That Starmer fella...

I'm also not sure Chris Williamson and Lowkey are representative of the 'labour left'

Yes, I think this is important. You also can't attribute the same level of influence and accountability to so-called left 'outriders' as you can to members of the PLP, who were as recently as yesterday briefing to the press about how they were planning to permanently exclude Corbyn from the party. They really look like they've got their sights set on the broader picture!

Lol this is so weak.

Criticising Starmer for trying to out-authoritarian the Tories isn’t “factional nonsense”. I want Labour to be providing opposition on this, not nodding along and saying “yes, but can we made it more crackdown-y?”. It says bad things about what Starmer’s tendencies would be should he get into power.

Conversely, yes, the PLP moving to permanently exclude Corbyn is factional nonsense. That was kind of my point: it’s the PLP engaging in factional nonsense at a time when you think they would have better things to do, like provide some opposition to this government and their shocking handling of just about everything.

I don’t even know who or what Lowkey is, and I’ve never read the canary so idgaf about those people. Last time I checked they didn’t have control of the party, and as far as I’m concerned they are irrelevant.

they didn’t have control of the party, and as far as I’m concerned they are irrelevant.

Doesn’t this line of logic just allow you to always ignore anything anyone but Starmer does, though?

Which TBF is consistent with your posts on this topic

I don’t even know who or what Lowkey is

Well named, clearly, as I also have no idea who this is

The level of support for the Canary is very minimal and consequently it's not right to argue that they hold significant influence over anything the party does, nor to take them as representative of the left more widely.

If it was Momentum coming out in support of Chris Williamson then fair enough, but I think @ReekBlefs needs to get over their obsession with these marginal outfits. Go to your local CLP and i can guarantee members who define themselves as being on the left will be (albeit potentially reluctantly) putting in groundwork 'to get Labour elected'

Lowkey is an amazing name but I had to read this;

9/11 Truther Lowkey sings them out in unintended Ricky Gervais homage

About 8 times before I realised it was a name at all with the capitalisation and it wasn't someone called "Truther" lowkey singing last month.

Fairly obviously not, no. There are various areas of power within the party: whether the shadow cabinet; the PLP; the NEC; so on and so forth. The leader is not a dictator.

Do the canary control any of these various areas of power? Again, fairly obviously not.

Apologies for posting about Starmer in the…[checks topic]…Starmer thread.

Fair points, i guess it just seems to lead to a position where poor behaviour by someone who no longer is in a position of power is (by that rationale) not open to criticism - which i don’t really agree with.

Obviously you’ll comment on Starmer in this thread, it’s just a bit tiring that this seems to be solely used as a place to slag him off, with pretty minimal balance or credit for anything good.

Obviously you’ll comment on Starmer in this thread, it’s just a bit tiring that this seems to be solely used as a place to slag him off, with pretty minimal balance or credit for anything good.

Would that not be indicative of the opinions around Starmer (or any leader with a topic) though? If he was doing fantastically well, it'd be reflected in what people are saying. If he's doing a bit shit, then the return opinions are showing that.

Fair enough (TBH i have no idea how popular the canary is). Is anyone saying it is representative of the whole of the left though, or that it has significant influence - the original post just seemed to be saying it was continuing with factional fighting, and that was unhelpful. Is that not true?

Yeah maybe, but the views on him I encounter elsewhere tend to be more mixed / nuanced than what i see on this board - where it feels like people would prefer to jump on anything bad than say anything good (w. exception of ReekBlefs). The feeling I get from this thread (rightly or wrongly) is that people want him to do badly.

Yeah maybe, but the views on him I encounter elsewhere tend to be more mixed / nuanced than what i see on this board

I think that, unlike some here, the general public doesn’t care that he was elected from the membership based on a left leaning policy platform that he’s abandoning at will, whilst also trying to consolidate power of the right of the party.

The electorate had an incredibly polarised view of Corbyn (and we can debate ad infinium why that was), but Starmer can’t seem to provoke much emotion from anyone outside of the labour membership. IMO that makes him more ‘unelectable’ than Corbyn, and he’s not even pushing a policy platform that excites me.

I think this exactly mirrors the comments about Corbyn when he was leader, and there is a lot of those (including me at times) on the left that are very quick to level the same criticisms at Starmer to try and evidence the rough ride Corbyn got from the labour party too, and their part in his downfall.
For myself - I do like winding up Starmer fanatics but in the end its just talk and I want us to crush the Tories as bad as anyone, and am prepared to get behind any leader as long as that happens.

Starmer can’t seem to provoke much emotion from anyone outside of the labour membership. IMO that makes him more ‘unelectable’

I can see that point of view. I don’t know if it is right - it was a blessing and a curse for Corbyn, as those strong views meant that people voted against as well as for him, and despite two tries he couldn’t get the ‘for’ team bigger than the ‘against’.

very quick to level the same criticisms at Starmer to try and evidence the rough ride Corbyn got from the labour party too

I think this is it for me - two wrongs don’t make a right. If this tough time was entirely hidden, I’d say it doesn’t matter that much, but it seems pretty visible so the news tends to be ‘labour is divided’ which is more interesting /easier to report on than ‘labour have opposed this policy with X, Y, Z’

I am not a Starmer fanatic and have some criticisms of him as well, but f* me it is tiring just reading “look, he’s shit isn’t he” over and over again from people on the left

Similarly, seeing the left of Labour accusing him of wanting to take Labour "more right than the Tories" isn't helping anybody.

Cummings with the truth bombs:

Much of Labour debate looks like people deluding themselves about ‘mobilising the young’ so they don’t have to face the tough questions about persuading Tory voters. Clinton, Blair, Obama persuaded people who voted for their opponent last time around. Hillary did not. Even Corbyn was sometimes better at this than Starmer and sometimes even said popular things that were noticed!

Look at four simple examples:

For all Starmer's babble at PMQs, there is no summary of a coherent description of Boris’s catastrophic handling of the pandemic. The vaccine success and their failure to make progress has scared them so much they’ve abandoned even talking about the fact the PM killed over 100k while making jokes about it! And Starmer has bounced around so much and is now taken so un-seriously it’s hard to see how he could do this even if he were given the ammo by someone who knows what they’re doing.

It’s so basic it’s a sign of a total dud that he hasn’t even tried to have an economic story. Particularly when Boris has trolleyed around all year and deliberately ruined relations with his own Chancellor, paralysing the government’s own economic story! All he can say about jobs, investments, skills and so on is flat platitudes that leave no mark on the news, never mind public consciousness.

This connects to Starmer’s total failure over the collection of problems around supply chains and energy prices which has been telegraphed since last year. Any serious political project would have been all over this, developing arguments all year. The PM even made another truly terrible political blunder at Conference by babbling that it was ‘not my problem’ on TV a few times. A serious team would have immediately seen this opportunity and said — we’re going to make ‘not my problem’ his ‘read my lips’. There should have been videos all over Facebook hammering the message until the PM panicked and gave a clip ‘clarifying’, thus pushing the story on and ensuring the one thing the public remembered about the Tory conference was the PM saying the collapse of supply chains is ‘not my problem’ — which would go down very badly with target voters. Instead? Starmer either vanished on holiday too or is just so rubbish he’s invisible and couldn’t exploit the error.

Target voters are deeply concerned about violent crime. The Tories have been useless for a decade because they can’t escape the pull of the permanent bureaucracy and human rights activists. And in another terrible and telling blunder, the PM refused to remove the failed Met management even after, in their panic, they started tweeting to women to ‘flag down a bus’ if the police try to arrest them. It’s hard to think of a bigger open goal, a bigger opportunity to show target voters you share their priorities and values. What did Starmer do? He rushed onto TV to support the PM and the management! Almost all stories, including ‘big’ Westminster stories, are irrelevant to the polls. It’s almost all noise. That was a rare example of a moment that was not noise, where everyone was watching. He couldn’t see it and couldn’t exploit it. If you can’t see the biggest things you won’t see the smaller things.

Surprised to see Starmer involved in international tax fraud: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58984814

Wow!

Eh? What's the link to Starmer? Just read the article and no mention.

whoosh

Help me out then.

amirite?

I only popped into this thread to essentially mark it as read.

Is this what it's all about?