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Keir Starmer


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2 hours ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

 

Radio. He goes to towns all over the country. I went to the recording of the Birkenhead one a few years ago. It was held in the centre of iniquity and privilege that is Birkenhead School, and of course he made a crack about having to set foot inside a fee-paying school.

Was it any good?

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4 hours ago, Scooby Dudek said:

Shithead UKIP, Brexit, latest self publicising party has been on QT more times than virtually anybody else. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Question_Time_episodes

 

 

His number of appearances is 35, which puts him 9th in overall appearances in the history of the program, not including presenters.

In relationship of appearances/years appearing on the program, he averages 1st, with an average of 1.8 appearances per year. 

 

2000, 2003, 2004, 2006, 

2007, 2007

2008, 2008, 2008

2009, 2009, 2009

2010, 2001, 2010, 2010

2011, 2011,

2012, 2012,

2013, 2013, 2013, 2013

2014, 2014

2015, 2015

2016, 2016, 2016

2018

2019, 2019 (Election Special), 2019

 

Not surprisingly the 8 people above Garage head would all be considered political heavyweights, such as Shirley Williams and Clare Short, not some twat who never won a parliamentary election. However, as I said he averages more appearances per active year than anybody in the history of the program. 

 

 

2003, 2005, 2012, 2013 are the years that Mark Steel appeared on QT, for 4 appearances over 10 years.  

He hasn't been on since he said this;

 

 

 

 

EDIT: Toby Young has been on 5 times

2004, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2015

Cheers mate. That's all I was looking for.

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Sadly I have just checked and Melanie Philips has been on QT 30 times.  

As I said earlier Farage has been on 35 times and is 9th overall, which must put Philips high up. 

 

30 times from 1996 to 2019, so 23 years 1.3 times a year, which is a better ratio than Clare Short and Paddy Ashdown.

 

Maybe the BBC and QT are just going out of their way to upset me.

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2 minutes ago, Scooby Dudek said:

Sadly I have just checked and Melanie Philips has been on QT 30 times.  

As I said earlier Farage has been on 35 times and is 9th overall, which must put Philips high up. 

 

30 times from 1996 to 2019, so 23 years 1.3 times a year, which is a better ratio than Clare Short and Paddy Ashdown.

 

Maybe the BBC and QT are just going out of their way to upset me.

Farage slightly behind Phillips in the hate speech top trumps 

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Labour should be talking about change for after the pandemic. They want votes they should borrow a bit of Trump except make their scape goat unpaid taxes and loopholes, close the havens pay the corona bill. As the public are dumb shits, its 3 word slogans and calling the opposition useless dumb cunts that rings home it seems. Open PMQs with a long list of Boris failures as a man through out his career...through out his life. Close the havens, pay the corona bill, save the NHS. Lock the loopholes!  Boris and his Ghoulie gang are a bunch of cunts. Wheres all the private contract money gone.. what's the story thieving tories. Michael Gove licks his own eyeballs. 

 

Paint the picture of just how low these people are. Look at the shit Priti Patel has done and said for fuck sake, some random person who works in greggs can say something stupid and face far more condemnation than for the things this public servant has actually done. 

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26 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

Does anyone know what the Labour Party is doing? Are they still going? Maybe they were wound up in November, and have retrained as yoga instructors or pig farmers.

 

Occasionally someone on the news mentions that the Labour Party has commented on something, such as: “Labour’s shadow minister for education said, ‘I am currently out of the office until 19 May. If your inquiry is urgent, please contact Mrs Tilbury at the Post Office and she will try to suggest a policy.’”

 

Luckily it’s been a calm year, with only the usual issues no one takes much notice of, so it’s been an ideal time to stay quiet.

 

One task of an opposition is to “hold the government to account”. But Labour have said it’s difficult to criticise the government during a pandemic. That’s understandable, because when a government causes the worst rate of infections in the world, you shouldn’t criticise that, as it can seem ungrateful. And when it offers tens of billions of pounds’ worth of contracts to companies that were often useless, and usually connected to people in the government, it would be churlish to find fault.

 

And how do you criticise people such as Dominic Cummings and Jacob Rees-Mogg? Whatever you say about them, their behaviour is above criticism.

 

Keir Starmer criticised the government on one issue, insisting they “should have opened the schools earlier”. So the one thing all scientists agree was done too early, he attacked them for doing too late.

 

Maybe he should have tried something similar with Dominic Cummings, complaining he didn’t drive far enough. He could have surprised Boris Johnson by saying: “Mr Speaker, if the prime minister’s senior adviser was concerned about his eyes, he should have tested them far more thoroughly. Instead of simply driving to Barnard Castle, he should have driven to Aberystwyth and organised a rave with 500 of his mates.”

 

It seems as if their idea for winning votes back is to hope the Conservatives are so terrible that everyone chooses Labour instead, even if they’ve disappeared. It might work, and in four years time, millions of people will say, “I’d like to give that other lot a go, that no longer seem to exist.”

 

Part of the problem is it’s hard to work out what Labour is trying to do. Who are they trying to persuade? And what are they trying to persuade anyone about? It’s like someone who opens a shop that only sells Lego, marmalade and hardcore porn – no one can work out what market they’re aiming for.

 

They have one strategy they seem sure of, which is to distance themselves from Jeremy Corbyn. Anything Corbyn approved of has to be discarded, including Corbyn himself. At their next policy review they’ll support napalming allotments.

 

They’ve made a start with their document that proposes winning back lost voters by “making more use of the union flag, and dressing smartly”. That should do it. Across Mansfield, people will say: “I don’t know what Keir Starmer stands for, but he wears a bespoke Italian silk suit and has a union flag tattooed over his face, so that’s good enough for my vote.”

 

One question Labour should try and answer at some point, is how they can win back support in Scotland, or alternatively how they can win without any MPs in Scotland. Ever since they lost all their seats except one to the SNP, their approach seems mostly to have been to call the SNP a bunch of idiotic scum, insisting Labour is more anti-independence than ever. This has proved so successful, Labour is down to 16 per cent in Scotland.

 

Maybe this will work, it just needs more time. In the same way, one day we’ll all realise that Millwall fans, when they roar “You’re full of ****, **** and more ****” at opposing fans, and lob bottles at them, they’re trying to win them over by reaching out.

 

Anas Sarwar, leader of Scottish Labour, published his “five-point plan for taking on the SNP and Tories”, of which the first is a “digital directorate, adapted to modern campaigning”. That’s the main thing, because no one’s bothered what a party says, as long as it’s said digitally. From now on, instead of saying they support staying with Britain on old-fashioned leaflets, they’ll dance it on TikTok in Paul Smith union jack suits, and Aberdeen will be theirs.  

 

Number two is: “We must talk about health, education and poverty.” That’s a good point, but does make you wonder what they’ve been talking about until now. Have they been knocking on doors and talking about canoeing, the route from Glasgow to Greenock avoiding the M8 and the best place in Motherwell to go dogging?

 

The Green Party is now at 8 per cent in the polls across Britain, so Labour has lost a couple of million supporters there, but they’re probably only young passionate people so they can afford to let those ones go.

 

If you suggest Labour could be doing better, you invite retorts such as “He’s doing better than Corbyn”. This is possibly true, but that’s quite a low bar anti-Corbyn Labour supporters have set, to do better than the person they derided as the worst person ever. It’s like a football manager brought in because the team lost 7-0, announcing, “Never again will we be humiliated like this. Under my leadership I’m determined to lose 6-0.”

 

Similarly if you suggest Corbyn made any mistakes at all, you’re told by some of his supporters to “Piss off and join the Tories, you traitor”, a debating point that might need smoothing down at some point.

 

So I suggest one half of the party spends a year teaching yoga, while the other half looks after pigs, and they all start again in 2022.

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He's going to do some policies.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/12/keir-starmer-to-kick-off-policy-blitz-in-move-to-head-off-labour-critics

 

Keir Starmer to launch fightback with Labour policy blitz

Leader to begin setting out key planks of a future Labour government after concerns over direction

 

Keir Starmer will seek to assuage growing criticism of his leadership within Labour by kicking off a major policy blitz next week, as the party aims to paint a picture of what it would do in government.

 

Concerns about Labour’s direction were underlined last week by a leaked strategy document that urged the party to focus on a new patriotic approach, including more use of the union jack. The document prompted some ridicule from MPs and calls for the Labour leader to flesh out his vision for the party and the country in more detailed policy terms.

 

Starmer is expected to set out some key planks of a future Labour government’s economic policy in a speech on Thursday, one of a series of interventions the party hopes will also raise the profile of his shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, before the budget on 3 March.

 

An immediate focus will be financial support for business – particularly the hospitality sector – which Starmer will highlight has taken on unfeasibly high debts during the Covid-19 crisis. Members of the Labour frontbench are also to be given more of a visible role, after the shadow Cabinet Office minister, Rachel Reeves, delivered a high-profile speech on government cronyism and wastage this week.

 

A number of other keynote speeches are planned in the coming weeks, including from the shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, and the shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds.

 

One Labour source described the strategy as “showing a bit of ankle”, but said Starmer would begin to transition into the role of a more combative opposition leader as the vaccine programme started to alleviate the immediate public health crisis. “That means we can start to focus on the bigger picture stuff and talk about systemic change,” the source added.

 

Angela Smith, Labour’s leader in the Lords, said the past year had been about “pressing the reset button” and that voters would begin to see a more passionate side to Starmer.

 

“Still waters run deep. My own sense of Keir is that he’s very passionate about his politics and what he believes in and what he wants to achieve,” she said. “He’s not someone who’s going to shout and holler, and be offensive, or cry on someone’s shoulder. But it runs deep, what he believes in.

 

“He’s said we can’t go back to business as usual and he will know his challenge is now to set out what that looks like. But he couldn’t do that in an environment where people didn’t trust us. You need foundations on which to build.

 

“If you look at great Labour victories – Attlee, Wilson, Blair – they all came at a time when things needed to change. They gave an optimism that things would change, but also the credibility that they were the people to do it.”

 

Another shadow cabinet minister said they had been frustrated about not being able to rally a better defence of Starmer amid criticism over the leaked document to the Guardian. “You can’t coordinate a big fightback while everyone is in their separate cities. Keir is still a figure who is unknown – and there is plainly frustration he has not exposed his own personality and vision. That is something that you will see he is about to do,” they said.

 

One shadow minister added: “I think there has been a feeling we have toed one side of the fine line in supporting the government through a pandemic and [that] we need to start stepping firmly over the other side of the line. And Keir says he agrees with that.”

 

The flak taken by the Labour leader has come most notably – but not only – from the left of the party, and has included a number of high-profile rebellions. Several rebels have expressed feelings of being misled by Starmer’s leadership campaign, which, they said, had a more leftwing agenda closer to that of Jeremy Corbyn’s.

 

“It’s not universal, but there is definitely a sense that this is not what we signed up for,” one leftwing MP said. “Government incompetence gets pretty boring. There’s an element of Covid determinism, which is, let [Boris] Johnson make a mess of this, and we’ll look competent and reap the benefits. It hasn’t panned out.”

 

Another senior staffer said: “It does feel reminiscent of the Ed [Miliband] era – it’s a bit of a blancmange.”

There are also fears among members on the party’s right, many of whom bristled at Starmer’s decision to vote for Johnson’s Brexit deal.

 

One said: “We are facing a very difficult fight over the next few years, where the Tories are going to spend lots of cash in seats they won, stick a picture of the MP next to a bypass or bridge with a grinning Boris on the leaflets and say: ‘The Labour MP never got this done in 20 years, look what a difference I’ve made.’ I’ve not heard a single answer to how we combat that.”

 

One of Starmer’s close aides, Anneliese Midgley, who previously worked for Unite and for Corbyn, is to head over to Labour headquarters to work on campaigning strategy one insider describes as “to get the party machinery working more closely with the leadership’s political strategy”.

 

Staff at the Southside HQ in London face a challenging runup to the local elections and a more widespread need to keep party activists motivated when they cannot campaign or canvass because of the pandemic.

 

Though private polling before the elections, which are scheduled for 6 May, has been mixed – described in briefings as abysmal in some places – there are chances for Labour to make some symbolic gains, including the high-profile West Midlands mayoralty.

 

Whatever the criticism of the leaked “flags and veterans” strategy that drew some derision, advisers are determined there must be a broader push to appeal to voters who have previously voted Conservative.

 

Polling at the moment shows Starmer has mainly been highly attractive to former Liberal Democrat voters in southern seats. “We might get to Blair levels in the south of England but not win back enough seats to get us a majority,” said one insider.

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13 hours ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

Labour should be talking about change for after the pandemic. They want votes they should borrow a bit of Trump except make their scape goat unpaid taxes and loopholes, close the havens pay the corona bill. As the public are dumb shits, its 3 word slogans and calling the opposition useless dumb cunts that rings home it seems. Open PMQs with a long list of Boris failures as a man through out his career...through out his life. Close the havens, pay the corona bill, save the NHS. Lock the loopholes!  Boris and his Ghoulie gang are a bunch of cunts. Wheres all the private contract money gone.. what's the story thieving tories. Michael Gove licks his own eyeballs. 

 

Paint the picture of just how low these people are. Look at the shit Priti Patel has done and said for fuck sake, some random person who works in greggs can say something stupid and face far more condemnation than for the things this public servant has actually done. 

In think I've said similar on this thread in the recent past.  I think tax avoidance would be a massive vote winner but the problem is that the biggest tax avoiders control what's fed in to the homes of the great british public every day, so I don't know how you get that message through.

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I think he’s maybe not more critical of the tories as he’s playing the long game, he is kissing arse of Tory swing voters. He will probably ramp up criticism as the election approaches but that’s ages away.

he’s very soft on holding the government to account so far.

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Worth a watch or if you want fast forward to 4.40 where he talks about Starmer and Labour. 

 

 

George Monbiot using my language -  failed state,  references oligarchs and Johnson as Murdoch's viceroy,  hedge funds, charlatans and that's before he gets to Labour. "Labour is nodding along with the outrageous system which we have normalised" 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2 minutes ago, sir roger said:

Putting to one side the fact that Mandelson should not be approached without a stake , I can't see how a guy who said the working class are best ignored and makes Starmer seem like Farage on Brexit will help with re-establishing the 'red wall' 

I also find it bizarre. If Starmer is looking to split the party he's on a winner because the left will undoubtedly revolt if Mandelson is back on the scene..Starmer was supposed to unite the party, at the moment he's in danger of doing the exact opposite. The Corbyn suspension was a blunder which is festering under the surface and will probably now drag on all this parliamentary term. Starmer seems to be picking the wrong fights.

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I think it’s clear, inarguable in fact, that Starmer is trying to steer the party back towards Blairism, I don’t think he wants to unite the party, he would dispel the left if he could, I think he sees this as the only way Labour can wrestle power from the Conservatives. Whether or not you agree with him is a different argument. Very surprised to see him be so brazen as to bring back the prince of darkness though I must say.

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