This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[JimJamUK]

It’s a shame she’s forever damaged by the 2014 (non)incident and her general smugness (often mistaken for uber middle classness) as otherwise she’s one of the most high energy Labour politicians of the last decade and would be able to play a much bigger role in the party’s public communication.

[JimJamUK]

Is there a single voter who could possibly be gained by this tweet ? Like is there anyone out there like, I was going to support the policing bill but Rosa Luxemburg wouldn't haved like it so now I have to vote labour.


Also I find it weird how many people in the parliamentary labour party support the spartacist uprisings which was explictly about rejecting electoral democracy and social democratic parties in favour of Soviet style council governments.

You assume that Trickett is speaking to ordinary voters rather than riling up Twitter leftists who will be even more pissed off should Starmer make any sort of conciliatory comments about the bill in the future.

On the second point, the nature of the British 2 party system means that some really far left people have ended up in Labour (particularly but by no means only under Corbyn) despite the social democratic electoralist orientation of the party in government and even under left wing leaders in opposition. Apart from the general far left 'vibes' that some people would find attractive about this sort of thing, some within Labour spend increasingly too much time within the far left media ecosphere and therefore pick up ideas from more anarchist orientated people who are not in Labour themselves and even under Corbyn were not entirely comfortable with the party on policy areas like immigration and policing.

[JimJamUK]

Duffield does seem to have fallen down the ‘gender critical’ rabbit hole and some of her statements/appearances haven’t helped her, but AFAIK she hasn’t gone full on transphobe (more vocally moderately so) and the sort of abuse she and others get is awful and unacceptable (and FTR this sort of abuse comes from both extremes to anyone publicly disagreeing with them).

[JimJamUK]

A good amount of the poison in the immigration debate was based upon the fact countless politicians talked about the problems with EU migration and promised to deal with it, but then did nothing. This was particularly true of Labour who accepted the narrative but were even less credible than the Conservatives in pretending they would do something about it. Now that we’ve left the EU (or more specifically, as soon as we voted Leave), controls have been established and EU net migration has crashed, both the salience of immigration as well as the level of anti-immigration sentiment has fallen significantly. There’s still concern about illegal immigration (see the recent coverage of the Channel crossings) which Labour have avoided but the government don’t really have a plan to deal with either. Nonetheless, there’s probably a decent bit of room for Labour to support more economic migration in the case of areas with a shortage eg; care workers, fruit pickers etc as long as they make clear free movement remains finished under a Labour government.

[JimJamUK]

Leaving aside the morality/optics, if Duffield's main concern is ending the social media abuse then i'm not sure becoming a Conservative MP is the solution...

[JimJamUK]

None of those names surprise, a minor curiosity that they are all female though.

I seem to remember polling from years ago that found women were more likely to support abortion restrictions than men (we are not America!), though the politicians did not seem to reflect this.

[JimJamUK]

Phillips is easily the most right wing of those three.

Yet hilariously, the only one who is actually a member of the Labour Party!

[JimJamUK]

Well apparently Starmer spent a lot of his Sunday morning BBC interview trying to turn discussions to the current cost of living crisis.

But guess what Sophie Raworth (the interviewer) wanted to talk about instead?

I haven’t seen anything from interview so I may be completely wrong, but I’m going to guess ‘do women have penis’?

[JimJamUK]

It will do Labour good to remind people that Labour did good when last in power with concrete examples eg; minimum wage, investment in public services, gay rights etc. It certainly won't do them any good to associate themselves with Blair himself.

[JimJamUK]

Daily Heil are today continuing their obsessive jihad against Starmer and his supposed "Covid lies and hypocrisy". In aid of this they had a picture of him eating a curry with the clear implication this was taken when restrictions were in force. In actual fact, cropped out of the shot was a certain Mr Frank Dobson - who died in 2019. This has not stopped a certain Cabinet member tweeting it, though.

On a similar note, a Cabinet ministers claim of a Labour-Lib Dem local elections pact is given uncritical front page billing on the ToryTelegraph. Nothing to do with both parties having next to no support or members in the places they are not standing.

[JimJamUK]

We’re all the potential candidates problematic, or is this just a standard stitch-up giving Wakefield a choice of 2 leadership approved candidates?

[JimJamUK]

It’s also good news for Labour generally. The lack of new fines will mean Johnson’s leadership is now secure, but the fact he has already been fined and it is confirmed he attended law breaking lockdown parties means that the public still hate him, don’t trust him, and think there’s one rule for them etc. While the Starmer investigation will damage Labour even if (by the looks of it, when) he is found not to have broken the law, the Johnson parties to any normal person will look worse, and it’s not like the day-to-day politics of the economy are about to rescue the Conservatives anytime soon.

[JimJamUK]

Labour needs a landslide to govern with a majority these days, that's just math thanks to Scotland.

The problem for Labour is that accepting this reality will just reinforce it. There are a significant number of voters who can switch between Labour and the SNP which means the SNP majorities can be softer than they look (see the swings of every election since 2010). Labour need to go into the election with the clear message that Labour can beat the Tories nationally (and the SNP locally) and they need every vote to do so. Conversely, publicly accepting the likelihood of SNP support will both piss off tactical unionist voters but also tell SNP-Labour swing voters that they can still vote SNP and get rid of the Tories. Furthermore, it allows the SNP to market themselves as the only party that will stand up for Scotland's interest in confidence and supply negotiations and therefore people should vote for them if they want an independence referendum/general pork from a Labour government. Its very much in Labour's interest to campaign for a majority government, and if they have to acknowledge the possibility of SNP support then it should be that the latter will have the opportunity to vote for a Labour minority government to get the Tories out. If the SNP argue back they would need a 2nd referendum etc, then Labour can claim the SNP are not a reliable vote for getting the Tories out.

[JimJamUK]

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.

[JimJamUK]

“Voters at the East Stanley Working Men’s club were not impressed by Keir Starmer, and look likely to deliver another landslide for Conservative leader and local MP Hillary Rodham”.

[JimJamUK]

Based on this Neal Lawson article which seems to be the same thing he's been saying for well most of my adult life.

www.newstatesman.com/comment/2022/05/where-are-labours-big-ideas

“The tragedy, of course, is that this is the very moment for big thinking and big ideas. An age of permanent crisis – the crumbling global order, climate crisis, pandemics, the tech revolution, ageing populations – demands equally big answers… the Brazilian philosopher Roberto Unger and many more have ready-made responses but Labour is stubbornly disconnected from such global debate… It does so at a time when Joe Biden in the US and Olaf Scholz in Germany have purposefully reached out to the radical left for energy and ideas and won”

Nothing says a crap article quite like listing on-trend crisis and then telling Labour to go speak to a philosopher. Of course they’re divorced from the global debate, they’re not seeking to win a world debating competition, they’re seeking to win a British election and make life a bit less crap for ordinary people. And are Biden and Scholz really the best examples he could think of radical left ideas men? Biden is a generic Democrat (if unusually in a Labour party mold) while Scholz is a bland centrist technocrat governing with little coherence and certainly no big ideas. At least Lawson got his proportional representation plug in there, cos it was about as interesting as the rest of article.

[JimJamUK]

Though less excusable is the lionisation of him by #FBPE types as some sort of passionate radical.

I did a Twitter search just after his strike comments and a good proportion of the popular Tweets were FBPE die-hards slagging him off for supporting Labour’s current Brexit policy.

[JimJamUK]

Sqwawkbox (I know, I know) seem pretty convinced that Starmer has been fined and are predictably getting rather excited about the prospect.

Their evidence is that they texted Starmer and he didn’t text back.

[JimJamUK]

I look forward to care person personally campaigning in North West Durham.

On current polls I wouldn’t bother, he’s toast.

[JimJamUK]

Question for those with a better sense for THIGMOO dynamics:

James Frith, the former MP for Bury North (2017-19), has in the past few days been reselected by the local CLP to fight the seat in 2024. In the past couple of weeks, he's done a number of joint events with Christian Wakeford, and the two seem to be talking each other up - in public at least. Wakeford's fate doesn't seem to have been decided yet - from everything I can gather, Bury South CLP haven't announced a timeline for selection, or a trigger ballot. 

Does the embrace of Wakeford by local worthies like Frith suggest that he's more likely than not to win reselection? Or does the delay suggest that there could be a bit of a fight here?

I seem to vaguely remember Frith was quite positive at the time of the defection. The people who would be expected to dislike Wakeford are the local councillors (who he was slagging off shortly before defecting), the local activists (campaigning against someone tends not the breed comradeship), and the local members (who in Labour tend to be pretty left wing even now). I’m not sure you can read too much into the fact someone like Frith (and presumably the people in the party oking the events) are backing Wakeford, it’s the other people who decide and are harder to get a read on. My own guess is that Wakeford will be reselected, as he has been uncontroversial since defecting and local members probably won’t want to cause a fuss, which you really need to to get a sitting Labour MP deselected.

[JimJamUK]

Margaret Hodge attacking the weaponisation of anti-semitism shows how far we’ve come from the Corbyn days (especially given he got suspended for similar remarks). For background, she previously secretly recorded then leaked Corbyn discussing anti-semitism complaints, called him a “a f**king antisemite”, and then said the investigation into the latter remarks made her think about “what it felt like to be a Jew in Germany in the 30s”. She was previously a patron of the Campsign Against Antisemitism, but they forced her to resign as she was standing as a Labour candidate at the 2019 election, and therefore she has personal beef with them. The tweet comments are absolutely deranged.

https://twitter.com/margarethodge/status/1548787881631686658?s=21&t=Yd23OioO...

[JimJamUK]

I mean I would be voting to trigger Duffield! For a number of reasons but her case is very much not a left v right.

It shall be an in interesting day for the discourse if she is triggered though.

I can’t work out if it’s in Labour’s interests to deselect her or not. Keep her and you risk her keep talking about trans issues and unsetting certain people, or deselect her and the press/Twitter activists will erupt. I suppose the ideal scenario is that she STFU and be an uncontroversial Labour MP, but it’s unclear if she wants to do that given she’s both endorsed further trans friendly reforms AND associated herself with some very dodgy anti-trans activists.

[JimJamUK]

Renationalising the railways is one of those policies that’s so popular, and frankly so minor at this point, that a Labour politician really has to go out of their way to oppose it. Says a lot about Reeves/the powers that be that they’ve taken this stance (it seems). Not entirely surprising given her comments on welfare/the unemployed during the Miliband era, but not a good sign for those hoping a Labour government would do much to change this country (its increasingly reminiscent of the 2019-2022 Australian Labor Party, ‘we don’t actually have different policies, but we want a better country and we’re not those dodgy conservatives’).

[JimJamUK]

Just noticed something really surprising in Yougov data (so probably MOE). Starmer has a higher net favourability rating among Con2019-Lab2022 voters (57%) than he does among current Labour voters (52%). Obviously he has tried to moderate the party in ways that alienate core Labour voters (who nonetheless keep voting Labour), but to have that high a net favourability rating among people who’s attachment to the Labour Party is weak enough they voted Conservative at the last election is surprising. It does suggest that the people who are already switching are not going to rush back to the Conservatives, and they’ll still hope to win over at least some of the ‘negative about everyone’ don’t knows.

[JimJamUK]

Michael Crick says Rosie Duffield has been re-selected (and not even very close),

https://twitter.com/tomorrowsmps/status/1552757581264945152?s=21&t=u2VkdvQoN...