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After Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning general election vindication, he must now show real leadership by reaching out to all parts of the Labour party, argues Joff Wild
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"I see Chris Leslie has attacked Corbyn again today as well. The idea that all is well in the Labour Party is simply fantasy."
We've just had another election where Labour is still out of power, for x years, where x could be 5 until the next election. That's another tranche of their existing MPs heading towards the end of their careers.
The "one more heave" brigade will say they didn't offer enough sweeties, is all. I still reckon half the Parliamentary party will be deeply worried that will be enough to push their credibility over the edge. And there is no-one left to hoover up. If they want power, they have to persuade Tories of the delights of red-in-tooth-and-claw socialism. Good luck with that.
The alternative, to attract Tories, is that there has to be a degree of realism on what can be offered in the next Manifesto. But that would mean taking away some of the sweeties from those who just came out to vote for them. Tricky balancing act....
Both David and RochdalePioneers were obviously very well-informed about their parties' operations in key seats.
But the YouGov model should have been the focus of a really serious bout of analysis. It was obvious to most posters that its basic principles seemed correct. If people didn't believe the results, and yet the idea of the model seemed solid, it should have provoked extremely intense curiosity, particularly given the betting opportunities if it was even half-right.
(If it is the future, it might be time to learn some Python or R, or at least serious Excel wizardry...)
Some lessons for other MPs to learn from the way Kevin Foster worked his seat these past two years, perhaps? And even more impressive when you consider the LibDems had been pouring poison out to the voters about his supposed "dodgy expenses".
This is an interesting and very balanced piece Southam. Corbyn actually mirrors some of the problems of May - the coterie of advisers out of touch with the party being one of them, but in his case I'm not even sure the advisers are in the "right" party.
But that's because they are trying to reshape the party. As is Corbyn himself.
Labour would be a far more effective force if it all pulled together. That would involve reconnecting the leadership cabal (which seems to be, ultimately, what it is) with the wider PLP. Reports, indeed recordings, of PLP meetings suggest a state more akin to isolation, even war.
Corbyn talks about getting politics out of a box. But if you look at how his office operate, Corbyn has built a box around himself. The effect, insulating himself from the PLP, is surely deliberate. Asking him to tear down the walls he has built around him is akin to asking him to abandon his transformational project at the moment his hand is the strongest. He'd be a fool to do that, given all the attempts to depose him, without clear guarantees - assurances not being enough - on such key points as succession and greater power for the membership.
Corbyn's Labour presented a very clear alternative to May's Conservatives at just the right time to make election gains. I'm not sure somebody from the mainstream of the party could have caught the imagination of so many people in quite the same way.
The execution of aides is same as end of the sovereign.
@ShippersUnbound: Boris has decided to prop up May but his allies believe there will be a contest this year. Selling him as a liberal, popular, Brexiteer
ParistondaParistonda Posts: 1,218
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Winstanley said:
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I disagree, Brown and May showed that new leaders get honeymoons - as May's experience up to two days ago shows. Smartest thing would be to continue, take all the flack personally, and give way to somebody untainted who will then call an election.
Would May want to? The temptation to do a Cameron must be enormous. Who wants to limp through as a humiliated zombie PM through horrible brexit negotiations, chained in by her own subordinates, only to be given the boot as thanks at the end of it so that her hated rival can take all the credit and swan to victory. That is exactly what Cameron thought, and I'm sure May will come to think the same thing. She is 60, with diabetes, she has already achieved the pinnacle of her political career, she has zero allies left in the party and they hate her now.
I don't think she will be challenged, I think she will step down of her own accord.
https://twitter.com/ShippersUnbound/status/873646511292391424
But you could have had an unluckily unrepresentative sample in the particular parts of the constituency you worked.
Or a representative sample of a part of the constituency that turned out to be unrepresentative of the seat as a whole,
Or as you did, a representative sample of a representative part of the constituency that was, on the national scale, unrepresentative!
Ultimately polling data surely contains more information than anecdata. But the more quantitatively minded gamblers on here must be wishing they could apply their own custom weighting and turnout filters to the samples provided!
Labour only dipped below Miliband's percentage in the polls after the coup-attempt. They caused months of constant bad press for the party, expelled thousands of activists on the most spurious grounds (the vast majority of which were soon invited to come back and set up new direct debits to the party by HQ...), changed the rules to ensure thousands more couldn't vote by putting an arbitrary nine month cut-off date on which members could vote (January to the election in September) when previously it had never been more than four weeks before the day the results would be announced (for Blair, Miliband, Corbyn's first time).
It would be folly to trust any of these people with positions which they could use to damage Labour again, now they've remembered they're supposed to be officers in the army rather than observer-critics - the day after the battle.
Indeed, the current Cabinet reshuffle is strikingly slow. The lack of comment about that is also striking.
@michaelsavage: On Boris, as I understand it, senior Tories were sounding him out about a leadership as bad results came in. Allies say he's not manoeuvring
@jessphillips: I'm watching Pitch Perfect. Where a controlling group leader says they will enter the competition playing same old tired songs.
https://twitter.com/MsHelicat/status/873648092322684929/photo/1
A stop Boris piece?
https://twitter.com/mshelicat/status/873648092322684929
"Britain’s Election Disaster
Theresa May’s political incompetence carries a high price.
Theodore Dalrymple"
https://www.city-journal.org/html/britains-election-disaster-15247.html
"It did not help that she had the charisma of a carrot and the sparkle of a spade. As she presented herself to the public, no one would have wanted her as a dinner guest, except under the deepest social obligation. Technically, she won the election, in the sense that she received more votes than anyone else, but few voted for her with enthusiasm rather than from fear of the alternative."
I will now be taking an extended break from PB and other political sites and restricting my political news fixes and analysis simply to what I pick up in passing from radio and tv news and general conversation. These things can become to rather all-subsuming and obsessive with the details and I am going to disengage and step back. Its healthier.
Best wishes all
FattyB
Today there are only two triggers for a Tory leadership contest
1) 15% of Tory MPs write a letter to the Chair of the 1922 asking for a VONC
2) The Leader resigns
(Far harder in these social media and "personalised" web days, though.)
Thanks for all the articles you have written.
Right young man, you are getting the collected works of Clive James for Xmas and you are not coming out of your room until you've finished. And then we get on to Hunter S. Thompson and George Orwell...
It's just a question of 15% of MPs requesting a vote on the incumbent.
Whenever that happens, there is a vote - on whether current leader survives. There are no challengers at that point.
The above can happen at any time.
As you say, if leader loses, they can't stand in the resulting election for a new leader.
Members dislike them. The public doesn't know who they are. They are not the important political characters the kinds of Westminster-watchers we are might think them.
Wonder if SO will vote Lab under Corbyn next time for the best opportunity to get rid of the Tories?
Did some oldies sit it out, middle aged did vote more for Labour than Tories, or it was student surge.
Mmmm - not sure how he plans to do that... I doubt even the Jezziah has been able convert enough tory MPs to help him vote down the Queen's speech!
I do suspect that turnout was down among older voters.
“I Beseech You, in the Bowels of Christ, Think it Possible You May Be Mistaken”
In 7 years the Liberal Democrats have gone from a 45.2% share in Redcar to 6.7%!
Hearing that Labour's membership has surged to 800,000. On course to be a million-member party for the first time since the 1950s.
Its the place to be fancy rejoining SO?
People pay me for training on pivot tables, even conditional formatting. Very effective tools with many uses. If you know how to use them, you've got a valuable skill.
(The older versions of Excel didn't come with pivot tables built in, so if I wanted one I had to custom-make one in Basic. Complete PITA. But Excel has lots of goodies so many people don't use - form controls are pretty nifty too.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_local_elections,_2016
Foxes can rejoice.
Meanwhile, writing the next Labour manifesto will be an interesting challenge.
One thing Jezza has got right, and by belief, is to not interfere in local parties, to move away from central control. He genuinely believes in localism, even when it disagrees with him.