....more armchair politics (Part 2)

Terry is right from a Labour voters perspective. That ain’t good enough. The rest, as they say, will be history.

I am too young to remember 70s Labour and have to hear about them via my right-of-centre, former Daily Mail reading mother. My experience of Labour started with Blair. He took the country to war in Iraq despite overwhelming opposition from the electorate. Starmer deserves kudos for not rolling over for Trump like Blair did for Bush.

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Blair’s WoMD = Trump’s Nukes

Nothing changes

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That seems to me to be a false equivalence.

Trump is the protagonist. Blair was not.

I’m uncertain politics today has anything to do with the word.

Billionaires and the media sculpt public opinion these days - the politics of old neatly sidestepped

Farage is the living evidence of this. When Starmer isn’t getting roasted in the news, Uncle Nige and his grimacing scrotum of a face is on there (Remarkable how much air time he gets for a private co party with not many seats - Proportionate?).

I looked at my mother’s FB feed the other day - it was remarkably different to mine. If we use this forum as a vox pop, Brexit would never have happened, Boris would never have happened, Trump would never have got anywhere etc. But we are in a minority algorithmic bubble. People are being farmed for content, fuelled on rage bait and getting likes on posts for dopamine. None of this is politics, it’s business.

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Given Jersey, IOM, City shenanigans etc., I rather feel that ship may have sailed :roll_eyes:

They didn’t know at the time, but did find out when they investigated it, then didn’t tell the PM for a few weeks. Unfuckingbeleivable.

In the meantime Olly Robbins is going to defend his position in front of a parliamentary committee.

Starmer really doesn’t have a grip on this lot, one Lab get evicerated at the locals, Welsh and Jock elections, he’ll have to go. If he survives that long.

At the start of Feb i.e. the last time the press and Chris Mason were putting it about that Starmer’s days (maybe weeks if he was lucky) were numbered, my brother actually e-mailed from the states, where he lives, asking if this was true. I said I reckoned Starmer would still be in post once it had blown over and he would quite likely be leading the party into the next general election. I was right about his short term survival and I don’t think this storm in a teacup will see him off either. Not least because every single one of the alternatives is so very obviously worse. I do wish he’d get a grip though.

By the way, if anyone’s surprised that the Foreign Office and No 10 don’t share information then all they need to do is to start at 1:30 here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVVX0lHZ8JE. That episode is from almost exactly 40 years ago (aired Feb 13th 1986) but nothing changes.

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Going back a bit in the discussion, whilst I agree that Starmer has been dealt a pretty tricky hand in some areas, I think there are other areas where he has made significant unforced errors, particularly around both immigration and trans rights. It seems to be a similar miss-step to the ones the Dems keep making in the USA, and this assumption that no matter how far to the right they lurch, they’ll always keep everyone to the left of them because “there’s no alternative”. In the USA, there’s certainly less of a viable alternative, but the UK has the Greens now occupying that space quite effectively. They also forget that most people on the left base their position around much more morals based concepts, and in turn they simply will not vote for anti-immigration or anti-trans parties.

As an aside, Wes Streeting is a complete piece of shit who needs hounding out of public life.

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This seems plausible, in which case it’s on Robbins.

But Robbins was ‘just’ a civil servant.

Mandelson’s name was put forward to the monarch by the Foreign Secretary, probably with the PM’s approval (or so it says in the HoC Library). Of course the Foreign Sec would ask his senior civil servant for suggestions of who might do a good job. But in the end the choice would be made by the poiltician, not the civil servant, and surely one of the factors in that decision would be the candidate’s security status. I can’t imagine that, as David Clark says, Robbins “… had sole discretion on vetting”.

The rush to find some civil servant or other to offload the blame to is just embarrassing.

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WAC

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What could possibly go wrong for Starmer when he put forward Mandy, sacked twice nicknamed the Prince of Darkness and a known chum of Epstein at the time Starmer appointed him. Starmer has zero political compass, i hope he goes. The cunt is also responsible for fucking up my pension and won’t even apologise. I won’t shed a tear for him.

As for who Labour put in to replace him, they’ll fuck that up like they fuck everything else up no doubt.

400 bloody MPs, a huge majority, and between them they have become the party of fuck ups.

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Word :oncoming_fist:

So Ollie Robbins has been sacked.

Does that mean from his current job or from the Civil Service entirely?

If the later wots he doing now?

Sacked equals suspended on full pay while they work out a lucrative severance package,

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I doubt if he was sacked as technically he did nothing wrong but the minister has lost confidence in him so they go into a “surplus” holding pool until another role can be found.

The IT director at the coastguard was binned off and sat in the surplus pool for 2 yrs before accepting a role at DSTL.

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Given what and who he knows I’m sure Goldman Sachs would have him back.

Wiki says he’s 50, though he’ll be 51 tomorrow (I hope the Foreign Affairs Committee remember to wish him belated Happy Birthday on Tues).

It also says he’s a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers so maybe we’ll see him behind a market stall pitching gloves and handbags ?