Keir Starmer

[Tony Moanero]

Hi everyone, just wondering if I’m in the right place. This is the Poosflash! thread, isn’t it?

[Numero Veinticinco]

1 hour ago, AngryOfTuebrook said:

One of the few instances in politics when it's actually legit to say "they're as bad as each other".

 

 

 

It is so fucking ridiculous. This is why I've been talking about a split so much in recent months. I called the internal attacks and sabotage against Corbyn a disgrace with those doing it needing to be kicked out. I feel the same now. It won't stop. Get Starmer out, get [insert choice lefty] in, then it starts again but from the other side. It's pointless. There needs to be a massive purge or a split. The Tories are running away with it everything and Labour are more interested internally than externally. Again. It's pathetic. 

 

Edit: Thanks for putting that face front and centre. Struggling to masturbate to this thread now. 

 

Edit 2: Panic over, I managed it.

[Dr Nowt]

1 hour ago, AngryOfTuebrook said:

One of the few instances in politics when it's actually legit to say "they're as bad as each other".

 

 

 

The perfect microcosm of why we have that fucking bag of cum in Downing Street, all of them.

[Red Phoenix]

I'm done with Galloway now after coping for several hours. He's cancelled. He can't even win fucking Batley and Spen the daft twat. He's homophobic, racist, anti-semitic, right, far-right, ultra-far-right, 1000,000,000,000 miles to the right far-right, right-right, righty, communist, ultra-commie, demon, nazi, hitler, far-right hitler, cat man, nazi cat man, ultra commie cat man.

 

Labour as it stands isn't something I'm hugely bothered about and it'd be stupid for me to pretend otherwise after rooting for cat man back there. One thing I do genuinely like after this whole circus is over though is the thought of Jo Cox looking down from somewhere and seeing that her sister has won. This is apparently the last time Batley and Spen will be as it is before boundary changes so after all of the drama it's fitting that it ended up being her.

[RedKnight]

A fitting analysis from someone who said they were an anarchist.

[Bobby Hundreds]

Galloway as articulate and well learned he can often be just wants to be the hero in his own story. He doesn't look at the bigger picture he just wants centre stage in it. 

 

For Mandelson to speak of corbynites conspiring against Starmer when  he said he tries to undermine Corbyn every day when Corbyn was leader just shows the slimey nature of the man. 

 

Labour seem to scared to stand for anything that may attract attention.

[Strontium]

I'm old enough to remember when anarchists wanted to smash the state, not expand it.

[Elite]

1 minute ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

Galloway as articulate and well learned he can often be just wants to be the hero in his own story. He doesn't look at the bigger picture he just wants centre stage in it. 

 

For Mandelson to speak of corbynites conspiring against Starmer when  he said he tries to undermine Corbyn every day when Corbyn was leader just shows the slimey nature of the man. 

 

Labour seem to scared to stand for anything that may attract attention.

He could be the greatest leader in the history of politics but I couldn't vote for a man that pretended to be a cat on live TV, the fucking weirdo.

[Megadrive Man]

It astounds me how Galloway rocks up in these communities and gets this sort of support!

 

I don't understand how he's got any credibility left?

 

I wonder if he inadvertently ended up helping the Labour vote in the end by giving pissed off Labour voters somebody else to vote for?

[Moo]

11 hours ago, skend04 said:

Galloway says he is going to apply to have the result set aside by the courts. What's he on?

 

An ego trip.

[Red Phoenix]

42 minutes ago, RedKnight said:

A fitting analysis from someone who said they were an anarchist.

 

Thanks. I decided to quit anarchism so that you'd stop posting about me not voting.

 

26 minutes ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

I'm old enough to remember when anarchists wanted to smash the state, not expand it.

 

There's a thing called pacifist anarchism, it doesn't have to be about smashing the state. I can't call myself an anarchist though if you look at it in the way that Graeber described it as something you do and not an identity. I believe in it more than anything else but I'm basically a green voter right now when it comes to politics and I accept that.

[Bruce Spanner]

4 minutes ago, MegadriveMan said:

It astounds me how Galloway rocks up in these communities and gets this sort of support!

 

I don't understand how he's got any credibility left?

 

I wonder if he inadvertently ended up helping the Labour vote in the end by giving pissed off Labour voters somebody else to vote for?

The vote split would be a real thing to behold.

 

Old disillusioned Trotts with a protest vote, Muslims who hate gays, ‘anarchists’, mentalists and housewives who remember him off Big Brother.

 

Id be fascinated to see the breakdown.

[Jairzinho]

10 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

The vote split would be a real thing to behold.

 

Old disillusioned Trotts with a protest vote, Muslims who hate gays, ‘anarchists’, mentalists and housewives who remember him off Big Brother.

 

Id be fascinated to see the breakdown.

And also a load of proper right wingers that have become aware of him due to him being with Fox and various other GB News types. 

[Bruce Spanner]

6 minutes ago, Jairzinho said:

And also a load of proper right wingers that have become aware of him due to him being with Fox and various other GB News types. 

Russia Today as well, where he takes the Putin Rouble.

 

You think these drongos were the ‘heavies’ he surrounds himself with and allows to intimidate folk?

[Red Phoenix]

This can't be good in the long run :

 

 

I think a lot of people are missing a potential elephant in the room with Galloway too. It's not actually about him as a person with all of his ravings and issues, it's his party and their policies. That's the potential elephant. Scraping through this by-election is good for Labour now but if anything similar is repeated around the country by the Workers Party in an election in even a small number of seats it could cause a lot of damage.

 

I pasted this around the time their party started and I'll do it again for a reminder (each quote here is from the about page on their site) :

 

Quote

The Workers Party is unequivocally committed to class politics. Though the fashion of the times is to divide working people along identity lines, we seek to unite them, based on their shared class interest. It is not ‘homophobic’ or ‘racist’ for socialists to focus their attention on those contradictions that concern the whole working class in its struggle for socialism. While being totally opposed to discrimination on grounds of race, sex or sexual proclivity, we declare that obsession with identity politics, including sexual politics, divides the working class.

 

Here's the first of their 10 policies :

 

Quote

An end to imperialist wars and financial domination, starting with withdrawal from Nato.

 

It doesn't matter to me whether or not anyone here agrees with anything in those two quotes, it's about how many people up and down the country do after feeling lost with the Labour Party after Corbyn left. The party was created in response to Corbyn no longer being Labour leader :

 

Quote

It is enough to note that the Corbyn project is dead and buried, and that with it, British workers should bury any illusions that electing a left-wing leader can change the fundamental character of the Labour party, which remains a party committed to capitalism and fully integrated into the workings of the British state – a faithful servant of British imperialism.

 

Of course anyone can have the view that they can simply fuck off if they don't like it and maybe the leave voters will make up for the losses now that Brexit is over, but it's another issue that I think could be a big one now that the Workers Party has national recognition and years to build on that before the next election. Focusing on Galloway alone and listing all the bad stuff about him could be missing the point completely.

 

But this isn't just about him or his party, it's going back to the top and thinking of the tweet again, then adding his party to that mix. Then add the Green Party as well, one that ironically didn't stand because their guy was withdrawn due to past homophobic tweets. What would the result have looked like if the Green Party had taken part? How many groups of voters can Labour afford to alienate before it becomes too much? At some point bridges have to be built again surely.

 

There's no supporting the Workers Party angle from me here either. This was a by-election, I thought Galloway could've been an interesting voice in parliament. A UK election where the outcome could lead to several more years of the Tories is a completely different thing.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

I view the Labour Party much the same way as I view the EU: it's obviously far from perfect and at times it does things that I'm completely opposed to, but it's capable of being improved and it's far, far better than any available alternative. 

[lifetime fan]

12 minutes ago, AngryOfTuebrook said:

I view the Labour Party much the same way as I view the EU: it's obviously far from perfect and at times it does things that I'm completely opposed to, but it's capable of being improved and it's far, far better than any available alternative. 

In one.

 

And if the egos on either side of the party can’t both stop being fucking dickheads we’ll never have a labour government again. They also need to stop bitching with other party’s work together and get PR sorted.

[Strontium]

10 hours ago, Red Phoenix said:

I think a lot of people are missing a potential elephant in the room with Galloway too. It's not actually about him as a person with all of his ravings and issues, it's his party and their policies. That's the potential elephant. Scraping through this by-election is good for Labour now but if anything similar is repeated around the country by the Workers Party in an election in even a small number of seats it could cause a lot of damage.

 

No. People weren't voting for the "Workers Party" and their pitiful agenda, they were voting for Galloway, British politics' most shameless self-promoter. Even if Galloway can cynically exploit one community in a by-election so they go out and vote for him, that won't be repeated at a national election.

[sir roger]

32 minutes ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

 

No. People weren't voting for the "Workers Party" and their pitiful agenda, they were voting for Galloway, British politics' most shameless self-promoter. Even if Galloway can cynically exploit one community in a by-election so they go out and vote for him, that won't be repeated at a national election.

I agree that the Workers party will not amount to anything and that Galloway is getting more and more absurd as the years go on , but on a broader point it would seem that Starmer's seeming disregard for the Muslim , Hindu and Black communities will cost him heavily in any subsequent elections.

[Strontium]

37 minutes ago, sir roger said:

I agree that the Workers party will not amount to anything and that Galloway is getting more and more absurd as the years go on , but on a broader point it would seem that Starmer's seeming disregard for the Muslim , Hindu and Black communities will cost him heavily in any subsequent elections.

 

I don't think this is a Starmer problem, this is an identity politics problem, insofar as it's going to be increasingly difficult to (for instance) appeal to socially conservative voters while also trying to adopt increasingly woke policies.

 

So in Batley and Spen you had a Muslim community which, at best, is largely indifferent to gay rights, and at worst, deeply hostile to them, and how do you reconcile that with fielding a lesbian candidate and being the party which pushes hardest on trans issues? It's not a coincidence that Galloway's leaflets emphasised his credentials as a husband and father and featured demands for parental involvement in the school curriculum, so that children aren't taught in a "moral vacuum".

 

Obviously some of this can be negated through the use of differential messaging - eg I doubt that leaflets featuring a photo of Boris Johnson with Narendra Modi would be issued in Brent North, where one-sixth are Hindu, or that a Labour candidate would be emphasising their pro-Palestinian credentials in Finchley and Golders Green. Nevertheless, it is a circle which needs to be squared.

[Red Phoenix]

2 hours ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

 

No. People weren't voting for the "Workers Party" and their pitiful agenda, they were voting for Galloway, British politics' most shameless self-promoter. Even if Galloway can cynically exploit one community in a by-election so they go out and vote for him, that won't be repeated at a national election.

 

There's always a reason why you vote for someone. He did offer them several things even if he might not have delivered on them all. He had a focus on local issues for a start. The police station that he said had been shut down by the local council was something he repeatedly said would be something he'd reverse. This could have connected with a lot of voters in a place where Jo Cox had been killed and there was clearly division before Galloway had even turned up. The area had been neglected in many other ways too and he said he'd deal with some of them. He also said he'd speak out for Palestine as well and Muslims obviously had someone who'd speak out for them in parliament. And :

 

1 hour ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

I don't think this is a Starmer problem, this is an identity politics problem, insofar as it's going to be increasingly difficult to (for instance) appeal to socially conservative voters while also trying to adopt increasingly woke policies.

 

This is also interesting because here you're agreeing with a core part of what his party is aimed at. Here you'd have nodding in agreement with you Joti Brar, who's the deputy leader and a communist (Leninist not Trot.)

 

Brar is to some extent some of the brains behind it all. She'd completely agree with you on this because the identity politics is the exact thing that to her, distracts the working class and divides them. It prevents those on the left from being able to organise and unite as a working class because instead they're split into different camps putting each issue they have as a key part of their identity, and this to Brar is something that's pushed deliberately by the elites so that organising as workers is so much harder.

 

She's also opposed to the transgender "ideology", which is a key thing that can be exploited as a weakness if the focus does actually shift on to the party instead of cat man at any point. To Brar, the question "is a trans-woman a woman?" would definitely result in the answer "no, he's a man" if she were ever having to answer honestly. And as we know, the likes of Owen Jones would have a fucking field day with that.

 

It's also the good old horseshoe theory in effect perfectly. The right don't want the identity politics because they don't give a shit about the problems a lot of these groups are raising, the left though to some extent oppose them purely because they're distracting the workers from being able to get together and focus on the main problem, capitalism.

 

It isn't something that many people are aware of right now but it's something that if tapped into enough can be really powerful. Think of how well Sanders managed to unite the workers and give them something real to believe in and vote for that could've resulted in meaningful change. Maybe the biggest thing saving Labour is that the Workers Party isn't led by a Sanders and they can distract from the key issues so well by simply attacking Galloway instead.

 

Or maybe it's that by being so aligned with actual communism it's too far to the left to ever get any mass support. I think several people inside Labour are at least going to be cautious of it from here on out though after Batley.

[Red Phoenix]

I just watched an interview on rt with cat man, he doesn't even know if he's standing in the next election, says it's a long way off. He said he's campaigning in next years local elections though.

 

Batley has battered my head for most of a week now though and last night it was veering off into reading up on communism, leninism, marxism, anarchism, transgenderism, etc. Time to have more of a rest from this thread and politics.

[Red Phoenix]

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, you political bastards."

 

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Just seen The Last Leg's discussion of the Batley & Spen result. Adam Hills said he hopes George Galloway will now pack his hat and bag and go and sell a monorail to Shelbyville.

 

Can't say fairer than that.

[Anubis]

6 minutes ago, AngryOfTuebrook said:

Just seen The Last Leg's discussion of the Batley & Spen result. Adam Hills said he hopes George Galloway will now pack his hat and bag and go and sell a monorail to Shelbyville.

 

Can't say fairer than that.

He will. The problem is that it’ll be in other Labour constituencies with large Muslim populations.