Virginia Axon

Jeremy Corbyn. For the many not the few #Yourparty

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

Andy Burnham is days away from becoming Prime Minister.
His chief of staff will be James Purnell, CEO of Flint Global, a corporate lobbying firm whose clients include Amazon, Uber, BP, Apple, Airbnb and Thames Water. The utility Burnham says should be nationalised.
A thread on what is behind the soft left mask.
https://t.co/Htw9KZvAoE

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

Grateful to Novara Media for giving me the word count for a proper political obituary of Starmer!

"Starmer might not have a political economy, but he certainly has a moral one. He inhabits a world where some people are deserving of attention, grace, kindness or deference. Usually this is determined by whether he thinks they are ‘proper’ people: the suit-wearers who hold zippy ‘bilats’ or who wield the sort of institutional power he alternatingly fears or valorises. These people Starmer treats with genuine warmth, care and respect – like the media class that repeatedly defends him as a ‘decent man’ because they fall within his internal Venn diagram of respectability, cultural cache and power, so Starmer treats them decently.

But woe betide those who fall into his out-group of the contemptible. These are usually people other powerful and socially adept people think are worthy of ridicule, and will give Starmer a thumbs-up if he punches down. For this group, Starmer has nothing but disdain, or cruelty or indifference.

We know who falls into this category: leftwingers, Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott, peace activists and Palestinians; those who stand up at Labour conference and demand accountability for genocide; the irresponsible idealists who refuse to put aside childish things like protest marches and human rights and justice and saving the climate in return for incrementalism, stoicism, ‘grown up’ politics, handshakes with dictators, dinner parties in Davos and accommodation with the ‘reasonable demands’ of capital.

Or, more concretely, the hundreds of thousands of members he told to leave the party – and did."

https://t.co/KOrD8xFmoP

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

20 day-old Osama Sahloul is just one infant in #Gaza affected by the rapidly spreading chickenpox outbreak where infections are increasing

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

"We now know America did do this, the evidence is overwhelming.. what's worrying is [the US govt] do seem to be now obstructing the investigation.. it is one of the worst mass civilian casualty incidents in modern warfare"

Dominic Waghorn on the Minab school bombing. A war crime

[MikeD @mjdaly57]

@RachelReevesMP You’ve built a very strong economy and lifestyle for yourself:

[MikeD @mjdaly57]

Labour’s Makerfield stitch-up and coronation of Andy Burnham as party leader and prime minister is (eleven years after the event) an official rebuttal and cancellation of the 2015 leadership contest.

It is the final cancellation of Jeremy Corbyn’s win in that contest and his subsequent leadership of the Labour Party.

The Party never accepted that result and never accepted the winning candidate who convincingly beat Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendal. Corbyn was vilified from day one, the party staged a coup to remove him a year later and subsequent leadership challenges when the coup proved unsuccessful.

Keir Starmer was very much involved in those plots to destroy Corbyn’s leadership.

(Despite the best efforts of the Labour Party to take down their own leader, Corbyn received the highest number of votes of any Labour leader this Century in the 2017 general election.)

And now the party’s favoured candidate in that 2015 leadership contest has been royally ushered into the leadership and Downing Street without any leadership contest, hustings, debates, interviews and the kind of scrutiny that a leadership contest normally entails. They are saying to Burnham: Labour members were badly mistaken in 2015 in not voting for you. But we’ve changed the rules, take the crown. It should have been yours in 2015.

All hail Andy Burnham. You have it all: MP, Party leader and Prime Minister. You rightfully have what should have been yours all along.

@UKLabour @andyburnham @jeremycorbyn @Peston @Keir_Starmer @BethRigby @PippaCrerar @BBCNews @Channel4News @AJEnglish

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

"You shouldn't be getting a medal for being robbed by your own government."

Betty Brown 92, the oldest surviving victim of the Post Office Scam was outraged about being in the New Year Honours List.

We want compensation and prison sentences not worthless medals.

[Dave @ItsOurDave]

"Andy Burnham is about to become Prime Minister... without any policy statement, no debate, no interview, no discussion, and I think that's a bit sad...

I do think a bit more scrutiny, a bit more statements from him would have been helpful."
Jeremy Corbyn.

[MikeD @mjdaly57]

Why is the MSM not telling the truth about Starmer? (Why all the gushing, sycophantic hype?) That one of his first acts as PM was to cut the winter fuel allowance to pensioners; that he initially decreed that the two-child benefit cap stay in place thus maintaining child poverty - that he suspended the seven MPs who defied him; that he moved to make life more difficult and precarious for sick and disabled people; the appointment of Mandelson as US Ambassador despite multiple warnings; that he publicly supported Israel’s cutting off of water, food and electricity to the civilian population in Gaza; his imprisonment of elderly people for protesting about what’s happening in Gaza; lying to the very end about Jeremy Corbyn; his bullying, overbearing attitude towards his opponents in the House - not least Diane Abbott and Corbyn; top of the Westminster league table for accepting freebies. And so much more. And now @Channel4News announcing this evening that he’s giving a further £250 million to Zelensky. Starmer is a war-mongering little Napoleon who’s been a disaster for The Labour Party and society. It is Parliament’s shame that not one MP had the courage to stand up amid all the obsequious, hypocritical cheering yesterday to spell out these facts about his cruel, authoritarian and oppressive leadership of The Labour Party.

@UKLabour @jeremycorbyn @HackneyAbbott @BBCNews @SkyNews @BethRigby @PippaCrerar @AJEnglish @itvnews

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

Oh brilliant. Another revolving door lobbyist at the top of urnham's Number 10.

Arden's previous clients have included oil & gas companies, data centres and US arms giant Northrup Grumman. Northrup provides parts and weapons systems to the IDF.

Arden sponsored Steve Reed's absurd performance at Labour Conference last year, where he wore and distributed MAGA-Style "Build, Baby, Build" caps.

[Michael Rosen 💙💙🎓🎓 NICE 爷爷 @MichaelRosenYes]

I think it's makey-uppy time again, isn't it?

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

WARNING⚠️
Andy Burnham is running to be Prime Minister on the strength of the Manchester Model.
Before the country decides, it should know what that model did with £600 million of public money in its own backyard.
GMCA's housing loan fund lent around £600 million to a single private developer, Daren Whitaker of Renaker, to build the skyscrapers that have redrawn Manchester's skyline.
A tribunal found GMCA failed to obtain a statement of assets and liabilities from Whitaker before lending.
🧵
https://t.co/n3BQB3WJBd

[Richard Murphy @RichardJMurphy]

What's wrong with 'The Treasury View'? https://t.co/2Fmnyg624J Just about everything, as it turns out.

[Manchester Green Party 🐝 @McrGreenParty]

Burnham has lied to us all like Starmer did.

Pretends to be progressive...

He's going to stuff the cabinet with Starmerites.

They want to cut welfare, to fund warfare!

Shame on them!

🥀🥀🥀

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

Andy Burnham talks of "criticising" Israel.

Which bit is his government going to "criticise"?

Deliberately shooting children in the head?

Murdering 1,600 medics?

Deliberately starving a civilian population?

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

Starmer’s premiership was short, but the clean-up crew are already moving in.

The publishers will come next. The biographies. The diaries. The official accounts. The soft-focus explanations from people who were there, but somehow saw nothing until the advance payment cleared.

The biographies and official accounts will arrive soon enough, each one polishing his short premiership into something noble.

Few will tell the truth about the damage done: the crackdown on free speech, the assault on the right to protest, the support for Israel through the destruction of Gaza, Labour’s surrender to corporate lobbyists, and the purge of left-wing members from a party founded to represent labour, all to build the politics of the extreme centre.

A cost-of-living crisis dumped on the working class while energy giants, supermarkets and banks enjoyed a profit bonanza, the freebies, the donors, the cronyism and of course the Mandelson scandal, the final straw.

But the lies were the thing: constant, rehearsed, spoken with the dead-eyed certainty of someone who mistook arrogance for authority and repetition for truth, delivered with the narcissism of a man who thought the public existed to be managed, not answered.

That is the record. Yet #Starmer spent years hiding behind carefully rehearsed family stories whenever the public asked what he truly stood for.

Strip away the biographies, the excuses and the varnish, and one line is left behind. Not a legacy. Not a vision. Just the refrain that came to define the man and his premiership.

👇👇👇

[Diane Abbott @HackneyAbbott]

Even our most cherished public institutions are not immune from widespread racism. It blights us lives and ultimately harms us all.

Black doctors in England four times less likely to get training places
https://t.co/VAZCYExz1x

[Diane Abbott @HackneyAbbott]

The campaign to make ordinary people worse off, to pay for the war drive continues.
Scrap the rise in military spending instead.

Scrapping triple lock could save £60bn, OECD tells Burnham
https://t.co/KK4CBuxe2r

[Jon Poole, @[email protected] @total2total]

Tweeting every day to remind everyone that we need to #savenhsdentists in the UK thousands struggle to get NHS dentists, thousands can't afford private dentists, dentists have been privatised via the back door, please retweet, @jamesmurray_ldn @LucyMPowell

[Carol Anne Grayson @Quickieleaks]

How dare they keep repeating the same old "antisemitism" lies

#ItWasAScam