There's a world of difference between Labour policies - actual policies - and the sort of stuff that appears on social media.
Actual Labour policy is focused on wealth creation, funding the public sector, help for small and medium businesses ...
All the stuff people in here say they want.
Nothing about pronouns. No shift on women's rights.
And Starmer has moved - consistently -away from Corbynism.
The Corbynists know this and are both furious and mounting a campaign to get rid of Starmer.
But ... there's a huge problem. Which I think is made really clear on this thread:
How would you know all that?
Our media is dominated by coronavirus. Labour are massively out of power - with an 80 seat majority for the Conservatives, the Opposition, led by Starmer, is almost an irrelevance.
Meanwhile, the click bait 'Leftism' of Owen Jones dominates social media.
It's incredibly hard to compete against someone whose aim is to generate attention for himself and his niche area at the cost of actually helping a political Party win votes.
The narrative about what the Labour Party actually stands for at the moment is very much at variance with its policies at the moment.
To me, it's utterly contaminated by a really niche version of 'progressivism'.
What do you do about that? I don't know the answer - but I think Labour needs to find an answer. And soon.
And, yes, the treatment of Rosie Duffield on Twitter is key to that. It's beyond a disgrace.
People can disagree - but bullying of the like she has been subjected to is unacceptable.
One problem is that it's on Twitter, rather than within an organised political space - so it's hard to discipline. But ... something needs to be done about it. It's poisonous.
As for the culture stackofcats identifies ... well, my feeling is that people - especially young people - experiment with ideas. However, you expect something different from an actual political Party.
One of the madnesses of recent politics has been the absorption of ideas such as those - at the cost of materially-grounded policies - into the mainstream, Parliamentary Left. It didn't work with the electorate, did it?
But, again, there is a huge difference between the policies and economic/social strategy the Labour Party currently have and that extra-Parliamentary politics.
The problem is that it seems very few people know that.
Reading this thread has made me think that Starmer needs to make this very, very clear.
For example, Owen Jones has virtually no purchase within the current Labour leadership. He had a whatsapp hotline to the previous administration.
No more.
He's totally out in the cold.
But people still identify his social media rantings with Labour.
This clearly needs to change.
So, in short, my wish would be for Starmer to be a bit more vocal about what he's done. Particularly about creating a clear firewall between Labour as the Party that seeks to govern and the wild 'progressives' who are really out of touch in their demands and behaviour.