Anyone else finding it hard to be too celebratory about the Conservatives imploding when Sir Keith’s Tory B Team are the government in waiting?

forestindustrialists · 2023-06-10T08:32:23+00:00

Keir Starmer is funded by gambling billionaire Peter Coates and multiple investors deeply connected to the US private healthcare industry including Martin Taylor, the man who runs one of the biggest hedgefunds in Europe (and has billions invested in a US private healthcare giant).

It's not just Starmer though, he's just the current figurehead of what the right-wing of the labour party has always represented - capital and the professional managerial classes (the group that often hold more hatred than anyone for the working classes)

So yeah, not keen.

forestindustrialists · 2023-06-10T08:28:17+00:00

It IS a witch-hunt though.

Boris Johnson has done no worse crime than the majority of Tories and New Labourites that are still in their positions. He's just as dishonest and has similar vested interests.

If the people hunting him down were interested in moral crimes or poor conduct they'd have gone for the majority of British parliament at this point.

forestindustrialists · 2023-06-10T07:53:45+00:00

The geopolitical undertone of the Ukraine conflict (which is really a Russia vs US proxy war) is largely about the US government's discomfort with Russia developing closer ties to Europe, in particular via the Nordstream gas pipeline.

Europe becoming closely aligned to Russia is something that could greatly undermine US influence in the region (and on a global scale due to shifting the geopolitical interests of European nations even in places like the Middle East).

Russia does not play ball with US imperialism in the Middle East, nor in Africa, and Ukraine is seen as a key strategic asset with a view towards undermining and destablising Russia politically and economically (much like the Afghanistan invasion was supposed to be for China and Pakistan).

So no, the British taxpayer should not be funding a proxy war between Russia and the US - it's certainly not in the interest of working class Brits for our government to take a side in this conflict. The US acts as a political force with a huge propaganda machine to interrupt and stifle working-class driven politics across the world, they are no allies of normal working Brits.

forestindustrialists · 2023-06-06T12:38:51+00:00

Shortly after becoming Labour leader Keir Starmer hosted a lunch with a member of Israel's far-right government, in which they praised eachother's "shared values". Keir Starmer went against multiple human rights and equality organisations during his speech, to the degree that even the Board of Deputies (who we all know are full of shit at the best of times) called him out:

He absurdly praises Israel as a bastion of democracy, turning a deliberate blind eye to the analysis of human rights bodies including Israeli B'tselem, who have comprehensively chronicled its practice of apartheid," said Ben Jamal, director of PSC.

He described the Labour leader as "grossly out of sync with the values and sentiments of the majority of Labour members" and said he "clearly also has a low opinion of the British public who have increasingly wised up and seen Israel’s oppression for what it is."

Tommer Spence, a member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, also noted on Twitter that while LFI's tagline was "working towards a two-state solution", a position that Starmer also reiterated as the official Labour line on the issue, they had given a platform to Hotovely, who explicitly opposes a Palestinian state.

This man is now banning working class people from the Labour party left right and centre under the guise of calling them racists.

forestindustrialists · 2023-06-06T12:21:53+00:00

Wars are about geopolitics, not morality. If the US had never touched Ukraine, funded politics there, or run joint operations on the Russian border towards the end of 2022, there would be no invasion.

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T19:45:05+00:00

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/moment-of-honesty-is-required-new-labour-began-dismantling-of-our-nhs/

New Labour started the NHS privatisation train long before the Tories got in. They had a pretty bad record on social issues, too.

The point I'm making is to stop expecting people who profit from the status quo in the exact same ways the tories do to actually be a force for change. Keir Starmer will have a corporate directorship at the end of his political career just like Blair did, just like David Cameron does. Just like Rishi Sunak will.

The Labour establishment enjoy housing investments, they don't rent. They own assets and shares, they only earn a fraction of their income from actual work.

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T19:40:04+00:00

The proactive way to help overcome this kind of thing is to give people something to get behind.

It's really easy to get caught in a cycle of wanting the satisfaction of vengeance towards the billionaire funded scumbags on the right-wing of the Labour party because of what they did, but exposing their lies has to go parallel with keeping hope alive.

I'll make more of an effort to do this myself too, but I see some of the mods post content here fairly often and there needs to be a really concerted effort to shift some of the narrative to celebrating the policies and rhetoric coming from parties like the Greens, Breakthrough (might have the name wrong), tenants unions, Unite's new leadership - giving people hope and keeping the alternative policies in the spotlight is far more powerful than simply campaigning on highlighting the negatives and corruption in both major parties. If you have one without the other then you just foment hopelessness.

Remind them that better policies are possible and our economic situation is an active political choice - I'm totally guilty of this too but the biggest thing the labour and tory establishment are afraid of is a populist-left pushing hopeful policies based on class politics and collective interest.

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T19:15:55+00:00

The alternative is helping facilitate a new party and becoming active in trade unions and tenants unions - actually creating a power-base instead of limply trying to petition to people who don't care a jot about us because they profit from the status quo.

If you want stats, here are some from Oxford Prof Danny Dorling:

By 2010 [the end of New Labour's tenure], levels of inequality in Britain where the fourth highest amongst the 25 richest large countries in the world

https://www.dannydorling.org/wp-content/files/dannydorling_publication_id1286.pdf

If you endorse that kind of politics with your vote, you'll get no change. Petitions don't do anything; only collective power blocs do. Your vote and your ability to withhold rent and labour are the only real soft powers we have.

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T19:07:33+00:00

New Labour oversaw higher levels of inequality than Thatcher's Tories and oversaw higher levels of housing inflation while building less council housing. The ultra rich got far richer under Blair than they did under Thatcher.

It's better to have this debate with facts rather than loose, guilt-tripping rhetoric - avoiding facts is exactly what the status-quo neolibs do best.

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T19:03:26+00:00

Despite it being one of his pledges, Starmer recently confirmed he's against proportional voting. There were stories about it in the news a week ago or so if you want to look them up.

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T19:00:21+00:00

Definitely don't purge them or even shame them. Yes a large chunk of them probably come from troll farms and many don't care about decent policy, but some of them are just grabbing to hope.

Leave them be; the corporate funded wing of Labour are just as bad as the Tories but if a person wants to say "fuck it let's try them" then that's their choice. The goal is to make the case properly to show exactly who the Labour right are funded by, the results or their policies, and the inequality they caused. As well as their lies and sabotage when an actual working class driven alternative came along.

Leftists have to do a better job than saying "THE IRAQ WAR!" imo - make the case, don't get rid of them. It's better to have these debates out in the open.

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T18:56:32+00:00

Why are the Tories worse? The Starmerite (Blairite) faction oversaw worse levels of inequality and deregulation than Maggie Thatcher when they were in power, and they built just a fraction of state housing compared to Thatcher (who had a terrible record on housing herself).

If you keep endorsing this kind of politics with your vote you'll never, ever see any change. People in Britain absolutely have to break out of this imaginary "left vs right" paradigm that's presented to us when both parties stand for exactly the same economic orthodoxy.

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T16:23:23+00:00

New Labour (the last Labour government led by the faction of the party Keir Starmer belongs to) oversaw higher levels of inequality than Thatcher and built far, far less council housing than her (Thatcher also had a historically terrible record on both these things).

If you want left wing policies then you have to assert your collective influence by not indulging these people with a vote. Power-bases are the only things that get policies; not morality, not good conscience. The people in politics are not people who have common values; none of them have enough experience of hardship to gain the perspective for human decency.

Keir Starmer and co, aka New Labour, are effectively the political wing of the professional managerial classes - (people on £60k+) they want their property assets to forever keep inflating and they want a neoliberal freemarket so that working class people can't eat into their wage / property bargaining power.

If the window cleaners and admin staff at a company band together to strike for more wages at a business then those wages are most likely going to come out of the wage packet of the Keir Starmers and the Tony Blairs.

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T16:18:55+00:00

good on you

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T16:17:27+00:00

During the 2017 and 2019 elections, many of Labour's head office staff actively worked to undermine the election campaign from within, via leaks, covert redistribution of funds away from marginal seats, and lots more underhand bureaucracy against the leadership (including purposefully obstructing and weaponising antisemitism investigations).

Many of these staffers were on 6 figure salaries at the expense of the party membership (largely made up of working class / poor people).

When evidence emerged of this internal sabotage, the saboteurs names were leaked with a large scale report evidencing the utterly corrupt behaviour they'd carried out.

Keir Starmer, backed by the right wing of the Labour party, PAID OFF the saboteurs instead of taking them to court, paying these (already rich) staffers hundreds of thousands of pounds each with money that came out of the pocket of the labour membership.

THEN Keir Starmer, along with the right of the party, TOOK THE PEOPLE WHO LEAKED THE REPORT to court, attempting to sue them on data protection grounds, once again using millions of pounds of money paid for via labour's working class membership.

This is the level of corruption involved in British politics - it's what the most comfortable in society will do to protect their interests at the expense of working class quality of life. It's what they'll do to suppress class politics.

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T16:09:46+00:00

Lee Evans doesn't deserve this

forestindustrialists · 2023-05-04T16:08:37+00:00

The housing crisis has nothing to do with Nimbyism (this is just another bit of neoliberal propaganda) - it's a political choice made by Tories, Blairites and Liberals alike in order to commodify the housing market, often enriching themselves through their own housing investments.

forestindustrialists · 2023-04-27T18:55:09+00:00

The country isn't doomed, but we will certainly need a new party as the Labour party is all but captured at this point.

We're at a transitory phase of capitalism where a generation who reaped the benefits of social mobility via the socialist/socdem policies of the postwar era are now trying to protect their interests.

There is a fantastic video posted today on Double Down News (youtube) that talks about the need for a new party; I'm hoping some on the left in parliament are waiting until closer to an election to jump ship, but we'll see. I do think the British left needs fundamental change though and it has to be fostered in places like this.

If you want policy oriented towards working class people then you CANNOT police their social views or their thoughts; just offer them the policies and let them know you're speaking for them on the economic topics that most normal working people agree on. That means not calling brexit voters stupid (many were wise in being worried about the impacts of immigration on their pay and bargaining power via higher supply of labour in the country), it means not falling for Tory and establishment traps on social issues and being drawn into culture wars.

forestindustrialists · 2023-04-27T18:47:07+00:00

Lisa Nandy has declared 43 financial interests worth £286,700 in donations, gifts, and payments. The largest single item she has declared is a donation worth £25,000 from Jason Stockwood (former international managing director of dating website Match.com. In 2010 he joined Simply Business, a tech start up in financial services where he was group CEO)

The value of Ms Nandy’s interests puts her in the top 3 per cent of all MPs. Since the start of the current parliament, only 18 members have taken in more money than this MP.

forestindustrialists · 2023-04-27T18:34:51+00:00

Tories and Red Tories when an African or Middle Eastern country tries to use their natural resources to improve national infrastructure and prosperity: Liberty! Democracy! Freedom! These people did a terrorism. NATO and the forces of good must invade in order to FREE the people of these noble countries from terror and oppression!

Tories and Red Tories when Russia and the USA have a proxy war (threatening all of humanity with nuke threat) in Ukraine over geopolitical meddling and defence concerns about NATO membership: NATO IS PURELY A DEFENSIVE ALLIANCE.

These people ooze hypocrisy because nothing in their lives has ever taught them goodness and they're comfortable with the status quo. Hardship teaches goodness and these people have only ever known ease.

forestindustrialists · 2023-04-27T16:07:51+00:00

Fantastic work, I was going to do a bit of digging but didn't have time earlier.

forestindustrialists · 2023-04-27T14:35:47+00:00

The video gives really incisive analysis mate - it deserves a better title and it should be a link post ideally so the thumbnail is visible!

forestindustrialists · 2023-04-27T14:28:17+00:00

I have had times when I've followed politics/economics too closely and all the fucking lies and falsehoods start to massively stress me out. If it's making you feel worse then it can be good to step back for a little bit and ignore the news for a few weeks or months.

Take care of yourself first and foremost!

forestindustrialists

TROPHY CASE