I remember when the press had real news values & Labour losing a single council seat brought the leader's job into question...
These days that kind of thing just isn't covered. Must be due to budget cuts, right? It can't be political because journalists & editors are objective.
Here's the May 2019 result for the council seat Labour lost last night. As you can see by contrasting the big victory in the ward under Corbyn to the heavy loss under Starmer, Labour must distance itself further from Corbyn if it wants to carry on achieving these kind of results.
It's funny to read the 2017 Guardian story about a lost council seat & see how warped news became in the Corbyn era. You get obligatory wrecking quotes from Jess Phillips & Tom Blockandstrop & that's enough to run with "casts doubt on Corbyn's leadership." theguardian.com/politics/2017/…
It then gets more surreal with wild speculation that the Lib Dems are gonna take Manchester Gorton parliament seat from Labour (they actually finished fourth, with 5.7% to Labour's 76.3%). Tim Farron's pitch, quoted, is: "There isn’t anybody else, why shouldn’t it be us?"
We've lived through incredible times in journalism. We're just lucky to have come out of the other side with everyone agreeing not to change a thing.
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Labour unsuspended Trevor Phillips, its most high profile member investigated for alleged Islamophobia, before the NEC heard the case.
Coincidentally, Trevor Phillips started his job hosting a Sunday morning politics show, interviewing Labour frontbenchers, the following week.
"LabourList has been told that the investigations officer working on the case – the only Muslim staffer in Labour’s governance and legal unit – was not included in the process." labourlist.org/2021/07/labour…
The Labour Party, and the Governance and Legal Unit in particular, can be a brutal place to work, even worse if you're Muslim, working on an Islamophobia case, and suddenly find yourself being bypassed as the person under investigation is unsuspended.
This article is a goldmine of stupidity. The quotes from Labour MPs and officials show a bunch of people flailing around as they drown, unable to understand the situation they're in.
It's nice of them to set out the Labour right's big objective: "A big bang change to water down members' hold."
Is that what 56% of members voted for last year? To have less say? To be made powerless?
Which number was that among Keir's 10 pledges?
The justification? "MPs represent millions of voters, whereas party members represent only themselves."
Nah MPs get elected as Labour reps. The idea they're all brilliant individuals whose sheer talent wows voters is quickly disproved by all the quotes from MPs in this article.
6 weeks ago Keir Starmer said Labour had to stop "looking internally."
Since then he's tried to sack his deputy, botched a reshuffle, dumped his chief of staff, director of comms & political secretary, & allowed endless obsessive briefing against the left
After the disaster of Hartlepool Keir Starmer said “I will set out what change is needed over the next few days” & present a “bold vision for a better Britain.” A month-and-a-half later, with another potential by-election disaster looming, where is it?
On the one hand, there's the thing Starmer promised to stop doing - "looking internally."
He's still doing it.
On the other hand, there's the thing Starmer promised to start doing - "setting out a bold vision."
According to @politico Angela Rayner insists "Corbyn photobombed her by sliding into the shot [on the left] unnoticed" & "she did not know he would be there in advance and did not talk to him"... yet she then posed for the shot on the right!
Such cowardly and pathetic behaviour.
In actual fact, Angela Rayner took the microphone from JC to speak, yet somehow didn't "notice" he was there.
Just beneath contempt.
And she walked into the photo, not the other way around.
Keir Starmer has made himself a hostage of the Labour right, and at a time of their choosing (not yet) they'll cast him aside. He dynamited all his bridges with the left, cutting himself off from any sources of counter-pressure, so no one's coming to save him. >
I think the political dynamics of bad election results are: the worse Starmer does, the more dependent he is on the right, which can make his survival conditional on him kicking the left more.
So they're already talking about a shadow cabinet reshuffle. It's almost sad for the soft left because they cheered on as Starmer cleared out those to the left of them, only to find that they're now next in line.
It's awkward for Labour that Human Rights Watch—far from the most radical human rights organisation—has concluded that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians amounts to apartheid, a crime against humanity. Labour seems to view the accusation of apartheid as antisemitic. >
In Feb, after Israeli human rights orgs B’Tselem reached the same conclusion, a Labour member proposed a motion to their CLP supporting B’Tselem's call for an end to apartheid. It was ruled out on the grounds that accusing Israel of apartheid runs counter to the IHRA definition.
Apparently, accusing Israel of apartheid is equivalent to saying it's a racist endeavour, one of the examples of antisemitism accompanying the IHRA definition. The matter was passed up from local CLP officers to regional officials to the governance unit. It's what Labour thinks.