Thread 38 Sunak: Soooo, square one is an option then?

[AdamRyan]

Thanks to @cornettoninja For the epic title!

Why do people insist on posting this tired trope?

If you actually bothered listening to what was said, rather than repeating inaccurate second hand rubbish you would know that Starmer does not believe Women have a penis. The damage to womens rights has been done on the tory watch.

Labour were also the party that wanted a full debate around Gaza, a debate that was shut down by the conservatives when they walked out.

When the Labour candidate showed himself as an antisemite with his language, he was removed as a Labour candidate. This was the right thing to do. When Anderson, Braverman, Dowden, Sunak are either showing their Islamophobic traits, or, accepting and supporting of colleagues that do and are allowed to remain in the party, they have a problem. Anderson was not removed for his words, he was removed for failing to apologise for those words. Everyone who has defended this is accepting of what he said.

Extremism in any form is unacceptable in positions of power and authority.

Excellent post L1ttledrummergirl

If you don't much about Galloway I suggest you do some reading. He's been paid a shit load of money by Russia Today & Iran TV.

Starmer did say "transwomen are women" - the whole JKR debate. He has since said 99.9% of women don't have a penis. He has said he won't roll back women's rights and wants to look at the law, recognise it is a small % and create protections - all of which I like. He appears to have grown into his opinions, which isn't a bad thing. I do agree he is better than the shitshow we currently have but it is coming back into the limelight again now we know trans crimes have been recorded as women's for an apparently unidentifiable amount of time. Data is useless if it isn't accurate.

I personally struggle to see anti IDF comments passed off as anti-semetic and I feel the longer the genocide continues the harder it is for people not to conflate the idea Jewish people are condoning what their state is doing.

I think the debate about Labour and trans issues has been thrashed out time and time again on other threads. I don't see the point of rehearsing it all again on this thread.

As for Ali, his remarks about Jewish people and the media were anti-semetic tropes in my opinion and nothing to do with the slaughter of Palestinians by the IDF.

The barometer for mismanagement isn't being less incompetent than the Tories though. The fact is that Labour ran this badly here. They chose the candidate too quickly, insufficient vetting done, then ended up in a situation where they couldn't replace him. They essentially had to forfeit the seat.

I know it won't matter much in the grand scheme of things, but it's still 100% a car crash.

If only Labour voters had got out and voted tactically in Rochdale.

Galloway is the Left version of Farage, an agitator with a deft touch of populism. He also lives in Holland, apparently? Odd for a Brit MP who is a Brexiter. This is an understandable protest vote and I expect Galloway to be gone at the next GE, replaced by Tully who seems to be popular in Rochdale.

I don't think it's true that Azhar Ali wasn't vetted and we are probably speaking through specifically non Muslim lenses here. He made his remarks after vetting and selection didn't he? He was previously seen as a reliable Starmerite and usefully Muslim for the constituency: very much in the mould of my local MP ( who, however, has yet AFAIK said anything anti semitic, in perception or reality).

Galloway will not last.

It is a car crash, but hopefully lessons learned.

I thought that Starmer wanted Paul Waugh and is usually all over getting the best candidate but local party chose Ali?

They chose him incredibly quickly though. Tony Lloyd died on 17th January and he was picked on 27th January. That is not a long time. It's possible that more vetting time would still have yielded a candidate who subsequently became a problem I guess, but the fact that we're talking in hypotheticals tells us something. It was rushed.

Galloway lives in Holland! Flipping hell that's a commute! (I don't expect they'll see that much of him apart from grandstanding)

Probably true tobee but you can see why he would be preferred by local party.

He was definitley regarded as very moderate.

I think Labour may be facing a bigger porblem than they thought in heavily Muslim constituencies (who , for a range of reasons, may feel abandoned and overlooked). But they'll probably be OK because I doubt there are too many members of Galloway's rag tag bunch.

Hehe. I wonder if he'll try and contest the seat at the GE. On the one hand he'll be the incumbent, on the other hand he might find somewhere in the south east more convenient.

Galloway will suck up a lot of attention - no doubt a whirl on QT - but little else. Let's hope for a May election.

I think Labour may be facing a bigger porblem than they thought in heavily Muslim constituencies (who , for a range of reasons, may feel abandoned and overlooked). But they'll probably be OK because I doubt there are too many members of Galloway's rag tag bunch.

They could well lose a smattering of seats if the conflict is still ongoing by the time we have the GE. There is a segment of the electorate, not exclusively Muslim by any means, who want to punish Starmer on this. But it won't make any difference to the outcome, and if anything that knowledge might make protest vote candidates do better.

Would you say the same about the MASSIVE long list of Tory MPs who have disgraced themselves?

There was no reason to think this ex labour candidate was going to do anything like this.

I saw this on another thread

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/general-election-candidate-selection

Say what, that the party fucked up the vetting process? I don't know, you'd have to be more specific. Did any of them choose a candidate in only 10 days?

What I certainly would say is that a completely incompetent, shambolic dead party walking like the Tories are now is the wrong barometer.

It's all very well saying it's the wrong barometer but at the end of the day it's all we have. There are faults with the labour party and its leadership but nothing like the order of magnitude in the Tory party. We effectively have a two party system so we can slag off the LP all we like but I hope with all my heart they get in at the GE and we have less of a car crash.

But unless you were involved in the selection process, you don't know what went wrong....
Labour seem to have fallen foul to a DM sting, where they got this speech, kept quiet but released it in a way to damage the LP but has also thwarted the democratic process, denying the people of Rochdale an official LP candidate, maybe this was even intentional?

Ali seems to have been a respected council leader (if there is such a thing?) so why not pick him?

There will be a Tory party after the next GE, they may even win, who knows? so comparisons are valid.

Something did, though. Car crash is a totally accurate term for what this turned into. No getting round that one.

In terms of the Tories, no argument predicated on the idea that they have a chance of winning the GE is valid. It's not happening. They're a shitshow of the sort that no sensible political party could possibly want to emulate now, and there's decent analysis raising the possibility that they could end up with fewer seats than either they or Labour have had in the modern era. This is why it is not sensible to respond to analysis of a situation where Labour had to forfeit a seat with the Tories are bad. Yeah, we know. That isn't news!

I think the mistake the Labour party made was rushing in to this election when they didn't need to.

But as Alexandra says, even with the extra time, Ali might still have been selected and the DM might have sat on the material that bit longer.

Yep. And of course this may have still happened even without avoidably and pointlessly rushing in. But what's being missed is that when you have to argue that things might have gone wrong even if we had been more sensible, that speaks for itself.