The Times posted:

Labour must encourage open debate, or it will die

On 6 May Labour lost another battle and yet its activists have been waging war for years. The problem is they’ve been fighting the wrong one. Rather than confronting an empty levelling-up agenda with an economic plan that sees opportunities distributed as evenly as talent and town centres reinvented, Labour’s regressive left has been set on fighting a cultural war.

The positions they adopt are driving true progressives further away from power, but the danger is greater than losing more elections. A seeming unwillingness to tolerate different opinions — let alone debate them — is a genuine and existential threat to progress.

When it comes to statues and flags, the chasm between voters, particularly those in seats like Hartlepool, and Labour activists is well documented. Sir Keir Starmer knows this. As most normal people were contemplating their breakfast the morning after the Edward Colston monument was removed in Bristol, Starmer was on the airwaves offering the beginnings of a sensible solution that involved statues in museums.

It was a position that understood the tension between recording history and learning from it, without being beholden to it or eradicating it. He made a virtue of moderation. But this message was lost at sea.

For on the same day others in Labour entered the debate. Parliamentarians who hold no positional power in the party but insist on speaking for it and – here’s where the leadership must take responsibility – seemingly without consequence.

Wrapped up in identity politics, their views become incontestable. Arguing against them is a political minefield of terminology where it’s very easy to get blown up by the wrong word. The consequences can be fatal. We end up with a so-called progressive party unable to tolerate different points of view. A party where preaching has replaced debate.

Whether it’s the endless propagating of an anti-Western worldview, fighting over the rights of biological women to have safe spaces or tweeting a picture of the Ku Klux Klan alongside the Sewell Report – Labour’s backseat drivers are drowning out moderate voices.

We hear regular denial that Britain is a largely tolerant country which has made huge progress in the last 50 years to become fairer and more equal and, for the many, a pretty good place to live. This includes an almost continual rise in the proportion of women in employment and the fact that 1 in 2 of the UK’s fastest-growing businesses were set up by immigrants – people who came to this country for opportunity and found it.

Indeed, the few who don’t feel this way – including white working class in poorer areas – are more likely to hear Labour arguing about whether they have privilege or not.

The regressive left just doesn’t get it. Their prescription following the Hartlepool defeat involves resurrecting the spirit of Corbynism and further entrenchment in the retweet-inducing, self-affirming world of identity politics. There is only one solution if Labour wants to win: this wing of the party must be removed from the frontline. No ifs, no buts.

Firing Rebecca Long-Bailey and removing the whip from Jeremy Corbyn saw a bounce in the polls. But this isn’t just a popular thing to do, it’s the right thing to do. Labour must be about much more than internal battles and self-serving, introspective cultural issues. It should be prepared to debate.

This is the key tenet of progressive politics – an ability to hear different perspectives, build on them and reach a new, unifying position rather than just sitting on the fence.

It is what centrism truly is. Not a suite of policies but a political philosophy that champions moderation. It’s pragmatic, progressive and ultimately respects the voter over the activist. It won elections in the 90s and 00s, and it’s the only way Labour can win in the coming decades.

Labour’s leadership must act quickly and decisively, taking a stand against the regressive left: if they can’t debate, disagree but fall into line, they must leave. It will be painful. Twitter will be an unedifying spectacle and fissures will likely be permanent.

Get this right and the prize is huge. Power. And with that comes the real possibility of progress.

Guavanaut posted:

Debate is vital which is why we must kick out people who don't agree with us! (but only the left)
Sounds about right.

Bobby Deluxe posted:

'It's fine manageable if people get infected as long as the hospitals can cope with the number of people getting sick'

namesake posted:

We're getting some calculations of how Delta is under our current conditions and it looks like the variants' R is 1.5:

No it's not going to be like the winter but letting a few thousand people die because the government doesn't want to protect them for a couple more months while vaccination continues still isn't acceptable.

sebzilla posted:

https://twitter.com/patrickkmaguire/status/1400559711360098308?s=19

Desperate throw of the dice to try to prevent Beckett winning and taking a load of money away from Labour?

OwlFancier posted:

I hope he wins, he seems like mccluskey but spicier.

jaete posted:

the most depressing, and also the dumbest, outcome is that Corbyn never gets the whip back, so that's my guess

there's a lawsuit about it ongoing i think so that will probably turn out to be a massive victory for Corbyn... in 2026 or so, when he has long since retired

OwlFancier posted:

Not that I have ever tried but I would assume people just... buy drugs on their phones nowadays rather than itinerant weed peddlers going tree to tree hoping for someone to approach them and request to partake of their dank.

stev posted:

Every day there's a different source leaking a different story. Johnson obviously hasn't decided yet and probably won't until 5.45pm on Monday.

Miftan posted:

I think Starmer's biggest issue (other than being a massive dork that nobody likes) is that hasn't realised that politics has polarised in the last 5-10 years. In every single statement he's trying to appease both sides ("I wouldn't have taken part in the vote to take down the picutre of the queen but it's their common room and legally they can do that") without realising that both sides are just going to assume the worst instead of hearing that he's partially on their side. In the queen picture issue, the right wing only hear "They're allowed to do that" and everyone else hears "I would definitely keep the picture up in fact I have 3 in my living room". So everyone hates him and he looks like a wet egg clutching a pint on TV.

ThomasPaine posted:

I've been thinking about a few things recently:

1. Really we're just very fortunate to live in a time when effective vaccines for viruses as complex as covid can be developed, and actually reasonably quickly too. I wonder how long this would have gone on in a pre-vaccine world - epidemics never do last forever after all, but maybe we'd just have to get used to intermittent waves of mega-flu knocking us all on our arses every couple of years and killing off a whole bunch of people.

ThomasPaine posted:

But it could have been so much worse. What would we have done if covid had that dreaded long incubation/high fatality combo? What if we were looking at a third or a quarter of everyone infected just dying, like in the black death? If whole towns were depopulated and it wasn't rare for an entire family to be wiped out? Mass graves all over the shop and the sight of corpses being collected from houses an everyday occurance? We could easily have been looking at that, and I genuinely don't think we would have had the facilities - organisational or ideological or emotionally - to deal with it. I think it would have led to genuine social collapse and the end of our society as we know it. It's genuinely scary to think about.

a pipe smoking dog posted:

I don't think I've ever seen Cressida Dick mentioned in a paragraph that didn't also include the words "corruption" or "incompetence"

But I suppose they can't find another senior police officer who that isn't true of to replace her.

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

What is a "cryptojournalist"?
I've inferred from google that it's something to do with bitcoin, but I'm sure that's not the entirety of it!

Gort posted:

You looking at different numbers to me?



Right enough that more cases hasn't meant (many) more deaths, but the number of infected people is rising, and the rate at which its rising is getting faster.

goddamnedtwisto posted:

... it's also possible that without quite such aggressive triage that people are being admitted this time round that would have been told to go home and take their chances before

Miftan posted:

How often do I need to get my boiler serviced in this weird country?

TheRat posted:

Too bad. That Turner character has said some extremely questionable poo poo fairly recently. No idea why people like Owen Jones are blind drunk on him.

Apraxin posted: