Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Guess the creator of this?

Who is Jones trying to pander to at this point? The Corbynistas won’t have him back as he dared be critical of the great one, all he seems to do is slag off the current leadership and party, and at some time or other he’s annoyed pretty much every other group he’s claimed to be an ally of.

He's getting his coin from Channel 5 in any case.

In fact he might be worried about his status of lone leftie talking head if Labour come to power and suddenly lots of people discover that they weren't that bad after all.

Tony Benn did a nice line in populist lefty on Question Time after he left the Commons, and had a cute joke about “spending more time on politics”. It’s money for old rope.

He's not even wearing a jacket.

The Commie bastard.

It's February - WHERE'S HIS FUCKING POPPY!!!

The Weeping Angel wrote: ↑Thu Feb 23, 2023 10:22 pm He's not even wearing a jacket.

Softy Harwood's never done the Bigg Market bar crawl on a chilly January.

T-shirt obligatory, any more and you're over-dressed.

So, five “mission” themes: the economy, the NHS, crime, climate change and education .

Seems about right.

Anything about housing? That's one problem that really needs to be sorted out pronto but there just hasn't been the political will to do it.

Well Lisa Nandy has put a fair bit out about it.

An excellent thread to refer the moaners to:

Dalem Lake wrote: ↑Fri Feb 24, 2023 12:21 am Anything about housing? That's one problem that really needs to be sorted out pronto but there just hasn't been the political will to do it.

The calculation is probably something like this: Everyone will tell you affordable housing is a good thing until homeowners go to the polling booth. ‘Will increasing housing supply reduce the value of my property?’ And maybe the Daily Mail is right and Labour will fill new estates with riff-raff and migrants. Best not risk Labour.’

The official line is that the five "missions" will be fleshed out in much more detail over the coming months, which is to say as the election gets nearer. Housing will probably be part of the economy "mission".

The thing is, everything is so interlinked. People need to be healthy, to work, to travel, and so on. They also need to be properly and affordably housed, partly to remain healthy. And they need to be educated, to help them work on key jobs in the economy (and hopefully to keep them from voting in Tory fuckwit governments like this one).

Sharon Graham proving that being a union leader is different to being a Labour leader.

Her big idea is what? Price controls? How would that work across the whole economy? (Sure they exist for quasi-public things, but they aren't generally set that low, to say the least).

The Corbynist rump within the Labour Party, most notably in the form of the full-time Trot disruptor posing as a “journalist” Owen Jones, loves to make much of of Keir Starmer’s pledges, made in the course of his campaign to become leader, which he is alleged to have either broken, reneged on, or discarded. The cries of betrayal are melodramatic, and banshee-like in their endless repetition, so much so that they are being taken up by actual journalists such as Amol Rajan on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in a recent 8:10am interview slot. Starmer dealt with Rajan’s hostile line of questioning very competently, but of course not to the satisfaction of the embittered and disgruntled Corbynite rump.

Jeremy Corbyn, of course, had his very own set of ten pledges when he stood for election as Labour leader in 2015. You don’t hear much about those any more, principally because they were a set of ten “pie in the sky” aspirational promises, all of which were predicated on Corbyn leading Labour into government, something which we know from bitter experience to have been impossible. Not a single one of Corbyn’s ten pledges then, was held to, let alone delivered.

With that in mind, Jones & Co’s carping about Starmer’s alleged broken pledges begins to look quite absurd. To a “normal” Labour Party member such as myself, who dearly wants a Labour government and recognises the absolute overriding imperative of kicking the Tories out and electing Labour to government, the carping is a source of irritation, which were polling numbers closer than they are, might even place Labour’s victory in jeopardy.

Let me be absolutely plain: I don’t give a flying fudge whether Keir Starmer has gone back on, abandoned, or broken any of the “pledges” that he put forward during his campaign to become Labour’s leader. when I voted for Keir as leader, I wasn’t voting for a dogmatic automaton who would conduct his leadership on the basis of sticking unbendingly to some laundry list of aspirational “pledges”. I wanted a leader who would use his political judgement, strategic skills, and campaigning know-how to position Labour in the best possible place to succeed in the election and return to government. You know, that overriding, absolute imperative. To be adaptable to changed political and economic circumstances. To get us back to government, whatever happens. Just as Corbyn’s pledges were necessarily aspirational, so too were Starmer’s. Labour members need to be as relaxed about Starmer possibly not fulfilling some of his pledges as the Cobynist rump is about Corbyn having broken all of his leadership pledges..

Chris Mason was similar in that approach, a man who seemed to treat the tory leadership contest as a meet up of old mates down the pub.

Some of the worst sycophant journalism I’ve seen, I assume Starmer and his team hasn’t given open access to them, I see it also from people like Paul Brand.

Beth Rigby brought it up as well but at least Rigby does go both barrels with any politician, one of his pledges was to unite the party, and I think he has with the membership that want to win the next election such as my dad.

470,000 members isn’t bad going considering we used to have about 250k for most of the 00’s and the Corbyn figures were always inflated by cheap membership, considering if you listened to some of them the party was losing members in droves.

Likewise meanwhile Aaron Bastani thinks he'll melt under the pressure

Well we all know both how unbiased and accurate Aaron is. Just look at this from 2019, for example:



…oh.

"This is like a master batsman at the crease!"