It's pretty hilarious reading some of the vitriol aimed at Labour on here and elsewhere today. Personally I'm not keen on this law and order campaign. But given the Tories' desperate efforts to equate Labour with turning a blind eye to "British Pakistani grooming gangs", and to tell us all that Labour would open our borders to any criminals who could be arsed to cross them, along with frequent pronouncements from Sunak, Braverman and others about Labour being soft on crime, it's a bit rich for them to moan about Labour attacking back.
Methinks the Tories doth protest too much.
CasinoRoyale in particular is quite risible. The “British Pakistani gangs” is/was an astonishing low point in British public debate and Rishi was all too happy to line up behind it with his “slideware”.
Yes, and Sunak and Braverman have been noticeably reticent to offer their views on recent convictions for appalling CSE crimes in Walsall and Bolton that didn't, as far as I can see, have anything whatsoever to do with British Pakistanis.
I am quite happy to believe that there is a particular (but hardly, as you note, unique) issue in the Pakistani community.
What I don’t accept is singling them out in an attempt to “own the libs” and dog whistle for racists.
Labour should fight dirty just as the Tories & their press friends do.
They really shouldn't.
I really thought Starmer was above this sort of thing and why descend to Braverman depths especially as they have a huge polling lead ?
Yes. By the standards of modern politics it is an entirely proper tactic - involving ordinary everyday distortions, evasions, untruths and dishonesty. As a Tory committed to voting Labour it would be troubling if for a moment I thought they believed it.
It has a Boris like feel in its populist half-truthery.
Also of course the slogan for Labour should be::
'Sentencing is a tricky matter best left to courts, and statutory intervention has tended to make things perverse, inconsistent and open to appeal, while filling our prisons with sad people in a system designed to make sad people bad and bad people worse. Let's have some incremental change'.
But this, while true, lacks the 'cage the paedos' factor.
Labour should fight dirty just as the Tories & their press friends do.
They really shouldn't.
I really thought Starmer was above this sort of thing and why descend to Braverman depths especially as they have a huge polling lead ?
Yes. By the standards of modern politics it is an entirely proper tactic - involving ordinary everyday distortions, evasions, untruths and dishonesty. As a Tory committed to voting Labour it would be troubling if for a moment I thought they believed it.
It has a Boris like feel in its populist half-truthery.
Also of course the slogan for Labour should be::
'Sentencing is a tricky matter best left to courts, and statutory intervention has tended to make things perverse, inconsistent and open to appeal, while filling our prisons with sad people in a system designed to make sad people bad and bad people worse. Let's have some incremental change'.
But this, while true, lacks the 'cage the paedos' factor.
As the Labour strategist just said for it to succeed it has to be believable and it is simply not and he would not have agreed to it being published.
Does anyone on here really think the public would believe Sunak would think that way
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
I think the Tories should call Labour’s bluff - say “ok Keir, if you publicly list the tougher sentences you want we will push them through with Labour’s wholehearted support this parliament.”
Either Labour have to put up, which will cause ructions in the party with those who don’t want tougher sentences, or will make them look stupid when they don’t actually have any idea what these tougher sentences will be and will also likely crash against sentencing guidelines softened whilst SKS was DPP.
It's pretty hilarious reading some of the vitriol aimed at Labour on here and elsewhere today. Personally I'm not keen on this law and order campaign. But given the Tories' desperate efforts to equate Labour with turning a blind eye to "British Pakistani grooming gangs", and to tell us all that Labour would open our borders to any criminals who could be arsed to cross them, along with frequent pronouncements from Sunak, Braverman and others about Labour being soft on crime, it's a bit rich for them to moan about Labour attacking back.
Methinks the Tories doth protest too much.
They are such snowflakes.
This is about where I am too. Labour supporters may not like the campaign (and neither do it), but Tory supporters can't really complain.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
No. But they have a vote to recover in WWC constituencies where lots of fundamentally decent people who don't have to run complex systems but do live with criminals are going to respond to slightly over simplified presentations of policy.
Remember all that Remainers who thought the EU was jolly convenient when going on holiday so it's great, and Brexiteers who thought Brexit could be achieved more or less overnight.
Labour should fight dirty just as the Tories & their press friends do.
They really shouldn't.
I really thought Starmer was above this sort of thing and why descend to Braverman depths especially as they have a huge polling lead ?
Yes. By the standards of modern politics it is an entirely proper tactic - involving ordinary everyday distortions, evasions, untruths and dishonesty. As a Tory committed to voting Labour it would be troubling if for a moment I thought they believed it.
It has a Boris like feel in its populist half-truthery.
Also of course the slogan for Labour should be::
'Sentencing is a tricky matter best left to courts, and statutory intervention has tended to make things perverse, inconsistent and open to appeal, while filling our prisons with sad people in a system designed to make sad people bad and bad people worse. Let's have some incremental change'.
But this, while true, lacks the 'cage the paedos' factor.
As the Labour strategist just said for it to succeed it has to be believable and it is simply not and he would not have agreed to it being published.
Does anyone on here really think the public would believe Sunak would think that way
This is why it may well be counterproductive
It might be unbelievable enough to get away with being an obvious joke in a libel trial
It's pretty hilarious reading some of the vitriol aimed at Labour on here and elsewhere today. Personally I'm not keen on this law and order campaign. But given the Tories' desperate efforts to equate Labour with turning a blind eye to "British Pakistani grooming gangs", and to tell us all that Labour would open our borders to any criminals who could be arsed to cross them, along with frequent pronouncements from Sunak, Braverman and others about Labour being soft on crime, it's a bit rich for them to moan about Labour attacking back.
Methinks the Tories doth protest too much.
CasinoRoyale in particular is quite risible. The “British Pakistani gangs” is/was an astonishing low point in British public debate and Rishi was all too happy to line up behind it with his “slideware”.
Yes, and Sunak and Braverman have been noticeably reticent to offer their views on recent convictions for appalling CSE crimes in Walsall and Bolton that didn't, as far as I can see, have anything whatsoever to do with British Pakistanis.
It's pretty hilarious reading some of the vitriol aimed at Labour on here and elsewhere today. Personally I'm not keen on this law and order campaign. But given the Tories' desperate efforts to equate Labour with turning a blind eye to "British Pakistani grooming gangs", and to tell us all that Labour would open our borders to any criminals who could be arsed to cross them, along with frequent pronouncements from Sunak, Braverman and others about Labour being soft on crime, it's a bit rich for them to moan about Labour attacking back.
Methinks the Tories doth protest too much.
The problem is the complaints come from within Labour and not least the guardian
I expect the conservative counter to these adverts is going to raise many difficult questions for Starmer himself
"The problem is the complaints come from within Labour and not least the guardian'
Thus giving the "high road" element in Labour plenty of cover.
"I expect the conservative counter to these adverts is going to raise many difficult questions for Starmer himself"
Which may well be even more difficult for Sunak & Co, particularly as focus will still be on Tory record of being soft on crime, especially when criminals are Tory PMs, ministers, MPs, donors, cronies, etc., etc.
Then again, I don't think voters generally give a shit.
The only effective response is for more people to apply similar standards to their allies as they do to their opponents. Partisan politicans obvs find this difficult. There is no serious defence of decency boundaries or anti-prejudice boundaries without an effort to do this.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
A few months ago now I did a prosecution of a daft laddie who had got a taser from someone and ran around a public park showing it off like something out of Star Wars. I was prosecuting this because it was in the High Court and the taser looked like a torch, in fact it even operated as a torch. The problem is that our legislation regards a taser as a gun. And the minimum sentence for carrying a disguised firearm is 5 years. Which is what he ended up getting.
This is the sort of idiocy you get when politicians muck about with minimum sentences and these sorts of posters, there is already a second one out about firearms, are exactly the kind of nonsense that encourages witless legislation like that. It is frankly embarrassing that a former DPP doesn't know or more likely doesn't care about that.
What does that translate to?
Minus 1/3 for a guilty plea and minus half for good behaviour? Or are firearms offences different?
I remember one where the courts were tied up for years. A chap a had shotgun (registered). The prosecutors were claiming the barrel was too short. By 1/4 inch. All the firearms experts who examined it, said no, it’s longer than the law requires. So he won every case/appeal.
Turned out the police/prosecution was trying for their own definition of barrel length - where the chamber ends and the barrel begins - used by literally no one else on Earth.
Surely double jeopardy applies (given the impossibility of new evidence arriving): how can he be tried twice for the possession of the same registered shotgun?
They prosecution lost the original case, then kept appealing the verdict, IIRC.
I recall it, because there was a gobsmacking quote from a lawyer, in Private Eye, saying that the legal definition of barrel length should be whatever the police felt it should be.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
Has anyone (yet) mentioned, that one possible victim of Labour's crime attack versus Conservatives, might be Boris Johnson MP (for now)?
In sense that it does NOT make it easier, for fellow Tory MPs to give him a slap on the wrist, and let him keep on attending HoC in those odd, short, infrequent intervals when he is NOT sunning himself on a tropic isle, or speachifying to well-healed clusters of fellow land pirates.
It's pretty hilarious reading some of the vitriol aimed at Labour on here and elsewhere today. Personally I'm not keen on this law and order campaign. But given the Tories' desperate efforts to equate Labour with turning a blind eye to "British Pakistani grooming gangs", and to tell us all that Labour would open our borders to any criminals who could be arsed to cross them, along with frequent pronouncements from Sunak, Braverman and others about Labour being soft on crime, it's a bit rich for them to moan about Labour attacking back.
I've looked at the both the Labour Ads today and still can't see what the problem is with them. If you're the Opposition you call out the Government's failures. The only people who seem not to like them are the Twitter wokerati, Corbynistas, and Tory client journalists.
Labour are criticising the result of sentencing guidelines - with a personal, signed agreement by Sunak even though he wasn't even an MP for the first five years of the figures they use
And Labour's leader was on the committee that changed those sentencing guidelines to imprison fewer offenders
Sir Keir has boxed himself in to a shit ton of new wallpaper
Would be surprised in Labour are worried about the nuance. It's campaigning, the advert has got over 15 million views on Twitter and everyone is talking about crime and the government's record. Job done.
If that's true, then it might work for the same reason the £350m did.
Remember how the terrorist attacks in the run up to GE 2017 actually damaged the Tories against Corbyn and Abbott?
This is that. Then the focus became Tory police number cuts.
You think everything Labour do damages the Tories, because you want it to be the case.
It's totally gross. On the other hand, the supposed party of law n order has a terrible record in this area, which the public might want to be made aware of. File under "whatever".
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
I suppose compared with Rwanda this is performative politics that doesn't waste shedloads of money? Doesn't seem much of a win, but we have to take them where we can.
Would I have put these posters out? No. Do I understand why they have done so? Yes. The Tories are already fighting dirty and seem convinced that even flecks of mud are sticking.
So go straight back at them. One of two things will happen - the Tories ramp it up to spectacular levels but can't deliver on their "shoot the migrants" policy. Or the Tories back off and stop fighting dirty. What Labour think is that if they slam home these messages, the big takeaway is how broken things are in Britain.
Either way, this far out from the election, screw it. The Tories have no moral leg to stand on anyway..
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
I think the Tories should call Labour’s bluff - say “ok Keir, if you publicly list the tougher sentences you want we will push them through with Labour’s wholehearted support this parliament.”
Either Labour have to put up, which will cause ructions in the party with those who don’t want tougher sentences, or will make them look stupid when they don’t actually have any idea what these tougher sentences will be and will also likely crash against sentencing guidelines softened whilst SKS was DPP.
Suella just has to restore capital punishment, something Starmer couldn't countenance. A landslide win for Sunak and Suella, and a very sorry state of affairs for the nation, but a win is a win.
Labour should fight dirty just as the Tories & their press friends do.
They really shouldn't.
I really thought Starmer was above this sort of thing and why descend to Braverman depths especially as they have a huge polling lead ?
Yes. By the standards of modern politics it is an entirely proper tactic - involving ordinary everyday distortions, evasions, untruths and dishonesty. As a Tory committed to voting Labour it would be troubling if for a moment I thought they believed it.
It has a Boris like feel in its populist half-truthery.
Also of course the slogan for Labour should be::
'Sentencing is a tricky matter best left to courts, and statutory intervention has tended to make things perverse, inconsistent and open to appeal, while filling our prisons with sad people in a system designed to make sad people bad and bad people worse. Let's have some incremental change'.
But this, while true, lacks the 'cage the paedos' factor.
I've looked at the both the Labour Ads today and still can't see what the problem is with them. If you're the Opposition you call out the Government's failures. The only people who seem not to like them are the Twitter wokerati, Corbynistas, and Tory client journalists.
Labour are criticising the result of sentencing guidelines - with a personal, signed agreement by Sunak even though he wasn't even an MP for the first five years of the figures they use
And Labour's leader was on the committee that changed those sentencing guidelines to imprison fewer offenders
Sir Keir has boxed himself in to a shit ton of new wallpaper
Would be surprised in Labour are worried about the nuance. It's campaigning, the advert has got over 15 million views on Twitter and everyone is talking about crime and the government's record. Job done.
If that's true, then it might work for the same reason the £350m did.
Remember how the terrorist attacks in the run up to GE 2017 actually damaged the Tories against Corbyn and Abbott?
This is that. Then the focus became Tory police number cuts.
You think everything Labour do damages the Tories, because you want it to be the case.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
I think the Tories should call Labour’s bluff - say “ok Keir, if you publicly list the tougher sentences you want we will push them through with Labour’s wholehearted support this parliament.”
Either Labour have to put up, which will cause ructions in the party with those who don’t want tougher sentences, or will make them look stupid when they don’t actually have any idea what these tougher sentences will be and will also likely crash against sentencing guidelines softened whilst SKS was DPP.
Suella just has to restore capital punishment, something Starmer couldn't countenance. A landslide win for Sunak and Suella, and a very sorry state of affairs for the nation, but a win is a win.
More like - “we will move sentencing guidelines from the committee on which the DPP sits, to parliament.”
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
I think the Tories should call Labour’s bluff - say “ok Keir, if you publicly list the tougher sentences you want we will push them through with Labour’s wholehearted support this parliament.”
Either Labour have to put up, which will cause ructions in the party with those who don’t want tougher sentences, or will make them look stupid when they don’t actually have any idea what these tougher sentences will be and will also likely crash against sentencing guidelines softened whilst SKS was DPP.
Suella just has to restore capital punishment, something Starmer couldn't countenance. A landslide win for Sunak and Suella, and a very sorry state of affairs for the nation, but a win is a win.
More like - “we will move sentencing guidelines from the committee on which the DPP sits, to parliament.”
I would have thought by recent parole change proposals (i.e the HS has the final say) it would be the HS rather than Parliament that decides sentencing for Suella.
Would I have put these posters out? No. Do I understand why they have done so? Yes. The Tories are already fighting dirty and seem convinced that even flecks of mud are sticking.
So go straight back at them. One of two things will happen - the Tories ramp it up to spectacular levels but can't deliver on their "shoot the migrants" policy. Or the Tories back off and stop fighting dirty. What Labour think is that if they slam home these messages, the big takeaway is how broken things are in Britain.
Either way, this far out from the election, screw it. The Tories have no moral leg to stand on anyway..
Politics has always been dirty, and fought dirtily. Remember McBride? Nothing here compares to that little sh*tty episode.
But the point is this: if Labour are descending to the gutter - and if Starmer has okayed these attack lines, then it shows at least three things:
*) Labour does not have a moral leg to stand on, either. If they do this to gain power, they'll have no problem doing it whilst in power as well. *) Starmer is an idiot. His time as DPP - when this was all going on - has always had potential to be a problem for him. This just highlights it - and not in a good way. *) Labour is willing to lie and misrepresent just as much as the government. That, as much as anything else, will lose them my vote.
(Sighs), so I guess it'll be the Lib Dems then, who aren't exactly running the local council on my patch well...
I repeat that putting Sunak's signature on it makes them problematic. Campaigning on the Tories' poor record on crime would be okay. But this is tawdry.
If it was during an election it seems like they'd be in some hot water.
Bank holiday bike ride. Which famous event from political history took place here? (About to get back on my bike so any speculation will have to remain just that for a bit).
Ron Davies receiving fellatio?
He'll be badgered about that for ever.
Aren't you Oop North somewhere?
Someone made a speech.
Yes, it's cyclable from Greater Manchester. Not a speech as such - not a planned one at any rate. It was in the build up to the 1997 GE.
Hmmm./ The build up?
Martin Bell standing for Tatton? First Independent for nearly half a century.
Struggling with why he would do it in a field.
Yes! Battle of Knutsford Heath - scene of a confrontation between Martin Bell and some hangers-on and Neil and Christine Hamilton and the bloke who played Ken Barlow from Coronation Street. 'Battle' overstated the drama a tad.
What do you mean played? He’s still going, isn’t he?
Is he? SURELY he's dead by now?!
You tell me, mate! I had you down as a Corrie-holic.
I haven’t seen it since about 1991. I was gladdened though to discover that it was one of Bob Dylan’s favourite shows.
God no. Can't stand it. People having needless arguments. I can't be doing with telly which is neither funny nor true.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
I think the Tories should call Labour’s bluff - say “ok Keir, if you publicly list the tougher sentences you want we will push them through with Labour’s wholehearted support this parliament.”
Either Labour have to put up, which will cause ructions in the party with those who don’t want tougher sentences, or will make them look stupid when they don’t actually have any idea what these tougher sentences will be and will also likely crash against sentencing guidelines softened whilst SKS was DPP.
Suella just has to restore capital punishment, something Starmer couldn't countenance. A landslide win for Sunak and Suella, and a very sorry state of affairs for the nation, but a win is a win.
More like - “we will move sentencing guidelines from the committee on which the DPP sits, to parliament.”
I would have thought by recent parole change proposals (i.e the HS has the final say) it would be the HS rather than Parliament that decides sentencing for Suella.
The big problem with having parliament or the HS do things like this should be obvious - they are idiots who have to pander to morons.
Politicians shaping policy for justice? Fine. But not a hate mob prompting politicians to hand out panicky sentences. We have had this for decades now - but it's difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. Especially when the lunatics have been told that *everyone* who is right-minded agrees with them that Pakistani paedo invader boat criminals should be jailed for 437 years minimum.
This shows me that Starmer wants to win and will do everything in his power to win.
He wants to paint the Tories as soft on crime.
He has a point.
I don't think they have a great deal of risk in doing this. It gets people talking about crime, and the perception is the Tories have done a very bad job. Sentencing is probably the least of that, but it is an easy and simple one for people to focus on.
Let me get this right: you are not allowed to like and link to posts that contain Substack links, because Musk thinks it might be a competitor to Twitter*, but Putin and Russian government accounts are OK? (And bear in mind that there are sanctions on businesses operating in Russia, so Twitter is presumably recieving money for the cherished "Blue Tick")
Turns out the "Twitter Files" was a load of bullshit, too.
Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/ ...The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact). And they were quite clear in their report on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to track election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they tracked in trying to follow how this information spread, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on...
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
I think the Tories should call Labour’s bluff - say “ok Keir, if you publicly list the tougher sentences you want we will push them through with Labour’s wholehearted support this parliament.”
Either Labour have to put up, which will cause ructions in the party with those who don’t want tougher sentences, or will make them look stupid when they don’t actually have any idea what these tougher sentences will be and will also likely crash against sentencing guidelines softened whilst SKS was DPP.
Suella just has to restore capital punishment, something Starmer couldn't countenance. A landslide win for Sunak and Suella, and a very sorry state of affairs for the nation, but a win is a win.
More like - “we will move sentencing guidelines from the committee on which the DPP sits, to parliament.”
I would have thought by recent parole change proposals (i.e the HS has the final say) it would be the HS rather than Parliament that decides sentencing for Suella.
The big problem with having parliament or the HS do things like this should be obvious - they are idiots who have to pander to morons.
Politicians shaping policy for justice? Fine. But not a hate mob prompting politicians to hand out panicky sentences. We have had this for decades now - but it's difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. Especially when the lunatics have been told that *everyone* who is right-minded agrees with them that Pakistani paedo invader boat criminals should be jailed for 437 years minimum.
Which was why sentencing guidelines were farmed out to the committee in question years back. With the resultant de-emphasis on short sentences for minor drug stuff, for example.
Politics has always been dirty. But that poster, while over the top, is expressing a vague opinion that New Labour are a danger. A new one even. It's not a specific policy claim which is at best claiming its statement is the unintentional side effect of Tory governance.
Bank holiday bike ride. Which famous event from political history took place here? (About to get back on my bike so any speculation will have to remain just that for a bit).
Ron Davies receiving fellatio?
He'll be badgered about that for ever.
Aren't you Oop North somewhere?
Someone made a speech.
Yes, it's cyclable from Greater Manchester. Not a speech as such - not a planned one at any rate. It was in the build up to the 1997 GE.
Hmmm./ The build up?
Martin Bell standing for Tatton? First Independent for nearly half a century.
Struggling with why he would do it in a field.
Yes! Battle of Knutsford Heath - scene of a confrontation between Martin Bell and some hangers-on and Neil and Christine Hamilton and the bloke who played Ken Barlow from Coronation Street. 'Battle' overstated the drama a tad.
What do you mean played? He’s still going, isn’t he?
Is he? SURELY he's dead by now?!
You tell me, mate! I had you down as a Corrie-holic.
I haven’t seen it since about 1991. I was gladdened though to discover that it was one of Bob Dylan’s favourite shows.
God no. Can't stand it. People having needless arguments. I can't be doing with telly which is neither funny nor true.
So with you on the telly
I watch comedy, sport, documentaries, cooking shows and news. Probably in that order
I read (mostly on here!) and hear on the radio far more news than I watch
I repeat that putting Sunak's signature on it makes them problematic. Campaigning on the Tories' poor record on crime would be okay. But this is tawdry.
But nothing tawdry about Sunak putting his signature on that campaign where he bribed people to eat out using our money (and killed some of them). Okay.
Labour should fight dirty just as the Tories & their press friends do.
They really shouldn't.
I really thought Starmer was above this sort of thing and why descend to Braverman depths especially as they have a huge polling lead ?
Yes. By the standards of modern politics it is an entirely proper tactic - involving ordinary everyday distortions, evasions, untruths and dishonesty. As a Tory committed to voting Labour it would be troubling if for a moment I thought they believed it.
It has a Boris like feel in its populist half-truthery.
Also of course the slogan for Labour should be::
'Sentencing is a tricky matter best left to courts, and statutory intervention has tended to make things perverse, inconsistent and open to appeal, while filling our prisons with sad people in a system designed to make sad people bad and bad people worse. Let's have some incremental change'.
But this, while true, lacks the 'cage the paedos' factor.
Nuance is not, sadly, a vote winner.
Manifesto for moderates:
- Stand up for incremental improvement! - Fight for the least bad option! - Sometimes the other guys have a point!
I repeat that putting Sunak's signature on it makes them problematic. Campaigning on the Tories' poor record on crime would be okay. But this is tawdry.
But nothing tawdry about Sunak putting his signature on that campaign where he bribed people to eat out using our money (and killed some of them). Okay.
Most things that the government do could be thought of as bribery with our own money.
Bank holiday bike ride. Which famous event from political history took place here? (About to get back on my bike so any speculation will have to remain just that for a bit).
Ron Davies receiving fellatio?
He'll be badgered about that for ever.
Aren't you Oop North somewhere?
Someone made a speech.
Yes, it's cyclable from Greater Manchester. Not a speech as such - not a planned one at any rate. It was in the build up to the 1997 GE.
Hmmm./ The build up?
Martin Bell standing for Tatton? First Independent for nearly half a century.
Struggling with why he would do it in a field.
Yes! Battle of Knutsford Heath - scene of a confrontation between Martin Bell and some hangers-on and Neil and Christine Hamilton and the bloke who played Ken Barlow from Coronation Street. 'Battle' overstated the drama a tad.
What do you mean played? He’s still going, isn’t he?
Is he? SURELY he's dead by now?!
You tell me, mate! I had you down as a Corrie-holic.
I haven’t seen it since about 1991. I was gladdened though to discover that it was one of Bob Dylan’s favourite shows.
God no. Can't stand it. People having needless arguments. I can't be doing with telly which is neither funny nor true.
So with you on the telly
I watch comedy, sport, documentaries, cooking shows and news. Probably in that order
I read (mostly on here!) and hear on the radio far more news than I watch
I have a weird affection for silliest telenovela’s. The way that so many conversations ends in a door slam, and the set visibly wobbles….
Bank holiday bike ride. Which famous event from political history took place here? (About to get back on my bike so any speculation will have to remain just that for a bit).
Ron Davies receiving fellatio?
He'll be badgered about that for ever.
Aren't you Oop North somewhere?
Someone made a speech.
Yes, it's cyclable from Greater Manchester. Not a speech as such - not a planned one at any rate. It was in the build up to the 1997 GE.
Hmmm./ The build up?
Martin Bell standing for Tatton? First Independent for nearly half a century.
Struggling with why he would do it in a field.
Yes! Battle of Knutsford Heath - scene of a confrontation between Martin Bell and some hangers-on and Neil and Christine Hamilton and the bloke who played Ken Barlow from Coronation Street. 'Battle' overstated the drama a tad.
What do you mean played? He’s still going, isn’t he?
Is he? SURELY he's dead by now?!
You tell me, mate! I had you down as a Corrie-holic.
I haven’t seen it since about 1991. I was gladdened though to discover that it was one of Bob Dylan’s favourite shows.
God no. Can't stand it. People having needless arguments. I can't be doing with telly which is neither funny nor true.
So with you on the telly
I watch comedy, sport, documentaries, cooking shows and news. Probably in that order
I read (mostly on here!) and hear on the radio far more news than I watch
Could be worse, your postal round could be where Heathener lives and everyone on the street would be stopping you to talk about politics and telling you the Tories are facing Armageddon. I’m so glad I don’t live there - would make a trip to the shops take hours and my flask would go cold.
Let me get this right: you are not allowed to like and link to posts that contain Substack links, because Musk thinks it might be a competitor to Twitter*, but Putin and Russian government accounts are OK? (And bear in mind that there are sanctions on businesses operating in Russia, so Twitter is presumably recieving money for the cherished "Blue Tick")
Turns out the "Twitter Files" was a load of bullshit, too.
Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/ ...The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact). And they were quite clear in their report on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to track election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they tracked in trying to follow how this information spread, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on...
Let me get this right: you are not allowed to like and link to posts that contain Substack links, because Musk thinks it might be a competitor to Twitter*, but Putin and Russian government accounts are OK? (And bear in mind that there are sanctions on businesses operating in Russia, so Twitter is presumably recieving money for the cherished "Blue Tick")
Turns out the "Twitter Files" was a load of bullshit, too.
Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/ ...The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact). And they were quite clear in their report on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to track election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they tracked in trying to follow how this information spread, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on...
Let me get this right: you are not allowed to like and link to posts that contain Substack links, because Musk thinks it might be a competitor to Twitter*, but Putin and Russian government accounts are OK? (And bear in mind that there are sanctions on businesses operating in Russia, so Twitter is presumably recieving money for the cherished "Blue Tick")
Turns out the "Twitter Files" was a load of bullshit, too.
Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/ ...The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact). And they were quite clear in their report on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to track election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they tracked in trying to follow how this information spread, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on...
I repeat that putting Sunak's signature on it makes them problematic. Campaigning on the Tories' poor record on crime would be okay. But this is tawdry.
But nothing tawdry about Sunak putting his signature on that campaign where he bribed people to eat out using our money (and killed some of them). Okay.
Most things that the government do could be thought of as bribery with our own money.
They don't usually append their own personal signature to it though - an act of such utter crassness that I really struggle to take seriously any attempt to claim Labour's appropriation of it as some kind of outrage. Especially as Sunak is one of the few politicians who could actually afford to bribe us out of his own money, or at least his wife's.
Bank holiday bike ride. Which famous event from political history took place here? (About to get back on my bike so any speculation will have to remain just that for a bit).
Ron Davies receiving fellatio?
He'll be badgered about that for ever.
Aren't you Oop North somewhere?
Someone made a speech.
Yes, it's cyclable from Greater Manchester. Not a speech as such - not a planned one at any rate. It was in the build up to the 1997 GE.
Hmmm./ The build up?
Martin Bell standing for Tatton? First Independent for nearly half a century.
Struggling with why he would do it in a field.
Yes! Battle of Knutsford Heath - scene of a confrontation between Martin Bell and some hangers-on and Neil and Christine Hamilton and the bloke who played Ken Barlow from Coronation Street. 'Battle' overstated the drama a tad.
What do you mean played? He’s still going, isn’t he?
Is he? SURELY he's dead by now?!
You tell me, mate! I had you down as a Corrie-holic.
I haven’t seen it since about 1991. I was gladdened though to discover that it was one of Bob Dylan’s favourite shows.
God no. Can't stand it. People having needless arguments. I can't be doing with telly which is neither funny nor true.
So with you on the telly
I watch comedy, sport, documentaries, cooking shows and news. Probably in that order
I read (mostly on here!) and hear on the radio far more news than I watch
I have a weird affection for silliest telenovela’s. The way that so many conversations ends in a door slam, and the set visibly wobbles….
Sounds like the Golden Age of USA soap operas.
Are you familiar with "Dark Shadows"? US tv-series weird mix of soap with gothic.
I repeat that putting Sunak's signature on it makes them problematic. Campaigning on the Tories' poor record on crime would be okay. But this is tawdry.
But nothing tawdry about Sunak putting his signature on that campaign where he bribed people to eat out using our money (and killed some of them). Okay.
Most things that the government do could be thought of as bribery with our own money.
They don't usually append their own personal signature to it though - an act of such utter crassness that I really struggle to take seriously any attempt to claim Labour's appropriation of it as some kind of outrage. Especially as Sunak is one of the few politicians who could actually afford to bribe us out of his own money, or at least his wife's.
Utter crassness to sign something? No, I think what’s crass is using someone else’s signature to imply falsely that they believe something, especially on a subject like sex crimes against children.
Would I have put these posters out? No. Do I understand why they have done so? Yes. The Tories are already fighting dirty and seem convinced that even flecks of mud are sticking.
So go straight back at them. One of two things will happen - the Tories ramp it up to spectacular levels but can't deliver on their "shoot the migrants" policy. Or the Tories back off and stop fighting dirty. What Labour think is that if they slam home these messages, the big takeaway is how broken things are in Britain.
Either way, this far out from the election, screw it. The Tories have no moral leg to stand on anyway..
Politics has always been dirty, and fought dirtily. Remember McBride? Nothing here compares to that little sh*tty episode.
But the point is this: if Labour are descending to the gutter - and if Starmer has okayed these attack lines, then it shows at least three things:
*) Labour does not have a moral leg to stand on, either. If they do this to gain power, they'll have no problem doing it whilst in power as well. *) Starmer is an idiot. His time as DPP - when this was all going on - has always had potential to be a problem for him. This just highlights it - and not in a good way. *) Labour is willing to lie and misrepresent just as much as the government. That, as much as anything else, will lose them my vote.
(Sighs), so I guess it'll be the Lib Dems then, who aren't exactly running the local council on my patch well...
I think it shows that Labour are not confident that their lead is a solid one.
The irony being that the time that Blair's dangerousness actually presented itself (Iraq), the Tory opposition backed him to the hilt.
Based on a false prospectus.
(Ok, it's possible the tories would have backed it out of simple bloodlust, but you have to make the argument for that....)
I could see it was bullshit, but the Tory opposition couldn't? At best they were idiots.
A PBer wrote a rather good book about his time as a weapons inspector in the run-up to GW2. I don't know if this was meant to be a takeaway from the book, but one of mine was that the Iraqis were behaving so darned suspiciously that it's unsurprising (if tragic) that we told ourselves there were weapons in Iraq.
I'd recommend it, but as it's published in his real name, I'd rather not without his permission.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
The irony being that the time that Blair's dangerousness actually presented itself (Iraq), the Tory opposition backed him to the hilt.
Based on a false prospectus.
(Ok, it's possible the tories would have backed it out of simple bloodlust, but you have to make the argument for that....)
I could see it was bullshit, but the Tory opposition couldn't? At best they were idiots.
A PBer wrote a rather good book about his time as a weapons inspector in the run-up to GW2. I don't know if this was meant to be a takeaway from the book, but one of mine was that the Iraqis were behaving so darned suspiciously that it's unsurprising (if tragic) that we told ourselves there were weapons in Iraq.
I'd recommend it, but as it's published in his real name, I'd rather not without his permission.
The reality was Saddam Hussein believed he had WMD but nobody in Iraq had the balls to tell them their WMD was a paper tiger after 1991.
Well, if the Labour tweets were designed to get people talking and help it to rid itself of its, and its leader's, current reputation for blandness, then it's been a rip-roaring success. Any publicity....
I repeat that putting Sunak's signature on it makes them problematic. Campaigning on the Tories' poor record on crime would be okay. But this is tawdry.
But nothing tawdry about Sunak putting his signature on that campaign where he bribed people to eat out using our money (and killed some of them). Okay.
Most things that the government do could be thought of as bribery with our own money.
They don't usually append their own personal signature to it though - an act of such utter crassness that I really struggle to take seriously any attempt to claim Labour's appropriation of it as some kind of outrage. Especially as Sunak is one of the few politicians who could actually afford to bribe us out of his own money, or at least his wife's.
Oooo good idea. Labour could imply the prime minister should be judged on the basis of his spouse too. Roughly as crass as the other insinuations.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
Well, if the Labour tweets were designed to get people talking and help it to rid itself of its, and its leader's, current reputation for blandness, then it's been a rip-roaring success. Any publicity....
I repeat that putting Sunak's signature on it makes them problematic. Campaigning on the Tories' poor record on crime would be okay. But this is tawdry.
But nothing tawdry about Sunak putting his signature on that campaign where he bribed people to eat out using our money (and killed some of them). Okay.
Most things that the government do could be thought of as bribery with our own money.
They don't usually append their own personal signature to it though - an act of such utter crassness that I really struggle to take seriously any attempt to claim Labour's appropriation of it as some kind of outrage. Especially as Sunak is one of the few politicians who could actually afford to bribe us out of his own money, or at least his wife's.
Oooo good idea. Labour could imply the prime minister should be judged on the basis of his spouse too. Roughly as crass as the other insinuations.
The irony being that the time that Blair's dangerousness actually presented itself (Iraq), the Tory opposition backed him to the hilt.
Based on a false prospectus.
(Ok, it's possible the tories would have backed it out of simple bloodlust, but you have to make the argument for that....)
Does IDS being one of the first politicians to call for an invasion of Iraq after 9/11 and pimping the idea of Iraqi regime change in Washington more than a year before the dodgy dossier appeared count?
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
If Labour want to personally attack Sunak then the obvious target is his wealth and his non Dom wife and his “don’t know a working class person”
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
While thinking about Keir’s greatest hits, I just remembered the Johnson Variant
These ads are about that level
Word on the streets, is that Keir Starmer strongly favors free orthopedic insoles for foot-weary posties - pass it on!
I might need them for my Royal Mail shoes, but not for my new Scarpas
You might try selling the RM ones on Ebay, and make a tidy profit?
Note I just acquired (via good offices of United States Postal Service) an Aloha shirt once worn by a Honolulu bus driver, featuring "The Bus" which is exactly the way I toured O'ahu earlier this year.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
If Labour want to personally attack Sunak then the obvious target is his wealth and his non Dom wife and his “don’t know a working class person”
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
Crime is the issue de jour, because of Tory criminality. Writ large and well-rubbed in the noses of the Great British Public.
Attacking Rishi Rich is pointless for Blue Wallers, and not exactly killer ap with Red Wallers either?
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Maybe the people running political parties in this country are significantly less intelligent than we'd previous assumed. I don't just mean the public figures; the backroom staff as well.
“A senior Labour source says: “One of the reasons people react is because they don’t expect it from us, but Braverman’s dog whistle last week was accepted as par for the course?””
Let me get this right: you are not allowed to like and link to posts that contain Substack links, because Musk thinks it might be a competitor to Twitter*, but Putin and Russian government accounts are OK? (And bear in mind that there are sanctions on businesses operating in Russia, so Twitter is presumably recieving money for the cherished "Blue Tick")
Turns out the "Twitter Files" was a load of bullshit, too.
Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/ ...The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact). And they were quite clear in their report on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to track election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they tracked in trying to follow how this information spread, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on...
Matt Taibbi is a case study in the dangers of cognitive dissonance.
I repeat that putting Sunak's signature on it makes them problematic. Campaigning on the Tories' poor record on crime would be okay. But this is tawdry.
But nothing tawdry about Sunak putting his signature on that campaign where he bribed people to eat out using our money (and killed some of them). Okay.
Most things that the government do could be thought of as bribery with our own money.
They don't usually append their own personal signature to it though - an act of such utter crassness that I really struggle to take seriously any attempt to claim Labour's appropriation of it as some kind of outrage. Especially as Sunak is one of the few politicians who could actually afford to bribe us out of his own money, or at least his wife's.
Oooo good idea. Labour could imply the prime minister should be judged on the basis of his spouse too. Roughly as crass as the other insinuations.
It’s basically his money, after all.
Last week I watched a documentary about a man who stole a woman's money, and then killed her. He walked into a small Arkansas bank with her chequebook, claimed to be her husband, and they let him transfer her life savings away with no checks. And this wasn't ye olde days - it was the mid 1990s.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Maybe the people running political parties in this country are significantly less intelligent than we'd previous assumed. I don't just mean the public figures; the backroom staff as well.
Labour’s latest position is that “the Tories are dog whistling racists but - get this - so are we! Hah! Bet you weren’t expecting that eh?”
As you say, this does not strike me as evidence of high intelligence in their PR department
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Maybe the people running political parties in this country are significantly less intelligent than we'd previous assumed. I don't just mean the public figures; the backroom staff as well.
I think it's more complex than that. I'd like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent (yes, really), but I'm also well aware that I occasionally do things that are utterly stoopid - and would appear so to other people.
Mostly, these happen when no-one's around, or just my family. On a few occasions it has been on PB.
But top politicians have vast amounts of decisions to make, and the majority of these are in public. So it does not matter if they make 99 perfect decisions; it's the one stupid one that gets noticed and laughed at.
Although I don't think any of our politicians reach a 99/1 ratio.... except if it's 99 dumb to 1 intelligent decision...
The sewage thing has been a great success for Labour. I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year.
The tactic - an opposition bill to ban something which the government then has to vote down - does not normally cut through. But this one has been a huge success for Labour.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Because - sadly - that is the messaging that focus groups have shown them they need to deploy.
I do hope that once we get past the election we can have an effort from all sides to lift the IQ bar. Morons used to be told "just vote for us, we've got your back." Not pandered to.
The sewage thing has been a great success for Labour. I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year.
The tactic - an opposition bill to ban something which the government then has to vote down - does not normally cut through. But this one has been a huge success for Labour.
I think that may evaporate when he becomes the one responsible for raising a couple of hundred billion to pay for it.
The sewage thing has been a great success for Labour. I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year.
The tactic - an opposition bill to ban something which the government then has to vote down - does not normally cut through. But this one has been a huge success for Labour.
Lovely use of 'floating' voter when discussing sewage in the sea.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
If Labour want to personally attack Sunak then the obvious target is his wealth and his non Dom wife and his “don’t know a working class person”
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
Crime is the issue de jour, because of Tory criminality. Writ large and well-rubbed in the noses of the Great British Public.
Attacking Rishi Rich is pointless for Blue Wallers, and not exactly killer ap with Red Wallers either?
There are a billion ways of attacking the Tories on crime without saying “hey we’re just as racist as the Tories and proud of it” like this is a surprise positive
They could for instance have a photo of some poor woman who was attacked and has been waiting three years for the trial of her attacker because the Tories have fucked up and underfunded the judicial system
That would be emotive and would engage the swing voter. It would also have the advantage of
1 being at least adjacent to the truth
And
2 not making Labour look like hypocritical lunatics who have forgotten that their leader was DPP for many years
Would I have put these posters out? No. Do I understand why they have done so? Yes. The Tories are already fighting dirty and seem convinced that even flecks of mud are sticking.
So go straight back at them. One of two things will happen - the Tories ramp it up to spectacular levels but can't deliver on their "shoot the migrants" policy. Or the Tories back off and stop fighting dirty. What Labour think is that if they slam home these messages, the big takeaway is how broken things are in Britain.
Either way, this far out from the election, screw it. The Tories have no moral leg to stand on anyway..
Politics has always been dirty, and fought dirtily. Remember McBride? Nothing here compares to that little sh*tty episode.
But the point is this: if Labour are descending to the gutter - and if Starmer has okayed these attack lines, then it shows at least three things:
*) Labour does not have a moral leg to stand on, either. If they do this to gain power, they'll have no problem doing it whilst in power as well. *) Starmer is an idiot. His time as DPP - when this was all going on - has always had potential to be a problem for him. This just highlights it - and not in a good way. *) Labour is willing to lie and misrepresent just as much as the government. That, as much as anything else, will lose them my vote.
(Sighs), so I guess it'll be the Lib Dems then, who aren't exactly running the local council on my patch well...
The sewage thing has been a great success for Labour. I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year.
The tactic - an opposition bill to ban something which the government then has to vote down - does not normally cut through. But this one has been a huge success for Labour.
Lovely use of 'floating' voter when discussing sewage in the sea.
I noticed it, thought about it, and decided to leave it in...
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Maybe the people running political parties in this country are significantly less intelligent than we'd previous assumed. I don't just mean the public figures; the backroom staff as well.
Labour’s latest position is that “the Tories are dog whistling racists but - get this - so are we! Hah! Bet you weren’t expecting that eh?”
As you say, this does not strike me as evidence of high intelligence in their PR department
It's pretty hilarious reading some of the vitriol aimed at Labour on here and elsewhere today. Personally I'm not keen on this law and order campaign. But given the Tories' desperate efforts to equate Labour with turning a blind eye to "British Pakistani grooming gangs", and to tell us all that Labour would open our borders to any criminals who could be arsed to cross them, along with frequent pronouncements from Sunak, Braverman and others about Labour being soft on crime, it's a bit rich for them to moan about Labour attacking back.
Methinks the Tories doth protest too much.
They are such snowflakes.
"They".
Speaks a 'Tory party member'.
A disillusioned one, by the sound if it. Or are you going to call him a traitor ?
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
If Labour want to personally attack Sunak then the obvious target is his wealth and his non Dom wife and his “don’t know a working class person”
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
Crime is the issue de jour, because of Tory criminality. Writ large and well-rubbed in the noses of the Great British Public
I think the public consider corruption and "sleaze" to be different from crime. Even when, like Boris and the cake, it attracted a criminal penalty.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
In what sense does it work as a warning shot across the bow?
For that to work they would need to have 'escalation dominance' in this area, but the political nuclear option on sentencing for crimes against children is to bring back the death penalty, which is something that Labour strategists have long feared is a card the Tories could play at some point.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
If Labour want to personally attack Sunak then the obvious target is his wealth and his non Dom wife and his “don’t know a working class person”
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
Crime is the issue de jour, because of Tory criminality. Writ large and well-rubbed in the noses of the Great British Public.
Attacking Rishi Rich is pointless for Blue Wallers, and not exactly killer ap with Red Wallers either?
There are a billion ways of attacking the Tories on crime without saying “hey we’re just as racist as the Tories and proud of it” like this is a surprise positive
They could for instance have a photo of some poor woman who was attacked and has been waiting three years for the trial of her attacker because the Tories have fucked up and underfunded the judicial system
That would be emotive and would engage the swing voter. It would also have the advantage of
1 being at least adjacent to the truth
And
2 not making Labour look like hypocritical lunatics who have forgotten that their leader was DPP for many years
Sorry, but am finding your arguments on this, less persuasive than your outrage and discomfort.
On specific points;
1. - close enough
2. - Tories have been spending LOTS of effort on THAT, and will keep on doing so, regardless of whether Labour fights back, or not.
Somebody once said “politics is a rough trade” and that’s just how it is and has always been. It’s not for all we might wish it otherwise a civilised debating society. Politics is a place where strong opinions are expressed with passion and those who choose it as career or calling accept it comes with all that flows from it.
Every Party leader in my adult life has been personally and politically vilified and ridiculed as politics were more blood sport than just rough trade.
The importance of immediate rebuttal was emphasised by Mandelson but it still dominates discourse. Labour insult Sunak - the Conservatives, via Guido Fawkes, respond in kind. Would they have been better to have maintained a dignified silence - no, because they can’t let the message go unchallenged into the public consciousness as it undermines their leader.
I imagine we’ll be told the next election will be the dirtiest ever but it’ll only hold that title until the next election.
Let me get this right: you are not allowed to like and link to posts that contain Substack links, because Musk thinks it might be a competitor to Twitter*, but Putin and Russian government accounts are OK? (And bear in mind that there are sanctions on businesses operating in Russia, so Twitter is presumably recieving money for the cherished "Blue Tick")
Turns out the "Twitter Files" was a load of bullshit, too.
Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/ ...The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact). And they were quite clear in their report on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to track election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they tracked in trying to follow how this information spread, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on...
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
In what sense does it work as a warning shot across the bow?
For that to work they would need to have 'escalation dominance' in this area, but the political nuclear option on sentencing for crimes against children is to bring back the death penalty, which is something that Labour strategists have long feared is a card the Tories could play at some point.
Promising to bring in the death penalty is like escalation to weapons of mass destruction.
It would be as likely to destroy the Conservatives as propel then back into serious electoral contention.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
If Labour want to personally attack Sunak then the obvious target is his wealth and his non Dom wife and his “don’t know a working class person”
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
Crime is the issue de jour, because of Tory criminality. Writ large and well-rubbed in the noses of the Great British Public.
Attacking Rishi Rich is pointless for Blue Wallers, and not exactly killer ap with Red Wallers either?
There are a billion ways of attacking the Tories on crime without saying “hey we’re just as racist as the Tories and proud of it” like this is a surprise positive
They could for instance have a photo of some poor woman who was attacked and has been waiting three years for the trial of her attacker because the Tories have fucked up and underfunded the judicial system
That would be emotive and would engage the swing voter. It would also have the advantage of
1 being at least adjacent to the truth
And
2 not making Labour look like hypocritical lunatics who have forgotten that their leader was DPP for many years
Sorry, but am finding your arguments on this, less persuasive than your outrage and discomfort.
On specific points;
1. - close enough
2. - Tories have been spending LOTS of effort on THAT, and will keep on doing so, regardless of whether Labour fights back, or not.
No. You just don’t understand the British political environment surrounding all these issues
Comments
What I don’t accept is singling them out in an attempt to “own the libs” and dog whistle for racists.
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
It has a Boris like feel in its populist half-truthery.
Also of course the slogan for Labour should be::
'Sentencing is a tricky matter best left to courts, and statutory intervention has tended to make things perverse, inconsistent and open to appeal, while filling our prisons with sad people in a system designed to make sad people bad and bad people worse. Let's have some incremental change'.
But this, while true, lacks the 'cage the paedos' factor.
Does anyone on here really think the public would believe Sunak would think that way
This is why it may well be counterproductive
Either Labour have to put up, which will cause ructions in the party with those who don’t want tougher sentences, or will make them look stupid when they don’t actually have any idea what these tougher sentences will be and will also likely crash against sentencing guidelines softened whilst SKS was DPP.
Remember all that Remainers who thought the EU was jolly convenient when going on holiday so it's great, and Brexiteers who thought Brexit could be achieved more or less overnight.
Most people don't comprehend complex systems.
Thus giving the "high road" element in Labour plenty of cover.
"I expect the conservative counter to these adverts is going to raise many difficult questions for Starmer himself"
Which may well be even more difficult for Sunak & Co, particularly as focus will still be on Tory record of being soft on crime, especially when criminals are Tory PMs, ministers, MPs, donors, cronies, etc., etc.
Then again, I don't think voters generally give a shit.
The only effective response is for more people to apply similar standards to their allies as they do to their opponents. Partisan politicans obvs find this difficult. There is no serious defence of decency boundaries or anti-prejudice boundaries without an effort to do this.
https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1644296621864132608?cxt=HHwWgICxuZrE29EtAAAA
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
Tbf they’ve have occasionally tried versions of that north of Gretna.
It's like never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then win because of their experience....
I recall it, because there was a gobsmacking quote from a lawyer, in Private Eye, saying that the legal definition of barrel length should be whatever the police felt it should be.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
In sense that it does NOT make it easier, for fellow Tory MPs to give him a slap on the wrist, and let him keep on attending HoC in those odd, short, infrequent intervals when he is NOT sunning himself on a tropic isle, or speachifying to well-healed clusters of fellow land pirates.
Speaks a 'Tory party member'.
On the other hand, the supposed party of law n order has a terrible record in this area, which the public might want to be made aware of.
File under "whatever".
So go straight back at them. One of two things will happen - the Tories ramp it up to spectacular levels but can't deliver on their "shoot the migrants" policy. Or the Tories back off and stop fighting dirty. What Labour think is that if they slam home these messages, the big takeaway is how broken things are in Britain.
Either way, this far out from the election, screw it. The Tories have no moral leg to stand on anyway..
He’s rigorously proved that he’ll say whatever he thinks he needs to to get the job
Does even he know now what he wants to do?
But the point is this: if Labour are descending to the gutter - and if Starmer has okayed these attack lines, then it shows at least three things:
*) Labour does not have a moral leg to stand on, either. If they do this to gain power, they'll have no problem doing it whilst in power as well.
*) Starmer is an idiot. His time as DPP - when this was all going on - has always had potential to be a problem for him. This just highlights it - and not in a good way.
*) Labour is willing to lie and misrepresent just as much as the government. That, as much as anything else, will lose them my vote.
(Sighs), so I guess it'll be the Lib Dems then, who aren't exactly running the local council on my patch well...
I can't be doing with telly which is neither funny nor true.
Politicians shaping policy for justice? Fine. But not a hate mob prompting politicians to hand out panicky sentences. We have had this for decades now - but it's difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. Especially when the lunatics have been told that *everyone* who is right-minded agrees with them that Pakistani paedo invader boat criminals should be jailed for 437 years minimum.
Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/
...The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact).
And they were quite clear in their report on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to track election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they tracked in trying to follow how this information spread, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on...
(Ok, it's possible the tories would have backed it out of simple bloodlust, but you have to make the argument for that....)
I watch comedy, sport, documentaries, cooking shows and news. Probably in that order
I read (mostly on here!) and hear on the radio far more news than I watch
- Stand up for incremental improvement!
- Fight for the least bad option!
- Sometimes the other guys have a point!
https://twitter.com/mrianleslie/status/747723590913622017?cxt=HHwWgoCwqZ6pueAUAAAA
These ads are about that level
Especially as Sunak is one of the few politicians who could actually afford to bribe us out of his own money, or at least his wife's.
Are you familiar with "Dark Shadows"? US tv-series weird mix of soap with gothic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgBMZOHZVLo
If you’re strolling to victory, why bother?
I'd recommend it, but as it's published in his real name, I'd rather not without his permission.
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
So Iraq acted like they had WMD.
Namely, Tesla, Twitter and Elon Musk.
On one hand, just one more in the crowd that's trashed & shredded their own reputations, thanks to associating with Donald Trump.
On other hand, a spectacular (if not totally unique) example of someone jumping down the same skunk hole as Trump, and Putin.
Any publicity....
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
Owen Jones"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_tIp15APX8
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
Note I just acquired (via good offices of United States Postal Service) an Aloha shirt once worn by a Honolulu bus driver, featuring "The Bus" which is exactly the way I toured O'ahu earlier this year.
Attacking Rishi Rich is pointless for Blue Wallers, and not exactly killer ap with Red Wallers either?
“A senior Labour source says: “One of the reasons people react is because they don’t expect it from us, but Braverman’s dog whistle last week was accepted as par for the course?””
https://twitter.com/singharj/status/1644349436120690688?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
This is quite spectacularly moronic
As you say, this does not strike me as evidence of high intelligence in their PR department
Mostly, these happen when no-one's around, or just my family. On a few occasions it has been on PB.
But top politicians have vast amounts of decisions to make, and the majority of these are in public. So it does not matter if they make 99 perfect decisions; it's the one stupid one that gets noticed and laughed at.
Although I don't think any of our politicians reach a 99/1 ratio.... except if it's 99 dumb to 1 intelligent decision...
The tactic - an opposition bill to ban something which the government then has to vote down - does not normally cut through. But this one has been a huge success for Labour.
I do hope that once we get past the election we can have an effort from all sides to lift the IQ bar. Morons used to be told "just vote for us, we've got your back." Not pandered to.
They could for instance have a photo of some poor woman who was attacked and has been waiting three years for the trial of her attacker because the Tories have fucked up and underfunded the judicial
system
That would be emotive and would engage the swing voter. It would also have the advantage of
1 being at least adjacent to the truth
And
2 not making Labour look like hypocritical lunatics who have forgotten that their leader was DPP for many years
What happened?
Or are you going to call him a traitor ?
For that to work they would need to have 'escalation dominance' in this area, but the political nuclear option on sentencing for crimes against children is to bring back the death penalty, which is something that Labour strategists have long feared is a card the Tories could play at some point.
On specific points;
1. - close enough
2. - Tories have been spending LOTS of effort on THAT, and will keep on doing so, regardless of whether Labour fights back, or not.
Somebody once said “politics is a rough trade” and that’s just how it is and has always been. It’s not for all we might wish it otherwise a civilised debating society. Politics is a place where strong opinions are expressed with passion and those who choose it as career or calling accept it comes with all that flows from it.
Every Party leader in my adult life has been personally and politically vilified and ridiculed as politics were more blood sport than just rough trade.
The importance of immediate rebuttal was emphasised by Mandelson but it still dominates discourse. Labour insult Sunak - the Conservatives, via Guido Fawkes, respond in kind. Would they have been better to have maintained a dignified silence - no, because they can’t let the message go unchallenged into the public consciousness as it undermines their leader.
I imagine we’ll be told the next election will be the dirtiest ever but it’ll only hold that title until the next election.
It would be as likely to destroy the Conservatives as propel then back into serious electoral contention.
The ad is a crass and unforced error. That’s it