As I understand it, Stop The War Coalition held a pro-Beijing rally in London yesterday at which attendants physically assaulted counter protestors, there seems to be no wider coverage of this on the wider British left today, but it seems like a significant & alarming development
Also highly alarming that former shadow chancellor John McDonnell was a listed speaker at this event, given that Diane Abbott has already had to issue an apology for appearing on an online panel hosted by this pro-CCP front.
Time & time again figures on the left sleepwalk into these situations, and it is becoming harder and harder to give them the benefit of the doubt.
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They will never understand how badly they lost and will always blame everyone else for their own failures. They won’t even accept culpability for the racism that was exposed by a statutory investigation into their control of the party.
Corbynites can never move on because they can live in a fantasy world in which they never have to acknowledge how humiliatingly unpopular & divisive their leader was. Always easier to blame your opponents than concede you were wrong, but it’s a mass delusion nevertheless.
Zarb-Cousin won’t ever show you stuff like this because he’s a moral coward but the public have very clear feelings on the man and that has precisely nothing to do with “the Labour right”. This is their own failure.
It doesn’t even touch on the most damning thing about Taibbi’s recent political switch, that he became an atrocity revisionist on Syria, defending the Assad regime. Even mainstream political punditry in America doesn’t seem to give a shit that Taibbi was covering up war crimes.
He’s not just a contrarian who, as he says in the piece, was falsely accused of supporting Vladimir Putin. He literally created a conspiracy podcast that pumped out racist lies to cover up the murder of Syrian children by a fascist dictator on a weekly-basis.
Apparently you can literally work to cover up mass murder and still get a fawning profile in the New Yorker treating your critics as if they are the problem, without even a cursory mention for your fascist activism.
I often find a lot of the criticisms of Starmer to be in bad faith, advancing a false narrative that he holds a less socially liberal position than he actually does, but I’m fully with this one. Virtually no one in Labour has bothered to address their backwards drug policies.
The war against drugs has failed, it doesn’t protect users & it doesn’t combat criminality. It really is time we moved on as a society, but that remains impossible while the leading progressive political force in the country is still stuck in the Prohibitionist 20th century.
Corbyn didn’t do anything on this front either. We need politicians to have the courage to say this war is lost and it must end. We must move towards treating drug use as a healthcare issue and not a criminal one. This is not even a radical socialist policy, it’s a liberal one.
It's weird how some things in politics are one day ubiquitous, like "the deficit", are the next day forgotten about. You never hear "the polls will change when we get fair general election media coverage" any more, despite it being everywhere 2017-2019
That's because the people who were making that argument in 2017 largely want the party to fail in 2023, even if that means ushering in another Tory PM, you just won't hear most of them say that out loud, especially when it means applying the things they said in 2017 back on them.
"Maybe we are the ones that should 'F*** Off and join the Tories' now?!" is not as catchy a slogan as it was the first time round.
This is my favourite genre of leftist contrarian, find a marginalised group protesting something, then mock and insult them for not instead protesting about an unconnected economic issue. Treat them as if their basic demands over an issue that affects them is worthy of scorn.
Interestingly enough and to the surprise of nobody at all this idiot has only ever mentioned community college twice on Twitter, clearly a matter dear to his heart, and it was only to dunk on young activists. Great work Lee! Fucking ridiculous wanker.
This guy’s Twitter output since his Strasserite colleague quit has basically been this.
I don't know about you Tim mate but I choose to judge a policy on its progressiveness based on an empirical analysis of the more than 100 years we've spent fighting a losing drug war through criminalisation with no positive benefit to society whatsoever.
If you are able to look at the results of our drug policies over the past century and still think they have had any progressive benefit for British society, then I suspect you are either a deeply reactionary individual at heart or simply aren't very bright. Take your pick Tim.
I just spent the weekend at Wilderness Festival with 20,000 mostly posh white folk. You can guarantee if they were the ones being disproportionately imprisoned for their ubiquitous mediocre cocaine habits people like Tim would probably be singing from a different hymn sheet.