This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think they got 22% in 2016 which was partly down to an extremely high Tory vote; so it’s a very worrying.

Yeah, 22% in the constituencies and 19% on the list. Though they polled at around about that consistently from the 2015 General Election until the 2016 Holyrood poll: the big surge in the Conservative vote knocked the SNP down from the high fifties and often hitting 60% to 46% in the end.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I've just read this article by Stephen Bush in the New Statesmen, with his analysis of the trajectory of the Labour under Starmer, which some of you may find interesting.

To condense what Starmer and those around him believe: a) the Labour Party is supposed to be a bloody Labour Party and that b) the trouble with trying to become the (American) Democrats is that, actually, one would end up as the (Italian) Democrats.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Also interesting is this.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well the answer to so much of this is that factionalism really is more of a vibe.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If she's convicted there's little doubt that the Vaz machine would be able to produce the necessary signatures for a recall in double-quick time, frankly.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There were actually two baby booms in the UK (one in the late 40s/early 50s and one in the early 60s), not one. Interestingly, the people born in between did not have a particularly lucky run of things (e.g. if you were born in 1953, you would typically have been entering the labour market in a serious way in the early 70s and, well, good luck with that), so a lot of the cheap, imported American generational rhetoric is not accurate and is probably needlessly aggravating.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's been as good as confirmed that Beckett was behind this. Such an impressively stupid man.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Burnham has always been good at appealing to ordinary people, much better than most politicians of either party these days. What wrecked his 2015 leadership bid (with disastrous consequences for Labour and the country, I quite agree), is that he struggled to realise that to win an internal election you have to pander to the selectorate, rather than engage with the electorate. It's a massive shame, but what's done is done, unfortunately.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Let's not forget that Michael Dugher was his 2015 campaign manager - that explains *a lot*.

(and almost none of it is good)

Dugher is a good example of a very specific kind of fool, a type well represented in the Labour Movement (all parts and shades and factions of it) but quite rare elsewhere.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think (?) it has been briefed that the EHCR will not be naming names in the sense of saying 'X is to blame' which is good.

It generally doesn't, or, to be more specific, it prefers not to. It's purpose is to clean up institutions rather than to function as some sort of Racism Tribunal, and this means that it leans towards careful, guarded language designed to encourage frictionless compliance rather than fire and/or brimstone. It was, pretty clearly, gearing up to use its institutional powers to dismiss certain people from their posts, but events have transpired in such a way that they have already gone: the EHRC will have been as relieved by this as anyone as it's not a thing they like to do.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If you read the report you'll see why he was suspended. Much is made in it of the concept of the 'party agent' and the responsibility that the institution in question has for the actions and public statements of people defined as 'party agents'. The Party is committed - by its own word but also, and more importantly, legally - to implementing the report and will face legal sanctions if it does not. There is a really critical precedent here, something of relevance not just to Labour: political parties are subject to the law of the land, they are not semi-sovereign fiefdoms.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It appears there have been "contacts" about how JC might be returned to the fold.

Be in no doubt though, if he just gets handed the whip back the optics will be just slightly sub-optimal - he surely has to show some genuine contrition.

One option would be to stick him on a course. Obviously he wouldn't pay attention to anything told on it because he is the man he is, but in situations like this it makes sense to start as you mean to go on and education is going to have to play a big role in cleaning this mess up.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

CLP section results have gone: 5 GV, 3, LtW, 1 OL. Compared to the outgoing NEC that is plus one for LtW and OL each, compared to the NEC elected last time round that is plus three LtW, plus one OL. Notable new members: Luke Akehurst (LtW), Ann Black (OL), Laura Pidcock (GV). One outgoing member - Henderson (GV) - defeated. None of the new slates managed to break through, but, bluntly, NEC elections are basically all about mailing lists so that probably shouldn't be seen as a surprise. No detailed figures yet so can't comment on turnout - it is usually pretty low o/c - or any other patterns, but we shall see.

And for Welsh Representative, well, Carwyn won. Holland re-elected Treasurer ('re-elected' really: half the vote cast by TU block vote and that was totally sewn up), GV candidates win Youth Rep and Disability Rep posts, but, again, this was near-certain given the TU nominations and the same rule as for Treasurer.

In terms of Balance on the NEC? Two extra seats for the pro-leadership camp, essentially. Plus another seat (the Welsh Rep) already in that camp becomes more enthusiastically so. And, ahem, a more fragmented CLP section means that, by default, the TU section becomes more influential, which definitely wasn't why so many were keen on the shift, my goodness no.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Document with results and transfers etc. here. Akehurst topped the poll.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Turnout figure of about 20% lol. You can make an argument that, in its way, that's a good thing.

Edit: not *quite* as low as that, but still very low, like a Blair-era NEC election: 27%

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Turnout not much lower than previous standalone NEC elections recently. Its not impossible that this one being an entirely online affair (previously, literature was sent to members) had an impact too.

Yes - the only people voting will have been those contacted by the various mailing lists, whereas 'normally' there will be a certain number of people who vote because they get the stuff in the post, which is harder to ignore than emails.

Though an interesting detail: this is basically not a news story. That's a good thing for Labour.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Between one thing and another we have a good example of why it is a very, very bad idea to have disciplinary matters handled by political committees. In this case we have had what looks like a series of brokered compromises, leading to a very long meeting in which more compromises will have been brokered, leading to a decision that leaves a bad taste, even if it is probably not greatly different to that which a better system would likely have arrived at. Moreover, we have had one part of the decision and hints at the exact sanction chosen informally from 'well placed sources' on the NEC, but not actually officially: ridiculous. Labour is, of course, now mandated to create and implement a new system: it would be for the best if it got on with it as speedily as possible.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There's an interesting parallel between Tom Watson's approach to internal opposition from 2016 onwards and the SGC/GV etc presently: playing procedural silly buggers and then having a strop when it doesn't work as intended. Of course as stakes this time round are a lot smaller it isn't quite perfect, though does mean that it maybe works as an example of 'second time as farce'.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So that effectively means Corbyn is a Labour Party member but sitting as an indepdent, correct?

In practical terms it means he can attend meetings of his CLP and Branch and vote in internal elections, but cannot attend a meeting of the PLP and will not be issued with the Whip (i.e. the document that goes round instructing MPs how to vote on legislation). Of course he's not a particularly popular chap in the PLP and never paid much attention to the Whip anyway, so it's largely symbolic.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If I understand correctly, the CLP is the one that (eventually) names candidates for general elections right? What if they name Corbyn again? (Assuming Corbyn does not get the whip back and that he wants to run for reelection)

There's a rule that whipless MPs may not be nominated by CLPs as official Labour candidates.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Would Corbyn run as dissident Labour?

No idea. But it's all extremely hypothetical as, no matter how this situation resolves, the next election won't be for a while, by which time he will be well into his seventies. And it has already proven impossible to simply resume his old status as an obscure backbencher.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So much hot air for several reasons, one of which is that the signatures of forty MPs would be needed and the numbers for that are just not there. Long Bailey did not manage to hit that total for the contest earlier this year,* quite a bit short, actually.

_{*Threshold is twenty per cent for challenges, ten per cent in the event of a vacancy.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's pretty grossly inappropriate given that Jewish people in the United Kingdom (and even more so in certain other European countries!) are disproportionately likely to be the victims of racist violence. I'm not sure if having a higher than average income and being more likely to own ones own business - hardly distinctively Jewish characteristics amongst British minorities I must note - necessarily makes up for the very real fear that being aware of that fact inevitably brings. Let alone being unfortunate enough for it to happen to you. Different minorities face different forms of prejudice, and the old Marxist argument that severity can only truly be understood in terms of the material impact (that nasty old line of Luxemburg's and so on) would be bad enough in any context - few arguments have been more thoroughly discredited by subsequent events - but is particularly grotesque in this context, where the lazy recourse to that argument can be shown to be one of the motive factors in furthering the whole damned problem. And that is the other issue: the reason why there has been so much focus on antisemitism recently is because of a public scandal involving antisemitism in a certain large national institution...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Lisa Nandy got herself in a bit of trouble (but phrased it differently & has a lot more goodwill among the Jewish Labour movement) for saying something slighty like that; I don't understand the need for people to continue trying to debate the semantics of this; we saw it in 2018 and we saw it in 2019 & it doesn't serve any purpose.

Nandy's argument was different: she was trying to explain that the other argument is very common on the political Left and that it is a contributory factor the problem as it means antisemitism is not taken as seriously in those circles as a result, but phrased it a little clumsily.