craner

Beast of Burden
There's no force or fervour there. He performs his tasks with the earnest diligence of a schoolboy. He works to counter the guilt of those booze sodden nights. In a cold sweat of shame and remorse. Gin on the breath. Pockets full of mints.

That's very shrewd, actually. All successful politicians are addicts in one way or another.
 

comelately

Wild Horses
Remain and Leave are code for a lot more than your position on EU membership these days, but yes.

Though tbf, the Torys have no real idea where they stand on quite a few issues thesedays.

Brexit is, after all, the great Kinder Bueno of politics.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I think he's doing a good job so far of not letting his opponents characterise him. Does lead to him seeing "oddly bloodless" as I heard him described recently, and I think there's a decent argument to be made that this is the wrong move in a national crisis. Being the Opposition leader is the hardest job in politics espcially with the flaming dumpster fire he inherited. The EHRC report has dropped and is being digested behind closed doors.
 

luka

Well-known member
Danny thinks being labour leader is a stealth mission.

The single-mission counterpart to the Stealth-Based Game, where the player must sneak through an area infested with enemies. Getting detected may result in automatic failure and/or death or just mean being besieged by lots of guards. Being thrown in an easily escapable jail cell is also common. Frequently means dealing with guards that have no sense of peripheral vision (or hearing), so the player only has to avoid direct line of sight with them to slip past.

Sometimes the player will have to avoid searchlights that sweep about in a specific pattern. This is actually convenient for players since a visible stream of light is easier to detect and get around than a normally invisible line of sight from a Patrolling Mook. The guards may also be equipped with flashlights that give off a similar effect.
 

luka

Well-known member
That's what my sister is like. She reckons Brown tricked the prison guards into letting him do wealth distribution by writing it in a secret code in his budgets so they didn't know what he was up to. All my new labour friends have this stealth mission view in fact.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
it's actually true if you look at what Blair did. Massive wealth redistribution only without going direct via taxation. That's one reason why there were so many supplementary schemes - Sure Start, EMA and so on.

I used to sign off EMA forms - £30 a week for 16-17 year olds for attendance in further education, for 60% of our pupils. I remember it well and its a marker of difference between New Lab and the Tories.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Remain and Leave are code for a lot more than your position on EU membership these days, but yes.

Yeah, I remember various articles a few years ago about how Brexit was never primarily about leaving the EU. Culture wars, the role of the state, our relationship to America, all sorts of stuff. Plus a thoroughly grubby get-rich(er)-quick scheme for a bunch of spivs, obviously.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Brexit is the main front in the culture war, which the Tories are desperate to have as they have fuck all else. That's why Cummings was calling Starmer a "remainer lawyer"
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Brexit is the main front in the culture war, which the Tories are desperate to have as they have fuck all else. That's why Cummings was calling Starmer a "remainer lawyer"
Yeah, it's a term that's taken on the sense of "quisling" or "traitor". Or "bourgeois" to a Leninist. Heretic. Infidel.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I have to say, I'd have thought it would be a no-brainer to allow a free vote on the undercover cops thing, even if in practice it would have made no difference due to the government's massive majority.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Also why should Unite sit there with a shit eating grin when Keir says it’s basically fine for the cops to spy on union reps and commit any crimes while doing so? It’s not 1997 any more.

10% reduction is way more lenient than I would be. Not that I paid the levy when I was a Unite member.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
He didn't say it was fine, he instructed his MPs to abstain. Why I don't know but it's a different thing. I assume it's about not giving the Tories easy attack lines. It's also a parliamentary way of signalling opposition before you submit amendments before the third and final reading. If they all the against it on the third reading how would you feel John? That's the critical point. There's loads of wilful misrepresentation of this doing the rounds atm.

McCluskey is an appalling influence anyway, glad it's on the wane.
 

version

Well-known member
What's to be gained from attacking Starmer's Labour at this time? Seems counter-productive when the Tories are currently in power, have thousands of deaths on their hands and are about to dump Brexit on us as well.
 
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