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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Searching for a parallel to 2015
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Searching for a parallel to 2015
Parallels from the past can never be as neat as those proposing them might like to hope. For starters, any modern comparison for 2015 could never do justice to the SNP’s triumph, and what happens in Scotland over the next five years could dramatically change the Parliamentary arithmetic in 2020. Regardless, let’s see what we can come up with, focussing on the two main parties.
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In Xavi (Of Barcelona fame) words "His talent was simply out of the norm. He could simply dribble past seven or eight players but without speed - he just walked past them. For me he was sensational." What were those England manager's thinking?
Despite being written 100 odd years ago it is in fact about Scotland today.
@stackee: Because this is going to end well... lizforleader.co.uk http://t.co/6ClXAobymD
Dirty tricks already
http://lizforleader.co.uk/
Is McBride advising Burnham?!
Yes, good, isn't it?
Nice article, TP.
'The beating heart of Labour' ... is flat lining after a dose of C Diff, and a swig of stagnant water from the flower vase.
It has changed again. Don't miss the headline
@adamdfox: @Andy4Leader actually thinking about it, you'll be wanting to take some action agains this then won't you?
Let the games begin...
The next Labour leader has a difficult balancing task - one that all party leaders must do, but to an unusual extent. S/he must adopt policies that attract new voters without annoying current ones. The obvious way to do this is adopt a populist stance on the issues your core don't care about but floaters do, and hard-line policies on issues that they don't. So for example, Andy (as I will call the next leader) could advocate an EU referendum but higher spending on welfare. It won't be easy, and may not be possible. But I can't see any other way back for the Socialists.
Oh, and emphasise issues, such as housing, where they aspirational (who want to live in them) and the WWC (who want to build them) can agree.
Thatcher:Blair is the best comparison of the lot - though what's truly bemusing is how Thatcher was and still is hated by her opponents. Her own side largely adore Thatcher's legacy. Blair and his legacy are now hated by his own side.
This I think has left some confusion in the minds of people in the left. Those on the right want to win and are by-and-large happy with when we have. There may be some splits and grumbling but looking over the long term winning has been good for us.
When is the last victory that is untarnished for the left? In my lifetime three Conservatives have won elections (Thatcher, Major and Cameron) but Blair is the only Labour leader to have won an election, and even now his own side can't stand him. By the next election you will have to have be 64 to have been old enough to vote when anyone other than Blair last won a Labour victory.
If you can't accept your own side winning, why put in the hard work to make sure it happens again?
No chance of Burnham being Labour's quiet man though. They might wish he was.
Actually, they aren't really going to pick him, are they? Is their ambition for 2020 limited to winning votes back from Ukip in the north?
It's too soon for Liz Kendal. She probably knows this but will be well positioned for a senior role now. I think Hunt could have been good, though his performance today suggests otherwise.
That leaves us with Yvette Cooper. She won't win a general election but I would suggest she'd get a lot further along the road to power than Burnham.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"> <html> ' <head> ' <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; 'charset=iso-8859-1"> ' <title>Register your fucking domains</title> ' </head> ' <frameset rows="100%,*" border="0" frameborder="no" 'framespacing="0"> ' <frame name="site" src="http://bringvictory.com/" 'marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" noresize scrolling="auto"> ' <noframes> ' <body bgcolor="#ffffff"> ' <p></p> ' </body> ' </noframes> ' </frameset> '</html>PS Thanks for all the kind words below and to OGH/TSE for publishing this.
So the parallel would be whether we think the rise of the SNP could split the Labour party, allowing them to be replaced as a party of government. I don't see this happening, because the SNP are pretty much going to achieve Home Rule this Parliament, and so it's not an issue that could divide MPs in England.
http://order-order.com/2015/05/20/liz-kendall-campaign-site-trolled-by-burnham-fans/#_@/rsk_UkvM5ODVBg
I thought throughout the Blair years that the left were never really happy in power. They much preferred moaning impotently from the sidelines. Most of them just about tolerated being in power, but the only election-winning Labour leader in the last 40 years was always hated by a large number of his Party, though they had nowhere else to go.
Until the SNP and Greens ...
Any chance of including a permalink to Edmunds Wonderful Widget? In the Links section, perhaps?
BJO et all: If you prefer opposition to a Blair-like victory, the public will be happy enough to grant your wishes.
Self-serving politicians like Brown and Heseltine end up damaging their party, no matter how much they do before that.
You don't have to win to do a good job. Kinnock and Howard both did huge service to their parties, short of winning an election. Sure, Kinnock erroneously thought he could take the next step, but he left the party in a better position than he found it.
Anyone who doesn't stand because they don't want to lose an election should be identified and marked by Labour members as one to avoid in the future.
With Farage batting for Out, they'll lose.
This really made it easier for the Tory spin machine to keep the focus away from Cameron.
I would approve of the idea to renew the leadership term.In hindsight it is better to get rid of a leader who is not making the inroads than lose another election.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_movements_in_Europe
A few unconnected thoughts:
1. The next election won't all be about Labour. Governments lose elections more than oppositions win them. A good leader of the opposition can lose. A bad one can win.
2. Labour do not suffer a lack of ideas for development. Blue Labour, One Nation Labour and predistribution are all promising starts for policy discussions. Ed Miliband was unable to move convincingly from analysis to a coherent policy platform. That doesn't mean that others can't do it.
3. None of the potential leaders currently being touted look like particularly effective policy salesmen or women for those policies. That is the nub of Labour's problem right now.
4. There are leftwing alternatives to Labour as well as rightwing ones. Any potential leader needs to shore up both flanks. The days of campaigning against the party are gone.
With Farage batting for Out, they'll lose.
Absolutely. Either Farage has always been a fruitcake and has now gorn completely mad; or the result he wants is a narrow defeat in the referendum he campaigned against having.
A narrow defeat or no referendum at all represented respectively the second-best and best prospects for the continuing existence of the Nigel's Alliance for Zero Immigration party. The persistence of this party, as long as he gets to be in charge of it, is clearly his actual goal, whatever he professes.
He is in the same boat as Labour campaigning about poverty. There isn't any poverty to speak of any more, so Labour in office has to create more poor people as best it can - by making work uneconomic, or by putting working people out of work. Without poor people Labour has no raison d'etre so if necessary poor people will be created.
Likewise in the wake of an EU referendum nor does Farage have any raison d'etre. So if he can't thwart a referendum outright, he has to make sure, as second-best, that Out loses it.
This is best achieved by Nigel Farage associating Out with Nigel Farage.
I realise that sounds naïve and simplistic, but we need a return to conviction politics
And i'm still protesting on my Graham Allen island.
The Labour proposal was at best lazy at the election. It was a case of trying not to rock the boat and hoping to win by default, but don't rock the boat is supposed to be the mantra of governments not oppositions!
Labour stood against certain things. Non-doms, mansions etc - but what did they stand for?
Look at the NHS. The Labour phrase on the NHS was "an NHS with time to care" - what does that even mean? While the Tories went with "a seven day NHS with GPs available seven days from eight to eight" - an actual policy. In five years you can measure GP opening hours, you can't measure "time to care".
Even if they're technocratic policies, you need to be in favour of something. It's no good just trying to be against something and then hoping you'll win by default.
No-one else shared that conviction.
Conviction politics are good - only when the convictions are those shared by the electorate.
In the last thread you stated that you didn't believe that the Conservative Party moving right would open up any space in the "centre ground".
That would seem to be directly contrary to history. Political parties - especially in this internet age, and when class based loyalties are no more - cannot occupy all political spaces at once. When the Conservative Party got into bed with the LibDems and went after socially liberal votes, it opened a socially conservative space on its right. When the Labour Party in the early 1980s headed hard left, it opened up a space for a centrist, social democratic party to its right.
The Conservative Party has swapped social conservatives for social liberals. In doing so it has allowed UKIP to flourish, but hammered the LibDems. If it moves in a socially conservative direction again, it will likely lose those social liberal voters. They may not go to the LibDems, but you cannot occupy all spaces on the political spectrum at once.
(As an aside, I think fragmentation is not going away. Outside the US, it's happened in a lot of countries. In the Netherlands, there are five parties with 15+% vote shares. In Spain, four political parties are hovering around the 20% level. This is much more fragmentation then has been the norm in the last 75 years, and I see no reason why it should dissipate. 36% may turn out to be the maximum any political party gets in the next two decades.)
Labour's problem is that so much of what is has campaigned for is stitched into the fabric of modern society. Employee rights, universal health and education, suffrage, pensions, equality, housing etc.
There are no more worlds left to conquer. There is no moral crusade right now.
Make sure that all four remaining candidates make it onto the ballot if you don't want to p off the membership and see people leaving the Party.
Still: the Alliance managed to get 20+% vote shares while getting barely more than teens number of seats. I think you can only retain relevance in an FPTP world if you can build up a local government base.
Which is why the next four years will be so interesting. If UKIP manage to gain and run some councils, and the LibDems recover their local base somewhat, and if the Greens make futher gains at the local level, then I can't see any of them going (completely) away in 2020.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."
http://quotes.dictionary.com/History_repeats_itself_first_as_tragedy_second_as#WfV1Vd41vbocWIfk.99
In essence you've just described Conservativism.