Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Lewis Goodall Profile picture
@lewis_goodall
Jan 18, 2020 • 27 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
Packed house in Liverpool for the first Labour Party leadership hustings...
Boris Johnson mentioned- some boos from the crowd
Question- why are you the person to beat Boris Johnson? @EmilyThornberry: “in the end he’s a liar, he’s callous, he has a woman problem- he certainly has a problem with me.“
.@lisanandy: “I know because I was elected in 2010 that the minute the next Lab is elected the TV cameras will look the other way. The luxuries of a hung parl are no longer there. In 2010-15 we couldn’t get a hearing.”
.@jessphillips: “Johnson has a majority of 80. We’ve got to start speaking to people’s hearts. That’s what Boris Johnson does. We’ve got to be really careful when we think we can have an intellectual argument. This is the fight of our lives. BJ would be terrified to face me.”
All been pretty nicey nice so far until Phillips makes pretty clear broadside to Starmer about “intellectual arguments” being useless with maj of 80. Some murmurings from audience “it’s all about her.”
.@lisanandy putting in another assured performance, trading in on another: “I’m not afraid of Andrew Neil.”
.@Keir_Starmer not afraid to play to the local crowd: “I certainly won’t be giving any interviews to @TheSun during the course of this campaign.”
.@EmilyThornberry: “Frankly being leader of the Labour Party is frankly the worst in the world. The establishment come to us because they find us scary.”

She’s really going for it. Nothing to lose.
Whether the left wins or loses this contest, its impact on Labour culture has been profound. The tenor of the answers, virtually every starting point and many of the points of analysis would have seemed alien in 2010 or for any of the other candidates save JC in 2015.
Jess Phillips again the only one really seeking to joust with the other candidates: “We’ve got to start talking in a lanaguage that people understand. No one sits around talking about federalism or this senate or that senate” seconds after RLB was talking about why it’s vital.
.@lisanandy pledges to move Labour HQ outside of central London.

With CCHQ, civil service and big bits of the BBC off might be a good time to bag some cheap office space...
Thornberry says doesn’t matter whether the next leader is from London- “the best prime minister we ever had was Clem Attlee. Where was he from? Limehouse.”

Well, Putney actually...
Phillips again absolutely going for RLB, this time over anti-Semitism: “I don’t remember some of the people here being in the room or fighting those particular fights.”
Thornberry is absolutely going for it. Answer on anti-Semitism saying must be able to criticise the actions of Netanyahu and Israel but saying “that is not the fault of the Jews.” Crowd loving it.
Thornberry knows she has to go big or go home. She is going big. This race which is already so locked and a wildcard will emerge. I wonder.
Thornberry: “I don’t think there was anything I disagreed with in the manifesto but there was too much of it.” Refuses to name anything she dislikes but gives strong speech about social care.

All of the others seem a bit dour and sad. She’s full of energy. Remind you of anyone?
Question- what keeps you awake at night?
Nandy-her son being 17 (as she was) before first Lab govt
Starmer- the frustration of opposition.
RLB- climate crisis
Phillips- a constituent who needs Lab, in a refuge who voted for Johnson
Thornberry- her mum getting old w/o Lab govt
God I already feel like I know all their gags. These people are going to want to kill each other by April
Verdict? All quite tame. Very different vibe to 15/16. Less energy/vitriol all round. Know some of the non RLB campaigns were concerned partly because it’s Liverpool (Corbynite stronghold in the party)that there would be lots of boos/anger. Early days but still urge to unite.
That desire to unite must benefit Starmer as de facto unity candidate.
Individually

Starmer- workmanlike, has Corbynite moments of pleasing the crowd when he needed to but largely tried to stay above fray. No gaffes which is main objective as front runner.

RLB- not as good as last night. Though she has radical ideas she often sounds technocratic.
RLB (cont)- doesn’t have sense of Corbyn’s energy or insurgency which is partly out of her control as they’re not the insurgents anymore. Hard to calibrate.
Thornberry- had to go big or go home so she went big. Unlike the others she DID have energy, the rest seemed glum. In 2015 it wasn’t just what Corbyn said but how he said it, that he stood out against the tired sounding rest. Race needs a wildcard. Did herself no harm.
Phillips- as ever funny but don’t think she got the tone right. In quest to speak truth she sometimes tells Labour too many. Ergo sometimes seems she doesn’t like Labour much. That’s a problem in a Lab leadership contest. It’s the Liz Kendall approach and is dangerous.
Nandy- solid performance, engages with the questions properly, still can’t help but feel she needs Starmer to implode to stand a chance.
But overall, as I was saying earlier:

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Lewis Goodall

Lewis Goodall Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @lewis_goodall

Lewis Goodall Profile picture
Aug 29
Polling from @Moreincommon_ on Lucy Connolly

More than half think her sentence was too lenient or about right. Only a third that it was too harsh.

Only 18% think politicians should associate themselves her, while 51% think they should actively distance themselves from her.
Turns out the preoccupations of the online right don’t mirror the way population thinks at large- who knew!
Conservative voters are more than twice as likely to say politicians should create distance between themselves and Connolly (48 per cent), than associate themselves with her (22 per cent).
Read 4 tweets
Lewis Goodall Profile picture
Aug 21
Globally, we're moving back towards an aristocracy of wealth, more akin to the 19th century than the 20th.

Anyone who cares about social justice, about moving away from higher and higher levels of taxation on work, should be very concerned. Time to do something about it.
Some uncomfortable facts

-The top 10% of UK households hold 57% of all wealth, while the bottom 50% own less than 5%.

-The top 1% alone controls 23% of wealth

-Inheritances are soaring: projected to double from £100bn a year (2020) to £200bn by 2040

-Half of all wealth in the UK is now inherited rather than earned, up from about 25% in the 1970s.

-Children of the wealthiest 20% are seven times more likely to remain in the top 20% as adults than children from the poorest fifth

Meanwhile working people are paying higher and higher taxes on their labour. We need to shift towards taxation on inherited wealth and a reduction in taxes on work and consumption. Both for moral and economic reasons. Let's allow people to keep more on what they do NOT what they inherit.
Lots of people accusing me of being communist. No- it's a liberal argument. On this I'll defer to John Stuart Mill, who wrote this in 1848 and would be dismissed as a "commie wanker" today:

"The principle of inheritance… is chiefly grounded on the duty of parents to provide for their children. But that duty has certain limits; and when these are exceeded, the right ceases. Beyond a certain point, to permit the transmission of enormous fortunes is nothing less than to establish a monopoly of wealth, and is wholly opposed to the spirit of a free and equal society.”

I'm being intentionally provocative when I propose a 100% rate. But I certainly think the rate should be much higher than it is today. It has been before in British history (go back to the 1920s) and in other societies- see Japan, S Korea.
Read 4 tweets
Lewis Goodall Profile picture
Nov 6, 2024
For those waking up in US, bewildered in Europe, what happened?

Have been on air for last 12 hours pouring over the data

Here it is

There's no silver lining for Democrats. Trump won everywhere. He's going to win the popular vote. He did better across the demographics. He grew his coalition, better with black voters, Latinos, young voters. The US become less racially divided by party. Harris underperformed Biden virtually everywhere.

Trump improved on his 2020 margin in 2,367 counties. His margin decreased in only 240 counties.
Trump didn't just sweep up in the swing states, and none of them are going to be that close. He closed the gap on Harris in a tonne of blue states. She turned out anaemic victories in New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Minnesota. He expanded his margins in red states to take huge generationally big victories in Florida and Iowa. He flipped Miami Dade county, winning a heavily Latino county Hillary won by 30 points by 10. He drove down Harris margins in big urban centres everywhere, including Chicago, New York, Austin etc.
This feels a far more devastating loss for the Democrats, even than 2016.

2016 the Dems had plenty of things to console them. A massive popular vote victory. A narrow electoral college loss in a few places. A rock solid ethnic minority coalition which looked like a solid electoral map of the future. Roe was intact. The Supreme Court was still balanced.

They have none of that now. They're staring down the barrel of a transformed Republican Party and a sustained inability to know how to deal with Trump and Magaism. In policy terms, they also have nowhere to go. In Biden's term they governed exactly in line with their own instincts. It's been soundly rejected by the electorate.
Read 8 tweets
Lewis Goodall Profile picture
Oct 23, 2024
Extraordinary intervention from Donald Trump’s own former Chief of Staff John Kelly. The fmr general says Trump meets the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator and has no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.

nytimes.com/2024/10/22/us/…
Kelly says: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly says Trump would not want to be pictured with amputee veterans saying that “it wouldn’t look good for me.”

Kelly confirms Trump spoke positively of Hitler as president.

“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.”
Read 8 tweets
Lewis Goodall Profile picture
Aug 27, 2024
Thoughts on Starmer speech

Self-evidently highly political. Little in the way of policy, instead a framing of politics to come.

But there’s a paradox to it all
As predicted, Labour are trying to suggest things are worse than they knew. There’s a bit of truth to that though broad contours of state of economy/public realm were known.

We’re clearly in for more pain. Just like, checks notes, the past 14 years.
That itself is an idictment of a generation of policymakers and politics. Voters might be forgiven for thinking they’ve heard all this before. Indeed they have, since George Osborne in 2010. Ernie Bevin said he wanted to be at the Ministry of Labour til 1990, ie to set the terms of thinking on industrial relations for a half century. It sometimes feels like Osborne will be Chancellor til 2050, no matter bow many times his vision of politics/political economy fails. You have to wonder how much more tolerance for it there’s going to be.

If nothing else, politically it was a huge contrast with the politics of optimism at last week’s DNC- instead now we have things are going to get worse before they get better.

Strongest sections of the speech were his diagnosis of the problems of populism and how Tories fell into that reap. Was authentically him and convincing.
Read 8 tweets
Lewis Goodall Profile picture
Jul 16, 2024
The story of the last time a former president was shot and lived to tell the tale🧵

In October 1912 President Teddy Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term in office. He'd left the presidency four years before. On the 12th he was campaigning in Milwaukee. Image
Roosevelt had left the Republicans to found the Progressive Party, also known as the 'Bull Moose' Party.

On the night of the 12th October he was dining at the Gilpatrick Hotel, owned by a supporter. After eating he left to give a speech at the Milwaukee auditorium.

En route he was approached by a man called John Schrank, a German-American tavern owner, originally from Bavaria.Image
Shcrank opened fire on the former president with a Colt revolver. He was quickly wrestled to the ground but not before a bullet penetrated Roosevelt's body.

Fortunately, the bullet hit something else first- TR's glasses case and the folded up copy of his speech, some 50 pages long entitled "Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual"- both of which in his coat pocket.
Read 6 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

Send Email!

:(