Next Labour Leader: Keir Starmer

[lordsummit]

He's abandoned, so far: BAME people, trans people, teachers, healthcare workers, social care workers, unions. It's a huge price to pay in return for appearing normal and sensible to a relatively small demographic, and he can't keep it up without support starting to fray, and then, potentially, collapse.

I see a difference between abandonment and what he’s done. PMQs has focussed on BAME. RLB did go into bat for the teachers, social media was full of black lives matter messages from him and Labour. He’s possibly not the only one who think white people chucking a statue into the docks in the name of anti-racism is perhaps not the solution and is maybe almost appropriation in the name of anti-racism. To my mind some of the white protesters (looking at the photos I believe that all bar one of the people moving the statue were white). The man who danced on its head when it was pulled down was also white. Look at the people pulling the statue down as well.

David Lammy has very persuasively called out the government over the BAME issue. Starmer has focussed on PPE and healthcare and the issue of allowing C19 patients into care homes without testing them first. He’s made his point, and he and his cabinet are slowly in my opinion anyway turning the screw. He wasn’t silent about the racist dicks out in force at the weekend, and he hasn’t turned a blind eye. He’s been left with a massively uphill task, a huge majority to try and overturn, and a prime-minister who currently seems to be Teflon coated.

How often did we hear from Jeremy himself? All too often it was McDonnell or Abbott sent out to try and defend him. These are difficult times, and people will soon turn against him if he constantly snipes and appears unsupportive. He has to win hearts and then minds. I think of it as a boxer who has to soften his opponent up by constantly jabbing until finally they expose themselves for the big shot.

I think you’re expecting too much now, and probably as I was in the latter stages of Project Corbyn smarting over your viewpoint being less prominent. We can’t go back to the electorate with a similar offering. We crash-tested that one and didn’t it go well? I don’t think we’ll win the next one, but we might just get in a position to form a meaningful coalition.

 

[gavreid]

They tend not to look at the beginning of the winning streak, not the end. That slow collapse is just put down to voters wanting a change, or perhaps finding Brown a bit prickly.

I guess we'll see what happens.

It wasn't slow Sean, they were hemorraging local councillors only a year or so after the landslide. They began very quickly to disillusion a lot of people, who had been desparate for a Labour Government for so long, by sticking with the Tory budget.

 

[Seanm]

I see a difference between abandonment and what he’s done. PMQs has focussed on BAME. RLB did go into bat for the teachers, social media was full of black lives matter messages from him and Labour. He’s possibly not the only one who think white people chucking a statue into the docks in the name of anti-racism is perhaps not the solution and is maybe almost appropriation in the name of anti-racism. To my mind some of the white protesters (looking at the photos I believe that all bar one of the people moving the statue were white). The man who danced on its head when it was pulled down was also white. Look at the people pulling the statue down as well.

David Lammy has very persuasively called out the government over the BAME issue. Starmer has focussed on PPE and healthcare and the issue of allowing C19 patients into care homes without testing them first. He’s made his point, and he and his cabinet are slowly in my opinion anyway turning the screw. He wasn’t silent about the racist dicks out in force at the weekend, and he hasn’t turned a blind eye. He’s been left with a massively uphill task, a huge majority to try and overturn, and a prime-minister who currently seems to be Teflon coated.

How often did we hear from Jeremy himself? All too often it was McDonnell or Abbott sent out to try and defend him. These are difficult times, and people will soon turn against him if he constantly snipes and appears unsupportive. He has to win hearts and then minds. I think of it as a boxer who has to soften his opponent up by constantly jabbing until finally they expose themselves for the big shot.

I think you’re expecting too much now, and probably as I was in the latter stages of Project Corbyn smarting over your viewpoint being less prominent. We can’t go back to the electorate with a similar offering. We crash-tested that one and didn’t it go well? I don’t think we’ll win the next one, but we might just get in a position to form a meaningful coalition.

I think it looks different to those in the groups he's failed so far to back, especially the more marginalised groups. He can't just stick Lammy out front and let him take the blows. He can't let black footballers put the work in and then take the credit.

Starmer himself was elected promising to take a similar offering to the electorate at the next election. The value added was going to be professionalism and "unity".

 

[AlexG]

This week alone he has been outflanked on racism by Cbeebies and on social justice/poverty alleviation by Marcus Rashford.

 

[lordsummit]

I think it looks different to those in the groups he's failed so far to back, especially the more marginalised groups. He can't just stick Lammy out front and let him take the blows. He can't let black footballers put the work in and then take the credit.

To be fair again, he has raised the fsm issue, Rashford has done a great job in pushing it forward. I don’t think any opposition politician could have managed that. Lammy is brilliant at it, All the teachers I know are not complaining about Starmer, they’re complaining about the chaos the government are causing. I’d suggest the way his approval ratings are moving suggest he’s doing the right thing. I do feel you’re projecting your own beliefs on others.

 

[ks.234]

.... All the teachers I know are not complaining about Starmer...

Not many teachers complained about Gove!

 

[Del monaco]

To be fair again, he has raised the fsm issue, Rashford has done a great job in pushing it forward. I don’t think any opposition politician could have managed that. Lammy is brilliant at it, All the teachers I know are not complaining about Starmer, they’re complaining about the chaos the government are causing. I’d suggest the way his approval ratings are moving suggest he’s doing the right thing. I do feel you’re projecting your own beliefs on others.

Agree.

 

[Seanm]

To be fair again, he has raised the fsm issue, Rashford has done a great job in pushing it forward. I don’t think any opposition politician could have managed that. Lammy is brilliant at it, All the teachers I know are not complaining about Starmer, they’re complaining about the chaos the government are causing. I’d suggest the way his approval ratings are moving suggest he’s doing the right thing. I do feel you’re projecting your own beliefs on others.

My views are partial of course, but I'm not making stuff up about anger and disappointment amongst BAME and trans activists and their allies. The extent to which disaffection at this level translates into electoral results is moot. But Starmer is taking a lot for granted.

 

[Kirk]

Surely Stammer has realised that Labour can't act like a Sixth form protest movement any longer and that the party needs to win over the majority of the working class to have any chance of winning a national election, a cohort that is now ethnically diverse and prizes family, fairness and hard work (traditional Conservative values; okay, maybe not fairness) over revolution, collectivism and nationalisation.

 

[ks.234]

Surely Stammer has realised that Labour can't act like a Sixth form protest movement any longer and that the party needs to win over the majority of the working class to have any chance of winning a national election, a cohort that is now ethnically diverse and prizes family, fairness and hard work (traditional Conservative values; okay, maybe not fairness) over revolution, collectivism and nationalisation.

When was the about Party in favour of revolution, collectivism and nationalisation?

(Yes, the LP was I favour of nationalising the railways, and so they should, but when it’s lumped together with words like revolution and collectivism it takes on a very different meaning)

 

[gavreid]

Labour right responsible for election defeat - as if we didn't know. We've been over the demographic arguments previously but the loss in support for the manifesto and the leadership was directly a result of the behaviour of the right.

Dysfunctional 'toxic culture' led to Labour defeat, major report finds

"They find that Corbyn’s leadership was a “significant factor” in the 2019 result. His public approval ratings collapsed at around the time a group of Labour MPs including Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna left to found the Independent Group, citing antisemitism within Labour and its Brexit policy."

"Labour would have polled 6 points higher" [without this shit going on]

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...lture-led-to-labour-defeat-major-report-finds

 

[Weekender]

 

[gintonic]

Key findings include:

• Labour “went into the 2019 election without a clear strategy of which voters we needed to persuade or how”, and failed to settle on a coherent message with the power of 2017’s “For the many, not the few”.

• “It was unclear who was in charge” of the election campaign, and relationships were soured by years of infighting which had created a “toxic culture” and “significant strategic and operational dysfunction”.

• Labour was outgunned by the Tories in the digital war, with messages poorly coordinated and most of them failing to reach beyond the party’s base.

• Helped by their clear “Get Brexit done” message, the Conservatives succeeded in turning out 2 million previous non-voters, accounting for two thirds of the increase in their vote share.

• Labour’s seat targeting was “unrealistic” and “not evidence-based”, and many candidates felt they did not receive enough support from the national party.

 

[gavreid]

Without AS-Gate and the behaviour of the PLP in general, Labour would have won in 2017 and we wouldn't be discussing this report. Nevertheless, the manifesto in 2019 would have been stronger without the sabotage that we now know had been taking place. Labour can't win without unity and it's this that the right (and soft left) has used historically to sabotage any prospect of a more left wing government - something akin to mainstream Europesn social democracy I mean.

 

[Seanm]

I've just skimmed it, concentrating on the media stuff, but it looks well researched and comprehensive. It doesn't spare the leadership by any means, but I'm glad it also has a lot to say about long term decline (especially the perception that "both parties are the same"), the structure of the party, and above all the need to engage voters at a local level (although it uses the unwieldy phrase "relational rather than transactional campaigning"). Unfortunately it spares the councils, and there won't be any renewal at the local level without addressing how awful many of them are.

The post mortem also says nothing about traditional media. I understand why - the minute you mention this you're accused of looking for excuses - but it's a major feature of the British political landscape. People didn't just spontaneously decide, between 2017 and 2019, that Corbyn was an antisemitic Marxist terrorist. The current strategy appears to be based on the assumption that the media system - which is in many ways simply part of the Conservative Party machine - can be gamed or at least neutralised, and it can't - except by Labour dropping 90% of the policies the report concludes are both necessary and popular.

 

[droodzilla]

Ash Sarkar (Novara) wrote a handy, and quite balanced, summary of the report:

If you don’t fancy wading through 150 pages of self-excoriation, here’s the gist. The shock result of 2017 made everyone a bit complacent come 2019: the party’s top brass ended up calling a General Election without much of an idea how to win one, nor how to mitigate the effects of Jeremy Corbyn’s poor personal polling, Brexit vote-switching, or perceptions of the policy platform. For Corbyn, the media’s relentlessly negative portrayal came as death by a thousand cuts to his approval rating, though the defection of Labour MPs to ChUK/TIG was, in hindsight, the moment of decisive plunge. The party’s civil war - no matter who can be said to be primarily responsible for it - had a debilitating impact on public trust in the leadership.

What’s more, some specific elements of the anti-Corbyn narrative (“[I’m] “Frightened at the possibility of a Marxist government. Disgusted at Corbyn being a terrorist sympathiser. Most disturbed about plan to nationalise BT as I fear it would allow a Labour government to spy on internet users”, said one 52 year old Lab-Tory switcher) chimed with longer-term drivers of Labour’s declining vote share. For the voters Labour have lost - older, town-based, less likely to have participated in higher education - the complaint has been “I don’t feel Labour represents people like me anymore.

According to the report, cultural issues have increased in salience at the expense of questions of wealth. Forty-odd years of neoliberalism have smashed to bits the institutions which tied an industrial working class to shared cultural values, and produced Labour voters. Former Labour heartlands have seen an exodus of the young to cities. And while support for leftwing economics has remained mostly stable, questions of belonging, identity and cultural positioning have polarised Labour’s once-stable electoral coalition. Labour had been haemorrhaging “socially conservative, anti-immigration and pro-Brexit voters” for some time. According to Datapraxis, 4 in 10 of those who voted Labour in 2010 and Leave in 2016 had already been lost by the Party in 2015.

Labour’s core vote, now, are young people, based in diverse cities, with progressive social values. Which presents a problem if you think in order to win back Labour’s lost vote, Sir Keir should come out as pro-hanging or something. Thankfully, that’s not a conclusion reached by the Labour Together report. TLDR, the report recommends sticking with McDonnellite economics, professionalising the party operation, make community organising more relational and less transactional. Oh, and do something about Scotland.

How reliable is this report? There’s something in there to both reassure and piss off pretty much every existing faction within the Labour Party. Whether its recommendations will be taken up or not depends entirely on whether Starmer and team have already made up their minds to go gangbusters on winning back socially conservative voters and abandon any vestiges of Corbynism. Sticking with the 2017 programme will be made more challenging by the composition of the Shadow Cabinet, though the risk of being outflanked on the left by Layla Moran (who’s making her pitch to the Lib Dem centre-left by backing UBI and free broadband) might mitigate the political instincts of, say, Thangam Debbonaire.

Perhaps the bigger obstacle for Starmer is his own reticence to shift the needle on points of principle. Johnson’s Conservatives have a canny grasp of the English appetite for authoritarian civic nationalism: the cultural shifts outlined in this report are likely to accelerate over the next 4 years, and at some point, Keir Starmer might have to try and change someone’s mind about something.

Although I'd love to know what the difference is between relational and transactional campaigning.

 

[Dave H.]

Labour right responsible for election defeat - as if we didn't know. We've been over the demographic arguments previously but the loss in support for the manifesto and the leadership was directly a result of the behaviour of the right.

Dysfunctional 'toxic culture' led to Labour defeat, major report finds

"They find that Corbyn’s leadership was a “significant factor” in the 2019 result. His public approval ratings collapsed at around the time a group of Labour MPs including Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna left to found the Independent Group, citing antisemitism within Labour and its Brexit policy."

"Labour would have polled 6 points higher" [without this shit going on]

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...lture-led-to-labour-defeat-major-report-finds

I read the Graun’s précis last night, and noted that it didn’t include any mention of the Labour right briefing against the party. So I figured the report was basically the Labour soft-right excusing themselves from blame.

It didn’t help that one of the MPs behind the group that produced the report is from up the road from me, and as far as I can tell was slightly ABC - she wasn’t among the rabid in that regard, but she was one of those who resigned and refused to be on JC’s front bench.

I’d rather not read the whole report because I think it’d be a threat to my wellbeing (I’m limiting my exposure to political stuff because of stress). But did I get the wrong impression?

 

[Dave H.]

Ash Sarkar (Novara) wrote a handy, and quite balanced, summary of the report:

Although I'd love to know what the difference is between relational and transactional campaigning.

ISTM relational is ‘This is Bill. Bill has qualities you share or admire. Bill also likes Labour. Be like Bill, vote Labour’. Whereas transactional is ‘Vote for us and we’ll give you stuff you want, or less of the stuff you don’t like’.

Another term that stuck out to me - how is the kind of nationalism the Tories are peddling ‘civic’? I (naively) take civic nationalism to be SNP-style, ie concerned with the wellbeing of those they seek to govern, and motivated by that to secede. But the strain the Tories have been trafficking for ages seems to be much more your bog standard malicious jingoistic exceptionalism.

 

[gavreid]

I’d rather not read the whole report because I think it’d be a threat to my wellbeing (I’m limiting my exposure to political stuff because of stress). But did I get the wrong impression?

No idea, I've no intention of reading it for the same reasons. We can leave it to Woodface to summarise for us all and then draw the opposite conclusions

 

[Woodface]

No idea, I've no intention of reading it for the same reasons. We can leave it to Woodface to summarise for us all and then draw the opposite conclusions

I have no interest in it. Nothing can be changed, read plenty of crap on here & wrote quite a bit myself.