Wes Streeting is in the wrong party
Arethosemyfeet
Shipmate, Heaven Host
in Hell
I would like Wes Streeting to fuck off, check where he is on Google Maps, fuck off from there, repeat until he's fucked off completely and then fuck himself.
Seriously, has this shiny man in a shiny suit done anything laudable in his career ever? I first encountered him 20 years ago and he was a treacherous gobshite then and he's worse now. How is he still in the Labour Party, much less the cabinet?
The latest is whinging about "overdiagnosis" of mental health issues, like anxiety or depression are some sort of Fae, only causing problems if you name them. And then to in the same breath claim to "want to follow the evidence", when we've known at least since Cass that he's only interested in evidence that conforms to his prejudices.
Get tae fuck, Streeting.
Seriously, has this shiny man in a shiny suit done anything laudable in his career ever? I first encountered him 20 years ago and he was a treacherous gobshite then and he's worse now. How is he still in the Labour Party, much less the cabinet?
The latest is whinging about "overdiagnosis" of mental health issues, like anxiety or depression are some sort of Fae, only causing problems if you name them. And then to in the same breath claim to "want to follow the evidence", when we've known at least since Cass that he's only interested in evidence that conforms to his prejudices.
Get tae fuck, Streeting.
Comments
It's Corbyn who was in the wrong party. He's now in the right party.
It was preceded by boasting that he was doing what the Conservatives could only dream of:
https://x.com/breeallegretti/status/1900157819132711190
Take your stupidity elsewhere, there's a good chap.
Because sadly that is now the Labour Party - unless you can find I think it's 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party to mount a leadership challenge. He's not an outlier to the leadership - he is cut from the same cloth. Starmer, Reeves and Kendall are all the same - once you base everything on snake-oil economics ( promising to fund public services from growth without raising taxes and pursuing policies like Brexit and austerity style cuts which actually kill growth) you need to scapegoat to distract and shift the blame for the crumbling and rationing of public services and the continued drop in standards of living - just as the Tories did.
And of course, there's an entire right-wing media infrastructure just delighted to help with that which Streeting is tapping into.
It was never going to stop with just eating the faces of young trans people - now we know who they're coming for next and they'll use a lot of the same tactics. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see some credentialled quack tasked with putting together a report to rubbish neurominorities and insist on RFK style nonsense approaches to mental illness. Stage 1 of manufacturing consent in the media from The Guardian to GB News has been going on for a while now.
"Democratic politics" are now, pretty much, there for distraction rather than for running society in the interest of citizens.
You really don't like him do you?
Just a side note; the framing of this statement was down to the interviewer who quoted a single 'expert neurologist' and Liz Kendall's remarks about 'self diagnosis':
https://x.com/SaulStaniforth/status/1901202533634154533
So I agree with the criticism of Streeting but the BBC in the shape of Laura Kuenssberg doesn't come out of it particularly well either. Their own reporting on this doesn't contain the relevant clip - but one from elsewhere in the same interview.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7ejvr3y0zo
Nah, you're just the one with the political sensibilities of a badger that's been hit by a lorry.
I don’t have a dog in this fight (other than having to be governed by them) but that’s hugely arguable or at the very least dependent on which founding factions and their principles you’ve got in mind.
Keir Hardie, to pick an example. I'll grant that there are similarities in behaviour between Starmer and Ramsay MacDonald's later years in government.
That got me thinking about Labour history, and MacDonald is the obvious Tory-lite. However, if you think of Wilson, Callaghan, Blair, Brown, aren't they all? Founding principles don't matter a toss, when basically Labour's job is to run capitalism, when the Tories need a rest.
Some are worse than others. Brown at least understood you couldn't cut your way out of a recession nor to a balanced budget. And whatever the disagreements with Brown's policies there's no denying that there is an actual functioning moral compass in the "son of the Manse", something that seems to elude Blair and Starmer both. It's one thing to accept the need to run capitalism in the immediate term, quite another to do it this badly and callously.
That's tory-dom and he really needs to go fuck himself.
It came as quite a shock to discover he wasn't a Tory.
Corbyn was never a team player. Just a member of the awkward squad. His nomination for leader was a joke and his election as leader was a disaster.
More of a team player than most of the current cabinet who refused to work with him.
That isn't to let the others off the hook.
That's not a comment on his policies but his abilities.
He certainly was a flawed leader, largely because his collegiate style was completely inappropriate to the situation in the PLP and central office. With the shower of bastards he had to deal with a degree of ruthlessness and assertiveness was required. The lack of it is what ultimately crippled his leadership and meant that the big step up from 2015 to 2017 was met with redoubled efforts at sabotage rather than seeking victory. Would that it had been McDonnell's "turn" in 2015.
Lord Sainsbury, for one.
He's fairly obviously a creature of Labour Together, and once they decide to pull the air out he'll deflate.
Here's Solomon Hughes of the Private Eye quoting from the recent Asantha and MacGuire/Pogrund books, where McSweeney runs victory laps and tells the authors how clever he has been:
https://x.com/SolHughesWriter/status/1835230062628471124
https://x.com/SolHughesWriter/status/1895479722265694600
https://x.com/SolHughesWriter/status/1895481842775863711
https://x.com/SolHughesWriter/status/1899489768519372822
not written yesterday but still apposite.
You can also read the review by Andrew Ranwsley and the extracts in The Times (behind a paywall):
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/09/get-in-by-patrick-maguire-and-gabriel-pogrund-review-inside-story-of-labour-under-keir-starmer-morgan-mcsweeney
They didn't rate him as party leader and didn't want him as party leader. Starmer worked for him to convince the gullible labour members that he would be Continuation Corbyn.
No-one thought that. We just hoped he might be less discontinuation than he was.
Yes he was a convincing liar. His job as a lawyer was to be convincing. Even those commenters who where pro Starmer and anti Corbyn, like Phil Moorehouse are finding the current plan on PIP beyond the pale.
Blair was definitely to the right but he was honest from the off about where he wanted to take the party. Streeting and his pals are destroying Labour. They criticised the left in some nasty ways but cried when the left criticised them.
Indeed. You can call it gullibility or naïvety if you want, but those of us who voted for Starmer did so because we thought he was offering a middle ground - decent policies without the baggage and able to keep the right of the party from throwing their toys out the pram. It turns out that the only way to prevent the latter is to be one of them. We'll know next time: vote for someone who can demonstrate a long terms commitment to socialism... and who'll show up with a Molotov cocktail to a knife fight.
Keir Starmer is really David Cameron in disguise. I claim my five pounds.
Astonishing article -I had no idea. But I wasn't sure if the comment 'highlighting positive Labour moves like paying striking doctors' was sarcastic or not?
That would be great news for Nigel and Kemi
Not so long as they keep splitting the right wing vote between them. A putative left wing Labour leader would only have to match Corbyn's 2019 vote total to win a majority, and a more capable leader would be able to do that without breaking a sweat.
It's up there with Clegg and tuition fees
I'm not a fan of the lib dems after the coalition but would pick Ed Davey over Streeting and Starmer.
If people want folk to vote Labour they need to be finding and motivating those 20% of MPs needed to remove him. I also don't think a vote for them is the route to keeping the far right out any more - it's their lies, mismanagement and enthusiastic confirmation of toxic frames of reference that are aiding the rise of Reform.
If people want to get MPs to remove Starmer they need to stop saying they will vote Labour and need to stop voting Labour any time the chance comes up in the immediate future.
The threat of loss of power is the only thing many of their MPs will respond to.
When you make a pledge the centrepiece of your campaign and prominently feature photo ops of you signing that pledge at every opportunity and you drop it like a hot rock at the first sniff of a ministerial car it looks rather duplicitous. Besides, the only measure by which the 2010-15 government was successful was in making it to the 2015 election without collapsing, something that could only happen because of the lib dems' abject surrender.
Hard not to have uncharitable thoughts about such people. LHM
If you vote for a non-Tory, and they proceed to Tory all over the place, you get upset with them and tend not to vote for them again.
Clegg sold his support to Cameron in exchange for a mess of pottage and a completely worthless referendum on the worst of all possible voting systems. A key promise in the Lib Dem manifesto was "We will scrap unfair university tuition fees so everyone has the
chance to get a degree, regardless of their parents’ income."
Naturally, one doesn't expect the junior partner in a coalition to get all of their own way, but what the coalition did was the direct opposite of what the Lib Dems had promised in their manifesto.
At a time when the voters had rejected Labour after 13 years, the country needed a stable government with a coalition. The LibDems joined the party with the most seats and there was stable government for 5 years.
Clegg's pledge was based on the LibDems winning the election. It was not possible for Clegg to deliver on free tuition as they had not won the election.
It was not possible for Clegg to do much. He was relegated to what posh British schools used to call a fag. Someone who does the bidding of and upholds the status of a more popular boy. He and his party were seen by the Cons as making up the numbers.
Labour had turned the country around from the mess left by the Cons and people were a bit bored of them. Voting in the Cons went well for 14 years didn’t it? (Sarcasm intended)