More and more evidence is coming out that the Blairites deliberately sabotaged Corbyn whenever they could. Have you noticed how the Labour party stopped opposing Brexit the second that they had got rid of Corbyn? The party line now seems to be “don’t question what the Tories are doing”.
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Little England - that I’d have understood!
But it seems that we Americans always conflate England, Britain and the UK. The Venn diagram there is much more complicated than most of us realize. Heck, I don’t understand corner cases like the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man, or the claims of Seneth Stenegow Kernow.
Many people fly the ‘barry of nine, sable and argent, a canton ermine’. I suspect that if their desire ever came to pass, the whole thing would degenerate into a Gallo faction in Rennes or Naoned and a Brezhoneg one in Vannes or somewhere. Because separatism doesn’t stop with independence.
I suppose that the Dissolution of Czechoslovakia is a worked example of an amicable divorce, but I can’t see that sort of split happening anywhere that’s English-speaking. British-derived imperial culture doesn’t allow for it, the 1931 Statute of Westminster notwithstanding.
(Imagine: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in CANZUS any more!”)
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If your urine is the same color as Irn-Bru, you need to see your GP, stat.
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For those wondering about the relationship of brexiteers to truth and buyer’s remorse and raging until they are blue in the face because they didn’t realise the plans were there all along, down a cellar in a locked filing cabinet with a leopard on the loose.
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Secession by states is built into the Australian constitution. Western Australia have voted twice to secede but haven’t reached the required majority. We are seeing a version of that now with covid lockdowns where WA are blocking movement into their state, even from small states and territories where the covid risk is absolutely minimal.
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I think Starmer sees himself as Blair MK2, but he’s coming across as a bit of a charisma vacuum, and doing well in PMQs doesn’t cut much ice with working class voters. I’m hoping someone comes forward to form a proper socialist party that I can feel at home in. (Are you listening John McDonnell?)
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Yoiu need to hydrate, Don’t you feel that tremendous thirst on?
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“Little Britain” as in the British satire show
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I laughed at “This is not a chance for Remainers to have a go”
aka “We don’t want to hear anything about this being the inevitable consequences of our own decisions”
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Really? As if those were cause and effect? As if the Brexit-vacillating Corbyn was a beacon of Brexit opposition clarity? You’re ‘avin’ a larf mate! 
Much as you clearly do not like the current leader, another leader as publicly left-wing as Corbyn, even if a vaguely competent leader (Corbyn was not vaguely competent as a leader and his self-sabotage was as bad as anything done to him), would get crucified by the right wing press.
I suspect Starmer is a bit more left wing than you might think, even if not as left wing as you might like. He sensibly realised that continuing to oppose Brexit would also get him crucified in the media and cause the public to take him less seriously, and give the Tories an open goal to score serious points against him time and time again and continue to undermine his position as a leader, and the credibility of the Labour Party.
He did as much as he could to oppose it and work for Brexit’s prevention or amelioration, while a shadow minister for Corbyn. He had to stop that once he was leader or he’d have been toast as a credible leader in the public’s eyes.
By acknowledging the Brexit vote was long ago and giving Johnson enough rope to hang himself with on Brexit (which Johnson seems to be co-operatively doing) and highlighting government incompetence elsewhere (notably of course with the omnifuckwitshambles that constitutes their attempts to protect the country against Covid-19), he is successfully helping the Tories undermine any vestiges of credibility they thought they’d earned at the last election. That’s hardly not questioning what the Tories are doing.
You may not like it but Starmer may be rather like the Biden option. A credible leader who will not scare off too many people whose votes will be critical. Unlike Biden, I suspect that if granted power he may be more radical than some fear (and radical enough to scare many vested interests). Either way he is the best chance to get rid of the Tories at the next election. Any of the more left wing leadership candidates that also stood would not have made it to the next election, and if they had, would have been soundly beaten by whichever semi-competent Tory will replace Johnson long before then.
(ETA and for avoidance of doubt I support many of Corbyn’s policies, in principle. In practice, I don’t think how to enact them was fully thought through. But it was his disastrous performance as a leader that meant we’ had no chance of seeing those policies enacted for another several years.)
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I don’t think he is doing well at PMQs either.
One of the problems that I have is that the Blairites and media have redefined working class to exclude me, because I am trans. Apparently only white cishet people are working class.
People who own restaurants are working class though, for some inexplicable reason.
I never said that Corbyn was competent, just that Starmer wasn’t. Let’s start with “I’ll take a leader who doesn’t side with transphobes at every opportunity” (Why hasn’t anything been done about Rosie Duffield?). Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is for Starmer.
The only thing that the Labour party has shown me over the last six months is that the leadership is not interested in representing me. I should have listened to the anarchists.
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The increasingly narrow definition of “working class” spiralling down into “those who might vote fascist without biccies thrown at them” is somewhat enlightening.
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For those that haven’t seen it, it’s the humour of kicking downwards. All kinds of -ist and -phobic, everything that you’d expect from right-wing humour. And if you want to know Walliams and Lucas better, watch the astoundingly racist follow-up. Or don’t.
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I fully understand your frustration and anger about Labour/Starmer lack of vocal trans support. (Though I strongly disagree that being trans or supporting trans is a working class issue specifically. Can’t anyone from any class be trans and suffer the same prejudices/discriminations?)
Anyway, your issue with their approach to trans issues is a long way from incompetent political leadership (and from realpolitik - something I have observed some people - very much not a comment made as a personal attack or barb here! - on the left have some contempt for, but get enraged about when asked if they’d like to get power or be free to shout about policies that will never get them elected) and a very long way from not questioning what the Tories are doing.
ETA and reading that back, I want to say that I am not implying that it is realpolitik to ignore trans issues per se. Starmer is focused on establishing credibility to the voters at large and undermining the Tories’ credibility. To do this he needs to focus on a few central, core issues and not get ‘distracted’ all over the place. The more he takes a Corbyn-like scattergun ‘here is our position on every little thing’ approach, the more he opens himself to right-wing media attack and presents opportunities for them and the Tories to undermine him and undermine the credibility of the Labour party as a party of government.
Off to bed hoping to avoid more nightmares and wake up to some better news. As if!
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In the US, we call “wee-filled bottles” Budweiser. We don’t encourage kids to drink them either.
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It’s a lot fucking harder if you are working class.
Maybe I could talk about how transition is still seen as a privilege rather than a right, and that I had to fund it all on top of the bills and rent that other working class people also have to pay. Do I need to repeat my story about the year I lived on a council estate in Carlisle, and how the transphobia I experienced there destroyed my mental health (and possibly physical health)? That I was prepared to get on a bus to anywhere else and live on the streets, because I felt it couldn’t be any worse? How I ended up couch surfing for six months because I decided that I wasn’t going back?
Or maybe I should talk about how the people who put me through hell between 2003 and 2004 are being chased for their votes at the expense of my wellbeing.
Realpolitik doesn’t even begin to explain away my feeling of betrayal, and it’s not the first time I have felt like this about the Labour party. The last few words on the back of my Labour party membership card say
Where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.
I don’t believe the current Labour party lives up to that by a long way. TERs within the party want to deny my rights and refuse to show solidarity, tolerance and respect towards me, and Starmer does nothing. I speak up about it and the TERs call it bullying and cancel culture, if I am not just ignored.
Do I have a future in a party like this?
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Yeah, well, fuck the Tories.
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While I’m certain Corbyn was sabotaged by the more conservative wing of the party, I’m equally sure that he wasn’t exactly opposing Brexit, either. He was a nostalgia-addled old man who let down the UK’s young people at a critical moment. If he’d been full-throated in his opposition to Brexit and had pushed for a second referendum he and not Starmer might still be party leader.
Also, given how poorly he handled the very valid complaints about anti-Semitism in the party, I’m not confident he’d have handled the TERF bigots any better than Starmer has.
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That wasn’t my point.
My point was that a lot of the loudest remain voices in the Labour party became silent the second Corbyn was gone. It was as if they never really believed in it and were just using it to beat the left with (some of whom supported remain, especially younger supporters).
BTW, I wasn’t a Corbyn supporter, I just viewed him as better than the neoliberal alternatives. Old Labour wasn’t ideal, but I felt that it would be easier to fix.
The party isn’t simply divided into left and right, there are at least eight different factions.
I think BBS regulars can work out where I fit in
Starmer is actually handling transphobia worse than Corbyn handled antisemitism.
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I loved Corbyn and I agree with everything you said here. Now that’s a headscratcher.
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