I'm afraid I still find all this bizarre. He didn't actually _say_ Sir Keir was involved in the decision: he said he was director of public prosecutions (which he was) & he didn't prosecute (which he didn't). It's at least an arguable claim
bbc.co.uk/news/60213975
Compared to the things that get thrown around at other politicians (other leaders of the Labour Party, indeed) this is not a shocking scandalous outrageous line
But everybody's acting as though he'd said Starmer is a serial killer
Like a game of Mornington Crescent. Johnson's chugging all round the houses, everyone muttering "oh well played sir, damn fine shot, he may stretch the rules but he never breaks them", then suddenly he says Marble Arch & they all go Nooooooooooooooooo
Concrete example: how is this _more_ of a lie than "Labour caused the financial crisis", which the govt repeated for years without calling the wrath of the fact checkers down on their heads?
It's somewhat similar in that Lab were in charge at the time, but their decisions prob didn't really cause it; if anything that one is the bigger lie, bc a British govt is in charge of the world economy a lot less than the DPP is in charge of the CPS

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More from @EdmundGriffiths

Feb 3
Interesting task by @Zaid_ISN. A few scattered thoughts from me: first of all, useless innovations can be useless in different ways & I'm not sure all the examples Zaid gives are really no use to _anybody_
I hasten to establish that I am also an enemy of the space-age superbins & have been grumbling about them for years (which must mean they are a #serious #annoyance bc as you know grumbling is not my way)
But they're not useless to the council: they contain a solar-powered compactor that squeezes the rubbish down to a fraction of its size, meaning they don't need to be emptied as often & the council gets to cut its wages bill
Read 14 tweets
Jan 11
Are you though
Can't you though
Will they though
Read 4 tweets
Jan 10
Not sure; but the conditions in the 2000s were ok in fact. At the 2005 GE Respect won one seat & got one reasonably close second place (3300 votes behind the winner), plus two distant seconds; that's better than the Greens in 2019 (one win & two even more distant second places)
Obviously the overall vote share was much much smaller, but that's bc there were only a fraction as many candidates in places where they were never going to win
It isn't self-evident that when left electoral challenges falter it's purely because of objective conditions that mean they _couldn't_ succeed. The objective conditions aren't too easy (as though they are for any other approach); but there are political & strategic issues too
Read 5 tweets
Dec 31, 2021
This is true—but there's a further point, which is that deciding to support & campaign for Labour on the basis that it would be a bit better than the Conservatives (even assuming it would be) just means we'll be facing the same miserable choice next time & forever
If you want better options, you need to support & create them—even if that means not prioritizing getting the govt you'd (arguably) hate marginally less in the interim
The founders of the Labour Party understood that perfectly well. They didn't just say "any Liberal government is better than any Conservative government"; sometimes they did deals with the Lib Party, but also they aimed to replace it
Read 5 tweets
Nov 1, 2021
Suppose you could argue given it's the PM that he'd be doing it fatuously whatever he did; but this way of posing the question is itself more than a little, y'know
One of the biggest obstacles stopping the general public taking the climate situation fully seriously—I suspect, the biggest obstacle—is politicians who _talk_ as though it's an existential global crisis but _act_ as though it's nothing to worry about
I think most people just take it for granted that political rhetoric is mostly exaggerated (that's why they prob don't think e.g. the Tories will really privatize the NHS—they think people who say so are overegging things as always)
Read 6 tweets
Sep 28, 2021
I'm not talking abt Big Names With Platforms, who can be assumed to have known what they were doing re Sir Keir; but the fact large numbers of left-leaning members got duped does I'm afraid say something abt what the organized left had been explaining to people & what it hadn't
To many people on the left, inside Labour & out, it was transparently clear that Sir K was the candidate of anti-Corbynist revenge & authoritarian Blairism; but many other people, also more or less on the left, couldn't see it at all
So you have to ask: did the first set of people do everything they could have, in 2015-19, to help the second set become sufficiently politically aware that they wouldn't be taken for a ride like that?
Read 5 tweets

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