Just to let you know that, after a week of feeling horribly ill, I am now pretty well recovered and ready for the challenges ahead. I will get the MRI scan results next week, but not particularly apprehensive.
I see yesterday the supposedly irresistible combination of Gordon Brown and the follically challenged Earl Strathearn met secretly to save the union. Which is a good time to remind you of this fact, which the media have wiped from history:
Gordon Brown, 2010 UK General Election: 8,609,527 votes – 29.0%
Jeremy Corbyn, 2019 UK General Election: 10,269.051 votes – 32.1%
By tacking hard to the right, confusing opposition with abstention, and making uncritical support of Israel a condition of membership, Keir Starmer is trying very, very hard to do even worse than the idiot Brown. But it’s a tough bar to get below.
Channel 4 News reports that their team was prevented from airing footage of Gordon Brown outside the gates of the Palace of Holyroodhouse where Prince William hosted the former Labour politician.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy said: “Kensington Palace have said we were stopped from airing the footage we filmed of Mr Brown in the grounds of Holyrood Palace – not because of sensitivities – but because they claim C4 News was trespassing. Our team were in public place outside gates.”
(https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/cambridge/mystery-surrounding-prince-williams-secret-meeting-with-former-prime-minister-gordon-brown-160778/)
The palace is a public place. FFS.
Ahh… but Kensington Palace ‘outrenks’ the Palace of Holyroodhouse,
even in Scotland (sorry: particularly in Scotland).
The roads outside the Palace are public places. Though there are barriers strung agross the places where buses normally park, and Abbey Strand which gives access to the “Visitor entrance” ie tourists. It’s so public that Google streetmap’s camera van had access to it. And there are armed police outside these barriers and elsewhere. They must be expecting a mass uprising …
An Auld Reekie pedant writes: Strictly speaking, Abbey Strand is part of the grounds of Holyroodhouse, like the Queen’s Park, which explains the brass esses in the paving, marking the old debtors’ sanctuary.
« Old debtors’ sanctuary » no irony intended with reference to the royal occupants, hem hem.
They should have met the Sarwars… for a cosy chat about defeating the Inland Revenue and thus tax payers!….We have no shred of democracy when a dynasty that is only centuries old controls a large part of the land of a people who have thousands of years of occupation before deeds were invented a dynasty that has no sovreignty over Scots yet control the destiny of many of by means of military, parliamentary public communications, University appointees, secret services and limitless wealth at their disposal….but their secret weapon?. A frozen ex-minister. The public pays for this family to carry out public engagement propaganda to retain wealth and control and also aim to control the way people think and vote and exercise their right to some semblance of democratic equality.
Did the gutless bastards capitulate?
Corbyn’s 40% in 2017 has been wiped even more completely from history. This allows them to claim thar the Starmer-Mandelson car crash is just a continuation of the Labour’ Party’s “inevitable ” and “unstoppable” decline. It is the new commonsense of a commentariat who assured us a “patriotic” Blairite-Brownite leader would take Labour at least 20 points ahead of the Tories ..
Aye, the Unionists have a dearth of talent from which to select. Sturgeon on the other hand casts aside genuine talent such as Joanna Cherry and promotes slavish adherents to the personality cult like Angela Crawley (Shadow Attorney General that’s never actually practiced Law).
Vivian – has it ever occurred to you that Sturgeon is a closet unionist? So she casts aside talented nationalists – and then replaces them with unionist non-entities.
I have no insight into Sturgeon’s internal position. My best guess would be ambivalence. Power is ALL!
What does appear provable from close inspection is that the leadership echelon of the party has been deeply compromised by the US State Department (at the behest of MI5?).
The brief given by Foggy Bottom? “If possible, avoid independence. If not, deliver an independent Scotland entirely compliant with the global aims of Washington.”
Vivian – well, I suppose that is basically what I mean.
If you want independence, then presumably you want it for some positive reason (and not just `oh we don’t like the English very much – they’re a bunch of snobs who talk down through the nose with posh accents’). The SNP always advocated that an independent Scotland would be a neutral nation, it wouldn’t have American military bases, it wouldn’t join in on the side of USA / England with overseas military conflicts, etc ……
Without this, I frankly don’t see the point of independence. What is independence for if the Scottish government is going to be in the pocket of the US State Department, the English MI5/6 and supportive of their agenda in the Middle East?
You’re absolutely right that power is *all* Sturgeon wants – and that she is prepared to do anything to get it. Probably overtures from US State Department and MI5 which led her to fit up Alex Salmond (who holds much more traditional SNP values).
They want power not to use it but to sell it on: to the EU, to Washington. Just as, since 1707, the predecessors of the Sturgeon crew used their power to barter with London.
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power”.
— George Orwell (O’Brien to Winston Smith, “1984”)
In fact few people realise that, in 2017, Jeremy obtained more votes than any of his three predecessors did at the four previous elections. What is more, he only needed a mere 700,000 more votes to surpass BLiar’s “landslide” total in 1997. Labour had reached a fresh audience of young people for whom the future boded nothing but debt, despair, low wages and highly uncertain futures. Now I cannot claim to be the most sophisticated political analyst since Cicero. Professor John Curtice I am definitely not. But did it not occur to even the most right-wing of Labour Party apparatchiks that they could do a great deal worse than build on this result, cultivating the new-found constituency, rallying round their leader and starting a positive campaign for change in the process? Well, history sadly relates that none of this happened. Instead, most members of the PLP continued their sniping and latched onto the utterly mendacious and disingenuous “anti-semitism” narrative – about which the vast majority of the electorate give not a single, solitary toss – to sustain their treacherous quest to topple him and his team. The result was a Party that was widely perceived to be seriously at odds with itself and as such in no fit state to be a serious contender for power at the 2019 election
Two more for y’all:
Labour under Ed Miliband at 2015 General Election: 9,347,273 votes – 30.4%.
Labour under Jeremy Corbyn at 2017 General Election: 12,878,460 votes – 40.0%.
Six & eight years since the global financial crisis, respectively.
In the process they so damaged the Labour party that for years to come they will not be viewed as realistic alternative to the Tories. They literally cut their own head off to spite Corbyn.
It was a fairly simple choice for the Blairites: they knew that a Corbyn victory would result in their eventual deselection. Much better for them if Labour remained “in opposition” and their bums remained on the green leather. At least the Blue Tories care about the Party as well as themselves.
2017 GE Corybn 40 %
2019 GE Corbyn 32%
Clearly the Labour party was going backwards under Corbyn.
The 2019 result was due to the second referendum policy forced on Corbyn by rightwing liberals. All the seats Labour lost to the Tories in that election had voted to Leave the EU in 2016 When the rightwing liberals saw the upshot of their second referendum policy, they told Labour members that the best person to win those Leave seats back was the ultimate personification of the second referendum policy and of metropolitan liberal elitism, Sir Keir Starmer.
So are you saying Corbyn was not in charge of his Party.
Going back to the 2017 GE, even though T.May ran an awful campaign , remember dementia tax policy u turn , still got more votes than T.Blair in 1997.
Labour leaders are *never* in charge of their party. They don’t get to set the party’s policies; that’ll be the NEC. They don’t even get to choose their own deputy.
A socialist PM in Whitehall will have to wait until Labour gets around to fixing its constitution.
Not to mention the extraordinary personal attacks by the British establishment via a tame media on a principled individual accusing him of anti-semitism in line with Israel’s policy of discrediting those that support the Palestinians.
It is irrelevant.
As leader he should be able to deal and respond to any media attacks.
Any leader has to persuade the public to trust them.
I mentioned the British establishment were responsible – the media simply their delivery mechanism.
Corbyn was not in control of the party because many in it were working against him and because the rules of the party could be used to do this.
“As leader he should be able to deal and respond to any media attacks.
Any leader has to persuade the public to trust them.”
He will have responded to any media attacks but you won’t have heard about that it the media since they only wish to attack him.
40% of the electorate trusted him in 2017 and the ones who didn’t vote Labour in 2019 didn’t like the policies that he had foisted upon him.
Starmer made a coup against the party policy at the 2018 conference – which reversed the policy of the 2017 GE manifesto, which trapped the Leadership.
Yes they , Corbyn, Milne and co, made a major mistake – it was to let Starmer back into the front bench and give him the BrexShit Brief after his first chickencoup participation.
Corbyn’s mistake was to try and reason with people who had stabbed him in the back once already. The party could not be united because the backstabbers’ club were not interested in compromise.
Actually, I think it too simplistic to simply blame the leader, be it Corbyn or Brown. It is true, that policies do matter as much as leaders and while there has been a long-term decline of Labour I think there are specifics to each election that need taken on board (a sort of political Kondratieff-wave imposed on the short-run election cycle).
I have been following politics and been involved on and off since the early 1970s and I have never seen the vitriol that was dumped on Mr Corbyn. You cannot say, “all Labour leaders get the same treatment” because they simply have not and under Starmer, are not receiving anything anywhere near what JC received. I think in the run-up to 2017, the powers-that-be thought they had done more than enough to see off Corbyn. However, I think they were genuinely shocked, and went into overdrive for the run-up to the next election.
I think it also needs stated Theresa May ran a very bad election campaign in 2017; Johnson in 2019 simply didn’t run one: hiding in industrial freezers to avoid questions and avoiding Andrew Neil more effectively than a Covid virus. The latter, of avoiding detailed questioning, was seen by his strategists of being the more effective approach.
However, two other reasons caused Labour to lose in 2017 and subsequently in 2019, and for this I will make myself unpopular, perhaps. Labour under Mr Corbyn didn’t know how to engage with the media. Now one might think it was a waste of time given how hostile they were. But I lost count of the times I waited and waited for a Labour spokesperson to come on the TV or get a quote in the papers putting forward a socialist – even a social democratic – point of view and silence. Are we really saying that if the LOTO had turned up at the BBC asking to be interviewed, that they would have repeatedly refused him? For a man that I greatly admire, I am afraid I thought he was almost the invisible man at times.
The other huge mistake was not to come out fighting on the ant-Semitism allegations. If I heard the expression once, “One anti-Semite is one too may in the Labour Party”, I heard it a thousand times. It was the one thing they managed to get in the media. I think the advisers to Mr Corbyn and perhaps Mr Corbyn himself thought it would genuinely blow over with the odd enquiry here and there and a few expulsions (many of whom seem to have been thrown under the bus as sacrificial lambs to the accusers). It has been said elsewhere that Corbyn took the bold step in the 2017 election of openly stating that the terrorist atrocities at that time could not be separated from British foreign policy. Easy for me to say, I know, but a similar approach to the anti-Semitism allegations was needed, and it didn’t come. This left Labour always on the back-foot as if they had something to sort out.
I sometimes think that Mr Corbyn is just too ‘nice’. How long did it take Keir Starmer to move Jenny Formby to one side? And how long did it take Mr Corbyn to move Ian McNicol?
The key reaction to the 2017 shock was the one you choose to omit — the people’s vote / second referendum psyop. Worked like a charm in its iintended purpose, then all its erstwhile adherents vanish, reappearing as flag shagging, antiWoke props for Boris. Ever feel like you’ve been conned?
Peter it is simply about the OXYGEN of publicity. That was fully denied to the Corbynites. You seem to think whatever they said would have been reported and repeated. The Media is fully controlled mainstream and AltSM.
LBC in the run up to the 2019 election would allow callers on various phone in’s to rant for a few minutes about the ‘ anti-semite’ Corbyn. There was no right to reply or any evident balance. James O’Brien seemed to focus on Corbyn’s perceived incompetence. I think Chomsky’s comments to Marr about only having his high profile role because he was perceived as the right sort with the right values and attitudes, ( acceptable to the bosses ), equally applied to at least some LBC presenters.
I listened to TalkRadio through the years 2018&19 having given up the propaganda charge of the BBC and its news and ‘entertainment’ gaslighting. To keep track mainly if the BrexShitheads and very revelatory it was.
The use of Fartage at prime time evening slot having the ‘different’ metrosexual audience brought by Eddie Mair – who was transferred from PM to bring that BBC with him at great reward. As he then revealed his DS leanings in the previous years with being a mouth piece of the Syria Campaign PR group, the lies of Doctors in Aleppo. Which transmuted into the AS trope and calm support of the Tories – part of the Mission Impossible Team graduates out of the CIA owned BBC news presenters Kuensberg, Preston, Mair, the whole News Night team and News and light Entertainment ’News’ shows.
Insidious? Certainly is
Conspiracy? Ditto
Theory? If anyone does not want to see the proof in front of their own eyes – more fools them.
Or ask Nish Kumar about his slapping down… ‘be a good boy or he’ll never work on the MSM again’. That’s how they have always dealt with uppity slaves.
In the meantime the latest new-nuLibLabGreen concoction is being drawn up to change the future of politics – more sham creations to fool the new generations.
“Are we really saying that if the LOTO had turned up at the BBC asking to be interviewed, that they would have repeatedly refused him? “
I think that’s entirely plausible.
” I think the advisers to Mr Corbyn and perhaps Mr Corbyn himself thought it would genuinely blow over with the odd enquiry here and there and a few expulsions”
Again he was trying to reason with unreason. Appeasement didn’t work and was obvious it was never going to.
I think he kept trying to unite the party when that wasn’t going to happen. Perhaps he thought it was important to make the effort even if it was doomed.
Peter the vitriol dumped on the Liberal Democrats by the ‘Tory Press’ from 2010 – 2014 was absolutely up there with what they gave Corbyn. It was basically a bunch of bullying journalists with severe psychiatric problems and BTL moderation policies basically allowing X-rated comments through as long as they trashed the LibDems, but never if they trashed analagous Tories.
“while there has been a long-term decline of Labour “
Which Corbyn reversed while he was leader, suggesting that support for the extreme center is in long term decline.
The thing they really didn’t like about Corbyn was his support for the Palestinians.
Labour 2015 30.4%
Labour 2019 32%
Labour leader 2015-2019, Jeremy Corbyn
Clearly the Labour party was going forwards under Corbyn.
Gordon Brown – like Blair and Campbell – makes my skin crawl.
Why they still get any media exposure at all in the UK simply reinforces the absolute disconnect between the MSM and the UK general public, in my humble opinion. 🙁
I hope it goes well for you, Craig, on both the medical and legal fronts next week. Whatever happens in the High Court, I will continue to spotlight your case.
Re. Labour, yes it’s really depressing how the one time People’s Party has been de-radicalised again. It would be marvellous to think Scotland might be closer to escaping from the Anglo-American empire, to which Keir Starmer is clearly sworn his unquestioning fealty, but I believe the SNP-Green co-operation agreement in the making is simply Sturgeon’s survival plan for when the inevitable defections to Alba occur. Something I address in my latest post:
https://jaggy.blog/2021/05/27/sturgeons-gonna-eat-her-greens/
We are living in a coup state.
Just because tanks and soldiers didn’t storm Downing Street and Parliament with a Corbyn led Government as promised by the Spy Master Dearlove – doesn’t mean there was no coup.
This is a sophisticated machine that has been fixing elections and arranging coups when they can’t fix elections across the world.
The proto Regional Assembly postal vote fixing trials in the North East operated by the evil genius ‘Dr Strangelove’ Cummings. That was successfully deployed first in Indy Ref to clear the path to delivering the 17 to 16 majority in the middle of the night in 2016 for the BREXSHIT the populace are not allowed to feel the full effects of yet – yup the Evil Genius loved Covid – there was the complete memory holing of their fixation which stopped EU corporation that has given us 2&half times the dead of Germany!
The coup fixes happened- look at the areas and look at the turnouts,
It took at least 4 attempts to oust Corbyn and to stop Labour winning by having an unprecedented prexmas winter election that would keep many at home – making it easier for the PV votes to make the difference. There are no statistics yet a whole 18 months later!
Be thing is certain if IDS,the gremlin of Chingford, hadn’t been found an extra 1200 postal voters papers after the polls closed – he and other marginals would have been toast.
Only the CIS trained journo Kuennsberg and her mob of Mossiob Impposaible scammers and soft porn soft focus promotion of Bozo allowed the public to believe that he ‘won’.
We live in a coup state. The only reason for the Freeport’s is to keep the City free from regulation by the CJEU and allow the global robber barons to continue their centuries of enslavement, conquest and exploitation. When that is a reality the rump U.K. sans the new City state we will be allowed to rejoin what it can’t physically leave – Europe !
Meanwhile the war to stop a united EU with a level playing field goes on – with the Hungarian and Swiss puppets agitation.
Gordon Brown IS NuLabInc as much as Blair, Mandy and Campbell.
Grandmama, Charlie & Wills had to banish the future kings brother Harry, as he was more popular than baldy. (Ahem as am I almost).
Did the Scottish church that Wonky Willy is head of and the bruiser Brown worships even consider the recent elections; its failure of fair publicity for Alba; and most importantly the illegal cases and imprisonment of journalists in Scotland?
We live in a coup state and Imperial blood suckers are feasting on the land with their hired mercenaries and collectors – the petty patels – ironically invented by another mercenary Scotsmen 300 years ago. Browns not the first or last.
The world will never be free of these ghouls if we keep celebrating and not atoning for OUR crimes. As Germany has done over Namibia today.
Coup states can be overthrown by the citizens as Bolivia has shown. Because we are the many and they are the few.
Corbyn is the legitimate PM of the U.K. denied by the most sophisticated coup at the heart of Empire.
Lyin’ Mike Pompeo said Corbyn wasn’t allowed to be our PM and he was right.
Yes, Groanin, we are living in a coup state. A universal ‘perpetual’ coup state. And no one, but no one, who supports the Palestinians will ever be allowed to hold office, anywhere.
In 2010, Brown refused to compromise in post-election negotiations on forming a so-called ‘traffic light coalition’ (red, yellow, and green). Admittedly, the numbers would have been tight (as they were for May with the DUP in 2017), and Labour would have had to give the Lib Dems most of their manifesto policy platform (which was good anyway) plus senior LDs key positions. David Cameron has since made clear he would have resigned, and given the Tories’ propensity for picking dud leaders: Major, Hague; IDS, Howard and May in recent times. There’s a fair bet they would have picked another dud.
With a popular coalition implementing popular policies, the Tories may by now have not seen power since 1997. There’d have been no Brexit and Labour could still be in power today had Brown swallowed his pride back in 2010. Gordon doesn’t like the UK political topography in 2021? Well, Gordon Brown needs to as questions of himself as to how we got here. As do all the Labour MPs who dismissed the idea of forming a coalition.
In addition to the Lib Dems & Greens, Brown would have needed either the SNP or the SDLP & Alliance plus Plaid on board as well, Goose.
That probably explains it then. He put his own high-minded ‘no dealing with nats’ unionism before what should have been the priority of keeping the Tories out.
He wasn’t the only one, many Labour MPs thought it would be a short period in opposition, but FPTP has other ideas.
The SNP only had 6 seats back then, the SDLP 3. Opposing independence has been disastrous for Labour.
Thanks for your reply Goose. I agree with you, our generous host & Clarkson that Brown was/is an idiot.
I would imagine that Eck’s price for supporting Brown would have been an Indy Ref – which, of course, happened in that parliament anyway. However, with a Labour-led coalition in Westmonster, rather than a Tory one, I doubt whether Yes would have got more than 40% of the vote, and maybe considerably less – perhaps putting the issue to bed for a generation.
The Lib Dems price might just have been Cabinet positions for Clegg, Vince & David Laws-Breaker (soon to be replaced by Beaker) – who could all be safely ignored by Labour, just as they were by the Tories – and a referendum on Alternative Vote, which, if it was anything like my pals, most of the electorate could barely understand, let alone bring themselves to vote for.
The SDLP, Alliance & maybe even the Independent Unionist Lady Sylvia Hermon could probably have been brought on board with plenty of pork-barrelling of their constituencies, just like Maggie May did with the DUP.
Even so, parliament would have been on a knife-edge meaning that by-elections would have been more interesting than usual.
The Lib Dems would’ve probably demanded AV+ and since that’s what the Jenkins Commission recommended – a report Labour themselves commissioned. I think Brown could’ve and should’ve supported that deal.
There’s little doubt, Brown had a chance to permanently shut the door on what is to this day, dominant Tory rule based on large seat majorities built on under 50% of the vote share,…and he didn’t take it.
Lapsed Agnostic (12.51): here are the 2010 figures: the Tories (306) plus DUP (8) plus Sylvia Hermon (1) had up to 315 seats, while if Labour (258) had not snubbed the LibDems (57) they would also have had 315. Labour would certainly have got additional support from Plaid (3), SDLP (3) and Green (1), probably also Alliance (1). Alex Salmond with his 6 brave Scot Nats might have struck a useful bargain, but Labour wouldn’t have needed him.
Thanks for your reply Coldish. I did say *either* SNP *or* SDLP, Alliance & Plaid. The 2010 Westmonster parliament would have required 323 seats for a majority, assuming the 5 Sinn Feinians still wouldn’t have taken their seats and speaker Bercow would have sided with the Tories. I realise now it would have had to have been SNP plus either SDLP, Alliance or Plaid. Plaid might have demanded their own Indy Ref as the price of co-operation.
A centrist Paradise Lost.
On the subject of Starmers support of Israel maybe its a good time to inquire if there is legal action being undertaken by Dr Ayman Abu al-Ouf’ family or collegues against Israel and the IDF.
He was crushed and buried alive along with others when his appartment building collapsed in Gaza when Israel fired missiles into the ground below it. How and in which court the legal action can take place will be interesting. Nothing less than US200M should be demanded.
BBC actually had a good piece. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-57148580
Pretty desperate stuff from Labour HQ bypassing the party’s rules to fast track Jo Cox’s sister and very recent Labour party joiner(weeks) Kim Leadbeater into Batley and Spen PPC contention. It isn’t clear who approached who, and normally to even put yourself forward for PPC selection, individuals have to be members of the party for at least a year(precisely to prevent ‘favoured candidates’, nepotism and other shenanigans). Trading on your sister’s name recognition and/or aiming for something akin to a sympathy vote is hardly admirable politics.
Jo Cox herself had only been an MP for just over a year and never held a shadow ministerial role. Jo Cox was among the first Labour MPs to call for Corbyn to resign and was seen as very much as being from the majority, anti-Corbyn centrist wing of the party.
Jo Cox was all for us going to war in Syria. Until there was a vote on it, when she abstained.
If she hadn’t been murdered by a nut case nobody much would have a kind word to say for her.
From her wiki entry :
Cox, a supporter of the Labour Friends of Palestine & the Middle East, called for the lifting of the blockade of the Gaza Strip. She opposed efforts by the government to curtail the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and said “I believe that this is a gross attack on democratic freedoms. Not only is it right to boycott unethical companies but it is our right to do so.”
—
Wonder if Kim hold the same views? If so Starmer, who declared himself a supporter of ‘Zionism without qualification” won’t be too happy. Zionism is widely viewed as a Jewish supremacist movement, how any leader or politician can say they support such extremism without qualification, is just bizarre.
Can only imagine the reaction if some MP said they support Wahhabism without qualification.
According to Wiki, Labour Friends of Palestine & the ME is chaired by Lisa Nandy, and boasts Sir Starmzy as a member. It’s a funny old world – although maybe not that funny.
It shows how the antisemitism smear was nowhere to be seen in early 2016.
That emerged after the EU referendum result, and then went into overdrive after the 2017 GE result, with Labour doing better than expected by getting 40%, PLP right-wingers changed tactics. The fact nobody was calling Corbyn and his supporters anti-Semitic in early 2016 or even in the 2017 GE campaign, just shows how synthetic and purely PLP + MSM generated the whole antisemitism nonsense was.
I’m no expert, but would ‘Labour Friends of Palestine and the ME’ be better named ‘Labour Friends of Middle East theocrats (apart from Iranian ones obvs.) and Palestinians – as long as they let whichever kleptocrats are in charge of Fatah these days, and not Hamas, run their local parish councils’?
Starmer’s membership may have been to curry favour with the left?
If Starmer is a plant the plan agreed with his handlers will have been to take over the Labour party – to wrest control from the left by any means necessary (10 ‘fake’ Pledges?). What came next was probably never discussed and hence Keith is having to improvise, which he’s atrocious at … Tho’ running the party into the ground is equally fine option with said handlers, who don’t care whether the UK even retains the semblance of being a democracy.
From what I remember, Cox was a great supporter of that western funded terrorist organisation the White Helmets.
Although, the MSM and Labour try to deify her, I personally didn’t morn her passing.
She was no friend of Corbyn or the left. From wiki Quote:
She was one of 36 Labour MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn as a candidate in the Labour leadership election of 2015, but said she had done so to get him on the list and encourage a broad debate. In the election she voted for Liz Kendall, and announced after the local elections on 6 May 2016 that she and fellow MP Neil Coyle regretted nominating Corbyn.
Her sister would never have been picked for B&S if Jo had been associated with the left.
Goose (12.31): Re Kim Leadbetter: I understand that Kim had been a party member before Jo Cox’s death. If she was also a Remainer she might justifiably have thought it prudent to get out of the line of fire. In her position I might have done the same. That doesn’t explain her reappearance tho’.
Might the recent bad business at Batley Grammar School become a factor in this by-election? It has certainly stirred the hornets.
Pleased to hear you are feeling better, Craig.
Do let us know your latest legal news when you can – I have donated to the pot, but happy to do so again if needs be.
Good to hear you’re back in the saddle and ready to rumble.
I see even less reason to vote for Starmer than I had for Brown, something I would never have believed possible. The polling trajectory suggests he’s going to limbo under that 29 pc bar nice and comfortable if he makes it to a general election.
Another test Craig – stay fit and cast forth the threat.
Congratulations on feeling better Craig.
– “Keir Starmer is trying very, very hard to do even worse than the idiot Brown”
Jonathan Cook on Starmer:
– Ignore Starmer’s moral posturing. He’s the one we should blame for stoking antisemitism
Clark – many thanks for this. One of the great things about Craig Murray’s blog is getting links like this.
Brown is a traitor to Scotland. The so-called royals are an irrelevance to Scotland. Disgusting people all. Just ridicule them; it’s all they deserve.
The essence of the Corbyn ‘project’ is to transfer the power of the ‘leader’ down to the membership of the party. It is very easy to tell people what to do and use the bureaucracy and the hierarchy – the whole panoply of clientage, patronage, etc. – to enforce the ‘leader’s wishes. But, of course, it is also self defeating because it deprives the Labour party of the power of democracy – the mobilisation of the many who work by hand and by brain, and the isolation of the few.
It was not Corbyn who failed – although of course he made mistakes as individuals and cliques always do and mass movements, by mobilising the abilities of the many, are much less apt to – but the membership and supporters of the party who failed to follow the first rule of a vessel sailing through sirens: to close their ears to the propaganda emanating from sources which were, and always have been, malicious and corrupted.
Corbyn ran into the power of the Establishment – which is never fair and whose only concern is the maintenance of the status quo and the unlimited prerogatives of wealth and power.
On the whole Corbyn did all that he could do. And what he did all who want freedom and democracy, will have to try again – learning from past mistakes but never succumbing to the nonsense that is involved in waiting for godot, for lefty or the perfect powerful leader who will never put a foot wrong and will crush all obstacles in the way to democracy.
As for Starmer and the NEC it looks as if those clever bastards – as Ian Drury would have called them – are hoist by their own petard in Batley as Skwawkbox suggests.
When the SNP made their breakthrough after the financial crisis they were praised for having compulsary reselection. Now their central offices seem to be imposing candidates. What happened?
Although Corbyn declared himself against compulsary reselection it was popular in the party but never made it through to the rule book. I wonder why and who supported whom on that occasion.
Glad to hear that you are feeling somewhat better Craig.
It’s good to see you back fighting fit, you must’ve been eating your porridge. Anyway Corbyn would’ve made an excellent PM his socialist tendencies couldn’t be allowed to be translated into policies he had to go. His replacement the Millionaire Knight of the Realm, could easily walk across the floor and fit in that says it all about Starmer.
Corbyn wouldn’t have lasted long as PM with a hostile PLP + official opposition + MSM.
The PLP recently held an NEC by-election in which Angela Eagle defeated Grahame Morris, the Labour MP for Easington who’s from the party’s left. Eagle received 150 votes compared to the 38 votes Morris secured.
Until Open selection is introduced to weed out the infiltrators, rightwingers & bad faith actors, who leads the party is irrelevant. Corbyn wouldn’t press for that one essential step that could have given him unity of purpose and a supportive PLP, he saw that as too confrontational. Without it, he wouldn’t have lasted long.
Goose.
I think Corbyn’s downfall apart from the corporate media lying their arses off to blacken his character, was his inability to come down off the fence on Brexit, I suspect that secretly he was a Brexiteer but didn’t want to alienate the remain camp. Pity, he would’ve made a far better PM than Johnson, whose staggered from one inept tragedy to the next, but for the life of me, I can’t understand why the lying, greedy, twisted trougher still remains popular in England.
“his inability to come down off the fence on Brexit”
He was a well-known critic of the EU, and had always opposed joining. His party opposed Brexit, so he had to keep quiet. No way was he going to back remain, so he kept his counsel.
My impression was that he was a poor figurehead. Whenever he was approached for a comment or quote, he’d turn on the reporter, and whinge about the meeja. He did himself no favours with the MSM. He was unquestionably media-unfriendly. It’s not surprising he got a bad press. But he certainly didn’t deserve the mauling he got, from a pro-Israel MSM and a pro-Israel PLP front-bench.
I don’t think he ever actually wanted to be PM. He threw his hat in the ring to prevent a coronation – he never thought he might win. If he had thought that, I doubt he would have stood.
Having said that, once confronted by a GE as leader, he sure made a decent effort to win. But with his “supporters” behind him, daggers drawn, he never had a chance.
[Replying to own post – sorry]
Also, he was indeed “too nice” (someone said that earlier). Any other leader of a divided opposition party would have moved immediately to remove prominent cabinet members that opposed him. Not Jeremy – I think he sort-of hoped they’d come around.
Obviously, I have no idea what advice he had; but nevertheless, I think he was badly-advised. If he was well-advised, and ignored the advice, then he was still ill-advised, because the advisor must have failed to convince him.
@Jimmeh
That’s correct. But don’t forget he didn’t seek the leadership, he put himself forward to trigger debate and “get the left’s voice heard”. The membership liked what they were hearing and carried him to his astounding, unexpected victory. The majority Blairite PLP never engaged with any of it; from day one they were out to remove him and his supporters, egged on by an equally unsympathetic rightwing press and wider media. He was left fighting too many battles.
Allies like Chris Williamson realised that the only way Corbyn was going to have PLP harmony was through the introduction of open selection (or mandatory reselection). What Corbyn couldn’t or wouldn’t do, the membership (then 580,000) would have done for him – if only he’d given them the democratic tools.
“Whenever he was approached for a comment or quote, he’d turn on the reporter, and whinge about the meeja.”
I don’t remember that and if he did there was plenty to ‘whinge’ about.
Corbyn was certainly lukewarm on the EU; I remember an channel 4 interview shortly before the referendum where he rated his support for it as “7/10”. But his stated position was remain and reform in the Varoufakis mould. During the campaign, he racked up vastly more miles travelled and speeches given on this platform than Theresa May, whose official position as a remainer would undergo such a dramatic changing of spots.
That this isn’t widely remembered is hardly surprising: the media, seeking to drive a wedge in to undermine his support the membership, had no interest in reporting on it (or ever giving his policies exposure generally, unless they could apply a negative slant).
Once the referendum was settled, he correctly recognised that it would be electoral suicide to run a policy seeking to overturn the result. And it was, as the ten points lost between 2017 and 2019 demonstrated.
I’m not sure Johnson is exactly popular; it’s just that there isn’t anyone who is more popular than he is.
I expect “None of the Above” would win the next election with a massive majority!
My neighbiur said he and other motorists on Portobello Road were aggressively motioned by a police cyclist to get to the side of the road, nobody has ever seen a cyclists do this before and took no notice at first (!) He was very irrate….then the reason became clear as cavalcade of motorcycles and blacked out cars came past presumably The Man Who Would Be King and Grate en route to Holyrood after a public worthy photo op at Cockenzie.
Normally a Royal Handshake visit is announced to the public.
But I said to my neighbour oh that’ll be operation save the union in motion again….
And someone has activated the deep freezer and dethawed Gordon Brown yet again.
Oh well, if William has to spend any time at all speaking to Gordon Brown as part of the price of saving the union, then he’ll soon become a fervent independence supporter …..
Is it verified a conversation took place? He may have just taken the gimp down to the cellar.
No – not confirmed, but why the hell do you think that William was chanking at warp speed down Portobello Road and that everybody had to get out of the way? A conversation with Gordon Brown does that to people.
Craig,
I wish you the best outcomes in your medical and legal challenges next week.
Courtenay
“I wish you the best outcomes in your medical and legal challenges next week.”
Me too.
My neighbour said he and other motorists on Portobello Road were aggressively motioned by a police cyclist to get to the side of the road, nobody has ever seen a cyclists do this before and took no notice at first (!) He was very irrate….then the reason became clear as cavalcade of motorcycles and blacked out cars came past presumably The Man Who Would Be King and Grate en route to Holyrood after a public worthy photo op at Cockenzie.
Normally a Royal Handshake visit is announced to the public.
But I said to my neighbour oh that’ll be operation save the union in motion again….
And someone has activated the deep freezer and dethawed Gordon Brown yet again.
Inspiration for Scotland’s independence lies in wait amidst the pages of British history…
Ireland was Britain’s oldest colony—and some of it still is.
Britain prevented the economic development of much of Ireland. The country’s wealth was sucked straight into Britain and run on the basis of divide and rule.From the 1870s onwards the Tories played on support for the union with Ireland, and for queen and empire, to build a popular base.Lord Randolph Churchill summed up the tactics with his call to “play the Orange card”. Protestant landowners had set up the Orange Order in 1795 to crush resistance. The Order described itself as “a barrier to revolution and an obstacle to compromise”.
https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/46687/Northern+Ireland+how+Britain+rules+a+last+outpost+of+empire
Apathy is like a sinking ship doomed to hidden decay – march for Scotland independence tout de suite or lose it.
Hope everything goes well for you Craig.
I’ve only spent 2 nights in prison, once in Oslo because I had nowhere else to stay and once because at university having got drunk at a party celebrating a dramatic performance in ancient Greek on some dodgy potion.
In daylight I have been in HMP Winson Green HMP Reading HMP Oxford. HMP Long Lartin and incarcerated at the Mental Health Unit in Hereford for 3 weeks. Thank God, I was never scared in any of those prisons because the staff were in those days professionals, not Group 4 stand-ins, and because I was just doing some teaching, or maybe learning…
One does one’s absolute best to avoid getting locked up, but in spite of that you cannot stop the nutters in power being mad , slipping their straightjackets, and concocting some bizarre accusation from the sulphur of legal brimstone. I know for certain that in these days of heady feminism like Lady Dorrian, and with a wife who failed to recognise the meaning of marriage, there but for fortune I would have spent my whole life in prison. first objecting to the antics of a non-Muslim wife and then objecting to the frantic gobbledygook of feminists like Sturgeon and Dorrian.
What I mean is that, just because they are locking you up, possibly, absolutely does not mean that they are right. It just means they are bonkers and they don’t like commonsense interfering with their jinns. Treat these nutters with respect and agree with them on everything, and they will stop feeling threatened by your deep commonsense, and let you out again.
giyane – are they going to let Julian Assange out again?
And an honoury mention to the Skripals – the disappeared of Salisbury.
… you’ll probably have to look under the floorboards …..
Jimmy Riddle
No, the US UK and Israeli administrations are insane. More insane than Nero or Claudius.Their only plan for gripping onto their crumbling empires is to torture their critics and fund their flatterers, threaten their enemies with war and terrorise their populations with incurable viruses.
Is it conceivable that they will reach an emprerors new clothes moment and realise that the entire world already knows exactly what their war crimes have been , their disgusting rendition torture, their excitement at droning their rivals’ generals, their nuclear bombing of hiroshima and their agent oranging of Vietnam? We all already know what they have done, these bastions of moral superiority.
I don’t know how to talk them off their window ledges. All I know for certain is that not one of their crimes against humanity is worse in the eyes of their Creator than their simple rejection of His authority over humanity. If they reject the Owner of the universe, how will they accept the voices of protestors like us? They seem intent on building their places in the fire of hell.
If you were an engineer and you designed products to last maybe one hour or one day after the customer had purchased them, how long would you stay in business? So how come the powerful have got away with designing a polity of mutual destruction? Do they really see themselves as being excempt from the effects of conventional or nuclear war? That they can keep the lid of what they did in Iraq and Syria and Libya by locking up their critics?
Here we are, enjoying the first warmth of summer, while the crazed madmen and women in power frenetically pull the levers of war in order to control the resources of the planet like chimpanzees on amphetamines. So no. There definitely is no cure for the madmen in power once they have discovered a way to subvert democracy and prevent us from allowing sane people like Corbyn to govern.
giyane – I have been hugely disillusioned. People *do* know *exactly* what sort of war crimes are going on, yet they are overwhelmingly able to turn a blind eye to the whole thing. About 20 years ago I did naively think that if the truth got out the whole thing would collapse like a pack of cards …….
Why do you need to go to prison if you have nowhere else to stay? I too spent a couple of days in Oslo but took the bus back to sleep in the airport (Gardermoen) and spent some of the time sleeping in the bus-station. When you have paid a couple of pence for a Ryanair (It was I think 70km from Torp airport to Oslo and the bus fare was something like €30 return, maybe more , but that’s Ryanair for you) flight you have no choice. I even ‘forgot’ to pay the bus fare to the airport once 😀
Fancy 🙂 I wonder what wee Patrick Harvie would think of that 🙂
Wings
Since you ask, I arrived on a roaming train ticket having set off from Sweden and crossed over to Trondheim. No plane ticket, no access to an airport. The same ticket took me by boat to Crete and then by plane ticket to Israel. The world was a safer place before the EU grabbed Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union. Safer from government and bureaucracy. Safer from being spied on by my bonkers Muslim neighbours. Safer from wonks like Nicola Sturgeon. All the girl in the train to scotland wanted was to drink her cans of beer. Now I cannot even sit in my own home without some crazy intelligence agency from 5000 miles away wanting to control my life for me. And hating me for being English.. That’s in my own house. What about on a train station in 2021 in Oslo? You would be scanned by Europol and arrested for not having a proper visa.
….. but you still haven’t explained how you managed to end up spending the night in a nice warm Norwegian prison cell. Did you go to the police station and ask a policeman nicely if he could nick you for something minor – such as parking on a double yellow line?
Oh yeah, and a young girl bought me some food and drink in the bus station – probably thought I was homeless 😀 And travelled to Gothenberg Sweden for a couple of pence too. And a host of other places. All good fun. Those were the days 😀
Sturgeon a feminist? Her principle raison d’être these days seems to be shepherding men into ladies’ toilets.
Ahem…..JC 2017 circa 12.5m votes and within 3k votes in marginals of holding power …..sigh.
Whether Corbyn would have been a good PM or not doesn’t really address the issue that power isn’t vested in Parliament, despite the portrayal that it does. Desperate being too weak as a personality, in that he allowed the Zionist lobby to piss him about and he was too quick to apologise for something that didn’t require an apology.
His policies, watered down social democracy that removes the excesses of capitalism but essentially retains it, would never have been put in place as was made clear by the security services and the army. The City of London would have called for an investment strike and his progressive policies would have been bogged down by legal challenges, heard by an unsympathetic judiciary.
So, whilst all the figures show that Corbyn’s policies were popular and that he too was much more popular as Labour leader amongst the general population than the turd now in office, had he been allowed to win, he wouldn’t have delivered anything really progressive simply because Parliament isn’t where real power resides.
“too quick to apologise for something that didn’t require an apology”
Quite so. By apologising, he implied that the accusation was true. He effectively affirmed that a person that supports Palestinian rights is antisemitic, thus betraying many of his supporters. I wish he had come out fighting when the first accusations emerged. I formed the impression that he was scared shitless.
Ingwe
Weakness gets you selected. It got James Wolffe selected and BoJo. Weakness by definition means they can kick you about once they have given you power.
I pray you outlive all your enemies.
He will. Tough as old boots.
I have a bad feeling that Sturgeon is about to further sell Scots out, as she, Gordon Brown, Alistair Carmichael (a proven liar) and Willie and Kate held secret meetings.
It goes something like this I think, Brown and Carmichael to barter the deal with Sturgeon, and Kate and Willie to give royal consent via Queen Lizzie.
It would be unwise of Sturgeon to go so far. Better to wait for developments in London, if she doesn’t want to declare UDI, which would be a reasonable act.
Did you mean reasonable or treasonable?
Oh I have a feeling that Starmer can get way below that. Its a shame that our wonderful ‘democracy’ only allows 2 votes per decade because it most certainly means that the torys will be in power until 2028? Its pretty clear that Starmer needs to go and the weakling ToryLite right wingers should form their own party, leaving labour to be a real left wing (or at least left of center) party. How many more years do we have to waste getting rid of the blairite neoliberal disaster capitalists?
Yes, Gerald, you’re right, Starmer should go. Starmer, you’ve never been any use, clear the stage for a proper socialist leader, like Labour and the country have always needed.
Most of the PLP owe their seat to Corbyn in as much as without Corbyn supporting voters at the last election they would have lost. The problem for the Labour Right is to con enough leftwing voters to make up the balance that will get them elected. It doesn’t look like business as usual is going to return post Corbyn.
The PLP will find this out when a large part of the left votes green at the next major election. The left are not stupid, they know they are hated by the right of the party, and the right have now demonstrated that they will throw the party under the bus with the most outrageous accusations and disloyalty rather than allow a left leader to become PM, so why stay? The PLP will never allow a left programme to be enacted apart from a token or two.
Loyalty eventually dies if its abused long enough as the death of the red wall has demonstrated. When the working class walks away from a party you know its no longer a party for or of the working class. The PLP is a metropolitan liberal graduate professional and managerial class party. It has zero emotional connection with classes out side itself or outside London. The Welsh labour party is still managing to remain connected, but how long before it is destroyed by the metropolitan PMC?
We face an interregnum of many years of Tory rule while the rump of the Parliamentary Labour party acts a dog in a manger against change, but maybe that’s its purpose now (apart from providing sinecure’s for the select). But it will eventually die as the membership and activists walk, leaving a top heavy ghost of a party. It will be fun watching the twisting of the MSM bigging up the PLP for fear of worse while also supporting the Tory’s.
The electoral problem for the PLP is that their brand of Neoliberalism only looks attractive if the Tory’s go far to the right, but the Tory’s have in recent years been good at picking leaders from the socially Liberal wing of the party who are also media savvy (Cameron and Johnson). They created a broad enough coalition to achieve power under FPTP. The PLP needs the PMC, working class and the left to achieve power, but are unwilling to give anything to either of the non PMC factions for fear of losing the PMC class, but in doing so they have alienated the left and a lot of the working class. Those votes will go else where, in Scotland they went to the Nationalists, in England they will go to the Greens and the Tories (closest England has to a nationalist party). When the Tory’s go far right we could end up with Tory supra majorities on a 30+% rump vote, a rump PLP in its metropolitan strong holds, and a scattering of others parties. Not good for democracy and the non rich!
Long term I see the Greens replacing the PLP, as the Greens are replacing the SDP in Germany. They have become better at building social, class and ideological coalitions. Expect a lot of Hatred to be directed at the Greens by the PLP and their MSM handlers. The PLP seems much to like making enemies more than allies these days, how to make friends and influence people, NOT!
Germany’s Greens are Neoliberals with Bicycles
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/greens-germany-federal-elections-pro-business-climate-action
(Huge NeoCons too).
The British Greens are preferable to the Mandleson gang, a low bar, but still very much a liberal remainer PMC outfit with no interest in the working class struggle.. Caroline Lucas’s attitude to Corbyn said everything. A convenient repository for left protest votes right now but hopefully something better will emerge in time.
You lad!