Keir Starmer at it again..

[BGreenWolf]

Bang on, really.

 

[Paul]

Right I don't vote Labour so its more of an outside view, but can I ask how come so many people have got this rose (red) coloured vision of what Corbyn 'would' have done, he resided over the opposition to one of the most morally corrupt governments in eons...and did nothing, he witnessed one of the biggest political decisions since the war...and we still don't know what side of the fence he sat on (well everybody did, he'd just never admit it ) but now your adamant that he's this decisive decision maker who'd make colossal strides , I don't see it ?

ps. I think Keir Starmer is easily the most apt opposition leader in living memory, well presented, well educated and articulate but all i see on Facebook etc is "he's a Tory" "doesn't represent true Labour" and many, many "I'll never vote for him", and you wonder why Labour fails so miserably, but don't worry, you can always blame the right wing media..........again !

 

[Tredman]

Ah, if only there were a thread to talk about Corbz.

 

[Tony Towner]

I'm not in a position to answer your first comment, but taking your ps paragraph any major political party will always have quite a breadth of views within its membership rarely does this mean they ultimately don't vote for them. A person who would consider themselves a true Socialist can either vote Labour, a niche local candidate or not at all.

Arguably Euro sceptics brought down 3 Conservative PMs in a row, but they didn't fundamentally affect Party policy. It was only when UKIP became a genuine contender for Tory votes that Camreon gave the Referendum vote and the party has subsequently moved to the right. There's no sign of a similar movement on the left.

Blair was called a Pink Tory, but he won 3 GE's. Starmer now gets Blue Labour but what the membership sometimes fails to understand or in some circumstances doesn't care, is you don't win a GE by just gaining votes from your core support and you don't effect change from the outside. I've never understood the 'pure' argument if it means you aren't going to get into government.

 

[pr0sl0]

Right I don't vote Labour so its more of an outside view, but can I ask how come so many people have got this rose (red) coloured vision of what Corbyn 'would' have done, he resided over the opposition to one of the most morally corrupt governments in eons...and did nothing, he witnessed one of the biggest political decisions since the war...and we still don't know what side of the fence he sat on (well everybody did, he'd just never admit it ) but now your adamant that he's this decisive decision maker who'd make colossal strides , I don't see it ?

ps. I think Keir Starmer is easily the most apt opposition leader in living memory, well presented, well educated and articulate but all i see on Facebook etc is "he's a Tory" "doesn't represent true Labour" and many, many "I'll never vote for him", and you wonder why Labour fails so miserably, but don't worry, you can always blame the right wing media..........again !

Can take a stab at this (and I'll try to make this about Corbyn compared to Starmer, rather than just about Corbyn, cos I know this is meant to be the Starmer thread... plus I think it's kind of necessary to explain).

Here's what's really, really frustrating, from the other side, hearing these kinds of points. But I'll try! First of all - "did nothing"? Labour, working with other opposition parties, forced an unprecedented number of government defeats in the Commons and Lords, and that was in turn made possible by the near-win of the 2017 election denying the Tories a majority and creating an incredibly finely-balanced hung parliament. His rise as leader also pushed the economic conversation in the UK to the left. Concepts such as universal basic income, higher welfare spending, higher infrastructure spending, the detrimental effects of outsourcing on government services, underfunding of schools and hospitals... We spent the five years with Milband as leader having to suck up to the batshit narrative established by David Cameron's government that austerity was necessary and Labour "crashed the economy". The left critique of this was that, no, it wasn't Labour or the Tories who crashed the economy, but an economic system which has been in place in the UK since Thatcher, and which was always a house of cards that would come tumbling down, and that the answer was to reconfigure the economy away from London, away from concentrated industries and the bubble elites which increasingly saw most or all of the growth they provided, and restore economic and community pride to the smaller regions and towns of the UK which were gutted by late 20th century globalisation. (I remember an interview with Gordon Brown last year where he came out and said as much, that Corbyn had been proven absolutely correct to rebel against much of New Labour's attemtpts to triangulate within that system, like PFI.) This principle also applied to the Labour party itself - one of the big failures of Corbyn, IMO, is that he and his team didn't get things like open selections in, which would have made it so much easier to make MPs more reflective of their constituencies and less reflective of a party machinery parachuting people in.

And I can say that I know that Corbyn would have acted on many things because it was in the manifesto, it was what he said he'd do, and it was what he and others on parts of the left have been saying for 40 years. The whole point of the "Green New Deal" was to rip up everything about how we're doing things now and reconfigure the economy towards loads of new manufacturing, engineering, design, production, etc, jobs across the country by rapidly phasing out old polluting industries that were more centralised, and decentralise stuff so that once again you wouldn't have to do what most people under 40 now have to do if they want any kind of career in a well-paying industry - move to or near a city. There's a reason there's such a massive and stark age divide in Labour vs Tory support now - if you're older, the economic system has generally worked for you your entire life. If you're younger, it's always felt like you're having to fight against that same system to get ahead. And with climate change such an existential threat, fixing two for one felt like not just a no-brainer, but a moral imperative.

At the same time, when it comes to "sticking up for the little guy" - Corbyn's done that his whole political career, since he was a councillor. West Papuans, Palestinians, Diego Garcians, Kurds, Chileans, black South Africans, Jews (yes, including Jews), LGBT people, sex workers - the list goes on and on of groups in the UK around the world who, when they've gone to Westminster and asked for help from one of the world's most powerful countries, found Corbyn's door open. But then this gets into where we can start talking about the comparison with Starmer, because Corbyn was always about sticking to a principle and trying to change the public's opinion over time - it's why he became leader, he was a way for hundreds of thousands of people who were crying out for principle in politics. There are very, very few politicians in Britain, or any democracy, with such a consistent track record of selflessness over decades. He didn't get caught up in the expenses scandal, he didn't vote for (and actively predicted the shitshow that would become) Iraq, he called out bullshit regardless of whether it came from his own party or another one... He was exactly what I and so many people desperately wanted from a political leader. Someone who didn't want to do what was popular, but what was right. And why not? The activist left had managed to make gay and queer acceptance mainstream during his time in parliament, as well as make many kinds of racism taboo. It's not without precedent. And for decades it's been a pretty thankless task, too, being mocked and demeaned and insulted by your own colleagues, your political opposition, and the press. Through all of those wilderness years for the left, he kept grinding away. I don't get this idea that becoming PM would have suddenly made him... what, lazy? Uninterested? That's just not believable to me, but clearly it was for many - most - people.

However, the flip side of selflessness is, of course, credulousness, and naivete. His willingness to sit down with any and all groups being "repressed" around the world meant that he had plenty of skeletons in the closet in terms of meetings, talks, ceremonies (the wreath, ffs), etc, with groups where the line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" was more than a little blurred. And even though the idea that the Labour membership under him became full of "Trots" (and the idea that Momentum was some Militant-like entryist group) was ridiculous, the small community of cranks were almost guaranteed to be within the orbit of Stop The War, and Corbyn's personal friendship circles, at some point. And then you get to the problem of the EU. You have a lifelong eurosceptic, leading a party of europhile MPs, representing mostly constituencies where majorities of the vote went towards Leave, but where still a majority of Labour voters overall voted Remain. I don't think any leader would have been able to thread that needle particularly well, but for Corbyn it was particularly devastating because his whole brand was built on consistency and clarity for decades, yet he just couldn't take a fucking clear position. At the same time, you have the easy dunk from the press and the Tories when it comes to the "terrorist sympathiser" stuff, because... well, if your defence is "but other politicians also meet with terrible people", or "that wreath was being laid next to the graves of terrorists, not their actual graves", then you've already lost that argument. And, as I explained at length in my last over-long post, Corbyn has a common blind spot among people on the left for when anti-Zionism overlaps with anti-semitism, something which I've always been so fucking angry about for how stupid and lazy and needless it was, both in terms of principle and in terms of the crass reality of PR during a political campaign. But then that also goes to the dithering, and the ways in which Corbyn was portrayed by the press and his opponents as simultaneously a ditherer and an authoritarian who was "purging" the party, for example. During the anti-semitism crisis's early days, old-right figures like Margaret Hodge criticised him for having his office be involved in addressing cases; when they responded by accepting the need for independent processes, he was then criticised for not personally ensuring that cases were being handled faster. People will still say both "at last, real opposition from Keir Starmer" and "it's good to see an end to opposition for opposition's sake", as if those two things don't contradict each other. Corbyn was constantly held to a higher, and impossible, standard than any other major frontbench politician in my lifetime in many ways. But that's not the same as saying that he doesn't deserve to be criticised at all, of course.

We know exactly why, between 2017 and 2019, Corbyn went from both very popular and unpopular at the same time (with net ratings around zero), to just negative. It was that he couldn't give a straight answer over Brexit, and that he "supported terrorism", that he "wasn't real Labour", that he "did nothing to stop the Tories/Brexit", and that he was "an anti-semite". There's loads of polling evidence that tracks this up to and after the 2019 election. The question for people like me - was that inevitable? I think it probably was, and I think that's because this country is fundamentally anti-radical, and it's implicit that the Tories deserve to be in power unless Labour makes the case otherwise. (Hence the idea that Convervatives "play politics on easy mode".) In 2019 we had a lifelong anti-racist who was seen as more racist than a man who has actually said and done racist and sexist things throughout his career. Corbyn was seen as less competent and less trustworthy than Johnson as well, despite the latter being a proven, consistent liar who has never actually done anything other than be embarrassingly incompetent whenever actually given any power. And we had Labour being widely perceived as a racist and anti-working class party, despite a manifesto that actually addressed systemic inequality and racial discrimination, losing to a party which has been enacting policies which have increased inequality and discrimination for a decade already. A party led by a man whose entire life has been spent trying to take power from bad people and give it to the masses, with a policy platform geared towards that in loads of different ways, lost to a posh Etonian who didn't know whether he supported his signature policy "revolt against the elites" until the last minute, running on a manifesto that could be reduced to a three-word phrase.

And the left has to ask itself not so much why that is, but why that is and how we can figure out how to respond, because I think too often the response is to play exactly into the hands of the culture war - and throughout the 2010s, we've generally been on the back foot there most of the time, and I think it's because too often the response is to go "aw but come on, the other side does it too". Describing Corbyn meeting with some nasty Egyptian terror cell or inviting Sinn Fein reps to parliament after the Brighton bombing as the equivalent of, say, Blair or Cameron meeting with a dictator for the sake of geopolitical chess, is just self-evidently ridiculous. Ditto when it comes to anti-semitism - responding to the problem by talking about it being a problem "on the right/in the Tories as well" just makes Jewish people into a political football, and it's such a predictable dynamic that the Tories could easily neuter Johnson's history of racism by keeping the issue in the spotlight, creating a "they're both as bad as each other" situation. And we know that the press is generally conservative - even the Guardian is really a left-liberal paper that rarely actually tolerates socialism - so complaining about it is like... yeah, and? Are we just going to complain, or are we actually going to do something about it? (And no, reading and sharing crap like The Canary or Skwawkbox doesn't count as an alternative.) Same for the leaked Labour report on how the pre-Corbyn staff in party HQ spent most of their time being racist about Diane Abbott and deliberately creating a backlog of anti-semitism cases to make Corbyn look bad. Not only does using that report as a catch-all explanation for what happened just sound like sour grapes to normal people, but it also shows how Corbyn's constant giving the benefit of the doubt to everyone - even people who loathe him, and literally talked to each other about how they wished that he would die - just left him open to more attack.

Because right now, while there are some good ideas out there on the left for what to do next, they're not mainstream yet, and we don't know that they'll work either, and until then we're stuck in a culture war where we're always on the back foot. And after five years, it hurts for a lot of us to go back to the old way of doing things under Starmer: When the tabloids say jump, ask how high. Don't rock the boat. Hide your radicalism, if not outright repress it. Accept the framing that the right creates and work within that framing, instead of trying to bust it open and move the debate onto ground that instead makes them uncomfortable.

The "cult of Corbyn" stuff was always a lot more self-aware and jokey than it might have seemed for people who weren't involved in Labour politics. People weren't really thinking of JC as Jesus Christ, and stuff like the "oh Jeremy Corbyn" chants was more about being silly with your mates. And I kept telling people to stop thinking that RLB would walk it in the leadership race, because I'd never, ever experienced a left space in the Labour party where criticism of Corbyn was just shut down or unconscionable, or where the majority were Trots or Stalinists or Maoists or whatever scaremongering Tom Watson and his mates kept putting out in the world. Everyone I know had a similar attitude: We can't keep doing what we've been doing for decades, but if Corbyn's the only vehicle for changing that, then that's what we'll have to make do with even if he's really, really not ideal as a leader. It's a very similar dynamic to the Brexit referendum, honestly, in that Corbyn's leadership was as much about trying to manifest some kind of reflection of our frustrations as much as it was actually about Corbyn himself, who may have had principles but rarely displayed aptitude for the leadership. But then, Boris has never had either, and he won a majority and harnessed exactly the kind of anti-establishment fervour that should have been a lock for an actual anti-establishment politician like Corbyn. And, also similarly, most Tories I know don't particularly like Boris either, really - he was also just a vehicle to get the bigger picture that they wanted, and/or to deny the left its first chance at actual power since... Well, ever, really. Corbyn is probably tied with Lansbury for most left-wing leader of Labour, relative to the context of the time period they were both leader.

Starmer as leader is a return to trying to win power by sacrificing principle, and hoping you don't lose your soul on the way. That means accepting that anti-semitism is something worth sacking an MP over, but other forms of racism are tolerable, for example, or that Starmer's going to do dumb PR shit like the new armed forces stuff which is way less substantive than the offer under Corbyn, but which will by contrast actually get a positive headline in The Sun. Starmer knows he can get rid of people disloyal to him because he's not seen as truly left-wing, so it's "decisive" instead of "purge". And he knows that it's too late to argue that so many of the narratives about Labour under Corbyn were false - you've just got to suck it up and look like you're dealing with it by taking "firm action". We lost. We have to move on to what's next, not keep relitigating the past.

Will it work? Well, it's the only way that a Labour leader has ever had consistent poll leads and majorities post-Thatcher, so logically it can't be the worst idea, as painful and cringeworthy as it is for many of us. (Let's just hope Starmer doesn't carve anything into a stone tablet...) And the left's either going to burn itself out spitting feathers, or it can stop complaining, dust itself off, and do the work. After all, Corbyn became leader after decades in the wilderness, and it was only him because he was one of only a handful of left MPs left. There's now a big tranche of new, young left MPs, there's a huge and active membership and activist base, there's so much exciting stuff happening in terms of new ideas and policies being discussed in new places. If the chance to be in charge comes back around, the left should be in a better place (I'm really excited about having the chance some day to vote for someone like Sam Tarry to be leader, for example). But the legacy of Corbyn has been poisoned for good, regardless, and Starmer's leadership will have to be defined by its response to that. Pretending otherwise is just foolish.

 

[Templeton Peck]

Now getting the approval of Farage over his BLM comments. George Osborne likes him too.

 

[Elephant Pyjamas]

Can take a stab at this (and I'll try to make this about Corbyn compared to Starmer, rather than just about Corbyn, cos I know this is meant to be the Starmer thread... plus I think it's kind of necessary to explain).

Here's what's really, really frustrating, from the other side, hearing these kinds of points. But I'll try! First of all - "did nothing"? Labour, working with other opposition parties, forced an unprecedented number of government defeats in the Commons and Lords, and that was in turn made possible by the near-win of the 2017 election denying the Tories a majority and creating an incredibly finely-balanced hung parliament. His rise as leader also pushed the economic conversation in the UK to the left. Concepts such as universal basic income, higher welfare spending, higher infrastructure spending, the detrimental effects of outsourcing on government services, underfunding of schools and hospitals... We spent the five years with Milband as leader having to suck up to batshit narrative established by David Cameron's government, that austerity was necessary and Labour "crashed the economy". The left critique of this was that, no, it wasn't Labour or the Tories who crashed the economy, but an economic system which has been in place in the UK since Thatcher, and which was always a house of cards that would come tumbling down, and that the answer was to reconfigure the economy away from London, away from concentrated industries and the bubble elites which increasingly saw most or all of the growth they provided, and restore economic and community pride to the smaller regions and towns of the UK which were gutted by late 20th century globalisation. (I remember an interview with Gordon Brown last year where he came out and said as much, that Corbyn had been proven absolutely correct about the stuff New Labour did like PFI that he had been such a consistent rebel against.) This principle also applied to the Labour party itself - one of the big failures of Corbyn, IMO, is that he and his team didn't get things like open selections in, which would have made it so much easier to make MPs more reflective of their constituencies, and less reflective of a party machinery parachuting people in.

And I can say that I know that Corbyn would have acted on many things because it was in the manifesto, it was what he said he'd do, and it was what he and others on parts of the left have been saying for 40 years. The whole point of the "Green New Deal" was to rip up everything about how we're doing things now and reconfigure the economy towards loads of new manufacturing, engineering, design, production, etc, jobs across the country by rapidly phasing out old polluting industries that were more centralised, and decentralise stuff so that once again you wouldn't have to do what most people under 40 now have to do if they want any kind of career in a well-paying industry - move to or near a city. There's a reason there's such a massive and stark age divide in Labour vs Tory support now - if you're older, the economic system has generally worked for you your entire life. If you're younger, it's always felt like you're having to fight against that same system to get ahead. And with climate change such an existential threat, fixing two for one felt like not just a no-brainer, but a moral imperative.

At the same time, when it comes to "sticking up for the little guy" - Corbyn's done that his whole political career, since he was a councillor. West Papuans, Palestinians, Diego Garcians, Kurds, Chileans, black South Africans, Jews (yes, including Jews), LGBT people, sex workers - the list goes on and on of groups in the UK around the world who, when they've gone to Westminster and asked for help from one of the world's most powerful countries, found Corbyn's door open. But then this gets into where we can start talking about the comparison with Starmer, because Corbyn was always about sticking to a principle and trying to change the public opinion - it's why he became leader, he was a way for hundreds of thousands of people who were crying out for principle in polti. There are very, very few politicians in Britain, or any democracy, with such a consistent track record of selflessness over decades. He didn't get caught up in the expenses scandal, he didn't vote for Iraq, he called out bullshit regardless of whether it came from his own party or another one... He was exactly what I and so many people desperately wanted from a political leader. Someone who didn't want to do what was popular, but what was right. And why not? The activist left had managed to make gay and queer acceptance mainstream during his time in parliament, as well as make many kinds of racism taboo. It's not without precedent. And for decades it's been a pretty thankless task, too, being mocked and demeaned and insulted by your own colleagues, your political opposition, and the press. Through all of those wilderness years for the left, he kept grinding away. I don't get this idea that becoming PM would have suddenly made him... what, lazy? Uninterested? That's just not believable to me, but clearly it was for many - most - people.

However, the flip side of selflessness is, of course, credulousness, and naivete. His willingness to sit down with any and all groups being "repressed" around the world meant that he had plenty of skeletons in the closet in terms of meetings, talks, ceremonies (the wreath, ffs), etc, with groups where the line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" was more than a little blurred. And even though the idea that the Labour membership under him became full of "Trots" (and the idea that Momentum was some Militant-like entryist group) was ridiculous, the small community of cranks were almost guaranteed to be within the orbit of Stop The War, and Corbyn's personal friendship circles, at some point. And then you get to the problem of the EU. You have a lifelong eurosceptic, leading a party of europhile MPs, representing mostly constituencies where majorities of the vote went towards Leave, but where still a majority of Labour voters voted Remain. I don't think any leader would have been able to thread that needle particularly well, but for Corbyn it was particularly devastating because his whole brand was built on consistency and clarity for decades, yet he just couldn't take a fucking clear position. At the same time, you have the easy dunk from the press and the Tories when it comes to the "terrorist sympathiser" stuff, because... well, if your defence is "but other politicians also meet with terrible people", or "that wreath was being laid next to the graves of terrorists, not their actual graves", then you've already lost that argument. And, as I explained at length in my last over-long post, Corbyn had a common blind spot among people on the left for when anti-Zionism overlapped with anti-semitism, something which I've always been so fucking angry about for how stupid and lazy and needless it was, both in terms of principle and in terms of the crass reality of PR during a political campaign. But then that also goes to the dithering, and the ways in which Corbyn was portrayed by the press and his opponents as simultaneously a ditherer and an authoritarian who was "purging" the party, for example. During the anti-semitism crisis's early days, old-right figures like Margaret Hodge criticised him for having his office be involved in addressing cases; when they responded by accepting the need for independent processes, he was then criticised for not personally ensuring that cases were being handled faster. People will still say both "at last, real opposition from Keir Starmer" and "it's good to see an end to opposition for opposition's sake", as if those two things don't contradict each other. Corbyn was constantly held to a higher, and impossible, standard than any other major frontbench politician in my lifetime in many ways. But that's not the same as saying that he doesn't deserve to be criticised at all, of course.

We know exactly why, between 2017 and 2019, Corbyn went from both very popular and unpopular at the same time (with net ratings around zero), to just negative. It was he couldn't give a straight answer over Brexit, and that he "supported terrorism", that he "wasn't real Labour", that he "did nothing to stop the Tories/Brexit", and that he was "an anti-semite". There's loads of polling evidence that tracks this up to and after the 2019 election. The question for people like me - was that inevitable? I think it probably was, and I think that's because this country is fundamentally anti-radical, and it's implicit that the Tories deserve to be in power unless Labour makes the case otherwise. (Hence the idea that Convervatives "play politics on easy mode".) In 2019 we had a lifelong anti-racist who was seen as more racist than a man who has actually said and done racist and sexist things throughout his career. Corbyn was seen as less competent and less trustworthy than Johnson as well, despite the latter being a proven, consistent liar who has never actually doing anything other than be embarrassingly incompetent whenever actually given any power. And we had Labour being widely perceived as a racist and anti-working class party, despite a manifesto that actually addressed systemic inequality and racial discrimination, losing to a party which has been enacting policies which increase inequality and discrimination for a decade already. A party led by a man whose entire life has been spent trying to take power from bad people and give it to the masses, with a policy platform geared towards that in loads of different ways, lost to a posh Etonian who didn't know whether he supported his signature policy "revolt against the elites" until the last minute, running on a manifesto that could be reduced to a three-word phrase.

And the left has to ask itself not so much why that is, but why that is and how we can figure out how to respond, because I think too often the response is to play exactly into the hands of the culture war - and throughout the 2010s, we've generally been on the back foot there most of the time, and I think it's because too often the response is to go "aw but come on, the other side does it too". Describing Corbyn meeting with some nasty Egyptian terror cell or inviting Sinn Fein reps to parliament after the Brighton bombing as the equivalent of, say, Blair or Cameron meeting with a dictator for the sake of geopolitical chess, is just self-evidently ridiculous. Ditto when it comes to anti-semitism - responding to the problem by talking about it being a problem "on the right/in the Tories as well" just makes Jewish people into a political football, and it's such a predictable dynamic that the Tories could easily neuter Johnson's history of racism with by keeping the issue in the spotlight, to turn it into a "well they're both as bad as each other" situation. And we know that the press is generally conservative - even the Guardian is really a left-liberal paper that rarely actually tolerates socialism - so complaining about it is like... yeah, and? Are we just going to complain, or are we actually going to do something about it? Same for the leaked Labour report on how the pre-Corbyn staff in party HQ spent most of their time being racist about Diane Abbott and creating a backlog of anti-semitism cases. Not only does it just sound like sour grapes to normal people, but it shows how Corbyn's constant giving the benefit of the doubt to everyone, even people who loathe him and literally talked to each other about how they wished that he would die, just left him open to more attack.

Because right now, while there are some good ideas out there, they're not mainstream yet, and we don't know that they'll work either, and until then we're stuck in a culture war where we're always on the back foot. And after five years, it hurts for a lot of us to go back to the old way of doing things under Starmer: When the tabloids say jump, ask how high. Don't rock the boat. Hide your radicalism. Accept the framing that the right creates and work within that framing, instead of trying to bust it open and move the debate onto ground that instead makes them uncomfortable.

The "cult of Corbyn" stuff was always a lot more self-aware and jokey than it might have seemed for people who weren't involved in Labour politics. People weren't really thinking of JC as Jesus Christ, and stuff like the "oh Jeremy Corbyn" chants was more about being silly with your mates. And I kept telling people to stop thinking that RLB would walk it in the leadership race, because I'd never, ever experienced a left space in the Labour party where criticism of Corbyn was just shut down or unconscionable. Everyone I know had a similar attitude: We can't keep doing what we've been doing for decades, but if Corbyn's the only vehicle for changing that, then that's what we'll have to make do with even if he's really, really not ideal as a leader. It's a very similar dynamic to the Brexit referendum, honestly, in that Corbyn's leadership was as much about trying to manifest some kind of reflection of our frustrations as much as it was actually about Corbyn himself, who may have had principles but rarely displayed aptitude for the leadership. But then, Boris has never had either, and he won a majority and harnessed exactly the kind of anti-establishment fervour that should have been a lock for an actual anti-establishment politician like Corbyn. And most Tories I know don't particularly like Boris either, really - he was also just a vehicle to get the bigger picture that they wanted, or to deny the left its chance.

Starmer as leader is a return to trying to win power by sacrificing principle, and hoping you don't lose your soul on the way. That means accepting that anti-semitism is something worth sacking an MP over, but other forms of racism are tolerable, for example, or that Starmer's going to do dumb PR shit like the new armed forces stuff which is way less substantive than the offer under Corbyn, but which will by contrast actually get a positive headline in The Sun. Starmer knows he can get rid of people disloyal to him because he's not seen as truly left-wing, so it's "decisive" instead of "purge". And he knows that it's too late to argue that so many of the narratives about Labour under Corbyn were false - you've just got to suck it up and look like you're dealing with it by taking "firm action". We lost. We have to move on to what's next, not keep relitigating the past.

Will it work? Well, it's the only way that a Labour leader has ever had consistent poll leads and majorities post-Thatcher, so logically it can't be the worst idea, as painful and cringeworthy as it is for many of us. (Let's just hope Starmer doesn't carve anything into a stone tablet...) And the left's either going to burn itself out spitting feathers, or it can stop complaining, dust itself off, and do the work. After all, Corbyn became leader after decades in the wilderness, and it was only him because was one of only a handful of left MPs left. There's now a big tranche of new, young left MPs, there's a huge and active membership and activist base, there's so much exciting stuff happening in terms of new ideas and policies being discussed in new places. If the chance to be in charge comes back around, the left should be in a better place. But the legacy of Corbyn has been poisoned for good, regardless, and Starmer's leadership will have to be defined by its response to that. Pretending otherwise is just foolish.

That was a really interesting read.

 

[Elephant Pyjamas]

Now getting the approval of Farage over his BLM comments. George Osborne likes him too.

I'm struggling with Starmer to be honest, as Proslo said here

"And after five years, it hurts for a lot of us to go back to the old way of doing things under Starmer: When the tabloids say jump, ask how high. Don't rock the boat. Hide your radicalism. Accept the framing that the right creates and work within that framing, instead of trying to bust it open and move the debate onto ground that instead makes them uncomfortable."

It does feel like this, that to win power Labour needs to be dishonest, or be something that isn't a whole lot different from the Tories anyway - so what is the point?

 

[Tony Towner]

I'm struggling with Starmer to be honest, as Proslo said here

"And after five years, it hurts for a lot of us to go back to the old way of doing things under Starmer: When the tabloids say jump, ask how high. Don't rock the boat. Hide your radicalism. Accept the framing that the right creates and work within that framing, instead of trying to bust it open and move the debate onto ground that instead makes them uncomfortable."

It does feel like this, that to win power Labour needs to be dishonest, or be something that isn't a whole lot different from the Tories anyway - so what is the point?

I was saying that prior to and throughout Corbyn being leader. In Proslo's excellent post he seems to accept it, although with disappointment.

So the question is would a Labour Starmer Government in the mould of New Labour be acceptable to you if the preference is Conservative? Many on here when I phrased a similar question 5 years ago said no so I'd be interested if that's changed.

I disagree with "what's the point"? Clearly the Brown/Blair years weren't by any means Socialist and some policies were Tory - Iraq, pfi etc. That said investment in hospitals and schools, LGBT rights, minimum wage etc were unTory and probably wouldn't have happened with a Conservative Government. For me that's the point.

 

[pr0sl0]

Oh, I'd take a Starmer government over any Conservative government, any day of the week. Chomsky has a line on this - he has no love for the Democrats, but votes for them and against the Republicans because "when you're voting for the lesser of two evils, you do at least get slightly less evil". The thing is that it has to come with a recognition that politics is always about more than just voting for one side or the other every 4/5 years, and pushing for change happens before elections and after them as well.

I find Starmer very wet, in general. I respect his human rights legal background a lot, but the thing about lawyers (Obama was similar) is that they're inherently very anti-radical in their instincts. And honestly, I think that's something that chimes with most British people more so than any of the specifically embarrassing things he's done so far. He just oozes "boring competency", and after several years of wild, un-British disruption with governments losing votes all over the place and everything being on pause, someone who you don't have to think about other than when they occasionally pop up on TV to say something unexciting but, on the surface, sensible, might be a nice change. And his suits fit, and he has a haircut. If you want to not have to care about politics (like most people, I guess, unlike weirdos like me) then knowing that someone so boring and reliable-sounding is there doing stuff in the background, and you don't have to pay that much attention, is an attractive prospect. I think that's the logic right now in the Starmer camp, much more so than Blair Mk II. It's the only thing that explains for me why he keeps saying he doesn't want to be too critical of the government, and why he's not gone for easy slam-dunks like calling for Jenrick to resign. Keep it calm, and carry on until 2024.

 

[Paul]

I find Starmer very wet, in general. I respect his human rights legal background a lot, but the thing about lawyers (Obama was similar) is that they're inherently very anti-radical in their instincts. And honestly, I think that's something that chimes with most British people more so than any of the specifically embarrassing things he's done so far. He just oozes "boring competency", and after several years of wild, un-British disruption with governments losing votes .

I'm sorry but I'm just going to have to stick up for a 'fellow boring person' here , do you honestly think the country as a whole would embrace 'radical', most people fear change do you not think radical change is just a step too far, I know we've got Brexit which is probably the most radical thing we've done, but I think that came about due to peoples complacency that something so radical could never happen ?

 

[Paul]

It does feel like this, that to win power Labour needs to be dishonest, or be something that isn't a whole lot different from the Tories anyway - so what is the point?

Remember McCartheys 'winning ugly' it does work sometimes

 

[Elephant Pyjamas]

I was saying that prior to and throughout Corbyn being leader. In Proslo's excellent post he seems to accept it, although with disappointment.

So the question is would a Labour Starmer Government in the mould of New Labour be acceptable to you if the preference is Conservative? Many on here when I phrased a similar question 5 years ago said no so I'd be interested if that's changed.

I disagree with "what's the point"? Clearly the Brown/Blair years weren't by any means Socialist and some policies were Tory - Iraq, pfi etc. That said investment in hospitals and schools, LGBT rights, minimum wage etc were unTory and probably wouldn't have happened with a Conservative Government. For me that's the point.

Yeah i was being a little flippant with the "what's the point" line, of course i'd prefer a Starmer government over this one. But in terms of fully getting myself behind it, paying subs etc, i don't really know what Starmer represents, what is his actual opinion on things? He's playing a game (one that will likely be successful) but i don't really like it.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

But in terms of fully getting myself behind it, paying subs etc, i don't really know what Starmer represents, what is his actual opinion on things? He's playing a game (one that will likely be successful) but i don't really like it.

You can't really throw this line out when Corbyn tried the exact same thing with Brexit (which is actually important) for nearly four whole years.

He was also shit at that game and that's why he lost so horribly.

 

[Templeton Peck]

Oh, I'd take a Starmer government over any Conservative government, any day of the week. Chomsky has a line on this - he has no love for the Democrats, but votes for them and against the Republicans because "when you're voting for the lesser of two evils, you do at least get slightly less evil". The thing is that it has to come with a recognition that politics is always about more than just voting for one side or the other every 4/5 years, and pushing for change happens before elections and after them as well.

I find Starmer very wet, in general. I respect his human rights legal background a lot, but the thing about lawyers (Obama was similar) is that they're inherently very anti-radical in their instincts. And honestly, I think that's something that chimes with most British people more so than any of the specifically embarrassing things he's done so far. He just oozes "boring competency", and after several years of wild, un-British disruption with governments losing votes all over the place and everything being on pause, someone who you don't have to think about other than when they occasionally pop up on TV to say something unexciting but, on the surface, sensible, might be a nice change. And his suits fit, and he has a haircut. If you want to not have to care about politics (like most people, I guess, unlike weirdos like me) then knowing that someone so boring and reliable-sounding is there doing stuff in the background, and you don't have to pay that much attention, is an attractive prospect. I think that's the logic right now in the Starmer camp, much more so than Blair Mk II. It's the only thing that explains for me why he keeps saying he doesn't want to be too critical of the government, and why he's not gone for easy slam-dunks like calling for Jenrick to resign. Keep it calm, and carry on until 2024.

Agree with all of this, and all of your longer post. Brilliant stuff.

 

[Templeton Peck]

You can't really throw this line out when Corbyn tried the exact same thing with Brexit (which is actually important) for nearly four whole years.

He was also shit at that game and that's why he lost so horribly.

Well his instincts on that were correct but he allowed himself to be dragged into a second referendum position by membership and some MPs. I get why he did it but electorally it was the wrong choice.

 

[Elephant Pyjamas]

You can't really throw this line out when Corbyn tried the exact same thing with Brexit (which is actually important) for nearly four whole years.

He was also shit at that game and that's why he lost so horribly.

Well i can, because i knew what Corbyn stood for generally, i don't with Starmer at all.

 

[Elephant Pyjamas]

Well his instincts on that were correct but he allowed himself to be dragged into a second referendum position by membership and some MPs. I get why he did it but electorally it was the wrong choice.

"Some MPs", one being Starmer of course.

 

[Elephant Pyjamas]

Agree with all of this, and all of your longer post. Brilliant stuff.

Yes me too.

 

[Templeton Peck]

I'd take Starmer over any Tory govt of course. I find him wet too but I think he taps into that 90s idea of a 'managerial' politician rather than having a vision as such. Not my cup of tea at all but might just work after 4 years of batshit Boris. My hope would be that if he gets in he won't piss it away like Blair did.