Starmer appoint Harman as his advisor on women and girls

[Theeyeballsinthesky]

Kier Starmer has apparently appointed Harriet Harman as his advisor on women and girls

https://x.com/politlcsuk/status/2053034283003007255?s=46

he really really still doesn't get it does he?

Sorry, not quite how i remember it (from wikipedia)
Once the guests of the hotel where a PIE public meeting was to be held learnt about the event, they cancelled $2,500 worth of hotel room reservations and physically threatened the manager, who was also faced with a walkout by the angry staff,

.

WW1 song going round in my head for some reason.

🤣

The more things (times) change, the more they stay the same.
The main difference now being is that PIE were in reasonable clear sight then, today the equivalent is the grooming that so many turn a blind eye to, or if you do object, you're cancelled and ostracized.
The PIE fraternity are just more crafty in how they inveigle.

I’ve been reminded that I listened to a podcast recently with Justine Roberts talking to Rachel Johnson, the series is called Difficult Women. In it, Justine talks about the Gordon Brown webchat which led to Biscuitgate. Apparently he didn’t listen to a single question asked of him and was instead just on broadcast mode. The impression I was left with was that he had a prepared speech or party political broadcast which he stuck to rigidly no matter what questions he was asked. Hence the favourite biscuit question. I didn’t realise that it wasn’t that he couldn’t name his favourite biscuit, more that he had no idea that was being asked repeatedly as he wasn’t paying any attention to the silly wims. Before my time, but I knew about Biscuitgate, just not the detail.

Do people remember just how loathed Brown was as PM? If you think Theresa May or Rishi Sunak were stiff, Starmer cold, Truss weird, just watch him in those sad three years leading Labour to defeat in 2010.
His arrogance combined with volcanic anger made him a really bad fit as leader.
Yet this is the guy Sir Keir "I'll see out a decade as PM" Starmer is going to for advice.

Yes! And how they could call him prudent when he sold off gold reserves at rock bottom prices and wrecked some good pension schemes, I cannot fathom.

He was having lunch at the next table to me recently in a cafe, and he looks really old.

I always found that smile he procured later in life was absolutely fake.
You can imagine the body language experts for years ordering "PM, lift the corners of your mouth, lift them! Keep trying".

I haven’t forgiven Gordon Brown for IR35.

Brown is only 75, and even though he was never popular with the voters, he's fairly well liked in the party. Maybe that's part of the calculation.

Tom Harris recently wrote an account of Phil Woolas's funeral - someone else who wasn't a popular hero with voters but was liked by party insiders - and apparently it was a reunion for New Labour veterans. Blair and Brown and Kinnock were all there, hugging comrades and swapping old war stories.

Keir and Victoria turned up, for why nobody knows because it seems neither of them knew Phil Woolas or even met him, and sat there not talking to anyone because they didn't know anyone.

Those kind of deep connections matter. Even a youngish man like Wes Streeting has loads of personal relationships in the party going back to his NUS days. Starmer doesn't, and maybe he sees Brown and Harman as his way of acquiring some sort of credibility with party stalwarts, in his usual clunky tin-eared way.

I mean John Major (83) has never really retired, he's still extremely active trying to pull strings in Tory factional battles. Kemi is IMO far too deferential to Tory grandees, but even she hasn't been daft enough to bring Major into her top team and trumpet that as building for the future.

I was musing on which old Labour PM he could contact by seance to ask for advice but tbh I don’t think Atlee or Wilson would recognise the current version of the party as “Labour”.

funnily enough he probably needs the advice of Thatch most. She’d give him a verbal clobbering around the head with her handbag and ask him where his spine was.

As an old 'un here, one of the comforts of old ahe is to see that one's previously-held convictions are so often reversed.
Margaret Thatcher? The devil incarnate when i was young. Now? Well, perhaps she had a point or two.
Ditto Mary Whitehouse.

As long as no-one ever tries to redeem B.Liar.
Even a guy like Starmer with zero political instincts knows how toxic Our Tone is.

Maybe Starmer just hasn't asked Tone yet.

Or maybe Starmer has asked Tone and Tone said no.

Anything seems possible these days.

As far as the PIE stuff goes, it's before my time, but I find it hard to believe that it was an extremely obscure niche subject if it was making the front page of the Mirror.

Memory is such a weird thing. I recall that Salman Rushdie had universal vociferous support from liberals on the Fatwa to The Satanic Verses. I'm fact it seems, most people kept schtum about it, or said the book was a mistake...including Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbitt! It was left to Chris Hitchens to speak up unequivocally in his defence.

I assumed PIE really was a niche concern.

It really wasn't an obscure niche subject at the time. As a very young and naive student at Edinburgh university in 1974 I remember sitting in George Square gardens reading about it in a newspaper. If I was aware of it I promise the world and his dog would have been, my main interest then was clothes!

It is mildly interesting that Gordon Brown was rector of the university then and a Ph D. student. He signed a petition in support of the gay rights group which started the Paedophile Information Exchange, based in Edinburgh in those days. As you will see from these dates I am ancient, and don't know how to do a link on here, but the Mail on Sunday ran a story about it on Nov. 16 2014. Brown said he was duped into signing.

Apologies for THE TRUMP-LIKE TEXT, not sure what happened there, lol.

Surely only within the Labour party? I reckon a lot of people still have a lot of time for Blair.

Oh of course he has. The man is clueless. As are the rest of his party. They're such cowards.

Harriet Harman? The woman who directed Labour to abstain on Cameron's Welfare Reform Bill? Who lobbied for PIE? She doesn't give a toss about women and girls.

I've never felt so utterly disenfranchised by the political narrative in this country. And I lived through Thatcher. The left have been completely bollocksed by activists, ideologues and right wing charlatans (Blair and his merry men). As have the Greens, Lib Dem's and SNP. Where's the viable alternative? Certainly not the Tories or Reform.

😢

The SDP.

He should try Callaghan. He wasn't much use in the face of political problems either ("Crisis? What crisis?")* but at least they could commiserate together about how crap they were as prime minister.

(*Yes, I know this was a Sun headline and not a direct quote!)

Callaghan is unfairly maligned for how it all ended.
He provided proper focus after Wilson lost the leadership qualities he had in the 60s.
He defeated the Benn "siege economy" axis in the party at the IMF crunch.
He and Healey arguably laid the ground for the Thatcher revolution by moving decisively away from the post-war Keynesian consensus.
The economy was ticking over in 1978, had he gone to the country then with the program of trades union reforms and small-scale modernizations to the economy he was planning, he'd likely have won a decent majority against Thatcher, and she'd have been a footnote in history.
Alas, he ignored advice to go to a GE in 1978, the unions got wind of his planned laws, they threw the country into chaos, and the rest is history.
Callaghan, maybe alongside Major the last of the truly consensus PMs.

Don't get me wrong, I voted for Amy Gallagher as London mayor, but I can't see the SDP going anywhere. They seem like decent people, they have a worked out philosophy, but their impact on UK politics right now is one councillor in Leeds who I suspect owes his position more to personal popularity than the SDP's philosophy.

They're very much in the same position as the Communist Party - they might be useful as a think tank, but not as a realistic option to vote for.