This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Cassius]

Who are the rising stars in the Scottish Labour and Tory parties?

Can’t speak for SLab, but Douglas Ross, the youngish MP for Moray and slayer of Angus Robertson, appears to be the odds on favourite to succeed Carlaw. Was a junior minister at the Scottish Office until he resigned due over the Cummings affair, which may do him a bit of credit. Other than that I don’t know much about him other than that he’s a qualified football ref.

[Cassius]

Can't imagine the national Tories are too thrilled about the prospect of a by-election in Moray though

I think they plan to skirt that issue by having Ross remain MP for Moray, for which there is the precedent of Alex Salmond continuing to sit as MP for Banff and Buchan after his election to the Scottish Parliament.

[Cassius]

Gogglebox is the best argument for returning the electorate to its pre-1832 size. Irrelevant nonsense.

[Cassius]

I mean, I imagine if there was a split over this particular issue then said splinter party would get <1% of the vote. I guess a few MP’s in ultra-safe seats might stand a chance of getting re-elected if they could get their CLP’s to walk out with them, but I don’t know enough about the Labour Party to know whether that would be in any way feasible.

[Cassius]

It was just waffle (as nearly all political speeches from both sides of politics are today). Starmer essentially reiterated what has been Labour’s message, in one form or another, since the days of Miliband, with some COVID related garnish because-it’s-2021. I did find it quite amusing how he laid into the Chancellor for pinning his hopes for recovery on short term consumer spending shortly after laying out his own plans for a number of short term measures to juice consumer spending though.

I’m not a Labour man so it’s probably not my place to comment on this, but I don’t really think Labour needs a grand vision in order to get back into office; it just needs to present a reasonably united and competent front, promise some goodies to the electorate and keep on walloping the government for the next three years and cross its fingers that the British public are sick of the Conservatives by 2024 (as they were in 1997 and to a lesser extent in 1964 and 1945). Of course, the party’s torpid state in Scotland is a significant problem that previous Labour leaders who led the party out of opposition and into government didn’t face, but there don’t seem to be any good solutions for that so the party will just have to hope that the Tories really f*** things up for themselves in the next few years (which is always a live possibility). I don’t think the public is particularly interested in ‘transformational’ policies, as opposed to getting back to the way things were before the pandemic, albeit with better public services and more government support thrown into the mix.

[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.

[Cassius]

I see some people in our movement are making up that Ruth Smeeth is going to be parachuted in...

Is she a good fit for the constituency?

Doesn’t usually matter that much, unless the candidate in question is a real doozy (and by doozy I mean someone along the lines of a criminal and/or registered nonce); after all, Peter Mandelson was elected comfortably as MP for Hartlepool three times running despite the fact he was about as far away from a monkey hanger as it’s possible to be. I’d caveat that by saying that, obviously, local parties don’t always take kindly to having someone dropped in from outside.

I suspect that Blair may be referring to the fears of a certain type of Labour hanger on that one of (((them))) might get the nod (although I could hav misinterpreted).

[Cassius]

Jenkins and Crosland (although I thought this was pretty much confirmed).

[Cassius]

British politics is essentially just an endless doom loop of the Conservatives doing something incompetent and Labour saying ‘hold my beer’ and vice versa.

[Cassius]

On that subject my favourite misreading of the Labour party was when a 'senior source' compared Tom Watson versus Caroline Flint in 2015 deputy leaders race as a redux of the 1982 deputy race...

Which one was supposed to be which? Watson seems more akin to Healey in personality terms, but at that point he was more known for his attacks on the Murdoch empire and thus was relatively popular with the left of the party.

Flint is closer to Benn's views on Europe, although perhaps not in 2015.

Did Viscount Stansgate ever come to support the EU?

Not as far as I’m aware. Benn’s chief objections to the EU (and previously the EEC) were that it wasn’t democratic and that socialism couldn’t be established in Britain whilst it was inside the bloc, neither of which changed before his death. He also had a deep appreciation for Britain’s radical political tradition and its history of parliamentary democracy (although he could be critical of the latter), and whilst that was far from a nationalistic point of view, it didn’t mesh well with being pro-EU.

[Cassius]

Polls for the latest by-election aren't looking good even as the national polls improve.

https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1389458290170634244

Safe Labour.

[Cassius]

Looking forward to round 401 of the Forever War...

I mean I think we’re due round 554 of Tory Crisis.

[Cassius]

I feel like we’re being spun by ‘Labour sources’ here. My money’s still on Labour holding Hartlepool and generally doing okay across the board, which will then be interpreted as an enormous success given the dire predictions that have been swirling around for the last month.

As for the left, I still don’t see which of their number can do a better job than Starmer. I’ve heard Clive Lewis’ name being mentioned, but he just comes across as a complete loose cannon who’ll be almost as polarising as Corbyn was (and probably polarising in the same way, ie loved by a minority and disdained by a majority).

[Cassius]

Mason’s got some gall making that Cervantes reference given that he’s the biggest windmill-tilter of them all at the NS.

[Cassius]

Good luck to him, but I suspect the serious job that being leader of the opposition is will be rather more of a challenge than the kid gloves paddling pool of the metro mayoralty.

[Cassius]

Good luck to him, but I suspect the serious job that being leader of the opposition is will be rather more of a challenge than the kid gloves paddling pool of the metro mayoralty.

Yes as much as I like Burnham and as impressive as the ward results where in Manchester there’s a weird tendency to see Manchester as not being a relatively safe Labour city.

If he could govern the shower that is Liverpool though I’d make him Leader tomorrow!

Agreed, and I also think the gaping lacuna in his argument that people are tuning into the concept of metro mayors is the paltry turnout in all the contests, including his own, which raises pretty serious questions about the extent to which he is actually widely popular or not. For what it’s worth I think he’d be a better leader than Starmer simply because he evinces more personality, but I’d not be surprised if Labour are in exactly the same position in a year and a half under a Burnham leadership.

Also, here’s an amusingly similar NS interview with him from 2015, which really just highlights how the more things change, the more they stay the same:

https://www.newstatesman.com/staggers/2015/06/andy-burnham-interview-im-not-part-crowd

[Cassius]

LABOUR IS BACK with fewer votes than in 2019!!!!!

[Cassius]

That first gentleman who spoke to him very much wanted Labour to have uno voce, uno duce from here on in.

[Cassius]

Kinnock wasn't (and isn't!) on the right-wing of the Labour Party.* But pseudo-history is more powerful than actual history for most people too deep inside THIGMOO to get out now. Though we should also be careful about briefings of this sort as most of the people relaying them are proven bad faith actors.

_{*His son is, but so what? So are Tony Benn's children and grandchildren.}

But Kinnock ‘betrayed’ the left (the origins of the soft-hard left split lie in the decision by Kinnock and others to abstain from voting for Tony Benn for Deputy Leader if I recall correctly?), which surely makes him worse in the eyes of some.

[Cassius]

So, if we acknowledge that Owen Jones is a 16 year old trapped in a 12 year old’s body, where does that leave him in terms of legal liability?

[Cassius]

I look forward to the launch of Labour Friends of Investment Fund Employees.

[Cassius]

According to some of the tabloids three Labour MP’s are apparently considering crossing the floor to join the Tories. Assuming this isn’t just japes and banter (which is what I assume it is), any of our Labour people have any idea who it might be.

[Cassius]

In addition to the above, being an MP used to be a role that was compatible with having extensive work interests outside of politics, such as being a barrister. For reasons mentioned above (you could well call it the ‘Irishing’ of the MP’s role) this isn’t as much the case now and the expectation on the part of the public is that the MP will devote themselves full time to their role as a representative, hence all the sturm und drang, for example, over Sir Geoffrey Cox’s perfectly legitimate legal work last year. As Blair said above, it’s not surprising that high calibre professionals increasingly tend to eschew politics given that they will earn much less money and get much more abuse. It’s also worth bearing in mind that, given the centralisation of party messaging and discipline that has taken place in the last few decades, the ideal MP from the perspective of, say, Conservative central office, is a lobby fodder drone, and highly qualified professionals don’t tend to make good lobby fodder drones.

[Cassius]

Big Labour news.

Cllr Steve Forbes, the leader of Newcastle Council and a member of the NEC has been deselected from his ward in Newcastle.

He is a major figure in Labour Local Government circles and a close ally of Starmer.

Guardian reporting he was in a feud with Ex-chief whip Nick Brown. He didn’t stand a chance.

[Cassius]

You’d hope that the purity tests would go away once you get knocked down to 200 MPs. Alas…

Well according to the British AOC, all Labour needs to win is young people, ethnic minorities and progressives, a coalition of voters that even Jeremy Corbyn has some reach outside of.

Sorry, but who is this?

Zarah Sultana

That's rather a shame if true, I genuinely thought she had a bit more about her than that.

If anything she has a bit less about her.