Until this week, it had been difficult to compare post-Brexit Britain to those moments in the 1970s when the lights went out and cars had to queue for fuel. Sure, supermarkets have been short of some lines, but the real 70s moments, the ingredients of a real winter of discontent, had been missing. But a week, as Harold Wilson observed, is a long time in politics, and now the fuel shortages have arrived with a vengeance.
And the shortages have spooked the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press: from the increasingly desperate and downmarket
Telegraph’s “
Alarm as BP begins petrol rationing”, to the Murdoch
Times’ “
Don’t panic, urges No 10 after BP cuts fuel delivery”, and the rather more downmarket
Sun shrieking “
WE’RE RUNNING ON EMPTY”, the conclusion has to be that someone is panicking, and it’s the Tory cheerleaders.
Worse, the Tories and their hangers-on are so clearly out of touch with more or less anyone outside their comfort zone: they cannot conceive of how withdrawing the £20 uplift in Universal Credit could possible be a problem. For Tory cheerleaders, think-tankers, hacks and pundits, that’s around a quarter, or less, of their average per person restaurant bill. For the least well-off, it’s a week’s food, and maybe some heating.
So it might be thought that Labour would be capitalising on the Tory ineptitude and cluelessness, and taking an opinion poll lead into their Conference, which begins this weekend. But the Times and YouGov have brought bad news: despite the shambles over which alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his cabinet of talentless sycophants is presiding, the Tories have regained a lead over Labour.
Why that might be is not difficult to deduce: while some leading Labour figures are doing their best to take the fight to the Tories - Angela Rayner taking PMQs this week and giving the clueless Dominic Raab a suitably good going over, for instance - that part of the leadership that almost sacked her was apparently busying itself with infighting.
As it is with YouGov ...
Like the idea of abandoning One Member One Vote for electing the party leader, for instance. LabourList
has reported that “
Keir Starmer has confirmed to his shadow cabinet that he will bring rule changes to Labour conference for a return to an electoral college system in leadership elections, a new reselection process for MPs and reforms to the policy-making process”. OMOV was how Starmer himself was elected.
This has not received universal acclaim: “
Unite the Union has already publicly opposed switching back to the electoral college system for leadership contests, which - unlike the current one-member-one-vote system - sees MPs, affiliates and members each given a third of the vote … Sharon Graham told Labour MPs in an email last night that the electoral college plan was ‘unfair, undemocratic and a backwards step for our party’”.
... so also with Survation
Picking a scrap with the left, which is how the abandonment of OMOV will be portrayed, is, sadly, rather like how Lyndon Johnson described making a speech on economics: “
Did y’ever think … that making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else”. The Labour leadership may enjoy putting one over on the Rotten Lefties™. But it will not address voters’ concerns.
And those voters won’t forget, or forgive, Labour playing games
while they went hungry.
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Just another day at the red tory Quiff Quisling office. Just another nail in the Labour coffin lid. It's in Keef's employment contract.
ReplyDeleteLabour is now at the same stage of disintegration as the Liberal Party circa 1921. All of it brought about by its always-treacherous right wing.
Starmer, like Bliar/Brown, will receive his pieces of Establishment silver in due course. Grass roots party members who believe the party was founded to transform society.....will be expelled ot otherwise betrayed.
Eventually even the shouty ms. Rayner might realise she's taken for a mug.
Meanwhile, the Quiff "contribution" is an empty-headed platitudinous pile of bullshit he calls an "essay". The gutless meff. The only thing missing is a white feather.
Britain 2021. A terminally sick nation.
It’s so sad it’s fucking pathetic. That we should still be stuck with that fat dishevelled blonde cunt is beyond me. That people should still have a place for the frog face little nazi shit never stops amazing me. And still keef sits in a cupboard counting his beans. What the fuck are we supposed to do?
ReplyDeleteI can understand Starmer's reasoning, when you get shits like Toby Young boasting about having bought a discounted Labour membership that he was planning on using to make Labour unelectable.
ReplyDeleteTo 16:46.
ReplyDeleteIs that the "discounted membership" that went from circa 160,000 to circa 450,000 on the basis that, for once, the Labour Party just, might just, hold to its founding principles?....That one?
But which is now receding like a rip tide in reverse thanks to a right wing red tory "leadership" with the morals of a cuckoo on heat.
Toby "Jug" Young? A grotesque suburban neonazi with a justified inferiority complex. A fart-in-a-bottle of no consequence.