That Starmer fella...

I wonder which perceptive MP really believes that Starmer's team 'have spent too much time over the last year trying to appease the hard left'

(7th paragraph in the article)

That article made me feel queasy.

The emergence of wider unease follows Peter Mandelson

Truth

too much time over the last year trying to appease the hard left

The Labour right are pissed that they got whipped to vote against the police, crime and sentencing bill. They really liked that bill.

Showing that we are not ashamed of the flag which represents that country is a good way NOT to exclude those people.

Does this mean I'm allowed to start listening to Morrissey again?

You're always allowed to listen to Morrissey.

No. Morrissey was 3 years early with all the flag nonsense. Unforgivable.

Is there actually any basis for saying this?

It was a joke.

But the joke is based in the fact that I cannot thing of a single other instance where anyone might think that Starmer has “appeased the hard left” in the last year.

I would like to point out that senior figures in the Thatcher government had VERY QUIET meetings with senior IRA representatives. The point is that it is necessary to speak to people with views you loathe, it is politically illiterate to do so openly.

With respect, I knew someone would make this point, which is why I covered it in my original response:

Again and again, Corbyn's 'peace making' only ever involved meeting the anti-west side of things. He's met with every dodgy terrorist group going in Palestine - don't recall him ever sitting down with the Israeli contingent, do you? He met up with the IRA guys an awful lot - don't remember seeing him brokering any meetings with any loyalists, though, do you? His meeting with bad people only ever extends to one side of the debate, and it's always the side which fights against our interests.

and it's always the side which fights against our interests

TBF most of the time "our interests" are pretty shitty as a country, you could say he's tried to broker peace from the position of our interests, as a man who actually worked for the government, with those who the said interests tend to harm. Sitting down with the loyalists wouldn't really have been necessary if they're already on side with the UK government.

Don't forget, Corbyn was arrested for protesting for the RELEASE of dangerous South African terrorists while Thatcher was thankfully working hard to protect our national interests by opposing economic sanctions on their government.

Need to have a Corbyn specific swing-o-meter. I guess we're all looking favourable on him at the moment. It was down after the defeat of the last election, and also down prior to the 2017 election when half the people on here went off to vote for the Lib Dems.

.

One thing the Conservative Party is good at is replacing leaders, resetting and moving on seemingly seamlessly. Not edifying but it is effective.

Contrast to Labour - a defeat at last election of such magnitude that may not be overturned until the next GE but one. But still reference to the last leader despite having a continuity leader would have been such a delicious political gift readily accepted (“we smashed you last time and you want more? Ok, if you insist”). And that’s before looking at the performance of the previous leader since defeat, whether it’s the “we won the argument” or the response to the anti semitism report - it doesn’t matter if he feels he’s right on either, it’s politically boneheaded.

Starter good, Starmer bad - returning to Corbyn’s approach isn’t an option anytime soon unless we want to give these current shower in government even further scope to do what they do

(PS Should have added that I don’t believe he was right on “we won the argument” nor the anti semitism report)

My apologies, I didn't read with enough care, which was lax of me. However, if Corbyn did not have meetings with those he loathed (I rather doubt he did) that tends to reinforce the point I was making.

He's met with every dodgy terrorist group going in Palestine - don't recall him ever sitting down with the Israeli contingent, do you? He met up with the IRA guys an awful lot - don't remember seeing him brokering any meetings with any loyalists, though, do you?

Who has met with both sides equally?

Starter good, Starmer bad - returning to Corbyn’s approach isn’t an option anytime soon unless we want to give these current shower in government even further scope to do what they do

This is also my view. I'm not even a huge Starmer fan, I just recognise that after our worst result in a hundred years we need to try to do something different. And I've felt like anyone trying to do something else deserves at least as fair a crack of the whip as I gave Corbyn (three or four years in my case, and my vote in two General Elections). And I think I've felt that Labour supporters should get behind the leader, and one side of the membership is not holding up its end of the bargain.

However I've had a bit of a change of heart on this. I've realised that - especially on Twitter - this often isn't a conversation between two Labour tribes. It's a conversation between people who are Labour supporters, and those who are Corbyn supporters - and there's a difference between the two. Whenever you see someone chortling about '20 points ahead' and 'Kieth', those are the people I'm talking about. And so many of the people I find myself getting miffed with were not Labour supporters before Corbyn, and now he's gone, are no longer Labour supporters. They joined the Jeremy Corbyn Party, and have no loyalty to Labour beyond Corbyn.

And the realisation I've had is, that's fine. Yhey're perfectly entitled to make criticism on that basis. No-one owes Labour any support and no-one needs to justify their withdrawal of support. But what I need to remember is that criticism from these people should be seen as being about as weighty as criticism from the Tories or from the Greens or the SNP - it's criticism coming from the outside, not the inside. That's a realisation that's helped me quite a bit.

I haven't met any Corbyn-only supporters, but I do know some people who became much more politically involved when Corbyn started to do more to return Labour to pre-Blairite ideas of supporting public services and opposing expensive defence spending and foreign wars.

I'm definitely part of the camp that would see Blair as the lesser of two evils, and Corbyn as a stubborn and limited leader who was out of his depth.

I struggle with that definition of the Blair era.

Less support for public services? Funding and quality increased throughout that government. Seems weird to me to describe it as if it was austerity.

Bit gatekeepery there. I've always been a bit of a grubby lefty, and since being able to vote have done so against the Tories, for labour or green apart from that one time I voted lib dem based solely on uni fees, which went well. Where I live has always been very safe labour so I've mostly voted green, in the vague hope it'll show support for their more environmental and lefty policies, if I'd stayed down in Reading when of a voting age I'd have 100% voted labour. Whilst I was already for labour in general, Corbyn as leader got me genuinely excited about a labour that might be a bit more left leaning and principled not just pandering to big business and the press, I get the feeling that a lot of other people felt the same way at the time, however that has gone now, whether they are Corbyn supporters rather than labour I don't know, I'd say they're more potential labour supporters that found an in with a left leaning leader and are now dealing with someone different. I've gone back to bring pro labour as far as they're the most likely not Tories, I'm not excited by the prospect of Starmer but would vote for him if it mattered and green if it won't.

More support for the marketisation and competition, and a decreasing role of the state in the public sector, then, which I would describe as less support, and others* may describe as moving "beyond left and right" to a position in the "radical centre" where capitalism is viewed much less critically.

Ok. Maybe this is what particularly distinguishes me from many on this thread, in that I genuinely don't care who provides services if they are provided for a good price, and publicly funded.

I don't really see why that is 'radical', or even actually particularly centrist, if it's a means to increasing the provision of state funded services to people overall.

It feels needless to me to criticise more the means of provision of the service than the level. (And the right are equally guilty when they argue that the state shouldn't own anything so things being privatised is inherently good).

I do completely agree that a lot of the time, a market solution doesn't work for things we typically want to be provided. But that's a different argument to the one you seem to be making.

It feels needless to me to criticise more the means of provision of the service than the level.

This is the difference between pragmatism and ideology / idealism imo. I'm with you - I can see the value in public ownership, private enterprise, and public private partnership, they're just different tools which should be used in different situations. But I think many people make a fetish of public services in the same way the tories do for private enterprise, when the reality is that each has its own strengths. Anyone who's worked for the NHS knows that it's an incredibly wasteful organisation. Anyone who's worked in private enterprise knows that the efficiencies often come at the expense of the workforce. Done right, public-private partnerships might be the best of both worlds; done badly it can be the worst of both.