Morgan McSweeney Pisses Down His Leg

So the Labour Party Conference is once more upon us, but not, for those running the party, at the moment they would have chosen: not much more than a year after being returned to power, poll ratings remain stubbornly low, and stubbornly behind Reform UK and its self-appointed Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage, with internal dissent never far from the surface.

And it is the manner in which potential and actual dissent is being addressed that shows us just how shameless, clueless, and detached from reality those who run the Labour machine have become. They think they’re still the bees’ knees, while all too many of their potential supporters have stopped listening.

At this point, a message from the distant past arrives. Lyndon Johnson’s observation “Did y’ever think ... that making a speech on ee-conomics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else” should be ringing out long and loud in the ears of Morgan McSweeney and his cabal. What they’re doing seems hot to them, but not to anyone outside their magic circle. Rather, it does no more than invite ridicule.

The Labour whip has been restored to John McDonnell and Apsana Begum, fourteen months after it was removed because they declined to back the two-child benefit cap. No, it doesn’t show a new generosity of spirit. But it does remind the world how authoritarian and intolerant Keir Starmer and his coterie of hangers-on became, and so soon after the election. Another fail.

Not even the blessed Tone was so intolerant of dissent. But the Blair years did produce policy proposals that went down like the proverbial cup of cold sick, one of which was ID cards. That’s the same ID cards that became so unpopular by the early 1950s that they were binned. Blair’s attempt, in 2006, to exhume them failed. But that has not dissuaded the McSweeney cabal.

Because now, it’s going to be DIGITAL. As the BBC report tells, “It is a way of proving your identity, and your right to work in the UK, using modern smartphone technology”. It is also, whisper it quietly, a way of getting every opposition party, from the Tories to Lib Dems, Greens, Independents and even Reform UK, lined up in forthright opposition. It’s another fail.

What it will not do is to “stop the boats”, the slogan by which Farage and his pals live their political lives. Far more useful, and better for everyone concerned, would have been to establish safe routes for refugees, and giving them the ability to claim asylum either in their own countries, or elsewhere outside the UK. Boats stopped, Farage deflated. So why not?

Because, sad to say, there seems to be a desire to fight Mr Thirsty on the latter’s chosen patch. WRONG. And when it comes to the kind of dissent that could derail the Starmer and McSweeney project, it gets worse. This has been superbly illustrated by their response to concerns that Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham may challenge for the Labour leadership.

So how has Labour’s ruling cabal addressed the potential challenge? What would a sensible, confident and collegiate leadership have done? What would Nietzsche have done? Sadly, this cabal does not operate on that intellectual plane, and the leadership has sunk to sending photoshopped images of Burnham as Liz Truss into the Internet. That’s a seriously bad fail.

Burnham has significant ministerial experience. His tenure as Mayor of Greater Manchester has included ending bus deregulation across the county, together with price capping to make travel more affordable. Adding local rail services to the “Bee Network” is the next step. Positive change. What has the McSweeney cabal done? Slagged off and undermined its opponents.

And coming over the horizon is Paul Holden’s book “The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy”. Which McSweeney and his pals will doubtless slag off and brief against. Because it seems hot to them, whatever those in the world outside New New Labour might think.

Worse still, Labour membership is in serious decline. Many may never return. Not while those who worked to throw the 2019 election are in power. Hint.

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Nigel Farage - Lying Beyond Barking

Our free and fearless press, and to their continuing shame our broadcast media, cannot get enough of Reform UK and its self-appointed Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage, failing to do the kind of job one might have thought journalists should be doing: holding this serially dishonest, bigoted and revoltingly slimy individual to account.

The failure to call out Farage and his increasingly thuggish coterie of aspiring insurgents is exacerbated by the utter failure of Keir Starmer’s team to provide any kind of narrative around which a coalition of voters can coalesce, in turn exacerbated by the shortage of Labour members willing to go in to bat for those who, by their own admission, worked to throw the 2019 election.

Into this vacuum has come Mr Thirsty. So has he shown leadership, any kind of responsibility? You jest: responsibility is far, far away as Farage declines to distance himself from Combover Crybaby Donald Trump’s flagrantly wrong claim that women taking Tylenol (Paracetamol in the UK) during pregnancy could cause autism. This is total and unadulterated crap.

Instead, we get the customary Farage fudge, saying he doesn’t know if the claim is true, meaning that his all too easily persuaded followers will start to believe that there really is something in Trump’s baseless ranting. Stoking the paranoia among the Reform UK faithful is Farage’s own flat-out whopper, claiming that Mayor of London Sadiq Khan wants to introduce Sharia Law.

Khan’s number one priority today is a rather more humble one: to oversee the introduction of the Bakerloop express bus service, the first stage of persuading central Government, along with business leaders, to back extension of the Bakerloo Line from Elephant and Castle to Lewisham. He has no intention of introducing Sharia Law. And Farage knows it.

But there he is, allowed to pitch this ridiculous suggestion live on LBC, courtesy of Nick Ferrari, and back it up by asserting that he knows Sharia Law is coming because a taxi driver told him. It sounds plausible enough for his followers - already on a hair trigger on the subject of Scary Muslims™ after years of variously peddled bigotry - to believe.

It gets worse: taking his cue from another deranged Trump whopper, that Haitian migrants to the USA were eating cats and dogs (they weren’t), once again, away goes Farage. Those scary brown people coming to the UK were eating carp and even swans! Ever tried to catch a swan? Clue: swans are more than capable to seeing off anyone so minded.

Worse still, anyone thinking that Mr Thirsty’s latest claims are so ridiculous that they might even drive away some of his supporters have been disabused of that notion by polling showing the distinct possibility that, were an election to be held in the immediate future, Reform UK might even be able to garner sufficient support to score enough MPs to govern on their own.

That should frighten the somnambulant media establishment into waking up and starting to put Farage on the spot, as they do for any other politician. The signs are not good, however: long-term Farage ally Nathan Gill has just pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery by a foreign state (Russia). He is expected to be jailed. Wall to wall media coverage? Nah. Crickets.

Gill is not just any old Farage hanger-on: it was he who introduced the 2019 intake of (then) Brexit Party MEPs to the European Parliament, prominent among them one Claire Fox, unrepentant terrorist sympathiser who, let us not forget, was not held to account for her support for the “armed struggle”. Instead, there were softball media appearances. There, there, eh?

In any case, Farage can bat away criticism by telling his followers that the MSM lies. Look over there at the real liars! And the MSM has a proud history of lying in pursuit of its smear campaigns, and elsewhere. He can also bat off Labour criticism by telling his followers that Starmer and his acolytes lie. And he is, once again, right. Because they do. But that is no excuse for inaction.

One small bright spot: the SDP-Liberal Alliance hit 50% in the polls in early 1982. The following year, they scored just 23 MPs. All is not yet lost.

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