But plan exposes arrogance of presuming to define what ‘normal’ is and deciding that only those will be allowed to become MPs
Labour insiders have briefed their friends in the so-called ‘centrist’ media that they want to train candidates it considers ‘normal’ to be future MPs.
Of course, since only right-wing, pro-Starmer candidates are being allowed anywhere near selections by the right, sardonic eyebrows will be raised at the thought that any of the drones who survive vetting against personality and principle could be ‘normal’. But far more serious is the underlying idea that Starmer and co have the right – or are remotely qualified – to decide what ‘normal’ is.
So far, signs are that – in the eyes of Keith and co – left-wing Jews are not ‘normal’. Nor are Muslims – and only certain black people might be allowed to make the grade, as long as they’re not too vocal on black rights or enthusiastic about the Black Lives Matter movement (not ‘moment’, take note!).
Arch-right-winger Luke Akehurst told Politics Home that ‘reflect the diversity of the country’ and who ‘have the skill set to be potential government ministers’. But that diversity is a funny thing in the minds of the Labour right – anyone who believes in the human rights of Palestinians will be barred, so again left-wing Jews and many Muslims will be just too ‘diverse’ to be allowed in, as will anyone keen on Labour members exercising their democratic rights without control and interference from ‘centre’.
Don’t forget that when Keir Starmer wanted to put together a ‘diversity panel’ early in his leadership, he chose an all-white set of people to sit on it and sidelined the party’s most senior employee of colour from it, which gives a fair idea what ‘diversity’ looks like to the Labour right. When Labour’s conference overwhelmingly passed a motion to support Palestinians by peaceful sanctions against Israel, Starmer and his cronies immediately dismissed it and cooked up a bizarre excuse for ignoring the party’s sovereign policy-making body.
And Starmer’s acolytes have been involved in mass purges at local government level of both Muslim councillors and their black colleagues in order to replace them with people from the approved pale, compliant and millionaire-friendly mold, while others have shown their real attitudes toward Gyspy-Roma Travellers.
And ‘normal’ is not allowed to mean anyone remotely anti-capitalist, anyone too invested in the rights of working people or the renationalisation of the NHS, or anyone who wants to do more than tinker around the edges while making sure nothing really changes.
Keir Starmer and his machine are not qualified to decide what ‘normal’ is. Because wanting to fix this country’s utterly broken system, or having black or brown skin, or a commitment to human rights and to fighting apartheid no matter the colour or religion of victims or perpetrators, or wanting a genuinely renationalised NHS, renationalised energy companies and every other critical industry in our country to be in public hands – those things are ‘normal’. But they’re in very short supply on the Labour right.
What isn’t normal is being against those things. The diseased minds of the Labour right wouldn’t recognise real ‘normal’ – in all its diversity and all its colours, religions and lifestyles – if it bit them.
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Temporary Embarrassment’s behaviour is normal when you are appealing to the Tory core vote, when it’s a race to the bottom and your looking to go to war, double the prison population or have dead children washed up on your shores
I fear a war on Iran, which Starmer is very likely to support.
Or more likely at the moment in the Ukraine.
@Paul
War in Iran is unlikely. As much as the Israeli government would dearly love to wipe Iran out, it’s not going to happen.
@Felicity
This is the real flashpoint area. If the Russian federation isn’t taken seriously, and they are deadly serious, expect some precision strikes. The worry is that someone from NATO (who shouldn’t be there really) is caught up or killed during the limited skirmish (Russia doesn’t want the Ukraine or it’s problems)
Paul, steady on. Don’t mention the wars or the Baltic, Ukraine and more recently the Balkans.+
Not convinced Doug, there is nothing Temporary about this Parasite TORY Party. They are not making much of a scene about anything this Government does. A scene: A lot more than standing at the box, and ever so politely telling your contemporaries that they are naughty boys and girls.
https://ibb.co/N9TVBFJ
We can fool ourselves and allow Blair/Thatcher’s Neoliberalism to consume The PEOPLE’S hopes of a better life, by voting for the Brand “Labour”, however all we will achieve is an extension of 43 years of TORY HELL. The PEOPLE have no means of winning the next GE, there are no one to vote for, there is no CHOICE like 2019, it is TORY vs TORY. The Smaller Parties wont/cant win Nationally, tactically voting Neoliberal Green/LD, are not ideal, but will go a long way towards Decolonising The TORY Parasites from The UK Labour Party. We can only start to rebuild an Opposition Party, worthy of The People’s Vote, be that Labour or anything Else, with those Sabotaging TORIES out of The Opposition.
What we have to look at is their behaviour History and completely ignore their Meaningless Empty Tin Can Promises.
Don’t Worship The Corporate Brand.
https://ibb.co/DbpwymS
The Labour right are well beyond parody.
We have a broken system that has been trashed by neoliberalism, and that is running blindly to it’s demise.
Add to that a Labour Party that is totally unfit for purpose, and it doesn’t take a genius to see the problems confronting us.
All I would say is look at how things have flatlined for ordinary people since the financial crash of 2008, the fall in the average wage since about 1980 at least, and how the 13 years of New Labour actually made, in the final analysis, no change in this downward trajectory.
In only one sense, I would welcome a Starmer government because it would finally wake up those people who think only the currently constituted Labour Party is all we have.
Why do we put our trust in a Parliamentary Labour Party made up mainly of dishonest LibDems and Tory-lites with only a semblance of a conscience, that Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath were to the left of?
How about we ask the Electoral Commission to prosecute Red Tories for Electoral Fraud
Or
Ask Temporary Embarrassment to stand again
“All Animals are diverse – but some are *more* diverse than others ..*
after George Orwell
*more* = less (of course)
It seems that even the accursed Margaret Thatcher was to the left of some in the “Labour” Party today. When she was PM back in the eighties, corporation tax and capital gains tax were much higher than they are today. When Corbyn stated before the last GE that as Prime Minister he would raise them (though not to the level under Thatcher) he was greeted by a barrage of venomous insults from the Establishment and its media, portraying him as some kind of Bolshevik (I recall a TV news item from around that date where a “Lenin cap” was superimposed on a picture of him). All this disgusting bilge eventually had the desired effect of alienating the electorate from him. We all know what the result of this was – the Johnson Tory government that we know and love today, not forgetting Keith Stalin the “opposition leader” that has done nothing but enable the Tories to do their dirty work – witness the recent collaboration over “no jab, no job” policies in care homes and the NHS, one of the greatest attacks on the working class in over a generation.
MSM…..the most powerful teacher we have today & the sole arbiter of News; Current Affairs & Morality.
What I don’t understand is why any of you are still members of the Labour Party. If you are still a member you are implicitly a Starmer supporter. How do you justify it?
The Whole Purpose of Blair/Murdoch’s The People of The SUN and Campbell/Mandelson’s People of The SUN in Lamb’s Clothing aka The Guardian, was to bit by bit drag once Centre Left to Right Voters way Past The Ghost of Thatcher’s Right Wing Conservative TORY Spot.
https://ibb.co/0hbxVLd
Don’t know about no jab, but when that right hook lands it’s wrist will break. That will spoil his late night reading, ” Max Headrooms picture book of the Thatcher years”. He needs his right hand for that.
I suppose that Starmer would classify psychopathic behaviour with homicidal tendencies as “Normal” but thats what happens when the members voted for a lunatic to be incharge of the Assylum……No excuses please you need to be honest with yourselves and start the new year with a “good confession” .IF you are still feeding the parasites…Why?
Yep Joseph, it would seem that Pretty Fucked Up is the now Normal. I will Second that New Years Confession.
And now the last Blairite PM tells us that Afghanistan is a failed state …………….. I wonder how that came about?
Talking about conffession…nelly skelly after the virus big pharma scam we need a “Truth and justice commissioner to route out the carpetbaggers,.
I see Labour are looking for a crackdown on anti virus campaigners and anyone else who states the “bloody obvious” that I am doing now.ITs not just scaremongering to describe the leader of the Labour party and the party as a
Fascist endeavour “…Normal people wouldn’t join the Labour party or serve in it anymore than the Nazis in Germany that continued to prop up the the
Hitler regime despite knowing the atrocities committed to cleanse the country of jews socialists gypsys and slavs as a slave race.I saw a repeat of Nazis in Pretoria RSA in the Boar heartlands and I see the same out of control fanatics in the emerging mutated Labour party…
So Starmer wants only “normal” people to stand as Labour candidates, with the potential for future ministers?
Would that be normal, as in the creepy Petie, the weirdo’s bestie sense?
Many (unthinking) people regard “Normal” as “Me and people like me.” I don’t doubt for one minute that people such as Redwood, Johnson, Mogg, the Queen, Prince Charles etc etc all regard themselves as “Normal.” People who have “my views, my attitude to other people, other nations, and everything else I support or abhor.”
That is of course dangerous, because if we do not try to see others views, then we can develop some strange, not to say, downright extreme views. Hence all those Blairites in the Labour Party only ever mix fully with Blairites, and have no cognition of other views within the party, and you get MPs such as Lammy claiming it’s a rainbow coalition and open to all ……
Normal as in ‘people like us’ is natural and the instinct to it is probably hard-wired and paty of biological and psychological make-up. Socialists (who were/should be dialectic materialists) and even Liberals previously compensated against the dangers this presented by believing and even encouraging variety aand diversity of opinion. Voltaire’s nifty little quote about freedom of speech/ defend your right to have is even when the belief you express harms me, is how the liberals and (some RW libertarians express it), WORRYINGLY, the democratic left too easily forgets this.
Corbyn’s votes aagainst mandatory vaccination of NHS staff and show-me-your-papers passports for venues were defended by himself on this basis. There’s the reason why he’s always on the right side of history – he’s a real socialist and a real dialectic materialist that respects others differentness.
OH, would we all be capable of this??
Starmer isn’t; he’s an authoritarian.
We know what works, what we don’t know is how to stop it being corrupted
Who policeth the police, moral hazard is a start, making an example of someone like the War Criminal is a good start
Normal as in greedy, power mad, war-mongering, hate-mongering, fear-mongering, deceitful, devious and deceitful, and totally corrupt and sadistic!
Just like HIM!!
Oops…. devious and duplicitous, that is!
Labour is dead.
It is an irrelevance.
Labour is dead but The PEOPLE need an Opposition Party, whoever that will be, to achieve that we need to remove The imposters, the Parasite TORIES from that Position. As long as they are in Labour pretending to be “an Opposition and working for The People, not The X-Lateral Commission”, Sabotaging/Conniving underhandedly leading The PEOPLE to Eternity of This TORY vs That TORY NON-CHOICE Merry-Go-Round from Hell, there will be no scope for anyone else to fill that vacancy.
As The PEOPLE, we need to Unite and Vote every Neoliberal Neo-Labour Party Parasite TORY OUT. Whether we care about Labour or not, it’s about having an Opposition Party or NOT, at this stage, it can’t happen this GE as there is no choice, but we can tactically vote out the Imposter “Opposition”. Only by freeing those seats will we create the opportunity to fill them with someone who speaks for/with us The PEOPLE or “The Undeserving Poor and Occasionally Normal”!
Yup, nelly k skelly – the ‘party being dead’ is just the papyrus on which we write our eternal holy scripts drying and beginning to rot (being unfit for purpose) and this makes the scipture illegible (and the party unelectable?).
Maybe it’s time to carefully transfer our holy writings onto new papyrus (and digitise it too), wheher the trade unions fund it or not – we can crowdfund (‘plebfund’) the entire thing!
I still believe the “WAR” is between The PEOPLE and NO OPPOSITION PARTY, we simply will have no Voice in Parliament until the Imposter Parasite Neo-Labour Party TORIES are booted out of their seats to make way for Democrats Socialists/Socialists to take easily. After another 5 years of Misery and Hell, The PEOPLE should be wide awake sitting up, listening. I am not, believe me I’m NOT speaking from a position of any comfort, but this is extremely serious now, look what they did in 2 years, wasting time on Neo-Labour Party TORIES again, as we did Blair will add another 10/15/20 Years of suffering to the already 43 years of TORY HELL, but bite the bullet now and get it out the way and done for the children, tomorrow’s leaders. I hope it works out that way as a lot of Twitter seems to talk that way and the past couple of elections it seemed evident. If I could survive another 15 years and see The PEOPLE take back Control, no matter which Socialist Party, I would ecstatic and ready to hop along my Galaxy Planet Hopping.
Did this one today, thought you might like it.
https://ibb.co/sCMyPsK
I don’t see the point in liberal “democracy”. Nothing will change.
The corrupt white supremacist system of capitalism will always be supported.
For now Frank yes, for now, but we can only do what is doable and for now in my opinion we need to get an Opposition Party It will most likely be Democratic Socialists as there is no way we will get Socialism or Communism into The HoC without the Democratic Socialist stepping stones, that is why so many unrelated and unknown to each other Democratic Socialists and Socialists were out on the Internet combatting the Lies, Smear, MSM 24/7 onslaught so that we could get the Democratic Socialist Government we needed as the stepping stone in, alas the MSM and internal sabotage from the Imposter Parasite TORIES was too heavy, too powerful. And now even Democratic Socialists are as good as Terrorists in the MSM Sheeple’s Eyes, a bit like Little America now!
nellykskelly.
Nope.
I’m bored with the same old same old.
Nothing will change by putting X every 5 years.
We need to be building a revolutionary movement.
My father was a partisan during the war, they won’t give us freedom.
We have to take it.
In many ways I fully support that, the trouble is that we will have to find non conflict means of Revolution, Boycotts, National Strikes, with modern warfare and trigger happiness any sort of violent revolution will be over on moments. There are many ways we can make a damned decent point without violence, hit their pocket will be the fastest. It will be no less a Struggle.
This is frightening, how he said this with such conviction and confidence, They want us all off into space slaving away in their Big Amazon’s in the Sky!
https://ibb.co/KsM27Np
Just imagine I wished to be a Labour applicant to stand as an MP. Which particular model of Starmer should I pretend to support? Would it be the early, very left Starmer from his student days; or his later servile attitude to the elite as DPP; or perhaps his pro-Palestinian stance of c.2015; or his “beliefs” in 2016 when he wrote his letter of resignation to Corbyn as part of the Chicken Coup; or would I be following his 10 “promises” in his leadership campaign, mixed with his donations from millionaires; or would it be his anti-Corbyn stance of the last two years; or should I support his own support for the Tories, including their woeful Brexit (non) plan; and would I also be expected to go missing every weekend?
Great point JR. Whichever version of the starmerbrand you adopted, you’d still need Klaus Schwab’s endorsement and the WEF seal of approval!
Joe Robson… Starmer was never left wing ever in his younger days.People seem to ignore the fact that some of us were in the Labour party in East Surrey and a councillor.I was vice chair of his local CLP for many years and never had one member with the name Starmer,although a lawyer I know went to the local snobs Reigate independent School fee payin with boy 👦 knight.
.Starmer is a plant and I keep repeating this but like the virus people tend to follow the media lies and propaganda that produced the knight from Surrey who was a socialist.Understand that the Labour party did not contribute to this appalling fascist dictator…He was manufactured in Surrey and planted by the Media and trilaterals to destroy the Labour party and hes succeeded.
I see that Tony Blair is to be knighted with the highest possible ranking, He is appointed a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the oldest and most senior British Order of Chivalry.
I suspect normal in this sense means none political so that no policy propositions are likely to appear as an alternative. The trouble in finding these normal is that they will not commit to all the hassle involved.
There is no such thing as normal. Sounds like media baloney to convince floaters that labour MPs will be like them (LOL).
Alan Dershovits has denounced Desmond Tutu as evil and the greatest anti-semite of our time. During the election he was given free rein and plenty of opportunity to slander Corbyn. The appaling interview on Channel 4 News should be revisited.
Dershovits is now embroiled in the Epstein scandal.
Wow!
I had to check that you were talking about the same bloke! And of course, you were spot on!
A man given, as you say, free rein to threaten Corbyn with legal action had he been elected PM, a man who brought Corbyn into a discussion about the American system of politics on Channel 4 (!), a man about whom the BBC now apologises for the editorial decision to interview him – the FIRST person to be interviewed as a “neutral lawyer” in the Maxwell case, and about whom “A BBC News interview with a lawyer accused of the sexual abuse of a minor after Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction “did not meet the BBC’s editorial standards”, the corporation has said.”
What can one say? Except “Wow!”
Joe….I am sure that lawyers are basically bottom feeders and thats why they infect the democratic party and the Labour party.There are basically good ones but to be safe avoid them like the plague(virus)and never vote for one.IF theres sleeze,corruption or perversions then lawyers are to the front being establishment waste…….treat all waste and dump it as far away from human habitation or recycle….but keep them away from children and small animals.
Alan Dershowitz Calls Desmond Tutu ‘Anti-Semite’ and ‘Bigot’ After His Death
https://www.newsweek.com/alan-dershowitz-calls-desmond-tutu-antisemite-bigot-1663559
What is taking place in the LP and in the political system within the West is but a mirror image of the same phenomena taking place across all spheres and at all levels across the cultural desert the West has now become.
Whether it is the LP, your local authority, where you work, or whatever organisation or institution you might observe or occasionally need to interface with at any point in time, nothing works properly or effectively. Anywhere. Any more.
From a technical/organisational point of view the following link provides a reasonable introduction:
https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2018/01/31/in-the-eternal-inferno-fiends-torment-ronald-coase-with-the-fate-of-his-ideas/
However, it does not explain the dynamics. So here is a metaphor for where we are and how we got here. The event which provides the metaphor below actually happened. And there will be many other people who have witnessed similar types of events in their own lives over the past forty odd years:
“Five engineers dealing with a damaged cable found upon excavating the pavement on a busy High Street in an urban area the damage had occurred as a result of a newly laid operational gas pipe by contractor’s working for the then recently privatised Gas utility.
A senior manager, at an equivalent level of an army lieutenant colonel in the company hierarchy, happened to be passing on his way back from a meeting. After assessing the situation he instructed the engineers to do to the gas main what the Gas Company contractors had done to the telecom cable and duct.
The engineers, without saying a word, simply handed the Rupert the tools to carry out the instruction, drove their works vehicles several hundred yards down the road, and sat supping tea to see what would happen.”
And that, in a nutshell is what has occurred en masse.
Across the entire Western world at every level the replacement of competent adults with complete numpties who don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground has resulted in those who do know what they are doing simply walking away from the clusterfuck which everything these twelve year old managerialist clones touch because they are outnumbered and do not want to be any part of the disaster when it invariably happens.
In instances where its not possible to immediately walk away the grown up’s have bided their time till retirement and taken their pensions.
Either way, including within the political parties like the LP, those who are competent have simply voted with their feet rather than be part of a complete bodge job.
You can see the electoral outcome in stark terms with the rise in the ‘none of the above’ non voting cohort over the past half century or so.
Between 1974 and 1997 this number exceeded 11 million only once – 1983. Following the corrupt Blair Government of 1997-2001 (before the illegal wars) that figure rose above 18 million – over 40% of the eligible to vote electorate.
It only reduced by around 1.5 million to a low of 15.5 million in 2015 before reducing by a further 0.9 million – two years later in 2017 (Go figure). In a stark reversal the 2019 election saw this rise to 15.75 million – just below the 2010 election figure.
Given the Stalinist approach of the Starmer Junta in its war against the wrong kind of voter/electorate leaving no choices on the table other than three versions of the same product – you can have any cola you like but water is permanently off the menu – its better than even odds that figure will rise to around the 20 million or above mark next time around.
That would be sufficient on its own to prevent any possibility of the pink Tory Party forming a Government at national level.
All the approach detailed in this article will achieve is tumbleweed when it comes to getting boots and bodies on the ground for canvassing come election time – local as well as national. This lot will be reduced to hiring mercenaries from the Tories and Lib-Dems to do the business on the ground.
If they can afford it.
Normal?
There is nothing ‘normal’ about this Labour Party!
It’s very normal.
The Labour party has always supported the corrupt white supremacist system called capitalism.
Corbyn would have too.
They have silenced the membership and took away individual thought now they have turned to MPs who will be chosen for slavish controllability, We have Powell, Reeves and several others calling for control of messages on the internet, we are heading for a very ugly Labour Party.
We have a very ugly and dysfunctional Labour Party.
It’s obvious that some of us white, male members support Palestinian rights and condemn the oppression of the Palestinians by the Apartheid State of Israel – – – – So I guess we would not be considered to be normal either.
Some of us are actually Socialists !!!
Now – That certainly puts us beyond the wire.
Would that be “normal” people like Reeves, Mann, Mandy, Fakehurst, Hodge, Blair, Starmer, Ryan etc?
A good majority of the population are decent people. Surely they are what is normal, not that self-serving crew.
New Labour – New Normal
Luke Akehurst,s – Selection Criteria for Normal (Stepford) Candidates
Section 1 – Ideological/Political Orientation
Q1) Are you a supporter of a) replacement of Trident, b) nuclear power, c)
the State of Israel? (10 points for each yes)
Q2) Are you or have you ever been a member of CND, Compass, CLPD,
the Campaign Group, Liberty/NCCL, PSC/LMEC, the Liberal Party? (minus 5
points for each yes)
Q3) Did you vote for Benn or Healey in the 1981 Deputy Leadership
election? (10 points for Healey, 5 points for abstaining, minus 20 for Benn)
Q4) If you had been a Labour MP in the 1963 Leadership election would
you have voted for George Brown, Harold Wilson or Jim Callaghan? (10
points for Brown, 8 points for Callaghan, minus 5 for Wilson)
Q5) Did you think the good guys in the Vietnam War were a) the
Communist Viet Cong led by Stalinist dictator Ho Chi Minh or b) the US
Marine Corps led by leftwing Democrats JFK and LBJ? (20 points for
anyone unlikely enough to be saying b)
26) In which year did you first publicly call for the expulsion of Militant? (2
points for every year prior to 1985)
Q7) who made the greater contribution to the history of the Labour Party,
Nye Bevan or Ernie Bevin? (20 points for Bevin)
Q8) Did you support British involvement in the following conflicts:
Falklands (1 pt), Gulf War (4 pts), Sierra Leone (1 pt), Kosovo (3 pts),
Afghanistan (3 pts), Iraq War (10 pts)?
Section 2 – Organisational/Campaigning
Q1) How many members are there in your CLP? (1 point per 50 or part
thereof)
Q2) How many electors did you personally canvass/voter ID in the 12
months before the last general election? (1 point per 500 or part thereof)
Q3) What was the difference between the swing in your own constituency
and that in the wider region in 2005? (1 point for each 0.1% differential in
Labour’s favour, minus 1 point for each 0.1% worse than the regional
average)
https://twitter.com/2Si_2Vess/status/1476197668053561351?s=20
Could it be a shadow state is now completely in control of the country
Searching for the practical definition of the key term – Normal – in this context it is difficult to better the contrast provided towards the end of the eight and a half minute video from Ed Snowden to be found here:
http://steelcityscribblings.uk/wp/2021/12/30/the-obvious-has-become-unspeakable/
The real choice is clear.
‘Me thinks I might, I MUST apply.
I haven’t a political idea in my head!
And radical solutions I would NEVER try.
And I’d do whatever the Mighty Leader said!
Plus political reading is not for me.
And I’d be up for bombing overseas.
Plus greasing up the wonderful rich.
And I’m middle class/upper class and very white if you please?
PS What’s the maximum projected earning potential from this post & and are there other fringe benefits?’
Favourite song: Beatles ‘Nowhere Man.’