Unlike Ian Lavery or, for that matter, Keir Starmer, there's no single burning reason ruling out Jess from standing. There's a multitude of them. Let's see. There's the dishonesty, the scabby behaviour, the overweening narcissism, the racism, the lying, and the chummy relations with the right wing press. Bad enough to make even a Tory MP blush, I'm sure you would agree.
Apt then her dishonesty extends to the very organisation of her leadership campaign. Former Grimsby MP Melanie Onn has spent the time since the election bleating about how we "can't afford internationalism" and that the second referendum did for Labour. All bitter digs at Jeremy Corbyn and the left and, by extension, Keir Starmer's campaign. It also happens Jess Phillips was also an enthusiastic advocate for this positioning. And yet, Mel Onn is now Jess's media spox talking about how she is the best thing since sliced bread. Either she has had a Damascene conversion to her boss's strategic nous, or it only really mattered because Corbyn was doing it.
Very obviously her record means Jess is not a fit and proper person to be a Labour MP, never mind the party's leader. But, you know, I am a bit of a softy and always willing to give others a second chance. So is there anything in her campaign video and the accompanying Mirror article that can persuade her critics and sceptics? Does she make a distinctive contribution to the post election debate a la Rebecca Long-Bailey's pitch and Lisa Nandy's Blue Labourism? And the answer to both is no. Nothing. Her article talks about how the Tories have screwed over her Birmingham Yardley constituency, how public services are crumbling, how she has held Boris Johnson to account for their miserable record and her admirable record working with vulnerable women and domestic violence survivors. The problem is how does this differ from any other Labour MP? All constituencies have suffered cuts, all Labour MPs have represented the interests of those affected by them, and all have written letters to ministers and asked questions in the Commons. Quite a few of them have also supported women's refuges and counselled victims of abuse. There is nothing in this prospectus to differentiate her from any other MP. All, that is, save her "big personality". Apparently this is what is needed to take on Johnson.
And then there is the politics. Apart from remain and having previously opposed the Iraq War to the point of resigning from the Labour Party in protest, what are her politics beyond episodically convenient means for self-advancement? I've been told by those who know her that, apparently, she's "very left-wing economically". But so was Kate Hoey and look where she ended up. Despite having had ample opportunity these last four years to set out where she stands, she hasn't gone out her way to promote a single policy that would benefit her constituents more than it would benefit herself. Instead, she has taken up every media appearance as an opportunity to establish her "character", and more than happily contributed to the trashing of the party. And without any obvious politics, this begs the most important question: why does she want to be Labour leader? "Because I'd be rather good at it" isn't an answer.
Does this all sound a wee bit familiar? It should. More than any politician on Labour's benches, Jess resembles Boris Johnson. No hard and fast politics, an unbecoming vanity bordering on the monomaniacal, and a desperate striving for the spotlight. Johnson and Phillips are twins, not antipodes. In the remote possibility of her actually winning the leadership contest, she will work tirelessly to undo the positive changes to Labour and will be egged on by the Murdoch press. Hers then is not a prospectus for winning office, big personality or no, but for civil war within the party while Johnson tries to consolidate the recent Tory gains. Don't know about you, but I think Labour could do without that kind of distraction.
Jess Phillips then is nothing but a media personality with a seat, puffed up by an unwarranted sense of self-importance. She is a vehicle for the regrouping of the Labour right and a means of making Labour safe for those interests who reaped the benefits of a decade of cuts and misery. Of all the candidates, declared or no, she is by far the worst, is most likely to do the party a serious disservice, and come nowhere near to forming a government. Labour can't fight Boris Johnson by presenting the public with a vapid narcissist of our own.
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21 comments:
«or it only really mattered because Corbyn was doing it»
I have been pointing out in the FT and The Guardian comment sections that in 2017 80% of MPs and 85% of party voters had voted for "get brexit" done, yet the FT and The Guardian were attacking relentlessly Corbyn for "2nd ref" and "campaign for Remain", and in 2019 55% of voters have voted for "2nd ref" parties, yet they have completely stopped the campaign for "2nd ref", going from 100% to 0% abruptly, and have started supporting (even if with some tut-tutting and hand-wringing) the glorious government of the champion of hard "Leave". Almost as if the "People's Vote" campaign only purpose was to screw up Labour, and once that mission was accomplished, the "Remainers" mattered nothing any more.
«Does this all sound a wee bit familiar? It should. More than any politician on Labour's benches, Jess resembles Boris Johnson. No hard and fast politics, an unbecoming vanity bordering on the monomaniacal, and a desperate striving for the spotlight.»
That would not be too bad, sometimes it takes a an opportunistic cad to fight an opportunistic cad, and she went to the "Daily Mirror" for her campaign, not to a Murdoch paper or the Daily Mail, like so many "centrist" Labour MPs do. Or perhaps she is a bit like the left-wing version of Anna Soubry :-).
Her being rumoured to be left-wing economically and her opposition to the Iraq war are good markers as you point out. Overall she reminds me more of David Davis and his principled stand against the anti-civil-rights laws of Tony Blair.
«Of all the candidates, declared or no, she is by far the worst»
Oh no! That's Yvette Cooper, the super-cynical hard-thatcherite clone of Jo Swinson. Like Chuka Umunna was she is in the wrong party.
«Unlike Ian Lavery or, for that matter, Keir Starmer, there's no burning reason ruling out Jess from standing.»
An interesting point about Keir Starmer: I follow The Guardian and FT comment sections (and occasionally when I can stomach it the Daily Mail one...) and invariably the anti-Corbyn "I always voted Labour but I am a likudnik thatcherite" commenters said that they wished Starmer replaced Corbyn, not Cooper, not Umunna (before he left), not Watson.
Those commenters were quite obviously part of an "astroturf" campaign, as they repeated the identical talking points with no arguments, just claims, and with almost the same words with little variations (yet I reckon they were mostly volunteers, not paid ones), which to me means that Starmer is beloved by the Establishment and security services of the UK and of some small middle eastern and large western atlantic government. Put another way you don't get to be director of public prosecutions unless you are a "trustie" of the "deep state".
Which may be an advantage for Labour, of the "only a Republican like Nixon could have gone to China" sort.
However the single biggest problem with Keir Starmer is that he is the personification of the "2nd ref" policy, and he is thus the person that as Labour leader is most likely to consolidate the Conservative gains in the "Leave" constituencies of the north. My impression is that quite a lot of Labour "leftoids" are still unaware how personally angry and offended are so many northern "Leave" voters that exit has not happened yet.
Things could be worse. They really could. The Blair cult in Labour is well financed and firmly entrenched. Siobhain McDonagh might throw her hat into the ring. Imagine that!
"My impression is that quite a lot of Labour "leftoids" are still unaware how personally angry and offended are so many northern "Leave" voters that exit has not happened yet."
I said before the election that my girlfriends mother would just shout at the TV every time Corbyn came on it, and this was mainly to do with Corbyn's Brexit policy but also his socialism.
There are 2 things that people may not be aware of about the 'Labour heartlands', one is that people are generally racist to the core and secondly that the BNP far better represented the views of the average person than did any socialist. In many ways when i look at the the average person in the so called labour Heartlands I would consider Hitler to be a moderate (moderate in that his world view pretty much chimes with the average).
Now being aware of this I would say that we should ignore what these racist scumbags believe and just stick with a socialist platform. let the fuckers go over to the Tories I say. Decades of pandering to these shitfucks has done little to progress anything.
As someone who lives in one of Labour's heartland seats (Midlands admittedly) I just don't recognise your description "...that people are generally racist to the core and secondly that the BNP far better represented the views of the average person than did any socialist". True there are some racists but they are more likely to have never voted than been part of Labour's core vote.
Yvette Cooper has ruled out standing, for the record.
And given that, its hard to see how she restores herself to relevance in the future. All that media puffery going back five solid years if not more.....and for what?
It's not a slick campaign video. It's one dimensional and very clumsy in places, although it does some things well. It's just much better than anything that Labour has produced in a long time.
«Now being aware of this I would say that we should ignore what these racist scumbags believe and just stick with a socialist platform. let the fuckers go over to the Tories I say.»
Well the functions of a "radical progressive movement" (in the words of Gordon Brown) are to represent those who already believe in the socialdemocratic/socialist approach, and to aim for power too, but also to lead/educate/improve. There are people who are "structurally" not for Labour, their interests are too opposed to those of the people who have to work for a living, and it is pointless indeed to pander to them:
«Decades of pandering to these shitfucks has done little to progress anything.»
But a lot of the people you describe are just yielding to their most superficial and worst instincts, and letting them being pandered to by the right is not just a loss, but wrong. Indeed I am not arguing with the Yvette Coooper/Rachel Reeves style opportunists that they should be pandered to Labour too; but that their views can change over time. After all that's what PR people believe too :-). BTW I am also against trying to change their views with something like the endless "shaming" campaigns beloved by the identity politics types.
One of the essential differences between conservatives and progressives is that progressives believe that while human character is not always and particularly nice, it can be slowly improved, even if with difficulty, and given the right circumstances.
For example I reckon that many if not most propertied middle/upper-middle class voters who work for a living too can be persuaded that their interests are more "proletarian" (in the classic sense used by our blogger) than rentierist by pointing out how risky their small holding of assets is and how much more secure is social insurance...
RtD
For what its worth (and it may not be much, granted) the video that Starmer has just released knocks spots off it IMO.
Blissex,
One of the former persona of the troll who uses dozens of different pseudonyms such as BCFG (Brian Clough Football Genius), along with DFTM, CAAC, Chris, Brian B, Dave, SIOB and so on was the BNP supporting Sentinel.
So I wouldn't put too much story in any of these comments he is now making, which simply fall into the same pattern of trolling behaviour of trying to provoke a response that he can turn into yet another pointless flame war.
Bless.
By far the worst prospective candidate is the financially dodgy (dodgy - not actually guilty of anything illegal), sexist, self-avowed champion of the "white working class", Ian Lavery. Far, far worse than Phillips.
“But a lot of the people you describe are just yielding to their most superficial and worst instincts, and letting them being pandered to by the right is not just a loss”
I think they are reflecting the tabloids but as experiments have shown, while you can brainwash someone to dance like a Chicken, you can’t brainwash someone to jump of a tall building.
This means that the reason the tabloid message drives home is because people are already primed to accept those messages. The question is why. Now there are probably a number of reasons for this, but no doubt the kind of pro imperialist civilising mission bullshit that Boffy supports is part of the reason people are ready to hold these views. Britain’s colonial past had the affect of binding the working class to its masters. Imperialism is uber economic nationalism and ultimately a form of supremacy and the nod and the wink between the ruling and ruled classes is lets keep this supremacy in place, Rule Britannia in other words.
Marx identified this danger in his writings on Ireland and Engels in his attacks against the chauvinism of Hyndman.
Any leftist who isn’t anti imperialist is a fake leftist.
The other trend we have to factor in, due to the emergence of the World Market , is the class composition of the UK. In the UK is no real proletariat in the classic Marxist sense, Britain stands in the world market as the money laundering centre.
The only thing that will change people is a weakening of the UK’s place in the world market and a decline in its imperialist power, i.e. reduction of control over shipping lanes etc and its ability to siphon off the surplus value created by ‘super-exploited’ labour in the Global South. Polite persuasion won’t and hasn’t cut it. If anything after a century of state education and decades of political correctness people are even worse now than they have ever been.
What we have are barbarians with iphones. This is something the likes of Boffy can’t contemplate or get their heads around, for them only the natives can be uncivilised.
Given the pathetic level of self criticism in the West across the whole spectrum of poliics, coupled with the Wests iron fisted and murderous grip on the rest of the world, it is little wonder things are as they are.
One of Israles keyboard warriors writes,
"Ian Lavery. Far, far worse than Phillips."
This is a Typical ad hominem attack from the witch hunter Denham.
I guess that makes up the minds of all genuine socialists then. Let us start the Ian Lavery for Labour leader campaign right now.
I've always enjoyed how sections of the Left are still lugging the ol' Transitional Programme around with them, whilst hardly any of them of heard of it, let alone understand it. There are that tiny number of late middle aged men who besides curiously sharing a tendency to having halitosis (and various other tendencies in times gone by), and being weirdly hostile to women unless they are young cadres who can be preyed on, actively peddle the same old Trotskyist fantasies. And then there are all the keen young things who really really want to be revolutionaries and more leftwing than anyone else. And we saw where that got us before Xmas.
For all you ingenues out there: for best part of a hundred years the Left in most countries has had an infestation of people who form teeny weeny groups whose title has to include at least one of 'revolutionary', 'proletarian' or 'workers', who then, conscious of the fact that the workers are never going to vote for them, nestle up to handy social democratic party and set about the key task of pointing out how treacherous the leadership is and how critical it is to denounce them as often as possible. The aim is to get the poor old workers to believe that all their past and present leaders are traitors so that everyone ends up being really disillusioned and paranoid and then will suddenly realise is what we really need is a collection of rather weird late middle aged men, with bad breath and a habit of leering at young women, to step forward to be our leaders. This hasn't worked either as the trail of failed revolutionary groups demonstrates, and sometimes it's necessary to get a young person who presents as being relatively normal to front things up. But in the background the shades of Gerry Healy, Ted Grant, Tony Cliff and many more are hovering. Happy New Year, Sam Gunn
"There are that tiny number of late middle aged men who besides curiously sharing a tendency to having halitosis"
You missed: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, ho chi minh etc etc and oh does Rosa Luxemburg count given she wasn't pretty and got old when she became Middle aged? Incidentally all those people were young once, right?
The other thing to mention, according to US research, (their private health care system necessitates research in area like this in order to scare people into buying products) incidences of bad breath are more common in women than men, so it is more likely that the men were preying on women with bad breath.
To quote the study:
"Women have a bad smell from the mouth more often. In all age groups we observed higher degree of bad breath in women."
Isn't it funny how out there in ignoramus land the opposite is perceived.
REDS UNDER THE BED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111111111111111111111111111
My latest comment was in response to the most recent anonymous commenter.
Sorry, I meant the last but one commenter before me.
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