This Once Great Movement Of Ours

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There were actually two baby booms in the UK (one in the late 40s/early 50s and one in the early 60s), not one. Interestingly, the people born in between did not have a particularly lucky run of things (e.g. if you were born in 1953, you would typically have been entering the labour market in a serious way in the early 70s and, well, good luck with that), so a lot of the cheap, imported American generational rhetoric is not accurate and is probably needlessly aggravating.

Is it accurate anywhere?  Give silly names to arbitrarily defined "generations" if you like, but don't expect the places where you put the boundaries to actually mean anything.

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There were actually two baby booms in the UK (one in the late 40s/early 50s and one in the early 60s), not one. Interestingly, the people born in between did not have a particularly lucky run of things (e.g. if you were born in 1953, you would typically have been entering the labour market in a serious way in the early 70s and, well, good luck with that), so a lot of the cheap, imported American generational rhetoric is not accurate and is probably needlessly aggravating.

Is it accurate anywhere?  Give silly names to arbitrarily defined "generations" if you like, but don't expect the places where you put the boundaries to actually mean anything.

Sure, this is understandable and to some degree justified.

But there isn't much doubt, for example, that "boomers" are actually a real thing?

In the sense that there was a baby boom, yes.  But I think the great majority of present day references to "boomers" really just refer to older people generally, not specifically to those who were part of it. 

And "boomer" is the least silly of these "generation" labels.

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Andy McDonald resigns from the Shadow Cabinet apparently because Starmer wanted him to argue against a minimum wage rise.

I suppose at least this row is actually about policy.

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Well this is strange.

It seems like this is the reshuffle that Keir wanted to do in May.

There is a lot of sideways movement and some people who were getting jobs aren’t exactly the first name that would come to mind for their portfolio.

Quick and lazy suggest glance suggests Shadow Cabinet is moving to the right (but not of the Blairite flavour specifically)

Yes, I think that's basically it.

I don't and never have got the Cooper "fandom" (rather like Reeves, but even more so) but there is no denying that she is adored by both much of the media and a large section of online centrism. So her appointment isn't going to do KS much harm save with those who despise him already.

Good point about true believing Blairites not being that prominent (McFadden is rather the exception) and back in the days when it was *the* metric, Keir would have been a "Brownite" without question.

One to watch who hasn't been mentioned so much in the reporting yesterday - Louise Haigh. She has rarely failed to impress in her public appearances and her promotion is well deserved.

I agree on Haigh (MP for a constituency neighbouring the one I'm in); she's been very impressive whenever I've seen her.

I find Cooper can be very good on her day, but she can also be disappointing.  I'm still disappointed by her 2015 leadership campaign.

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The less said about Harman's second acting spell as leader the better.

Indeed, execrably bad. And very much a contrast to her first.

How much do you think that was responsible for Corbyn winning the leadership?  (As opposed to the campaigns of Burnham, Cooper and Kendall.)

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Does anybody have any inkling as to who the favourite to be Labour's candidate in the South Yorkshire Mayoral Election is? I haven't been paying attention to the state of the race.

A hunch would be Oliver Coppard- who imo should be the Sheffield Hallam MP. He stood against Nick Clegg in 2015 and your seat is actually one of the most depressing things about that night.

I know the left and some trade unions are backing someone else- I know next to nothing about South Yorkshire Labour stuff though.

Yeah - I like everyone else have heard nothing but good about Oliver Coppard. That left candidate is Lewis Dagnall who I believe is a Sheffield Councillor and the husband of Olivia Blake MP. From what I've seen he's campaigning heavily on transport - timely given the Stagecoach strike in Sheffield and Barnsley. However I've no idea how he's doing.

Yes, Dagnall is campaigning heavily on transport.  Most of what I've seen has been from him and Coppard but that's probably a reflection of where I'm getting things from rather than a strong indication that they're the front-runners.

I would vote for Coppard if I were a member.

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Does anybody have any inkling as to who the favourite to be Labour's candidate in the South Yorkshire Mayoral Election is? I haven't been paying attention to the state of the race.

A hunch would be Oliver Coppard- who imo should be the Sheffield Hallam MP. He stood against Nick Clegg in 2015 and your seat is actually one of the most depressing things about that night.

I know the left and some trade unions are backing someone else- I know next to nothing about South Yorkshire Labour stuff though.

Yeah - I like everyone else have heard nothing but good about Oliver Coppard. That left candidate is Lewis Dagnall who I believe is a Sheffield Councillor and the husband of Olivia Blake MP. From what I've seen he's campaigning heavily on transport - timely given the Stagecoach strike in Sheffield and Barnsley. However I've no idea how he's doing.

Yes, Dagnall is campaigning heavily on transport.  Most of what I've seen has been from him and Coppard but that's probably a reflection of where I'm getting things from rather than a strong indication that they're the front-runners.

I would vote for Coppard if I were a member.

Oliver Coppard has been selected as the Labour candidate for South Yorkshire Mayor.

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The Express is a particularly terrible rag and should be ignored.

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I suspect that there'll be a lot of "don't let the door hit you on the way out" type reactions...

However, I'm a little conflicted here.  I don't have much time for her position on the issue she's most associated with, but if she's really been the victim of "obsessive harassment" as she claims, then that shouldn't be acceptable (and, frankly, the people responsible aren't helping their cause much).

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There's no reason I can see why Labour would want to maintain an association with John Bercow after this report.

It's striking that it said that if he had still been an MP the recommendation would have been expulsion from the House.  This hasn't happened since the 1950s, though that is partly because in a handful of cases people resigned before they would have been expelled, and I'd assumed that it had more or less been superseded by the recall procedure.

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Who were the other 3 Labour MPs?

Mary Glindon, Kate Hollern and Rachael Maskell.

https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons/Division/1273#noes

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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.

After reading this I had a guess which Cabinet minister might have done that, so I checked.  I was not surprised.

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One of my more "right wing" opinions is that I fully understand why the national party wants to "fix" selections for high profile byelections (and most on all wings of the party who recall the famous 1980s disasters from not doing this will agree, at least privately) but there is really no need to be so clumsy and transparent about it. And given that a byelection is very likely coming up (Leicester E) where the Labour candidate being locally acceptable could well be very important, this matters.

Are you referring to Peter Tatchell in Bermondsey or are there other examples ?

Greenwich 1987 maybe?

I understand why the leadership is always going to consider some candidates unsuitable in a by-election, but what I'm less impressed by is the shortlist ending up so short; for a vacancy like this there must surely have been more than two suitable candidates applying.  I also don't think the leadership necessarily gets its judgement right.

Of course the Corbynites were perfectly capable of their own shenanigans around selections.  And Labour isn't the only party to have issues with candidates in by-elections, as we saw twice last year.

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Olivia Blake has resigned as junior climate minister. Not an explicit anti-Starmer resignation but not gushing..

Significant in as much as she’s one of the few campaign group members left on the frontbench and is quite good. It was a red flag for the bad operation in early 2021 that individuals were quitting for no real policy reason (which often means ‘I hate the job, the party and would rather spend my time doing what I want’)

My MP.  She's tweeted pictures of herself on the RMT picket line today.

She also has a very marginal seat that could be slightly weird in the next GE…

It could be, but as long as Labour's strength among students holds up I think she's favoured.  The currently proposed boundary changes are minor but to the extent that they change anything they help Labour.

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Wales could end up being very vicious just because of the number who might be left without chairs.

Though, amusingly, this will be as much of a problem for the Tories now thanks to '19 gains in North Wales and the elimination of the LibDems in Mid Wales...

The Mid Wales Tories are actually OK on the initial proposals as both their seats are expanded into neighbouring areas rather than abolished.

Retirements may solve some of these problems.  For Labour, Wayne David in Caerphilly has already announced his retirement, which would leave the proposed Newport West & Caerphilly for Ruth Jones, unless Labour actually select a new candidate for Caerphilly.  The Labour MP who seems most likely to lose out on the initial proposals is Beth Winter (Cynon Valley).

Meanwhile for the Tories it seems unlikely that Jamie Wallis (whose Bridgend seat is effectively abolished; the name is transferred to a successor to the existing Ogmore) or Rob Roberts (whose "Delyn" seat might provide a berth for one of the North Wales Tories who would otherwise be seatless) will stand again.

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Isn't Skwawkbox about as reliable as the Daily Express?

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

Hopefully she loses to the Tories.

I think the chances of whoever the Tories select in Canterbury being noticeably better than Duffield on trans issues are pretty minuscule, though at least they're higher than the chances of them being better than Duffield on other matters.

NB that's a seat where the boundary changes could make it harder for Labour to win.  The initial proposals don't make much difference, but IIRC there were alternatives put forward which would.

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The wing of politics he represents more generally seems to have a real problem with understanding that there can be such a thing as a simple war of aggression and conquest, and that such an episode is straightforwardly bad (without any qualifiers about "outside interference" or "underlying causes")

I think he'd see it if it were a Western power or ally doing it.

I used to think that I had a fair amount in common with left-wing "anti-war" movements, but I find the Putinophile tendencies many of them show completely incomprehensible.

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For those unaware, why is Tarry under so much strife for preselection? Especially given more controversial Corbynites (e.g. Sultana) look fine?

Because his original selection was a stitch-up and the person controversially excluded then has a lot of local support.

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There’s suddenly been a lot of noise in the Sheffield Central selection.

I believe there are four local candidates, mostly councillors (Mike Buckley, Jane Dunn, Rizwana Lala, Abtisam Mohamad), and two ‘celebrity’ candidates (Eddie Izzard, and journalist Paul Mason).

Curious if those with a better sense of THIGMOO movements have a sense of how it’ll all play out.

It's always going to be a high profile selection because it's a bit of a plum seat and because of Izzard's candidacy in particular.  (Though, on the plum seat thing, it's worth pointing out that Paul Blomfield only beat the Lib Dems by 165 votes in his first win in 2010, and the proposed boundary changes would certainly wipe that majority out with room to spare; if the demographics that have swung from Lib Dem to Labour since then were to swing away from Labour again they could easily be in trouble.  On current boundaries it had the highest student population in the whole UK in the 2011 census, and the boundary changes actually take out some of the least studenty bits.)

Another local candidate is Abdi Suleiman.  Only Dunn and Mohamed are councillors, and both are for wards in the neighbouring Sheffield Brightside & Hillsborough constituency (though Dunn used to represent Broomhill).

The Greens, probably the least unlikely challengers, have already selected Alison Teal, who used to be a Green councillor for Nether Edge & Sharrow and made her name as a tree campaigner.  However, she also appears to have TERF tendencies, so her selection is far from universally popular in the Greens.

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Thoughts on this from Michael Crick?

https://twitter.com/tomorrowsmps/status/1594288084786597888

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Since there doesn't seem to be a "dedicated" LibDem thread on here, maybe might be worth noting at this point that they recently deselected one of their candidates in a key target seat.

Crick also followed up the tweet above with one on the Lib Dems:
https://twitter.com/tomorrowsmps/status/1594296778723041286

The one you mention was a curious choice in the first place: the deselected candidate was a one time Lib Dem activist who moved to the Christian People's Alliance, having some senior positions within that party, and had more recently returned to the Lib Dems.  Now, you can guess what sort of views the CPA might have on certain issues, and how some of those views might go down in the Lib Dems.  There were also some mutterings about his campaigning skills, but I don't know what the real reason was.

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Abtisam Mohamed, councillor for Firth Park on Sheffield City Council, has been selected as Labour candidate for Sheffield Central, beating Eddie Izzard among others.  From what I've heard she's quite impressive.

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Abtisam Mohamed, councillor for Firth Park on Sheffield City Council, has been selected as Labour candidate for Sheffield Central, beating Eddie Izzard among others.  From what I've heard she's quite impressive.

The surprising thing to me about that result was that Izzard actually came 2nd (on the first round, anyway), which is better than I thought she'd do. Pick a more suitable constituency and she might have a decent shot at winning selection.

What do you think might be a more suitable constituency?

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Interesting Guardian piece on Labour frontbench dynamics- some chafing at the return of Douglas Alexander and rumours around Ed Balls and David M. Basically just a ‘well they weren’t here for the hard part why should they get a cushy job’.

To be fair to Balls the reason he wasn't "here for the hard part" was the voters of Morley & Outwood.  Boundary changes there are quite favourable as it happens...