This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Geoffrey Howe]

Any news around Ian Austin?

[Geoffrey Howe]

Any news around Ian Austin?

Has he formally joined the Tories yet?

He positions himself as a Blairite, and Mr Johnson - except to a degree perhaps on public spending - is definitely not a Blairite.

What do you dislike about him?

[Geoffrey Howe]

Any news around Ian Austin?

Has he formally joined the Tories yet?

He positions himself as a Blairite, and Mr Johnson - except to a degree perhaps on public spending - is definitely not a Blairite.

What do you dislike about him?

These things matter to about 5 people within Labour but he's a brownite- he use to work for Gordon Brown & was then his PPS- and backed Ed Balls (a sign of being an ultra brownite fwiw)

I'm not sure if I did a post about it a while back but the men (yes it's all men) who worked for Gordon Brown have gone on to have rather combative careers in Westminster, most of which have ended up in failure.

Ed Balls lost his seat, Watson lost his peerage, Michael Dugher works for British Gambling & Chris Leslie for the debt collection industry group. They very much typified the worse elements of Westminster politics, while insisting that they were miles better than it. These were people who spent the last two years of Blairs government basically saying how awfully ran it was (they had a point!) and then proceeded to get in the car and avoid the ditch offered by Blair, only to end up in lake!  

I remember him calling himself a Blairite, which is a brave thing to do in the modern Labour Party.

[Geoffrey Howe]

The Manchester Guardian has some background on the Rayner sacking:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/09/how-labour-fault-lines-led-to-a-seismic-event-with-angela-rayners-sacking

[Geoffrey Howe]

Just been flicking through Denis Healey's autobiography and, related to this, he pins the beginning of Labour's demise in the second Wilson term (1966-70). And of course during this came the Rivers of Blood speech.

One could argue that Labour's demise began in 1951...

[Geoffrey Howe]

Almost everything??

These things matter to about 5 people within Labour but he's a brownite- he use to work for Gordon Brown & was then his PPS- and backed Ed Balls (a sign of being an ultra brownite fwiw)

I'm not sure if I did a post about it a while back but the men (yes it's all men) who worked for Gordon Brown have gone on to have rather combative careers in Westminster, most of which have ended up in failure.

Ed Balls lost his seat, Watson lost his peerage, Michael Dugher works for British Gambling & Chris Leslie for the debt collection industry group. They very much typified the worse elements of Westminster politics, while insisting that they were miles better than it. These were people who spent the last two years of Blairs government basically saying how awfully ran it was (they had a point!) and then proceeded to get in the car and avoid the ditch offered by Blair, only to end up in lake!  

Apologies - I was thinking of Ian Murray.

[Geoffrey Howe]

Interesting article in The Times today. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/3a306d92-b336-11eb-9055-64edaa2be8dd?shareToken=a30aad6535e326bcac7f62da23aa0052

Mr Matthewson describes canvassing in the election with one of these Militant types who joined to support Corbyn. The fellow went round knocking on doors saying Labour would abolish the monarchy (vote winner!). This was not in the manifesto, so Mr Matthewson asked him where he had gleaned this: ‘me and Jeremy agree on everything so I know how he feels about this so it’s fine to say.’

[Geoffrey Howe]

[Geoffrey Howe]

I don’t know whether he’ll read it here (no problem if he does), but CraneHusband has just been accusing AI of propagating right wing conspiracy theories. Amusingly, this was in a thread where he told someone else not to lecture him about his own country.

[Geoffrey Howe]

A question: has the Labour Party, in any of its promotional material, referred to the Tories as the Conservatives? I don't think I've ever seen it.

[Geoffrey Howe]

My parents were once great fans of hers, but it’s at least two years since they moved on.

[Geoffrey Howe]

Meh, I think it's out of frustration with Corbynites acting as if they won the election in a landslide, when in fact you were over 50 seats off the Tories despite May's awful campaign.

[Geoffrey Howe]

Meh, I think it's out of frustration with Corbynites acting as if they won the election in a landslide, when in fact you were over 50 seats off the Tories despite May's awful campaign.

The 2015 baseline made getting up to 280 in seat numbers quite hard... I’m hardly a devout corbynite but 2017 saw results in traditional English marginals that I don’t think Labour will see even on a good night in 2023.

Fine, but that's not particularly useful if you can't get into government.

[Geoffrey Howe]

I think that people in the Labour Party vastly overestimate how popular Angela Rayner is.
Even The Guardian has started to raise its objections to her.

[Geoffrey Howe]

Oh the travails of being a socialist...

[Geoffrey Howe]

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.

Of course, Gaitskell got 47% of the two-party vote; while Blair got 58% in 1997.

[Geoffrey Howe]

People have been doing the same ad nauseam with Boris Johnson and he isn't as universally reviled as Corbyn. I think it's because has some redeeming features - humourous, intelligent, annoys the right people - which Corbyn didn't have.

[Geoffrey Howe]

People have been doing the same ad nauseam with Boris Johnson and he isn't as universally reviled as Corbyn. I think it's because has some redeeming features - humourous, intelligent, annoys the right people - which Corbyn didn't have.

Yeah, you're kind of proving my point. The chorus about Johnson has always included those 'redeeming features' - again, irrespective of whether or not they are 'true' - and for that reason he has prospered well beyond what his many shortcomings would have foretold. By contrast, it's not that Corbyn lacked 'redeeming' features. In private, journalists and voters alike invariably commented on how mild-mannered, charming, and empathetic he came off. It's that those aspects of his personality were never accentuated, nevermind repeated ad nauseum, by the people/institutions necessary to effect a public image that was more redeemable.

I sort of agree. For one thing, though, those attacks wouldn't have struck a chord if they didn't have some basis in reality - Corbyn, to many, was a revulsive character regardless of what the Daily Mail said. I do think that most people who like Boris are aware of his flaws but don't particularly care about them - who cares if he lies a bit, disrupts norms, isn't very competent: he's a politician and people have come to expect this (obviously I disagree). People did go on about how nice "Jeremy" was; this grandfatherly figure, but his perceived flaws where ones which the general public strongly disliked (seen as anti-Britain for example), whereas Boris' flaws people have stopped caring about; indeed managing to annoy the "pundits" and the Guardian is a strength.

[Geoffrey Howe]

Sorry, I've been offline a bit. No doubt, the media wasn't especially kind to Corbyn. But it's impossible to argue with someone if you attribute anything the public thinks to what "the media" allegedly wants. Lots on the right think "the media" is biased against them. And anyway, surely what the big newspapers think is less important in an age of social media?

[Geoffrey Howe]

Apparently there are more Tories in Unite than the voter turnout.

Not that that's particularly surprising when you think about it.

After all, the Tory candidate in the 1981 Warrington by-election was a member of the TGWU...whose reputation was not exactly sparkling outside hard-left circles.

[Geoffrey Howe]

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?

[Geoffrey Howe]

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.}

Understood (and agreed). You are referring to the broader climate of lower turnout over a decade or so. I was under the impression you were talking specifically about 2001. (Might have something to do with the fact I haven't read the article which prompted the discussion.)

[Geoffrey Howe]

Once Brexit is out of the way and Labour shift well to the right, they will come flooding back

[Geoffrey Howe]

For once a serious attempt to think about what the phenomenon of the "Red Wall" really is beyond the squawking cries of "culture war": https://on.ft.com/2XxfIuk
It's not cutting-edge original but a refreshing change to the usual. Decent analysis of Johnson's politics too.