British correspondent Tony Jay, continuing from yesterday’s post…
… Back in 2019 the corporate media and the Right of the Labour Party had been justifiably confident they’d left no stone unturned in forging an Establishment-wide coalition of exactly the kind of creepy, crawly things you’d expect to find living underneath stones, all dedicated – for one reason or another – to sparing the UK a nightmare of progressive social policy and reduced inequality by painting a vote for the Party led by the lifelong anti-racism campaigner and pro-diplomacy peacenik as nothing short of a green light for concentration camps in Golders Green and the compulsory renaming of all male children as Yasser Adolf Mao Ho Chi Amin Dzhugashvili, meanwhile the spoilt, mendacious, casually racist asset of Russian oligarchs and American billionaires with the long history of corruption and shameless lying was passed off as that funny posh bloke from the telly who, say what you like about his eye for the dolly birds, at least you could always rely on to put the interests of Great Britain first.
I wouldn’t say the Tories were actually popular in 2019, but by and large the coalition’s PR policy had been to make Labour even less popular and they’d given ‘centrist’ voters licence to sadly shake their heads and tell each other that they simply couldn’t possibly be expected to sully their precious consciences by casting a vote for a man who’d personally betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis (well, maybe the actual facts didn’t show that, but if even Nigel Havers and that nice girl off Countdown said he would have, well, no smoke without fire) and if anyone was
honestrude enough to equate that decision with letting Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson have his destructive No-Deal Brexit, well, that was just another thing to blame that ghastly Corbyn for, wasn’t it?In comparison, it’s not so easy to overstate just how irredeemably unpopular the Tories had become by July 2024. Cholera. Priests in your bed. Elon Musk’s aesthetic choices. These are just a few of the things a majority of the British electorate found less offensive to their spirit animals than the thought of another five years of Tory Government. 14 years of national decline and the continued widespread enshitification of the culture for everyone who wasn’t already dirty rich.
This national decision-by-osmosis had reached an apotheosis in the clogging of Britain’s rivers and beaches with unprocessed sewage by private water companies while their executives just shrugged, funnelled the billions they’d saved on infrastructure maintenance into shareholder dividends, and paid themselves multi-million pound bonuses as a reward before hiring lobbyists (many of them former Tory or Labour politicians) to
bribeoffer inducements to fund the off-the-books jet-setting lives of have in-depth private consultations with Government Ministers about signing off on funding the clean-up efforts with public money… or if they couldn’t swing that, then certainly about slow-walking any serious investigation of criminal liability until said executives had moved on to another stratospherically rewarded post and the companies could play the “Oh, that was under previous management, it’s all good now” card. Corruption, deceit, incompetence, these were all the bywords for Tory Government and people were tired of it.
While the wider electorate, the normies, the Bobs and Janets in their samey little houses on their samey little housing estates living their samey little lives in the expanding ground zero of what Tory Government had done to their communities were finally, belatedly, partially, and years too late, becoming aware in a general sense of who was to blame for it all, the political junkies who lived for this stuff and had been screaming about it at various volumes and intensities for years were getting good and steaming over the undeclared leadership race taking place at the top of the Tory Party. Sunak was officially Prime Minister, but only because a majority of Tory MPs had thought he was the best choice at the time to meet the corporate media’s measure of what “Not that bloody nutter Truss” looked like, while still being acceptable in the – very, very specifically – short term to the factions that had put Truss into Downing Street. He’d never won a majority vote of the rabid Tory membership (nor would he, given he was a non-white male of military age, and so therefore clearly an illegal migrant and a danger to our nation’s blonde virgins) and given that he’d only been an MP since 2015 and so didn’t have any loyalists within the Party who had tethered the success of their political futures to his that he could rely on to take his side when things got down and dirty, he was never institutionally strong enough to actually do anything when one of his Ministers struck out on their own in search of the support of one or another of the Tory Party’s frothingly doolally factions.
You always got the impression that none of the shrunken Tory Party’s version of ‘big beasts’ expected Sunak to lead them past the next general election, and that his entire term in office was an arm-wrestle between the shrinking number of pragmatists who wanted the Tory brand to lean back towards the formerly mainstream Conservatism of the Thatcherite school (business friendly, fuck the poor, buy off the middle-classes with Law n’ Order and cheap credit) and the triumphant radicals who wanted to complete the journey of the post-May Tory Party into a modern Conservative Nationalist movement of the Powell school (anti-immigrant, culture-warring, isolationist). The Radicals were obviously winning, because they were the ones Sunak would occasionally pop up and throw bones to, so a lot of 2024 was spent yelling at the TV screen “Just call an election, you prolapse! Get it over with!”
When he eventually did call one, at such a terrible time for the Tories, there was a fleeting double-take from everyone who expected him to try to hold on until winter (What? Really? Now?) followed by an audible release of tension and an anti-climactic shrug. Even the corporate media with all of its arsenal of LOOK AT US graphics and ZOMG! WHAT COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN NEXT? boostering couldn’t convince anyone that the result was ever in any real doubt. Those stubborn gusset-stains running newnewlabourinc tried to help out by doubling and tripling down on their newspeak mantra that any statement conveying even the slightest scintilla of doubt in or disagreement with any policy announcement emanating from The Great Plastic Sage, however sotto voice or qualified, was doubleplusbad and therefore absolutely certain to result in victory for the Tories, but as with virtually every single thing newnewlabourinc said and still say that isn’t “We can’t afford that popular policy” or “We love flags, King and Country!” it was understood that this was far more about giving rhetorical cover to silencing internal dissent and trolling centre-left Labour members than any genuine fears about the result of the election. It’s hard to convince people that matters of consequence are teetering on a knife-edge of decision when you can’t keep a shit-eating grin of orgasmic disbelief off your shiny, caviar-streaked face for more than two uninterrupted seconds.
You know what? I really don’t want to talk about the newnewlabourinc Opposition that are now the Government. They make me way too angry in a way that Tories don’t and that’s no fun for anyone. Tories are supposed to be the vitreous discharge of humanity’s darker impulses that decent people can only find distasteful while being careful not to get any on their clothes. Labour, OTOH, are supposed to be the progressive Party fighting the corner for the millions of people who aren’t rich and who don’t necessarily have a wagerable stake in the rat-eat-rat ecology of modern Britain. This shower are a lot of things, all distasteful, but are definitely not that.
At their best they’re a bunch of slate-brained, sledgehammer-wielding entryist goons who have used bureaucratic skullduggery, brute force and the transactional sociopathy of media mercenaries to drive everyone else out of the Labour Party’s command tent so they can erect upon barren hills made out of children’s malnourished bones and the betrayed hopes of millions their ziggurats to Ba’al B’Lair, toothsome God of Lies and Envoy of Those Who Dwell On Yachts, and in the shadow of His terrible ego go dancing knife-in-back around His monuments chanting the Gilded Rule (The Rich eat first, eat last, eat everything) while praying for golden showers of donations and post-politics sinecures to rain down upon their upturned faces. At their worst, they’re grasping neo-Thatcherites who see in the demise of the Tory Party a once in a generation opportunity to pull off their own version of the Southern Strategy by rebranding newnewlabourinc as the centre-right alternative to whatever Hard Right chimera slithers skinlessly out of the carcass of the Tory Party, bartering their souls for the support of the comfortable Establishment by promising amiable compromise with the Right and savage beatings for the Left so that… something… something… something… everyone who matters can keep on eating, drinking and flipping second houses to their heart’s content without fearing a brick through the window or an audit of their unpaid taxes.
So, yeah, not talking about them (unless I have to). They’re wankers.
Back to the election.
Going from 202 seats to 411 seats in one swell foop is pretty impressive, right? That’s a titanic landslide. Record breaking. Going by the scale of their triumph they must have increased their vote share by near double figures and attracted millions of new voters to their banner, yeah? Setting them up to dominate UK politics for the foreseeable future? Crushing all before them and hearing the lamentations of their pollsters? That kind of thing?
Not so much. The numbers themselves tell a very different story, one without much of a happy ending and bait for a very bleak sequel indeed. When the 2024 UK General Election is described as a ‘Potemkin landslide’ and ‘the most disproportionate election in history’ they’re being kind. Put it this way, in 2017, after a series of outright revolts by large chunks of the Blairite-era Parliamentary Party that could only have hurt us with ‘mushy middle’ voters, Labour surged to 12,877,918 votes, 40% of the voting electorate on a turnout of 68.8%. In 2019, after the most destructive campaign of character assassination and outright sabotage in British political history, Labour still got 10,269,051 votes, 32.1% of the voting electorate on a turnout of 67.3%. In 2024, after the return of the Labour Party to ‘sensible centrism’, the purging of tens of thousands of members for once liking a post about tasty Palestinian bread recipes, and while running under a banner of amorphous ‘it can mean whatever you want it to mean, sugartits’ “Change” and with collapse of the Tory Party into feuding satrapies of deeply hated incompetents and knaves completely clearing their path to easy victory, newnewlabourinc could only muster 9,708,716 votes, 33.7% of the voting electorate, on a measly ]turnout of 59.9%, the second lowest in well over a century.
That’s right. They lost votes. Lots of votes. Over half a million of them. You’ll still hear Starmerites describing 2019 as ‘the worst election result since 1934’ (they’re lying – natch) while two-facedly denying their own very prominent role in making that happen, and you’ll also hear them loudly braying that ‘parties of Government’ count seats won, not how many votes you can stack up in your heartlands. Now, there’s a case there to be made and an argument that better people could have, but I’m so not that person. The fact is, when you’re promoting yourself as the grown-up Party of sensible, moderate adults who could easily have won either of those two previous elections if they’d been in charge, rather than that horrible bearded nazi-communist terrorist-loving tyrant-wimp, and when your opposition is a Tory Party that’s about as popular as a competent psychiatrist at a Trump rally and which virtually everybody without a seven figure bank account and a membership at the Garrick Club wants consigned back to the primal ooze, the very least you can do is match the awful, terrible, no-good vote total of British History’s Greatest Monster, right?
ZOMG!!! Rong!!!
To Be Continued
Anonymous At Work
Thank you for using Alexander Boris dePfeffel Johnson’s real name, the poncy chylde of Eton and Oxford. I use it and people look at me like I’ve spouted pure drivel. I do, at times, but only when quoting Tories.
Villago Delenda Est
@Anonymous At Work: Going all Saxe-Coburg-Gotha on Boris is fine in my book.
Anoniminous
Labour didn’t win, the Tories lost.
Biggly.
Eunicecycle
This is definitely not the coverage of UK politics we get in the US. I had no idea the number of votes went down. I just heard it was a landslide by Labour. Thanks, Tony Jay!
Regnad Kcin
should the SNP ever un-F hemselves, we can leave this Southron assininity behind for good (please, FSM)
Zelma
Good grief, Tony. Is there any “labour” left in the Labour Party? I was never a big fan of Corbyn (not that it matters, because I don’t get a vote) but I’ve been following the new government’s policies, and it all adds up to “No we can’t!” Can’t fix the NHS, can’t save local governments, can’t reform the tax system much, can’t do anything that really needs to be done. At least the ministers seem to have a modicum of competence compared to the Tories. And they are not as blatantly corrupt. At least not yet. And these at least are plusses. See Biden v. Trump. But Biden did accomplish stuff and he didn’t have the kind of majority Starmer has.
I look forward to your next post. Perhaps you have some idea “What Can Be Done?” I sure don’t. I’d hate to be a moderately progressive Brit these days. Where would one go? It seems you’d be politically homeless.
Chet Murthy
@Eunicecycle: Even setting aside the actual vote
totalsnumbers, what doesn’t get reported in the US, is that one of the reasons for the “landslide” is that Labor and the Lib Dems arranged tactically to withdraw candidates in constituencies where it made sense (so if the LibDem candidate was doing better than Labour, then Labour would withdraw the candidate, to ensure that the Tory lost for sure). So the actual vote -percentage- was nothing like a landslide.And haha, it gets worse. Here’s Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_general_election
Labour took 34%. Tories, 24%. Reform …. 14%. Lib Dems 12%. It’s well-known that Reform are mostly Tories who moved rightwards, really rightwards. And you can’t say there’s any relationship between Labour and the LibDems like that. So add Tory+Reform …. 38%. Gosh, that 34% Labour landslide looks less and less impressive.
RepubAnon
And Nigel (Mr Brexit) Farage is waiting in the wings, planning to take over as soon as thin gs get bad enough for the British people to vote fascist again.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Regnad Kcin: [ please forgive my perhaps spotty memory ]
Rusty
We were expats living just outside of London from 2005-2009. It only took weeks for me to detest Blair. Asked a question that was just what they wanted, and they let forth a torrent of blather that had nothing to do with the question but whatever neo-liberal idea they were currently barfing up. I heard their explanation, for example, of privatizing the funding of hospitals, and I thought, that’s nuts. Your taking a small cost off the books this year and paying vastly more for decades after. They were also deep into surveillance of everyone. The only saving grace was Obama winning when we were there. I kept up on UK politics for quite a while, but actual life and lite time eventually made me drop it. Thank you Tony for the brilliant updates.
eclare
https://youtu.be/tkAqwHiAR-g?si=kRYj2oWpxdMXRI8T
John Oliver on the British election and fourteen years of Tory destruction. The fact that stood out to me was that British kids are now shorter, IIRC by two centimeters.
Eunicecycle
@Chet Murthy: thanks for the additional info. I am really not well-informed about British politics in general. I am always so impressed how much more informed the British are about us.
Jay
Thank you, Tony.
Kim Walker
We were living in Stony Stratford from 2005 to 2007. I absolutely loved it and was sorry to leave. Food was cheap and excellent, public transportation was pretty good (but expensive), the NHS was wonderful. The gardens and countryside were gorgeous. My husband and I always thought that the British, in general, were some of the smartest, best educated, wittiest people we had ever lived among. And we mostly hung out with working class folks. I feel so bad for what’s happened. I never could stand that smarmy prick, Tony Blair. And I did like Corbyn, but even I could see that he was going to be taken down.
Kent
Thanks Tony. Fascinating.
So here in the US the GOP basically does culture war 24/7 to distract from its unpopular positions and the popular Democratic ones. I assume it is the same there. Immigration for sure, and probably some trans-phobia.
But what are some uniquely British culture war subjects. Presumably “wokeness” is a uniquely American affection. Along with all the latest fearful acronyms: DEI, CRT, etc. You must have some of your own that don’t translate across the pond.
Chet Murthy
@Kent: Simon Wren-Lewis (economist, blogs at https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/ ) has discussed in detail how the Tories do what you describe: since nobody likes their “all the money for our rich donors” policies, they push culture war which their base eats up with a spoon. Just like in the US. He argues (with some evidence) that the average Tory MP is more socially liberal than the Tory base, so they’re sort of where the G(r)OP was a generation ago: not actually committed to the Christofascism, but just nodding along b/c it got them votes.
Jay
Test
Anoniminous
@Zelma:
Starmer can’t fix things because the fix requires the UK rejoining the EU. Ain’t gonna happen (IMO.) First, it is politically impossible on the UK side. Second, the EU would have to be totally loony-tunes to let the UK rejoin as the county will never, ever, sign-on to the fundamental EU goal of “An Ever Closer Union.”
Another Scott
Thanks for these letters for us, Tony Jay. I’m sorry that you and the good people over there are having to go through all that.
I heard bits of a story about renationalizing the passenger railroads. The radio story told about the collapse in on-time performance, people spending days on a normal few-hour trip, prices being much higher than other civilized countries, etc. But a BBC web story I saw about the plan only talked about ticket prices probably are not actually going to fall very much, and taxes might go up, and it will take 3+ years for existing contracts to end, so maybe it’s not such a good idea…
[ sigh ]
Looking forward to the next installment.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
BigJimSlade
Thank you Tony Jay for that tour de force of sentence writing – sentences that veer off in so many directions and variations so much as to awaken the ghost of Elgar and cause him to tip his hat in appreciation, even as it was used in the enigma of British politics rather than music, phrases that go to slay dragons, who have been terrorizing and decimating, or its inverse, the populace unbeknownst even to themselves, phrases to stop to piss on so many deserving targets as though it were an awards ceremony for the bottom-of-the-shoe shit that must be scraped off at every country house doorstep north, south, and west of the Thames, phrases that summon the scenes behind the scenes to explicate the rascalry of all involved and, well, it’s bedtime here, so I can’t quite do justice to it all or I will imperil the tranquility and even energy of a fine tomorrow that may find me walking for miles, swimming for, well, a mile-ish, and even squinching out some work when needed, so for I must leave this praise now with a heartfelt… to be continued (possibly).
:-)
Tony Jay
Once again, thank you everybody’s body for your kind words. I’d love to wax my prolix about all of this much more than I can, but I can’t, just too busy. That’s one of the reasons I blather so much in the posts – trying to get as many answers down as possible while I have the chance. We spent the last two days coming back from the Outer Hebrides (think Nova Scotia and then remove the blazing sunshine) and the last five hours of that driving through rain so heavy I half expected to hear that little girl from Poltergeist whispering “They’re here” from the depths of the lashing static. Now it’s back to work for intense one-on-one training in my new role so I’m going to be brain-disengaged for the rest of the week.
Thanks to A-L once again for letting me splatter my biases and bile all over the walls here. It’s somehow soothing. Like being choked between the padded thighs of a Sumo grand master. Enjoy the concluding part of this Election retrospective, if that’s in any way possible given the downer gloom of it all.
Maybe soon I’ll find the time to explain why I really, really don’t like newnewlabourinc for how they’ve done what they’ve done to the Labour Party, and clarify the reasons I want everyone involved to rot from the toes up while trapped in a sleeping bag with Steve Bannon’s laundry. Won’t that be fun!
ColoradoGuy
Thanks so much for the poetic description of the UK horror show, Tony. What’s opaque to us Americans are the arcana of the British parliamentary system, and exactly how the UK chooses their leaders.
This split between Parliamentary Labour and non-Parliamentary Labour is a complete mystery to this reader … and I went to a British secondary school! It seems as impenetrable as Cricket, which I will never figure out (nor want to).
I’d be the first to admit there’s a lot of 18th-Century cruft to the US system, and nearly all of it done so the slave-empire oligarchs would join the Revolution. The notorious Electoral College and the gross malapportionment of the Senate have repeatedly given this country terrible governments. And the Supreme Court was so bad it set the country up for the Civil War, and then repeated the performance by trying to overturn most of FDR’s New Deal.
Eric NNY
Brilliant
msdc
You can slam the Tories without having to pretend that Jeremy Corbyn is anti-racist or anti-war. He’s supported violence when it’s targeted at democracies–just look at his stance on Ukraine, which is to blame the war on NATO expansion and oppose sending arms. And his anti-racism stops well short of the Jews.
These weren’t creations of “the corporate media.” These were his views for decades. You don’t have to cover for him.
Baud
In fairness to Labour, this may be a reason voting was down. In the US, competitive elections tend to increase turnout.
kalakal
Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock would like a word. Ed Milliband was destroyed because he ate a sandwich
Baud
@kalakal:
What kind of sandwich?
kalakal
@Baud: Bacon
Baud
@kalakal:
Pretty sure he’d be considered a hero in the US.
Tony Jay
@msdc:
Not pretending a single thing.
Anti-war in the pacifist sense. Absolutely clear for decades that war is a destructive waste of everything that always – always – ends in people sitting down around a table and discussing terms. His thing is “let’s skip straight to that without pretending that the world is easily and cleanly divisible into Goodies and Baddies.” Painting it as something sinister or pro-aggressor is and always has been a load of shit. I may not agree with him entirely in all cases, but he’s consistent.
And as to the anti-semitism smear, zero patience. Anyone still repeating that garbage is – very charitably – put in the same box as people blathering on about ‘Kopmala’ or Killary. I’ve discussed it in detail before, end of.
MomSense
@Zelma:
I love Keir’s speech ‘it’s worse than we imagined’, ‘the budget is going to be painful’. He is also saying that this is the end of easy answers. Good luck with that. If there is anything that the public likes it’s complicated answers about unpopular policies. Yup, that will work just fine.
Clearly the Tories fucked things up over decades, but Labour is bad at politics and they need to be really good to deal with this mess.
Tony Jay
@kalakal:
No comparison. Foot’s battery by the media and Establishment runs closest, but the attacks on Kinnock and Miliband were purely Election fodder and did nothing to drive them out of politics or away from the table of ‘respectability’. Kinnock is a Baron and Miliband a Government minister.
What was done to smear Corbyn – and by extension the Left of the Labour Party as genocidal antisemites – was a whole category shift worse, went on and on for years, and is being maintained by the current shitshow leadership and their Media allies.
Ken
Brilliant writing, Tony Jay. Though I see that when it comes to newnewlabourinc, you’re a sometime-follower of HP Lovecraft: say that something is unspeakably indescribable, then spend the next three paragraphs on a feverishly detailed description.
Tony Jay
@Ken:
This is a failing. I’m aware of it and, with The Old Ones’ help, I hope to be better.
Geminid
@ColoradoGuy: I think the Senate orginally was created to better balance power between small and large states, not between slavery and “free” states. The institution of slavery itself was not at issue at the time, and that institution was in effect ratified by at least two Constitutional provisions.
This changed in the 1840s, when population growth in the Northeast and the former Northwest Territories* made the slave states a permanent and shrinking minority in the House, and slave-state Senators became a bulwark against rising anti-slavery, “Free Soil” sentiment in the North.
* The most consequential act of the short-lived Articles of Confederation Congress was passage of the Northwest Ordinance (1787) that led to the formation of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin, and prohibited slavery within them.
Thse states altered the Congressional balance of power in the 1840s and 50s, and were to decisively affect the military balance of power in the 1860s.
Baud
@Geminid:
Right. Weren’t the smallest of the original 13 states the New England states?
kalakal
@Tony Jay: Infighting in the party was absolutely brutal in the ’70s, the party actually had a split. The smearing wasn’t anti-semitism it was the Left were Communists. the Right were tools of The Establishment. The media assaults were constant, espescially upon Trade Unions.
kalakal
@ColoradoGuy:
A really big difference is the UK doesn’t have party registration and the actual parties are very small. Labour is the biggest at about 450,000. Party members tend to be activists who are ok with attending meetings at 8pm on a wet wednesday, no one else can be bothered. I remember meetings in Leeds NW ( electorate 100,000 ish) where 30 was a good turn out. The MP selection ones ( sort of like primaries) got 70
Geminid
@Baud: Delaware was a slave state, as was neighboring Maryland. At the time, these were among the smaller states in terms of population. So was Georgia, I believe.
evodevo
OMG I LOVED THIS!! and I don’t even know half the characters he’s talking about (I’m only familiar with some of them because of Tracy Ullmann’s sketches – especially Rees-Mogg, Corbyn and Flobalob
Tony Jay
@evodevo:
Why, thank you. Part Three should be coming soon.
billcinsd
@Zelma: Starmer was promoting his economic policies as the new neo-liberalism
Cutty Snark
To cut a long story short, AFAICT the Starmerites seized power mainly through the brilliant strategy of (a) lying through their teeth and (b) having the absolute commitment of the elites, media, and political establishment in burning anything remotely left wing to the ground and salting the ashes so that it may pass into distant memory and never dare threaten again the important business of enriching already ludicrously wealthy evil monsters yet further. Evidence for (a) may be found in his abrupt U-turns on his “pledges” (yes yes, I know we’re all adults and shouldn’t expect politicians to be anything other than craven opportunists who would eat a baby on live television if they thought it would garner an extra 0.01% in the polls – but still, even by those standards it was almost impressive to witness the speed in which he divested himself of even the most tissue thin veneer of pretending to give a single damn about anyone other than himself and – to a much lesser extent – his surrounding bottom feeders). Evidence for point (b) may be found in the way that convenient blind eyes have been turned to a variety of shady practices which All Very Sensible People now fully agree Are Just Good Politics Actually – undeclared donations: check; supposedly neutral organisations mysteriously funded through shady thinktanks: check; breaches of the law: oh, you better believe that is a check. Yet, for reasons no doubt beyond the ken of man, somehow none of this has been reported with one billionth of the degree of intensity with which the exact angle of Corbyn’s bow was (yes, I realise that sounds insane; no, I am not making it up; yes, if it sounds familiar to those with a recollection of tan suits and eating the wrong sort of fast food condiments then you are absolutely not alone).
I am by no means blind to Corbyn’s faults (would I be any sort of socialist worthy of the name if I didn’t have obscure grudges against other leftists?), but it is rather difficult to take the accusations of racism seriously when the alternative was Boris “flag-waving piccaninnies” Johnson, a position I feel is further validated when one considers how rapidly everyone stopped caring about institutional discrimination the second it was no longer a convenient club with which to bludgeon the left with. I would suggest that in many ways Corbyn’s greatest fault was being (in comparison to the vast majority of other politicians) a relatively decent person – had he actually been the Jackbooted Stalinist he was painted as, there is a small chance that we wouldn’t now have a series of empty suits parading past us murmuring about how there was no way to predict how bad things were before they came to power and that is why granny will have to just learn to do without food or warmth this winter.
What we are currently experiencing in the UK is the culmination of quite a lot of time, money, and effort having been poured into ensuring that the only choices the voters will ever have in future is what flavours of culture war bullshit they want accompanying their Austerity-and-Corruption Unhappy Meal.
Cutty Snark
No, no. Not *some* transphobia – *a lot* of transphobia (the UK has just banned puberty blockers for gender-questioning young people, but not cis people!). But don’t you worry – there will be plenty of racism, sexism, and hippie punching to go around. You can expect newnewnewnewlabour to be tough on society, and tough on the causes of society!
Tony Jay
@Cutty Snark:
Stands. Applauds.
Yes. This.
Paul in KY
@BigJimSlade: Good try that!
msdc
@Tony Jay:
Corbyn wants to skip straight to the negotiations on terms and timelines that are favorable to the aggressors, so long as those aggressors aren’t liberal democracies. He was urging the West to stop arming Ukraine in 2022. In the US, that’s the position of Trump and the Republican party. On the eve of the invasion, he claimed Russia had valid concerns and blamed the impending war on NATO expansion. That is the position of Vladimir Putin. This is all on the public record.
So is Corbyn’s long history of tolerating antisemitic statements and associating with antisemites, from attending events organized by a Holocaust denier to supporting a blatantly antisemitic mural.
You may have discussed this “in detail” before, but if you’re still in denial about it then your discussion was, what’s the word… a load of shit.
Zero patience for people who defend this man.
Tony Jay
@msdc:
You can keep on repeating the easily and often discredited lies, the only person it reflects on is you.
Not a good look.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Tony Jay: I always appreciate reading your posts. Usually I have little familiarity with the subject matter so I have little to add. In this case it rings a bell.
Donald Rumsfeld once famously remarked, “in a war people die.” True as far as it goes.
One might extend this idea and say, “therefore wars should be avoided.” Trouble is, there are people who are willing to use extreme violence to achieve their aims. It’s unlikely to work then to “skip straight to that” [end stage negotiations] as you put it.
Alas.