Keir Starmer at it again..

[Del Woppio]

 

[Templeton Peck]

View attachment 9220

A Starmer pledge is worthless so Christ knows where a 'confident ambition' ranks.

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

About ten times better chance of a grain of truth than anything pint size says*

* I appreciate this is not a high bar

 

[leedswolf]

* I appreciate this is not a high bar

Literally...

 

[Sniffer]

It will happen. He's just rebuffing the £28bn black hole in the finances accusations from pint size and his mob.

I could be wrong but I think I read yesterday that £13bn of this type of spending is already planned by the Conservatives anyway so he only has to find £15bn which in an economy of our size should be manageable.

 

[Del Woppio]

It will happen. He's just rebuffing the £28bn black hole in the finances accusations from pint size and his mob.

I could be wrong but I think I read yesterday that £13bn of this type of spending is already planned by the Conservatives anyway so he only has to find £15bn which in an economy of our size should be manageable.

Spot on. Electorally he's playing it right - fiscal responsibility (or the optics of) has always been the Tory's ground, and they've pretty much wrestled it from them over the last year or so, and it'd be daft to give Rish the slightest bit of ammo in that battle this close to an election

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

And Pint Size will now delay probably until November and throw unfunded tax cuts at the electorate in the interim knowing he can reverse them im the unlikely event of victory and the economic damage it would do becomes a labour problem if he loses.

He sees it as a free hit gamble on voter individual greed for a bit more money in their pay packets.

 

[The Saturday Boy]

And Pint Size will now delay probably until November and throw unfunded tax cuts at the electorate in the interim knowing he can reverse them im the unlikely event of victory and the economic damage it would do becomes a labour problem if he loses.

He sees it as a free hit gamble on voter individual greed for a bit more money in their pay packets.

I still think a May general election more likely. He has a particularly difficult couple of months with his own bank benchers and the Rwanda policy so if that falters an early general election with that as the flagship policy means he can commit candidates to support it in the same way Boris did for Brexit in 2019. Realistically, the Conservatives need to get their base out and hit about 30% of the vote as a minimum, the longer he fails to "Stop the Boats", the more support Reform Party will get. Pretty much any increase in support for Reform is coming from 2019 Tory voters so they are going to hurt the Tories in the Red Wall and the Blue Wall.

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

You may have a point of course. The way he said it didn’t definitively rule in or out any date between now and the last date.

 

[Templeton Peck]

Tice could always bottle it like Farage did in 19 but I don't think he will.

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

I do hope he doesn’t as that way lies electoral carnage for the Conservatives

 

[Elephant Pyjamas]

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

This seems a fair, non-revisionist point from Andrew Rawnsley to me:

A Labour veteran, thinking to compare the tepid feelings towards his party in the present day with the last time it was in opposition preparing to be in government, recently lamented to me: “For all that Keir has achieved, it doesn’t feel like 1997.”

This is true enough, but mainly because how people usually remember the famous Labour victory of that election year is at odds with how it actually was. Folklore has it that Tony Blair achieved a landslide triumph in ’97 by generating a huge surge of optimistic elation about the prospect of a Labour government. Didn’t an ecstatic crowd line Downing Street flourishing union jacks to hosannah him into Number 10? So they did, but the cheering, flag-waving throng was not composed of members of the public. They were Labour party staff and their families.

Sir Tony, as he has since become, was an ace at delivering uplifting oratory when he thought the occasion demanded it, but the stats tell us that this did not excite a substantial majority of the electorate. New Labour won the 1997 election with just over 13 and a half million votes, about half a million less than dull old John Major had secured for the Tories in 1992. The most crucial factor in the Blair landslide of ’97 was not soaring expectations of what a Labour government would deliver; it was the collapse of support for the Conservatives and efficient anti-Tory tactical voting. A frequent complaint about Sir Tony was that his programme was too cautious and his campaigning too buttoned-down and tight-lipped. That’s a criticism that will sound familiar to Sir Keir. The late Roy Jenkins, generally an admirer of Sir Tony, gently mocked the then Labour leader in advance of the ’97 election by remarking that he behaved with the trepidation of “a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor”.

Four previous and successive election defeats for Labour – in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 – made Sir Tony averse to taking any risks. His Labour was very constrained in what it initially promised it could deliver, even though it knew that it would come to power with the economy doing well.

The Labour high command of today is likewise scarred by quadruple consecutive losses, in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019, the last the most catastrophic defeat for the party since 1935. And whereas Sir Tony could expect to inherit decent economic growth, the bequest from the Tories to a Starmer government will be much grimmer.

 

[Templeton Peck]

Most of that's fair. Blair's plans were bolder than Starmer's though. Low bar of course but the 5 pledges on the card were very good.

 

[SSB]

Rotherham councillor sorry for falling asleep in child sexual exploitation briefing

Rotherham councillor Alan Atkin is heard snoring during a child sexual exploitation briefing.

www.bbc.co.uk

Rotherham councillor Labour's Alan Atkin sorry for falling asleep in child sexual exploitation briefing.

"People fall asleep at work all the time, don't they? I was probably asleep for two minutes. Everybody is making a mountain out of a mole hill."

Uhm, yeah my boss is forever telling me to wake up.

 

[Keef]

I fall asleep on the bus, sound of screaming always wakes me up, passengers are never happy about it for some reason

 

[Del Woppio]

Had the whip suspended? Is that it? Regardless of the subject matter, he's clearly not fit to work/a disrespectful lazy cunt.

 

[Stan Hullis]

There is a man with sleep apnea if I've ever seen one.

 

[Del Woppio]

Senior MP confirms Labour has dropped £28bn target for green investment

Darren Jones says party will decide budget based on state of economy and individual projects if it wins election

www.theguardian.com

Politically and electorally I can see some sense - that £28bn line had become a massive attack line for Sunak, though whether the "u-turn" attack line is any less damaging I'm not convinced. Taking it all in though he's wrong to not stick to his guns and stick by the policy commitment in favour of the optics of fiscal responsibility

Overall though, I do wish he'd grow a pair of fucking bollocks. The plan made sense, and they lost the argument because because the split of public vs private investment just didn't cut through, which is plain bad comms and politics.

Wanting the votes of the centre and centre-right shouldn't come at the expense of moving the UK to a greener economy and taking steps to ensure lower bills and more sustainable energy production in the UK.

It's the whole "ming vase" bollocks again when in reality he's got enough headroom to be a bit more radical and a lot more settled in what he wants to achieve.

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

Get elected and then do it anyway.

I’m a long way away but back to square one sounds a lot better than Tory cuntery