Thread by @rcmoya84

I look at the overwrought debates among my British lefty friends about the state of Labour and think they're overthinking things. From a distance, it feels very simple - Labour are reaping what the right of the party and their allies in the media sowed for 5 years. That's it.

Electoral outcomes are overdetermined, and the state of Labour now is the aftermath of 2019:

- Corbyn was the victim of an obscene volume and quality of attacks in the media
- The rightwing of the party sabotaged him from day one
- Liberals deliberately made Brexit a wedge issue

That's it. It's both bitterly simple and also also ruinously difficult to see a solution to what comes next after that.

The British media (the BBC and the Guardian were the worse of all imho), the right of the Labour Party (especially Starmer!) + the Remainers created a desert.

Little @Keir_Starmer is as much a victim of his own success as anyone. He wanted to make the 2019 election about Brexit. He got his wish. And now that wedge has shattered the @UKLabour Party's prospects for a decade.

This is what he and the Labour Party right wanted. Tough!

I can't imagine how bleak it must feel to inhabit this terrible reality. But I think the Left made a fatal mistake in being far too open and "honest" about the shortcomings of Corbyn. They thought critical support was enough when people were being flooded with hateful messaging.

Folks were too weak, too hesitant, and at least superficially had too much good faith in the bastards who were your interlocutors. (Bless Graeber for not giving an inch.) They wanted to destroy you and you needed the will to crush those attempts.

And now it's all finished.

I don't know how you row back that unmitigated defeat - and I don't just mean the electoral defeat, I mean the deep-seated and possibly longterm stain on the Left that the media and the Labour right have successfully left on it - but it's extremely bleak

The @UKLabour Party is in a far more parlous, embarrassing and frankly disgusting state than its counterparts across the Atlantic. It frankly doesn't deserve to exist at this point - the Tories don't need implicit cheerleading from a nonexistent opposition. Pantomime politics.

I'm sorry if I come off as a bad comrade for being this critical from across an ocean. I love my friends, family and comrades in the UK. And I genuinely love the place - it will always be a second home. The UK is trapped in a spiral of reaction & breaking it now is a tall order.