Hysteria as ONE poll puts Starmer Labour level with Tories. Why isn’t he 20 points ahead?
Apparently The Guardian reckons Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has gained 26 points in the opinion polls to draw level with the Conservatives on 40 each. This is nonsense. In fact, I think it’s a flat-out lie.
My reasoning is obvious: Labour has not fallen to 14 points on the opinion polls this year. When Starmer took over as leader, I am reliably informed the party stood on 32 points.
So, if The Guardian was right, Labour should now be 18 points ahead. And that’s still not the 20 points ahead that Labour right-wing cuckoos said Jeremy Corbyn should have been, when he was Labour leader!
Who wrote that nonsense for the Graun and how do they justify their paycheques?
And consider this: while Labour as a party is said to be level with the Tories in this outlier poll by Opinium…
Preference for Prime Minister:
Boris Johnson: 34% (-)
Keir Starmer: 32% (-1)via @OpiniumResearch, 26 – 28 Aug
Chgs. w/ 14 Aug— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) August 29, 2020
… Starmer himself has fallen behind Johnson. It is a matter of days since Starmer’s adherents were claiming his critics should shut up because a poll had put Starmer above Johnson as preferred PM while Labour was several points behind the Tories.
They want to have it both ways, and it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Hilarious overreaction from centrists to *one* poll showing Lab and Cons level.
Some perspective:
When Lab and Cons were level in 2019, centrists said Lab should be 20pts ahead.
Before #PeoplesVote campaign alienated 4m Lab Leave voters, Lab were consistently ahead of Tories. pic.twitter.com/pUhONEa6cE
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@OwenPaintbrush) August 30, 2020
Labour’s current – only average – showing is due to the incompetence and greed of Boris Johnson and his Tory cronies, who are clearly to be seen cashing in on the Covid-19 crisis when they should be doing everything they can to help the citizens of the UK.
And it’s not going to last – because Starmer’s decisions are catching up with him.
So we see in Labour Heartlands that genuine left-winger and film director Ken Loach wants to know Starmer’s involvement in the Julian Assange case:
As DPP, Sir Keir Starmer tempered his supposed love of liberty by fast-tracking the extradition of Julian Assange (a process now making its way through the courts). He flouted legal precedents by advising Swedish lawyers not to question Assange in Britain: a decision that prolonged the latter’s legal purgatory, denied closure to his accusers in Sweden, and sealed his fate before a US show trial. Leaked emails from August 2012 show that, when the Swedish legal team expressed hesitancy about keeping Assange’s case open, Sir Keir’s office replied: ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet’.
Documents released under Freedom of Information requests to Italian magazine La Repubblica confirm the very close relationship between the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Sweden in the Julian Assange case. The files contain hundreds of mostly redacted emails sent over a five-year period. But according to one authoritative source, the number of CPS documents relating to the case may be much greater than has so far been disclosed.
In May 2017, the Swedish authorities announced they had ceased all remaining investigations into alleged sexual assault by WikiLeaks founder Assange. But the Metropolitan Police arrest warrant for skipping bail would remain in force. Subsequently, Assange’s legal team sought a ruling that the Met warrant should be rescinded, but the court ruled otherwise.
This case is one of the great political cases of the century, as John McDonnell recently said. It’s a defining case for the left, and Sir Keir Starmer has taken the most conservative position imaginable.
This is what Labour Party members can expect from a Starmer leadership: unquestioning loyalty to the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic.
I really hope that Assange is released from Prison and holds #StarmerOut to accont, he is no socialist, he has always been just a puppet working for others who pull his strings he is an insult to the UK.. no asset to anything, as someone said nothing more #StarmerTaylorsDummy https://t.co/Flg2jfPVf7
— Isobel_Waby we NEED a COALITION (@Isobel_waby) August 30, 2020
And then we have the matter of the Labour Payout – the £600,000 that Starmer handed over to a group of right-wing factionalists who are no longer working for Labour but who made extravagant claims about anti-Semitism and Jeremy Corbyn, while apparently doing all they could to sabotage the party’s chances at election (according to a now-infamous leaked Labour report).
One part of those allegations involved the diversion of 2017 election funds away from target seats to safe seats in a move that was hidden from Corbyn. Former elections director Patrick Heneghan was said to be responsible for this and he has now published his attempts at self-justification in response to the inquiry into that leaked report.
His response has been picked apart in a 14-tweet thread by Steve Howell, who also worked on Labour’s General Election Campaign Committee (GECC). I make no apology for including those tweets here, so we all have access to them:
https://twitter.com/FromSteveHowell/status/1299723557002452993
https://twitter.com/FromSteveHowell/status/1299723560282398720
https://twitter.com/FromSteveHowell/status/1299723563616866304
8/14 Heneghan was still arguing for a defensive strategy even as Matt Singh was writing in the FT (May 16) of a Corbyn surge.
It's a measure of his judgement that the Ergon House operation was apparently set up three days after that to support strongholds with huge majorities. pic.twitter.com/lWjxgcThNv
— Steve Howell (@FromSteveHowell) August 29, 2020
10/14 Would the money diverted into this rogue operation have made a difference? In a piece for @LabourOutlook I explain how the £135k we know about could have been used on a GOTV mailer to 15,000 voters in 35 more marginals. This is my conclusion. Link to full piece at the end. pic.twitter.com/CmTFQt745t
— Steve Howell (@FromSteveHowell) August 29, 2020
12/14 Heneghan throws in an old story about my conference call with the candidates. My first general election experience was in 1966 (I was 12), and I've never known one where a Labour leader was universally loved. I may be wrong but IMO canvassers should look for common ground. pic.twitter.com/NBzEeEzcir
— Steve Howell (@FromSteveHowell) August 29, 2020
14/14 Footnotes:
Heneghan's blog (quoted in the thread):https://t.co/M1c6gbVM1h
My @LabourOutlook piece (one extract above):https://t.co/n15KpchZbt
Also above are three extracts from Game Changer & an email about the Wakefield ad.
My previous thread:https://t.co/jfeASoI1oG
— Steve Howell (@FromSteveHowell) August 29, 2020
(Oh yeah, let’s have the rest of that previous thread as well:)
https://twitter.com/FromSteveHowell/status/1298941004322660354
https://twitter.com/FromSteveHowell/status/1298941007309004800
It is clear that Heneghan did siphon off Labour campaign money that could have been used to win the seats needed to form a government in 2017 – without the knowledge of the party leader – and it is entirely possible that this action prevented Labour from winning that year’s election.
So why did Starmer give a huge amount of money to the people who threatened to take Labour to court over it? It seems clear they did not have a case.
Put these matters together – along with any others that you care to mention – and one thing seems clear:
Keir Starmer’s position as Labour leader is on borrowed time. He may not last long after the Forde report is published.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
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