This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[EastAnglianLefty]

I’ve already moved on, and I urge anyone else to choose better, albeit now smaller, pastures from here on out. The Labour Party’s ability to serve the British working class is dead, with cheers from the holders of Capital in Britain ecstatic that the nominal left party is of no threat to them.

This sort of statement is genuinely hilarious when you consider the actual economic policies of Corbyn's Labour. They literally decided that they could only afford to either abolish tuition fees or reverse benefit cuts for the low-paid, and picked the former.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Labour Party is in a significantly stronger position than almost any other European social democratic party. Low bar, I know, but it must be said.

Not really. Spain, Portugal and the Scandinavian nations certainly have more influential social democratic parties right now. Labour has a higher base vote, but that's not a sensible comparison to use when comparing FPTP and PR jurisdictions.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Labour Party is in a significantly stronger position than almost any other European social democratic party. Low bar, I know, but it must be said.

Not really. Spain, Portugal and the Scandinavian nations certainly have more influential social democratic parties right now. Labour has a higher base vote, but that's not a sensible comparison to use when comparing FPTP and PR jurisdictions.

Historically one can say Tories benefites more from the FPTP system than Labour. After all Atlee won the popular vote three times in a row (1945, 1950 and 1951), but that last time Conservatives won the majority of seats (it's funny to think that Churchill lost the PV three times in a row).

On the flipside, FPTP worked to the Conservatives' detriment in 1997, 2001, 2005 (very notably) and to some extent in 2010. But talking about which of the big two the electoral system benefits is beside the point. The system as a whole benefits the big two, regardless of whether one benefits more than the other.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I think it's clear enough why it happened. The bigger question is whether the various groupings with mutually incompatible desires who ended up plumping for Labour are our ceiling or not.

[EastAnglianLefty]

is The swing needed to win 2024 attainable or is 2029/2034 more realistic for labour

Swing as a meaningful metric is just a myth at this point, honestly (if it was ever worth anything to begin with). Every election is a blank slate.

The utility of swing is mostly for working out which seats would be expected to flip first. It's never been that useful on a national level.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Worth noting that neither of the two other candidates who attracted support (Byron Taylor, former TULO Officer and Karin Christiansen, former Co-Op Party General Secretary) could reasonably be described as Corbynites, so it was largely academic anyway.

[EastAnglianLefty]

But also the things I stated, which seems to be what people are noticing more at the moment.

(and as if to illustrate my point, "Owen Smith" is trending on Twitter right now)

"People" are noticing this because "people" are hyper-factional clowns who make up for this by having no discernable interest in policy. Outside of Twitter, this is not going to be news - not least because 80% of the PLP backed Smith and a sizeable proportion of the 20% are no longer MPs anyway.

It is worth noting here that polling shows that only a small fraction of both Labour supporters and the electorate in general have a problem with Starmer's decision: https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1276530854391619585

[EastAnglianLefty]

I'd not be surprised to see full slates run, certainly on the left and probably on the right, as a) it's not uncommon for people to totally fail to understand the rules; b) they'll figure it's the best way to avoid vote leakage; and c) it's easier than having the argument about which slate candidates have to stand down.

I rather suspect first preference votes are going to show some high-profile slate candidates with high votes and some others at 0.X%. This may be a problem if there aren't transfer surpluses to redistribute.

Eddie Izzard and Ann Black probably have a reasonable shot at getting 10% of first preferences and hence being elected on the first ballot. I'm not sure anybody on the left slate is both well-known enough and popular enough with the hard-left to do the same.

That said, turnout for the NEC is consistently tiny, so the most you can hope for is very poorly informed guesswork.

[EastAnglianLefty]

That one is a complete red herring, as there's no reason to believe any other section would return a different factional balance under STV.

I think the union section is still done by general secretaries using bloc votes, but the representation is divided up broadly proportionally to the size of the unions anyway, with a small boost to the (generally much more left-wing) smaller unions. If the left wants to take control of the union section, it doesn't need STV for that, it just needs to get Unison back on side.

There are only three PLP representatives, and 3 quotas requires 75% of the vote. Corbynites don't have 25% of the PLP, so they'd be shut out anyway.

And there are only two local government representatives, but the position of the left in local government is if anything even weaker than in Parliament.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I agree with all of that and certainly don't see much reason not to just nod it through for the local government section. The MPs section is a slightly harder sell, but if a leader is serious about trying to make the party more democratic, it ought to be possible to bounce them into it.

However, I have no idea how you could convince the unions to agree to STV for their section (and it's not really feasible nor defensible to impose it on them based on everybody else's votes.) For starters, switching to STV but still letting union leaderships rather than affiliated union members cast the votes would be a total nonsense, but no general secretary is going to give up on that bit of patronage.* Secondly, there is an issue that the current stitch-ups do actually serve to give smaller unions a larger voice on the NEC than they would otherwise have, which is probably net positive.

I think we have to accept that the union movement has both good and strongly-held reasons for wanting limits to internal democratisation (the good reasons aren't necessarily strongly-held and vice versa, of course.) How we elect the NEC is always going to be a fudge and at the end of the day if things are going well we shouldn't notice it too much anyway. I'm inclined to say that if we can't fix the entire thing, it's probably just best to bank the victories we can win and move on.

*Also, on a cynical but nevertheless cautionary note, let's remember that nobody really thinks Unite's official membership figures are credible. This is bad and it will probably come back to bite them at some point. Having already lived through the Falkirk scandal, it would probably be best if the way that one gets revealed isn't through an NEC election blowing up in the Labour Party's face.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I think it would pitch itself as the Starmer Slate, but I'm not convinced that's terribly accurate. It's the traditional Progress/Labour First slate, it's just that Akehurst knows that there's going to be a benefit in appearing less factional this time. It's still a slate designed more around hostility to the left than it is around positive support for Starmer.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I think it would pitch itself as the Starmer Slate, but I'm not convinced that's terribly accurate. It's the traditional Progress/Labour First slate, it's just that Akehurst knows that there's going to be a benefit in appearing less factional this time. It's still a slate designed more around hostility to the left than it is around positive support for Starmer.

A discredited & unpopular faction hitching itself to the new powerful hegemon to help it push through internal changes & cement it's power- sounds familar!

But yes it's a slate that is opposed to Momemtum; rather than the left! Anne Black is just one woman but she is of the left & I think a lot of the right would (and did!) walk over hot coals before supporting her.

And I should have mentioned that for his faults Akehurst knew very early on that Starmer was the only horse in the race to rebuild the party & didn't engage in the stupidity of Jess Phillips campaign. Or the Draft Yvette effort.

Yes, but this is because Akehurst's foundational political principle is that the hard left need to be driven out of the Labour Party and if at all possible fired into space. His actual domestic priorities seem to be right in the mainstream of the soft left (he didn't just back Starmer, he also backed Ed Miliband for leader) but that comes second to grinding the CLGA into the dirt.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Yes, one could argue that, if one had absolutely no understanding of either Labour or the Liberals. One shouldn't, though, because one would get laughed at.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It's worth noting that the Youth Officer is elected by a 50/50 member/TU electoral college, with the TU votes being cast by general secretaries rather than young members in their unions. 2 affiliate nominations are needed to get on the ballot, meaning that candidates without any union support can easily be kept off.

McNeill seems to be a genuinely terrible individual in just about every respect, but (?) she's got the support of Unite and I think of most of the smaller left-wing unions.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Yeah, it was a way of stacking the deck - as the youth wing had tended to the right (especially under the previous system, which had a complicated process where various groups picked delegates who were the actual voters for the post) the aim was to use union votes to secure the seat for the left.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The CLGA slate was always going to include people with a bad record on antisemitism because *gestures at who actually makes up the CLGA*. However, this list seems to have landed particularly badly with the Twitter left because it also includes a number of transphobes. Not sure they're necessarily representative of the left members who actually vote in NEC elections (most of whom are about three decades older), but there's certainly a lot of bad blood as a result.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The sound is me banging my head against the wall.

This is the second week that Ed has been briefed against in the Sunday Times.

Last week had a reference to his 'predators' speech in 2013 & this one mentions Gordon so whoever is doing this is clearly hung up on the past.

I have no idea who it is but it's petty, destructive & serves no purpose; like this is what I call cruel briefing- it serves for no reason then to generate an awful story & slag someones character. Like please brief about current policy splits, debates etc but who cares frankly what Gordon Brown did or didn't say?

https://twitter.com/Gabriel_Pogrund/status/1282220526115618817

It was reasonably obvious who was briefing last week. It's less obvious this week, because the presumed culprit last week was much closer to Blair than to Brown. Nevertheless, given that Starmer is prepared to be very ruthless when it suits him and that from a party management perspective there are benefits from booting a mediocre right-winger off the frontbenches pour encourager les autres, this seems like a dangerous game to play.

[EastAnglianLefty]

In addition to the interactions from student politics, Streeting retains some of the rhetorical mannerisms you'd expect from a Labour Students hack, which is a red rag to a bull for the online left. He's also Jewish, which gave him extra reasons to be unhappy about a lot of what went on under Corbyn, and which is definitely relevant to some of the assumptions parts of the online left make about him.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Given that McCluskey only got narrowly re-elected in 2017 against pretty dreadful opposition, there must be a fair chance that Beckett won't win anyway?

(though I admit I know next to nothing about the other hopefuls)

I get the impression that this is part of the reason Beckett is trying to make the contest all about Labour - the aim is to appeal to the tiny number of Unite members who are active internally. If any opposing candidate actually manages to reach rank and file members by pointing out that the union is legendarily ineffective at advocating for its members, he could be in trouble.

I'd also note that GS elections in just about every union are distinguished by notably dodgy behaviour on all sides. This is considerably easier to accomplish when eg branch meetings can't be held, or can only be held via Zoom.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Getting rid of Leonard strikes me as a waste of time, because all the possible replacements are approximately mediocre as he is and spending time drawing attention to this doesn't seem like a great way to win support.

To the extent there is a viable electoral niche for Scottish Labour, it involves attacking the SNP from the left - it's notable that on a lot of the coronavirus relief measures, especially the ones relating to housing, the SNP and the Tories voted in lockstep, whereas the Greens tended to line up with Labour. Leonard is better placed to sell that attack line - not enough to keep his job, but enough that it might at least keep Scottish Labour relevant enough for a new generation of politicians to come through and spare us from the 1999 vintage.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Actually, I believe the decision was even more Machievellian than that - they ruled that she would need to resign in order to put herself forward for the selection.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Yes, but union leaders know how their interventions are going to be reported. This is sabre-rattling, the more measured words are just about providing plausible deniability.

[EastAnglianLefty]

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.

[EastAnglianLefty]

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.

[EastAnglianLefty]

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.