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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Labour’s GE2019 post mortem
Proverbial wisdom tells us that success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. It’s a saying that appears to have by-passed the Labour party at least, since their general response to the election has been to hurl fistfuls of paternity tests at each other in a way that would send Jeremy Kyle off for a cold shower and a lie down.
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Clive Lewis joins race to be Labour leader pledging to 'unleash' party
Shadow Treasury minister says he wants to go further than Jeremy Corbyn in giving power to Labour
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/19/clive-lewis-joins-race-to-be-labour-leader-pledging-to-unleash-party
Some Tory leavers have assured us all that Priti Patel is a liberal Home Secretary.
I’m mocking those people.
What you write addresses part of their issue. To my mind though their main issue is that they are a party whose beliefs date to a hundred years ago. Some of the beliefs of that time which they had a big part in championing are so mainstream we wouldn't give them another thought. Some of the beliefs though are clearly obsolete. In particular Labour's economic policy is just ridiculous.
Labour need to reinvent themselves as a party of the people once again. They need to ditch ALL of the socialist economic nonsense. They also need to ditch all this 'rights' crap.
Representing the people as they actually are today - and that doesn't mean some weird person who can't work out their sexuality, or sex, or the day of the week - it means Joe Average - look at him, work out what he needs. That is what caused Labour to exist and that is what Labour should be doing.
I think Priti Patel will surprise you. The fact that someone called 'Priti Patel' is the Home Secretary is in itself a huge step.
Give her a chance TSE.
She has no place in the cabinet.
That’s not the most encouraging of thoughts...
But her elevation - a woman who ran a parallel foreign policy, and then lied to the Prime Minister about it, not once, but twice - to the role of Home Secretary worries me greatly. It suggest that honesty is not one of the qualities our Prime Minister is looking for.
As a result, its voters have abandoned it, and it is left with smugness.
They cannot see why constantly thinking themselves the right people to rule Britain and naturally superior to everyone else isn’t appealing to their voters. ‘We’re right! They’re just Tory scum! How can people not see this? They must be Tory scum themselves! Well, then they can fuck off and vote for them, we don’t want their support as they are Tory scum.’
O’Farrell’s memoirs, where he admitted he had become what amounted to a Fascist as a supporter of Militant, were an interesting example of this. But O’Farrell was just an ordinary member. These dafties are running the party.
And as long as they lead it, it’s going nowhere.
After the 1992 General Election, some political scientists implied that Britain was becoming a one party state, then The Tories discovered Baxter Basics. John Smith and Tony Blair found ways to make Labour electable.
I'm not sure if Labour have someone with above average political talent who could haul them out of the morass in the short term. The Party Machine and The NEC is packed with Corbyn's appointees. Can Labour find someone who will remove Momentum, Milne, Murphy and McCluskey from positions of power?
(I could add that she is well equipped for keeping seats warm, but that would be an inappropriate thing to say.)
The Tories have won a thumping majority and reacted with humility. The line to take is that they appreciate voters "lent" them their votes and will work hard to make sure they can justify getting the votes again next time.
Labour have had their worst result since before WWII and have reacted with arrogance saying "we won the argument" and that their policies and manifesto were popular.
Go figure. I know which I think is the smarter response to the results.
The obvious path out would be Labour sans Momentum. If this becomes increasingly unlikely and with the LDs dead in the water, I cannot yet see what the alternative way forward might be.
https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/24778/priti_patel/witham/votes
Corbyn’s biggest weakness were the following:
1. His lack of competence
2. His lack of self-awareness
3. His stubbornness
4. His sense of moral superiority which prevented him from doing what all leaders must do - convince voters of their arguments. Corbyn’s ‘your with or your against me’ mentality prevents this dialogue from occurring.
5. The lack of competence of those running his operation outside McDonnell (mainly Murphy, Milne, Murray et al)
6. His baggage on issues related to national security
7. The anti-semitism crisis which undermined Labour‘s image as an anti-racist party
8. The 2019 manifesto, which devolved into a large wish list instead of providing a vision and a strategy as to what Labour wanted to achieve in office and how it would achieve it. So much of their campaign was focused in free giveaways Labour failed to articulate what they stood for and their values - something they at least attempted to do in 2017.
Lefties on twitter are not really relevant to Labour’s issues. They skew younger, and are generally different from the demographic that makes up Labour’s membership which is, like other parties made up of older white people, who are relatively well off.
Corbyn’s Labour, however, told voters what they wanted, and then called them racist and stupid when they disagreed and asked for something else.
Whether Johnson will keep any of his promises is another question entirely. My guess would be he won’t, but even if he keeps just a few of them it still gives the Tories an edge on a continuity Corbyn candidate.
And the gloating in Sedgefield doesn't speak to humilty one way or another, it was clearly just for the fun of it.
And that's why we lost Blyth Valley.
https://www.gov.uk/complain-trade-union
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/18/jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism-claims-ludicrous-and-wrong
(Incidentally, Corbyn’s claims about Eisen in that article are patently false. Eisen has been a Holocaust denier for decades.)
At the same time, as your posts note, there is a tendency to throw the whole blame on Corbyn and his cabal and ignore the real problem - even when you get past his racist scumbaggery, the policies he stood on simply were not of interest to voters.
Tough on crime
Tough on the causes of crime
Good to know Labour members have finally appreciated my prescience
I utterly detest the man.
As I said in a post the other day, we need to address what matters to the middle 80%.
1) Free broadband
2) the destruction of private pensions
3) massive bribes to self-interested bleaters
4) Dithering on major constitutional issues
5) Huge unfunded spending increases on things they cannot quite define.
Labour’s last two manifestoes have been a mess. They got lucky in 2017 because the Tory manifesto was a worse mess. With Johnson cleverly learning from this and going policy light, the inadequacy of their proposals was brutally revealed.
Where it becomes complex is I don’t know if Walker was or is a union member.
https://twitter.com/cjayanetti/status/1207669648520560642
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/antisemitism-on-the-far-left-has-overtaken-antisemitism-on-the-far-right-according-to-research-1.493759
Roughly 1/6th of Labour support will be from the Muslim vote, and maybe the same from the hard left.
Then you have 1.2 million people working in the NHS and a million in primary and secondary education. I think the NHS works heavily skew labour and teaching slightly less so.
Finally the rest of the public sector also probably skews heavily labour.
So a manifesto that is antisemitic, promotes nationalisation, and heavy spending on NHS and hospitals looks like the way forward.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/19/ex-labour-mp-anna-turley-awarded-libel-damages-over-union-story?CMP=share_btn_tw
I have seen a suggestion from a Sunday Times journalist that the costs might be closer to £2m. McCluskey take a bow for fouling up big time.
I have no idea what Labour are going to do. At present they seem to be in a hole, the digging of which was often their own. It's so bloody deep I'm not entirely sure they will ever get out.
There are currently too many irreconcilables. Fissures so great no one may span them in a generation, in a century.
There is one unthinkable solution.
Split.
What did Boris say while he was in Sedgefield? Did he say "ha ha look at us we won the war criminals old seat" or did he say "thank you for lending us your vote"? One is humble, one is gloating, and without seeing him speak there I can guess which way he will have gone.
It's hope now. That Boris opening up the spending taps won't buy loyalty, that Brexit will be calamitous, and a change of face will do enough of a job for Labour. All those could be true, but it will be tricky.
That it were always the way, sadly. A distant relative of mine by marriage was Clive Jenkins' very attractive young mistress in the late 1970s and early 1980s.