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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Playing the long game: what do Labour’s moderates do?
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Playing the long game: what do Labour’s moderates do?
Keiran Pedley posed a good question on Twitter yesterday, when he asked “I keep seeing people say that Labour moderates should now ‘act’. What does that actually mean?”. The problem is that those demanding action are often demanding the impossible – namely that they remove Corbyn and return Labour to a centre-left social democratic party.
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In the document, Global Science Research, Mr Kogan’s company, outlined terms and conditions that asked users for permission to collect information, including their likes and status updates as well as those of their Facebook friends. The terms stated that the company would have the right to “edit, copy, disseminate, publish, transfer, append or merge with other databases, sell, license . . . and archive your contribution and data”.
https://www.ft.com/content/6ef3766a-3368-11e8-ac48-10c6fdc22f03
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/31/mcdonnell-calls-for-lord-sugar-to-delete-corbyn-hitler-tweet
Army says fatalities include Hamas gunmen trying to breach fence;
https://www.timesofisrael.com/6-gazans-said-wounded-as-thousands-flock-to-border-to-protest/
Israel has certainly been guilty of over reactions in the past, but 30,000 people rioting and it appears they shot 14 gun men seems quite restrained.
#McDonnellOnManoeuvres
Time for the True Believers to move against the Columnist Within...
nuclear reactormeh, Corbyn has shown the voters don't worry about past IRA associations.....It's a Private Eye cover and with a different headline could as easily have been directed at Corbyn's critics.
The only thing that didn’t quite chime for me was this:
“Other than that, the moderates must hope that the faddists simply get bored with the Corbyn project and move on, leaving enough scope to act when the opportunity arises.”
I think the Labour Party membership are engaged and fired up.
I could see members giving up after a big defeat - but just drifting away feels unlikely...
What shocked me were that there were people shocked by this poll - especially Conservatives and moderates on twitter, who seem surprised at Labour members views re when they were asked about various countries. I’ve not gotten the impression, that many on the left shared similar outlook on these questions with Conservatives. It’s a situation where the PLP’s shared outlook with other parties on these questions are not really reflective of many on the left.
What it confirms (to anyone in doubt) is that the most hardcore of Corbynistas are representative of the Labour membership.
Keyboard warriors are all very well - but they aren't as effective as boots on the ground. And for many, that is a bit too much effort.
And there is also a significant minority of Labour members who are just sitting quiet in the hope that their party eventually sobers up.
This is all about differential turn out. The ongoing coverage of internal Labour struggles won't help drive people to the polls on 3rd May. There are plenty who identify as Labour but who will struggle to vote for the current party.
Somewhat brave of Sir Alan, but newspapers have republished it. Watching Corbyn or Labour trying to sue him over it would be popcorn time on steroids!
MPs and activists could make preparations to split, and use it as leverage to demand Corbyn and his supporters stop enabling and tacitly racism, and their nastiest instincts, or with regret they will be left with no choice but to campaign against the party and advise the public that he is totally unfit to lead the country.
So the extremists in charge of both main parties have the field to themselves.
Frankly, they are currently ashamed of their party and don't want to be associated with it. And the only thing bigger than the hundreds of thousands of members controlling its direction are the many millions of voters that empower it. They could say "we cannot in all conscience ask you to vote for the current Labour party" - whether because of Corbyn's supine attitude to anti-semitism alone, or combined with Corbyn's supine attitude to Brexit and/or his supine attitude towards the threat from Russia. This May, send a message - sit on your hands. They could use the expectation that Labour will do well to show they still have leverage on the voters. A poor set of results for Labour as against expectations - and they have demonstrated real clout for change.
It would at least be doing SOMETHING. It's not a mass resignation from the Front Bench. It's not committing suicide by forming a new party. It is appealling over the heads of the members to protect their Party. It's saying "c'mon guys, help us take back to where you don't feel dirty putting your cross against Labour".
It'd need altering, but the basic thrust is probably one all moderate Labour MPs could unite under.
Really?
Their only regret is that they got caught, this was a premeditated and organised attempt to cheat, which just isn’t cricket. Maybe they’re just trying keep attention on themselves to distract from how many more of their colleagues were involved.
Sod it.
Feelings trump everything. Even evidence half the time.
1.4k retweets of it so far, hope they’ve all got lawyers.
The UK's top police officer has blamed social media for normalising violence and leading more children to commit stabbings and murders.
Met Police commissioner Cressida Dick told The Times social media sites "rev people up" and make street violence "more likely".
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43603080
Serves them right, however.
I can't bluntly get worked up about them sandpapering the ball, because that's common. Where Smith and Warner's defence comes apart is that they bullied the most junior member of the team into doing it and then lied to try and cover up what they were doing while pretending they were 'fessing up.
I do hope Corbyn sues though. Watching the entirety of his past links with war criminals, Holocaust deniers, mafia governments and Nazi terrorists being thrown at him in a privileged forum would be funnier than Sunil's attempts to show The Last Jedi is a good film.
The difficulty with alternative leaders sitting back and waiting is 5that while they do, they get interested in something else entirely and go off and do it. Cf D. Milliband.
IANAL, but would find it hillarious if Corbyn took the bait and sued Sugar over it- it would keep the story running for months, and have Sugar’s very expensive team of Silks showing every piece of the reams of evidence about Labour and antisemitism to the court.
Meanwhile Comrade Corbyn’s Fan club would be saying that the courts are run by the Jews so it was always going to find against him.
What should Labour moderates do? First get some ideas. The majority of Labour's 570,000 members are not hard left ex SWP types but Corbyn won two leadership elections by having a vision of what a Corbyn government could be like that excited a majority of the membership. I started the 2015 leadership election as a Burnham supporter, but he only offered reheated Milibandism and the 2015 GE offer of "austerity but we'll be nicer about it" was an amorphous thing to sell on the doorstep. 2017 GE's pitch was a lot simpler to understand, both by the electorate and the activists.
If you go onto the Progress website you'll see moaning about Brexit, moaning about Corbyn, moaning about Corbyn's policy on Brexit but very little sense of what a more centrist Labour party would do in Government. Until they come up with something that makes the membership want to campaign for then they only have the three choices that David's identified.
David used the phrase "only eight years", yet someone's lifetime ambitions of world-kingship can go from strong to weak in much less time than that (as that ambition's originator has himself amply demonstrated). That the chicken coup was so badly and so obviously mismanaged is surely in large part due to its having had the 'wrong' motivations (insofar as the public/politics are concerned).
Seeing the prospect of government office slipping by does mean that we cannot rely on everyone involved to think and act rationally. Which may well be why some of them are once again stirring up internal dissent when the likelihood is that this will harm their party's prospects without doing anything to help point it in a more amenable direction.
*not financial advice, obviously*
Should be noted however that it's not only the faithful who are aggrieved. Even John Mann thought it was a step too far:
http://twitter.com/JohnMannMP/status/979816946869985281
King Cole, indeed not, it's very dark round here.
Mr. Herdson, good article. However, I do think a new party stands far better chance than most here assume. I still suspect it won't happen, but, if it did:
1) if every non-mental Labour MP defected, it'd automatically be the Party of Opposition. That brings with it short money exceeding all other parties, and guaranteed equal media coverage with the party of government come election time. It would relegate Jezbollah to the third party position.
2) the unions seem to be less than enthused with Labour. They could jump ship, taking the money and historic link with them, perhaps also calling in whatever debt the People's Party of Jezziah owes.
3) as you say, people are crying out for a new party. The Conservatives have recently done a cracking job on Russia but otherwise are stuck in a lacklustre limbo, and the Labour Party has been captured by the far left. There's a vast yawning chasm waiting to be filled in the centre ground.
4) other new parties elsewhere have stormed to victory. En Marche and Five Star are the most obvious options. The argument here is that FPTP prevents this recurring, but I don't believe that. It's an excuse. Starting from zero, the system makes things very hard. But starting from a theoretical 172 MPs, give or take, is entirely different. And, if the split happened now, the Labour-But-Not-Insane Party will have years of Party of the Opposition status to cement their status as the government-in-waiting.
5) election debates are seen as critical now. It seems likely there would be a three way debate (Conservative, New Labour, Jeremy's Communist Collective). By default, that makes the New SDP look the best, because the Conservatives will look a bit right, Corbyn will look very left, and the breakaway party will look like the sensible compromise, benefiting from both the novelty of being a fresh option, as well as the natural psychological bias people have to favour the centre option (Lib Dems benefited from this in 2010).
6) it could destroy the Corbyn anchor effect. I've said before, repeatedly, that Corbyn's an anchor for both main parties. On his side he has blindly loyal tribalists and, more importantly, his own Cult of far left nutcases. That means anyone worried about the prospect of his leadership has to back the blues. But if Not New Labour take over the mantle of leftiness and get significant polling, more sensible left people will jump their way. And then rightwingers (well, soft-right) may well decide the Conservatives need a break from government and the new party is a bit Blairish, and jump that way too.
It's an opportunity. But it won't happen. Labour MPs will grumble, some quietly, some loudly, and do nothing, boiling slowly. Their loyalty to their party brand will exceed their courage, or their repugnance at what's being done to it.
Where your post does fall down somewhat is that Corbyn's ideas while they may have been simple and popular were not only ludicrous and contradictory but in many places actively dishonest - even more so than Blair's infamous 2001 manifesto, which continues to bedevil student funding. Corbyn and Labour were very fortunate that May's pitch was no more credible (even if the country isn't).
Absent any real leadership or coherent platform, it does seem a quite likely fate.
The right of Labour has a lot to learn from the success of Corbyn , both in terms of raw appeal and organisation .
Equally the left has much to learn from the right in terms of forming practical policies and electoral success.
When you look at how right wingers have started to campaign and left wingers are thinking about policy as demonstrated by the manifesto, this process is clearly already happening .
The point is it's a fair comment in light of what's *happened*.
https://twitter.com/carriesymonds/status/979839679343288321
But then, Amanda Spielman's tenure as Head of Ofqual was an utter fiasco that I think will end in the courts this summer, and she's now free to screw up OFSTED as well (which she has with skill, speed and élan).
So clearly intelligence, integrity and administrative competence are not required for top quango posts in London.
It would need to be a leading figure in the party to stand up publicly and frequently for an alternatively vision of what Labour stands.
It's not so much a question of policy as of values. Acting as an independent in deed but not resigning the whip.
It will be deeply unpleasant for them as an individual, and may not achieve much, but will help to preserve the memory - and the future potential - that Labour could be something more.
Otherwise the issue is that, the longer the current malaise lasts, the more the nature of the MP pool and the membership changes and the more entrenched their world view becomes.
Corbyn was out campaigning in Milton Keynes on Thursday, for councillor Margaret Burke.
https://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/news/former-nazi-wins-a-labour-council-seat-1-3826439
Was it reported to someone else?
How do you define "serious"?
Whatever you think of the government of Israel they don't make a habit of killing people for laughs - they just are more tolerant of civilian causalities in achieving their objectives than we are. (And Hamas frequently uses civilians as a human shield).
Perhaps you have a link with more detail?
If the sensible Lab MPs are going to jump, they need to do it quickly and in numbers such that they become the Opposition.
Curious to know what someone on the left, but who is clearly not enamoured with the Supreme Leader, thinks of such a thing.
The responsibility for this sorry mess lies squarely with those who decided to cheat and not with their innocent relatives.