Mailwatch(ed) Forum

I lost patience with the boy Jones some time ago - I think it was during the Batley & Spen by-election when he decided to big up that nasty racist, anti-Labour bastard George Galloway by giving him an interview. Jones subsequently failed to disguise his disappointment when Labour held the seat at the by-election.

It's the sheer brazen hypocrisy of the man that really gets my goat . The whole "Don't blame me, guv - I'm just an ordinary, honest jobbing journalist doing my job" crap. He isn't. He is a fully paid-up, disruptive, card-carrying Trot. His open hostility to the current Labour leadership is now well beyond a joke. Hardly a day goes by without him having a pop at Keir Starmer for whatever reason he can find. His latest, thoroughly disingenuous piece excoriates Starmer for not having an instant, detailed, costed, "oven-ready" (he didn't actually use the Boris-ism but he may as well have done) alternative three years away from the election is a case in point. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... mer-tories

It's only recently that I discovered that his parents got together when they were both members of Militant tendency back in the 1980s (and presumably expelled from the Labour Party under Kinnock's initiative). It may explain a lot about young Squealer's thinking. He'll never be happy with Starmer, because he isn't Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell (Squealer used to work for McDonnell and has an abiding affection for him. He is at least correct in his assessment that McDonnell is several country miles more capable and intelligent than the eejit Corbyn).

Jones is - let's just say it bluntly - an enemy of the Labour Party. At the moment, he is helping the Tories, not Labour, as all Trots tend to do.

Where's the clear plan says bloke who doesn't have a plan beyond "somebody said you could raise x from capital gains tax". That doesn't even tell me if he thinks there should be a cap or a floor.

As the early votes rolled in for Trump he was pushing his guardian comment piece on how the centralists had failed again picking Biden.

It didn’t age that well from an electoral standpoint at least.

Useless Joe Biden here, outperforming his party.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2 ... joe-biden/

I've generally been quite fond of Owen over the years, but I will admit some of his more recent pronouncements have been rather clumsy and over the top. In fact, just this past week he posted a video on YouTube decrying Labour's imaginary "War On LGBTQ and Young People", which seems to be a reference to the fact that the party is (finally) taking disciplinary action against Jess Barnard.

I understand the points he is making, but why the need to frame it as some sort of ongoing conflict being waged by the current leadership?

Think disciplinary action v Barnard has been dropped. Young Labour are going to be an embarrassment, but better to ignore them.

Starmer can channel Biden. "Me radical leftist? Really?"

Arrowhead wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 2:41 pm [...] which seems to be a reference to the fact that the party is (finally) taking disciplinary action against Jess Barnard.

O rly?

https://labourlist.org/2021/09/young-la ... ia-tweets/

Update, 8pm: A Labour spokesperson said: “We apologise unreservedly to Jess for the hurt and upset this has caused.” LabourList understands that Jess Barnard is not under investigation, the notice of investigation was issued in error and has been rescinded, and Labour has apologised to her. The notice was apparently sent outside of the usual processes and the party is looking into how the ‘error’ happened.

Squealer has become quite melodramatically hysterical. This can only be a good sign for Labour.

The Labour leadership is reintroducing the electoral college to elect the next leader, meaning MPs' votes will be worth hundreds of times more than Labour members.

Here's what it means.

It means - conclusively - that Keir Starmer and his team lied their way to the Labour leadership, when they promised party unity, not to "trash" the 4 years preceding his victory, and to end internal navel gazing.

They wouldn't have won if they'd be honest about their intentions.

It means many will ask that if the Labour leadership are willing to lie their way into power in the party, they will do so again and again.

British democracy has been corrupted by liars and charlatans like Boris Johnson. How is the Labour leadership able to argue it is different?

It means that the Labour leadership have only a strategy to crush the left: they have, as they have shown, no strategy to defeat the Tories.

But millions of voters under the age of 40 are attracted to ideas of the left. Labour is now telling them to go and take a jump.

It means Keir Starmer's leadership is dead.

You'd only rig the leadership rules in a hurry if you were scared a leadership election soon would allow a candidate you don't like to win.

The Labour right privately say Starmer is a loser and will now feel safe in replacing him.

The Tories have presided over tens of thousands of needless deaths, multiple scandals and a war against working class people, e.g. by cutting Universal Credit.

Labour let them get away with it all, and are only interested in waging war on their own party.

Here's what the Labour leadership are achieving: simultaneously completely failing to win over older Tory-leaning voters while repelling younger voters.

They may win this particular battle.

But Keir Starmer is set to be king of the ashes, and nothing more.

Time for Jonesy to fuck off.

Does Squealer not realise that the electoral college was the idea of that well known Labour right-winger Tony Benn?

>"The Labour leadership is reintroducing the electoral college to elect the next leader, meaning MPs' votes will be worth hundreds of times more than Labour members."

Good, given what we've seen can happen

>"It means - conclusively - that Keir Starmer and his team lied their way to the Labour leadership, when they promised party unity, not to "trash" the 4 years preceding his victory, and to end internal navel gazing."

Did they say specifically they wouldn't change anything at all? If not - bollocks

>"They wouldn't have won if they'd be honest about their intentions."

They won under a system that massively favoured wing-nut candidates and everyone was so sick and uninspired by them they lost anyway. So, no.

>"It means many will ask that if the Labour leadership are willing to lie their way into power in the party, they will do so again and again."

Is this the sort of "lie" that means they're not keeping something they never said they would but you assumed they would, or the sort of lie where someone says they're a lifelong campaigner against bigotry but doesn't give a shit if it suits him?

>"British democracy has been corrupted by liars and charlatans like Boris Johnson. How is the Labour leadership able to argue it is different?"

Changing an internal process = widespread, open corruption. Got it.

>"It means that the Labour leadership have only a strategy to crush the left: they have, as they have shown, no strategy to defeat the Tories."

Apart from anything else, this is LITERALLY all Corbyn's lot did when in power to anyone who wasn't in their gang, up to and including effectively throwing some seats in order to exact revenge on people seen as disloyal

>"But millions of voters under the age of 40 are attracted to ideas of the left. Labour is now telling them to go and take a jump."

Ideas of the left, which are still in place. Not a system that sees hard left wingers boosted into roles they are incapable of performing at the whim of a bunch of randoms who were probably out selling Socialist Worker at the weekend.

>"It means Keir Starmer's leadership is dead."

Based on...?

>"You'd only rig the leadership rules in a hurry if you were scared a leadership election soon would allow a candidate you don't like to win."

Or you'd do it now while you can so that a useless old git doesn't get in again in the future, and to help dissuade any utterly clueless blunderers from interrupting a poll climb with a pointless distraction (*cough* Burgon *cough*)

>"The Labour right privately say Starmer is a loser and will now feel safe in replacing him."

Do they now? Bit convenient, you having this "Labour right" source with a soundbite that fits your narrative and yet would be something that someone on the left would say to try and dissuade people from doing what would make life worse for them.

>"The Tories have presided over tens of thousands of needless deaths, multiple scandals and a war against working class people, e.g. by cutting Universal Credit.

Labour let them get away with it all, and are only interested in waging war on their own party."

Labour can't do anything, what with not being in power and being a much reduced minority thanks to one J. Corbyn. Putting things in place to make it clear people like him won't be able to jump in in some sort of coup if Labour are re-elected will help bring voters back in.

>"Here's what the Labour leadership are achieving: simultaneously completely failing to win over older Tory-leaning voters while repelling younger voters."

Yes, that would be exactly why the poll direction is upwards.

>"They may win this particular battle."

Ah, the "I'm actually conceding defeat, but only at the end after a long list of made-up complaints" bit

>"But Keir Starmer is set to be king of the ashes, and nothing more."

Keir Starmer? The man with the dead leadership who's about to be ousted? He'll be king, will he? Make your mind up. And who exactly started the house fire he's been trying to put out for the last couple of years?

Of course, it's all strategy. For a while I've been talking about Starmer needing to have his "Blair moment", just as Blair in turn engineered his own "Kinnock moment" - in essence, it's the leader picking a fight with his/her own party in order both to demonstrate to the electorate the virility of his/her leadership qualities and control over his/her party, and to convince the electorate that Labour has indeed changed for the better and can again be trusted to govern as a real alternative to the incumbents.

In Kinnock's case it was a genuine and essential need publicly to kick Hatton, Heffer, and the rest of Militant Tendency out of the party. In Blair's case it was the slightly less essential and more confected need to re-word clause IV of the party's constitution (I can remember being skeptical about it at the time - and I still don't see that the re-write of clause IV was even necessary - but looking back I can clearly see the benefits that accrued to the party because of it).

Starmer's "Blair moment" then, seems to be to get rid of the OMOV system that delivered the Corbyn leadership debacle and revert to the electoral college.

From the reaction to the proposal from the left faction (see J. McDonnell), it would appear to serve the purpose of picking a fight with his own party very well, though it is a highly sensible reform in its own right.

Should Starmer succeed in getting this change through, this can (and will) be presented as a victory over Labour's diminished and weakening crank left faction, a demonstration of Starmer's strong leadership qualities, and a very public and symbolic (and essential) indication that Labour has changed in the wake of the Corbyn disaster and can be trusted to govern again.

In that respect, there is more to this proposal than meets the eye. In fact, there is a great deal riding on it.

Squealer seems to detect in it the end of the line for his fellow cranks in Labour's residual Corbynista faction. I sincerely hope that for once, he is right.

Abernathy wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 3:26 pm Squealer seems to detect in it the end of the line for his fellow cranks in Labour's residual Corbynista faction. I sincerely hope that for once, he is right.

If it works, and I sincerely hope it does, expect a considerable amount of retconning on his part to show he was "concerned" about it but not wholly against it in principle, then "broadly supportive, though cautious about its implementation" and finally arriving at never having been against it in the first place. He undeniably knows when to bail on a project and throw in his lot with the winning side. Unfortunately, these days it's all too easy to find the evidence online of his previous positions.

I mean has Owen forgotten what happened in 2017?

The attacks on Starmer’s reform become even stranger.

I'd accept that.

Squealer is really having a full-scale meltdown on this. Starmer really must have got it right.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... SApp_Other

He’s disingenuously wrong, of course, in trying to paint this conference as a spurned opportunity properly to attack the Tories and present lovely shiny new lefty policies, instead bashing “the left” and indulging in gratuitous factionalism by putting forward “undemocratic” reforms. It is nothing of the kind. The purpose of the conference is at least twofold : to demonstrate to the wider voting electorate that Labour has changed, has left the Corbyn debacle behind, and has a strong leader in Starmer who is the alternative Prime Minister in waiting, and to highlight Labour’s plans to re-build the country following the coronavirus pandemic and the calamities of Brexit. The two purposes are not, Squealer, mutually exclusive.

Squealer either does not understand this or (more likely) chooses deliberately not to understand it.

He is, to put it bluntly, a shit-stirring, dishonest, and disruptive little Trot who has zero interest in Labour returning to government.

Looking back at Jones' tweet about the voting reforms. The party conference wasn't "blown up", was it?

The blower uppers had to pull the £15 an hour minimum wage out of their arse and attack their own policy at very short notice to do that. Funny how the "while the Tories are cutting universal credit" lark didn't apply to that one.

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Sun Oct 31, 2021 5:42 pm Looking back at Jones' tweet about the voting reforms. The party conference wasn't "blown up", was it?

The blower uppers had to pull the £15 an hour minimum wage out of their arse and attack their own policy at very short notice to do that. Funny how the "while the Tories are cutting universal credit" lark didn't apply to that one.

This isn't the first time he's got it wrong.