This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Blair]

I see some people in our movement are making up that Ruth Smeeth is going to be parachuted in...

[Blair]

Oh lord the timetable for selection is quick even for standard stitch up times!

[Blair]

I see some people in our movement are making up that Ruth Smeeth is going to be parachuted in...

Is she a good fit for the constituency?

No not really; her old seat isn't nearby & she has no local links but some people on labour twitter are sh**t stirring by claiming that Keir is going to give her the seat. She appeared at his conference speech in 2020 I think & has done a lot of work on antisemitism & helping Labour rebuild with it's relations with the Jewish community organisations.

There's imo a lot worse people on the Labour right but as Cassius said she gets a lot more vitriol than others.

It's also ironic because there's hardly a shortage of North-East Labour moderates who LOTO will try and help out... such as the ex-Stockton MP Paul Williams who is being floated.

[Blair]

its funny as the Labour right did the same thing in constantly claiming that various people were going to be given a seat by Corbyn- most of which was made up rubbish.

[Blair]

Thought of the day- what is the most hilarious/depressing/inept example of selection rigging in Labour history?

I don’t think I’ve seen a long list of 1 person before!

[Blair]

Even more baffling as he easily could have just been made a Peer to let him serve as foreign secretary, although I think Labour had just hammered Douglas-Home over not being an MP while Prime Minister (he eventually got a seat)

[Blair]

Labour are backing the commissioners being sent into Liverpool.

Jon Lansman had one of the saner points that this is part of a massive long running failure to focus on good governance in the party... some of the less clued up left wing blogs are saying it’s a sign that Starmer is a Tory.

I’ll wait for the statement from the Government but this looks like it could be much bigger scandal than we even thought last December.

[Blair]

And it was well known wasn't it that Unite & the Labour left stopped him from getting a seat- he kicked up a very big fuss about it in 2017, especially after the left ran Steve Rotherham, who was pretty much a backbencher.

If its even possible where did Anderson actually sit on the Labour factional spectrum?

[Blair]

The sight of left wing s***posters rushing to canonise classic machine politician Anderson

Joined by Andrew Adonis of all people- who claimed that it shows that Keir Starmer isn't trusted to run the country somehow

It does seem the most questionable people in the Labour Party all seem to come from the private office of either Blair or Brown... Woodcock, Austin, Dugher, McFadden, Adonis....

https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1375022746116194305

[Blair]

Thelma Walker, formerly PPS to Mac the Knife, is running for the Northern Independence Party... she quit the party over JC losing the whip but this is a bigger step!

[Blair]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/starmer-to-axe-shadow-chancellor-anneliese-dodds-after-labour-poll-slump-n55z62dkg

Is it really a Sunday if there isn’t an aggressive article in the Times about Labour?

No great surprise though- Dodds has no particular base in the PLP, isn’t beloved by political journalists  and has a pretty impossible job.

Yet another article referring to the ‘big beasts’ of Benn and Cooper being sounded out... a shadow cabinet with them in it needs a lot of changing to get them the roles they’d expect (and the egos one of them would bring)

Also mentions Jess Phillips for promotion... which is baffling as she’s actually in a role that suits her professional experience (to non anoraks she is the shadow domestic violence minister and previously worked for a charity that deals with this)

It was always my guess that Dodds was picked by Starmer for party management reasons.

He wanted someone who he could trust and who who was seen as a relative olive branch to the left; Which ruled out Rachel Reeves and he was under pressure to pick a women... which ruled out Ed Miliband (and that choice would have triggered a lot of ‘sensible’ journalists)

[Blair]

No evidence that this is anything other than Fat McPadden on manoevres again. The utterly ludicrous, almost deranged, comment that SKS has "appeased the hard left" is a massive red flag there.

And tbh my take is slightly different - Dodds is who Starmer genuinely wanted. The right wing were trying to foist Reeves on him, and to his credit he resisted that.

Whilst we are at it, why this fetishisation of both Benn and Cooper by so many lobby types? They had prominent positions under Ed M - its fair to say that neither pulled up many trees in that time.

I honestly think it's because they want one story about 'Labour make big changes'... but much like sacking Dodds there's a good chance you do it & nothing really would change.

I don't even know though- I think in both cases it might just be a hang up from the anti-Corbyn years/remainiac tendency. In Coopers case there's certainly a rather wishful thinking from Lobby types that pointed questions at a committee hearing or at Home Office Questions will make a difference- yes Yvette is good at that, but the Home Office has always been an easy punching bag!

Both re-branded themselves significantly in the Brexit era too & people are lazy- it took about 2-3 years after Corbyns victory for people on the right to realise that there were better candidates for replacing him than Chuka, Yvette and David Miliband. 

There was also this exact same tendency in the Miliband years to say that he needed to bring back Darling, Alan Johnson and other ex-new Labour ministers because the then shadow cabinet (made up of Cooper & Benn) was lacking.

I actually think the that the current shadow cabinet is largely quite good... when you consider how hollowed out the PLP is.

[Blair]

I hadn't seen the Observer article which was even more stupid... one of Labours flaws was apparently allowing Ed Miliband to put forward a policy for green cars when he didn't own one himself!

Are people really this dense in the PLP?

[Blair]

UNITE General Secretary Election is now back on... I think I read to expect a result in Autumn.

There appear to be 3 candidates from the UNITE left and one from the right... who did rather well last time. It’s a FPP election I think and would be peak Labour if Coyne won because of a year old row over a virtual meeting.

[Blair]

A rather friendly write up, all things considered.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/year-of-keir-part-1-jittery-mps-politics-and-passion_uk_606654ccc5b6aa24bc60a48d

You call up and he’s basically managing you on the call and he sort of thinks he’s really smart and you haven’t clocked that he’s just managing. Obviously, we’re ing politicians so we know when we are being managed.

This was my favourite line, partly because every Barrister thinks they're much smarter than everyone else & frankly Starmer is smarter than most of the Labour right!

[Blair]

I'm aware I do this every weekend but there's yet more briefing in the Times against Keir. A favourite line of mine...

''One shadow minister complained that 'it can sometimes feel like we're his paralegals', while another said of his team: 'they think they understand the red wall, when really all they understand is Westminster game-playing and a couple of postcodes in Camden.''

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-year-on-keir-starmer-is-feeling-the-strain-s5scj8mnm

If you believe the above why on earth are you on the frontbench? A bit ironic to complain about Westminster game playing while providing an off the record quote to the Times... at least we don't get 'senior labour source' anymore.

I'm aware it's rather ironic as I'm probably at the same stage that many on the left were after the constant sniping (and this is a lot more low level) but I really don't understand the strategy of these people?

If Keir gets hit by a bus do they really think there is someone from their faction in the PLP who can A.) Win the Leadership B.) Outperform Keir

The Labour party really does make my head hurt at times- there was a great quote saying that Keir needed someone like Karie Murphy (Corbyns former chief of staff) who was praised as 'tough' in said quote- when Labour MPs spent years saying she was awful, was ruining the party & was the reason we were doing so badly?

The Harold Wilson quote about the coach really was true wasn't it...


 

[Blair]

In Kremlinology news the article is quite interesting in showing the divides among the party; with claims that a lot of the briefing against Dodds is coming from MPs who backed Lisa Nandy.*  This would make partial sense as the two names both briefed to replace Dodds were Nandy & Rachel Reeves.

There was also some new reporting of tension between Rayner & Starmer; the biggest surprise for me over the last year has been how quite Rayner has been & how willing she was to go along (at least in public) with some of the calls made by Keir. While some will obviously put this down to her own politics I do wonder if it's because she is actually just relatively loyal?

There were some gripes in the article about her not getting a shadow job (I wanted her to have one) but she has been quite good in her internal role & frankly Labour does need someone whose sole job is to keep the activists happy.


*The group of MPs that backed Nandy in 2020 is actually much smaller than the larger tendency in the party; a lot of people backed Keir because he was going to win & was the best chance to beat the left.

[Blair]

I did say that it's much more low level!

[Blair]

What's also notable is that there are instances of bastardry being ascribed to Starmer's team, particularly relating to Hartlepool and Liverpool. It's just that the decisions that people tried to force through in those cases were  observably not the best decisions (Williams is as good a candidate as any other, but the CLP would have selected him anyway; Smith was not a good choice to review Liverpool Labour if you didn't want to start an unnecessary punch-up.)

This is rather a theme. There are a lot of people who believe in toughness as an absolute virtue, and continue to do so even as the tough option repeatedly gets worst outcomes than sensibly negotiated options.

Funnily enough I missed that it was the NEC officers group who stopped it being Smith- who was a bizarre choice with no local government experience & who has largely been a talking head for the last year. It shows that we can sometimes trust people in the party to do the right thing...

I also don't really understand the review; it doesn't seem like this was a case of someone in the regional office forgetting to tick a box.

[Blair]

I presume that Owen Smith is being referred to here?

Had totally missed his even being proposed tbh.

Jacqui I assumed!

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/liverpool-city-council-labour-review-david-hanson_uk_60622c2ec5b65d1c281826fa

[Blair]

I think Al referenced it before but these are the same struggles that every LOTO within Labour has faced*; my rough reading of post war politics is that there's pretty much three categories of how they are perceived. Some like Miliband, Hague, IDS were seen as deadweight from their own parties from the start, others like Wilson & Cameron were clearly skilled politicians who only managed to get into office through pure luck & others were clearly going to enter No.10.

It's going off topic slightly but there's also an interesting amount of well incorrect memories around various LOTOs; John Smith is beloved within Labour but was iirc seen at the time as a good man but an average leader.

[Blair]

Notice the time... reason 501 why MPs shouldn’t have Twitter. God knows why he’d tweet this.

https://mobile.twitter.com/stephenctimms/status/1379425681004756994?ref_src=twsr...

[Blair]

Well I know why he did but it’s quite obviously gaslighting. And from someone who knows what they’re doing!

[Blair]

Timms is, and always has been, an outspoken Christian.  Why is it surprising or wrong that he would think this way?

I don't think people who know the PLP are that surprised but it extends the story into it's 5th day (when it should have been dealt with on Saturday) & is frankly asking the whips office to take action or look like they haven't really learnt any lessons from the past few days.

To paraphrase Diane Abbott he also isn't the only Christian in the PLP! But he is an evangelical which is rarer... as was I believe Tim Farron.  

And I just remembered this comes only a few months after Labours Shadow Faith Minister quit for saying that registrars should be exempt from marrying gay couples if they wish.  

[Blair]

I frequently use this thread to bitch about the movement so thought this would be a lighter note.. probably the most fascinating leadership election in that all 5 were easily big enough figures to claim the mantle (but all equally flawed in rather shocking ways)

Bonus points if anyone knows which two were rumoured to have had an affair...

https://twitter.com/labour_history/status/1246693549309075456