This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This reminds me a bit of the fuss over the Rotherham selection a decade ago: the thinking wasn't unreasonable, but the execution was, shall we say, a little crude. Anyway I suspect that if Hemingway very much wishes to be an MP then he should dust himself down, accept that he was never getting picked for a by-election, wait to see where the Outwood area* ends up after the boundary review and run hard for whatever seat results. Or try to convince Trickett to stand down at Hemsworth.

_{*Which is where he actually lives and is a councillor. That's not not local as far as these things go, but there's been some definite gilding-of-the-lily over quite how local it is...}

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You can tell it's Summer because everyone in the Labour Party is briefing to the papers every fifteen seconds for no obvious reason. Somehow it's even more amusing when literally no one's attention is on the Party for the moment.

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One of the most right-wing members of the PLP in fact, which people often fail to notice for a reason that does not reflect entirely well on them.

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Where there is an issue is that the leadership often seems to assume that people ought to be able to work out certain things for themselves, but of course that's not how things often work out in practice: politicians often need quite clear briefs even about what 'ought' to be inherently clear.

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Present constituencies. It's usually then easy enough to make adjustments for boundary changes based on what share of a constituency is in a new one etc.

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Wales could end up being very vicious just because of the number who might be left without chairs.

Though, amusingly, this will be as much of a problem for the Tories now thanks to '19 gains in North Wales and the elimination of the LibDems in Mid Wales...

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He's pretty clearly had a telling off. But, as I've said before, I think the assumption that senior frontbenchers will automatically know the line to take during media appearances because 'surely it's obvious' that we still sometimes see is something that needs to go.

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Sqwawkbox (I know, I know) seem pretty convinced that Starmer has been fined and are predictably getting rather excited about the prospect. We might well know in the coming week, anyway.

There's genuinely no way they could actually know and even were that to happen there's little chance that the replacement would be much to their tastes either...

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If it comes to it - and we don't know if it will - then the mood in the PLP, in the wider Party and, important not to forget, amongst the General Secretaries would be critical. Other than that it would be very angry we can't be entirely sure of much. It is possible (especially if the general view leans heavily towards 'Establishment Conspiracy') that the feeling would be that there should not be a normal contest as it would not be a legitimately caused vacancy and so on. But if that were to happen the anointed replacement would end up being solidly Party Mainstream (whatever their 'formal' factional position: except in situations like the 2016-20 period this matters less than people tend to think anyway) and approved of by both the PLP and the General Secretaries. It's very unlikely that a situation like that would be used to successfully foist a particular candidate on the Party who would have otherwise struggled to win. On the other hand the mood might be similar to 1994. I suspect that if there were to be a contest that anyone - under those circumstances - trying to press factional buttons too hard or to suggest another radical reorientation of the Party would regret it. But in general we don't really know.

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The circumstances of Tarry getting that seat always made it likely though.

Live by the sword and so on. If he does go down I wouldn't be particularly surprised if he re-emerges somewhere else, mind.

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I look forward to care person personally campaigning in North West Durham.

On current polls I wouldn’t bother, he’s toast.

Given his silence on a spate of nasty crime related stories in his constituency over the past year I wonder if he even runs again there: he seems to have little interest in actually representing the place.

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CAA has had a... how shall we say... er... bad reputation amongst other activists against antisemitism for a few years now for various reasons (read: feuds and personal vendettas). They've also not coped very well with mainstream Jewish community organisations and institutions making their peace with Labour since Starmer's election and the publication and implementation of the EHRC report. In this particular instance they've fallen for what appears to be a pretty blatant piece of unpleasant agitprop trolling by a low-ranking journalist with fairly obvious hard-Left politics (and which has otherwise largely been noticed only by the Skwawkbox Tendency) because it fits with what they wish to hear.

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Very invested in Israel/Palestine issues, but not in a righteous or healthy way.

Somewhat amazingly the increasingly... erm... less than hinged... Duffield has been less of an embarrassment than the 2015 candidate would have been had he decided to stand in 2017 and had he been elected. Chris Williamson-tier views...

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Amongst other things there are serious questions as to whether she is now entirely... capable... of doing her job. Which we should note is also a factor in the unpleasant mess (I have no further comments as I don't know the full details and I'm not sure if anyone unable to speak Bengali does) unfolding at Poplar & Limehouse CLP.

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Forde report is finally out today. Not sure there’s anything that’ll shock anyone or change any minds.

Had a read through because I don't have anything better to do. The consistent pattern is: a) inexperienced and unskilled people in key posts resulting in b) gross incompetence and poor behaviour and then b) a complete inability to then deal with serious disciplinary problems. It's pretty clearly that most of the people who worked for either HQ or LOTO 2015-20 should never be hired in any position of significant responsibility. It's consistently dismal all the way through. The stuff on factionalist pathologies is grimly thorough and I would say (from personal experience) accurate. Broadly speaking, the only people remotely 'vindicated' by the report are those who believed the entire apparatus to be a burning landfill site. All other positions are left... to say the least... looking less than credible. The report does say that there have been some improvements since (which is good and not insignificant) but that there's a lot more that needs to be done - its recommendations on that front seem reasonable. And I would suggest that parties other than Labour give them some thought as well. Some of Labour's internal issues are unique, some are certainly not.

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I would add that the report certainly isn't perfect: specifically, there are a couple of points at which a desire to be fair and even-handed leads to outright naivety, but these don't appear to be on critical sections for what the report is ultimately for.

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Besides it’s someone being stupid as FS I believe used Starmer on her leaflets, in a positive way. It just seems like a weird argument from one set of people who miss the forever war- I mean this is the first win the left have had internally in what 6 months?

And explicitly as (my goodness an actual somewhat legitimate contemporary use for the old term!) a 'soft' Left candidate, thus the picture with Starmer and so on. In a strategic sense, that sort of thing is ultimately a win for the right-wing and centre of the Party, much as equivalent movement was back in the 1990s.

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...but are they really trying to say no-one else in the PLP stayed awake for the "E" section of their PPE courses?

Funnily enough it happens that on that course you only follow up with two elements of the three into your Finals: Economics is usually the bit that gets dropped. There's actually a serious lack of knowledge of economics at Westminster in general at the moment, and it's a cross-party issue: the Tories have a lot of MPs with Finance backgrounds, but that's really not the same thing at all.

Over this particular issue there's a tendency towards mild dishonesty in Labour circles all round: it isn't true to say that nationalising a large swathe of utilities and infrastructure was easily affordable two years ago but is not now (even if the situation has deteriorated), but it also isn't true to say that doing that would be easily affordable at all and that it practically pays for itself. It comes down - as is usually the case with the Labour Party - to priorities rather than either possibilities or principles, and it's clear that there's been a shift there.* But I think perhaps it isn't so strange that it's difficult to discuss issues around public ownership in a straightforward manner given the Party's history: altogether too much fraught symbolism for everyone, even if most of it is beyond irrelevant to how things are now.

_{*Which may be related to a trickier fiscal position than a few years ago. Which may be related to the Schools And Hospitals brigade being more influential in the Shadow Cabinet than a year ago. Which may be related to the personal preferences of the two Shadow Chancellors. Though it's likely to be a combination of all, plus a few other factors as well.}

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The frustrating thing is that I feel there isn’t even any appetite in the party to use the tools of the state to tame the privatised industries- the water companies are universally hated for pumping sewage into our rivers and the domestic electricity supplier market has virtually collapsed- I could live with some fudge around the ownership model if say Labour were going to basically call for a stricter price cap on bills- I mean all of the companies who would go bust have already done so!

One plausible scenario for a Starmer government as regards the water companies is an attempt to bring them to heel through regulation followed by a decision to pull a Railtrack > Network Rail out of frustration if things don't improve or don't improve fast enough: particularly if there are serious issues with supply and drought in the more populated parts of the country. One thing worth bearing in mind is that public ownership of water is not a panacea in itself (Scottish Water, which is publicly owned, actually has an even worse record on sewerage release than most of the privately owned firms in England) and more thought as to alternative models of public ownership in the sector to the standard British one would be useful. Energy is an interesting case as while there's a very strong technocratic case for nationalising power generation, the argument (though not non-existent) isn't as strong for the rest of the sector and there is a good political reason to be wary of having the government be seen to have a direct role in setting energy prices, particularly these days. But I think over energy policy governments, no matter their colour, are going to have to be making major decisions on the fly quite a lot in the future, whether they want to or not.

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Bit of a bizarre suicide-by-cop situation, but I wouldn't have indulged him and don't really see the point in doing so.

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The plural of anecdote is not data and I don't have a huge amount of faith in YouGov internals, but... that does track with what I've come across anecdotally. I'd say 'welcome to vibes-based politics', but in reality we've been there a while.

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Wasn't Tarry a councillor there for a time or am I misremembering?

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Even for THIGMOO standards this is hilarious and messy. Worth reading in full!

https://labourlist.org/2022/05/exclusive-labour-on-target-to-lose-dagenham-and-rainham-cruddas-warns/

The fact that it is complete nonsense psephologically (and that he will know that) is the real 'Italian Chef Kisses Fingers' detail. Old school; classic.

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Roy Hattersley has a guardian article attacking Keir over Brexit. It’s not a bad article but has he actually liked any Labour Leader since 1992?

This assumes that he liked Kinnock, which is questionable.