This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Blair]

And as usual its the lack of transparency that really stands out - *why* is this happening? Search me.

Well at first I thought it was done to suspend one of the candidates; but this seems to be more & obviously looks awful.

There is a lot of talk (by talk I mean left wing twitter.com types) about the left running one of the suspended people & winning because Liverpool won't vote for a parachuted candidate... which will be news to Angela Eagle, luciana berger and co.

This did remind me that Liverpool had two particularly vicious selection cycles in 2017 & 2019; in the former I believe both Teresa Griffin MEP & Joe Anderson were blocked from standing & I think a lot of Labour first types said that good local choices were blocked in 2019.

[CumbrianLefty]

And as usual its the lack of transparency that really stands out - *why* is this happening? Search me.

Well at first I thought it was done to suspend one of the candidates; but this seems to be more & obviously looks awful.

There is a lot of talk (by talk I mean left wing twitter.com types) about the left running one of the suspended people & winning because Liverpool won't vote for a parachuted candidate... which will be news to Angela Eagle, luciana berger and co.

This did remind me that Liverpool had two particularly vicious selection cycles in 2017 & 2019; in the former I believe both Teresa Griffin MEP & Joe Anderson were blocked from standing & I think a lot of Labour first types said that good local choices were blocked in 2019.

Though that doesn't seem to have happened.

It could be that they want somebody totally "untainted" by the previous regime, I suppose?

[Blair]

Sarwar wins SLab leadership.

57-42%; with party members going 62% to sarwar.

Not a huge Shock considering A.) Sawar ran before and was the front runner B.) drop off in membership in the last year on the left C.)  the fact that Scottish lab members voted for Owen Smith over JC.

A decent result and campaign for Monica Lennon. Funnily enough some people want Jackie Baillie now

[CumbrianLefty]

Former senior Labour staffer Emilie Oldknow has failed in her legal bid to force the naming of whoever leaked the infamous "dossier" allegedly revealing the unlovely behaviour of several people in the party apparatus, herself included. The judge was pretty dismissive of her attempt, too.

[cp]

I've only been half paying attention, but it seems the Liverpool mayoral saga rages on. Can anyone explain to me what the 'real' story is here?

[CumbrianLefty]

Your guess is as good as anybody's tbh.

Though the idea it was all just a(nother) left-bashing exercise looks wide of the mark. Especially if the claims of who was on the actual panel deciding this are correct.

[cp]

Your guess is as good as anybody's tbh.

Though the idea it was all just a(nother) left-bashing exercise looks wide of the mark. Especially if the claims of who was on the actual panel deciding this are correct.

I assure you that is not the case!

The pattern of Starmerite (really, David Evans and Luke Akehurst) witch hunts has become so prevalent I just assumed it was something along those lines. But as you allude to, if it was that there would be clearer indications. It's not like the left of the party is in the mood to pull its punches, or the right of the party feels the need to cover its tracks. Something else is afoot. The oddest part, though, may be the utter absence of any real interrogation by anyone as to what that might be.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There is a major corruption scandal raging in the city at present (it is, in fact, the reason for the vacancy) and if certain rumours are to believed it may possibly involve a certain large institution rather prominent in Labour Party circles and especially so in and around the city of Liverpool.

[Blair]

Yeah it's been very heavily hinted that people who are actually in the know are not commenting because of the reasons... which in itself lends a suggestion to what the issue might be.

The new shortlist also irrc lacks anyone with a link to the council.

On a side point I do hope they abolish the position of Mayor; it's a pointless title. I always assumed they planned to abolish it if Big Joe had won the selection in 2017...

[Corbyn is (no longer) the leader of the Labour Party]

Can someone explain why Labour suddenly seems to be doing so badly in the polls? They were leading a few months back.

[Silent Hunter]

We're having a very effective vaccine rollout, which I think is helping.

[Cassius]

Can someone explain why Labour suddenly seems to be doing so badly in the polls? They were leading a few months back.

They’ve only had one really bad poll thus far, where they were 13 points behind, so we’ll see whether or not that was an outlier. Labour have never really been in the lead; there was a period from August 2020-January 2021 where they jousted with the Tories for the top spot but they never established a definitive lead over the government. The recent Tory lead isn’t that big and mainly seems to reflect the government’s support firming up in the 40’s rather than a collapse for Labour (provided there aren’t any repetitions of that poll with the 13 point deficit). I guess the government regaining the lead is a combination of; the government’s successful vaccine strategy; the fact that the government hasn’t made too many mistakes over the last month; and the fact that the Labour Party has, over the last month, been shooting itself repeatedly in the foot in time honoured Labour Party fashion.

Personally, if I were a Labour supporter I would say it’s slightly worrisome that Labour never managed to establish a definitive lead over the government, despite the nine months of monumentally bad press that the latter had from May 2020 until January of this year, but, as always, the election is several years away and polls at the moment don’t mean a great deal. The various local and regional elections due to be held in May will likely be our first solid indicator of how things are faring for the parties.

[CumbrianLefty]

It might indeed be worrisome if these were "normal" political times, but of course there has been a "rallying to the flag" effect during the past year in almost the whole democratic world (its true that Trump was ultimately an exception, but that was only narrowly so after he tried his utmost to be)

Unless this May's elections are a total washout (still unlikely) Starmer is almost certainly going to get a bit longer to show if he ultimately has the right stuff.

[Blair]

Can someone explain why Labour suddenly seems to be doing so badly in the polls? They were leading a few months back.

The 'roadmap' plan to unlock is helping a lot too I think; along with the fact that the economic support has been extended.

We're stuck in a weird holding pattern & on the coronavirus front alone the Government have had much worse months.

There's also no denying that Keirs own approval ratings have gone down; a lot of this seems baked in from the poor choices he made in the Autumn.

[CumbrianLefty]

Can someone explain why Labour suddenly seems to be doing so badly in the polls? They were leading a few months back.

The 'roadmap' plan to unlock is helping a lot too I think; along with the fact that the economic support has been extended.

We're stuck in a weird holding pattern & on the coronavirus front alone the Government have had much worse months.

There's also no denying that Keirs own approval ratings have gone down; a lot of this seems baked in from the poor choices he made in the Autumn.

Expand on this, perhaps?

[cp]

I think there's multiple reasons why Labour's underperforming right now, some of them outside their control (i.e. the Tories), some of them not (Starmer's announcements). For a reasonable exploration of the latter, Adam Tooze in the Guardian has a good take

[CumbrianLefty]

On a more short term note, I had been tentatively starting to hope Labour's messaging had at least started to get better since the budget - but both Starmer and Rayner put their collective feet in it to some degree today (our deputy getting into a wholly avoidable mess over NHS pay, which might not matter so much but for the party making it the centre of their campaign launch for May's elections - whilst Keir himself reacted to the horrible apparent murder of a young London woman by saying "we need more police"; whilst this is the customary boilerplate in these situations - and Corbyn indulged in it as much as any other Labour leader - the fact the chief suspect is a copper makes it awkward)

[Blair]

Can someone explain why Labour suddenly seems to be doing so badly in the polls? They were leading a few months back.

The 'roadmap' plan to unlock is helping a lot too I think; along with the fact that the economic support has been extended.

We're stuck in a weird holding pattern & on the coronavirus front alone the Government have had much worse months.

There's also no denying that Keirs own approval ratings have gone down; a lot of this seems baked in from the poor choices he made in the Autumn.

Expand on this, perhaps?

I might be looking at it with too much of a bubble view but it came from the decisions made in Westminster.

He failed to make a case that the Tier system was falling & that the economic support was dire; it was obvious and Labour hinted at it a lot, but they should have used the fact that 60+ Tory MPs rebelled on the December (?) tier vote to say publicly 'do these 5 things (increase SPP, fix gaps in support, expand business support, make it easier to isolate etc) and Labour will vote for it. It would have been a good way of doing the 'Labour values' act without asking for a lot.

Instead Labour abstained, it passed and Starmer was seen as another politician trying to have it both ways, and who wanted the best of both worlds.

The decisions to abstain on the Overseas Operations Bill at second reading when they were eventually going to vote against it & when people on the right of the party were going 'oh wait this bill is quite sh**t', and then the decision to abstain on the spy-cops bill (I have a very long & boring take on why the later is more defensible than the former) caused a split with the left in the party & in the PLP- I don't really know what difference voting against either would make when frankly we know that the Tories are going to dredge up the depths of Keirs CPS record to accuse the party of various things.

The one caveat I will add, and one I generally try and remind myself when I get annoyed at actions of the party is that I know that the party should not exist to appeal to its/my comfort zone; which is basically an extremely policy heavy focus on either politically irrelevant issues for voters ( I saw someone suggest Labour should campaign in the locals based on the Nolan Principles) or the bit from spitting image where Neil Kinnock is just shouting 'Nurses, Nurses, Nurses, Teachers, Nurses, popular people, people who people like'.

[Blair]

The comfort zone strategy for me would be replacing Dodds with Miliband, bringing some of the left back into the Shadow Cabinet, bringing back 1-2 of the competent older hands (Angela Eagle, Meg Hillier etc) and trying to be a bit more creative with our economic policy- there's a chance it would make me feel better but there's equally a chance we'll still only get 33%.

[morgieb]

The one thing that I think will save Starmer is that I don't think there's an alternate leader that would be better. Most of the Left Cadre have too much baggage at this point to cut through; Nandy and Rayner don't feel like they have it either. Starmer's frontbench feels very meh. Someone like Cooper or Miliband's far too much of a retread, someone of the right could destroy the party. Burnham probably makes the most sense in theory but he's not in the House so......

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The electorate is very volatile at present (this can be considered as a 'permanent' feature) and so will ever be prone to shifting about a lot, and at the moment very few people are paying much attention to politics - people instead are by and large tending to their own gardens, a fact that a) makes it harder to poll and b) means that polling will be even more volatile (this can be considered as a 'temporary' feature, a result of the pandemic). That's the first point. The second, a point to be combined with the first, is that the standard MoE on a British poll is about 3%. Taking the wider picture together, we've moved from a situation where the government had a massive lead, to a situation where it had a modest lead, to a situation where things were tied, and now back to a situation where the government has a modest lead (in all cases there were outliers in this or that direction every so often. It is possible, quite probably really, that the unusual situation increases the likelihood of bad samples as well). Except for the movement away from the first of these, the shifts required have not been particularly large. It is very hard to say how 'real' any of this is or has been. As for Starmer's personal ratings, the salient fact remains that the 'uncertain' category (however it is phrased) is very high.

A broader point: a lot of opposition parties across the World have been struggling the polls throughout the pandemic, generally more so (particularly when the various contexts are considered) than Labour here. It is fairly obvious why: it isn't just or even mostly that some voters feel a sense of loyalty to 'the Government' during a national crisis, but that the issue drowns out all others* and is hard to 'do politics' with as it is not a normal political issue. Patterns of media exposure are also abnormal: government ministers are routinely on the television in a technocratic context rather than a conventional political one.

_{*In fact attempts by some government ministers to draw attention to this or that non-pandemic related issue have generally fallen on ground as stony as that which shadow ministers have found when they try the same.}

[CumbrianLefty]

Yes, there's a bit too much pessimism around concerning a Tory party poll bounce that may well be contingent and temporary. I have referred myself to unforced errors from the red team and these certainly don't help, but maybe they are at least partly a consequence of deciding to elect someone as leader who was actually remarkably inexperienced in actual *politics* - its easy to see how this could be a strength given the party's recent history, but it was always going to have downsides too.

[EastAnglianLefty]

East and West Ham CLPs have been suspended after accusations of entryism: https://twitter.com/siennamarla/status/1370432204808056838

The problem is that Labour is also complaining that the Met is investigating allegations of electoral fraud relating to this, whereas the Met say they looked at it and concluded an investigation wasn't required.

Local parties being places into special measures isn't that unusual (although Newham hasn't had a reputation for being particularly odd - a few Rahmanites but generally much quieter than neighbouring Tower Hamlets.) However, alleging criminality that doesn't stand up to ten minutes of investigation is not a great look.

I think a lot of the criticism Starmer has come in for has been unfair. On the other hand, the appointment of Evans as General Secretary looks more and more like a bad misstep and it's hard to see him holding on the post much longer on this trajectory.

[cp]

East and West Ham CLPs have been suspended after accusations of entryism: https://twitter.com/siennamarla/status/1370432204808056838

The problem is that Labour is also complaining that the Met is investigating allegations of electoral fraud relating to this, whereas the Met say they looked at it and concluded an investigation wasn't required.

Local parties being places into special measures isn't that unusual (although Newham hasn't had a reputation for being particularly odd - a few Rahmanites but generally much quieter than neighbouring Tower Hamlets.) However, alleging criminality that doesn't stand up to ten minutes of investigation is not a great look.

I think a lot of the criticism Starmer has come in for has been unfair. On the other hand, the appointment of Evans as General Secretary looks more and more like a bad misstep and it's hard to see him holding on the post much longer on this trajectory.

Speaking only for myself, if Starmer sacked Evans (and made a show of it) and replaced him with someone with solid left/Corbyn credentials, I'd be much more inclined to support his leadership of the party. It's one thing no longer have the top spot, it's quite another to be denied any seat at the table.

[CumbrianLefty]

It appears that the police are saying they have no evidence of electoral fraud in the two Newham CLPs despite Evans claiming there was. The moment he bit off more than he can chew?