Arsenal till I die

Someone with such a lack of conviction is unfit to be on the front bench of any government, regardless of party, politics or beliefs.

True, although the same would have happened to Blair. They were already shedding votes and seats (as they did in 2005).

As someone on this thread has already said, it's called being in opposition you fuckwit. And you're way out on his constituency work. You're right about Islington though. The sooner London leaves the UK the better.

"Is the leadership challenge going in? Oh yes it is!"

The best bit about Wrexham is that the North East is usually Labour/Tory marginal. Few Welsh speakers, scouse accent (not the most Tory accent, I know), Brexit voting, and yet the Tories couldn't even make the top 2. And they can't even blame a goal being wrongly disallowed for offside, despite it being Wrexham...

I know, it's terrible. But Starmer is something else. At least Blair wanted to win and at least Labour portrayed themselves as a left wing party that was making some concessions to get into government. These days they portray themselves as a party who see left wing as an insult. Blair is a shape shifter, the Blair of 97 got some things right however dishonest his long game.

You've gotta hand it to Starmer. Only the 1st leader to make me miss Blair is capable of turning the name of a Pie and Bovril thread into the title of an Owen Jones video. I wonder if the Northern Independence Party is standing in the Durham County Council election.

That's just about the last thing I would do. It's segregation and helps posh kids believe "the other" is "the enemy". Don't get me wrong, there's just as much of it on the other side and I'm no fan of grown ups hating kids for going to private school either.

Can't argue with that. The problem is how factional it all is. My opinion is that there are very good people, and very bad people, on all sides of the party. Some want the party to do well whoever's in charge, and some want to wreck the party from within, and will join whatever faction they feel will best help them achieve that. This is where Corbyn failed - he should have been the one to sort the house out. Labour's Bruce Rioche if you will, the one who would set the party on its way to winning under a subsequent leader. Instead he turned a blind eye and focussed on well, Corbynism. Every leader thinks they're the messiah who the party will get back in under.

Medicare would be Communism type post imho

Good question. As NS regularly points out at FMQ's, they haven't performed as well as the Scottish government, although they've still done better than the UK government (which she has also pointed out at the same time, to be fair). They are also nowhere near as bad as Scottish Labour, and they may even turn in favour of independence. Language is a big issue, a lot of monolingual English speakers there have a kind of language nationalism about them. The English get blamed which flies in the face of the facts - most of the English are in Gwynedd (it's nice) which is solidly pro independence, PC voting and bilingual. I also believe Wales has less powers than Scotland, so less to blame the government for. In my opinion, the SNP and SF need to team up and demand a referendum for Scotland or NI. If the UK government says no to both, they need to throw their weight behind Welsh independence. It's tough, but if the Welsh voters can be shown a UK that is denying referenda left, right and centre, they might be persuaded to vote for one. Then, if they can be convinced "Vote Yes or you won't get another one", then the break up of the Empire should commence. I should add in some personal experience here as well. We had a caravan in Gwynedd and regularly went on holiday there for the 1st 2 decades of my life. I can't be the only English person for this to happen to, but being there, where just about everyone can speak Welsh, must have really affected my politics (that and growing up in multi cultural London). You just really feel, literally standing on the mountain, "this land doesn't belong to England". This is why I feel that the amount of English in Snowdonia and Snowdonia's high support for independence shouldn't be contradictory. We were near Fairborne, which was featured on the BBC site. They done a segment of how it could become the first town in the UK abandoned to rising sea levels. Most of the people in the programme being interviewed have English accents. The nearby Talyllyn (Skarloey) Railway was pretty much revived by Brummies as well. Another bit of personal experience is I used to help out Welsh Labour round Wrexham way. I never heard one bad word against independence (it would have registered, as I was already in favour of indy), no sure I even heard a bad word about Plaid either.

So who's this Murray bloke who got passed up? Can't be the same Murray who keeps defending the Tories surely?

If I was the Labour leader, I was to the left of Blair, to the right of Corbyn, and yet thousands of members who stuck with the party during the Blair years were resigning their memberships, I would be asking myself why. Who is Starmer going to attract to Labour? Lib Dem voters? They want electoral reform, Labour stabbed them in the back with the 97 promise, and he's recently boasted to believing that FPTP always produces the deserved result. Tory voters? There are plenty of Tory voters with school aged kids up and down the country, fearful for their children's lives and outraged at the government for trying to throw their kids in the firing line at the start of the summer when everyone else was protected and everything else was shut. So what did Starmer do? Sack the only person who was sticking up for them. Even from an electability point of view, Starmer is not the person to lead Labour to victory. He is the most divisive Labour leader ever, his behaviour is the exact opposite of the unity under Blair, Labour have only ever stopped the Tories winning elections when they have been united with left wing voters. When their enemy has been Militant, the SNP, Jeremy Corbyn or RLB the Tories have won. With the Red Tory county council in Durham and voters blaming the party as a whole for the council at the last election, I know someone who is planning on voting Tory at the County Council election just to win the seats back at the next General. Starmer and his cult won't realise until it's too late that not everyone who has a problem with him is some sort of Corbynite. Most voters don't care about Israel, they don't care about Palestine, they don't care about RLB, and they don't care what Starmer thinks is and isn't anti Semitic. They care about their kids, most people engaged in politics care about our broken system, and most people in the party care about party unity and not having a leader who will tear the party apart. But he will have his fingers in his ears until it's too late.

Progress stated (at 4am at the latest) that Labour had a net loss of seats in 2015 due to not being right wing enough. For the record, they lost seats to the SNP who were at the time to the left of them, and away from those seats had a net gain.

To be fair to Nick Ferrari (never thought I'd say that) when we have non-Jews like Cummings, Trump, Rees-Mogg etc to choose from, it seems a weird choice for puppet master accusation.

Yes, if they've been caught wattsapping each other saying "we're in for a long night" when Celtic score, etc...

I agree with pretty much the rest of your post, but I must take issue with this. If there are Tories who want to destroy Labour from within (and whatever opposition party replaces them as the main opposition) then it won't matter who the leader is. So are you seriously saying that this is a damning indictment on anyone and everyone who is the leader of the main opposition party of the day, ever?

I would disagree with both of you. Firstly, he did change. He went further to the left with things like free broadband (I don't disagree with the concept - a lot of things including job pages are online these days, but it's hardly a vote winner) but he felt like he had to change because of the idiots hell bent on destroying the party from within. The Tories losing their majority, in an election they called less than half way in to a term, was an abject humiliation. But no, the southern centric, ultra Remain Blairites who thought Brexit made May worse than Thatcher, train privatising Major, and more Thatcherite than Thatcher Cameron, decided that taking a swipe at the Labour leader and accusing him of missing an open goal was more important than logic, just as it was in 2015 when they claimed Labour lost seats in Scotland for being too left wing. So they managed to panic Corbyn into believing that an even bigger kick in the nuts for Boris Johnson wouldn't be good enough. He had to gamble everything for an overall majority, and he did. He believed his own hype and blew his chance to make the party a more fairer party internally, but that's another problem entirely. The irony is is that he's a mirror image of Blair - going to the right of the 97 manifesto was what did for Labour under him.

I blame the green Party myself. I mean, people vote for them and they still live in a polluted country.

I had a red dot from a Dundee fan I think who had a history of about 2 posts and about 3 pages worth of dotting...

That's a strong accusation to make. Do you have any links to back up your claim? And I have read what you quoted.

Just about the last place it will. It might make Labour go up in the estimation of Tory voters who...will still vote Tory anyway. I'll admit though, Labour are no longer the tactical vote for Scottish Unionists.

I'll accept much of the manifesto and Corbyn had major flaws while your claim about smears has been answered in pretty much the next post. However, as far as the railways go, privatisation has made rail travel a museum which was steam travel in my day (and I'm in the Labour voting 35-44 age bracket). A man famously flew to Germany and back because the train journey between the 2 points in England would have been more expensive. This is clearly not sustainable, not for people, not for the environment, not for the planet. Money that should be invested in the economy (including the railways) is being paid to shareholders and executives. We can't afford NOT to renationalise something which even Thatcher didn't privatise. And it wouldn't be bought out - the franchises would simply be allowed to expire.

Say what she said in a Boris Johnson voice and it goes perfectly...

What the likes of the BBC won't tell you is that Labour still won an overall majority of seats in the North, even counting places such as Mansfield as being Northern. They won the most seats in the North West and North East, and in Yorkshire and the Humber the Labour and Tories were bang on, with one seat going to the Lib Dems and 1 seat Indy. Taking away North Yorkshire (the entire county, not just the Northern half of Yorkshire), which has been solidly Tory since I don't know when, I imagine Labour are probably still pretty solid in the rest of Yorkshire. This is why we badly need an all Northern assembly. Not only would Scotland-Northern England-Wales be contiguous, but it would also provide a quick reference for who the largest party in Northern England is.