Labour Party - Any other leader would be 20 points ahead

[Buelligan]

I think you should start a new thread for that one.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

But its in direct response to Keith's mad eye.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I knew the Suspiria remake was meant to be bad but I would have never dreamt...

[Buelligan]

But its in direct response to Keith's mad eye.

I'm just teasing, heheh. 

[Fambo Number Mive]

"Instead of us talking about what women in Clapham wanted us to talk about, we started a discussion about Cressida Dick, which wasn't the issue" Keir Starmer

Weren't most people talking about the response of Dick and the Met Police also talking about "what women in Clapham wanted us to talk about?"

[Sebastian Cobb]

He is a cowardly servant to the establishment and nothing will change until he's sent back in tears to the donkey sanctuary.

[BlodwynPig]

I knew the Suspiria remake was meant to be bad but I would have never dreamt...

Profundo Noioso

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I was actually relieved when Starmer was choosen. I don't know what I was thinking. Anyone but Cooper, I guess. More fool me and my stupid optimism.

I really wish Burnham had won in 2015. He would have been a mediocre PM, and I think Corbyn's popular (and youth) support would have rolled mostly independently, keeping old-left pressure on the center high and making more young, social justice minded people feel better served by class politics than liberal reformism. There would still be a 'Corbyn wing' of the party even if clipped. I don't think Corbyn's popularity had much to do with him being party leader - people just like him and his opinions, which is a shocka for the modern labour party. He'd have smashed on regardless.

Starmer the UK's Liz Warren: a smart, broadly well-intentioned person who is extremely impressive when campaigning for her own career position within her own party but fundamentally ill-suited for confrontation and more focused on symbolic issues than material reality. Someone with a conservative personal history who should be respectable right-leaner but ends up earning contempt for posing as a left-leaner. Someone who would be a major asset for any left-liberal party if it wasn't for the fact that they lust after the status of leadership positions they're absolutely useless in and show a narcissistic unwillingness to adapt their behaviours to criticism, blaming phantom biases for whenever they get disliked for doing and saying dislikable things.

[Fambo Number Mive]

looool they dont stop comin and they dont stop comin


https://archive.md/KyApC

(not paywalled but fuck the mail)

And if he'd done it after Johnson, the Mail would complain he'd taken too long. Nothing says respect for the Duke's death like using it for a party political attack.

[BlodwynPig]

Ah, you drew us in Video, but now you've revealed your true self. Could have stuck the dagger in but chose to offer the hand of attrition.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

the hand of attrition.

Sanded down to a nub I am

[idunnosomename]

you cant deny his haircut in the mail headline photo looks good though. thats gotta count for something.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Don't get me wrong, I loved watching Corbyn at PMQs. I was punching the air at times. I was moved by him reading Keats at Glasto. I thought free broadband was a genuinely visionary idea and I'm groaning that Biden is going to be lauded for doing it first.

But it was never going to happen. It was depressing to watch Labour's rhetoric stay radical but the content of their manifesto drift towards Guardian-y localism because they. Were. Fucked. By. Media. Corbyn was always going to be hung out to dry by the liberal establishment. Its a parable about a popular movement putting too much stock in electoral politics when it was already a force enough to have political establishment quaking in its boots and spitting out nonsensical smear campaigns from the very beginning (remember before anti-semitism, when it was Trot entryists trying to destroy the left? Remember people saying it was Telegraph readers registering as labour members?)

I'd have loved Corbyn to have a platform to bash the fuck out of his own party like he did to May and Johnson and Labour to be a strong enough position that they couldn't do owt about it. Now we don't have either possibility and an old guy who said "it'd be great if so many of us didn't needlessly die" is going down as the greatest bigot since Enoch.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Alan Partridge thinks Burnham should have won in 2015 too and he did that thing with the cheese.

[Buelligan]

I really wish Burnham had won in 2015.

I really do not.  Corbyn called people back to the reason why anyone cares and he gave us hope and a belief that things can change and we're responsible for changing them. 

Burnham's just another face - every time he spoke in those hustings, constantly repeating words like leader, like someone behind the scenes had told him how to hypnotise the dumbfuck membership.  We got plenty like that, politics is crawling with them.

We don't need another face (which was what Starmer was presented as), we need something real.

[Buelligan]

Don't get me wrong, I loved watching Corbyn at PMQs. I was punching the air at times. I was moved by him reading Keats at Glasto. I thought free broadband was a genuinely visionary idea and I'm groaning that Biden is going to be lauded for doing it first.

But it was never going to happen. It was depressing to watch Labour's rhetoric stay radical but the content of their manifesto drift towards Guardian-y localism because they. Were. Fucked. By. Media. Corbyn was always going to be hung out to dry by the liberal establishment. Its a parable about a popular movement putting too much stock in electoral politics when it was already a force enough to have political establishment quaking in its boots and spitting out nonsensical smear campaigns from the very beginning (remember before anti-semitism, when it was Trot entryists trying to destroy the left? Remember people saying it was Telegraph readers registering as labour members?)

I'd have loved Corbyn to have a platform to bash the fuck out of his own party like he did to May and Johnson and Labour to be a strong enough position that they couldn't do owt about it. Now we don't have either possibility and an old guy who said "it'd be great if so many of us didn't needlessly die" is going down as the greatest bigot since Enoch.

Maybe the people needed to see the Establishment grind Corbyn under their boots, just to finally understand what kind of game is being played.  Corbyn came to lay the road out.  Make a map.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Sadly I think "something real" is going to mean something outside of electoral politicals for the forseeable future.

Maybe a wave of local victories could change the landscape enough. I don't think the movement represented by Corbyn really needed the electoral route. It was more that the establishment needed Labour to play ball. (edit: Or grind them under their boots as you say)

The grim lesson from the 05-20 period for me is that everything major happened outside of elections: the rise of the tea party, the online brexit campaign, Corbyn, left wing revolts in Greece and Spain, Gilet Jaunes, BLM, etc. The difference is that the right has been able to successfully convert that extra-electoral political will directly into state power and law, usually with trojan horse candidates and issues, and the left largely has not as has shrank back after defeats in elections whereas in the states and the UK there have both been cases where the right getting thoroughly caned at the polls has been a good thing for them. Before winning a general election, the unelected PM Boris Johnson was the least successful prime minister in UK history

The media successfully painted Corbyn (and Bernie Sanders) as outsiders with a small, vocal support group that didn't represent voting public. Its so clearly false, its a hoodwink against pressuring institutions that the right wing never falls for. The message is that if you don't win the numbers war you won't win the battle of ideas. The fact that the most successful political movement of the last two decades was the fucking Tea Party should disprove that for everyone. Corbyn and Sanders absolutely won the battle of ideas, even before the pandemic, and they did it without winning elections. The tactic of the 'establishment' now is to act as though they didn't.

[Buelligan]

Dunno, think this is a bit off-topic for the Labour threads but would say, was Corbyn outside of elections?  And what was proper major about the gilets jaunes? 

I think there's something to be looked into (with the gj's) that points towards intersectionality - a bit like the support, at least initial support, for Trump.  People being so utterly fucked off with the Starmers and Burnhams (Burnham is not as bad as Starmer - but is that because he hasn't yet had the opportunity?) of conventional politics that left and right polarise round the back and create a new force.  There's a discussion to be had about that perhaps.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Dunno, think this is a bit off-topic for the Labour threads but would say, was Corbyn outside of elections?

The level of engagement from Corbyn was enormous, and wrongly dismissed as just students on Twitter. Nothing like that has happened in the UK since the winter of discontent.

People were arguing about ideas, not just in a poseury way online but actually engaging. Marx v Reformism, Socialism v Social Democracy, Localism v Internationalism, Identity v Class... even if most of this was internet tripe and bickering it is still tremendously exciting to see this level of engagement with the question of What Should Be Done? across all levels - academics, activism, aesthetics, party politics, local organising, media - electoral politics is a major part of it but its only one part. People with previously only vaguely liberal ideas about politics were getting super heated about everything from the Combahee statement to Max Stirner memes and Chomsky youtube poops. People were both questioning life long political beliefs and forging new political commitments that'll be with them their entires lives.

Its definitely a bamboozle to say that because the electoral politics aspect failed, the whole thing is over and none of the other stuff happened. If the right wing believed that about their movements, right wing political parties would hardly ever last beyond one election cycle.

  And what was proper major about the gilets jaunes? 

They've hamstrung both Macron's party (he is maybe going to run as an independent in the next election) and Melenchon's populist left party (he's got to constantly broker deals with the old left if he wants to do anything at all, his dreams of a populist wave pushing him to the last round of an election are over) - also gutted the national front's support at the local level before the pandemic made everything swing back around to Marine. They're also the group that the far right in other countries tries to emulate when they try to pose as misunderstood leftists, which speaks to their influence if not their coherence

GJ aren't great but they're a good example of an extra-electoral movement that seems to flip back and forth from a ramshackle collection of nobodies to a group with an inexhaustible ability to influence parliamentary politics from the exterior.

I think this is all very relevant to discussion of the current year Labour party.

[Johnny Yesno]

The level of engagement from Corbyn was enormous, and wrongly dismissed as just students on Twitter. Nothing like that has happened in the UK since the winter of discontent.

People were arguing about ideas, not just in a poseury way online but actually engaging. Marx v Reformism, Socialism v Social Democracy, Localism v Internationalism, Identity v Class... even if most of this was internet tripe and bickering it is still tremendously exciting to see this level of engagement with the question of What Should Be Done? across all levels - academics, activism, aesthetics, party politics, local organising, media - electoral politics is a major part of it but its only one part. People with previously only vaguely liberal ideas about politics were getting super heated about everything from the Combahee statement to Max Stirner memes and Chomsky youtube poops. People were both questioning life long political beliefs and forging new political commitments that'll be with them their entires lives.

Surely all of that suggests that it was excellent that Corbs and not Burnham won the leadership in 2015.

And seeing the austerity narrative get destroyed was educational.

I thought free broadband was a genuinely visionary idea and I'm groaning that Biden is going to be lauded for doing it first.

It's galling but the pragmatist in me feels that this is still a victory of sorts. There's a significant amount of cross-pollination between the UK and US left and the idea that the US left managed to sell our guy's idea to their centrists is impressive. Perhaps when they have free fibre-to-property broadband, it will be easier to sell the idea in this country.

[BlodwynPig]

Don't get me wrong, I loved watching Corbyn at PMQs. I was punching the air at times. I was moved by him reading Keats at Glasto. I thought free broadband was a genuinely visionary idea and I'm groaning that Biden is going to be lauded for doing it first.

But it was never going to happen. It was depressing to watch Labour's rhetoric stay radical but the content of their manifesto drift towards Guardian-y localism because they. Were. Fucked. By. Media. Corbyn was always going to be hung out to dry by the liberal establishment. Its a parable about a popular movement putting too much stock in electoral politics when it was already a force enough to have political establishment quaking in its boots and spitting out nonsensical smear campaigns from the very beginning (remember before anti-semitism, when it was Trot entryists trying to destroy the left? Remember people saying it was Telegraph readers registering as labour members?)

I'd have loved Corbyn to have a platform to bash the fuck out of his own party like he did to May and Johnson and Labour to be a strong enough position that they couldn't do owt about it. Now we don't have either possibility and an old guy who said "it'd be great if so many of us didn't needlessly die" is going down as the greatest bigot since Enoch.

Trenter?

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Surely all of that suggests that it was excellent that Corbs and not Burnham won the leadership in 2015.

Yes. But it also suggests that what propelled Corbyn in a landslide would not have dissipated into thin air had he not won, whereas the neo-blairism of Cooper and John Major 2.0 of Kendall have both vanished into thinktank history, replaced by Starmer's national identity politics (uh oh) and desire to emulate the US Democrats. By the time that liberal broadsheets were running scare stories about Corbyn, it was already a done deal that the movement forming around him would be a major force in UK politics for the next five years. My reading at the time is that they didn't want him to lose to get him out of the public eye, they wanted it to be a humiliating loss in order to knee-cap the movement because it was already too late undo what he'd achieved just by running as an underdog. The desire to humiliate him, rather than simply defeat him, was a major misjudgement and undoubtedly contributed to the scale of his victory and set the tone for liberal media opposition to him for the length of this leadership.

Its maybe wishful thinking looking back there is simply no way that, had Corbyn not won, the next five years wouldn't have been the same constant barrage of "this doesn't look good for Corbyn" that we had when he was leader. And there is a world of difference between attracting that kind of attention with the weight of general elections on your shoulders versus trying to push your party leftwards and political coverage can be "all news is good news" if your goal isn't personal victories but gaining popular support for the heterodox idea that eglaritarian economic policy can work with social justice reforms.

I'd have loved Corbyn as PM too. But I don't think that it was ever remotely feasible. And even though his 2015 platform was hardly radical, the level of ambition expressed by his movement in the 2016-2018 period, before Brexit got properly rank, was nothing other than a total reform of UK politics and a re-instatement of the welfare state: something that is much bigger than general elections. The idea that Corbyn should be judged on win/loss electoral results is a media narrative I reject - a narrative that they were already piecing together before he'd even won in 2015! I'd rather a moist Labour suit as PM and Corbyn still as a major political figure than Boris Johnson as PM and Corbyn run out of town. Much like, as bad as it is, it is a sliver lining that Biden is president and Sanders is a major (if compromised) economic advocate for left wing ideas instead of Clinton Prez and Bernie Sanders in Jail for Racist Memes.

[chveik]

Trenter?

clearly not

[BlodwynPig]

clearly not

it was response to the 'greatest bigot since Enoch' point.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

it was response to the 'greatest bigot since Enoch' point.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

I understand the point VGF2000 is making (aren't I smart).

Overall though, I don't think you can separate one from the other. Without becoming Labour leader Corbyn's ideas would not have reached critical mass, nor do I think Burnham was in place to profit electorally in 2017. It's highly likely that a more pro-Remain leader, as he would have been, would have hit real trouble and got sidetracked in between Brexit and whenever May decided to call an election. The manifesto would also have not been a social democratic one, as it was.

It's clear that the media and the establishment were not expecting and not prepared for Corbyn to do so well in 2017, so to confidently predict there was no chance he would ever have become PM is already, at face value, nonsense. They had profoundly underestimated him as well as the potential popularity of his policies with the electorate. Corbyn would have had a claim to form a minority or coalition government if Labour had won even a handful more seats, not fantastical given the slim marginal results and sabotage by Labour HQ which disarmed Labour's campaigning forces.

Likewise, if he had inherited more seats from the outset, rather than the 232 MPs he inherited in 2015 from the centrists, a 10% swing would have tipped the balance further. Yes, let's not forget that the wonderful electable centrists spent 5 years conspiring to lose a further 26 seats, and Ed Miliband won fewer votes than Corbyn managed in 2019.

So yes, to make bold predictions like that is, I'm afraid, both unwise and not giving true weight to the data or the historical context, in my opinion.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I think my speculating on who would have won and other "what ifs" does hurt my larger point, yes. I don't really have any argument for the fact that I feel that Burnham could have won the election or that Corbyn would have stayed as a major political figure despite scandals. Its just speculation based on what vote turnouts were like and the huge indifference to the London/upper-middle class centric Remain campaign. (I feel that Burnham would have done a good job communicating the benefits of soft brexit, and the current border related disasters happening now, to low income brackets and people without higher ed, but I wouldn't want to argue that point)

A lot of what I'm posting is just frustration at how easily the Labour right has been able to re-write history. Starmer's triumphant "the labour party is under new management" statement and all that. I'm hugely disappointed. I expected left-leaning liberals with social justice concerns, not liberal-leaning conservatives with an appetite for social justice branding. I went to the bar for a beer, the bar man said no beer but we can get you a mineral water, and I said alright then, and he poured me a thimble of his own piss.

Imagine if the right judged their movements the way that the Labour party has treated its left wing over the past 35 years: oh uh, MAJOR defeat in local election. Better get everyone who canvassed for these candidates out of the party! Oh uh, horrible racist twats spewing bile on TV, better sack them all right now! Oh uh, total failure to pass any legislation at all for months on end, better resign! Oh uh, popular candidate humiliated in a general election, better purge the entire party! Uh oh, everyone with a college education hates these Tea Party cunts, better publically distance ourselves from them and call them bigots on TV to make sure everyone knows we're not just them!

Clearly not. Every high profile event gets built into the same monolithic push towards passing their agenda through, at whatever cost. It makes me laugh when people claim that Steve Bannon was a  innovative genius for the maxim "politics is downstream from culture" when thats how its been since the 1970s at least. What's happening with the Labour party, and other mainstream left parties throaten the western world, is the liberal left embarking on a campaign to convince the socialist left to willingly abandon any progress it has made in extra-parliamentary politics, or any cultural shifts, or any promotion of its ideal to the wider world. And the beneficiaries of this aren't the liberal left, but the gilded human lampposts of the neoliberal center.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

In 2005 Tony Blair was returned as Prime Minister, with Labour having 355 MPs, but with a popular vote share of 35.2%, the smallest of any majority government in UK electoral history. In terms of votes, it was only narrowly ahead of the Conservatives, but still had a comfortable lead in terms of seats. The Conservatives returned 198 MPs, with 32 more seats than they had won at the previous general election, and won the popular vote in England, while still ending up with 91 fewer MPs in England than Labour.

Within this paragraph is the indication as to the ebbing away of Labour support that was concealed by their increasingly defensive electoral campaigning under Blair. In an odd echo, in 2010 Brown lost 91 seats. Miliband then lost 26 more. Then Corbyn inherited the wreckage.

Then, in the space of 2 years...

2001 (Blair) - 10,724,953
2005 (Blair) - 9,552,436
2010 (Brown) - 8,609,527
2015 (Miliband) - 9,347,273
2017 (Corbyn) - 12,878,460
2019 (Corbyn) - 10,269,051

Labour are going to be a very capable formidable party if they campaign on clear visible social democratic economic lines and speak directly to the people most inclined to support them. They are going to lose if they get sidetracked by nationalism, referenda, wars, etc

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Our only hope is crowdfunding a time machine back to 2010 and chanting "Punch her, Gordon" in unison.

Labour are going to be a very capable formidable party if they campaign on clear visible social democratic economic lines and speak directly to the people most inclined to support them. They are going to lose if they get sidetracked by nationalism, referenda, wars, etc

Focusing on social justice rather than economic equality has been a key platform of every non-Corbyn Labour campaign from 1997 onwards.

I'm letting my own biases show but Corbyn's steadfast denial of the doctrine that economic equality and social justice were mutually incompatible is perhaps key to some of his juicier turn out figures. Describing class politics as a form of social justice was always going to resonate with people who felt alternated by the false choice. And its probably telling that the 2020 manifesto and conference speech was the closest he ever came to giving an inch on that. Labour's demographics likes to hear it can have social reform and a fair economy at the same time, it doesn't like to hear that it has to pick between them (I think Remain ran afoul of this too).

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Labour's demographics likes to hear it can have social reform and a fair economy at the same time, it doesn't like to hear that it has to pick between them

Disagree, but probably no point raking over it.