United Kingdom 2

[quote=JKR]

He kills mosquitoes too?

[/quote

He's killed millions of humans- and his New Statesman piece is proof he wants millions MORE killed.  As to Iran, he likely won't stop until he's restored some leftover Pahlevi to the "Peacock Throne".

JKR wrote:

How has he killed millions?

Who would Iranians elect if they had open elections in Iran? I don't think it would be a leftover Pahlavi but neither do I think it would be someone supported by Iran's  ruling class of Mullah elites.

In the Anti-Muslim Wars(Iraq & Afghanistan), up to two million died.

And I'm no fan of the existing Iranian regime, but it goes without saying the West would only bomb Iran in the hopes of replacing the mullahs with a new Shah- that they would never allow Iran to be a democracy.  The West proved they would never allow a democratic Iran, once and for all, in 1953, when they overthrew Mossadegh, the democratically-elected president of Iran, and insisted on replacing him with a Pahlevi restoration.  It was that restoration that made the events of 1979 inevitable.

JKR wrote:

The West allows there to be a democracy in Iraq so why wouldn't they allow one in Iran?

Uh, NDPP...YOU want to take this one?  I think you could explain it better than I can.

How can the Iranian people make decisions regarding their government when the mullahs there won't let them?

JKR wrote:

The West allows there to be a democracy in Iraq so why wouldn't they allow one in Iran?

Is that the democracy that nicely asked the occupation force to leave and have been ignored?

JKR wrote:

That's the one. I didn't say they were a powerful democracy.

Begs the question of what is a democracy if it has no territory that it is the sovereign authority over.

JKR wrote:

Is Canada sovereign since we are partially dependent on the U.S.?

Canada was not sovereign until the passage of the Westminster Act in 1931. Prior to that our armed forces were under the authority of the British High Command. After WWI all the colonials demanded a change since the English officers were arrogant incompetent assholes. I think currently with the integrated NATO command it can be argued we have reverted to the pre-1931 hierarchy except the arrogant incompetent assholes directing our armed forces are now American.

It's a travesty that the arrogant incompetent assholes directing our military are not Canadian!

Tariq Ali: G7 merely a PR campaign to prepare western populations for action against China, Russia (and vid)

https://www.rt.com/shows/going-underground/526379-tariq-ali-campaign-g7/

On this edition of Going Underground, we speak to author and activist Tariq Ali. He discusses the purpose of the G7 meeting, which he believes is to prepare populations for action against Russia and China, drilling in ideological commitment among their citizens. He also talks about the role of NATO  nations in creating multiple refugee crises..."

George Galloway: After Biden's addled appearance at the G7, we can only hope he's never left alone with the nuclear codes

https://on.rt.com/baa1

"...It was all theatre macabre, of course. The G7 represents neither the world's democracies nor its largest economies. Canada can be there only out of sentiment. Indonesia, India and other truly large democracies are excluded. The second largest economy in the world, China, likewise.

Europe's largest country, indeed the world's largest country - Russia is persona non grata over the 'invasion' of Crimea. But the US/UK invaders of almost every nation in the world sat at Her Majesty's pleasure. And China and Russia were still there, of course, living rent-free in the heads of those who were in attendance. It was a Cold War romp that descended on England's green and pleasant land.

And it was as regrettable a sight as poor old Joe shuffling around like an embarrasing elderly relative. We must hope that Mrs Biden is never indisposed, leaving her husband alone to kick the nuclear football."

The Liberal Democrats have pulled off a stunning by-election victory, overturning a 16,000 majority in a seat that has always voted 

The party's candidate Sarah Green won by 8,028 votes from the Tories, with the Green Party in third place.

Labour had the worst by-election result in the party's history, with 622 votes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-57472032

nicky wrote:

Josh, are you advocating abandoning Labour for the Lib Dems?

Are you saying that those hordes of voters who think Labour is not left wing enough have suddenly stampeded to the Lib Dems?
 

Not at all. The lesson is that Starmerites are even less popular than Corbynites, in all types of ridings. This particular one was apparently hopeless for Labour, but their candidate under Starmer managed the impressive feat of losing votes from the disaster of 2019. The same trend has shown up in the loss of previously safe Labour seats such as Hartlepool. Starmer has shockingly managed to lose popularity in all demographic and political categories. Well done, Sir Keir, you bum.

nicky wrote:

Josh, are you advocating abandoning Labour for the Lib Dems?

Are you saying that those hordes of voters who think Labour is not left wing enough have suddenly stampeded to the Lib Dems?
 

No...but what happened in that by-election IS proof that Starmer's "all that matters is crushing the Left" strategy is an absolute failure- as the May 6th results had also proved.

Look...relax...Corbyn is never coming back...but what we now know is that Labour is NEVER going to win over any voters who are to the right of the party, and the only votes he can add are of all those people who supported the policies of the previous leader...policies Starmer vowed never to move to the right of...and who support internal party democracy...which Starmer vowed to expand, not obliterate.   Starmer needs the Corbyn generation and the only way he can get them back is to start by ceasing his pointless fight to drive them the hell out of the party.

He wanted to show he isn't Corbyn? fine, he's done that.

Now, he needs to move on from that and show that he isn't Neil Kinnock 2.0, or worse Tony Blair 2.0, because the polls prove he can't win by replicating either of those two.

He needs to admit that support for Corbyn was never a cult, but simply about a legitimate and valid set of proposals for change.  He needs to admit that there is nothing to the right of those policies that would be of any use, and that it wasn't a nefarious conspiracy that most of the party rank-and-file backed and STILL back those policies.

He needs to admit that, whatever anyone thinks of Corbyn, erasing everything the party stood for in the Corbyn era and replacing it with centrism, of treating idealism, enthusiasm and any sense of vision as things to be replaced with nothing but bitter, spiteful defeatism- is not only never going to elect another Labour government, but wouldn't even be worth TRYING to elect one on, since there are no centrist policies that can ever address unemployment or poverty, and since there is no way any future government could ever engage in another Blair-style military intervention in a non-European country, such as Hilary Benn's essentially Tory support for bombing Syria and Iran, could possibly avoid leading to massive cuts in whatever pathetically small social benefits a "centrist" Labour government would bring in.

It's not going to bring Corbyn back to the leadership for Starmer to just do these three things:

1) Make it absolutely clear no policies to the right of the 2017 manifesto will be adopted;

2) End his pointless fight to drive the Left out of the party-Labour without a left wing couldn't be different than the Tories

3) Actually carry out his pledge to expand internal party democracy, and admit that there is no reason to freeze the party membership out of any real say in candidate selection, policy direction, or party governance.

If he takes those three steps, a Labour victory would be possible.

If he refuses to and keeps listening instead to discredited reactionaries like "Mandy", he can only doom Labour to another defeat.

It's only worth getting the Tories out of the government that replaces them obliterates everything they've done in office.

G7 is a neocolonial cabal (podcast)

https://www.blackagendareport.com/g7-neocolonial-cabal/

"The recently concluded summit meeting of so-called G7 nations revealed them once again to be 'nothing but a cabal and gangsters' bent on 'maintaining neocolonial rule' of the planet, said Richard Medhurst, a Syrian-born journalist and political commentator. Made up of white settler regimes and former and current neo-colonial powers, the G7 spend much of their time 'maligning Russia and China' but can no longer compete in a multi-polar world, said Medhurst."

NDPP wrote:

The United Kingdom is a Police State...(and vid)

https://twitter.com/richimedhurst/status/1406038185558384648

"Laws have passed in the UK which allow undercover agents to commit crimes and gives British troops immunity from prosecution after committing war crimes. Richard Medhurst asks is Britain becoming a totalitarian state and just where is the opposition?

Being led by the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Sir Keir Starmer, who also collaborated enthusiastically  in the stitch-up of Julian Assange.

Yes, the UK is clearly becoming a totalitarian state.

Priti Patel’s new threat to British journalists
By Richard Norton-Taylor• 15 June 2021   ---Richard Norton-Taylor was The Guardian’s defence correspondent, its security editor for three decades and is the author of several books, most recently The State of Secrecy--

....A largely unnoticed and unreported consultation paper on changes to Britain’s Official Secrets Acts drawn up by the Home Office shows that the government is preparing far-reaching threats to the media and the public’s right to know.

It intends to abandon the existing distinction between spying and leaking, and between leakers, whistleblowers and journalists. “Both primary and onward disclosures have the potential to cause equal amounts of harm”, the paper states.

This makes it clear the government wants to claim a journalist responsible for an “onward disclosure” — a publication in a newspaper or website, for example — would be as liable and on a par in criminal law with a primary source, such as a whistleblower in a government agency.

The government is determined to make it easier to prosecute whistleblowers and make it harder to mount a defence for disclosing information the government claims is damaging to national security. ...

Leakers and journalists could be charged with disclosing information that was merely “capable” of being damaging. They could be sent to jail on a hypothesis.

The Home Office makes clear it wants to prevent sensitive information from being disclosed in court. One way of doing this would be to lower the burden of proof prosecutors would need to secure a conviction. A jury would not need to know evidence of how damaging a disclosure of information was. Mere claims by government lawyers would be enough to convict....

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-06-15-priti-patels-new-thre...

George Galloway, TMOATS, Ep 106 (and vid)

https://twitter.com/MoatsTV/status/1409208935068966914

Matt Hancock scandal; is George's political campaign financed by Russia? 'Carry on up the Crimea' fiasco, Britney Spears' abusive 'conservatorship', latest 'Epsteined Mcafee' bombshell, Bill Gates, Prince Andrew and more!

anti-spam bump

Labour have narrowly held Batley by about 1%, down frim a 6% margin in the general election.

The Cons likely would have won last time except for a right wing minor party which drained off 12%. The narrow Labour win looks better in this context.

Polling had Labour well behind two weeks ago so there appears to have been a large shift to Labour since then. Perhaps news of a Corbynite coup against Starmer helped shore up the Labour vite.

Final results.

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1410890103615000577?s=20

So the Conservative vote actually dropped in this one.

Given the 323 vote margin, and the drop in the Conservative vote, it's hard to draw any solid conclusions one way or the other.  It would appear that at least some Conservative voters voted for Galloway because of his strong pro-Brexit stance.  While left voters voted for him because of his foreign policy stances and his opposition to Starmer's anti-Semitic witch hunt.

Wrong on just about every count.  Just to take one point, with Corbyn at the helm in 2017, Labour won the constituency by 17.  

https://electionresults.parliament.uk/election/2017-06-08/Results/Location/Constituency/Batley%20and%20Spen/

And Galloway took away pro-Brexit voters who might have gone Tory otherwise.  So his presence hurt both parties.

So Labour dropped 11% under Corbyn in 2019 and only scraped home because the conservative vote was split

Huh? Labour got 55% in Bailey & Spen in 2017 and fell to 42% in 2019. How is that a gain of 5?

nicky wrote:

Huh? Labour got 55% in Bailey & Spen in 2017 and fell to 42% in 2019. How is that a gain of 5?

It was a gain of five from the 2015 showing to 2017.

And again, there is no such thing as Corbynism- there is simply democratic socialism, which the Left supports, and Blairism(Toryism) which YOU support.  

Corbyn's election as leader was strictly because the party rank and file wanted radical chamge- it was never about a damn personality cult- and that victory was neither illegitimate nor a diabolical plot against the party,

Stop the delusional, vindictive lies.

Corbyn was never worshipped like some sort of freaking god and the people who stood against him for the leadership lost because they had nothing to offer- none of them were ever personally popular, none offered any worthwhile notion of what a Labour government should do0 and the Labour rank and file just didn't want any of them to be leader.

Why is that so hard for you to accept?

And why can't you admit that it's time for Keir to end the nastiness and offerm instead, a positive socialist vision of the future?  

And btw, why IS your approach discourse so relentlessly spiteful, vicious and dismissive?  Nobody here has ever posted anything about you to justify the tone you take here, and it's hard to imagine anybody could have said anything to you anywhere else to merit this toxicity.