After condemning Greens for collaborating with Tories, arch-rightwinger curiously quiet when Labour does it
Labour in Scotland – run by Starmerite placeman Anas Sarwar after Keir Starmer removed left-wing leader Richard Leonard and Scottish Labour’s general secretary to please some millionaires – has made a pact with the Tories to run Edinburgh Council and keep out the SNP.
Bizarrely, this has been met by complete silence by Shadow Health Secretary and wannabe next leader Wes Streeting – not even a couple of weeks after Streeting laid into the Greens for colluding with the Tories to run Worcester:
Despite Skwawkbox’s best efforts there appears to be no mention in Mr Streeting’s social media kf the Scottish scandal, even though it must surely be causing him great outrage.
Leading figures in possession of some moral fibre were more outspoken, such as Bakers’ union head Ian Hodson:
Starmer’s Labour, of course, is so close to the Tories politically that you would struggle to insert a cigarette paper between them – in fact, Labour is if anything now to the right of the Tories in many ways.
But surely it must be odd that Weasley is remaining tight-lipped about Labour’s collusion after lambasting the Greens for it. It’s unthinkable that he and his boss would be hypocrites, after all…
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It seems Labour learned nothing from colluding with the Tories, during the Scottish Referendum, in 2014.
Labour, and the Tories, were trashed, in Scotland, the following year, during Miliband’s GE.
Let’s hope it’s another wake-up call for the Scots, and they do the same again. Better!
It will be George Peel and it emphasises once again that there is no real difference between the Tories and Labour in Scotland or anywhere else.
There’s not much difference between them, the Greens and the SNP either.
Way off subject – Mick Lynch RMT’s GenSec is being interviewed for 25mins by Nick Robinson on BBC R4 at 17:30 today (Saturday)
New Labour’s opposition to and anger with the Tories was always largely synthetic and the outrage feigned.
Like staged US professional wrestling, the rivalry is to put on a good show. The reality is a lot more cooperation than many realise. Corbyn wasn’t prepared to deceive the electorate like that, so he had to go.
@Andy The trade term is Kayfabe.
And you’re correct. There’s a great picture of Osborne and Bliar grinning together at a dock. It’s all an act, if they can bothered (Jess Phillips fawning at the Moggerf……..)
Starmer’s a unionist. He’s even upturned Labour’s neutrality on whether Northern Ireland becomes part of a united Ireland, stating that he’d campaign for Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK. And even that neutrality position which Starmer trashed, was a move away from support for a ‘United Ireland by consent’ a position the party previously held. Starmer is opposed to a United Ireland therefore it’s unsurprising he won’t allow cooperation with the pro Scottish independence Greens.
This is why progressives, who think Starmer is open-minded to coalitions and think he along with other parties will usher in proportional representation for Westminster, have their heads planted firmly up their backsides.
Starmer is a deeply reactionary establishment figure, a man determined to wave his little Union Jack and preserve the status quo at all costs including things like the outrageous, wholly unelected HoL.
Well said Andy-Starmer(and ergo the Labour Party) has proclaimed that he is a Unionist-which puts him on the side of everything that is tory,extreme right wing reactionary and wrong-his DUP friends still wont countenance the setting up of a democratically elected Assembly-that is the measure of the man. Gosh-how far down will the Labour Party go?
Sadly, he still has some progressive supporters though, as elections in London showed recently. The lack of CLP activity against his obnoxious leadership also illustrates this.
He’s conned guardian columnists, those who favour progressive democratic / constitutional reform; people like Will Hutton and Polly Toynbee, who both favour PR for Westminster and HoL reform.
Why can’t they see what a bad faith actor Starmer is from his campaign betrayal, and how everyone, even moderate progressives, are wasting their time investing any hope in this man to bring about even modest progressive reforms?
Have you looked at the latest MRP poll.
Latest YouGov MRP model suggests that if an election were held tomorrow, the Conservatives would hold on to just three of 88 battleground seats
The Conservative party faces the prospect of largescale losses in Con-Lab battlegrounds up and down England and Wales, according to YouGov’s latest MRP model.
From the 88 constituencies which the Conservatives either (a) won from Labour in 2019, or (b) currently hold with a majority of less than 15pts over Labour, our modelling predicts that just three would remain in Conservative hands: Ashfield, Bassetlaw, and Dudley North.
Other high profile ‘Red Wall’ Conservative gains from 2019 would fall straight back into Labour hands if an election were held tomorrow, including Burnley, Blyth Valley, Leigh, and Stoke-on-Trent North.
Other constituencies sit on an absolute knife edge, with Labour’s predicted winning margin in each of Bishop Auckland, Scunthorpe, and Great Grimsby all less than two points.
Elsewhere, Boris Johnson’s seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip would likely fall into Labour hands, with current results suggesting a 5pt Labour lead in the constituency.
Wakefield – where Labour have a strong chance of winning the by-election next month – would also return to the red column.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/05/28/yougov-mrp-boris-johnson-set-lose-seat-labour-swee
SteveH
Polls don’t factor in apathy. And we’ve had another ‘week from hell’ for Johnson, so any snapshot taken now is hardly representative.
Do you seriously believe Reeves and Starmer’s weak sauce manifesto offer will have people who so enthusiastically supported Corbyn queuing at the polls? Or that Starmer’s charisma (what charisma?) will shine through in an election campaign? Don’t forget the hassle of new voter ID requirements too. If postal voting were banned except in exceptional circumstances, Starmer’s Labour would be facing total disaster. Forget snapshot polls, where to date, have Labour shown an ability to pile up even protest votes under Starmer?
The thing is, under FPTP, Labour gets in power all too infrequently. Do people who crave an alternative to the Tories really want a timid team of Starmer, Reeves in power for 4-5 years protecting establishment and monied interests? Then thrown out having achieved F-all, making way for another 20 years of Tories? Because unless Labour supporters wake up, that is the best case scenario in the UK. Reeves and Starmer are fake opposition, put there to stymie change.
Latin America News – Guatemala throws USAID out of the country.
They should really have done the same with all the CIA front organisations.
Goldbach – that’s interesting – I’ll look
it up. I didn’t know Guatemala had even a
vaguely left wing govt ..
I don’t think that it does, but something must have happened to irritate them.
The landscape gardeners are turning up to do the delta cowboy seals backyard.
Corrupt or not, many of the 88% see which way the winds are blowing. The empire is dying. Dollars are rapidly becoming poisonous.
Better to deal with the Chinese than the USA/IMF. We all know how the IMF works. In order to get the money, you have to give up anything of value to us. Chinese have been far more generous in their terms and conditions.
In other world news, Russia has blamed a US biolab in Nigeria for the monkeypox outbreak.
Vote Labour; get Tory. Why am I not surprised???
Guatemala – the relatively new President is in fact
very right wing. He succeeded a President who
was elected to deal with corruption but then
became corrupt himself. Previous Guatemalan
governments have a terrible record with
indigenous peoples but there have since been
successful prosecutions of the worst of Human
rights abusers.
USAID – CIA?
The policy of USAID is now to encourage “localism” –
the ability of local communities to help themselves ..
Its aim is to reduce the involvement of large
corporations – so hardly CIA !
There is a Youtube snippet of the Guatemalan (?)
TV News which explains the reason for
USAID being chucked out – but I struggled to
understand the English.
USAID – CIA?
At the very least.
It’s always been about control, not help. The only thing USAID aids is the US.
From Wikispooks;
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an agency of the US State Department with the stated mission to provide “international development”. In addition, it has also gained global notoriety for its extensive role in helping brutal dictatorships repress, torture and murder; its role in facilitating drug trafficking; and its decades-long effort in mass sterilization.
A former USAID director, John Gilligan, admitted it was “infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people.” Gilligan explained that “the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas; government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”[1]
It also plays a big role in other strategic projects, such as population control and forced sterilization campaigns.
Some aid…
Alex Mair writes an interesting short piece in Jacobin:
The Britain Project Is the Latest Incarnation of Zombie Blairism
Since Keir Starmer was elected party leader in April 2020, most of the Parliamentary Labour Party have been at pains to remind the wider membership that, above all else, he is a bona fide election winner…Yet just over two years into his leadership, there are strong indications that the picture is not all rosy…Writing in the New Statesman, Blair said Starmer was “sensible but not radical”…[and has been], until now, the clearest sign yet that Blair et al. no longer believe that Starmer has the magic touch. That is until a few weeks ago, when the Britain Project was created. Its exact purpose remains unclear, except that it seeks a more centrist alternative to Starmer’s Labour.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/05/britain-project-tony-blair-starmer-labour-party
One of the few positive legacys of the Blair years was the Good Friday agreement and the peace it brought to the island of Ireland.The knights intention along with the conservative and unionist party in collaboration with the DUP is to “piss all over it and democracy.I think mr Blair must be a little more than irritated when the knight as ignored a hundred years of tradition of neutrality of the labour party on Ireland and most importantly the partition of Ireland that the labour party now supports.Bad move starmer and the wrecking of political carreers on the shores of Ireland is the future of the knight of the realm.
Joseph – I hadn’t realised that Keir would have a vote.😲
Don’t be clever stevie H it doesn’t suit you.So basically you are saying that labour entering the political arena in N.Ireland as it did in the assembly elections with “prominent members of the labour party in Derry doesn’t matter.Well stevie you might be correct as the voters were so angry at the labour party involvement that two social democratic flip flops lost their seats?.Your leaders got the opposite of the” midus touch “and its spreading comrade.
Joseph – What I am saying is that when the people of Ireland (North & South) actually get round to having a vote on the reunification then they will listen to opinions from all sides of the argument and make up their own minds which they vote.
Unlike you I don’t think that anything Starmer says will make much difference either way,
Surprisingly I actually seem to have much more confidence in the eventual outcome of the referendum being a vote for reunification than you appear to have.
Thanks for this link PW, it’s’s a good piece.
I’ve been thinking for a while now that Blair has a god complex, charaterised by
A sense of entitlement.
Grandiose sense of self-importance.
Exploitation of others.
Living in a world of fantasy.
Demeaning, bullying, intimidating and belittling others.
Need for constant praise and admiration.
After reading this,I am now convinced of it.
Blair and his henchmen, Mandelson, Starmer Streeting et al are intent on destroying what passes for democracy in the UK and are very dangerous individuals. The left really has to come together to stop this bunch of narcissists.
The headline on the National says it all beautifully.
https://twitter.com/SashaClarkson/status/1530474793757188096?s=20&t=lQOzrf89wtbaF_w2wxZiXA
Ouch! Sadly, most south of the border will miss this.
In answer to the question, no. This is par for the course. Typical Labour. They do not care about us, it’s simply about power.
Big question is power for who? Politicians are merely marionettes.
https://skwawkbox.org/2022/05/28/streeting-oddly-silent-as-labour-gets-into-bed-with-tories-to-run-edinburgh/#comment-224155
Wowee! All but three seats that went blue in ’19, eh? Yeah, alright.
And of those that they reckon would remain blue, Dudley North was formerly austin’s seat whereas Bassetlaw’s was mann’s.
Ashfield was de piero’s seat, now held by the former labour councillor who thinks we can eat for just 30p lee anderson – another total arrogant gobshite. Like the other two, it was tory pre-2019, it will be tory under smarmerist labour.
So while the other seats would in effect remain tory if they reverted to red, the exact same things would apply to Dudley N. & Bassetlaw. remaining blue.
Therefore, in essence you’re cheerleading for NO F***ING CHANGE.
…Unless you want to tell us of any difference between the two? 🤔 NO? Then DO shut the fuck up.
Toffee – Thanks for you response. You obviously found the results of the latest MRP poll interesting.
Isn’t it is good to see that Labour are still consistently ahead in the national polls and I agree that it is interesting to see the consistent results of the MRP polls that provide a valuable insight into voting intentions at constituency level.
I found it to be typical of the tripe that you’d post, nowt more, nowt less. It makes NO odds to people like me.
As Doug says, ‘two cheeks’…
And of course, we were meant to see smarmerist labour hoover up seats on the locals, weren’t we? Wanna remind us how that went?
Toffee – We gained seats instead of losing seats.
Gained seats?
How many – from the four thousand-odd seats that were up for grabs? You more or less told us they’d sweep the board with your opinion poll translation nonsense.
They didn’t. Far FAR from it, in fact. .
The libtards and the greens did FAR better than smarmerism in proportion to their Westminster representation, so don’t try to piss down my back and tell me it’s raining, soft shite.
They might be taken in in the capital by that shower of shabbite, but not elsewhere.
Toffee – How many – from the four thousand-odd seats that were up for grabs?
Overall Labour gained 108 seats + Labour also lost the control of 5 councils.
Whichever way you look at it is a considerable improvement on the previous election when Labour lost 84 council seats + Labour also lost the control of 6 councils and then went on to loose 60 seats in the general election.
How did the TUSC and the various other lefty parties do?
You more or less told us they’d sweep the board with your opinion poll translation nonsense.
Did I really? I don’t recall ever saying that, can you provide a quote that supports your ‘assertion’
The libtards and the greens did FAR better than smarmerism in proportion to their Westminster representation, so don’t try to piss down my back and tell me it’s raining, soft shite.
Big deal, given that the Greens only have one seat in parliament that particular stat is less than worthless
Oops – Overall Labour gained 108 seats + Labour also
lostwon the control of another 5 councils.108 seats….whoopie-fkin-doo! 🥳
Won 5 councils?? LOST others – And failed to take control of many more.
How many seats did the libs and greens get?
And against THE worst, THE most corrupt government on all history.
108 seats. Pffft! No wonder you’re universally known and regarded as the turd polisher.
No – you didn’t say they’d sweep the board, at least not in as many words, but you were asserting as much.
As for the greens stat… How the merry FUCK. can it seriously be considered worthless you dozy prick? They WON their seats fairly & squarely and smarmerist labour DIDNT take them like you ASSERTED they would. Which onlybporves further that smarmerist labour is NOWHERE FUCKING NEAR as popular or provide ANY alternative as you make out.
Now fuck off. Idiot.
Toffee – You can jump up and own and rant your distractions as much as you want but as I said above, whichever way you look at it a gain of 108 seats and the control of 6 councils is a distinct improvement on the loss of 84 seats and the loss of the control of 5 councils.
It is also an improvement on the 2018 results where Labour gained 79 seats with no change in the number of Labour controlled councils
Now here’s a concern.
Certain analysts are suggesting that, as part of the US attempt to preserve its unipolar world, the US is encouraging Taiwan to declare independence in order to provoke a Chinese response.
That would mean WW3. Can they really be so completely insane?
goldbach – I understand your concern but surely the real problem here is China’s imperialist ambitions, don’t you think that the people of Taiwan have a right to self determination.
Steve H….Taiwanese lost the war and fled to a Chinese island.Seems that loosing wars to the “people” is a problem for all of the fascists.Read your history fascism has been rejected by the many including you lot
Joseph – Could you please clarify your position, are you saying that you don’t believe that the people of Taiwan have a right to self determination.
A guide for the over-simplistic for whom the intricacies of international relations are a mystery.
For many decades there has been a de facto agreement between the US and China in which:
1. China regards Taiwan as a province of China.
2. China takes no steps to take control of Taiwan. It plays the long game in trying to get the people of Taiwan to build closer relations which could eventually lead to reincorporation into China.
3. Taiwan has not formally declared independence, though in practice it operates as an independent state.
4. The US has gone along with this because it has guaranteed that the government of Taiwan could operate independently. It acknowledges China’s claim of sovereignty without any steps being taken to assert sovereignty.
The result?
Taiwan is able to run its own affairs – A win for Taiwan
The US is able to have Taiwan within its sphere of influence – A win for the US
China is able to envisage the possibility that, in some time in the future, Taiwan might wish to reintegrate within China – A win for China.
This has served the far east, and the rest of us, well for decades.
The question we have to ask ourselves is:
Would a Taiwanese declaration of independence lead to a conflict in the far east and, in all probability, WW3?
I think that the answer is “yes”.
I would ask anyone who blathers on about the “right to self determination” whether that trumps the right of everyone in the world not to be vaporised in a nuclear holocaust.
goldbach – Or China could just do the right thing and abandon any claim to Taiwan.
I see you’d be happy to see WW3 in preference to a continuation of the relatively stable situation we’ve had for decades.
If it turns out that we do have WW3, come back and tell me if you’re still happy with that scenario …………….. that is, if you’re still alive.
goldbach – I meant precisely what I said above, nothing more and nothing less. Anything that you’ve chosen to add are your own thoughts, not mine.
Perhaps it would help if China gave the rhetoric a rest and stopped making everyone nervous with its provocative military incursions into Taiwan’s air space.
Since you’re so strong on the ” a right to self determination.”, do you extend this right to the people of Luhansk Oblast, Donetsk Oblast, Zaporizhia Oblast, Kherson Oblast, Mikolaiv Oblast and Odessa Oblast?
……… and, for that matter, Crimea?
…… and I forgot to mention – Keep your eyes on Jerusalem today. It’s the marching season.
@Goldbach
Yes. Absolutely. Russia isn’t the only one facing existential crisis.
@Luke
You really need to brush up on your history. Makes the baloney easier to swallow. Instead, you sound like an American spokesperson. Imperialist ambitions. That’s classic Bernays/Goebbels.
Has anyone seen such arrogance as this fool, then Senator Joe Biden talking down to Scott Ritter over WMD in Iraq. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH1SI9ufr8
On the original post: called out the hypocrisy correctly, though I have no problem with a Labour-Tory coalition (which would have been the best outcome in 2008). Neutering the faux oppositional stance that FPTP demands and having to be collectively responsible for running the country without being able to justify incompetence by maintaining the myth that the other side would be worse, at stake would be the competency of the political class as a whole, something that would focus minds on improving the lot of the public rather than accruing benefits for themselves. Sadly, such a move would most likely end in an almighty fallout (trumping any of the theatrics so beloved in WWE) and the two parties retreating to the illusion of polarised positions but, more positively, the chances are that the charade becomes exposed and the clamour for a different politics something that can no longer be ignored.