2020 Labour Leadership Election

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah, a Starmer win for the nomination vote from that organisation is... well... a surprise.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh, and Thornberry has narrowly failed to make the ballot.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And Nandy is a big campaigner for Palestinian rights. This proves the smears wrong: the JLM are legitimately worried about defeating anti-Semitism, not about defending Israel.

The thing about the JLM is that it was a small legacy organisation - for many years it was quite literally run out of the late Reg Freeson's front room - with a membership comprised almost entirely of elderly nostalgics until a couple of years ago. It's acquired the profile and sizeable membership (for an organisation of that sort) that it now has became it now has a very clear purpose.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Don't think you can take too much from it, but there are some interesting patterns nonetheless.

Surprisingly weak for Long Bailey in Wales (especially; hardly anything there) and in Yorkshire; usually these would be above average for a designated Left candidate. Nandy's pattern is interesting, because there is a fairly clear one but it is new.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A chain smoking, mouthy ex-barrister who threatens to sue ex-colleagues for Libel doesn't match that description as much as other MPs do.

Legend.

I mean, not leadership material, God no. And the experiment of having a leader who is not conventional leadership material, well, it did not work out, so let us not repeat the error. But all the same. Legend.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Thornberry has her plus points - but Christ, I have known few senior politicians more gaffe-prone.

(*that* by-election tweet from Rochester is just the start of it)

The funniest part about that tweet was that it turned out that she just takes photos of random houses all the time. Incredibly odd duck, a fact presumably not unrelated to her bizarre Dickensian upbringing.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Labour doesn't know what to say about immigration because it doesn't honestly know what to think about it (and never really has) and so really ought to say as little as possible.* Though I'll point out Nandy's article isn't particularly contradictory for a Labour politician on the issue; it's just that The Independent have chosen to run a rather misleading headline that contradicts the text.

^{*Interestingly, the issue has now come up rather more during this leadership campaign than it did in the General Election. Labour really is a very masochistic party at times.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Starmer seems to have the most impeccably "working class' credentials. His mother was a nurse and his father was a machinist. But I guess since he grew up in Surrey he doesn't talk with that northern twang that many people stereotypically associate with being working class in the UK

That he comes from a humble background is immediately obvious. Specifically, it is very obvious that he comes from a humble background And Has Done Well. All sorts of little clues (in the pattern of his speech, in his dress sense, the way he carries himself etc) that more people will pick up subliminally than consciously. Maybe journalists won't, but they are largely frivolous and unobservant people who miss things that most do not. He would, of course, be the first Labour leader from a working class family since Kinnock.

Anyway, I'll note that his family background is quite an interesting one to reflect on given the past few years: skilled working class who moved out of the city for better employment prospects and home ownership. One of the few clear signals he has given* as to the sort of direction he would take Labour in is that he would like to see it focus more on the broad middle of society. Which some people read as 'middle class', but, no, that is not what he said...

_{*Do not read this as a criticism. He's in this to win it and from the position he has found himself in, saying as little as possible is the best strategy.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Has the UK ever had a PM who spoke with anything resembling a working class accent? Judging from The Crown, it sounds like Harold Wilson had a bit of Yorkshire accent, but not a particularly strong one....not sure what Ramsay McDonald or Clement Attlee sounded like.

To be more specific, Wilson had a mild Huddersfield accent. Accents in that part of Yorkshire were not (and are not) particularly tied to class. Callaghan had a working/lower middle class urban Channel ports (I was about to write 'Portsmouth' but it had a wider distribution) accent of a type that is largely extinct now. MacDonald had a very strong rural north east of Scotland accent ('Doric') leavened by decades as a stump-speaker in England. David Lloyd George had a very distinctive humble-but-educated North Walian accent and there were traces in his speech that immediately marked him as someone whose first language was Welsh. Little point asking about anyone else.

Attlee had the most impeccably perfect lower upper middle class accent of his generation imaginable. No one speaks like that now, of course.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

He (Starmer) would, of course, be the first Labour leader from a working class family since Kinnock.

What sort of class background does Corbyn have?

Upper middle. And relating this to accent chat: he talks like a posh farmer from east Shropshire, which makes sense given where he was educated.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Attlee had the most impeccably perfect lower upper middle class accent of his generation imaginable. No one speaks like that now, of course.

There are lower upper middle class accents and upper upper middle class accents?? What a bizarre country.

Not really now, but in Attlee's day, when this really was A Class Society, then, yes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There's an... event... just around the corner that will have profound consequences for Scottish politics and until it's over there's little point in speculation about the future. None.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There's an... event... just around the corner that will have profound consequences for Scottish politics and until it's over there's little point in speculation about the future. None.

Um... what are you referring to?

Let us put this in the manner of a cryptic crossword. 'Oily fish as prize at sheepdog contest near a yellow field?' A--- S------ R--- T----

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I don't know where to start with this. It really shows how many people that use to dominate the party are really sh**te at their history. I don't know if it's more hilarous that someone doesn't know that Tom Watson came exactly through the old right of the party & or that they think that Flint is somehow being on par with Denis Healey.

It doesn't help that so many of these types see 1994 as a sort of "Year Zero" and have such little knowledge of, and even less interest in, Labour's rich and involved history before that point.

Similar comments can be made of the Labour Left as presently constituted as well. There's an awareness of a few key figures and a couple of particularly strong myths, but otherwise a weird blankness. In both cases this is odd. Most of the big names in New Labour had (and have) a very strong interest in Labour Party history, and you could hardly claim that people like Benn were ignorant of it either.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Of course it's an issue that is now only of relevance to around 30% of CLPs.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I can imagine a ton of reasons for why Labour lost votes there, from Brexit to immigration. However, why would Corbyn's antisemitism be one of them? Does Northern England care that much about it?

One particular problem for Labour at the 2019 GE was normally reliable supporters either not turning out at all or casting ballots for minor parties of all hues and shades. If you talk to the sort of people concerned, you would find a widespread feeling that 'Labour is not Labour'; and this slow-boiling scandal was a factor in that, though, sure, not the only one. It confused and worried a lot of people of this type.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Balls was actually an effective Shadow Education Secretary, the last one there's been, really. No use crying over spilt milk and all that, but it's hard not to look at those initial opposition years and wonder...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I mean to give an example one of the weakest parts of the last manifesto (and in 2017) was welfare & UC- the reason it was crap was because we had a crap shadow secretary of state.

I had to look up who that even is, which tells you everything.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Sure Corbyn was a problem for Labour overall but there was good to come out of his leadership, jettionsing it altogther is not a good move.

Oh, if Starmer wins then most of the past five years and all of the past three will go straight in the bin. His worldview and political priorities are just not compatible with the direction that Labour ended up taking under Corbyn, not in the slightest.

But it wouldn't be a simple matter of moving 'to the centre' or 'to the right' or whatever. Labour Party politics is much more complex than that. The thing about Starmer is that though his factional positioning is murky (he pretty clearly dislikes factionalism), his politics are anything but.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I went back and forth with Nandy; I'm aware that I'm in a bubble of people who would vote for her (right wingers who think Keir is a traitor is for going near the Shadow Cabinet) but equally I think she had the most growth in the campaign & was likely to hoover up among people who were going to back Jess.

There's also a certain percentage of members out in the provinces who, whether Left, Right or Centre, are understandably bitter about one or two things and wish to cast a vote based off that; you can see this even in the CLP nominations.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If anybody wants the 5,000 word version of this...

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/03/sensible-radical

It's a good article and is worth a read. However, I do have one major point of disagreement: the suggestion that Miliband, Corbyn and Starmer are all, at some fundamental level, quite alike ideologically. I would argue that they are all very different: Miliband is a post-Marxist social democrat, Corbyn is a perfect representative of the New Urban Left*, Starmer is what used to be known as a libertarian socialist; a tradition with deeper roots in the Labour Party than often assumed - there was more than a small element of it to Bevan, for instance.

_{*It was 'new' in the 1980s...}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

How would you characterize it? What's his priorities?

At a pretty fundamental level Starmer does not trust large bureaucracies (whether State institutions or private corporations) to look out for the interests of ordinary people and marginalised groups, and his politics are largely concerned with regulating and reforming the behaviour of the former in order to protect the latter. This is why he took the DPP post, for instance. He isn't interested in power in an abstract sense, but in a concrete one; maybe that's why he has no time for factionalism.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Nandy's support doesn't really track conventional factional alignments at all, which is fascinating because it isn't random either. You have people backing her (whether officially or 'will clearly vote for...') who you'd never have thought would end up on the same side in an internal election, but there's a logic to it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If I were in the UK, I'd be a Burnham/Corbyn/Nandy voter- don't know how much of those exist.

Quite a few.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anyway, just for completeness, a few comments on the underlying ideologies of the other candidates. Long Bailey is the opposite of Starmer: one can see immediately where she stands in factional terms, but exactly what she stands for or why she stands for it is entirely unknown. It is possible that she doesn't really know herself; this is the case for a pretty high number of politicians and explains some of the odder career trajectories around. Nandy, though, is easier to place: her politics are representative of what might best be phrased as Labour's historical Left; Bevan, Crossman, Castle and so on. We routinely use the phrase 'Old Right' to describe a particular strain of Labour politics, probably we should considering a similar phrase for Labour figures of her type - certainly makes more sense than 'Soft Left' which is an increasingly meaningless term that obscures more than it clarifies.