This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Its really not.

Some voters don't like Starmer, actual representative surveys show that also quite a lot do.

Actual representative surveys mean nothing.

Well that's just - there is no other way to put this - simply not true.

Corbyn polled better at the time you mention, when more people actually liked him.

This isn't rocket science.

Oh my sweet summer child ...

What's untrue is the premise, upon which your estimation is based, that popular opinion of political leaders is primarily dependent on the intrinsic characteristics and personalities of those leaders. It isn't. If it was, Johnson would have been laughed out of the backbench 15 years ago and Ed Milliband would be Prime Minister.

My point is that the image of politicians confected by journalists, partisans, and professional opinion-havers is the primary determinant of how said politicians are perceived. The surveys produced to quantify this process are at best seen as symptoms of their efforts or (more accurately) additional fodder for spin. Gogglebox, for all its shortcomings, at least has the virtue of capturing live and instinctual reactions. It's harder for spin doctors with budgets to pay for favourable polling to manipulate.

You're right that this isn't rocket science. It's politics. I suggest you acquaint yourself with the difference.

Its really not.

Some voters don't like Starmer, actual representative surveys show that also quite a lot do.

Actual representative surveys mean nothing. Corbyn was personally popular for a good spell around and after the 2017 election.

Yes, and Labour did (relative to how it "by rights should" have done) very well in the 2017 election. How is that an argument for surveys not meaning anything?

The surveys showing Corbyn as popular came at the end of the 2017 campaign and in the month after. That is to say, when the influence on public perception held by procedural formulaic polling had been largely superseded by the alternative lens - I would argue, less biased lens - of the equal time provisions of the campaign (and, admittedly, the aura of success that came from the momentum Corbyn generated).

You could have saved yourself a few minutes and just posted the image instead

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Len throwing his toys out of the pram

https://twitter.com/Gabriel_Pogrund/status/1313539744551272450?s=20

I've seen a lot of discussion of Starmer's courting of big donors but do we know exactly how bad the financial situation the party is in with the Panorama lawsuits?

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Corbyn has the whip removed

[Statilius the Epicurean]

It's a shock, but in retrospect it probably shouldn't have been.

I'm reasonably sure Starmer's team will have asked Corbyn what response he was planning to make to the EHRC report and will not have been pleased with a couple of lines in there (and if they didn't ask, Corbyn's team should have assumed it was a case of giving him enough rope anyway.) We know that if Starmer tells you to apologise and you argue, he will take action.

We haven't learned very much new, except that you really shouldn't try to out-bluff Starmer.

Redux of the RLB stuff really. Left only has themselves to blame.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Saw some stuff on the leftwing UK twitter accounts I follow about some dumb movement to call Starmer "Keith Starmer" because he has apparently betrayed Labour ideals so greatly that he has no right to use the same name as Keir Hardie.

Not going to lie I thought it was a parody at first. Some of these people have go so far into Inside Baseball (to use an American term) on these intra-party fights

Keith is a weird nickname. I'm more sickened by people like Ash Sarkar (former Corbyn media outrider) taking the "racism against Jews isn't that bad" line:

https://twitter.com/ayocaesar/status/1329557930773983234?s=21

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I would be interested to know people's thoughts on this.

At first I thought it was obvious we should vote against it, then I drifted towards abstaining on the principle of 'letting them own it' but know I feel that abstaining will just make the party look divided & is avoiding having a fight we need to have.

My view is that Brexit is crystallised in voters' minds as a referendum issue apart from party politics. There is going to be no "it's turned out badly and Labour can take advantage of it" moment because the obvious rejoinder will always be "we implemented the will of the people " - haggling over it was too hard won't cut through. This isn't a Conservative Party policy. Therefore, considering the electoral landscape, if you're not going to take a principled stand against the issue then you might as well vote to implement it.

I think the arguments for abstaining are premised on an emotional feeling of not wanting to actively enable a policy they've spent years fighting. And that's understandable. But from a tactical perspective the issue was settled in 2019.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I might be deludedly optimistic, but I wonder if the Yes vote will continue to hold together under the SNP if/when they win on a mandate for a second indyref and can't deliver because of Westminster.

That said, the only route back for Scottish Labour at the moment seems to be via a Labour government in Westminster perceived as credible in Scotland.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Kendall never thought she could win IIRC? She was just running a factional campaign to keep the right in the conversation.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I know the sins of the father shouldn't count, but has Anas ever discussed Senior's interesting overseas career?

Reading his wiki, this is bad enough:

Sarwar is a supporter of Glasgow football teams Celtic[34] and Rangers.[34]

[Statilius the Epicurean]

This is rather good

https://twitter.com/FisherAndrew79/status/1354881476723138567?s=19

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Though a more optimistic alternative reading might be "Starmer wants to offer at least some of the big stuff that Corbyn did, but believes that will only be feasible once a sufficient number of people have been persuaded that the party he leads isn't a bunch of weirdos who hate this country".

Btw those saying Labour want to win over "Red Wall pensioners" aren't quite right - it is recognised that many in this group are lost to the left for good. Its actually the middle aged (ie 40s and 50s) who are the demographically crucial grouping. Quite a few of these actually voted Labour in 2017, only to recoil from their offering two years later.

So long as Starmer and the rest of Labour's current leadership keep accepting - or do nothing to refute/transcend - the underlying premise of the framing that Corbyn and his supporters were 'weirdos who hate this country', Labour will not return to government, and deservedly so.

Yes, the only way for Labour to return to government is argue with the public that Corbynism Was Good. Really?

Differentiating the party from the most unpopular opposition leader since records began is what any new leadership would be doing in their first year. Including RLB's team, if she had won.  

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Though a more optimistic alternative reading might be "Starmer wants to offer at least some of the big stuff that Corbyn did, but believes that will only be feasible once a sufficient number of people have been persuaded that the party he leads isn't a bunch of weirdos who hate this country".

Btw those saying Labour want to win over "Red Wall pensioners" aren't quite right - it is recognised that many in this group are lost to the left for good. Its actually the middle aged (ie 40s and 50s) who are the demographically crucial grouping. Quite a few of these actually voted Labour in 2017, only to recoil from their offering two years later.

So long as Starmer and the rest of Labour's current leadership keep accepting - or do nothing to refute/transcend - the underlying premise of the framing that Corbyn and his supporters were 'weirdos who hate this country', Labour will not return to government, and deservedly so.

Yes, the only way for Labour to return to government is argue with the public that Corbynism Was Good. Really?

Differentiating the party from the most unpopular opposition leader since records began is what any new leadership would be doing in their first year. Including RLB's team, if she had won.  

I'm not saying the new leadership shouldn't try to differentiate itself. I'm saying it needs to be willing to challenge conventional wisdom and their own (mis)conceptions - about Corbyn and much else about British politics - if it wants to succeed.  

From the moment Corbyn took over the party, the old guard of Blair/Brownites - the people who are in charge again under Starmer - insisted Corbyn's policies and style of leadership would be a disaster and rejected by the public. They operated off the underlying premise that Corbynism, in the sense of a non-neoliberal/New Labour style of left wing policy proposals, was the pipe dream of a 'bunch of weirdos who hate this country'. But then in 2017 Labour gained votes, seats, and percentage of the electorate at a rate not seen since 2001. Like it or not, and to the immense chagrin of the old guard, it turned out the only style of politics that had Labour make *any* meaningful gains against the Tories in the past 15 years was Corbynism.

Obviously, the 2019 election belies this narrative, not least because Corbyn as a political personality/caricature got completed monstered in the ensuing two years (thank you, British media*). But I'd argue that disaster had at least as much to do with the recalcitrant Labour centre's refusal to grant Corbyn or his policy/ideological perspective the endorsement and symbolic capital that his electoral success in 2017 ought to have earned him. Had the old guard had the humility to admit *their* style of politics was the one that was out of step - and that Corbyn's supporters/policies were not something aberrant or traitorous - events would have turned out quite differently.

That, of course, is history. But my point is a key lesson of the recent past is that Labour's not going to get back into government until it gets its factions - all of them - to sing from the same song sheet. Uncomfortable though it may be for Starmer and his team, he won't be able to do that without challenging the received wisdom about Corbyn and the nature of his appeal.


*And Corbyn and his team, to be clear. They could and should have done better.

Labour will only win the next election by supporting popular stuff. "Challenging the recieved wisdom about Corbyn" to be blunt literally who cares? Maybe highly engaged political anoraks but not voters.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Hyde's a writer with an amusing turn of phrase but not much else yeah.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

The hard left ballsed up tremendously in trying to elevate Batley as make or break for Starmer. Will be interesting to see the fallout.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

The hard left ballsed up tremendously in trying to elevate Batley as make or break for Starmer. Will be interesting to see the fallout.

Oh it's death by a thousand cuts for Starmer. Nothing at all has changed with this result, if nothing changes about Starmer's leadership.

He has the space to now with his new team. We'll see what happens. Won't be any leadership challenge in the offing for a while now at least.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Both Blair & Brown were even in 2006 &  2021 (assuming that was when the interviews were filmed) extremely close politically & personally- but the countless number of tragedies & disasters for New Labour all come from the endless blue on blue between junior aides, ministers and other people becoming obsessed with 'doing the other side in'.

15 years on the Blairite/Brownite stuff seems just, like, why?

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Rosa Luxemburg isn't just admired by fringe ultra-leftists tbf.

The spartacist uprising is way too over mythologized as well as the narrative of the SPD betrayal.

She was far from perfect, but her recognition that socialism could only be achieved under democracy went sadly unheeded by certain others of her political stripe.

? Luxembourg supported armed uprisings against the democratic SPD government.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

? Luxembourg supported armed uprisings against the democratic SPD government.

Nope - there was no democratic SPD government - the SPD and USPD had formed a provisional government after a popular revolution, but the SPD was ready to hand over power to the militarist right (or at least, have a de-facto power sharing agreement). So, the uprsing was to resist the return to power of the old capitalist, militarist elite, even if their rule would, for some time, take the form of "democratic constitutionalism."

(Didn't last all that long - so there is a direct line from the SPD suppression of the spartacist uprising to rise the of the NSDAP)

1) The SPD were a democratic party and had just led a democratic, republican revolution.
2) The SPD won the elections held in January 1919, a week or two after the Spartacist uprising. The USPD was the 5th largest party in that election, let alone the KPD who had recently split and were nowhere (and got 2% in the national election a year later in 1920).
3) Power sharing with sections of the right was the only way to avoid a civil war, which the right would have won. The alternative would be a proto-fascist military government 15 years early.
4)  The idea that the Spartacist uprising had the slightest chance of success even if the SPD leadership magically supported it, is voluntarist fantasy.
5) "Democratic" is the entire people, as a whole, having a voice in government. Luxemburg and the KPD opposed this, instead advocating class dictatorship.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Rosa Luxemburg isn't just admired by fringe ultra-leftists tbf.

The spartacist uprising is way too over mythologized as well as the narrative of the SPD betrayal.

She was far from perfect, but her recognition that socialism could only be achieved under democracy went sadly unheeded by certain others of her political stripe.

? Luxembourg supported armed uprisings against the democratic SPD government.

Both of those can be true, as contradictory as they may be.

It's true if you play word games. "Democracy" meant something different to Luxemburg, an orthodox Marxist, than it does to most people.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

While I understand there are reservations about Wakeford, given his conservative voting record, I remain amazed by the ability of Labour factions to not only look a gifthorse in the mouth, but to demand the gifthorse be immediately turned into glue.

Between Momentum, Young Labour and Co, there seems to be a number of calls demanding Wakeford either resign, or face immediate deselection, within hours of his defection. Very Twitter-brain.

I understand even less the Tories (and some on the left) calling for an immediate by-election as some sort of own, as if the incumbent wouldn't win comfortably in current circumstances.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

A reminder that this "alliance" includes the Northern Independence Party - an outfit run by an online s***poster based in Brighton. After its launch last year, the very online left was full of dizzying stuff about how it would eviscerate Labour in its "Northern heartlands" in the same way the SNP had done in Scotland - and then at the Hartlepool byelection its candidate (a former Labour MP who has in the past few days been urging all left wing people to leave a party that currently appears to be poised to take actual power for the first time in years) came two votes ahead of a confirmed paedophile.

With such powerhouses behind it, how can this new project possibly fail?

It's even funnier: he's an academic anthropologist with a specialisation in the Middle East living in Brighton. You couldn't come up with a better parody.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Well this hasn’t been done before…. Last few lines are very telling.

https://mobile.twitter.com/UKLabour/status/1520659285163794432?ref_src=twsrc%5Eg...

Strange to someone living up here that the video didn't mention Scottish and Welsh devolution, one of New Labour's most important and popular achievements...