‘Tougher than the Tories’ Reeves is not only even less human than Keir Starmer, but her appointment is a massive ‘f*** you’ to poor and vulnerable people, ethnic minorities and Scots – and potentially part of Mandelson’s planned war on trade unions
Keir Starmer’s ‘reshuffle’ appears to be an attempt to improve his public perception by promoting MPs with even less personality, empathy, charm or recognisability than himself – and has been condemned as a massive ‘f*** you’ to the poor, vulnerable and disabled.
Starmer has promoted the likes of Alan Campbell (who? exactly!) to the position of chief whip – but his decision to replace the bland Anneliese Dodds with Rachel Reeves as Shadow Chancellor has outraged many Labour supporters.
Reeves, a particularly wooden media performer, infamously promised in 2014 under Ed Miliband that Labour would be ‘tougher than the Tories’ on benefits claimants – signalling Labour’s complete surrender to the Tories ‘strivers vs scroungers’ demonisation of the poor, vulnerable, disabled and unemployed and their children.
The news of her appointment brought justified howls of outrage from those who suffer under Tory policies and those who stand with them. Socialist Telly’s ‘Cornish’ Damo Willey, who is an unpaid carer for disabled family members, tweeted that Starmer had effectively told millions of struggling people to go and f*** themselves:
He was not alone in being appalled. Here are just a few of the many nauseated responses:
Promoting Reeves also sends an awful signal to people from ethnic minorities, given her comments in 2016 about immigration causing riots, which many people of colour – and even the centrist New Statesman – felt was a dog-whistle to bigots:
Starmer’s appointment of Reeves also looks like a move in his handler Peter Mandelson’s open declaration of war on unions.
Mandelson said that Starmer’s priority in responding to the New-New Labour electoral disaster by attacking left union leadership – and Reeves told ITV’s Robert Peston that she would be happy to see unions’ influence in the Labour party – unions founded the party and democratically represent millions of members – subjected to the same proposed lobbying laws intended for unaccountable corporations and billionaires.
Reeves’s promotion is also a slap in the face to Scottish people, including Labour members. She was recently one of several Blairites in Westminster who tried to lever out then-Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard – shortly before Keir Starmer removed him to please anonymous wealthy potential donors.
When Keir Starmer was asked last week what changes he wanted to make in response to Labour’s catastrophic elections, he was unable or unwilling to name even one, in an excruciatingly embarrassing television interview. Small wonder – it seems that he views ‘change’ as meaning diverting from his own lack of leadership ability by promoting MPs with even fewer appealing qualities than he possesses himself.
In the process, he has insulted, alienated and appalled the millions persecuted for more than a decade by the Tories – and signalled that he doesn’t give a flying f*** about their feelings, suffering and future.
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Hmm, no idea what’s going on here.
Virtual, civil war, last night. Musical chairs, this evening, as though last night had never happened.
Who’s taking the Michael, then?
“Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all”
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apologies, meant for Foggy below. Spot on Foggy.📍📍📍
The only option come the next election is to actively campaign AGAINST any Labour MP who is not of the left (and vote Lib Dem, Green or Independent). WIPE THEM OUT and start afresh. Start campaigning NOW to make sure they are not re-elected.
Andrew Jenkinson, I’v posted same since about two months ago. I agree, except on no account the Lib Dem nor even Green. WIPE THEM out by voting Independent Left MPs
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It goes from bad to worse. foods always struck me as as Finance Minister who knew what she was talking about but Ok not a politician; that she shares with Starmer. He has to answer the Queen’s speech this week but it’s unlikely to knock your socks off. If this cabal, now strengthened, stays then that is really the end of the Party, it regresses into the past instead of facing the future.
Dodds not foods.
Doesn’t matter Paul foods …Dodds…even Ken dodd and his tickling stick.ITs all a two fingered salute to you the members.
The Ken Dodd /Anneliese Dodds confusion is understandable given their respective political philosophy and attitude to tax avoidance.
Every single MP that Starmer has sacked this weekend had been set up to fail by him. Sending any MP out onto the campaign trail with no policies then sacking/ demoting them is constructive dismissal.
I said on a previous skwawkbox article to watch out for a hard swing to the right and boy oh boy has Starmer succeeded. He’s not doing any ‘taking responsibility’ or listening to members or MP’s.
Enough is enough now. Starmer must be challenged to restate & defend the ten pledges that he has been mandated on in a leadership contest.
THIS TIME JON TRICKETT MUST STEP FORWARD !
You’ll have SteveH to answer to for that insolence!
Trickett will never ‘step forward’, or Lavery, or any other member of the so-called ‘Sociaist Campaign Group’, Foggy. These poseurs never even had the basic solidarity to refuse the Labour PLP Whip when Jeremy Corbyn was so unjustly refused the Whip. And Trickett could have stood against Starmer in the Leadership contest , rather than the useless Long-Bailey – but he is simply not up for it. The Lefties naively awaiting any real resistance from the poseurs of the PLP ‘Left’ will be waiting a long time. And anyway, no Labour PLP leftie could garner the nominations needed to stand anyway.
Forget any successful ‘Left fightback’ Foggy, it’s OVER for Labour as both an electable Party, and as a possible vehicle for Left advance, We had that once in a lifetime chance during the disastrous ‘Corbyn Insurgenc’, and the Left, particularly the Corbyn Circle (and Lansman’s spineless Momentum creature) , retreated constantly in the face of Right aggression, and muffed it , forever.
Incredibly hard as it would be, only a new Left Party OUTSIDE of Labour is worth spending any socialists time in building. And FPTP will not be the barrier it once was – because the collapse of Labour electorally has left a huge void in potential working class voting support , which the always , in practice, pro Austerity middle class non-socialist opportunists of the Green Party cannot fill, and which a new radical populist RIGHT party will fill if the Left doesn’t get its act together – as has been already demonstrated across Europe.
I’ve always thought of Trickett as kingmaker, rather than king, himself. He’d run a stonking campaign for Richard Burgon, for instance.
If I had to put my money on one single person who could, if only he’d walk from that bastard NEO-Labour TORY Party, then that is Andy McDonald, quiet and unasuming but he speaks it’s like thunder.
What worries me of the 10/15 UK Labour Party (RIP 13 Dec’19) MPs that they like to dangle on the outside of the NEO-Labour TORY Party HQ, like baubles, is what is their game!? Selection for leadership? NEVER AGAIN in that shithole TORY Party! Careerism? Easy Life? Their Constituents wants them to stay? What is it!?
Whatever it is, they are doing the electorate a diservice they are speaking UK Labour, but all they can offer is NEO-Labour TORY!
They need out so that we can get a new Party Started. If not for this GE then the next!
I suppose you could say to the Labour party membership, “Youve got what you paid for” with a knight of the realm and his shadowy cabinet.?Hardly worth saying more is it?
Rachel Reeves? Now wasn’t she the one who tweeted that a statue should be erected outside Parliament of that great admirer of Hitler and raging antisemite, Nancy Astor? By their friends ……
She was indeed, goldbach ! But then a knowledge of history has never been the Blairites’ strongpoint – eg, Starmer’s extraodinary misrepresentation of the ‘ 100 years since the Bryant and May workers demo’ nonsense , a bosses enforced turnout of its employees to lobby Parliament against a tax on matches – rather than the actually rightly famous Bryant & May ‘matchgirls’ (sic) Strike of 17 years later !
Skwawkbox is of course quite correct about the wooden media performance of the ghastlyex banker, Reeves, – but according to that megaphone of the Blairites, the Guardian, apparently Rachel Reeves AND that useless dummy, Jonathan Ashworth are all star media performers ! Such is the delusional world of the Blairite Right – full of triumphant hubris at their suvccess in smashing Corbynism, as they smash the Labour Left – drive out a hundred thousand activist Left members (the most likely current figure for members leaving is well over 100,000) , and drive NuLabour2 ever nearer to that final fall into PASOK-like electoral oblivion.
That the international PR man for sundry dictators and oligarchs , Peter Mandelson, is pulling Starmer’s strings as he drives Labour over this electoral cliff is beyond satire . Mandelson, that ‘Prince of Darkness’ , whose claimed ‘brilliant political stategising ‘ oversaw during the Blair/Brown era a fall in labour votes of 5 million and a halving of Labour’s membership, and the near collapse of the UK economy in 2008’s Great Financial Crash, due to Blairite banking deregulation, is puppeteering the pompous dummy woodentop , Starmer. It would make a good black comedy – but in today’s UK reality it is well beyond mere tragedy for the mass of the UK population, who will be truly fucked over by ever-more rampant privatisation and general destruction of civil society and workers rights by the bandits of the Tory Party and their crooked hedge fund vulture capitalists. .
if it had been a statue for Constance Markievicz she’d have my total support and help raise money for it
Along with Pollard they were both wet with adoration!
Vacuousity
Two things:
1) The Labour right lost these elections – where it is left-led, it has done well
2) Sir Keir should avoid Mark Drakeford like the plague. Starmer’s dismal election results across England contrasted with an increased vote for Welsh Labour, whose leader Mark Drakeford is on the left.
Democratic socialists have to fight back. As Steve Walker at Skwawkbox advocates, CLPs need to use votes of no confidence in Sir Keir.
We might not have MSM attention or the televisual news-management powers that the billionaire-supporting ‘centrist’ MPs could harness in the 2017 shadow cabinet resignations chicken coup fiasco, but this is not about the wretched Laura Kuensberg, this is about Labour Party Integrity.
The stench that Starmer is producing around himself is second to none!!
Noway can this person be a PM in a lifetime of politics he just can’t cut it!!
When he creates a stink he must think he’s summing up in front of a Jury looking for a guilty verdict, but not against himself!!
He will blame anyone on the shadow front bench he thinks isn’t on the same page as he is!
I think a vote of no confidence is well overdue in his case!!
Starmer “OUT”!
Reeves admires Nancy Astor, but is a vice-chair of LFI. She helped whip up the factitious claims of institutional anti-Semitism in Labour. Streeting is also an LFI supporter, though in July 2018 he called for “targeted economic sanctions” against Israel over illegal settlements. Reeves is a confused woman. An economist who has worked for capitalist outfits. An unapologetic supporter of Israel who admires an anti-Semite. Streeting is equally dizzy. He calls for sanctions against Israel yet supports the Israeli State. But in both cases, Starmer has promoted people whose support for Israel will please the B o D, which is the one thing we know he believes in.
Yes. Interesting that the BoD put in complaints about things that had been said by Reed, Nandy and Sheerman, but not about Reeves’ Astor comment.
I posted on the Guardian yesterday that it was funny how, the second after a Jewish leader stepped down, anti-Semitism became endemic throughout the Labour party; and then the second Corbyn stepped down, that systemic institutional anti-Semitism disappeared from every nook and cranny. I said it was almost as if the whole thing was an invention to attack Corbyn.
I think the posting might have lasted two minutes. Certainly not much more.
First fury at such Nazi stiupidity, then anger at such ignorant retards placed in positions of power, then the realization that all these Royalist conforming sub human devils are given this chance because these lower class whores to money for money are psychotic. No grasp of any reality; just construing fantasies over paid brats of satan pass their time considering. I last voted for Corbyn (also paid obscene amounts of money!) I no longer vote: no point. Such Nazis are everywhere …even amongst many powerful Jews! I am disabled. Evil people; I am not. I cross over to the other side of the street to wipe their slime off my feet and leave such Nazis to be judged by God. What a farse All Souls Day is now. May those who died fighting such evil rest in peace.