1. Margaret Hodge's Attack on Unite
2. Defeating Gerard Coyne
3. Keir Starmer's Cowardice: Another Exhibit
4. Evaporating Labour
5. Abdicating Leadership
A whole month of Labour related factional and polemical content. A poisoned well for some, but a good source of views as far as this place goes. It's not for want of trying to branch out with plenty of posts going after the Tories. The truth is the blog is entirely at the mercy of its tiny public, and as Labour remains a strategic site of struggle for working class politics I'm going to keep churning them out. Unfortunately, if you're bored with posts about the party we can look forward to more Keir Starmer-related tribulations in the month to come. Today's Batley and Spen contest isn't going to be great and leadership speculation isn't about to disappear, even if Labour scrapes home.
Which posts are drinking in the second chance saloon? There's another, yes another Labour leadership piece about the dysfunctional consequences it's having, or could have for wider establishment politics. And moving away and venturing into matters philosophy, there's this on deceleration. Any radical politics incapable of slowing down and taking stock is guaranteed to fail.
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«Unfortunately, if you're bored with posts about the party we can look forward to more Keir Starmer-related tribulations in the month to come.»
ReplyDeleteAs to that, I found I had saved and forgotten a wonderful quote from an "establishment" labourite who confesses having voted for Corbyn "because I wanted to avoid him coming last" and also because "the other candidates ran such astonishingly bad campaigns", and then adds, writing in February 2017 not long before Labour got the largest number of votes in 20 years:
https://medium.com/@MissEllieMae/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-corbyn-aafe32418dcf
“We don’t need terrifying opinion polls to tell us Corbyn is doing badly. We can just observe his performance so far and come to the conclusion ourselves. The sheer amount of opportunities he’s missed to stand up to the Tories. The easy wins for Labour, like stagnating wages and rights for the self-employed, which have fallen by the wayside. The unbelievable number of self-owns (Mao’s Little Red Book, anyone?). The inability to communicate clear messages on Brexit and the economy. The excessive hostility towards the media. The fact that he seems invisible a lot of the time. The incompetence in the way he treats his own staff. The incompetence generally.”
Ah the irony when comparing that with the present times! :-)
NOTE: It is hard to imagine someone writng that Corbyn had "excessive hostility towards the media" rather than the right-wing media having excessive hostility to him, but there it is.
But the relationship with the right-wing media (either way) is in that list the biggest difference (and perhaps the only real one) between that criticism of Corbyn and the situation with Starmer, who is indeed treated with deferential respect by the right-wing media.