This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[EastAnglianLefty]

Would I be wrong in thinking that the regional divide between North and South also contributes to the divisions in Labour?

Like from studying in the UK even I managed to notice the differences in attitudes and politics between students from the North vs. students from the South. I'd assume that may carry over to intra-party politics

As a Labour party member from London I'm perhaps not the best to give a good answer but my assumption is that there is a split but it doesn't fit that well into North v South. It ties into the rather complex definition of what the North is, the differences between the regions & also fundamentally the difference between urban & non-urban areas.

The biggest contribution is probably that a lot of the Labour party does not understand large parts of the country it wants to govern; Lisa Nandy had quite a good line about how people in Labour just think that we should pump loads of money into Northern cities- without focusing on the fact that most people see these cities as distant.

In terms of the leadership elections the North-West was always seen as a stronghold for the left; Corbyn did very well in the region & cleaned up in 2016 (he picked up a lot of people who voted for Andy Burnham in 2015)

The PLP (Labour MPs) tends to be a more mixed bags; those MPs in Northern seats aren't generally more left wing- some of this came from the fact that the MPs were selected back in 2005 or 2010 when you were naturally more likely to be from the Labour right than the left. Many of these MPs lost their seats in 2019 (Jenny Chapman, Phil Wilson, etc)

I would question whether this is accurate, as a) we haven't had a definitive breakdown by constituency of any leadership election since 2010 and b) the region was also Burnham's stronghold in 2010, when he positioned himself as the further right candidate in the contest.

There are some broad left and right alignments within CLPs, but they're a) not easily broken down along regional lines and b) not necessarily that solid - plenty of previously Progress-aligned CLPs in London ended up electing Corbynite execs at some point in the last five years, and many have now swung back the other way.

[EastAnglianLefty]

They're less volatile in my experience; the big London CLPs tend to swing back and forth because they have the membership in the 1000s which mean that it can't just be stitched up.

Although in the past decade there have been large increases in membership just about everywhere. My CLP (in a hopeless seat) had about 100 members in 2010, whereas my ward alone (slightly less unwinnable, but still not exactly fertile territory) had more than that by 2018.

Anecdotally more of our members seemed to be willing to be active in some way when we had a tiny membership than the new members were, though that may be to some extent because they were the people who were willing to join when nobody else was and more of them knew each other. And members who aren't known to the CLP leadership are obviously harder to corral one way or the other in leadership elections.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The other reason that the merger was bad idea was because mergers in the trade union movement are usually a way of avoiding dealing with falling membership numbers and bank balances, and they usually serve to make the merged union less effective at looking after its members (leading to falling membership numbers and a focus on existing activists, leading to expensive bad decisions, which creates the conditions for a new round of mergers). This was especially blatant with UCATT's integration into Unite a few years ago.

What the union movement really needs is a wholesale restructure of different sections to different unions and a shared set of agreements on basic levels of representation members can expect. But in practice that affects way too many people's powerbases for that ever to be even remotely plausible.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It's not so much a point as a threat, and the effectiveness of the threat depends very much on the outcome of the Unite GS election.

In any case, that resolution would be a catastrophically terribly idea (especially but not exclusively in terms of how it'd play out when the whip is withdrawn due to sexual allegations) and would also piss off the EHRC in a really self-destructive manner.

[EastAnglianLefty]

In the long term, if her plans for reform do work then it'll strengthen Unite's influence over Labour, because large and growing unions are more able to demand things. Fixing the nominal core part of the enterprise would be good even for the hobbyists.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The thing about deselections is that nobody falls victim to them without bearing at least some of the blame. Even horrendously polarising figures have successfully fought off challenges when they've actually put the work in. Making it tougher to trigger a reselection mostly just protects the lazy.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I'm quite comfortable with the continuing existence of Young Labour, provided anybody on its exec is made forever ineligible to stand for Labour in any internal or external election afterwards.

[EastAnglianLefty]

To state the obvious - had David won we would have called him the wrong brother too.

In retrospect, the wrong brother did win - because David would have self-destructed long before 2015 and we could have tried something new, whilst still having Ed as an option in future.

Yeah the obsession about David is stupid- I think he could have got a better share of the overall vote but the best result Labour was going to get from the 2015 general election in hindsight was to stop a conservative majority government.

I actually take the rather weird view that the leader in 2010 should have been someone who was an MP in 1997. The party skipped a generation and gave power to a frontbench made up of New Labour staffers.

I actually agree with this. I thought the article was very disappointing, featured too many of the ‘golden gang’ and really didn’t capture the actual issues facing Labour over the last decade. The quote from Douglas Alexander on Scotland was laughable.

Also seemed devoid of the extra parliamentary left and the other liberation politics- something that’s had a huge impact on Labour since 2010 really.

Would be interested what others thought.

https://mobile.twitter.com/JamesMills1984/status/1433580089258749955

What was that?

The "hottest take" from me regarding Scotland was John McTernan's assertion that Labour's collapse there would never have happened.......if only......David Miliband had been elected leader!!

And of course the contributions from "OUR SAVIOUR OVER THE WATER" were typically risible.

(McTernan really is a strange one, though - just the other day he was strongly defending Labour as a "broad church" party, a barely coded rebuke to the macho-rightist tendency in the party who often quite genuinely seem to desire everybody to the left of Starmer expelled)

He said that Scottish Labour MPs weren’t actually that out of touch since even the MPs with the best contact rates on voter ID still lost!

Which obviously ignores that Labour MPs did take those seats for granted and the warning signs had been there since 2007.

I spent a year as CLP secretary of Aberdeen North (because I turned up to a meeting to complain about the CLP secretary not answering emails, it turned out he'd moved to England and nobody else wanted to take over.) Their contact rate was pretty good, but I don't think it actually bore any relation to who they'd actually talked to. The inability of Scottish CLPs to realise that most CLPs in safe Tory seats in rural England could comfortably out-organise them never ceases to amaze me.

[EastAnglianLefty]

And as for turnout drops being uniform - whilst this was *mostly* the case in 2001 it was rather less so four years earlier when the drop was concentrated in safe Labour seats (and some really hardcore areas, eg inner Manchester and Liverpool, had seen a fall against the trend in *1992*)

Does this actually argue against the point? Manchester and Liverpool are known for many things, but high life expectancy is not one of them, so you'd expect any cyclical decline in turnout to manifest there first.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Not really. Adonis being wrong is a fairly reliable constant.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Tom Harris mostly exists at this point to disprove the argument that if you were going to design the stupidest nominally Labour commentator you could, it would be Dan Hodges.

John Rentoul, of course, exists because he can only be killed by a wooden stake through the heart.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It's a speech to the TUC Conference at a time when there is a need to take the tensions out of relations between Labour and the unions and when the Tories are attacking each other more than usual. Why would now be the time to change the dynamic? That's what Labour Conference is for.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Is this even in reverse? I thought the Left won the ballot for the CAC again this year?

Also notable that other motions on a similar topic which stray into fewer other policy areas have made it through. I wouldn't rule out that factional sh**thousery has played a role, because this is the Labour Party, but I also wouldn't rule out a situation where a motion was badly drafted and people are trying to hide this behind factional posturing, because again, this is the Labour Party.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I actually hate party conferences. Every one since I joined in 2014 have been an absolute disaster in one way or another with virtually every faction debasing themselves in public.

In an ideal world, conference would just be for fringe meetings and frontbenchers' speeches, because the parts that are meant to be about democratic control of the party are a legacy of the 1920s. Any claim that it's about democracy doesn't survive an encounter with how delegates get selected (ie who can afford to take a week off work) let alone the compositing process.

We do not live in an ideal world, so we're going to have to keep pretending it's at all functional for decades to come.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The system usually only matters when it's close between the leading candidates or when the eventual winner is unacceptable to a critical mass of one section of the party. Where that's the case, the outcome is likely to be bad whatever system you use, so it's basically just an exercise in picking which kind of debacle you want.

[EastAnglianLefty]

He doesn't even understand how mirrors work.

[EastAnglianLefty]

They tried to undermine him, but with little success - Arthur Scargill formed his own breakaway Socialist Labour Party in a deliberate and woefully unsuccessful attempt to split the vote.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Yes, there are realistically two ways you can make conference run smoothly in the modern age. Either you can separate anything relating to rules off into a separate conference and deliberately make it so dull no journalists turn up, or you can construct a Faraday cage round the conference centre.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I suspect if Burnham had had a speech it would have been distinctly underwhelming - he talks a good game and the powers of the role are not huge (especially when you don't have a politically sympathetic government) but his actual record of achievement is pretty thin. Not bad, but nothing to write home about.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Be fair - is there anything more authentically Labour than passive aggression?

[EastAnglianLefty]

Why would you follow Owen Jones? Regardless of how you feel about his politics, his Twitter timeline is just deeply tedious and self-regarding.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Both Coventry S and Coventry NW were ultra-marginal in 2019. The initial proposals for boundary changes leave NW unchanged and shore up S a little, but they don't make an awful lot of sense on the ground and there are a lot of other plausible alternatives for S that would make it nominally Tory by 1000-1500 votes.

[EastAnglianLefty]

My CLP is still doing meetings via Zoom, which makes the situation worse than it would otherwise be.

[EastAnglianLefty]

My CLP is still doing meetings via Zoom, which makes the situation worse than it would otherwise be.

Those sound like torture to me.

So you're familiar with CLP meetings, then?

[EastAnglianLefty]

If I were Michael Fabricant, I would simply steer well clear of discussing the sexual misbehaviour of people with a public profile.