Labour launched an investigation into Ms Abbott’s comments. Since then, all enquiries as to whether she would be allowed to stand as an MP at the next General Election have been deflected: there was an investigation, we must wait for it to conclude. Keir Starmer was especially keen to point this out to whoever was asking. And then, today, came inconvenient reality.
The BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire launched the explosive device at 0739 hours: “I can reveal Labour’s investigation into suspended MP Diane Abbott’s racism comments finished 5 months ago. A source says she was given a ‘formal warning’ in Dec ’23. Ms Abbott was required to do an online ‘anti semitism course’ - which she did in Feb”. OH DEAR, KEIR. And there was more.
“Yet source says she still hasn’t been told if she can stand as a Labour candidate at election. I understand veteran MP is ‘angry, depressed & worn out’ by way she feels she’s been treated by Labour”. So not only Starmer, but every other Labour figure who echoes the line on the investigation not having concluded, had misled their audience. What was it Gordon Brown said?
Sadly, it seems that the Labour leader’s office does not operate on such a lofty intellectual plane. Having already claimed that Ms Abbott’s suspension had nothing to do with him - restoration of the whip, with the chief whip reporting to him, has everything to do with him - the last thing Starmer needed was evasion, not owning up to having misled the electorate.
Instead, official radio silence has descended. Starmer would have known about the investigation concluding; he lied about that. The impression of forthright dishonesty is now inescapable. Rumours swirl about not making a decision on whether Ms Abbott can stand in time for her to run as an independent, as former leader Jeremy Corbyn has done.
Those rumours are now caught up in further rumours about long-serving Labour MPs being asked to retire, so pro-Starmer favourites from the NEC can be gifted safe seats. And all the while, right-wing newspapers and other media outlets are forming up a damning characterisation of a Prime Minister in waiting as not only dishonest, but evasive, devious and untrustworthy.
Will today’s revelation blow Labour off course? Don’t bet against it.
https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton
28 comments:
Starmer has lied about everything else, so why not this?
Stand by for yet another five years of Toryism, Starmer 'style'.
Delicious though it is to see Sir Kier Torylite squirming, once again the Tory press win the gold star award for utter, shameless hypocrisy. Poor diane, left in limbo, the left (rightly) furious over her treatment they cry! This surely can't be the same press that spent the last twenty plus years making her life as miserable as they possibly can? No, can't be...
There are many reasons not to vote Labour, the lack of meaningful policies that would benefit the majority, the outright disdain for anyone to the left of Genghis Kahn but perhaps the most concrete reason to place your vote elsewhere is the objective fact that the Leader is a liar. At least as big a liar as De Pfeffel. He lied to get elected leader and he hasn't stopped lying since.
The only reason his lies are not more widely known is the lack of reasonable press coverage, something that, as we saw with De Pfeffel, can change overnight with pretty disastrous results for the lying individual concerned.
As with De Pfeffel, it would be better if his character was more properly interrogated BEFORE he is given the job of leading the country, because it all worked out so wonderful for us all when bozo was in charge...
Starmer is a hollow creature. No substance whatever.
Reckon it'll derail the labour campaign? I doubt it.
I'd argue that had Abbot been publicly rehabilitated, the media response would not give a shit how many courses she'd been on, and would largely be about Labour not having changed. Every old smear would be reused, and "they've not gone away" would be the accusation.
Better to sideline her. As someone from around these parts loves to say, she was for a time but not all time, and there she goes....OUT!
Now that the quisling is 'a socialist' he'll have to expel himself.
Abbot is no angel, she has made mistakes, we all do.
Starmer, though, he is one hell of a devil.
Never thought I would dispise him as much as Boris Johnson. Well done Mr Starmer.
It's shameful the way she's been treated and she has a noble record in the Labour party; but she's an easy target in a campaign and has proved to be an embarrassment in past ones. And that's without even mentioning 'Left Labour MP privately educating her kid after having criticised Blair and Harman for the same thing'.
I'd say that hypocrisy is possibly seen as a greater sin in a Labour MP than lying is, the former seeming to undermine the party's claimed moral superiority while the latter is just regarded as par for the political course.
Politics is a rough old game, as someone used to say, and those who succeed tend to be ruffians. If you're going to have a fit of the vapours every time a player falls short of saintliness then you might be better off following crown bowls.
Or clog dancing.
I used to think you had a touch of Tony Robinson about you. Turns out it was more like Tommy.
Her treatment is in direct contradiction of the recommended course of action from the EHRC, and it proves Martin Forde right.
Easily done tbh. Sunak and Starmer, two cheeks of the same arse. The only choice the electorate is being given is between the outright nasty party, and the 'party with the same policies but less evil'. According to a Tory pollster, and based on the local elections, the Torys are set to do alright. Apparently the polls are 'exaggerated' and despite getting mauled in those elections, and every recent by-election, he reckons it's going to be close. If he's right, it proves, beyond any doubt, that the uk public really are thick as pig shit...
'A player who falls short of saintliness'.
A new way of describing a perpetrator and supporter of war criminality and mass murder of defenceless women and children.
Utterly contemptible cowardly filth, the kind of corrupt muck peddled by Murdoch and Rothermere and broadcast equivalents.
Spittle-flecked Sturmerisms, Cloggy. Risible even by your standards.
Fraternally
Bertie
Oh dear, no more picnic invitations for me then, Ed.
Affectionately
Bertie
I'd be more than up for a picnic Ed but, just like last time, you'll have an "attack of the vapours" at the idea of it.
Dwell on what you wrote, I beg you.
Just wondering if there’s a much simpler possibility than these interpretations.
Maybe Abbott did the required course, but expressed a desire also to be allowed to support to support the campaign of an independent candidate for parliament…. And as a result her being allowed to stand, or not, became a new issue nothing to do with the investigation.
Simpler. But just a theory, mind.
On today's "news", corporate media thugs besieging Abbot as she left her home.
Goes with the BBC yesterday labelling Rayner an "attack dog".
A safe bet the same gang won't say Sunak and Starmer are "the same pig with different lipstick". Not even when they wallow in the same sty.
.
Quietly rational, and much more effective for that, tweet on X re oily Streeting's cringey media round this morning:
'Wes Streeting saying just now that voters are more interested in the fate of the NHS than Labour's treatment of Diane Abbott; but the two issues are inseparable, because a party capable of showing such cruelty & unfairness to one of its own is not to be trusted on *any* issue'
Begs the question though: where is the party and where are the politicians who *could* be so trusted? So you're left with what you've got, the compromised choices of a blighted system.
It's fine margins, as the sporting cliche goes. Or the ostrich option.
23:05.
Yeah, dead "risible" for those who support this:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/05/genocide-in-rafah-and-the-icj/
Well done for dropping the disguise hiding your actual far right self. As someone said, the internet never forgets.....
This is the first time in history where the two main political parties are seemingly fighting hard to lose an election! In normal times, such a cock up would be fatal. But the Tories, with their defections and half baked national service plans, are proving to be fierce adversaries.
Now, the Dianne Abbott scandal will rumble on for a while and the Tories will wait a little before announcing their next self defeating policy... Banning rivers to stop the sewage problem? Building a wall along the southern coast? Giving all first born to Amazon?
Great news for the Festival of Bullshit fronted by the genocide-supporting Sunak/Hunt/Starmer/Reeves far right party.
1. The Israeli mass murder machine is only dropping "small US bombs" in "precision strikes". Presumably to kill only small Palestinian people with thousands of precision- guided flying shrapnel.
2. The CGI that is Wes "Essex mad eyes" Streeting has just announced in the Daily torygraph there will be increased Yank type profiteering privatisation in the NHS. Early warning for vulnerable patient bankruptcies, US-style.
British "democracy" in action.
14:22.
And you have adopted the "ostrich option".
Well done, a self-fulfilling notion. Thatcher's TINA in action.
For someone who appears to have read a bit of Orwell, that great promoter of the clear and precise use of English, you seem to have about as much respect for those qualities and for that noble language as does that orange American oaf I’ve just watched rambling incoherently on television.
Are you by chance related?
Bertie
With the country in a shocking state, a deep recession looming, and only figure fiddling keeping inflation down, unemployment under control, and seemingly unnoticed by the media, business failures at a ten year high, there is a suspicion that neither party wants the poisoned chalice..
21.48
That's quite possible. And it leaves an opportunity for a new party, a Third Way.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Who will rise to this epochal occasion? Who will hear the call? I see only one possible leader.
'ANONYMOUS!!!!!!!!.........'
Anonymous at 19:49 - that was real stream of consciousness stuff, wasn't it? Yet I'm sure the gun and fentanyl addicts of that failed state will still vote for him.
13:02.
There's something wrong with your clock as well as your spelling and outed far right posts.
Tsk tsk.
Great "democratic" choices between (a) War Criminal Mass Murder Supporter Blue, and (b) War Criminal Mass Murder Supporter Red.
The former shouts Yah and the latter shouts Boo. Tremendous stuff.
I am surprised no-one has asked why the Observer saw fit to publish Abbott's letter, knowing full well the trouble it would cause. Conspiracy theory, anyone?
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