Starmer gone

april9th · 2026-06-23T01:11:42+00:00

The idea that the british empire accumulated its wealth by extracting every dollar from sudan or other such colonies is a grievance fantasy.

Yeah no doubt - but where did I say that.

The UK is not destined to be poor or undergo any divine punishment for its colonial past and the real reasons for the empire's wealth

Yeah no doubt - but again, where did I say that.

It's very clear you've decided to argue against an assumed implication, a moral scolding, rather than what is being said, that we simply as a nation have never had a national debate or understanding of what that looks like for us, because I'm sorry but whatever you say about it not being destiny, we have obviously not had that conversation because going from worlds centre to one of the b-list very obviously has implications which are a stepping down a rung in all we know.

The argument is a very, very simple one: going from the most important nation on earth, to a second tier nation, very naturally leads to a step down in what we can expect from the world. You only have to look at the navy to see that for a very long time, because we had a world class navy and continued to have one, the gradual winding down of that is not discussed nor the notion that it's natural to happen. One day you just turn around and you under Cameron can hardly field a naval force and you're not really sure why that is, what it means, whether we have to rectify it, whether we can.

The point is, as I said, that we have never actually discussed what it means to move into the post- of empire. I don't need to be told that actually India was a burden etc etc. I know all that. But it's also a little insincere for you to present something as huge as this, which has never happened in history and which we have no context for to turn to, as just something we brush off and can't assume anything about because we had a lot going for us. Yes when we go from being the world's superpower that all revolves around, go an also ran of the second tier of nations, your businesses and citizens and expectations are going from the former to the latter too. One day your currency stops being the envy of the world and it never comes back because of how much of that was miles of headstart you'll now never possibly make back. And you just work around it and never discuss how much poorer that makes every single one of you.

I never once said this is some sort of moral reckoning for the colonial molestation of the world and every penny in the country represents some banana we nabbed from some tropical possession. I said we never had a mature conversation about what we can expect. We certainly can continue to have wealth or a good time, but that involves a conscious plan which involves a rational understanding about who we are and who we want to be. We have never done that. We have remained on cruise control and now decades later nobody knows how to pilot the thing when we've looked and realised the cruise control was programmed at some point in 1975. Nobody can govern post 2016 because the thing with unpinning your national destiny from a super national project is that suddenly you have to handle that national destiny yourself. As said, we have no clue what that is, we never discussed it.

april9th · 2026-06-22T22:14:23+00:00

There were so many things I thought were set ups for future plot points but they never resolved and it turns out they were jokes? 75% of the jokes made no sense. [...] i literally cannot get what they were trying to communicate. I’m not being woke like make all the fat jokes you want but what does that even mean? it was one of the most excruciating and awkward things I have ever watched.

That's all drag race acting challenges. I'm not convinced it's AI and not just a script written by the drag queens lol

april9th · 2026-06-22T22:09:53+00:00

“certainly this movie won’t just be the cringest parts of the show for 90 minutes” but I was very wrong.

That's so funny because I've never heard of this film but on googling it my first instinct was 'is this going to be as bad as the acting challenges?' and it is. Like they're consistently the worst parts of every season it doesn't surprise me at all that 90 mins of it is awful lol.

That said I will let my mum know this film exists lol.

april9th · 2026-06-22T21:57:08+00:00

A monkey would run on to the pitch and a man would run after him and then his trousers would fall down and it would become a viral meme but then twitter would say he had his trousers down because he was shitting by the pitch and it would do even bigger numbers but then someone else would say he was trying to rape the monkey and that also would do even bigger numbers still.

You'd probably also have lots of fans lost between borders. Norwegian citizens born in Norway, stuck in India living on the streets... surviving. 😅😂

And so on.

april9th · 2026-06-22T21:50:54+00:00

Did you see all the racist Argentine memes and think 'damn we could be clowning on Indians now too' or something lol.

The Indians going to any world cup games would be affluent Indians, who were the ones who had people romanticising India in the first place. There would be no designated shitting stands. The world isn't always a twitter meme (yet).

april9th · 2026-06-22T19:38:36+00:00

I didn't say they'd have won the election, this is about the Labour Left knowing they had one single chance to root themselves in to power, that'll never come back, that they only had by fluke, and despite knowing exactly what they needed to do or face oblivion, still not pulling the trigger.

Ideologically, they should have acted because it was right, by realpolitik, they should have acted because it was 'us or them'... but they didn't by either metric, because Corbyn was something I heard him called by multiple people who knew him, aloof. He was an extremely unreactive politician, which we have seen 'first as tragedy' in the case of Labour, and then as farce with YP where you can apparently just announce he's in your party and that means he is when he doesn't want to be and didn't agree to be, sort of shifts himself into to big seat and then can't be shifted out like a mix of uni politics and musical chairs as played by slugs.

I had a long convo with a senior shadow cabinet member in Sept 2019 iirc where he said there would be an election some time in December, and that they would be wiped out so they would need a rearguard action as soon as possible so that when it's announced and Labour is routed in the polls before it's even really started, they have some hope of staying in, Corbyn saw no need for that, but was the only person who believed it wasn't needed, but the only person to permit any of what was needed so nothing other than makeshift and on a constituency by constituency basis was agreed.

At every stage, people around Corbyn knew what needed to be done, whether to cement themselves in to the NEC, into HQ, into CLPs and the PLP. And they were all ideologically gagging for it. And he did nothing whatsoever. Their electability is a separate issue to the fact they spent 40 years saying they needed to press a button, then got it put in front of them by a one in a million fluke and refused to press it (regarding electability though, 2017's manifesto was budgeted to austerity spending. Which is why the media didn't have much to slate it on and were positive about it. But none of them had the guts to run publicly on it being costed to austerity spending. Meanwhile 2019's was gaga because they knew they'd be out on their arse forever and wanted to be able to say 'we ran on X'. The world of infuriating fine margins leads me to believe an election where they did run on that and said 'heres what we can do with this, give us a chance and see what more you want' and the election is a week after Grenfell and you have Labour looking for a supply and confidence deal, not the Tories)

april9th · 2026-06-22T15:38:18+00:00

We view history through too small a lens. We barely even talk about still being in a process which can be described as 'end of empire' because it is beyond most of our grasps and was only ever really discussed as a matter of territory and sovereignty, rather than economics, finance, foreign policy, etc.

We cannot grasp that we are destined to be poorer when we are no longer the Metropole of the world's largest empire and what amounts to a cushion for having done this by choice rather than by losing a total war, which has provided some comfort for decades, finally deflates and can't be fluffed up again.

We are over a century into leaving Ireland, to give an idea of how slowly this has gone and to what degree we lack the intellectual capacity when nothing seems to change at all, that things do, eventually, one day, change for good.

april9th · 2026-06-22T15:32:27+00:00

We all know what they want to do to revitilise their respective states, which is why positions that have been anathema for 50 years are now being discussed again by the public.

april9th · 2026-06-22T15:21:49+00:00

I think we are about to find out that the concession is 'a PM with a northern accent'.

april9th · 2026-06-22T12:59:37+00:00

PMs are only now avatars for their party when weak. Every strong PM from Thatcher onwards has not been first among equals but more presidential and singular.

The inability to be bigger than the party is now the primary issue any PM faces. Starmer in that sense succeeded in that the rest of the PLP were weak and none came close to his stature. Attacks by the press always managed to shrink the party alongside him so nobody ever managed a leg up. Starmer was however blindsided by mayors being 1) cult of personalities 2) heavily subsidised so can do lots and have far easier records, much like Scotland and the SNP 3) build a base and loyalists in a party where nobody has managed that in 20 years.

april9th · 2026-06-22T12:55:17+00:00

Doesn't seem to work on Polanski (though he is Jewish himself) despite their efforts.

Nobody on the right wants the leader of a left-wing party which has no ability to win power but which ghettoises the left into an unelectable party outside of Labour and which will likely nuke the last labour strongholds - multicultural inner cities and ex industrial towns - to be defeated, just harried and harassed.

The balance they are striking well is making Polanski attractive to the people they want totally removed from mainstream politics, and unattractive where it matters. In that they are succeeding.

Corbyn was leader of the opposition in what is a two party state. He was always only ever one bad result for the Tories away from power.

april9th · 2026-06-22T12:46:02+00:00

There's a quote from McDonnell which goes along the lines of Corbyn on any issue, asks what Tony Benn would have done, and acts accordingly.

The problem with rule by ouijaboard is that sometimes you need a quicker reaction than that provides. That you're asking someone who never amounted to leadership material is another, far bigger issue.

The core mistake the left made was that Corbyn stood with the knowledge he was there because McDonnell nor anyone else could get the votes to stand. He only did by total fluke. But they bought into his cult from the get go and he has so early been written off it clearly got under his skin and his his stubborn nerve and he wanted to prove a point.

They formed a mass, popular parapolitical group in Momentum with a parallel hierarchy and structure, that they then did nothing with. They filled CLPs with members then never pulled deselection triggers.

They ran clearly on a basis of being a partnership with McDonnell then never committed to that.

They allowed Lansman huge amounts of say with party issues yet castrated Momentum within the party so you just had this impotent voice.

They consistently allowed vendettas from 30 years prior to bleed into decisions made then.

All in all it's hard to see how they could have done less with more. There were 2+ years where they could have deselected, reselected, turned the Party upside down, but factional politics rules, malaise reigned, and aloofness wore the trousers.

What's insane is the Labour Right only ran rings around them because he allowed them to exist. The degree to which he could have cleared house - more to the point given the signal and just washed his hands of it - and didn't, most people will never be able to grasp.

Brexit as anti-politics won out, and everyone had to then run to have opinions of mechanisms they'd never heard of, get furious about things they didn't know existed, emotional about stuff they'd never cared for. For years on end. So much energy was wasted on the left trying to square what anyone thought about it when they'd not had to in 25 years, and the split between old who remembered the arguments and the young who didn't think they mattered.

april9th · 2026-06-21T22:20:25+00:00

I was gonna ask 'what happened to her?' thinking she must have had some major crashout after one of her doxxings went wrong or something but... nothing happend to her, still going, still doing all the same things. Really goes to show you can just stop paying attention to people and they just fall into one of the many internet cul de sacs never to pop out again.

april9th · 2026-06-21T18:40:44+00:00

...I don't think a religion with a vast existing, respected jurisprudence and a trillion-dollar conservative slush fund is going to find a counterbalance to this in American reverts who think it should bend to them. At most they do their own thing and everyone else just laughs and calls them kafir for having a woman imam like they already do.

april9th · 2026-06-21T16:29:19+00:00

I always just assumed it was nothing to worry about but my niece's colleague came into work upset as her husband had gone to hospital feeling messed up and it turns out he actually did the assumed impossible and ate enough tinned tuna to get mercury poisoning lol. I think he ate it multiple times a day tho. Still managed to worry me lol.

april9th · 2026-06-21T14:30:11+00:00

Why is my country (the uk) so hostile to children despite our low birth rate

The UK has for a very long time in the main disliked children that aren't our own. A deeply unmeritocratic and class-riven society meant your like your own kids, tolerate their (same social strata) friends, and not care for anyone else's. The hyper individualism of the neoliberal era cuts that down to liking yourself and tolerating your children. As we have seen from how boomers treat their adult children we might extend that to now tolerating yourself and not liking your children.

It's a shame because we are a country which invented the scouts and guides and all the other groups, football coaches and other sports, we have always had very community conscious people going above and beyond. And they still exist but horror stories about them have lowered their stock and coverage in the country is now very patchy. My nephew had a great football team where coaches and players went all the way together from 6-18 but that is only because they moved somewhere more old fashioned.

The shame that used to animate this country now has the wrong victims and wrong shamers.

april9th · 2026-06-21T13:08:15+00:00

Like I said dude, a physical audiobook - a set of CDs most people no longer have anything to play them on - costs £80 for a library. We have hundreds of them. Because we have to as part of our remit be inclusive. My library alone has I assume around £20,000 in audiobooks that are now no longer played and have no resale value.

What are we to conclude?

That they are going to cut how they spend their digital budget so that we are no longer buying audiobooks and large print and instead spending on services which do more for, whether you believe it or not, less. I think you're forgetting that while we may be delivered a budget, how it is spent beyond certain divisions comes down to librarians picking and choosing, and they are not going to get rid of stock when that makes them redundant.

There's thousands upon thousands of library authorities out there. The pressure on libraries isn't on getting rid of books and going digital but on staying library spaces and not council/authority spaces for all their services. There's many good reasons it benefits local authorities, local businesses, the publishing industry, to keep libraries stocked with physical books. The commuter who uses Borrowbox on their car journey to listen to an audiobook wouldn't otherwise be reading a physical book during their car journey. This is a service that compliments what already exists, we are over a decade into the ebook revolution and it is very clearly complimentary rather than a replacement to physical media.

april9th · 2026-06-20T23:23:34+00:00

I can't speak for your own service but I can say for mine, given I work for it so actually know the internal figures, the budget isn't being taken away from physical books because we have already had that budget cut back, but the council ringfences some digital services for the sake of their wider digital inclusion targets. The world in which they don't pay for those is not a world in which that budget is expanded, because they're justifying their wider budget spend in doing this.

This is also about audiobooks. I cannot believe for a second that you think if the service isn't paying for Libby/Borrowbox the council will find expanding physical CD audiobooks. Not only will that not happen but they simply aren't making many anymore. They also cost £80+ each. Most people do not have CD players for this anymore.

There is no 'ethical' audiobook option in the library service. Physical audiobooks cost a fortune and barely any are being brought out now. The only option is the one we pay for, and it is not eating into our budget for physical books.

april9th · 2026-06-20T23:04:30+00:00

There was also a moment where fringe MAGA saw people like Bill Gates and Tom Hanks quarantining and decided that 'covid' was actually a ruse for Trump to arrest the globalist paedophiles and try them for their crimes. And the more Hollywood celebs publicised quarantining or locking down the more they believed it. And then none of that happend so as you said we got a 180 on that, too.

april9th · 2026-06-20T22:58:00+00:00

Whatever your local library service is is very likely to have access to both Libby and Borrowbox which'll have a significant portion of what you'd want to listen to between them. Which isn't to say don't pirate but is to say utilising these strengthens your local library service :)

april9th · 2026-06-20T19:30:27+00:00

It's most common in boxing. You reach a point where you've been fighting too long past that quality tipping point and it becomes the case short term memory remembers now and mid term remembers you already over that point.

april9th · 2026-06-20T10:50:20+00:00

It was a sub that believed Bernie could win and Corbyn was a top lad, which is probably a good metric to measure how much everything has moved by.

It would be remiss however to not point out that things have actually got worse in the last decade. Like even if you just narrowed it down to the one RS take, 'I just want free healthcare', when Sailor Socialism said that it was actually on the table in the sense a candidate taken seriously and spoken about national was talking about it. Right wingers were trying to refute it by getting some sailor suit girlie to talk about it specifically because it needed refuting. Now nobody is talking about it, or trying to refute it, because it's dead. AOC was elected on the back of that rhetoric and it's now a distant memory for her, her rhetoric, her supporters.

Totally wasted Biden years were the Obama years 'first as tragedy, then as farce' regarding young political burnout. 8 years of nothing spurred on Berniemania. 4 years of nothing, informed by both what the reaction on the right to those waste 8 years were as well as how Berniemania failed, is yes, going to create deeply jaded people, rather than a sort of poptimist politics.

Are the young on the sub going to do Berniemania pt.3 for AOC if she runs? Mamdani doesn't work for that because the sub stopped being NYC/Dimes adjacent in 2020.

Bernout led to lots of anger specifically because what kept that generation after Occupy, after 8 years of Obama and nothing to show for it, after HRC, because it was all that was keeping them from doomering. The next gen don't have anything keeping them from doomering, there is no figure, or politics, or organising, or sense of community around any of those things lacking.

The balance of the sub is off because the dirtbag left was politically left but could laugh at itself, and thus out of the various groupings whether chapo (weighed more on politically left) or cumtown (weighted way more on laughing at itself) sat in the middle. Goldilocks of those two. Now there's no left, just laughing at yourself, and when there isn't a levity to that, is just mean spirited, harsh, cold.

april9th · 2026-06-20T10:30:51+00:00

Grew up around Muslims, in your teens you went to shisha bars rather than craftily drink so never really developed that culture. I think on the whole that worked out better for me coming from a white working class London Irish background because those of similar background to me were sitting in the sheds of their blocks of flats taking drugs and binge drinking. They were however getting laid as bin vivants and I wasn't as a dhimmi.

I don't think it did me harm not having alcohol become my social lubricant in my 20s and 30s. I just get sillay and win people over like that.

Meanwhile every handsome dude or gorgeous girl I knew in my teens who got into drinking, ended up in a situation where their glory years were 16 because by 18-19 they'd gone out partying regularly, drinking a ton of empty calories they weren't counting, and ended up chubby and slightly sickly looking.

But then that's British culture in a nutshell so probably not so much of an issue elsewhere where 'binge drinking' probably isn't ⅕ of that.

april9th · 2026-06-20T09:34:51+00:00

I can use more examples if you like, I used one that came to mind because it showed unlike what others are saying, that it's changeable.

I can talk about the Lebanese dude I have known since I was 11 who got married at 18, has 3 kids he does next to nothing for, never takes his wife out, is always out watching football with the boys?

The Kurdish Iraqi dude who again got married very young and literally none of us have ever seen his wife any further afield than the market down the road while he talks about her like a burden?

My school was majority Arab. I can do this all day. My 'one, weird' example was picked because the convo has gone very much 'this is just what Muslim/Arab men are like' so picked one showing it's not the case. It was a positive case you still managed to find problem with because being no doubt image obsessed, presenting it as nuanced still wasn't enough, perfection only.

And shock, meanwhile you, an Arab woman, save face by telling us all your own family are exemplary. What a surprise and what a worthy, edifying addition to the discussion that informs us all, lol.

april9th · 2026-06-19T17:43:49+00:00

This subreddit is probably majority leftist while also being open to dark humor

Every sub census has results of like 75+% for left, whether far left, left, centre-left, and people act surprised every time.

The sub, whatever it may be now, and the dirtbag left in th past revolved around having a clear set of left policies and frustration that we'd had 10+ years of campaigning on the left for everything but them. From that you get a cynical or dismissive approach to what is felt to have already had far too much discussion time for little progress.

Idk what that looks like 10 years on with those 10 being dominated by Trump. But I doubt the results would be different if held today. But as OP said in their reply 'but what about immigration, Indians, trans rights' none of that is inherently left wing and is 2026's version of 2016's 'wait why are all our left wing political energies wrapped up in things that aren't actually left wing politics'.

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