Thread by @TheCosmosUK1

1/ This article is everything wrong with @BBCNews and shows why much of its output is propaganda, not journalism. Awful. Going to use this thread to pick it apart piece by piece. It will take a while, so sorry for the gap between posts bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi… #JeremyCorbyn.

2/ The article - as is usual for the BBC - centres entirely around opinion in the "Westminster village", assuming what a small circle of MPs think is representative of the party and country as a whole. It's the world according to whoever @bbclaurak chose to have coffee with.

3/ This statement goes uncontested: "We're now getting to a position where on the polls we're about even, so that's a step in the right direction." This is false. In the past months, Labour had at points been level with the Tories but it is now consistently 3-4pts behind

4/ the false statement is then reinforced by @bbclaurak herself: "Now regularly, Labour is level pegging with the Tories." it seems she has simply taken what she's been told and regurgitated without any independent analysis.

5/she then moves on to an entirely dubious assertion that: Tories. "Sir Keir's personal ratings as a potential prime minister make good reading for his allies too", ignoring the fact that these are on the slide too...

6/ while also ignoring that #starmer regularly polls behind Boris Johnson as "best PM". This is not a sign that he is doing well. Despite puff pieces like this from client "journalists". He is doing poorly.

7/ as @LeftieStats has kindly pointed out, there is also this:

https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1359188103215341576?s=20

8/ Anybody who understands polling (perhaps @bbclaurak doesn't??) knows that 1. Polling 3 yrs prior to an election is basically meaningless in terms of percentage vote share. 2. Right now it's the direction of travel that shows how well they're doing: Labour is going backwards.

9/ The article relies entirely on selective polling analysis for its representation of public opinion, not results in actual general election vote share, which paints a slightly different story, which brings me to my next point...

10/ "Sir Keir's leadership team hadn't just been preoccupied by fixing immediate problems they found on arrival, but they have suffered from a lack of political inheritance." This is again unchallenged...

11/ but a halfway balanced analysis might at least acknowledge that increasing Labour's percentage vote share in actual general elections above what both his more centrist predecessors achieved IS an inheritance...

12/... And that's before we get to the broad span of fully worked out practical progressive policies that had been scrutised by the civil service. These were - and still are- ready to implement...

13/ and the small matter of a solvent party funded by a mass membership that #starmer basically flushed down the toilet. Not the inheritance, Starmer wanted perhaps but not to be discounted.

14/ Now for the 1 bit of insight in the entire piece: "Kinnock passed project to Smith, Blair picked that up from him," [...] and there is, they suggested, "no line of succession" this time." it's not that there is no inheritance, but just not one that shifted Labour rightwards.

15/ it's worth dwelling on this point for 1 moment longer, just to give @paulmasonnews time to catch up and take some notes. The purpose of #starmer's leadership is to return Labour to the trajectory of Kinnock/Blair. This is a reactionary project & won't advance social justice

16/ Hopefully this will disabuse any lingering believers (looking at you @OwenJones84) realise that there is no chance whatsoever of #starmer delivering on his 10 pledges. And thinking about them...

17/ @bbclaurak says:

"When we sat down to talk to Sir Keir when he was pitching for the leader's job , it wasn't crystal clear, beyond a commitment to "moral socialism", what he really wanted to do with the power he sought." This is yet again false...

18/ if @bbclaurak were a proper journalist, she might have noticed 10 commitments: keirstarmer.com/plans/10-pledg… but I guess she wasn't told to look for it by one of Keir's staff and she usually gets away with lazy, sloppy and inaccurate work, so why bother, right?

19/ there is so much more to unpack here but a 20 tweet thread is already too long, so I'll finish up with this unchallenged assertion: Asked about concerns over his leadership, Sir Keir said: "The vast majority of our party and our movement are behind what we're doing."

20/20 in last year's leadership election 490,731 returned ballots, from a total of 784,181. That means nearly 300,000 eligible people did not vote. #KeirStarmer came second to apathy. He has never had the support of a majority of the party and movement.