2020 Labour Leadership Election

[DL]

Seems to be that RBL is not fairing too well among 'moderate' second preferences. For example:

Islington North: RBL got 125 votes to 80 for KS, who pips her to the post by 138 votes to 135.

City of Durham, my constituency, RBL got 37 votes to 23 for LN, who wins 52 to 41.

Should point out that in Durham most speakers supported RBL and RB, for deputy, but a silent more moderate majority prevailed

Who gets to vote in these CLP contests? Is it any Labour Party member residing in that seat? If so these seem like very low numbers of votes for a party that supposedly has half a million members

[EastAnglianLefty]

Anybody who has been a member for at least 6 months and is willing to turn up to a 3 hour meeting.

[Blair]

https://twitter.com/CLPNominations/status/1226139468073185280

[Blair]

I forgot to post my extended ramblings about my own CLP nomination; for context we nominated Jeremy both in 2015 & 2016- and are a largish london CLP in a safe labour seat. We went for Keir this time by 100-60 (with RLB in second)

Even balance of speakers between Keir & RLB; interestingly all the Keir speakers spoke about his background as a campaigner/legal activist with talk about winning/appearing credible.

A few of the cranks speaking for Long-Bailey were lately talking about the 2016 coup & Peter Mandelson. The rest were long monologues about climate change; as always in politics the danger is you talk about what you think is important not your audience (see Labour Leadership election 2015)

The Climate argument is much weaker imo than I think her supporters think it is- most Labour members don't know what the Green New Deal is, all four leadership candidates support it & I'm not actually sure Labour members value climate change as an issue. Everyday I buy more and more into the theory that actively following & obsessing over US politics does you no favours in UK Politics (whether it was New Labour's obsession with Clinton, Miliband bring Axelrod in or Labour thinking 'Bernie has community organisers we need them too' without actually noticing they were for an internal election)

Funnily enough one person made a very good speech for RLB which was actually the best pitch for her; about her background, her work on the frontbench, the courage in standing & appearing on the media for Labour.

And a handful of Nandy speakers; most of whom were from the Corbynsceptic right of our CLP; from the results I think we had 35 of the Nandy votes go to Keir- only one went to RLB.

I went in expecting a tight but close win for Keir but felt much happier afterwards... now onto the deputy race...

[Blair]

The Deputy Nominations was much like the real race; Angela won by 80-60 over Rosena Allin-Khan.

Only about 6 people could be bothered after the hour long leadership one before hand; of course no-one really understood what the deputy does (because it no longer even has the job of waiting for the leader to collapse as that power was usurped during Tom Watson's days) and most people didn't care.

Three speakers for Burgon; often citing him not signing the Board of Deputy Pledges & being a strong socialist voice, one for Ian Murray and everyone else stood up and said 'well I don't actually know who I want but I think Angela, Dawn and Rosena are good'

Funnily enough only one person spoke fully in favour of Angela but much like her campaign she din't need to say anything and she won anyway.

[CumbrianLefty]

Funnily enough one person made a very good speech for RLB which was actually the best pitch for her; about her background, her work on the frontbench, the courage in standing & appearing on the media for Labour.

And that's the thing - the RLB campaign is not making the most of her genuine plus points.

Instead, most of her stans on social media seem more interested in trying to scare people witless with the "horrors" that would supposedly follow a Starmer win. We actually had "vote Starmer, get Iowa" from a prominent Corbynite on Twitter a few days ago

[DaWN]

And that's the thing - the RLB campaign is not making the most of her genuine plus points.

Presumably because they can't be observed with the naked eye

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There are certain parallels to the Owen Smith campaign actually: this sense of a candidate almost being frogmarched by actors more powerful than themselves into running the sort of campaign and being the sort of candidate that they clearly would not 'naturally' be, and consequentially often coming across as slightly out of tune, for want of a better way of putting it.

[Lord Halifax]

How serious are the allegations about the Starmer campaign stealing data from Labour? Is there any chance he might withdraw if they're true?

[Antonio the Sixth]

We actually had "vote Starmer, get Iowa" from a prominent Corbynite on Twitter a few days ago

Of course. It's obvious that Starmer has a secret plan to scrap the CLP selection process and replace it with a byzantine system involving 3 tiers of election and complex mathematical calculations to apportion artificial weights across precincts, and to administer it he'll ask a company owned by a former Blair staffer to develop an app that will immediately crash, and make sure not to have enough phone lines to answer people when that happens. All the signs point in that direction.

[brucejoel99]

How serious are the allegations about the Starmer campaign stealing data from Labour? Is there any chance he might withdraw if they're true?

No way the frontrunner is forced to withdraw; it'd destroy the party & the left with it. Frankly, it's just a fairly baseless rumor & I'll believe it when I see it. And even if his campaign did something wrong (which, again, I don't think it did at this point), I'd need to see absolute evidence that the direction came from Starmer himself to feel it was appropriate to call for his withdrawal from the contest.

[afleitch]

https://twitter.com/MattSingh_/status/1227006789973151745

[brucejoel99]

https://twitter.com/MattSingh_/status/1227006789973151745

The membership will come around to the public's point of view eventually; they don't have a choice. It's just frustrating that it takes them so long to do so.

[DaWN]

Reading that report has left me even more convinced than ever that RLB remains inevitable

[CumbrianLefty]

Focus groups are easily manipulated trash, and Ashcroft is a dubious grifter.

(Singh is also a complete charlatan)

Actually, lots of Labour people (including on the party's left) are well aware of why the election was  lost so badly, but the "solution" always implied by stuff like that - 1) abandon everything that the left has ever believed in 2)?? ?? 3)PROFIT!!!!! - should not be taken seriously by any good faith person.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/MattSingh_/status/1227022190614323201

This is quite literally an autopsy report, so ignoring it is ones own personal risk...

[CumbrianLefty]

https://twitter.com/MattSingh_/status/1227006789973151745

The membership will come around to the public's point of view eventually; they don't have a choice. It's just frustrating that it takes them so long to do so.

You say that as if "the public" has a singular and unchanging view of things that is never affected by actual events. Is it really just last summer that the Tories came 5th with 9% in a national election (even if it was, as some of us said at the time, one of the most meaningless ever held) and then hit an all time low of 17% in the polls?

Labour needs to respond to why it lost, the trick is understanding what amongst those factors will still be relevant to a 2024 GE and what will turn out to be transient fluff. Self-interested grifters like Ashcroft, Singh and Mattinson will be no help in that, indeed rather a hindrance.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If you are a good observer of people and don't let your own wishes, biases or fears get in the way, then you can learn an astonishing amount from just talking to people. Focus groups are an attempt to artificially replicate this sort of thing in a secure and controlled environment. In practice, of course, such replication is not very easy at the best of times, and manipulation of the findings is easy and quite possibly routine. You will often notice that the vocabulary and phrasing that comes out in focus group reports does not match well the way that ordinary people often talk. That doesn't make them automatically worthless (because see the first sentence), but it does mean that caution is required, followed by more caution and then a little extra caution on the side.

[brucejoel99]

Focus groups are easily manipulated trash, and Ashcroft is a dubious grifter.

(Singh is also a complete charlatan)

Actually, lots of Labour people (including on the party's left) are well aware of why the election was  lost so badly, but the "solution" always implied by stuff like that - 1) abandon everything that the left has ever believed in 2)?? ?? 3)PROFIT!!!!! - should not be taken seriously by any good faith person.

As anybody in marketing or user testing would tell you, that's utter bollocks.

This kind of attitude is exactly why the party is in the mess that it is. The world is moving on & politics is changing, changing differently to how a chunk of Labour want it to &, instead of reacting to it in a positive and constructive way, you're burying your heads into the sand & throwing tantrums.

There's no appetite for the politics that you've been pushing for. The polls showed it, the general election showed it, & now this report has shown it again. Time to accept that & engage in constructive decisions about how to correct the wrongs of the past few years rather than calling people who disagree with you "easily manipulated trash."

https://twitter.com/MattSingh_/status/1227006789973151745

The membership will come around to the public's point of view eventually; they don't have a choice. It's just frustrating that it takes them so long to do so.

You say that as if "the public" has a singular and unchanging view of things that is never affected by actual events. Is it really just last summer that the Tories came 5th with 9% in a national election (even if it was, as some of us said at the time, one of the most meaningless ever held) and then hit an all time low of 17% in the polls?

Labour needs to respond to why it lost, the trick is understanding what amongst those factors will still be relevant to a 2024 GE and what will turn out to be transient fluff. Self-interested grifters like Ashcroft, Singh and Mattinson will be no help in that, indeed rather a hindrance.

It's not wrong to point out that Blair is still the most popular leader of the Labour Party in modern times. Yes, a return to 3rd-way Blairism would be a mistake given how far the Overton window has shifted, but there's a lot that Labour can learn from his message management. Case in point, Corbyn refused to talk to the press at all because they're pro-Tory, & then people wonder why the Labour voters who get all of their news from the press defect to the Tories: because nobody is giving them an alternative narrative!

So how can you disregard so much qualitative data just because of your bias against the runner thereof? As is made evident, focus groups present an opportunity to voice opinion in a way which other methods simply don't. As Realpolitik makes clear, the lesson is that focus groups aren't worthless, so long as you use caution, caution, caution.

[CumbrianLefty]

How is the bloke in your avatar doing at the moment, pal?

Oh and just one thing, I said that focus groups themselves were "easily manipulated trash" - not voters. Did you know that according to reliable accounts, it was a focus group after the 2015 GE that fatefully persuaded Harman that abstaining on the welfare cuts vote would be a good idea?? If that doesn't warn people away from them, nothing will.

[brucejoel99]

How is the bloke in your avatar doing at the moment, pal?

Oh and just one thing, I said that focus groups themselves were "easily manipulated trash" - not voters. Did you know that according to reliable accounts, it was a focus group after the 2015 GE that fatefully persuaded Harman that abstaining on the welfare cuts vote would be a good idea?? If that doesn't warn people away from them, nothing will.

Yeah, because voting against the welfare cuts certainly helped Prime Minister Corbyn end up where he is today.. oh wait? :/

Oh and just one thing, focus groups (again, as anybody in marketing or user testing would tell you) are literally a representative group of individuals who exhibit the same characteristics as most of the population (in this case, a political focus group being representative of the voting population). Did you know that according to reliable accounts, it was Ashcroft's focus group after the 2005 GE that fatefully persuaded Cameron to rebrand the Tories with an increasingly socially liberal position that enabled him to take the Tories back into Downing Street?? If that doesn't show people that they have (at the very least, some) value, nothing will.

P.S. who I support when it comes to the American Presidency is wholly irrelevant with regards to an abstract discussion of the British Labour Party. Nice crack at a cheap shot, though!

[CumbrianLefty]

And the meta-point is without that focus group convincing Harman*, Corbyn might never have happened.

(*though as I have said previously, there were also certain other motivations)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A classic case of not realising who the relevant audience was at that moment as much as anything else. Though she presumably would not have been thrown so much by polling data as a focus group report: in a Labour Party context they are, of course, very much associated with the late Philip Gould and the mystique surrounding him and his work. Which would have a certain special pull to a 'mainstream' Labour figure of Harman's generation.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1227300116937216000

Clown show.

[Cassius]

How is the bloke in your avatar doing at the moment, pal?

Oh and just one thing, I said that focus groups themselves were "easily manipulated trash" - not voters. Did you know that according to reliable accounts, it was a focus group after the 2015 GE that fatefully persuaded Harman that abstaining on the welfare cuts vote would be a good idea?? If that doesn't warn people away from them, nothing will.

Yeah, because voting against the welfare cuts certainly helped Prime Minister Corbyn end up where he is today.. oh wait? :/

Oh and just one thing, focus groups (again, as anybody in marketing or user testing would tell you) are literally a representative group of individuals who exhibit the same characteristics as most of the population (in this case, a political focus group being representative of the voting population). Did you know that according to reliable accounts, it was Ashcroft's focus group after the 2005 GE that fatefully persuaded Cameron to rebrand the Tories with an increasingly socially liberal position that enabled him to take the Tories back into Downing Street?? If that doesn't show people that they have (at the very least, some) value, nothing will.

P.S. who I support when it comes to the American Presidency is wholly irrelevant with regards to an abstract discussion of the British Labour Party. Nice crack at a cheap shot, though!

Cameron’s ‘socially liberal’ position didn’t help the Tories take back Downing Street; they didn’t get a majority in 2010 and made, at best, a modest advance in the popular vote that translated into seats due to the decline of the Labour vote. The original Cameron pitch of ‘compassionate conservatism’ (ie wishy washy bullsh**t) was basically junked in 2008, as the Tories did a tactical 180 towards promoting ‘austerity’ and the Black Legend of Labour profligacy (not entirely false but in the context of the debts run up specifically during the financial crisis, a myth). This probably didn’t do a great deal for them in 2010 either, but they certainly didn’t run on the hug-a-hoodie, hug-a-huskie PR sh**t that characterized his first couple of years as leader. The Tories did get a majority in 2015, that much is true, but the campaign they ran in 2015 hinged around bashing Ed Miliband as a Marxist weirdo in the pocket of Nicola Sturgeon whose election would instantaneously cause the collapse of the British economy... and little else. Not particularly socially liberal.