit. A few decades ago, a family could survive with one 'breadwinner' working 40 hours a week. Since then, we've had amazing advancements in automation, which should take some workload off humans, but somehow we now need two breadwinners in an average family to barely scrape by. This all comes down to our endless cycle of right-wing politics, which leads to all this extra productivity ending up in the wallets of the 1%.

 

Simple answer. No.

I view him as more of a stepping stone on the road back to power for Labour, if they take that course. A Kinnock, or a John Smith, if you like. (Smith would of course have been much more than that but for his untimely death.) Starmer lacks charisma. But Boris has it in spades - so which do you want? The media will always unfairly attack the Labour leader. But it becomes harder for them if that leader is more centrist and causes less alarm to the average voter. Corbyn was an easy target. Starmer less so, so they have to resort to presenting him as 'boring', just as they invented the 'Welsh windbag' slur for Kinnock. Corbyn could promise all sorts of things - he was never likely to be able to implement any of them. Starmer has set out where he is coming from, if anybody has the patience to read it. I like the philosophy of better job security and working conditions, and of equipping people so that they can enjoy better equality of opportunity than at present. If that's 'boring', then bring it on.

Regardless of personal preferences though, I do think the conference and surrounding shenanigans next week are going to be fascinating watching.

 

On the points you highlighted we clearly come at things from different perspectives, so I think playing ping-pong has only limited mileage. But I think a couple of points are worthy of further observation

EU. May was so desperate for a deal she could get through that she had conceded retention of EU employment rights. A deal agreed on that basis could only have been perceived as a victory for Corbyn, who wanted 'out' anyway, so that he wasn't hampered in due course on state support. He could easily have claimed 'we are respecting the democratic vote'. He'd then have faced May again and not Johnson, which would have tested out the 'one more heave' scenario. Very poor political judgement, in my view.

Let's not be coy about Salisbury. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. Given his admittedly unfair press he presented a further own goal to the media, who were able to further portray him as unpatriotic.

Your comments about Marx are interesting, although I do have to say there is a 'end of the world is nigh' feeling to the forecast of the downfall of capitalism. After years of depressing wages through anti-union laws and deregulating employment contracts, it now looks - post-Brexit - as though labour shortages are beginning to turn the tide a little. I tend to think this will lead more to a cyclical economic correction rather than the death of Capitalism.

 

Talking about easily smeared I still can’t understand why Starmer’s taking so much advice from Mandelson. I doubt he will but if Starmer ever looks like he could be PM it’ll be used against him.

He’s literally pictured at Epstein’s island & has 11 entries in his phone book as well as been good friends with Kevin Spacey.