This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I’ve already moved on, and I urge anyone else to choose better, albeit now smaller, pastures from here on out. The Labour Party’s ability to serve the British working class is dead, with cheers from the holders of Capital in Britain ecstatic that the nominal left party is of no threat to them.

Did people come to this same conclusion when Blair was elected Leader in 1994? If so, clearly the Labour Party's ability to serve the British working class wasn't dead then, unless one is seriously going to argue that Blair's UK was materially no different for workers than Cameron's/May's/BoJo's; if not, then coming to this conclusion now implies the absolutely ludicrous belief that Starmer and his people are to the right of Blair and his people. The fact that any sane person could possibly hold that belief speaks to Corbyn's success in moving the party's center of gravity durably leftward, not to his many and various failures.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

These gossip books are always a mixed bag. The general picture presented will be broadly speaking accurate (and some important things will be confirmed: my suspicion that for a time last year Corbyn and McDonnell were not on speaking terms, for instance!) but many details will be dodgy and some of the more colourful stories will be heavily embellished.* It seems unlikely to do many reputations many favours, with the rather large exception of McDonnell.

_{*Usually it is the source, not the author, who does this.}

McDonnell is just about the only figure in the Labour hard left for whom my respect held steady after last December. Admitting straight-out that the election was a disaster, and one for which the leadership team he was part of bore a great deal of the responsibility, would once have been a low bar for somebody in McDonnell's position to clear, but, well, he did clear it, unlike Some.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Its really not.

Some voters don't like Starmer, actual representative surveys show that also quite a lot do.

Actual representative surveys mean nothing. Corbyn was personally popular for a good spell around and after the 2017 election.

Yes, and Labour did (relative to how it "by rights should" have done) very well in the 2017 election. How is that an argument for surveys not meaning anything?

He's like a Labour Theresa May.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not familiar enough with Starmer's public image or "aesthetic" to know what exactly you mean by this.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Thought of the day- what is the most hilarious/depressing/inept example of selection rigging in Labour history?

Patrick Gordon Walker at the 1965 Leyton by-election.

There is a story here. I'd like to hear it!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Who was the last Labour leader (other than Smith, obviously) to not make it to a single general election? Do you have to go back before the War?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

One talking point on both the right and Corbynite left, btw, is that the Tories have a blitz prepared on his time as DPP (you know, "he let Savile go free" and similar) if they ever felt really under threat by him. Even were such a plan to exist, it would surely be high risk tho.

I'm not familiar with Starmer's record as DPP. Did he (or could he reasonably be framed as having) let Savile go free? I know Savile's behavior was widely known in, and covered up by, the BBC and NHS, but I hadn't heard about figures like Starmer being in a position to know about it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The gender crits daily pile on (the Girl Guides got it yesterday for a tweet about asexuality) is LGBT Labour after an unsubstantiated claim about two men vetting lesbians holding 'gender critical' views.

Anyone asking for evidence is being called a misogynist, because this is where we are now.

What does asexuality have (allegedly) to do with anything?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Perhaps this is a difference in perceptions of different types of people between the US and the UK, but I never got particularly left-wing vibes from Lammy. He's always struck me as very much a social-liberal type of person rather than a social-democratic one. During the various dramas of 2019 he was on MSNBC all the time to explain the situation to liberal middle-class Americans.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I gained a lot of respect for McDonnell when he publicly and apparently sincerely took responsibility for the 2019 catastrophe.