 Keir Starmer is known to be a man who takes focus groups seriously. Indeed, he's often criticised for following them too closely, instead of taking a policy lead. However, there was one focus group of swing voters this week filmed for Times Radio, whose advice I don't believe Sir Keir will be following. Let's take a look. What would you say to Keir Starmer? Very quickly, Sarah, your message to Keir Starmer? He needs to give up the ghost and make way for somebody else. Des? Get a personality, I will leave. Paul? Goodbye. Dick? Same, just I think you need to go. Vicki? I think if he could come across a little bit more genuine and yeah, maybe find a different role. John? Move over, let someone else take over. And Gary? Yeah, definitely. Let someone else take the reins. Just not good enough. Would anyone say anything nice to Keir Starmer? Come on, someone's got to have something nice to say. He's got a cool Christian name. I've got a bum. Sorry, Sarah, what are you going to say? Nothing. I was thinking. I thought Vicki said it nicely. You need a new role. Whereas people are like, bye. He's got a better man cut than Boris. The only good thing they had to say, he's got a better cut than Boris. And he's got a good first name. Keir is a nice name, to be fair to him. Darlia, he's not going to be happy with that one, is he? Oh, God. It's going to be, it's that HGV thing all over again. I feel like he's going to make the same face as he did when he crashed into that like plant pot behind him. Very good. Very good. Just like when he failed the test. It's honestly, it's just quite depressing really to watch him consistently fail on his own terms. I don't think Starmer ever really wanted to succeed on the terms that I would consider success, which would be shifting what is politically possible within the UK through collaborating with social movements, with social organization, creating pathways to power that are based in convincing real people and communities and not playing games with the media. That's what I consider successful. I don't think Keir Starmer ever considered that to be his benchmark of success. What his benchmark of success was this kind of focus group politics, which was sort of invented by Tony Blair, by Alistair Campbell, and it's basically replacing like grassroots community organizing, campaigning and frankly policy with sort of very carefully calibrated comms and messaging with this kind of, you know, these kind of politicos sort of believe that that can be arrived with the very deeply scientific method of focus groups and also being really, really friendly with media barons. That's also very effective scientific technique to get to that kind of perfect comms and messaging. And obviously comms and messaging is important. I'm not saying that you don't workshop your messages. Of course that's important, but it can't be the wholesale of your political strategy, especially not in the kind of moment that we're in now. Like, there was a very brief moment in history where labor could win on those terms, you know, a historically specific moment where, you know, the ability of the Tory party to consolidate and secure business interests was waning. The amenability of Blairism to entrenching Thatcher's neoliberalism was, was, you know, ripe for support by the mainstream media. So in that moment, having, you know, focus group politics worked because you had a, you know, very friendly media to, to kind of receive that and, and sort of broadcast it across the nation to the extent that it became sort of commonsense thinking. But that moment's gone. Like the Tories have a viable social coalition. They are, they are deeply connected to the media. The pathway to power just can't look like that anymore. It just has to be different. And do I claim to have all the answers? Of course I don't, but trying to kind of revive the corpse of 1997 and stripping that election of all of its historical context, this is even before you get into the politics of Blairism, whether or not that was a good thing, even if you're just going to look at this purely in terms of electoral strategy, it's just not going to work for this day and age. And it's really depressing to watch the Labour Party refuse to learn this lesson. We've actually got some breaking news from Labour land. MPs have come up with a really smart way to try and re take centre stage and set the national agenda, regain momentum for the party, make it seem, can convince the public they stand for something. You can probably guess what it's going to involve bashing Jeremy Corbyn. These are some tweets from Sam Coates at Sky News. So he tweeted today, or there's, or just this evening, in fact, there's a plan for amongst some Labour MPs to exclude Jeremy Corbyn permanently from the Parliamentary Labour Party. They want to change Labour standing orders to allow MPs to decide Corbyn's future, then vote him out. This would spare Stammer from having to own any decision. Labour MPs involved in this plan believe the changes made at conference to make it harder to deselect sitting MPs in bolden them to make this change, but whips worry about the numbers, while others worry about the optics of another Labour internal row taking centre stage. I mean, darling, this isn't a surprise, is it? Whatever the problem is, the answer from the Labour leadership and Labour MPs is maybe we could just be horrible to Jeremy Corbyn a bit more, maybe then people would like us. This is the equivalent of like Nicki Minaj trying to like ring Cardi B out every time she feels like she needs to try and make some cheap like popularity points, basically, it doesn't work because people love Cardi B and people are like pissed off with this constant like this constant feeling. It just doesn't read well not only because people, the vast majority of people like actually just don't really care about this anymore. And it looks disorderly. It also that that idea of like trying to engineer it so that Stammer avoids owning any decision. Is that not exactly the feedback that we've been hearing that Stammer doesn't have any like, no one knows what motivates Kirstammer, no one knows what gets him out of bed in the morning, like no one knows what is actually driving him. Kirstammer cannot deny that Jeremy Corbyn's voter base, which within the Labour Party members is considerable, are the people that put him into power. They are the people that elected him leader of the Labour Party. And it just doesn't look good to treat the people that vote you into power in this way. It doesn't set a good example to the electorate that Kirstammer is hoping will one day put him in charge. What it tells them is that he has no loyalty or no accountability to the actual people that gave him the mandate that they gave him. It's such a bad look and it's not going to help. At this point, it's actually only going to harm. Because also you can take Jeremy Corbyn out of the Labour Party, he's still going to win his seat. He's not going to be defeated in Islington by any Labour MP. He's deeply loved because he has been embedded in the community there. Whatever you think of him as the leader of a national party, as an MP, you can't, as a constituency MP, you can't question his credentials. So it's only going to make the Labour Party look more incompetent to the general public. And it's going to alienate the Labour Party's base as well, which still particularly in the membership wants to retain part of the legacy of Corbynism. And that's just a fact. I would love to see him stand and win in Islington North against the Labour Party. It'd be a lot like Ken Livingston winning originally in London when Labour backed a different candidate and it was all a bit of a stitch up from the top. I feel like this is again Kirstammer overstepping the mark. I mean, he's a goner. So I can imagine actually them doing it even though they know it's going to damage Kirstammer because they're doing a scorched strategy, which is to say how many of the left can we throw out before this dud stands down, which seems to be the overall story at the moment when it comes to the Labour Party. They don't have much to say on anything policy wise, they just bash the left over and over again. Sad.