This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Also Starmer hardly ever brings up his upbringing (rather obviously because his father was basically Felix from Our Friends in the North and...) and frankly needs to make much more of it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I would assume that in general the issue is that the party's disciplinary procedures are (as we all know!) completely broken and that the small number of people who work on these cases are not able to cope particularly well with the volume of complaints. Strange errors, misidentifications and so on have been periodically complained about by people on the wrong end of such letters for as long as I can remember.* It's a little stranger when relatively high profile people are affected as well, though in Osborne's case I wonder (this is idle speculation and is probably entirely incorrect) whether it might be a case of someone in her CLP (a notorious nest of vipers that she was o/c foisted on... and where the previous two MPs had both departed under pretty nasty clouds...) making some lurid complaints, an investigation being launched (perhaps incorrectly: as in the wrong button being hit?) and it then emerging that continuing would not be a very good idea.

But, basically, the new disciplinary system needs to be up and running as soon as possible, ideally before.

_{*Of course some people also insist that this has happened to them, when, actually, no, there is no error...}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Or Bridget Phillipson in the House this week. We've reached the point, I would argue, where 'bread and butter concerns' over benefits are about the skimpy and ineffectual nature of the system post the IDS deforms, not about (say) benefit fraud. Welfare is historically a strong issue for the Labour Party: the weakness of both the Miliband and Corbyn leaderships on the issue should not be allowed to obscure that.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Who says that mine is a charitable view? Nothing remotely charitable about it. But we know that things like this have been happening (or claimed to have) for decades, despite* the constant very high turnover of staff in HQ (which, ftr, is underfunded and understaffed even at the best of times, and these are not those), and we know that basic inability to deal with volume is a problem from a recent detailed report that touched on the administrative shortcomings of the organisation.

_{*Or in part because?}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Owen Jones did recently quote a Labour MP "close to Starmer" who said some in the party apparatus were set on a mass, and permanent, expulsion of the entire left from the party.

Jones is presently tying himself up in knots trying to argue that it is right and proper to place certain antisemitic organisations on the proscribed list but an outrage to automatically expel Ken Loach due to his role in one of those organisations that he says he supports the proscription of, so, hmm.

Of course it wouldn't surprise me if some people on the Right of the party do have fantasies about expelling the entire Left (up to an including Ed Miliband probably), but it would be no different to the existence of some people on the Left on the party who had fantasies about driving out everyone they considered to be on the 'Right' (i.e. everyone in the usual party mainstream) during the 2015-20 period. The fact is that there has never been a mass expulsion of the Left in the Labour Party's history, and actually orchestrating one would be extremely difficult even if there was the political will for it (and there certainly is not). A spate of strangely worded and/or mistaken investigations rowed back on immediately is potentially evidence of a lot of things, but not of a looming purge.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

https://twitter.com/siennamarla/status/1439973605518057473

The details noted above are:

'He said the issuing of a Notice of Investigation (NOI) to the Chair of Young Labour had been due to an error, and a full review had revealed it was because of processes not being followed properly. There was a backlog of 5,200 outstanding complaints being worked through. The Executive Director of Legal Affairs, Alex Barros-Curtis, said that the process of going through the backlog would take 6 months and was in its 7th week. External additional staff had been trained in Labour’s rules and processes to do this. 3,000 cases had been assessed so far, of which 30% had been closed at assessment stage as they did not merit investigation. The NOI to Jess Barnard had not been signed off properly but it was an innocent mistake by the person concerned. The tone of letters had been amended and staff reminded never to send them outside office hours.'

LMAO THIGMOO

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The general emphasis of most of the rules changes that have already happened or which are mooted and/or rumoured to be under consideration is, yes, very much in the direction of making pretty sure that the Party Mainstream cannot lose control to groups on either outer flank of the party. STV for the CLP section of NEC elections remains one of the more cunning tricks seen so far.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Don’t the union GS’s have more power in the current system? Old system gives powers to these TU members who choose to vote and pay the political levy- these voters broadly aren’t that different to Labour members!

Depends on what sort of influence you want. The present set-up gives them a blocking influence: without TU endorsements candidates have to go round the country securing CLP endorsements and that's a lot of work. The old system gave them a more active influence. If the idea is to keep to the one vote per member rule then they would have more influence over an Affiliates Section in an EC than before as back then you had as many votes as affiliated orgs you were a member of (plus Party Membership if you had that).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I’d be surprised if it passed but the reaction suggests they might have the votes. Although the tested method will be the TU to either fudge or kick it down the road.

It depends on whose idea it is and where the energy for it is coming from. If the answer is 'a number of General Secretaries', then it will presumably pass. If it's other people trying their luck, well, hmm. But we shall see.

Am I being dense in thinking that as both a Labour member and say affiliate member (as I am) you’d get to either pick which one you use (one would be worth more) or even vote twice?

If they kept the rule in place about only having one vote, you would get a choice whether to vote as a Party Member or as an Affiliate Member, I think. But just the one vote.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The takes on these proposed changes are genuinely hilarious given who supported - and opposed - the current way of doing things back in 2013.

Classic THIGMOO really: eventually every single potential position on any internal matter ends up being occupied for a time by every single faction and sub-faction. All of whom, at the time, insist that their stance is a matter of Deepest Principle.

My own view is (perhaps predictably) that the present system - which is essentially a very odd and convoluted three-round affair - is a bit of a camel and can't be defended on its own terms, but that neither version of the EC worked well in practice.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes the present rule is that you have to sign up specifically as an 'Affiliate Member' at the launch of the contest. This applies to the Socialist Societies as well as the affiliated TUs.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Just for fun and maybe to make a point, but there have been four significant changes to the system used to elect the leader of the Labour Party. The first was the switch from the PLP ballot to an Electoral College with a 40/20/20 split between the Affiliates, the CLPs and the PLP. OMOV only existed for the PLP section: both Affiliate and CLP sections used block votes. The intention of the system was that it would lead to the election of a candidate from the Bennite Left: the actual result was Neil Kinnock. The second was the reform of the EC to equalise the EC to 33.3/33.3/33.3 and to introduce OMOV for the Affiliates and CLPs. The intention here was to reduce the influence of the General Secretaries and of CLP Execs in favour of ordinary TU/party members, and also to make it very difficult for the Affiliate section to swing things on its own. In this case the new system did not backfire initially (Tony Blair, of course, was the first leader elected through it), but the assumption that the Affiliate section would not be able to tip the balance proved unfounded (2010). The third was the replacement of the EC with an OMOV ballot of party members, Affiliate members who had specifically registered for any given election and 'Registered Supporters'. The intention in this case was to make it easier for candidates without much support from TU bureaucracies (such as David Miliband) to win anyway. The actual result was Jeremy Corbyn. The most recent change was the introduction of a second stage of the nominations process requiring candidates to win the support of either three Affiliates (two of which must be TUs, the total membership of which must be at least 5% of Affiliated membership) or 5% of CLPs. The intention was to make it very difficult for candidates without significant institutional support outside the PLP to make the ballot. This is what did indeed happen in 2020, except that it backfired as not having that sort of other candidate to kick around influenced the tone of debate in a way that was not helpful for the candidate of the official Left.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Grifter's gotta grift.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

https://twitter.com/MarkSeddon1962/status/1440690333323436034

Knock off the glue Mark, solvent abuse is very dangerous.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why can't the labour party just be a normal party ? why does it insisit on shoving all it's dirty laundry in public ?

All three main political parties have quirks that mean that dirty laundry gets aired. We had the hilarious situation in the past where those opposing Theresa May couldn’t count to 48 and launched a leadership bid for a race that hadn’t been triggered.

It's worth noting that more than half the time no one not 'in politics' even notices. In this case, for instance, although every detail has been feverishly reported on the twitter accounts of those journalists who do a lot of THIGMOO gossip and drama, it's been barely covered elsewhere: minor items on television and online news services, not many column inches in the papers.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I've read the Starmer pamphlet (for reasons some of you are aware of, I have a lot of free time on my hands right now). It's pretty standard Labour Party stuff almost to the point of cliché, with a very big emphasis on social solidarity which is probably the most 'Labour Party' idea of all, at least historically. The prose is reminiscent (I suspect not entirely accidentally) of Harold Wilson's, which is to say that reading it does carry a mild risk of lead poisoning - however it does mean significantly less jargon than has been normal for things written by Labour politicians in recent decades.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's pretty clear that the basic problem here is suddenly springing the idea on everyone out of nowhere, which is generally a terrible idea as everyone high up in THIGMOO has a massive ego and like the sense that they're being respected. It's all starting to seem very like the attempt to abolish the Deputy post back in 2019.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The whole affair has turned out to be absolutely classic THIGMOO. Vintage stuff. The trouble is that it's really a much less viable way of going about things these days than it was in the 1970s or even the 1990s.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It was a coinage of this country's greatest political journalist, the late Alan Watkins, who had a close but ambiguous relationship with the Labour Party and wider Labour Movement. He was responsible for some other frequently used expressions as well, including The Men In Grey Suits. It is sometimes incorrectly rendered as TIGMOO, which makes no sense and also just doesn't sound as funny as THIGMOO.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Is the UK in the middle of a massive energy and supply crisis? from the goings of the Labour conference it doesn't seem so

Conference hasn't really changed from how it functioned in the 1970s. The bulk of the agenda is set well in advance and usually reflects the long-term obsessions of particular TU General Secretaries and groups of CLPs. Wrangling over rules changes and policy positions remains essentially public and is conditional on a process of negotiation and brokerage that is rarely subtle and often involves performative skullduggery and surely unnecessary chest-beating, and the less said about how things unfold on the floor the better. It's also always ten times more fraught when Labour is in opposition than when it is in government.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That's what he says. Specifically he claims one to £15 an hour, which is not a serious proposition. Much like the 1970s-style absurdities over the rules changes, I'm not sure exactly who this risible staged resignation is supposed to impress.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Tbf this very much fits into Labour history.

Conferences going back decades has been like this- we once had Cherie Blair call Gordon Brown a liar on camera the year before he succeeded Tony. At least we haven’t had MPs and activists screaming at each other on stage yet.

Yeah, by historical standards this is pretty mild. And a Conference where the Leadership is strong enough to push for rules changes* but does not have a locked-in supermajority will always be extremely messy, unless and until the way things work at Conference alters significantly. Which it should because it isn't particularly tenable in an age where every journalist has their twitter feed open on their smartphone.

_{*I.e. that it actually wants.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This may be a dumb question, but have policemen in the UK outside of NI been *always* a very Tory demographic? I would assume so but was curious if there's been historic movement to or from that "equilibrium" of right-wing sentiment.

I know in NI the RUC were pretty much exclusive Protestant and very unionist/right wing. so I'm asking for the mainland ones.

Yep. And the politics of policing and the police have tended to differ in different parts of the country as well. Provincial police forces have always tended to reflect the areas they serve, which are also the areas they recruit from. Senior officers were (are) mostly Conservatives, but that was (is) the norm for higher management posts in general. But the Met was, and to an extent still is, very different: it has always recruited from across the whole country rather than just London, has always attracted more ex-army types than normal, and developed a fierce hard-right political culture that became increasingly toxic and dangerous as time moved on: efforts to reform it since the Macpherson Report have largely involved trying to battle against this and the consequences of it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This from Ipsos-MORI is useful for showing both the successes and limitations of Starmer's leadership in terms of Labour's image:



Essentially there's solid progress on problems that emerged under Corbyn (which is good), but basically none on the long-term issues, which rather suggests that a pivot from 'look we're normal again' to something else is required sooner rather than later. Starmer's Conference speech would potentially be an example of a shift in that direction, but this has to be maintained. It is very bad if half the population think you're lunatics but this not being the case is not a reason to vote for you, it's just a precondition.*

_{*Though the way FPTP works it's more like: while this may be a reason to cease to actively vote against you, this is not a reason to vote for you.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Using red cards at a *Labour* conference was very liable to be misinterpreted, too. The sort of thing that seems clever until you actually try to carry it out.....

Ultimate Meme Party tbh.