cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/25749999
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s High Court ruled Friday that the government’s decision to outlaw the protest group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization was unlawful, but it kept the ban in place pending an appeal.
Well that was obvious from the start. By all means arrest people who commit crimes but calling those crimes terrorism was insanely stupid.
It wasn’t even done any particularly sinister reason, it was just them being dumb. Terrorism charges obviously carries longer prison sentences, but that in no way benefited the government, so there was no reason for them to do that. They just came off looking bad at a time when they really needed their public image to improve. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating because every time a story like this comes out it makes labour look like the US republicans but they’re not. They’re just really really really really stupid.
Starmer used to be a human rights lawyer, so I don’t understand how he’s so bad at his job.
Starmer got his PM job after a coordinated campaign by the rightwing press and Labour rightwingers to falsely claim that Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow government were antisemitic. As a consequence, Starmer is now hypersensitive to the damaging effects that a such claim of antisemitism could do to him, whether true or not. And policies that are not in open support of Likud’s genocide are at risk of such claims.
TL;DR-- he’s maneuvered himself into a position where he’s in Netanyahu’s pocket. And he’s a coward.
It wasn’t just the smear campaign against Corbyn though. He did quite a lot of shooting himself in the foot as well, which really didn’t help matters.
But really none of that should matter to Labour, the media are for the most part in the pockets of the right anyway so who cares what they say. Most Labour voters won’t read those papers anyway.
What’s pissing off a lot of traditional Labour voters is all this fence sitting he is trying to do. People elected a liberal government, so obviously they are going to be expecting some liberal policies, that was what they voted for, that’s what they wanted. If they wanted someone to sit on the fence and ruminate about every possible decision the Liberal Democrats are right there. The reason that the Greens didn’t get a lot of votes this time around was because people didn’t want to split the vote, but if Labour are just going to be Tory Lite (although frankly not that lite) then who cares, we might as well risk it because otherwise we’ll end up with a right-wing government either way. It baffles me that no one in Labour HQ can see that.
I honestly think that if labour just fall on lent into it, they would probably get way more votes than they currently do.