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I would say the hard left proudly self identify.
It's a huge issue with party politics. We all fall on a spectrum of left/right/center on a wide range of issues. Sometimes on conflicting issues.
How can any one leader or MP really represent you? I'd much rather vote for the local person who has real life experience, understands compromise and the greater good (the greater good).
Life is nuanced, so should our ability to vote.
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Thread on recent polling:
https://twitter.com/keiranpedley/status/1443522335601045504 -
If I read that correctly, the suggestion is that the main reason why people don't believe Labour are electable is because people perceive the party as divided.
With all the mega brains arguing on the internet that trying JC again will succeed this time and Starmer is an idiot who doesn't know what he's doing, i'm not surprised.
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Although the other thing that stands out on that analysis supports what several have said here. Starmer is not capitalising on Johnson's mistakes. Johnson has seen a slide in popularity but those people haven't flocked to Labour...they've decided that neither of them are fit for purpose.
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From 2015, by David Stubbs.
HAVING seen the left wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's speech, I have to say I was entirely unimpressed. To begin with, he wasn’t even wearing any shoes. This was either through absentmindedness or as some misguided socialist statement of intent. Or perhaps he has gone quite mad and fancies himself to be Jesus Christ himself. Whatever, it shows that the left wing Labour leader Mr Corbyn has chosen to surround himself with incompetent advisors - or perhaps disciples? In fairness, it turns out that he was wearing shoes. However, given that it was impossible to tell from the way the cameras were set up, concealing him from below the knee as he stood at the podium, this hardly bodes well for the sort of open and honest leadership we were promised. Are you wearing shoes or are you not, the left wing Labour leader Mr Corbyn? Just answer a straight question.
The left wing Labour leader Mr Corbyn has a beard, and doubtless this is why the vast majority of Party members voted for him. However, beneath the beard lies the face of a clean-shaven man - like Ed Miliband, like Gordon Brown before him. We would do well to remember this.
The speech itself was hard to follow as he rambled across a whole range of topics - housing, Syria, inequality - which made it hard to follow. He could take a leaf from Tony Blair’s book. At a memorable conference in 1996, he repeated the word “Education” over and over for 45 minutes. This was political oratory at its finest. We who were there came away with a very clear sense of what the speech was all about. It was about education. We were able to write about it the next day in our broadsheet columns and write that, make no mistake, the speech had been all about education. There was no similar clear, binding theme to the left wing Labour leader Mr Corbyn’s speech. It was all over the place.
Finally, he failed to address a wider audience than those in the conference hall. Yes, inside the conference hall he was audible but go and stand outside in the street and all you could hear was the sound of traffic and the sea lapping against the pebble beach. The left wing Labour leader Mr Corbyn must find a way of solving this if he is to be trusted, and not just another clean-shaven politician whose gimmick is that he wears no shoes. It is all very well having principles and appealing to a “hard core” of voters but what about those who would never vote for him in a million years? Unconvinced Tories such as David Cameron? Instead of trying to placate Mr Cameron, trying to bring him onside, he spent half the speech insulting the man. I tell you this; unless the left wing Labour leader Mr Corbyn can find a way of persuading David Cameron to vote for him at the next election, then he must be considered the miserable failure many of us predicted he would be.
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The way Starmer dealt with the heckling was enjoyably awkward.
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Maybe people think its divided when they see things like Starmer ejecting Corbyn from the party and purging the left? If he's generating those headlines, then thats whats sticking.
Sure, of course its a two way thing.
That said, its not as if Starmer went into leadership with a plan to purge. He tried diplomacy and I expect realised that short of magically transforming into Jeremy Corbyn himself, was never going to have a constructive discourse with Corbyn fanatics. Once in that position, what choices does he have available to him? Spending the next few years infighting with people who will never accept his politics or attempting to unify the party and accept the cost/damage of losing some members?
And for what its worth, I like Jeremy Corbyn. He's a man, mostly, of great principle. Somebody who believes in a fairer world. On the other hand, he's also a man who repeatedly supressed reports into antisemitism and was found to have presided over the party during a period in which it was found to have broken the law.
From the EHRC report:
The watchdog said its analysis "points to a culture within the party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54731222
The issue of anti semitism was used as a stick to beat Labour to great effect in the run up to the 2019 GE and its an issue that had to be dealt with. Suspending a member who was responsible for the party during that period should not be seen as a purge.
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Seriously, I see so many people griping that when a Conservative MP is found to have broken the law, nothing happens to them.
Why is it so hard for people to support Jeremy Corbyn's suspension while an investigation is carried out into the strong evidence that Labour broke the law under his leadership?
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Why is it so hard for people to support Jeremy Corbyn's suspension while an investigation is carried out into the strong evidence that Labour broke the law under his leadership?
With apologies to Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his self-image depends on him not understanding it. We have a tradition of solidarity on the left, which says we stand up for those in our faction. Sometimes it can be a really impressive trait which gets things done - what trades unions achieved, what Labour achieved with the NHS, what Blair achieved with eradicating child poverty et al. But other times, it means we defend our factional allies even when they're being a bit cunty. Usually that's not a big deal but where it intersects with something like antisemitism - in which disbelieving the people raising the alarm is in itself is an example of the thing - it becomes truly toxic.
The proof of it is that we still call the EHRC ruling a 'report'. Even I do it from time to time. But it isn't a report. The Jewish Labour Movement's submission was a report; the leaked Labour report was a report; they were all witness statements. The EHRC judgement was the final word, and it found beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Labour Party acted unlawfully in its discrimination against its Jewish members.
It is statutory legal judgement. It is binding. It cannot be got out of. It must either be accepted, as I'm trying to do, as the shameful, awful thing it is. Or it must be ignored, denied, minimised, as many on the left are still content to do. It will sit there like a bone in our throats until we collectively sick the fucking thing up and deal with the fact that we all, every faction, every part of Labour, contributed to our failure to tackle antisemitism effectively. All Labour bears that shame.
Because of that denial from Novara / Canary / Skwawkbox (all the Corbyn outriders), the terrible significance of that judgement has failed to sink in for large chunks of the left, because it's been denied. For that, if for nothing else, they should be especially ashamed. And because a fish rots from the head, I think Corbyn himself bears the most responsibility for that denial. They took their cues from him. But he still thinks that he and his friends did nothing wrong. It's like every lag you meet in prison telling you that the judge misunderstood the law. Well maybe they did mate, but it seems pretty fucking unlikely to me.
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Quite a shallow analysis
Yeah, fair point. I wasn't happy with what I said after I posted it.
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He tried diplomacy
What the fuck?
He literally made a bunch of pledges to the Labour Left* and then completely reneged on them, and shortly kicked all the left out of his cabinet. There was no diplomacy at all.
I have no idea why he's doing this to be honest. While the heavily right wing tabloids pressed everyone into hating Corbyn (which he certainly didn't counter at all well) left wing policies themselves are still immensely popular - nationalising public services, taxing the rich increasing nhs spending etc.
I can only think Starmer's plan to win the next election is to get Murdoch's support with a bunch of economically right wing policies a la Blair.
(*like isn't Labour supposed to be a left wing party?)
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Well said. What you say about the EHRC ruling is spot on. And I think Starmer is trying to be seen to both deal with it and minimise it, for fear of losing more allies and as a result coming across as vague and dismissive.
However, I think its still true to say that Corbyn isn't the victim of a purge, he has been suspended pending investigation of his role. Whether that would have happened or not if there was no political benefit to this, I don't know. Maybe not.
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He literally made a bunch of pledges to the Labour Left* and then completely reneged on them
he made those pledges to the membership, spoke about unifying the party, taking the best lessons from the past few years and applying his own thinking. the legitimacy of his leadership is derived from the mandate given to him by those members who elected him on that prospectus. it is entirely his prerogative if he wants to renege on those positions and prosecute an entirely different leadership - but the democratic thing to do would be to take that back to the membership to endorse it.
I have no idea why he's doing this to be honest.
look at the donors he courted and the advisers he counsels.
anyway, user revenant was right. there's no route back to power for labour because their coalition's collapsed. game was a bogey when they died in scotland really - baw's burst mate
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If this really is the beginning of the end for Labour, where do their votes go next?
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The tories biggest success has been convincing the Red Wall constituencies that their labour MP’s have failed them. Not the governing party who had all the power.
If Labour fought the other side as hard as they fought each other they would be a force to be reckoned with.
Politically my aim is to remove the Tories from power. I see Starmers Labour as a good way of achieving that. -
They were always going to struggle with the new boundaries from the electoral reforms anyway and now that fppt has been slid in for Metro Mayoral votes, they can probably say goodbye to those as well
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I have no idea why he's doing this to be honest. While the heavily right wing tabloids pressed everyone into hating Corbyn (which he certainly didn't counter at all well) left wing policies themselves are still immensely popular
I think I can help here. You're right, left wing policies are extremely popular when they're passive (should we raise more money for the NHS?). But as soon as they're made tangible (we will be raising money for the NHS from YOU), they suffer from 'real world' wilt.
Look at the collapse in support for an increase in National Insurance to pay for the NHS backlog. In August this was a very popular policy - two thirds of people supported it, when it didn't really look like it was going to happen:
Within a month - and the ever increasing likelihood that it would actually happen - that support had wilted to 33%:
https://twitter.com/BritainElects/status/1435600668711075840
The people who changed their minds aren't evil. They're not selfish. They just thought about it a bit more. They moved a policy in their minds from the general to the personal - from 'should we do this' to 'how will it affect me if we do this - how will it help, how will it hinder, how much will it affect my ability to put food on the table'. This is the difference between thinking about a policy in general terms vs thinking about it in personal terms. We have to do both.
You might dislike Starmer but I think we can both agree he's a pragmatist who wants to win elections. If there was a simple, easy way to come up with a set of policies which were universally popular with everyone, he would take it. That he isn't pursuing left wing policies isn't proof that he's a monster, its proof that (to this best of his knowledge) doing so will not increase his chances of winning an election.
With love I think this is the trouble with factionalism. I did the same thing with Corbyn. 'Why can't he just back Remain' I'd say, 'the membership are all in favour of it, and it's the right thing to do, the man's a liar and a hypocrite and a coward'. It's that cartoon image of him I had in my head which prevented me from seeing the very real electoral calculus he was attempting to balance by NOT coming out in favour of Remain. It's very clear to me from the other side of the fence now - but I know when we don't feel listened to it's much easier to believe a cartoon version of our political counterparts not only exists but also runs the damn party.
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Look at the collapse in support for an increase in National Insurance to pay for the NHS backlog. In August this was a very popular policy - two thirds of people supported it, when it didn't really look like it was going to happen:
Thats a bit of a bad example imo. People turned on it because it was an utterly shambolic idea. Even Conservative ministers shied away from what was essentially an attempt to get low paid workers paying more tax to help elderly property owners pass on an inheritance to their families. It lost popularity because it was an epically unfair and bad idea.
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The proof of it is that we still call the EHRC ruling a 'report'.
As does the EHRC, no?
My understanding may well be off, but isn't any compulsion to act is because of the HRA / EA / other legislation - the EHRC cannot themselves directly compel action, but can seek enforcement through the courts.
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