BrexitBanana

If brexit is a good idea then I’m a banana! 🍌 (Apologise to Ian Hislop and Private Eye, but it was a long time ago!)

[Anne @Anniepop2027]

Woman “in glasses”

“We need to let elected Prime Minister’s, also elected as leader as well, the time to deliver their policies over their whole term”

And there it is ..,

In a nutshell.

You say to Starmer you’ve got 5 years to deliver and oust him after 2

No.

@LBC

[TimMacpherson🌹 @TimGMacpherson]

As a CLP Chair, activist of 40 years, sometime Labour candidate I feel insulted that @andyburnham thinks he can descend upon us to rule with no consultation, no vote and no mandate. It’s quite disgraceful. Twice a failed leadership candidate. You have no mandate.

[Philip O'Connor @PhilipOConnor5]

Does anyone in this country, or in @UKLabour , care about basic democracy? I do, and I suspect many others do. The Labour Party will, I believe, live to regret what they and @andyburnham have done to an extremely competent Prime Minister @Keir_Starmer .

[Gordon Fielden @GordonFielden]

Tom, you've missed the point I was making.

This isn't about whether CLPs can technically block a candidate. It is about democratic legitimacy and the rights of Labour Party members.

Sir Keir Starmer was elected Leader of the Labour Party by the membership under the Party's democratic rules. Those members pay their subscriptions, campaign in all weathers and keep the Party alive between elections. They have every bit as much right to participate in choosing the Party's leader as MPs have within the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The question I keep coming back to is this: with well over 400 Labour MPs, why could they not produce a single credible parliamentary candidate to put before the membership? Apart from Wes Streeting, who few believed would defeat Sir Keir, they could not unite behind one of their own.

Instead, they have turned to someone outside Westminster who has already sought the Labour leadership twice and been rejected by the membership.

If members are denied a meaningful opportunity to exercise the same democratic right they exercised when they elected Sir Keir Starmer, then the Party is excluding the very people who fund it, campaign for it and give it its democratic legitimacy. That, to me, is the real issue.

[Martin Docherty #FBPE🇪🇺 @MartinDochert12]

Well Lisa Nandy looks happy, no wonder she couldn't give a shit about the BBC & the MSM bias and offcom doing fuck all about it. Snakeess.

[JanTheStitchWitch @pictureladyjan]

Remember this photo Keir Starmer took with President Zelenskyy and President Alex Stubb of Finland?
Starmer and Stubb both wore black, in solidarity.
I will never forgive Labour MPs for what they have done, or the media hacks who helped foment the panic.
This was a coup.

[BrexitBanana @BananaBrexit]

@realstewpeters That’s what’s the world is praying for!

[BrexitBanana @BananaBrexit]

@AndrewHWestern Well it could have, now not so sure.
This unnecessary leadership change has taking the heat off Farage.

[The Last Blairite #TrueLabour @LastBlairite]

The ratio here is brutal. Labour MPs (independent in Karl’s case) are ignoring everyone to protect the Burnham myth. The reason Karl has been ratioed here is because he’s very incorrectly said that Burnham has ‘legitimacy.’ Many Labour members and most of the country don’t agree

[Barry Halverson @barry_halverson]

This is one screenshot from the BBC News app on 3 June.

Not different days. Not cherry-picked.
The same day. The same InDepth page.

Four anti-Starmer stories, all presented together.

But apparently there’s no anti-Starmer bias at the BBC.

[BrexitBanana @BananaBrexit]

@StephenDyke_1 Still angry, its the arrogance and assumption that this is a done deal that’s winding me up the most.

[Frances Hinde @franceshinde]

He was goodat getting things done - nearly 70% of manifesto completed or in progress in just 2 years.

[IslamophobiaUK @uk_islamophobia]

Two Muslim men pulled an elderly couple and their grandson from a burning house in Leeds last Friday.

You probably didn’t hear about it.

Mohsin Qayyum. 22.
Mohammed Yusuf Iqbal. 20.

Both from Bradford.

They drove past the garden. They saw the fire. They ran straight in.

Sheila Robinson, the grandmother who was trapped inside, posted on social media:

"My family and I will be forever grateful to these young men."

Her granddaughter Kayla wrote:

"Drove past the garden, seen it, and ran straight in and made sure everyone was okay without a second thought."

Everyone got out. The house can be replaced. The family is alive.

Every outlet that covered it called them heroes.

They deserved every word.

But not one headline told you they were Muslim men.

We have seen this before.

Two weeks ago, a teacher was stabbed in the neck protecting his pupils from a knife in his Manchester classroom.

Maysum Abdullah. 27. Science teacher.

LBC named him a hero. So did the Independent, the Manchester Evening News, the Mirror, the Sun.

He ran towards the blade.

A hero in every paper. A Muslim man in none of them.

This is the pattern.

When a Muslim name appears in a crime, the faith leads the headline.

When a Muslim name appears in a rescue, it vanishes from the page.

Now look at who that erasure clears the path for.

Bradford, the same district these men come from, is now led by Reform as its largest party.

One of their candidates, Daniel Devaney, topped the poll in his ward after writing on Facebook that Muslims were "pure scum" and that he wanted to "blast [them] off the face of the earth."

He was not deselected. He was not suspended. He was elected.

They are loud about our religion when they want to call it a threat.

They are silent when that same religion sends two young men running into a fire.

The book they want to criticise is the same book that commands us to save a life.

"Whoever saves one life, it is as if he had saved all of mankind."
— Qur'an 5:32

Qayyum and Iqbal lived that verse on a Friday in Leeds.

Abdullah lived it in a Manchester classroom.

And the headlines recorded the act, but erased the faith that drove it.

When we are the suspect, our religion is the whole story.

When we are the rescuer, it is not worth a line.

Their names are Maysum Abdullah, Mohsin Qayyum, and Mohammed Yusuf Iqbal.

Muslim men.

Say both.

Sources first comment.

Report: https://t.co/D9amGp2yxO
Keep us alive: https://t.co/Z8H0Flg44Y
Substack: https://t.co/9x6sqmwMge
IG: @islamophobiauk

[BrexitBanana @BananaBrexit]

@LindaR39 @Keir_Starmer @UKLabour I do try to break the algorithm and reply to reform zealots.
And yet I agree, the vast majority of posts I see now are in support of Starmer and the sheer madness of changing leader now.

[Linda #BringbackStarmer @LindaR39]

I know I live in a bit of an echo chamber on here but my timeline is full of incensed members, ex members & everyone that respects @Keir_Starmer but it’s so important that we at least tag in @UKLabour so they hear us. I’m re-quoting as many as possible. They need to know.

[Thomas Standfield @TStandfield1789]

Chris Mason:
"It's not a game. It's not entertainment."
BBC political journalism?
Is this a joke?
@ChrisMasonBBC @BBCPolitics @BBCNews @Ofcom @lisanandy

[BrexitBanana @BananaBrexit]

@GordonFielden Excellent, but don’t let @@SkyNews and @itvnews off the hook either. It’s been a relentless campaign.

[Gordon Fielden @GordonFielden]

Chris, there are rare occasions when an author dismantles his own argument before the reader has progressed beyond the opening paragraphs. This is one of them.

You readily concede that much of your reporting over recent months rested upon anonymous briefings, unnamed sources, private conversations and opinions offered only on condition that they could never be subjected to public scrutiny. You then ask your audience to accept that such material provides an accurate account of events. With respect, that is not evidence in any meaningful sense. It is an interpretation of events, constructed from assertions that the reader has no means of testing, verifying or challenging.

No serious observer disputes that confidential sources have a legitimate place in political journalism. They always have, and they always will. But there is a profound distinction between using anonymous sources to illuminate established facts and using them to construct an entire political narrative over many months. The former is responsible journalism; the latter risks becoming an exercise in reinforcing assumptions until they acquire the appearance of fact simply through constant repetition.

Indeed, your own article inadvertently exposes that very process. It repeatedly invites readers to accept what unnamed MPs supposedly believed, what unidentified advisers were allegedly saying, and what anonymous insiders privately thought. Such accounts may well have reflected genuine conversations, but they remain assertions rather than verifiable facts. There is an important distinction, and one that ought never to be blurred.

More striking still is the omission at the heart of your analysis. You devote thousands of words to explaining how Westminster concluded that Sir Keir Starmer's premiership had become untenable, yet you devote scarcely a sentence to examining whether the relentless stream of anonymous briefings and speculative commentary from sections of the political media played any part in creating that very outcome. That question surely deserves examination.

Nor do you grapple with the constitutional consequence of what follows. The British people elected a Government led by Sir Keir Starmer. Should he be replaced by another individual through internal parliamentary manoeuvring alone, the process may be constitutionally lawful, but that does not automatically confer political legitimacy in the eyes of the electorate. Those are two entirely different questions.

Many of those now defending such a transition were previously among the most vocal critics of Rishi Sunak for assuming office without seeking his own mandate from the country. Constitutional principles cannot be invoked when politically convenient and quietly abandoned when they become inconvenient.

History has a habit of punishing such inconsistency. If Andy Burnham were to become Prime Minister in these circumstances, I believe the pressure upon him to seek his own mandate from the British people would become irresistible. In my view, he would have little practical choice but to call a General Election within six to eight months. Whether Labour would survive such a contest is, of course, for the electorate to determine. My own judgement is that they would face a severe electoral reckoning, with the country returning either a Reform UK-led government or a hung Parliament.

Journalism should chronicle events, not become so intertwined with Westminster's internal conversations that it begins to mistake the mood of the political class for the settled will of the British people. That, in my view, is the fundamental weakness running through your analysis.

https://t.co/8vSBlsVlze

[Times Politics @timespolitics]

Renewal or collapse? Labour is on a knife-edge https://t.co/yETNPFre1P

[Adrian Gosling @digitalsunshine]

The BBC being called out by viewers for their gleeful reporting of the Keir Starmer resignation, and their influence in hounding him out of office

Chris Mason, one of the main culprits, says this is an 'offensive' suggestion

Ok mate 😂

#BBCBreakfast
#R4Today
#NewsWatch