This Once Great Movement Of Ours

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Barry Sheerman the latest Labour bod to commit an AS related faux pas on social media. Tbh I am increasingly sympathetic to the view that our MPs should be discouraged from contributing on Twitter beyond the absolute minimum.

Rather galling that Starmer hasn't said anything about this, nevermind disciplined him like RLB. So much for 'zero tolerance' to antisemitism.

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I'm reasonably sure that if Sheerman had been a frontbencher (Heaven forfend!) he'd have been given the sack.

Anyway, a compulsory retirement age for Labour MPs seems increasingly like it would be a good idea. Far too many embarrassments of one sort or another over the past few years, far too many.

Hypotheses aside, it's still kind of moot. If 'zero tolerance' means anything, then there should be a disciplinary action regardless of the stature within the party. Starmer's said and done literally nothing. Quite telling, sadly.

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Potentially the bigger issue long-term (since Sheerman gave an apology that was grudging and half-hearted, but still recognisably an apology) is the furore over Rosie Duffield. Duffield made transphobic comments and in return got a lot of justified criticism and quite a lot of abusive tweets. Whilst a lot of MPs (the Shadow Equality minister included) have condemned the abuse, they haven't mentioned the transphobia, which Duffield has doubled down on.

One gets the very definite impression that Starmer does not want to take sides on the escalating fight within Labour over trans rights, but that it is not going to be feasible for very much longer.

The problem for Labour is that the party has a clearly defined & well supported public policy position on this- but it is becoming a cultural & Political debate rather than a policy one (why is ofc what Section 28 was)

It's worth noting that until 2018 it was widely accepted as part of the mainstream thought of both parties & previous Select Committes that you reform the GRA to allow for self-ID and introduce some sort of change for documents.

The GRA reform was set up with the expectation this would happen! But it was mothballed & delayed-and has seen a very skilled lobbying effort that has turned this debate into something it shouldn't be; endless culture war rows about who said what & what tweet said why.

The danger is that as the above happens it becomes more painful for Labour to get involded but equally in my view becomes much more so morally correct; having seen how my wing of the party absolutely botched the response to Gay Rights in the 1980s it's hilarous to see how many people seem prepared to make the mistake (no doubt to then in 20 years talk with teary eyes about the amazing work we did to support trans rights)

A damning indictment of Starmer's cowardice, if there ever was one. Such clear eyed, crisply enunciated moral indignation ... unless it's standing up for the rights of people that Blairite centrist wine moms feel icky about.

And as "hilarious" as it might be for you, for trans people this is frightening. Please show some respect.

This mere days after he made a bizarre semi-defence of Ghislaine Maxwell on the same Platform. He will be eighty in a couple of weeks. Hard not to wonder if we have another case of the Kaufman's on our hands, urgh.

Was Kaufman ill for most of his last year? The only thing I knew about his last years was that the CLP has to be suspended because of the feud over who would suceed him

Barry Sheerman the latest Labour bod to commit an AS related faux pas on social media. Tbh I am increasingly sympathetic to the view that our MPs should be discouraged from contributing on Twitter beyond the absolute minimum.

Yes completely. It should be seen as a tool which they use to keep in touch with constituents, comment on national & local stories & engage in party political activty.

It was quite funny that a few days before Steve Reed put his foot in it Jenrick joked in the Chamber about Reed spending too much time on twitter; he was right! The most frustrating thing is that the tweets that get MPs into trouble never actually contribute anything.

Like if you give a really long speech in the chamber & mess up a line or an attack you can at least say 'oh well I did 95% of the speech which was fine'- a tweet contributes & changes nothing. What was to gain from Rosie Duffield making a flippant remark?

RLB might disagree

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I don't like that Starmer hasn't been as forceful as he could have been about this, but there is a difference between 'Senior Shadow Cabinet member' and 'elderly possibly senile backbencher'. I don't think Sheerman's actions are as obvious a symptom of the overall problem as RLB's.

Zero tolerance is zero tolerance. Start playing favourites with it and you're not really caring about antisemitism anymore.

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I don't like that Starmer hasn't been as forceful as he could have been about this, but there is a difference between 'Senior Shadow Cabinet member' and 'elderly possibly senile backbencher'. I don't think Sheerman's actions are as obvious a symptom of the overall problem as RLB's.

Zero tolerance is zero tolerance. Start playing favourites with it and you're not really caring about antisemitism anymore.

I agree with the general sentiment but remember that RLB was actually sacked because she refused to apologise, not the actual tweet, and that it's not like Starmer can do anything to Sheerman, short of suspending him from the party, which will seem like a disproportionate response given he didn't suspend her.

Yeah, but by setting the bar at 'zero tolerance' such niceties of proportionality go out the window. The punishment is the point. Any violation of the new norm *must* incur a censure, no matter how minor the infraction or lowly the perpetrator.

You either have a moral backbone or you don't. You either care about stamping out antisemitism or you care about something else.

Also, *apparently* RLB's transgression was not showing sufficient obeisance to Starmer's 'leadership', and not immediately agreeing to a full apology (preferring a deletion of the tweet and retraction instead- a response one could easily argue was far more ... proportionate).

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Sigh can you please read my post again? Specifically the part where I said the leadership have a moral need to call out anti-trans rhetoric & the GRA needs to be reformed to include self-ID.

I'm part of the LGBT community I don't need to be told how terrifying this for Trans people.

I don't see the issue with saying a factions stance is hilarous in the historical context when I'm attacking them for not doing enough on trans rights!

If that were the case, such comments would not be made. For the record: the issue is that calling the despicable reaction of the Labour right on this issue 'hilarious', historically contextualized or otherwise, portrays it as something amusing when it is very much not, certainly for those of us who have skin in the game. It's depressing, offensive, embarrassing, hypocritical (as you point out), and predictable. Hilarious not so much.

And fwiw you didn't say the leadership had a moral need to call out anti-trans rhetoric. You posited it was increasingly 'morally correct' for 'Labour to get involved'; that can mean anything but I'm reassured to hear it's a call for more action to support trans people. Cheers for that

Regardless, the point is Starmer's shown he's comfortable placating transphobes on this issue and isn't even getting the benefit of a poll lead out of it, nevermind being 20 points ahead like we were promised.

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I thought that zero tolerance was meant to be applied only to antisemitism? (Which seemed to be the big problem in Labour)

I will say it's not really like the Tories can really mount a campaign off "we are the true pro-Trans" party either; unlike with antisemitism (Labour are the true antisemites, the Tories stand with the Jewish community)

That won't stop them from trying. LGBT Tories (heavy emphasis on the G) are an unfortunately common occurrence in the UK. To their credit, the official LGBT Tory outfits have condemned TERF rhetoric when it's emerged. You're right that it's an uphill battle, though. Most trans folx are pretty dead set against the Tories for the simple fact that Tory stewardship of the NHS for the past decade has made it inestimably harder to access critical healthcare for medical transitioning.

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Its not the party that Starmer is worried about re trans rights (even though it is obviously divided on the issue, and not always on the "normal" factional lines either) but the media. Several influential and widely read female journalists, in particular, are uncompromising TERFs.

True. Starmer's fear of them is, if anything, even more pathetic.

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My general impression is that what was being done was certainly unprofessional, but I don't think you can credibly make the accusation of sabotage. Labour were heavily behind in all the polls (and those polls that showed a closer contest were widely disbelieved by Corbyn's opponents) and in those circumstances there wasn't much of a case for offensive targeting beyond hope. Moreover, in 2015 Labour had lost seats due to refusing to play defence and the party (particularly the right of the party) was accordingly gun-shy. The extra resources make sense as an attempt to prepare for a 1983-style result. The specific seats picked were certainly picked on a factional basis (and there's the unquestionable unprofessionalism.) On the other hand, some of there were actually lost in 2019, so on an insurance basis I'm not sure it wouldn't have made sense as a strategy.

More generally, I'd suggest that arguing that something was a betrayal in 2017 is made more difficult when the absence of the same was a major contributor to bad results in both 2015 and 2019. As a general rule, we have not done a very good job of dealing with the inevitable optimism bias.

Something being unprofessional and something being sabotage seems like a distinction without a difference. If the unprofessionalism (leaking reports, being obstreperous over routine matters, scheming to plan for a post-defeat recapture of the party) was deliberate, targeted, and out of step with their usual performance in the role - which it quite obviously was - it doesn't really matter if the polls at the time made it seem arguably unnecessary or was contrary to a cautious electoral strategy (prudent though it might have been to a reasonable observer).

As to the performance in the 2015 and 2019 elections and optimism, obviously there's more to Labour's results in an election than just sabotage vs no sabotage. I think the point to take is that in elections when the optimism wasn't really called for (2015/19) but the electoral machine worked well the party lost, but the one time there really was a reason to think Labour would overperform the right of the party actively stymied (read: were actively working against) success because of their own arrogance, hatred of Jeremy Corbyn, and consequent inability to acknowledge he was connecting with voters.

This does add a new layer of meaning to the DM headline from the start of the 2017 campaign, though. Crush the Saboteurs, indeed.

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I think it's fair to say that Labour hasn't succeeded in finding a way to manage its increasingly divergent and contradictory factions over the past decade. Equally, the one person who was able to manage those factions to produce an increase in Labour's membership, vote share, and seat total was Corbyn and the team he put in place running up to 2017.

At the risk of pulling back too far, most major social democratic left-wing parties have struggled to bridge their internal party divides over the past 15-20 years. Formerly ascendant centre/right factions from the 90s seem incapable of acknowledging just how thoroughly their failures of the 00s (Iraq and the GFC in particular in the UK) discredited them and their brand of politics.

Regrettably, the resurgent left hasn't coalesced enough to dislodge reactionary conservative governments, or even convince putative liberal allies into not aligning with said reactionaries when the chips are down.  

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Point taken, but in this case 'the media' in question consists of a minuscule number of TERFy centrists at the Times and Guardian peddling demonstrably false conspiracy theories. The editorial line from both those outfits and rest of the (non-reactionary conservative) media is to support the GRA reforms to make it easier for trans people to self-identify - reforms the public overwhelmingly supports, too.

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The big mystery is whether there was a comprehensive review into the 2017 election; even after Iain McNicol & others left HQ in 2018?

I know it's very internalised but I can't look at the period between 2018-2019 and believe that if the team from 2019 were super-imposed back into 2017 whether we would have seen a better than expected result?

I mean can I just settle at the view that the Labour party hasn't exactly been very well ran since 2005?

Yes, this is exactly it. The reason the distinction between sabotage and unprofessionalism matters is because unprofessionalism isn't something that is solely the preserve of right wing hacks at HQ.

Nonsense. The point is whether you call it unprofessionalism or sabotage, the actions of those on the Labour right in the 2017 campaign were a coordinated attempt to hinder Corbyn's team and hence the wider Labour campaign. It was a betrayal of the party's members, voters, donors, and volunteers writ large and a staggering demonstration of callow cynicism from a wing of the party that had worn its (evidently chimerical) moral superiority and hard nosed pragmatism as badges of honour. The people who did it have no business anywhere near the Labour party, regardless of which wing is ascendant. After all, if they're willing to conspire against their party to throw an election, how can you ever be sure they won't do the same thing again?

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The big mystery is whether there was a comprehensive review into the 2017 election; even after Iain McNicol & others left HQ in 2018?

I know it's very internalised but I can't look at the period between 2018-2019 and believe that if the team from 2019 were super-imposed back into 2017 whether we would have seen a better than expected result?

I mean can I just settle at the view that the Labour party hasn't exactly been very well ran since 2005?

Yes, this is exactly it. The reason the distinction between sabotage and unprofessionalism matters is because unprofessionalism isn't something that is solely the preserve of right wing hacks at HQ.

Nonsense. The point is whether you call it unprofessionalism or sabotage, the actions of those on the Labour right in the 2017 campaign were a coordinated attempt to hinder Corbyn's team and hence the wider Labour campaign. It was a betrayal of the party's members, voters, donors, and volunteers writ large and a staggering demonstration of callow cynicism from a wing of the party that had worn its (evidently chimerical) moral superiority and hard nosed pragmatism as badges of honour. The people who did it have no business anywhere near the Labour party, regardless of which wing is ascendant. After all, if they're willing to conspire against their party to throw an election, how can you ever be sure they won't do the same thing again?

And my point is that the evidence that it actually was a co-ordinated attempt to hinder the campaign, rather than an attempt to minimise the expected damage to their particular wing, is weak at best.

I struggle to see how someone could come to that conclusion without relying on motivated reasoning or just being naive. The evidence is quite clear.

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The evidence is clear that they didn't like Corbyn or those associated with him.

It is somewhat more circumstantial of a full blown conspiracy.

Maybe it's just semantics, but given their actions and the indisputable motivation on which they were based, it was clearly more than just casual ad hoc unprofessionalism. They wanted a Corbyn loss and they took steps to make that more likely, sharing suggestions and plans for how to do so along the way. Any reasonable person would call that conspiratorial.

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But the thing is, even if it *wasn't* a full scale conspiracy (something which barring some as yet still elusive "smoking gun" will be difficult to prove) the behaviour of several cited in those documents was still disgraceful and unacceptable - and sanctions are highly likely to be warranted.

Indeed, the racism in some of those texts was galling. Can't say I'm surprised, tho.

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What does that mean?

Nice tweet I saw yesterday - on the lines of "lots of people out there who are totally not racist, but whose least favourite three politicians just happen to be Abbott/Butler/Lammy"

It's a dim middlebrow joke from a TV show that aired 15 years ago. It means the same thing as 'lightening rod'.

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These things will keep happening because, even if Corbynista Twitter were not arguing in bad-faith, as they are, it isn't possible for Starmer to appease them because it would make no sense for a high-ranking politician who believes the institutions of the British state must be reformed to respect the rights of ordinary people to suddenly turn around and decide they should go out of their way to be intelligible to a tiny, very weird subset of the population (i.e. people who argue about Labour internal politics online) and almost certainly make themselves less intelligible to everyone else. At some point we must simply start to ignore it.

I suppose the point is that most people on the left of the Labour party don't believe Starmer is such a politician. And they have a point.

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Also interesting is this.

That as basically mundane a personality as Corbyn excited such irrational extreme passions in *both* directions really is one of the paradoxes of the past five years.

No more a paradox than why trade deals and arcane debates about sovereignty drove so many to apoplexy in the Brexit debate. In both cases, the received wisdom of the status quo ante seemed so fixed - either due to its self-evident superiority in the case of supporters, or its unaccountable entitlement in the case of detractors - that the very effort of debating it automatically became a matter of moral conviction. To even entertain the notion that Corbyn wasn't a hero/villain, or that Brexit wasn't a catastrophe/panacea, was to adopt a perspective from which no common ground could ever be found.

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Also interesting is this.

That as basically mundane a personality as Corbyn excited such irrational extreme passions in *both* directions really is one of the paradoxes of the past five years.

No more a paradox than why trade deals and arcane debates about sovereignty drove so many to apoplexy in the Brexit debate. In both cases, the received wisdom of the status quo ante seemed so fixed - either due to its self-evident superiority in the case of supporters, or its unaccountable entitlement in the case of detractors - that the very effort of debating it automatically became a matter of moral conviction. To even entertain the notion that Corbyn wasn't a hero/villain, or that Brexit wasn't a catastrophe/panacea, was to adopt a perspective from which no common ground could ever be found.

Most Brexit voters did not care much about trade deals, or even sovereignty. It was immigration...

Well, not really. Immigration was the sharp and racist edge of the Leave campaign during the referendum, but the discourse during and after June 2016 has been propelled more by rhetoric of 'control', and the taking back thereof. Most of that was articulated in terms of transactional economic nationalism and ideological principle. Meanwhile, the Remain side was preponderantly fixated on the economic benefits of close alignment (again, before and after the referendum campaign).

In any case, the received wisdom about immigration was one of the things Brexit supporters found themselves stifled from criticizing. I don't agree with the need to criticize it, of course, but I can't really deny the opponents' impressions of how their views had been treated prior to 2016.

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https://twitter.com/BenJolly9/status/1309766414006398979

Sad to say, but this is a far more perspicacious forum for gauging popular opinion and political skill than PMQs ever was or will be.

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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. It's how the person is portrayed that matters, especially in putatively unmediated forums like Gogglebox.

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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).

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The shocking revelation for me is that googlebox is still on TV.

Ratings wise it pulls in at least a few million each episode. About the same as some of the better panel shows (QI, 8 out of 10 Cats), and about half as much as daytime soaps like Coronation St.

By contrast, PMQs only gets above 1M when there's a new leader or it's September 2019, and that only lasts a week.

My point is that the efforts of Starmer's acolytes to portray his forensic (ugh) performances in PMQs and the wholly predictable improvement over Corbyn's late 2019 numbers as something voters are impressed by is little more than wishful thinking. 

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The shocking revelation for me is that googlebox is still on TV.

Ratings wise it pulls in at least a few million each episode. About the same as some of the better panel shows (QI, 8 out of 10 Cats), and about half as much as daytime soaps like Coronation St.

By contrast, PMQs only gets above 1M when there's a new leader or it's September 2019, and that only lasts a week.

My point is that the efforts of Starmer's acolytes to portray his forensic (ugh) performances in PMQs and the wholly predictable improvement over Corbyn's late 2019 numbers as something voters are impressed by is little more than wishful thinking.  

i've been involved in politics for 40 years now, you don't need to lecture me or others on here about how polling or the media works. We already know.

(not to mention that my criticisms of both are on the record here and elsewhere)

And my anecdotal evidence - just as valid as yours - is that Starmer is doing "OK to decent" with most people. No, he doesn't inspire the devotion that Corbyn did with a minority, but that's not actually "normal". And it might mean he doesn't cause revulsion in another (ultimately larger) group either.

Ok Boomer

In all sincerity, I don't think 'OK to decent' is how most people see Starmer. For one thing, I doubt most people have seen enough of him to even form an opinion in the first place. Among those that have, perhaps 'ok to decent' was their first impression, but as the Gogglebox episode suggests, there's evidence of an emergent narrative of Starmer being weak and vacillating. I'm not saying such a narrative is necessarily fair or even accurate, but it's clearly there, and it's something that  'representative surveys' would struggle to capture.

Also, to return to the original point, I think Gogglebox has more validity than anecdotal evidence, but it is admittedly just as susceptible to curation and bias. That said, I also think it's a far better way to gauge how effectively a politician is doing (particularly the LO) than PMQs.

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Hehehe. Yeah, 1966 is right on the cusp. I think the US census uses it as the cutoff for the baby boom.

If I'd lived in the UK at the time the first election I would have been able to vote in was 2005, which I guess makes me a millennial. Not sure many of the people identified as such by the media would see me as one of them, though!

I've taken to calling <20s 'Zoomers' lately, if only because it lets me roll my eyes at them and say 'Ok Zoomer'.