After Corbyn

[shpalman]

The membership seems to want Starmer: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... rst-choice

[GeenDienst]

The membership seems to want Starmer: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... rst-choice

So it seems, and especially older members. Presumably, that's because they can remember the 1980s.

And Phillips at #3. And the same poll shows that northern members don't give an average f.ck about whether the candidate's northern or not.

Now the briefing against Starmer and Phillips starts. Unfortunately for Labour the members as a whole do not control the constituency and central party processes. Next we see who can get backing from enough CLPs to stand.

[El Pollo Diablo]

For those of us who might have joined recently, it's probably time to get involved at a constituency level.

[GeenDienst]

Starmer is now variations on 1/2 at the bookies, with BLT ranging around 3/1 or 4/1.

[plodder]

“Your Brexit is sh.t” is a pretty simple message and has the benefit of not being disprovable.

[sheldrake]

“Your Brexit is sh.t” is a pretty simple message and has the benefit of not being disprovable.

That would only be a benefit if people's voting decisions actually rested on whether they could disprove things. In reality, it would just come across as a snide moan from somebody who didn't get their way, trying to browbeat their way to popularity by telling the working class they were wrong, again.

Terrible tactic.

[plodder]

Here's the maths.

52/2 = 26.

48 > 26.

[sheldrake]

If all the remainers had voted labour last time they would have won. You're forgetting how proud remainers were of their degree educated professional demographic. Not massive fans of income tax rises, them

[dyqik]

If all the remainers had voted labour last time they would have won. You're forgetting how proud remainers were of their degree educated professional demographic. Not massive fans of income tax rises, them

What income taxes rises would have affected them?

[monkey]

If all the remainers had voted labour last time they would have won. You're forgetting how proud remainers were of their degree educated professional demographic. Not massive fans of income tax rises, them

What income taxes rises would have affected them?

Don't you know that 48% of people are in the top 5% of earners?

It's why the rich have big houses, they need the room.

[sheldrake]

If all the remainers had voted labour last time they would have won. You're forgetting how proud remainers were of their degree educated professional demographic. Not massive fans of income tax rises, them

What income taxes rises would have affected them?

According to Labour's own announcements everybody earning over 80k a year (i.e. a significant proportion of london white collar workers, and many traditional professionals and self-employed tradespeople outside London. The self-employed people don't show up in the usual income distribution stats according to https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlab ... sandincome). Plus lots of less well-paid married people.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50567979

It was also obvious to many that with people like McDonnell, Corbyn and Abbott in the Cabinet spending would've quickly shot beyond the original plan and required further tax rises.

[dyqik]

So they wouldn't have been affected. Ok.

[sheldrake]

So they wouldn't have been affected. Ok.

The married ones and the ones earning over 80k would.

[GeenDienst]

Now, Robinson is interrogating possible Labour leadership contenders over the assassination of that Iranian general. he said on Wireless 4 that this is “a very early test for those who want to be leader of the opposition”. Hmmmm. Don't see it posed as a serious test for those actually in charge.

Corbyn gave the answer you'd expect him to, citing “the US assassination” and "belligerent actions and rhetoric coming from the United States", going on to the routine stuff about serious escalation and need for restraint.

Starmer, Phillips and Nandy just went for the "increasing tension and need for deescalation" vibe, without the direct attack on the US, which sounds almost exactly like Raab's statement. Nandy gets extra leftie points for shoehorning in a reference to Iraq, though. Nothing from BLT or the others AFAIK.

This bit's good:

Robinson asked Melanie Onn, a Labour MP who lost her seat but is supporting Phillips: “Should people like Jess Phillips take a sort of Corbyn stand, or should she be wary of those who criticise Mr Corbyn for seeming to back the wrong side in international conflict.” In response, Onn said: “I don’t think that anyone who is trying to emulate somebody else is the right person for the Labour party.”

[GeenDienst]

And Rowson is a genius.

[bjn]

So I’ve joined the Labour Party, first time I’ve ever been in a political party. Hopefully i can help to get a decent competent leader elected.

[Pedantica]

Jess Phillips or Lisa Nandy are I think probably the best options at the moment. I think Stephen Kinnock is very good too but he's on the record saying he thinks the next Labour leader should be a woman so I don't think he's running.

I think Labour is in a bad place. Probably worse than it was in 1983 when it was still 14 years away from power. But with the same central problem.

A) The new leader needs to take back control from the hard left clique who control the party.
B) The new leader needs to convince the majority of the membership that Labour can only win by appealing to people who voted for other parties in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019.
C) The new leader needs to show some visible evidence that they are improving Labours electoral performance quickly enough to keep the momentum to do A and B.

Kier Starmer has 3 problems I think:

1) He was the most visible face of Labour's Brexit strategy. That was one reason for Labour's poor performance in the election. I actually think it's only the 3rd most important after (i) the leadership (general lack of and Corbyn specifically) and (ii) Labour's overreach in its economic policies.
2) He never really stood up to Corbyn and that worries me for his capacity to do A and B above.
3) I expect the EHRC report will be damning. As a member of the shadow cabinet during Corbyn's leadership Starmer will face difficult questions about why he didn't do more to stand up to the party leadership.

Of course 2 means he's much more likely to be elected than Jess Phillips for example. But potentially much less suited to the immediate task ahead.

[sheldrake]

1) He was the most visible face of Labour's Brexit strategy. That was one reason for Labour's poor performance in the election. I actually think it's only the 3rd most important after (i) the leadership (general lack of and Corbyn specifically) and (ii) Labour's overreach in its economic policies.

The only thing that really changed about Labour between it's less embarrassing defeat in 2017 and the catastrophic one it just had in 2019, was that it's Brexit policy tilted much further towards remain under pressure of people like Starmer. Economic policies & leadership personalities & issues were all the same.

I'd say that means that 1) was actually the most important factor in the result.

I'm definitely not a socialist, but Socialism is not your problem. Appearing un-patriotic to the big traditional minded mass of working-class people a Labour victory depends on is your problem, and it's just as bad for people like Starmer as it is for Corbyn. Boris Johnson has just managed to get coal mining communities in the far North voting Tory again simply by not appearing to hate the idea of the UK as a nation-state. Think about that; an Etonian Tory who worked in media before politics managed to make Labour look like effete southern weirdos to their own core vote. The reality you must face is that you did this to yourselves and Boris is just a superb opportunist. You must not let this happen again.

A pro-brexit version of Jess Phillips proposing a 'scandanavian economic model' would've been a massive, massive problem for the right at the last election.

[GeenDienst]

Jess Phillips or Lisa Nandy are I think probably the best options at the moment. I think Stephen Kinnock is very good too but he's on the record saying he thinks the next Labour leader should be a woman so I don't think he's running.

I think Labour is in a bad place. Probably worse than it was in 1983 when it was still 14 years away from power. But with the same central problem.

A) The new leader needs to take back control from the hard left clique who control the party.
B) The new leader needs to convince the majority of the membership that Labour can only win by appealing to people who voted for other parties in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019.
C) The new leader needs to show some visible evidence that they are improving Labours electoral performance quickly enough to keep the momentum to do A and B.

Kier Starmer has 3 problems I think:

1) He was the most visible face of Labour's Brexit strategy. That was one reason for Labour's poor performance in the election. I actually think it's only the 3rd most important after (i) the leadership (general lack of and Corbyn specifically) and (ii) Labour's overreach in its economic policies.
2) He never really stood up to Corbyn and that worries me for his capacity to do A and B above.
3) I expect the EHRC report will be damning. As a member of the shadow cabinet during Corbyn's leadership Starmer will face difficult questions about why he didn't do more to stand up to the party leadership.

Of course 2 means he's much more likely to be elected than Jess Phillips for example. But potentially much less suited to the immediate task ahead.

A. Definitely agree, mostly. Labour is certainly in a much worse place than 1983. Then, Militant weren't really a problem outside Liverpool. Momentum are embedded like a virus at every level. I read that the membership are kinda soft left overall, but Momentum control all of the party machinery, from CLPs to the NEC. But Momentum aren't a homogenous lump either, and there will be a spread of opinion there. It's encouraging that the trigger ballots turned out to be a damp squib, although most of the probable dreaded centrist victims had already walked. Time will tell just how much control Lansman et al can retain in the post-Jez era.
B. Definitely true. The membership will buy this, as a whole, but see (A), above. We are likely to have a position where many CLPs and the NEC act against the wishes of the membership as a whole. We saw this clearly in the tortured evolution of the EU so-called policy.
C. Certainly. Or at least enough to give a start to the next leader.

I don't really buy some of the second part of this. Now then. Starmer.

1. 17 million voted for parties advocating a second referendum, 15 million for parties denying one. Labour's overwhelming problem was Corbyn, not Brexit, and we've read that the campaign was an uncoordinated clusterf.ck, riddled with personal enmities, so largely agree here. remember when Labour went all Brexity for the Euro elections and the LDs kicked their arses into 3rd place? And then their 2nd ref stance (plus Swinson's incompetence) squeezed much of the life out of the LDs.

2. Hattersley recently eviscerated the entire non-Corbynista PLP by pointing out that, whereas in 1983 he and his colleagues stayed and fought, the current bunch stayed and did not fight. This applies to pretty much anybody outside the Leader's Bunker (Phillips does get some points here). I f.cking despise the so-called bigger names for sitting on their hands for Corbyn's second leadership win, while some self-regarding f.cking nobody was the only one with the spine to put up a challenge, with predictable results. Later on, at least Starmer was visible, and clearly trying to achieve stuff that the members wanted, in opposition to the leadership. Who else can say any of that, maybe apart from Creasy, who isn't standing? I guess Starmer is safe from deselection from his local PLP, which is a start.

3. A damning ECHR report is a gift to any new leader, Starmer included, who isn't tarnished with being a central figure in the old regime (yes, you, BLT). Starmer has already said "...the party should show it was ready to 'throw open the books [to the ECHR] and say you have got access to anything'." It's not Starmer who has spent decades being ...uncomfortably close... to holocaust deniers and the like, while never engaging Israel. Starmer, AFAIK, has never "liked" vividly antisemitic images. It wasn't Starmer's clique who the whistleblower said was interfering in the disciplinary process to get their mates off. Starmer's free of all this baggage, and the Jewish community will engage with him, but he must fix it, and quickly. I expect he will accept all of the ECHR's points unreservedly, but he'll still have to fight those who maintain that the whole thing was a manufactured slur by neoliberals, centrists, MSM, triangulators.....

For me, a big test of the new leader will be whether they f.ck off the 4 Ms. On day one. That very likely rules out Long Bailey, who is already Unite sponsored and Corbyn's prophet on Earth. And I don't think it has to be an angry northerner. I suspect that Labour, in chasing the rest of those, is going to forget about all the people who did vote for them.

We should remember, the next one isn't going to win an election. The new leader's job will be to hand over in a better shape, like Smith did to Kinnock, like Kinnock did to Blair. Long road ahead. Starmer could at least get Labour to "not a joke".

[sheldrake]

The people who voted Labour this time don't really have anywhere else to go. You really do need those angry northerners back. This '15 million voted to leave vs 17 million for another referendum thing' is doomed. Labour absolutely have to stop beating this completely dead horse to win those northerners back. Our first past the post system does not reward opinions concentrated in a relatively smaller number of actual constituencies.

Jess Phillips saying she might go into the next election planning to rejoin the EU is a gift to the Tory party, make no mistake about that. Labour members are going to have to learn to separate what they think is right from what is going to win them a vote. Is rejoining the EU really more important to them than introducing a Scandinavian economic model with much higher education and welfare spending? If the latter is more important to them, they're just going to have to put this nutty obsession with re-running or overturning the 2016 vote aside. If the former is more important to them, good luck, but they're going to be out of power for 25 years.

[GeenDienst]

I see Phillips has just ruled herself out of contention. saying a perfectly sensible "I'll recommend what's best, when it's best", which is now forever going to be lied into all this anti-willy-peeple f.ckwittery that we're all so depressingly used to.

Looks like inexperience. Doesn't matter. She can be 4th or 5th leader from here, years down the line, when they might have a chance of winning.

[Pedantica]

YouGov did some polling regarding why people didn't vote Labour. Results are here:
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/ar ... ned-labour

The polling suggests Brexit Was The 2nd biggest issue. The reason I relegated it to 3rd in my list is that I think almost any Labour Brexit policy would have lost them votes. So the question is how many more votes did it lose them than the best option they could have chosen.

It was a difficult decision done quite badly. By contrast Labours economic promises were an easy decision done very badly: don't promise 20 things; promise 3 things that are really popular.

[bjn]

YouGov did some polling regarding why people didn't vote Labour. Results are here:
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/ar ... ned-labour

The polling suggests Brexit Was The 2nd biggest issue. The reason I relegated it to 3rd in my list is that I think almost any Labour Brexit policy would have lost them votes. So the question is how many more votes did it lose them than the best option they could have chosen.

It was a difficult decision done quite badly. By contrast Labours economic promises were an easy decision done very badly: don't promise 20 things; promise 3 things that are really popular.

Reading that, the Brexit issue want just that they weren’t committed to Leave, but their policy confusion over Brexit and Remainers also deserting them.

[sheldrake]

Honestly, you guys are engaging in wishful thinking here. There's no future in trying to re-fight the fight of 2016. This yougov poll is being stretched in all kinds of ways so that people can say 'see it isn't really about brexit as such'. This is not how you learn and move on.

[lpm]

Agreed. Labour should leap-frog straight to the fights of 2024. It's fairly easy to predict what they'll be. And it won't be Leave vs Remain.