This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It is reasonable to describe it as psephologically illiterate because at the 1959 General Election there were only two candidates in a majority of constituencies. It is, anyway, always dangerous to treat FPTP vote totals as the same as those generated by a PR poll.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I do wonder if the Tories will do this with voters in Richmond, Bath or Esher. Although admittedly Labour need to win at least one of the Blackpool seats if it wants to get north of 250 seats.

Not presently but a few years ago probably very heavily and who knows what the next leader of that party but one or two or whatever will do. Except that, whatever they do, they'll use a lot of focus groups because they love them even more than Labour.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It isn't really news - it was clear that the party's financial position was in fact 'not good' despite periodic claims to the contrary* when layoffs followed the last GE, and to that now must be added its considerable legal costs - so much as an official confirmation.

Anyway the legal position is that an organisation such as the Labour Party cannot enter bankruptcy and can be maintained indefinitely despite whatever debts so long as money comes in, but if it were to fold (and note that it cannot be forced to) then, yes, it would probably be individual NEC members who would have to foot the bill.

_{*Questions very much raised by that, but you'll never find out as there is no way that any faction would wish for outside accountants to go through the books with a fine-tooth comb, no way at all. Probably all that can be done is to carefully note certain names down and to raise severe objections if they're ever appointed or suggested to any position involving money in any situation, Labour Party/TU related or not.}

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I see that someone is... unfamiliar with Mr Beckett.

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I also forget to make a glib point about Liverpool not always being a socialist city- it was iirc ran by the Conservatives at a local level until the 1970s?

Had a Conservative administration continually from the late 19th century until the 1950s when it elected its first Labour majority. The 1970s is significant because that's when the Liberals emerged as major players in local government there, following a great moment of crisis in the history of the city as it lost its economic function and saw the grand vision for its transformation into a city of the future agreed to by both major parties hit the buffers because of the economic disaster. And it's been a cycle of crisis, crisis management and attempted 'rebirth' ever since.

Anyway, I'm not sure if the concept of a socialist city (or town or village) makes any sense at all in th context of 2021. So much of what is read into place by political people of all stripes is delusional projection.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What damages most is the continual repetition of what people suspect is probably true. The classic case for our times being Corbyn: the more extravagant attacks never hit home, the more mundane stuff that was actually true or was partially true or looked as it it could be true (we are not discussing the balance today, thanks!) did the sort of damage that water dripping on limestone does over a long period of time. 

[Filuwaúrdjan]

(we are not discussing the balance today, thanks!)

Oh well.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In other news, R*s*e D*f*i*l* is doing transphobia again

Is there some kind of correlation between TERFery and left/right position, or are those people everywhere?

Essentially none in terms of factional alignment, but there are some patterns:

Positions within the Labour Party on these issues to do not correlate with factional alignment at all: there are people who take quite hardline 'gender critical' positions in the hardest parts of the Labour Left and there are people who are extremely sympathetic towards Trans people in the most right-wing sections of the party. If there's a pattern it is that old line Feminists are the most likely to take 'gender critical' positions, and those people can be found in nearly all of the party's many factions, subfactions and tendencies.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

One talking point on both the right and Corbynite left, btw, is that the Tories have a blitz prepared on his time as DPP (you know, "he let Savile go free" and similar) if they ever felt really under threat by him. Even were such a plan to exist, it would surely be high risk tho.

I'm not familiar with Starmer's record as DPP. Did he (or could he reasonably be framed as having) let Savile go free? I know Savile's behavior was widely known in, and covered up by, the BBC and NHS, but I hadn't heard about figures like Starmer being in a position to know about it.

Not personally- but he was the head when the decision was made. I’m not an expert in these things but it seems to largely be a case of the police not doing as much as they should and then the CPS just rubber stamped this decision. Saville was never arrested let alone charged in 2008

Yes, the CPS can't prosecute if there's no arrest and no charge (the whole point, of course, is to have the decision whether or not to prosecute be entirely separated from that process) and decisions they do make about whether to prosecute or not are actually highly technical: there are a series of 'tests' that have to be met. The post of DPP is really nothing like an American-style public prosecutor, it's really more of a civil service job.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It doesn't, but it puts a hard limit on the sort of people who see it and on the ability of political actors to try to play that card themselves. Well unless very stupid, I suppose. We can never entirely rule that out.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This was always inevitable

The 2015-20 period (particularly the last half) will be a nasty lightening rod as far as Labour Party discussions go for quite a while, yes.

But my point was about the perception of plausibility. Attacks that work best are the ones that people think sound as if they must be true, that chime with existing preconceptions, biases and prejudices. Attempts to claim or imply links to the KGB or other Warsaw Pact agencies never flew and were never going to, but 'he supported the IRA!'... ah.

Though the latter reminds us of a further caveat: a poorly chosen tone can wreck (temporarily) an attack that, in theory, should be effective. Attempts by the Conservatives to bring up Corbyn's Northern Irish baggage in 2017 failed as they made the completely insane decision to argue them from a Unionist perspective, a huge mistake given the unpopularity of Irish Unionism in Great Britain.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There has never been a significant 'purge' of the Left (however defined) in the entire history of the Labour Party, which has always made the persecution complex of the post-1970 Left deeply perplexing.* What has just happened is that a number of tiny and very unpleasant organisations have been placed on the proscribed list. Two of these are entirely comprised of geriatric racists who seem to define 'socialism' as 'ranting incoherently about the Rothschilds', and the other is a deeply nasty organisation that churns out extreme pro-Assad propaganda, amongst other things. This is genuinely not a hill worth dying on.

_{*In fact the only significant purge in Labour's history was of MacDonald and his supporters during the 1931 crisis. And while most of them (MacDonald included) had been on the left-wing of the party only a few years earlier, they were clearly not by then.}

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Which committee even is the CPC again?

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Is Ken Loach being kicked out a big deal? Is he still relevant?

No: he's a member of at least one of the organisations put on the proscribed list the other week, so this is an automatic procedure and that he would be one of the members removed by it was widely noted at the time. I presume that he's just had formal confirmation and wants attention. He was, of course, a member and generous supporter of various small parties extremely hostile to Labour for two decades, which does make the 'good comrade' line that always gets trotted out a little... difficult.

Relevance is an interesting question. He has not been politically relevant since the 1970s. Cultural relevance is a more complicated matter: he once had a great deal but it has fallen over time, as fashions have changed (while capital 'R' Realism remains strong in British film and television, his particularly grim and uncompromising strand is associated with decades past, not the present) and as his political follies and various controversies have become harder to ignore. His early work is still widely remembered,* and occasionally he'll turn out something that the BFI/Guardian nexus pushes heavily, but he has become a marginal figure as an active artist. Certain highly ironic (for more reasons than one) parallels with Woody Allen could be drawn, perhaps.

_{*It probably helps that most people aren't aware of some of the methods he used with child actors on e.g. Kes, stuff that would get him (rightly) in a lot of trouble now.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's now being heavily rumoured that Graham probably has it. Who would have thought that 'vote for me because I don't care about Labour Party drama' would have widespread appeal? There's a lengthy interview with her here which makes her general perspective and platform pretty clear.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Old fashioned observers of British TU politics have always tended to see internal elections as more about 'Establishment' vs. 'Reform' tendencies and campaigns* than about Left and Right, and it looks like we're seeing a particularly striking vindication of that view here.

_{*And, of course, yesterday's 'Reform' tendency often becomes tomorrow's Establishment etc.}

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The important thing to remember is that nearly everyone who joins a union does so because it is in their self-interest as a worker to do so and because that union is the union recognised at their workplace.

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There's something vaguely sweet about the continued obsession all round with DESELECTIONS given how few MPs Labour even has now.

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Just abolish it.

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The only things I liked about the article were its analysis of 2001 (which we don't hear enough about)

Unfortunately it's an analysis that relies heavily on teleological fallacies and which can be debunked within seconds. Falls in turnout between the 1997 and 2001 elections were pretty much uniform across the country, which was also the case for the similar, large, fall in turnout between the 1992 and 1997 elections. We have a habit of forgetting this, but at the time turnout in 1997 was regarded as remarkably low, and it was the lowest for a very long time. It has, noticeably, not been reached at any General Election since. It is reasonably clear that most of the people who voted in 1997 and not in 2001 (and also most of the people who voted in 1992 but not in 1997) had died in the meantime. Now, the average age of death in the 1990s was in the middle 70s. Most of the people dying at the time, then, were members of the Wartime Generation, who, and isn't this a funny coincidence, happened to be the single most politicised cohort in our democratic history. The tendency of British political scientists and electoral observers to assume immortality on the part of the electorate is most perplexing.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I mean is this actually true? Its "only" 20-25 years we are talking about - its not *quite* the same as asking "where has the old Labour vote in rural Norfolk gone?" (six feet under, that is indeed where)

It's the sort of thing that can never be known absolutely, but there is no other explanation that fits the facts and makes any logical sense. Most, of course, does not mean all: there were definitely people who voted in 1997 and were alive in 2001 and did not vote and have voted in some (but we can be fairly sure not all) subsequent elections. But the vital statistics for that decade are what they are, and the same is true of the structural, permanent element to the fall in turnout.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why do you think most of the change in turnout came from people dying? Is there something in the data which suggests this, or is just a hypothesis based on the fact that the sorts of people dying were particularly politically aware? What about the steady rise in turnout from 2001 to 2017?

The hypothesis fits the information that we have and nothing else does. Turnout rises and falls depending on circumstance (and, especially, on whether people think an election is competitive: people are more likely to vote if they think their vote matters), but during the 1990s there was a structural decline in turnout. The General Election of 1997 saw the lowest turnout since 1935, a fact that was much remarked on at the time. Every single subsequent General Election has had a significantly lower turnout. Just as tellingly, turnout at the 2016 Referendum (often talked about as if it had an extraordinarily high turnout) was only about 1pt higher. So, something significant must have changed during the 1990s, something below the froth of everyday political shifts. The inevitable conclusion must be that the replacement of a cohort of voters who were, due to extreme and unrepeatable circumstances when they were young, unusually politicised* with new voters who came of age in a very different world caused a structural (and permanent) decline in turnout. Are there even any genuinely plausible alternative explanations? Arguments about 'political disillusionment' wont wash: if that were true then turnout would have crashed through the floor in the 1970s and that was very much not the case.

_{*And, we should not forget either, unusually committed to both basic liberal democratic norms and to the two 'big parties'. And unusually hostile to perceived political extremism and even towards 'populist' electoral tactics.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

To the extent it should be taken seriously, the article betrayed the perennial flaw of just not wanting to look seriously at Corbyn or the movement/politics he inspired.

I'm going to maybe surprise you a little by agreeing with that, at least up to a point. That point being his election as leader: afterwards it was a case of throwing things at walls to see if anything stuck as people screamed at each other in the background and haggled over posts (so much the same as every other Labour leadership since the Financial Crisis struck).¹ But that it happened must tell us something, even if the moment is gone and the edifice collapsed under its own weight. I go back to what I thought at the time, which was that it was the wrong answer to the right question. Much as Modernist technocracy was clearly dead as a means through which to pursue socialist politics by the 1970s and 80s, so has the use of a tidy surplus produced by the financial sector to pursue socialist goals through market mechanisms been since 2008. And there's little doubt that substantial harm has been done to the core of our polity - and also to wider society - by Osborne's 'austerity'... and this changes what can and can't be done politically.² And that there needs to be some way of exploiting the pretty widespread dislike of the practical consequences.

<sub>1. Though there is certainly a case, as for every other Labour leadership in the period in question, to look at what did stick and what definitely didn't.
2. Amongst other things local government can no longer be used (as it always was by Labour in opposition) as a redoubt and a testing ground as local government in the traditional sense effectively no longer exists.</sub>

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Labour in opposition (all leaderships since 2010 have been prone to this) has a bad habit of assuming that it needs to come up with detailed alternatives whenever it opposes something that the government does. Of course the media's weird habit of acting as if Labour is in power or has any influence over policy contributes. It's all very silly.

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Kinnock wasn't (and isn't!) on the right-wing of the Labour Party.* But pseudo-history is more powerful than actual history for most people too deep inside THIGMOO to get out now. Though we should also be careful about briefings of this sort as most of the people relaying them are proven bad faith actors.

_{*His son is, but so what? So are Tony Benn's children and grandchildren.}