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Author Topic: This Once Great Movement Of Ours  (Read 146687 times)
Filuwaúrdjan
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« on: May 07, 2020, 09:09:39 AM »

A thread for general discussion of the British Labour Party, the wider British Labour Movement and wider issues pertaining to the pair of them. Please behave.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #1 on: May 09, 2020, 08:12:26 AM »

I didn't say that, I asked if they still did.  As they did just a few months ago, I thought it was a reasonable question.  Apparently it's not and magically, Labour totally loves Jews now and there totally isn't still a problem.  Right?

Not at all: what has happened in this respect over the past five years has amounted to a public scandal and is being investigated as one by a statuary body (the Equalities and Human Rights Commission). The report is due out at some point over the next few months. It is likely that the report will be highly critical of what has happened, it is likely that the new leadership will move to implement its recommendations with something akin to enthusiasm. But until the report is published we're in a strange limbo.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #2 on: May 09, 2020, 08:18:09 AM »

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.

It's also the case that a) a substantial proportion of Labour's vote at the last GE was driven by tactical pro-European voting, only moved towards Labour quite reluctantly during the campaign, and can't really be seen as 'belonging' to Labour as such. Take that away and you're looking at 25-27% or so, and that b) most voters understand how FPTP works at a constituency level which means that to understand support you can't just look at vote shares. If there's massive consolidation behind the other party (and my God did we see a lot of that last year: the scale of anti-Labour voting in most of the country ought to be seen as quite shocking) then that's often a sign of the party in question being deeply unpopular. FPTP has always encouraged 'negative' voting, but it has taken widespread partisan dealignment for the impact to be visible in Britain.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #3 on: May 13, 2020, 06:54:51 PM »

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.

If you have a situation in which a large majority of the electorate has a strong affinity with either of the two major parties, then swing tends to be very useful as a gauge in that sense; after all, when that is the case then there is a hard limit on the extent to which public opinion can actually shift. When that is not the case (i.e. now, but also before the 1950s) then, yes, every election is a blank slate.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #4 on: June 27, 2020, 12:18:33 PM »

Former head of the Child Poverty Action Group and another Fabian (actually chaired the society for a time). Very much a serious, civic-minded social democrat, which seems pretty clearly to be Starmer's general preference.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #5 on: June 30, 2020, 07:22:27 PM »

Can someone explain the drama around STV?

It has been pushed for - initially more out of doomed enthusiasm than expectation - by some groups and individuals on the moderate Left for a while. The arguments in favour are fairly obvious: that the existing system (multi-seat FPTP) is the worst electoral system possible and produces perverse and undemocratic results; that factional sweeps (when they occur) leave substantial sections of the membership unrepresented; that the existing system results in giant, tightly-controlled slates and that this encourages all the worst sort of factionalist mentalities. There's also the small matter that it would make it a lot harder for any single faction to control a majority of seats on the NEC. And there's a final issue, and that is that transfers are very important in an STV election, meaning that transfer-unfriendly candidates will find it much harder to get in than transfer-friendly candidates.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #6 on: July 01, 2020, 01:18:08 PM »

There's also the position for the Socialist Societies, but a) it is one seat only and b) the only ones with large memberships are the Fabians and the JLM...
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #7 on: July 12, 2020, 10:56:55 AM »

This is more signifcant news for the movement & would be interested to hear others thoughts....

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/hardman-howard-beckett-takes-step-closer-to-becoming-unite-chief-and-thorn-in-sir-keir-starmers-side-3n9zw2w2d

Imagine having the absolute brass-neck to run for a leadership post in a British Trade Union after being fined for misappropriating money from the Miners Compensation Fund.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #8 on: July 12, 2020, 11:36:40 AM »

Streeting and McFadden both have very distinctive writing/speaking styles and it is generally not hard to work out who is who. Streeting gets a lot of heat from Online Radicals because he was in student politics when they were (or, actually more frequently, a few years after they were) and because he was on the other side. McFadden used to brief the old Labour Uncut website, of less than entirely blessed memory.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #9 on: July 15, 2020, 06:58:06 PM »

Not a surprise but a significant story.

I did laugh at the quote from an NEC member who complained that the party had received legal advice in the JC era that they would win; which ignores the fact that virtually every NEC claims to have 'legal advice' backing up their position (by favourite was in 2016 when the GS office & the NEC iirc actually had different advice) and also ignores that this is a political decision, not a legal one.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jul/15/labour-to-apologise-to-antisemitism-whistleblowers

It also ignores the fact that even if the Party were to win (which... well... hmm), there is literally no way it would be cheaper than settling now.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #10 on: July 16, 2020, 08:48:01 AM »

Suggestions seem to be that overall the report will be more "technical", and less denunciatory, than some may have expected/feared/hoped (delete as applicable)

That was always certain: the EHRC's job is to clean up institutions, not to pronounce Judgment on them for All Time. Though that certain individuals have left the Party's employment is important as well: there is no need to go to lengths to identify them and their specific actions (and dismiss them from their post) if they are already gone.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #11 on: July 18, 2020, 12:13:04 PM »

hahahahaha
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #12 on: July 18, 2020, 12:16:09 PM »

It also means that the trade union movement as a whole will be spared the humiliation of having a leading figure who was fined for pinching money off sick miners.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #13 on: July 20, 2020, 08:30:31 AM »

The funny handshake brigade strike again! And yet, that is actually the most effective (it isn't even a contest) large trade union in the country, somehow.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #14 on: July 23, 2020, 08:40:51 AM »

Predictably, many on the left aren't happy over the party's decision to reach a settlement with its former employees in the libel case resulting from *that* Panorama programme.

Which is extremely silly as not only had Starmer pledged to do this during the leadership election, but so had Nandy and Long Bailey. Even if we ignore any other considerations,* the financial case for settlements with apologies was overwhelming: it would certainly have cost the party even more had it not settled and won, and it is better to not think about the costs had it not settled and lost.

*Which we should not! I don't just mean the moral ones or the standard political ones and so on... the reality is that no political party in its right mind should ever submit itself to a libel case involving its internal operations because of the disclosure process. An awful lot of things that are best to be left as private information would become public knowledge.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #15 on: July 23, 2020, 08:54:22 AM »

Meanwhile, the outcome of the Unite Left endorsement has been confirmed. The levels of #banter in the details are... unreal...

Quote
Former Labour general secretary Jennie Formby – who had supported Beckett – was barred from voting as her subscription to the union was not up to date, sources have said.

on brand

Quote
Some 230 of Beckett’s 367 votes came from Scotland, where the union had launched a big recruitment drive at the Grangemouth oil refinery run by INEOS, whereas Turner’s were spread over the whole of the UK and Ireland.

FALKIRK!!!!!!
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #16 on: July 24, 2020, 07:57:28 AM »
« Edited: July 24, 2020, 08:03:47 AM by Filuwaúrdjan »

There's no point in picking a fight with someone who is already finished. Looks like a vendetta, and you want to avoid that. Better to use the forthcoming report* as the foundations for wider (necessary) changes to party structures and culture, and enforce matters rigorously and consistently.

A greater problem than former leaders would be quite how toxic many constituency and branch parties have become. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that some are now quite dangerous spaces: I am aware of cases where what has been euphemistically described as 'physical intimidation' occurring at meetings. I don't know whether the solution is to go down the route of research, special measures and the targeted expulsion of sociopathic monsters, or whether a wholesale reorganisation might be more effective and less painful. But it's a topic that needs discussion.

*Note that whatever it recommends will be compulsory anyway.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #17 on: July 25, 2020, 11:25:59 AM »

In essence (and we should probably not go further than that), this is likely to shift attention back towards the personal liability of those responsible for the creation and/or dissemination of the document. Complete mess.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #18 on: August 05, 2020, 08:27:35 AM »

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.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #19 on: August 05, 2020, 10:54:47 AM »

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.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #20 on: August 05, 2020, 06:33:36 PM »

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

Kaufman was senile. Started showing publicly obvious signs of dementia shortly after the 2005 election, and his subsequent deterioration was pretty rapid. Ended up saying completely disgusting and awful things on a regular basis and his behaviour in public became disturbing in other ways as well. There was an element of elder abuse to this from certain organisations, who found him increasingly useful. Part of the issue was that because he was always known to be kind of a prick, the assumption was that he'd just become increasingly bitter and cranky in his dotage. Right up until he started sounding like an actual Nazi, at which point he was basically muzzled. But still put up for re-election in 2015. It was awful.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #21 on: August 16, 2020, 01:00:22 PM »
« Edited: August 16, 2020, 01:07:24 PM by Filuwaúrdjan »

As I do not want to go anywhere remotely near to Corbynite Twitter, can someone explain to me what Starmer has done wrong this time?

Written an article for the Mail on Sunday in which he attacks the mess that the government has made over A levels, says that the government is failing children because it has not taken seriously the problems caused to education by the pandemic (points out that more attention appears to have been given to how to re-open bowling alleys safely than schools), and says that there cannot be any more excuses and that they must re-open schools next month.

I gather that this is bad because 'never opening schools again' is praxis, or something.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #22 on: August 21, 2020, 01:40:59 PM »

Note that ASLEF will almost certainly keep their seat because the sly buggers switched sides.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #23 on: August 25, 2020, 12:53:51 PM »

These gossip books are always a mixed bag. The general picture presented will be broadly speaking accurate (and some important things will be confirmed: my suspicion that for a time last year Corbyn and McDonnell were not on speaking terms, for instance!) but many details will be dodgy and some of the more colourful stories will be heavily embellished.* It seems unlikely to do many reputations many favours, with the rather large exception of McDonnell.

*Usually it is the source, not the author, who does this.
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Filuwaúrdjan
Realpolitik
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Posts: 67,609
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« Reply #24 on: August 26, 2020, 09:55:26 AM »

So, Tony Woodley will not be accepting the Peerage offered to him. His reasons are quite understandable and well-articulated, but you'd think someone might have... checked?
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