What I want is a rejection of bigotry that the Labour party is currently unwilling to do. You want me to be part of a progressive alliance? That its my unbreakable condition.
Ask yourself this. Who is the person who has a bug-out bag for escaping the country? Is it you? Or is it me me, part of the group of people who have watched an escalation of hate for the last 5 years, which both the Tories and Keir Starmers faction are complicit in? I may not even have a vote when there is a general election, because I may have left the country. Cory Doctorow warned us several years ago before he left the country, now I am doing the same. Least bad is no longer good enough, peoples lives are at stake even if you refuse to accept it.
If tolerance and acceptance can not win a general election then fascism has already won and it doesn’t matter which party is in power. Stop pandering to bigotry!
It’s pragmatic for you because you’re not in the line of fire right now. You’re talking to someone who is and so has different, more serious concerns. Instead of telling them you’re indifferent to their life, maybe get that through your head and show some empathy.
That’s not at all fair. Just because you didn’t mean to step in it when you called Starmer’s approach “sound” and went on to note approvingly that Labour isn’t participating in the culture wars - you did indeed step in it.
What people are pointing out is that your intent really doesn’t matter when you’re stomping about on the carpet with shit on your shoes. A decent person would stop spreading it and apologize rather than insisting in one’s right to stomp about on the carpet.
Jeez you’re all tilting at windmills and I’m still none the wiser as to why.
Let’s recap :
I said Johnson is safe, for now because no-one wants to sup from the poison chalice that is PM at the moment, but that Tories always eat there own in the end.
Up pops a non-sequitur of the style “what about Labour?”
I respond to say that he’s not playing Johnson’s games and making this issue about integrity, not party politics or Dominic Cummings extended culture war - and that is working.
Which somehow turns me into an apologist for the unrelated bigotry of a subsection of a political party that I’m not a member of, don’t represent my values and I wouldn’t vote for if I had a viable alternative.
Please explain, if I’m missing something, where Starmer’s approach to this scandal - the context in which I engaged in this thread, the only aspect of policy I’ve discussed, - isn’t sound?
The Tories are in meltdown partially because he’s not given them anything to rally around.
I will apologise for indulging my fantasy of ending FPTP for ever and with it ending the duopoly of populist Tories and “broad-church” Labour - because that’s the only way that ends.
Objectively, it’s been successful - polling suggests he’d actually win an election - a rarity for a Labour leader.
But how is that callous? It’s a thread about a PM lying about a party.
Making this issue, the topic of the thread, about integrity in public office, not a party political one based on tribal division (the key to Johnson’s successes) is the right move.
I’m not addressing Labour’s long-standing failures in combating bigotry anymore than I’m speaking to their woeful policy on drugs. If I were, it would be in a thread about that, not one about another Johnson scandal.
As someone who joined this comment thread late, but read through the comments in order, I did not get that from your posts at all. If it seems like you’re being misunderstood, one way of overcoming that is to be thorough and not leave anything as simply understood. That may be the hang up hear.
Because even now, when I read your recent explanation and what you wrote earlier, it sounds like you’re ok with the status quo, no matter who suffers, as long as it costs the Tories eventually.. It doesn’t matter how the topic started; you’ve made it sound like Starner is doing the right thing, sort of, by letting the Tories have a free hand to destroy people rather than fight them tooth and nail. It’s not.
Can we STOP pretending like trans rights are just culture wars bullshit that can be safely dismissed as “tribal”… FFS, we’re talking about people’s HUMAN RIGHTS. I don’t think you’d be dismissing it as “tribal divisions” if it were YOUR rights on the line.
well, it’s just culture wars that’s distraction from REAL politics! /s
“Integrity in public office” could easily be re-phrased as “attempting to treat all humans one is supposed to be serving equitably”. If Labour’s leadership had some backbone they could more compellingly* frame things in terms of the latter in response to just about any Tory depredation, from this Christmas party to attacks on LGBTQ people and immigrants. Instead, in the worst tradition of the zentrum (including the hapless American Dem establishment), they let their right-wing opponents call the shots and quail at thought of being perceived as “tribal culture warriors”.
Both those failures emerge from attempting to fight battles on fields that the enemy has chosen.
[* I include in this “effectively in the electoral sense”, because older white men they’re desperate not to lose to the Tories are rapidly losing demographic and therefore political clout, while the people they’ve been willing to throw under the bus are gaining.]
I can’t disagree with that. But barring extreme events (The Winter of Discontent, Brexit) UK governments for 30 years or so are usually variations of the same set of policies. When they stray too far from the middle (Corbyn, or Foot for example) FPTP punished them hard in marginal Seats.
