This Once Great Movement Of Ours

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The reality is that he's doing All Right under difficult circumstances. He's not been a smashing success (rare anyway at this stage), he's not been struggling more than is normal for a Leader of the Opposition, and he's certainly not been a catastrophe. And this is surprisingly hard for the great discourse mills to properly process.

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(though of course that contradicts the now quite in vogue narrative that he never upset the left)

Haha, are people pushing that? He was, and I don't need to tell you this of course but this is the fun of a semi-public forum, an old fashioned right-winger who didn't like them very much and the sentiment was mutual.

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There's also no normalcy. Politics (via politicians) are closer than ever to the public from briefings to short term announcement of policy, but more distant because there's a lack of the normal news cycle. You can't be opportunist in those circumstances.

If things resume and Keir is equally as 'meh' then there's a problem.

It is very noticeable that the ups and downs of polling movement (to the extent that we can trust polling under present circumstances, and I remain as basically sceptical there as I was a year ago) has correlated with (perceived) government struggles and (perceived) government successes to an even greater extent than usual. And it is hard to see how things could be much different, at least in a positive direction: the options are take a hard-line crankish stance on the pandemic or 'well we'd do what the government is doing but better', there's no room to articulate an alternative or to score points in the usual manner. It isn't even really possible to fully exploit things when they go wrong, because you really don't want to get caught crowing during a national crisis!

But this particular climate can't last forever and there will be much adjusting to new circumstances all round when things start to alter.

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Timms has done more good in his tenure than most MPs manage, but he has his flaws. The thing about the man, the critical thing to understand about him, is that both stem from the same root.

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This would appear to be a specific 'the Labour Party in the West Midlands is an absolute binfire' issue.

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Who was the last Labour leader (other than Smith, obviously) to not make it to a single general election? Do you have to go back before the War?

George Lansbury. And it is almost certainly going to remain that way as well.

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In actual news, Len McCluskey's disastrous eleven year tenure as Unite's General Secretary is due to end in August as the union's executive council has triggered the election. A full timetable has yet to be agreed. Unite being Unite there is already controversy at a decision to make ballot access much harder.

Three candidates (Steve Turner, Gerard Coyne and Sharon Graham) have declared that they are running and a fourth (Howard Beckett) is expected to join them shortly. Turner has been endorsed by the union's formal Left faction (winning a contentious vote over Beckett) and has stressed a desire to move attention away from internal Labour Party politics and towards the day-to-day work of trade unionism, Coyne is associated with its less formalised Right faction and ran against McCluskey in an extremely bad-tempered election four years ago, while Graham is associated with a new grouping on the Left but which places industrial strategy over political involvement. All three are thus running against the McClusky era, though in very different ways and at very different volumes. Beckett will be the continuity candidate.

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The issues here are specific to the West Midlands conurbation, but in fairness the Labour Party in the rest of the Midlands is also a binfire. In Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire they've been struggling for decades because they've been unable to make the fairly obvious case that the low-waged largely Eastern European employment in the area that is very unpopular is almost all at businesses that financially prop up the Conservative Party locally.

Yes, that one really is next level political/electoral incompetence.

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I have read the Scarborough piece. Very much confirms my long-standing view that most Youth/Student politics in this country amounts to a form of abuse and that Young Labour should be abolished and not replaced.

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Factionalism in the Labour Party is a lot like factionalism within the clergy of the Church of England: in both cases a big part of the problem is that new recruits are immediately introduced to factional groupings and are usually immediately indoctrinated into one of them (often for reasons that might as well be random) and then they learn everything else about the institution and life in it through the factional grouping they have become attached to. The only difference is that the factional groupings in the CofE do, at least, still map on neatly to actual disputes about fundamental matters: the current roster of Labour Party factions mostly date to the late Cold War and their alignment to each other is entirely from that period. In practice this actually adds to the unpleasantness.

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Tory factionalism can be vicious, but they do seem to be better at "getting it over with" and both sides accepting the outcome once things are decided.

It's largely about personalities and there's a tendency to abandon a defeated faction leader for dead, which makes it easier to unite around the winner. Of course when it gets really bad it's as debilitating as anything Labour has to offer, but it seems that some sort of spiraling effect has to develop for that to occur.

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By-elections in general tend to matter less than journalists tend to assume when one is going on,* and this particular by-election is happening on the same day as a lot of other elections. Would tend to be wary of making predictions as to the result in this case for a bunch of reasons.

Anyway, though it was a long time ago now it is worth noting that in 1960 the Conservatives gained Brighouse and Spenborough off Labour in a by-election. Four years later they lost power and over sixty seats along the way.

_{*Though even there they do not get covered anywhere near as intensely as they used to be.}

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There is a longstanding tendency for CLPs in 'hopeless' rural constituencies to be controlled by the Left (of whatever vintage), but this doesn't necessarily mean that the members in those constituencies lean that way heavily or at all. And the same general comment often applies much more broadly, to apparent clusters of dominance from whatever faction.

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I don't understand.

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I don't understand.

Well a few hours later and things are no clearer. My recommendation is that senior people in the Labour Party and their aides, assistants and associates need to drink less and get more sleep. Then maybe this sort of thing might not seem so... characteristic.

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Tony Blair as the last Marxist alive, in this essay I will...

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I see that Howard Beckett has managed to outdo himself again.

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It seems this was the safest option for the left of Unite to maintain power.

Depends on how many votes he was likely to actually get - the general supposition was that hardly anyone outside the ghasty absurdity that is Unite's 'community member' section (which is not large) were likely to vote for him. But it avoids personal humiliation (well... er... it avoids some personal humiliation) for him, and allows for the impression of unity or whatever.

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It is worth noting that the changes to the rules made during the Corbyn leadership mean that the threshold for a challenge is now very high. Everyone sort of knows this, but the implications maybe haven't quite sunken in yet. By implications I don't just mean the obvious - i.e. it will not be possible for the SCG to run a factional candidate as they don't have the numbers in the PLP - but also the issue in terms of the calculations to be made by individual MPs.

Though it is probably best that people don't get too ahead of themselves.

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It's clear Starmer is useless as of now. But 'now' is temporary. He could be the right man afterall once the Covid crisis is over.

He's an odd one in that at times he's been very good and at times very poor. It's probably a reflection of the fact that he is not a career politician, but he doesn't seem to have a 'level' at all.

One thing that's worth noting is that the main pattern regarding his approvals continues: that is, when people are given a 'not sure' option in those surveys it always ends up a lot higher than is usual. My guess is that to most of the electorate right now he's just a generic Labour Party leader from central casting (that's how he comes across, even vocally!) who they know little of particularly.

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The truly cunning observation is that the general effect of the service economy is turning (and will continue to turn) most places into a fairly level patchwork with a solid lower middle class lean, so what appeals in Wolverhampton will be much the same as appeals in Worthing. One of Labour's hang-ups is a tendency to think very much in terms of place, when that isn't really how our society is structured now.

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Parts of the Labour movement have also been rather puritanical in not supporting the self employed businesses and workers living in these sort of seats... these people have been at the sharp end of a number of policy changes (most notably around tax law with IR35 but also with being excluded from COVID support ) but lots of people within the PLP don’t want there support* and get embarrassed by the idea.

Which is completely ridiculous as this is a - large and growing - section of the electorate that is actually very swingy, at least when it votes. It isn't just brainless 1970s-style TU idiocy either... there were some very badly done surveys back in the early 1980s with tiny sample sizes and shocking methodologies that suggested otherwise and, well, guess when so many important figures in THIGMOO were at university, sigh.

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My considered suggestion would be that all senior people in the party of whatever faction or grouping should now take some time off, go on holiday to some tranquil rural location. The late Rhodri Morgan liked a little stretch of Cardigan Bay because of the dolphins and would spend his time-off just tramping around the place dressed like a determined rambler from the 1930s.* Most people would accept that he was one of the most balanced senior Labour politicians of recent decades and, well...

_{*Met him doing that once.}

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It's a T&G thing, mostly. Those divisions are as important - in practice - as 'Left/Right'. I'll repeat my usual observation that the merger was a very bad idea.

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In the sense that the two unions weren’t really that suited to each other?

Fundamentally different cultures, yes.

My rather limited knowledge is that Amicus was the right-wing (in a Labour sense) manufacturing and electrical union- while TGWU was largely by 2005 just the dockers (and Lens branch)

Amicus was the result of a long series of mergers being created from the AEEU (itself a merger of the AEU and the EETPU) and the MSF (a merger of the ASTMS and the TASS). The old AEU and EETPU both had histories of serious conflict between right-wing Labour types and actual Communists, although that was a long time ago now. A lot of people who try to bluff knowledge about trade union history like to insist that the main 'right' faction in Unite is pure descendant of the AEU, but in reality it comes just as much from the EETPU tradition. The ASTMS was dominated by what would usually be called the Soft Left (Clive Jenkins was its General Secretary for many years) and the TASS by a much harder variety of Left. TASS in fact had started life as the white collar section of the AEU and political differences were a big factor behind the two splitting. The result of all this was a trade union with a very decentralised power structure (if not to GMB levels) and membership in a pretty wide range of skilled occupations, manual and non-manual.

The old Transport & General Workers Union, of course, was the most centralised major British trade union for the bulk of its history and Unite has ended up following on from that, which was not actually the original plan at all. It was strong in a couple of other areas to those that you mention, with a lot of members in the car industry and (especially) bus drivers and the like.