At a time when coronavirus dominates the headlines, other news struggles to get out. Yet one piece of news deserves to get a much wider hearing, namely, the story of how Labour full-time officials opposed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party to a degree where they preferred the party do do badly in elections. The same party officials were responsibly for feeding contacts in the media a constant drip of anti-Corbyn leaks, particularly around anti-semitism and Corbyn’s alleged failure to deal properly with complaints. Now a leaked internal party report, commissioned during Corbyn’s time in office, has revealed some of what went on and much about the attitudes and behaviour of senior Labour staffers, particularly during the 2017 general election when Labour did better than expected and denied the Tories a majority. Reports: Aaron Bastani at Novara Media, The Morning Star (1, 2, 3), The Independent.
The details revealed are very shocking although perhaps not surprising to anyone who had encountered these individuals or others like them in student politics in earlier decades. Essentially, they regarded themselves as the true guardians of legitimate mainstream Labour, understood as being very right-wing social democratic indeed (probably well to the right of former leader Ed Miliband and possibly his predecessor Gordon Brown) and believed that the elected leadership of the party and the majority of the membership were illegitimate. The epithet frequently used is “trots”. They devoted their time to rooting out from the party those on its left by trawling social media for statements that could justify exclusion (perhaps someone just “liked” a tweet by the Green Party). In communications (including to a private WhatsApp group) they gave full rein to their attitudes and even violent fantasies about those they hated, expressed hostility towards Muslims and solidarity with journalists who promoted an Islamophobic agenda. During the 2017 election campaign, they diverted resources from marginal seats towards candidates they approved of, expressed dismay at any good polling results, and when the actual results started to come in were angry and disappointed that the party had done well. Following that election they redoubled efforts to destroy Corbyn’s leadership.
Now we have a new leader, Keir Starmer, who many Corbyn supporters, at least on social media, identify with the wreckers. I voted for Starmer and I’m happy to have him as leader and I think that identification is wrong. In fact a friend who very much identifies with the politics of the anti-Corbyn officials regards Starmer as tainted and suspect because he served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Corbyn-supporters also believe that Labour might have won in 2017 but for the wreckers (a result that might have spared us Brexit or led to a softer one). I think that claim is implausible, but what isn’t implausible is that Corbyn, without the undermining, would have squeezed the Tory numbers quite a bit more.
The spotlight is now on two groups of people. First, Starmer and those close to him. Are they going to take action against the former full-time officials and throw them out of the party? Or are they going to appoint them to senior positions: his rumoured choice for General Secretary is Emily Oldknow who features heavily in the WhatsApp conversations. Second, the journalists who were used as conduits by the wreckers. People like Michael Crick of Channel 4 News or the political staff of the Guardian, Times, Financial Times etc. Nobody can blame political journalists for making use of a good scoop, though perhaps they can be held responsible for a lack of scepticism. They have their own politics of course and in some cases may be under pressure to promote a proprietor’s line. But now that this story is out, they surely have a duty to give it coverage, to let the chips fall where they fall and to tell the unvarnished story rather than being the instruments of factions or interests. So far, crickets, or pretty much (this is the Guardian’s coverage, and this is the FT’s).
{ 84 comments }
Roger Gathmann 04.14.20 at 8:03 am
I have long wondered: why is it that British cultural journalism – The London Review, the Times Literary Supplement – is so good, and British journalism in general – the newspapers and tv – sucks? The coverage of the coronavirus (with special celebrity insert by Boris Johnson) is just disgraceful.
I suppose when all the people in power are educated pretty much in the same institutions, this is what you get. But it is extremely sad.
Hidari 04.14.20 at 9:51 am
@1
The TLS (currently edited by Stig Abell, who used to be managing editor of The S*n) is not perhaps quite as good as you remember it being, and it never takes any political risks.
The LRB looks good for the same reason that a diamond looks good if it’s placed on top of a steaming pile of horseshit.*
OP: ‘. First, Starmer and those close to him. Are they going to take action against the former full-time officials and throw them out of the party? Or are they going to appoint them to senior positions: his rumoured choice for General Secretary is Emily Oldknow who features heavily in the WhatsApp conversations. ‘
Well I hate to have to tell you but I think we all know what the most probable answer to that question is. Indeed, the way you have phrased it indicates, I think, that you know the answer to that question yourself.
*Indeed, the LRB is not perfect. It has its flaws. The issue is that it’s literally the only periodical published in the UK that’s actually worth buying unless you have a speciality interest (you’re into angling or yachts or skiing or whatever).
Phil 04.14.20 at 10:52 am
The story is starting to get a bit of attention in the news. To my particular surprise, this (unsigned) story on the BBC News Web site is not that bad:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52271317
See also this from Jon Stone in the Independent:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leak-report-corbyn-election-whatsapp-antisemitism-tories-yougov-poll-a9462456.html
I agree with the OP in not being hopeful about what this is going to say about Starmer’s leadership. He’s certainly not a right-winger of the old school – apart from anything else he’s an old Trot himself, and has never to my knowledge denounced or repudiated that part of his c.v. – but I can’t see any way out of this which doesn’t involve him endorsing one side and hanging the other out to dry, and when push comes to shove I think he’ll go Right rather than Left.
SamChevre 04.14.20 at 12:27 pm
I expect Labor to make the same decision about Corbyn opponents I expect the US Republican Party to make about Trump opponents–“let’s let the past be the past.” I can’t imagine that if a more normal politician than Trump were the most senior elected official, people who were privately hostile to Trump’s populist agenda, preferred that Democrats win to the most anti-immigrant Republicans, and so on would be squeezed out of the party establishment.
pseudo-gorgias 04.14.20 at 2:32 pm
Unfortunately, this stuff works. We just saw that over here in the states with Bernie. For the left, solidarity with the “moderates” is a one way street. We have to support them, or else we’re enabling the worst elements of the right. But they never have to support us, ever. That’s the lesson of the last four years.
wp200 04.14.20 at 4:04 pm
Hyperlink mix-up: the link to the Novara Media piece by Aaron Bastani unfortunately links to the Independent piece.
Here’s the Novara Media link:
https://novaramedia.com/2020/04/12/its-going-to-be-a-long-night-how-members-of-labours-senior-management-campaigned-to-lose/
[Thanks, fixed now. CB]
wp200 04.14.20 at 4:18 pm
The Guardian’s piece is spectacularly unclear.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/13/labour-leader-sir-kier-starmer-orders-urgent-review-leaked-antisemitism-report
It doesn’t mention that the party HQ was staffed by “moderates” who were opposed to Jeremy Corbyn.
This makes it seem as if the “hyper-factional atmosphere prevailing in party HQ in this period, which appears to have affected the expeditious and resolute handling of disciplinary complaints†was somehow Corbyn’s fault instead of his enemies.
Then the Guardian closes with “The previous Labour leadership’s handling of allegations of antisemitism against party members overshadowed parts of the 2019 general election campaign.”
Only the allegations weren’t handled by the political leadership but by Labour HQ, which was staffed by people undermining the leadership.
Robin McDugald 04.14.20 at 4:49 pm
When I read some of the reports on this this past week, I was thoroughly disgusted. Even should the people quoted go down the now well-worn path of (1) outright denial , then (2) claiming they were quoted out of context, and finally (3) making seemingly abject apologies, I don’t see why any of them should be allowed to remain members of the Labour Party. After years of voicing racist and sexist remarks about their political opponents within the Party, conniving to have false and ugly rumours spread about their opponents within the Party, and working hard to bring about the political and electoral failure of those they opposed within the Party, I fail to see how they can be said not to have brought the Party into disrepute. They, not the anti-semitism they worked so hard to exploit, are the real cancer within the Party. They should immediately be suspended from the Party , And should a fair an open investigation prove that they actually said and did what they are reported to have said and done, they should be ousted and never let back in.
R McD 04.14.20 at 5:06 pm
PS. Some more references:
https://labourlist.org/2020/04/internal-report-lays-bare-poor-handling-of-complaints-by-labour/
https://labourlist.org/2020/04/labour-can-only-move-forward-by-rediscovering-a-shared-political-purpose/
Also, it seems to be a bit ambiguous as to whether it is the content of the report or its formulation and its release which will be seriously investigated by the new Labour leadership:
https://labourlist.org/2020/04/starmer-to-commission-independent-investigation-into-leaked-antisemitism-report/
Hidari 04.14.20 at 5:25 pm
@7
The Guardian is ‘unclear’ about this astonishing story because no small number of the Kath Viner led newsteam were and are on the side of the Labour ‘moderates’, and while they doubtless disapprove of the ‘bad language’, and some of them might even disapprove of the openly expressed racism and Islamophobia (although be under no illusions, this number will be smaller than you think), a large minority of the Guardian permanent news staff (perhaps even a majority) will be in fundamental agreement with the Labour ‘moderates” point of view. And the rest of the staff will be prepared to go along with the ‘moderates” views because they have mortgages, rent to pay, no other career options etc.
And these staff members (i.e. the ones who supported and support the ‘moderates’) will not be, so to speak, randomly distributed. They will be, generally speaking, the best paid and the most ‘famous’ and influential of the Guardian news-staff (and their number will include a large number of very well known Guardian columnists).
fledermaus 04.14.20 at 5:54 pm
“You’re ruining the party!”
“Then we shall preside over the ruins”
We will see if the Labor centrists can expand the number of Labor MPs with a return to Blair-lite policies or if New New Labor follows the French Socialist Party into irrelevance. But regardless, it is their party and they are keeping it.
Cian 04.14.20 at 6:11 pm
Nobody can blame political journalists for making use of a good scoop, though perhaps they can be held responsible for a lack of scepticism. They have their own politics of course and in some cases may be under pressure to promote a proprietor’s line.
I think you give them way too much credit. The political correspondents hated Corbyn just as much as the Labour party apparatchiks. The Guardian’s coverage of Corbyn was positively unhinged – and only really made sense if they were actively trying to get rid of him. They published this stuff because it fit their agenda. Which is why we’re not going to hear much about it now, because that would require admitting some uncomfortable truths about UK journalism.
Jon Stone deserves to be better known. One of the few UK political correspondents who actually bothers to do journalism, rather than act as a laundromat for some political faction.
steven t johnson 04.14.20 at 6:43 pm
By my benighted standards as an USian, accepting a knighthood is an official disavowal of a Trotskyist past. And, refusing the title is the convincing way of showing they don’t really like titles.
The issue on hand in the Labour Party so far as I can see is whether the Corbynites are to be purged, not Blairites, traitors or no. It is highly unlikely that Starmer, who seems to me to be a Labour Party insider, certainly in the sociopolitical sense (DPP!) was any less aware than Corbyn of the how the party staff were.
It appears the central staff heads were an integral part of the Parliamentary Labour Party and Corbyn certainly knew what they were. Corbyn didn’t want to split with the PLP, so he didn’t want to split with the Blairite clique. (Yes, they aren’t just Blair clones, nothing is ever so simple, but this is a good enough tag for this purpose.) The belief that Starmer didn’t want to openly split with Corbyn doesn’t make him a leftist, it makes him a squish. As noted in the OP this is objectionable to the right-wing SDs. But then, right-wingers always object to playing for time and making strategic concessions.
And, unpleasant as it may be to interject actual politics into a debate on partisan loyalty, there was the sabotage in the last campaign. (If that were the issue, the self-defeating loyalty of Corbyn might be interpreted as proof that partisan loyalty is an over-rated virtue or worse, political cowardice, even a kind of treason to the cause in its own right.) The most shameful ploy was of course the anti-Semitism smears. I don’t think there’s the slightest doubt internal disloyalty inside the Labour Party took part in sabotage. If Sir Keir Starmer advised Corbyn’s unprincipled surrender, he was just as much a saboteur as any. Of course, those who really think anti-Zionism=anti-Semitism and Tory anti-Semitism=/=anti-Zionism will disagree.
wp200 04.14.20 at 7:28 pm
@10
I am not a native speaker and was hesitant to infer nefarious motives, but yes, it seemed to me that the Guardian piece was unclear on purpose.
That’s a shame, as newspaper websites without paywall go, the Guardian website is legible and they write about topics I’m interested in. I don’t mind an agenda, but I can’t stand a hidden agenda.
Cian 04.14.20 at 8:01 pm
The lesson from this if you’re on the left is that everyone on your right is your enemy. This is also the lesson from the recent US primary. At best liberals are untrustworthy allies who will stab you in the back, even if it means letting the fascists in.
Add to that the lesson that the media hate the left, and will lie shamelessly (even the so called left wing media) in order to destroy them. Not sure what conclusion one can really draw from this other than that for the left electoralism is not the way forward.
It will be interesting to see who is willing to learn that lesson and what they will do with it. Hopefully it will lead to wider forms of mass movement work and building coalitions. But it could just as easily lead to nihilism and revolutionary politics.
Cian O'Connor 04.14.20 at 8:05 pm
@wp200 – you can’t trust the Guardian on parliamentary politics. Or quite a lot of things sadly.
They’ve never been as radical as their reputation suggests – but in recent years they’ve become a sort of centrist establishment paper. Which just seems left wing in the UK because the rest of the media (except the Independent) is rabidly right wing and Tory. The writing was on the wall when their new editor dismantled their excellent investigative reporting team.
Barry 04.14.20 at 8:31 pm
SamChevre 04.14.20 at 12:27 pm
” I expect Labor to make the same decision about Corbyn opponents I expect the US Republican Party to make about Trump opponents–“let’s let the past be the past.†I can’t imagine that if a more normal politician than Trump were the most senior elected official, people who were privately hostile to Trump’s populist agenda, preferred that Democrats win to the most anti-immigrant Republicans, and so on would be squeezed out of the party establishment.”
I’m trying to figure out what this means – Trump has decisively taken over the GOP, and those who didn’t come on board early enough are out.
As for the original controversy, I’m more and more of the opinion that an EU/Scottish Republic/Unified Irish Republic operation will eventually have to invade and liberate what’s left.
At this point the English elite class has decided that it’s time to finish consuming England. The only cure is their destruction as a group with any power.
Kiwanda 04.14.20 at 8:35 pm
I know nothing about this particular situation, but it calls to mind what I’ve seen Jon Schwarz call the Iron Law of Institutions, namely, “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.” Schwarz discusses as one example McGovern and the Democrats. Freddie deBoer discussed Sanders and centrist Democrats in 2016 similarly, and in a different direction, campus activism.
NomadUK 04.14.20 at 9:52 pm
It’s a shame there’s no ‘like’ or ‘upvote’ button here, because I would not be able to hit it enough.
The astonishing thing to me is how angry and disgusted this has made me, even though I knew it was the case all along.
Sashas 04.15.20 at 5:10 pm
@Cian 15
Note the contradiction between “The lesson from this if you’re on the left is that everyone on your right is your enemy.” and “Hopefully it will lead to wider forms of mass movement work and building coalitions.”
Andres 04.15.20 at 8:47 pm
I’m not sure if cian is doing the sarcastic chest-thumping troll dance (especially when he equates “the left” with 20th century communism with the assertion that “everyone to our right is our enemy”) or if he’s serious. But he does have a point. The political landscape in all electoral-process countries is divided into (a) those who favor a malign oligarchy, split between a predatory financial wing and a racist/xenophobic wing, (b) those who favor a benign economic and political oligarchy (i.e., the center), and (c) those who favor true economic democracy. Although group (c) can win occasional victories, the electoral game is stacked against them because The House (groups a and b) controls the institutional means by which elections are carried out, the news media not least but also campaign financing as well.
Which means that group (c), whether Corbynistas in the U.K., Sanders supporters in the U.S., and radical leftists in Europe, has to relegate electoral politics to a strictly secondary activity and start to engage in non-violent revolt. As in refusing most of all forms of cooperation with governments led by (a) and (b), while also engaging in mass coalition-building to make sure that such non-cooperation is effective. The lesson of the past 20+ years is that it is time to stop relying on elections as the main weapon for bringing about progressive political change.
J-D 04.15.20 at 11:15 pm
It occurs to me that if my employer had evidence that I and my colleagues had been conspiring to sabotage our employer’s operations, then I would predict that disciplinary action would follow. To me it would seem strange if an employer failed to take disciplinary action against employees in such a situation, although not impossibly strange, stranger things than that having happened. The following thought occurs to me that although employers typically have the power to take disciplinary action against employees, they don’t typically have the same power against former employees. In some instances employers have the option of taking legal action against former employees, but not everything which is a disciplinary breach is also a breach of the law, and taking legal action is more burdensome than taking disciplinary action.
That happens a lot, unsurprisingly, but it’s not a universal rule, because if it were a universal rule there would be no examples of people voluntarily relinquishing power, whereas in fact there are examples of people voluntarily relinquishing power (I could list a few fairly easily): it may not be the usual thing, but it does happen.
J-D 04.16.20 at 1:55 am
Is it the case that everybody within the Labour Party but to the right of Clement Attlee was an enemy of Clement Attlee?
What is the evidence that working outside the electoral process is a more effective strategy than working within the electoral process?
Chris Armstrong 04.16.20 at 7:01 am
I haven’t read all the detail on this. But ‘preferring a party to do badly in an election’ covers two things that we might evaluate quite differently. If these people wanted Labour to lose, while winning was a realistic possibility, that’s very bad. But I take it from your post that this was not a particularly realistic possibility (hardly anyone thought Labour could actually win in 2017). If these people recognised that Labour were going to lose and hoped that defeat was clear rather than marginal, in order that a leader that they didn’t like would be more likely to be ousted, those improving their chances of actually winning next time…well then I am tempted to entertain a thought along the lines of ‘there but for the grace of god go I.’ Haven’t we all entertained thoughts like that, down the years? It’s a pretty common trope in football (I hope we get hammered, so they’ll finally have to sack this idiot manager and we can get back on track). Is it obviously wrong in politics?
I’m not interested in defending the things these idiots have said, which are, I hear, objectionable in all kinds of ways. And Corbyn is the only Labour leader I’ve voted for in many decades, so it’s not that I share their politics. I’m just interested in whether there is genuinely anything wrong in the preference itself. Maybe if what you want above all is to get the Tories out, then hoping that Corbyn lost heavily rather than marginally was not an unreasonable thing to hope for, or even to try and help bring about.
Hidari 04.16.20 at 9:03 am
I’m surprised that no one has linked this story and what it means to Bernie Sanders’ ignominious defeat, and what this means for the left in the ‘Anglosphere’ (short version: very bad things).
@22 This analogy (political party is a business, party leader is a ‘boss’) is a compelling one, but it’s not accurate. If I run a small business, ultimately, my employees’ wages come from…well…me, ultimately. Also I can get rid of them. In other words, I can ‘hire and fire’.
Corbyn (and Starmer) are not in the position. MP’s wages come from the State, and the Party Leader can not just hire and fire (he or she can in the shadow cabinet/cabinet to a certain extent, but that doesn’t hit an MP in the pocket).
Corbyn had an option to, so to speak, ‘install’ a ‘fire’ option (reselection) but because of ferocious pushback, he didn’t ‘follow through’: which was one of his many ‘failures of nerve’.
Don’t discount also the mesmeric power of ‘party unity’ on the Left. The right don’t care: they go into politics to make money, and which party they belong to is more or less irrelevant to them (cf Chris Patten who literally chose his political party by random chance). But, incomprehensible as it might seem to outsiders, there are many on the left who get dew eyed at the idea of the Party flag and singing the Party song.
Hence Corbyn was terrified of a split. And he wasn’t wrong. When the TIGgers went, it wasn’t much of a split, but their votes were crucial in terms of blocking one of Corbyn’s ‘compromise Brexit’ proposals and thus dooming his project. A larger split might have destroyed Labour (note that it’s only ever the Right who split because they don’t care: they want highly paid consultancies after they retire, that’s why they went into politics, so they have nothing to lose). Ultimately, Corbyn had little to threaten the Right with, but the Right had much to threaten Corbyn with. He could have stood up to them, but that was a high risk strategy, especially as he had so few allies. In retrospect, he should have done it anyway, as he had nothing to lose. But, obviously, he didn’t know that at the time.
CF also Sanders now accepting ‘hail fellow well met’ type greetings from Biden and with his followers being given ‘come into my parlour said the spider to the fly’ type video messages from Obama. Sanders is doing it for party unity, and because for many on the left a split in the party is almost literally the worst thing they can possibly imagine.
lurker 04.16.20 at 12:30 pm
Taking their base for granted on the assumption that they have nowhere else to go reduced Labour in Scotland to a single MP.
Could they manage to do the same in England and Wales?
Or will they just vegetate as a Tory Lite party that fails to get the elusive moderate Tory voters while demoralizing and/or expelling crucial parts of their own coalition (e.g. all minorities), without actually being replaced by some other party (LibDems, Greens, Plaid Cymru)?
harry b 04.16.20 at 1:38 pm
The culture around honours is complicated. Hard to explain but here’s a story. Two leaders of the Anti-Apartheid movement in the UK were offered OBEs (or CBE, maybe, which is between an OBE and knighthood — BE stands for British Empire in all cases). They wanted to turn them down, but were convinced by comrades to take them, because of the signal it sends to the wider public about the value of their work.
A scientist I know, a really hard line socialist and lifelong republican, accepted a knighthood on the first time of asking because he said that colleagues and students would benefit from the prestige it would confer on his lab, and he felt a responsibility to them.
DPP is one of those jobs where people generally get knighthoods afterwards, and its considered a bit weird if they don’t. Someone else I know eventually accepted a knighthood (under lots of pressure from various people), also having been in a career in which people who achieve a certain amount get knighted. It reached the point at which it looked a bit odd that less distinguished people than him were knighted and he wasn’t: it was obvious that he was just refusing it. Said person agreed to be knighted in return for a promise of a an injection of several million of funding into salaries of early-career professionals in a public service.
The whole system is very odd.
Starmer is definitely not a Trotskyist! Even though he had the most left wing platform of the candidates, I’d guess he’s somewhere to the left of Miliband and to the right of McDonnell (a lot of space there). But nothing follows from his acceptance of a knighthood.
Roger Gathmann 04.16.20 at 2:02 pm
#23 The evidence seems to be the leaked labour report. Pretty good evidence that the Labour party has a ceiling – centerist only – and the Left would do better emigrating to, say, a nascent Green party. Given that Labour is never going to get Scotland back, it seems pretty baked in that they are a minority anyway. Like the terrible pseudo-lefty parties that have collapsed in Europe, it looks like it is time for a re-alignment. Hard to tell what that will look like, but it is pretty clear that the soft takeover of left parties by “moderate” centrists – socially liberal, economically neo-liberal – has hollowed those parties out, lost them the working class and the young while gaining a foothold in the upper middle. Labour, in the midst of the biggest fuckup in modern British history, can’t even bring itself to criticize the government. It has a toasty feel to it.
Hidari 04.16.20 at 7:33 pm
One last point: don’t want to derail the thread. But remember this when people say ‘I prefer the cock up theory rather than the conspiracy theory of politics.’
But what is this if not a conspiracy? Albeit a rather stupid one, carried out by racist idiots. But, possibly a successful one (remember Corbyn didn’t have to WIN in 2017 to change history. All he had to do was win more seats than he in fact did. If he had, one of his proposed ‘Brexit lite’ proposals would have become law, and Boris Johnson would not now be PM).
Please bear that in mind when it comes to…ahem…other suggested conspiracy theories about elections mooted in recent years for which hard evidence has been, shall we say, somewhat lacking. The press went on about these and on about these and on about these, and didn’t stop talking about them for years (only the Covid-19 saga has really wiped ******gate from the front pages).
Compare and contrast the media exposure of what is undeniably and unarguably a genuine conspiracy, carried out, not by ‘foreign actors’ but by the Labour Right, to essentially throw a democratic election and hand victory to the Conservative Party.
Comparing this and contrasting these stories tells us much about the modern media landscape, how it works, and for whom.
Bob 04.16.20 at 8:48 pm
So Chris, is there in fact a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, or was this just some made up thing to hurt Corbyn? Your post isn’t really clear on that.
Raven Onthill 04.16.20 at 8:49 pm
Hidari, Sanders defeat was a very different matter. It wasn’t party insiders that made it happen, though they didn’t love him; the primary voters just wanted a familiar face and “normalcy.” He has now aligned with Biden because he regards Trump as “the most dangerous President in modern American history.” I think he sees Trump and his supporters as Nazi-equivalents, and he is probably right.
Chris Bertram 04.16.20 at 10:15 pm
@Bob the post wasn’t about that. But imo it is true both that there is some anti-semitism and that it was exploited to hurt Corbyn, including by some who cared very little about it as a wrong in itself.
J-D 04.16.20 at 10:56 pm
I don’t suppose the intention of this …
… or of this …
… was to be cryptic, but from the other side of the world the meaning is unclear, so I’d appreciate more details about what’s being referred to.
Collin Street 04.16.20 at 11:33 pm
But what is this if not a conspiracy? Albeit a rather stupid one, carried out by racist idiots. But, possibly a successful one (remember Corbyn didn’t have to WIN in 2017 to change history. All he had to do was win more seats than he in fact did. If he had, one of his proposed ‘Brexit lite’ proposals would have become law, and Boris Johnson would not now be PM).
No, not really. Two factors:
+ A siginificant fraction of the british conservative party are subordinate to specifically money-laudering interests in London. Not the general finance services, or even the corporate tax-avoidance schemes, but the “personal services”/”high net-worth individual tax structuring services” people. Probably numbers in other parties, it’s harder to tell from australia. Now the thing you need to remember about international money laundering is that russian oligarchs these days are subordinated to Putin and russian governmental power. Have been for a few years now. Which means that “subordinated to money-laundering interests” means, inter alia, “subordinated to people working for putin”.
+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault
A hostile actor that has control of more than one-third the control authority of a system can use that control authority to prevent decisions from being made.
Put the two together. Doesn’t matter how many more votes Corbyn would have got: as long as he had control of less than two-thirds of the house of commons it would be open to the remaining third to keep oddly switching to destroy the emergency of any decision to act. Obviously, not all tories are subordinated to agents of putin, and most of the ones that are probably don’t realise it in quite those terms and can only be influenced in certain ways without revealing the man-behind-the-curtain, but party loyalty is also an issue… and equally obviously it’s not like the labour party is free of people with links to money-laundering either.
It’s a significant issue and I don’t have a solution.
Collin Street 04.16.20 at 11:44 pm
Also of course the whole antisemitism thing turned out to be another, labour-internal, byzantine generals problem.
J-D 04.17.20 at 12:14 am
You dream superbly.
You remind of the old joke about there being two ways to win some war, one natural and one miraculous.
‘So, what would be the natural way for us to win this war?’
‘We pray to the heavenly powers, and a host of invulnerable angels with flaming swords appears to rescue us and vanquish our enemies.’
‘Then what would be the miraculous way?’
‘Our armies outmanoeuvre and outfight theirs. That would be a miracle.’
Collin Street 04.17.20 at 1:27 am
So Chris, is there in fact a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, or was this just some made up thing to hurt Corbyn? Your post isn’t really clear on that.
That’s an excluded-middle fallacy.
[the education system doesn’t offer a lot of assistance on learning this sort of thing; you’re sort of expected to pick it up sometime around high-school graduation or first-year uni. Which also means that there aren’t remedial resources either, if you don’t; access to cultural capital has a huge impact. You’ll have to self-teach, I’m afraid.]
J-D 04.17.20 at 2:03 am
Yes. That’s true for general reasons, but it’s even more emphatically the case in this instance.
It may even be true in football, for all I know (or care). Just because it’s common for people to hope for their own football team to get hammered, doesn’t mean it’s right. But the outcomes of football matches don’t (I hope this is obvious) matter in the same way that the outcomes of elections do.
It’s fairly common for election outcomes to seem overdetermined in retrospect. However, actually being predictable with certainty in advance is not the same thing as seeming so in retrospect. In 1964 Barry Goldwater felt certain in advance that he was beaten, and so did George McGovern in 1972 (although he kept on campaigning), and perhaps they were right to think so. But many people were sure in 1948 that Tom Dewey would defeat Harry Truman, and yet that’s not how things worked out, and part of the reason they didn’t work out that way is that Truman kept campaigning as hard as he could right to the end (whereas Dewey perhaps didn’t). In general, the rational course of action is to approach an election, in advance, as if campaigning efforts can affect the outcome.
In this particular case, the leaked document suggests that the people whose conduct we’re evaluating did, in fact, behave as if they believed their campaigning efforts could affect the outcome: they chose to act in a way which they believed would hurt their party’s chances. It’s not clear in retrospect that they would have been wrong to believe that their choice of behaviour could make a difference. An inspection of the results shows that there were twenty-eight seats in which the Conservative candidate beat the Labour candidate by less than 5% of the vote. If the Labour candidate had beaten the Conservative candidate in all twenty-eight of those seats, Labour would have won more seats in total than the Conservatives, which would almost certainly have meant a Labour minority government.
If the Labour headquarters staff had all worked as hard as they could for a Labour victory, would that have been enough to shift 5% of the vote? There’s no way of knowing, obviously. In this context 5% of the vote is a substantial proportion and it’s reasonable to be dubious about the chances of making a difference of that size. What smaller figure would seem more plausible? Shifting 1.6% of the vote might have moved ten seats from the Conservatives to Labour. With ten fewer Conservative MPs, there would have been no majority for a combination of Conservatives and DUP, and also no majority (if you want to speculate about this possibility) for a combination of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. There’s no way of knowing what would have happened then, but in that scenario a minority Labour government would at least have been within the bounds of possibility. Is 1.6% of the vote an implausible estimate to make of the impact of the sabotage under discussion?
steven t johnson 04.17.20 at 2:12 am
Hanlon’s razor (the “cockup” theory) is astoundingly popular. As I remember school, pretending to be stupid was by far the favorite excuse. What was Hanlon’s exclusionary rule? “That which is adequately explained by someone else’s indifference to your problem is neither stupidity nor conspiracy.”
Hidari 04.17.20 at 7:21 am
@30
It’s irrelevant. What is little remembered is that ALL Labour Governments get smeared as being anti-semitic by the Rupert Murdoch press (yes, even St. Tony of Blair). The smears increase insofar as the Labour Party move to the left even when the accusations make no sense whatsoever (Miliband’s Labour Party was smeared as being anti-Semitic at literally the same time as Miliband himself was getting anti-Semitic abuse from the Murdoch media.* Murdoch himself, of course, is an extreme right wing Christian fundamentalist anti-Semite with a penchant for conspiracy theories of the ‘Jews control the media’ type).
So Brown got more abuse than Blair, Miliband got more abuse than Brown and Corbyn got the most abuse of all. As someone once said (rumour has it it was Murdoch imself) (to a politician) ‘What’ll it be? A headline a day, or a bucket of shit every day?’
That’s the choice.
All the signs are that Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC will be what cynical civil servants call ‘a safe pair of hands’, but if he makes any moves whatsoever towards even a mild form of social democracy, the ‘Labour is anti-Semitic’ smear can be resuscitated and will be.
Since the Rupert Murdoch crime family essentially invaded the UK in the late ’60s, literally not one British Government has come to power that didn’t have the de facto or de jure support of the Murdoch media, and this won’t change.
The British media is not concerned with truth in any shape or form whatsoever. It is concerned with money and power. That’s it. Nothing else. You should read the papers for the weather and maybe the sport, and if you want to know what’s on TV tonight, but that’s about it as far as objective news goes.
As far as, so to speak, subjective reality, on the other hand, if you want to know what the leader of the Conservative Party (or people associated with him) thinks, you read the Times, the Sun, the Mail, the Express, the Star, the Telegraph (or, nowadays, the BBC). If you want to know what the LibDems think about things, read the Independent or the Guardian. If you want to know what is going on in the world of objective reality, don’t read the corporate media.
*And don’t delude yourself that such stories, even when they are self-evidently insane, don’t have an effect. Mindbogglingly, the collapse in Jewish support for Labour occurred under Miliband, not Corbyn. Astonishingly, Corbyn was not any less popular with British Jews than the Jewish Miliband was. The reason? Israel).
J-D 04.17.20 at 7:36 am
harry b
There’s some plausibility in supposing that accepting a knighthood (or other honour) can draw attention to some organisation or cause with which recipient is associated; but not if the award is a default one for holders of a particular position. If it is routine for holders of the position of DPP to receive knighthoods, then a person in that position would draw no attention to an associated organisation or cause by accepting that knighthood, but might draw signficant attention by refusing it. It might indeed appear weird or odd, but what’s wrong with that?
Petter Sjölund 04.17.20 at 8:46 am
I think you’re forgetting how all his contenders save one inexplicably dropped out in unison before Super Tuesday.
J-D 04.17.20 at 9:03 am
That’s evidence that leftists will face obstacles if operating within the electoral process, but it should be obvious by default that anybody operating within the electoral process will face obstacles. However, it should also be obvious by default that anybody operating outside the electoral process will face obstacles. So the fact (and it is a fact) that if you operate within the electoral process you face the risk of sabotage by people within your own party is insufficient evidence to justify any conclusion about the relative effectiveness of electoral and other strategies.
The Green Party operates within the electoral process, so it faces the risk of all the same potential obstacles that face any party operating within the electoral process. The strategic choice between working through the Green Party and working through the Labour Party is a separate choice from the choice between working within the electoral process and working outside the electoral process.
It’s not simply a strategic choice, though. Some people choose the Green Party over the Labour Party because they prefer the goals of the Green Party, and some people choose the Labour Party over the Green Party because they prefer the goals of the Labour Party.
I’m not sure whether it’s even possible to separate the question of effectiveness from the question of difference in goals, but if it is possible, it’s hard to figure what evidence there is to support the conclusion that the Green Party is more effective than the Labour Party. If there is such evidence, it would interest me.
Given the historical fact that there have been multiple occasions in the past when the Labour Party has won a majority of the Commons seats in England and Wales, there’s no clear evidence that it has become impossible for the same thing to happen again.
It’s not clear what this refers to. More details would be welcome.
I would be interested in evidence that another party is getting more votes from the working class (however ‘working class’ is defined, and definitions do vary) than the Labour Party is. It would be foolish to say that’s impossible–it might be true–but in my experience assertions like that are far more often presumed to be true than demonstrated. I know that enemies of the Labour Party like to assert that the Labour Party has lost the support of the working class, but it would be silly to take their word for it.
Daragh McDowell 04.17.20 at 10:48 am
“But now that this story is out, they surely have a duty to give it coverage, to let the chips fall where they fall and to tell the unvarnished story rather than being the instruments of factions or interests. So far, crickets, or pretty much (this is the Guardian’s coverage, and this is the FT’s).”
I dunno, but a report written by Corbyn’s lieutenants with the express purpose of undermining the EHRC report and absolving themselves of blame for the 2019 election doesn’t strike me as the most credible of documents (McDonnell said the quiet part loud about this on Sky yesterday).
Add on the huge data issues in leaking an unredacted report to people like Aaron Bastani (which if we’re ragging on ‘pet journalists’…) and the fact that ‘smoking gun’ elements of the report prefer to summarise WhatsApp chats rather than supporting them verbatim, it becomes a bit clearer why reputable outlets are a bit skeptical about this (and to be clear, The Morning Star and Novara are very much in the bucket of publications that should be considered ‘not reputable’ IMO.)
There’s a separate issue w/r/t to the clearly toxic, nasty and unprofessional behaviour of a lot of staff towards their colleagues, even if this was just confined to bitching in private WhatsApp groups, and there should be a serious clearout and effort to change the culture in the party. That being said, I’d be very curious to see what the equivalent groups in the Corbynite wing of the party look like. Certainly, prior to the election a senior official resigned over what he viewed as unacceptable and unprofessional behaviour from senior LOTO staff citing ‘a lack of human decency’ and citing serial incidents in which his work with Corbyn was deliberately sabotaged and undermined. Of course that individual was notorious Blairite factionalist *checks notes* Andrew Fisher.
Musicismath 04.17.20 at 10:52 am
The conclusion I came to after watching the “debate” unfold on Twitter and BTL in various places over a couple of years was that the opportunistic or bad-faith deployment of the AS accusation against the left flank of Labour was in many cases simply code for a form of anti-antiracism. It was a way of attacking the antiracist and anti-colonial strands in Labour with a giant tu quoque argument. But the overt racism and Islamophobia among much of this leaked material (along with the ancillary obsession with Dianne Abbott) makes me wonder how much of it was straight up white identity politics as well. See also, “white working class,” “legitimate concerns,” etc., etc.
Chris Bertram 04.17.20 at 1:16 pm
@Daragh, there’s enough verbatim from the WhatsApp groups. But I’d just like to take note of the whatabouttery in your comment, a rhetorical move that I’m sure you’d deplore in other contexts.
Daragh McDowell 04.17.20 at 2:53 pm
@Chris I think I was pretty clear that the verbatim comments are horrible and gross and certainly should result in firing and expulsions. The question is whether they demonstrate the key claims the document was generated to support – a) that anti-semitism claims were deliberately slow-rolled to embarrass and undermine Corbyn b) that the 2017 campaign was deliberately sabotaged. The decision on what to quote verbatim and what to summarise should give us some idea over how well those claims are supported (as should the fact that Labour did reasonably well in the ‘sabotaged’ 2017 campaign versus the 2019 campaign which was managed by Corbyn loyalists. Funnily enough the post-mortem on that campaign also found a handy reason for why Corbyn and his team were not to blame.)
As to the Whataboutery charge – if someone leaks selectively curated and edited correspondence from one particular faction in an organisation to argue that that faction is uniquely toxic and horrible, when there’s plenty of evidence their own faction aren’t particularly saintly and delicate in their language, I think it is less ‘whataboutery’ then ‘appropriate policy positions on stone throwing for residents of certain dwellings.’ Equally, if one has an interest in decreasing the levels of toxicity in the organisation as a whole it seems to be to be extremely counterproductive to focus on the toxicity in one particular section of it and not others.
Fake Dave 04.17.20 at 3:07 pm
Yeah, the role of a pliable and impressionable press cannot be overstated in this. So many of the “narratives” in our increasingly-permanent campaign seasons are just as trumped up as Corbyn’s anti-semitism “problem” or Clinton’s emails, but rarely is there such obvious evidence. Even crude propaganda and obfuscation can be surprisingly effective at shaping someone’s reality in ways they don’t realize. Most reporters seem to think they’re too smart to get played that way, but there’s a whole industry dedicated to exploiting sloppy journalism to generate free press and slander the competition and it’s growing all the time. There’s even a convenient revolving door between corporate media, PR and lobbying firms, and political staff, so they all know each other already. It’s easy to report if you have good sources and it’s easy to get good sources if they like what you’ve been reporting. Every liberal journalist can tell you all about the right-wing hacks out there doing this, but most haven’t looked in the mirror lately.
Zhou Fang 04.17.20 at 4:28 pm
Starmer has called for an independent inquiry. This report isn’t independent.
“In the meantime, we ask everyone concerned to refrain from drawing conclusions before the investigation is complete”
This seems very appropriate.
Hidari 04.17.20 at 4:49 pm
@43 ‘Given the historical fact that there have been multiple occasions in the past when the Labour Party has won a majority of the Commons seats in England and Wales, there’s no clear evidence that it has become impossible for the same thing to happen again.’
It’s also a historical fact that the Whigs used to win large numbers of seats in the UK, and the Federalist party used to win elections in the United States. Political parties are born, they live, and, sometimes, they die. There is no objective law of the universe that states that the UK must, for all eternity, have a left-wing political party called ‘The Labour Party’, and there is a good deal of evidence that (at least for the foreseeable future) the Labour Party’s time in (e.g.) Scotland is simply over.
There is a narrative (and as always one must ask whose interests this narrative serves) that the huge ‘crash’ in Labour support was under Corbyn in 2019. But in reality an equally huge ‘crash’ took place under Miliband, in 2015. There is, as of yet, no signs of Scottish Labour returning to its previous position of power.
Likewise, it seems to be being assumed that Tory predominance in the North is ‘just one of those things’ and that after those dreadful Corbynites have been purged from the party things will go ‘back to normal’. Perhaps. But, equally, perhaps not. CF Syriza, The German SDP, the Italian and French Communist parties, what little remains of the Israeli ‘Left’ and so on.
RobinM 04.17.20 at 8:17 pm
Wrt no. 49, Zhou Fang
But would Starmer have called for any sort of inquiry had the cat not been let out of the bag? And is it at all clear that any inquiry will focus on what the whistleblower revealed–since it had somehow, somewhere already been decided NOT to include the report which was leaked in the Party’s representation to the EHRC? Is it at all clear whether the inquiry will not spend most of its efforts unveiling and denouncing the whistleblower and the act of whistleblowing?
Hidari 04.17.20 at 9:45 pm
@8 The people named in the report ‘should immediately be suspended from the Party’.
This will not happen.
@47: ‘ the verbatim comments are horrible and gross and certainly should result in firing and expulsions. ‘
This will not happen either. Well it will, but the people who end up being fired will not be the people currently being discussed.
J-D 04.17.20 at 11:52 pm
MPs are not party employees, and the party cannot dismiss them from their positions as MPs (they can be expelled from party membership, but they can be expelled from party membership and still remain MPs).
But the people whose actions are described in the leaked report cited were not MPs. Party employees is exactly what they were, and the party’s disciplinary power over them as employees did include the power to dismiss them from their employment. (As I mentioned already, the party’s disciplinary power them as their employer would have ceased when they ceased to be employees of the party.)
That’s discussing the party’s disciplinary powers as an employer. Political parties also have disciplinary powers over party members, whether they are employees or not, including the power of expulsion. A party member can be expelled from membership of the party (not usually by fiat of the party leader alone; different parties have different rules for the exercise of disciplinary powers). But party disciplinary powers are different from employer disciplinary powers, arising on a different basis and governed by different rules, and the strategic considerations governing their use are different. I wrote before that it would be strange if an employer did not take disciplinary action against employees who deliberately tried to sabotage the employer’s operations (although not so strange as to be impossible, stranger things having happened). It would also be strange if a political party did not take disciplinary action against members who deliberately tried to sabotage its operations; but not strange to the same degree (and thus a degree further away from being impossible).
Nothing lasts for ever.
One day I will die. I don’t know which day it will be. It might be tomorrow. One day you will die. I don’t know which day it will be. It might be tomorrow.
One day the United Kingdom will no longer exist. I don’t know which day it will be, but it won’t be tomorrow. One day the Conservative Party will no longer exist. I don’t know which day it will be, but it won’t be tomorrow. One day the Labour Party will no longer exist. I don’t know which day it will be, but it won’t be tomorrow.
The history of the Conservative Party to date includes election victories (as well as election defeats). The most recent was in 2019. It’s possible that as well as being the most recent to date it will turn out to be the last ever, but it’s also possible that it won’t and the Conservative Party will win a future election.
The history of the Labour Party to date includes election victories (as well as election defeatst). The most recent was in 2010. It’s possible that as well as being the most recent to date it will turn out to be the last ever, but it’s also possible that it won’t and the Labour Party will win a future election.
If somebody in this discussion asserted that it is certain that the Labour Party will win at least one more election, it would be relevant to point out that the evidence that would justify such a conclusion has not been produced. But nobody in this discussion has made such an assertion. I certainly haven’t.
If somebody in this discussion asserted that it is certain that the Labour Party will never win another election, it would be relevant to point out that the evidence that would justify such a conclusion has not been produced. Somebody in this discussion did make such an assertion, or one very much like it. That’s what I was responding to.
J-D 04.18.20 at 1:22 am
If you want to decrease the level of toxicity in an organisation as a whole, then investigating evidence of individual incidents of toxicity is, by itself, at best a strategy of limited effectiveness; but obviously not investigating obvious evidence of individual incidents of toxicity has to be counterproductive. (This is true regardless of how you are defining toxicity and what you are including within the scope of that concept.) As that applies to this specific case, if the Labour Party wants to decrease the incidence of behaviours such as those alleged in this case, investigating this particular case will be insufficient, but obviously not investigating this case will be counterproductive.
‘What else should the Labour Party be doing?’ is a good question, but I don’t have any ideas about the answer. I do know that ignoring the allegations in this case is not a good idea.
J-D 04.18.20 at 3:17 am
I clicked on that link and looked at the cited source, and I found this sentence:
But the House of Commons is not a setting where there is only point-to-point channel between all the components, so the conditions for the mathematical proof to apply are not fulfilled.
It is not the case that a minority in the House of Commons numbering more than one-third of the house can prevent decisions from being made. Even a minority of 49% can’t prevent a decision that a majority of 51% is determined on.
lurker 04.18.20 at 8:30 am
https://twitter.com/judeinlondon2/status/1251205677063852034
It was just locker room talk, everybody does it, and I can call people anything I like if they are not in the room.
You’ll only get the party from their dead, cold hands.
Collin Street 04.18.20 at 8:43 am
It is not the case that a minority in the House of Commons numbering more than one-third of the house can prevent decisions from being made. Even a minority of 49% can’t prevent a decision that a majority of 51% is determined on.
How do the 51% determine which decision needs to be made?
If more than two-thirds of the non-ratfuckers are agreed on an outcome then the ratfuckers are irrelevant. If the ratfuckers can be identified and two-thirds of the non-ratfuckers agree to bind themselves to a decision made informally excluding the ratfuckers, then again they can be bypassed. More than two-thirds if the ratfuckers are more than a third, of course. An absolute majority, whatever that works out to. [And if the entity has supermajority requirements you need fewer ratfuckers]
Otherwise, the ratfuckers will be involved with the decision-making process and will be able to prevent decisions being made by strategically changing their preferences to prevent any definitive conclusion being reached and actions taken. Obviously some actions would give their identities away, but it doesn’t take much to seriously cripple the ability of an entity to function, in a way that’s difficult to distinguish from genuine policy disagreements coupled with some mild dogmatism.
[“only point-to-point communication” enables nefarious actors to avoid detection; if nobody’s looking then whether or not the nefarious actors can theoretically be detected becomes irrelevant]
Gareth Wilson 04.18.20 at 8:54 am
There’s a kind of paradox of leadership here. It may be a terrible injustice that a couple of schlubs in party administration were able to stab Corbyn in the back and prevent him from winning. But that doesn’t say much for his hypothetical effectiveness as a head of government, does it?
Hidari 04.18.20 at 9:40 am
@53
I’m not responding to your last point (over the last 6 paragraphs of your post) because my pedanticismometer went off the scale.
But your first point, while true, also misses the point. The Labour Right don’t really care if they win elections or not. They went into politics not to do politics but because of what they want to do after they leave politics: i.e. to get highly paid ‘consultancies’ with tax dodging TNCs (Trans National Corporations). Evincing any sympathy for left wing or even mildly social democratic politics would be a hindrance for that. Actually, ceteris paribus they would probably rather lose elections because winning would mean delivering on some of their election promises (none of which they mean, except the right wing promises).
That’s why all the splitters, invariably, are from the right (in 1983 and now). Left wingers (Galloway etc.) are expelled from the party. Right wingers choose to leave (or, like Alastair Campbell, put themselves in a situation where they ‘have to be’ fired: sorta like ‘suicide by cop’).
Corbyn was always terrified of a split and was right to be so. Ultimately he made the decision to prioritise party unity over his principles. As we know now, that was the wrong call, but had things gone only slightly differently on about 4 or 5 key occasions, he might now be PM. Don’t discount sheer random chance: on a few occasions, Corbyn was just unlucky. But it could have gone the other way, he could now be PM (or at least still leader of the opposition) and (presumably) thousands and thousands of innocent British people would not now be dying of Boris Johnson’s incompetence, a culling the Labour Right seem to be intensely relaxed about (Starmer, in echoing Trump and calling for ‘an end to the lockdown’ albeit implicitly, is essentially trying to outflank Johnson from the Right, which will be what he will attempt to do relentlessly throughout his tenure as leader before his inevitable defeat).
In short: you write: ‘It would also be strange if a political party did not take disciplinary action against members who deliberately tried to sabotage its operations.’
Indeed, it is ‘strange’ but that’s what’s going to happen because, to repeat, the Labour Right don’t care about winning elections, they care about their careers. So from their point of view, deliberately throwing an election is a positive boon, especially when the manifesto on which they won would be seen as being business unfriendly, and which, therefore, would jeapordise their future career prospects.
Hence the link with the Democrats. In putting forward Joe Biden as the Presidential nominee, the DNC have made it clear that they don’t really care who wins the next election, and are, in fact, pretty relaxed about it being Trump. CF also this:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/demexit-now-how-the-democratic-party-cheated-bernie-sanders-out-of-the-nomination.html
I’m not saying it’s the only thing that matters. I’m not that cynical. But ‘Cui Bono’ and ‘Follow the Money’ are the two key injunctions that should be asked in any given political situation. They won’t, on their own, give you the whole truth. But they will always, invariably, give you part of the truth.
rogergathmann 04.18.20 at 2:00 pm
43 – I don’t see your p.o.v.
1. The past history of labour wins is really no better a guide to its future then the past history of the Liberal party’s wins in 1910 were a guide to its future. Party’s lose their constituency and their grip. David Runciman, at the LRB, has long argued that, without Scotland, Labour is doomed to a perpetual minority. A recent column by Andy Beckett makes pretty much the same argument. The Tory hegemony is like the Christian Democratic hegemony in Cold War Italy.
2. To my mind, then, the “left” has to think about its vehicle in the next decade. And that vehicle does not look like Labour. Given Labour’s electoral defects to begin with – its loss of Scotland, its inability to satisfy remainers and Brexiters – why stay with a vehicle that will probably remain in minority and despises the left more than the Tories? Far better for the Corbynites to think about joining forces with the Greens, or simply breaking off to start their own party. This would free up Center-Labour, which could, I don’t know, ally with the Libdems or just change the party name to The Third Way and hang up big pics of Theresa May and Tony Blair as their household spirits.
3. Of course, there is also the possibility that leftists should themselves accelerate devolution. More than ever, it looks like a United Ireland is a possibility. And why not three countries, England, Wales and Scotland? It would not be a tragedy if that happened.
4. Whatever the fallout, I have a hard time believing Momentum will service attaching itself to a New Labour organization – for its own sake, and for the sake of the larger left constituency, the energy spent arguing over the remnants of a clearly exhausted minority party seem to be disproportionate with the gain. Neither the left nor the ‘new Labour” peeps are going to be in power anytime soon, so why not use this time and space to make the break? What was a marginal and sorta crazy position fifteen years ago now looks like the most logical position today.
rogergathmann 04.18.20 at 2:03 pm
… Momentum will service attaching itself… – I meant: “will survive.”
steven t johnson 04.18.20 at 3:02 pm
Wouldn’t a breakup of the UK leave us Ireland, Scotland and London?
J-D 04.19.20 at 12:01 am
Collin Street
The House of Commons rarely if ever makes decisions by all the individual MPs individually communicating with each other. Most of the time, the Conservative Party has settled on its position internally and all the Conservative MPs come into the House to vote for the party’s position, and the Labour Party has settled on its position internally and all the Labour MPs come into the House to vote for the party’s position, and so on for each other party. If one party has at least 51% of the seats (which is usually the case), then that party’s position prevails, no matter what the MPs of the other parties do.
And if one party has 51% of the seats (which in the UK is mostly the case), then it also doesn’t generally make its decisions by all the individual MPs individually communicating with each other. That party forms the government, and the Cabinet settles its position internally and brings it to the parliamentary party, and the backbenchers have a binary choice between the options of defeating their own government and falling in line behind its position.
So, in practice, most of the time, the MPs who are involved in formulating the content of the decisions which formally are decisions of the House are (at most) those who are members of the Cabinet.
I don’t know, perhaps you want to suggest that a minority of ratfuckers in the Cabinet can prevent it from making decisions. But Cabinets generally do make a lot of decisions (bad ones as well as good ones, but they do make them). The Prime Minister has the power to sack people from Cabinet, and I figure there’s a fairly good chance that if there were Cabinet members who were deliberately and repeatedly engaged in obstructionist manoeuvring, the Prime Minister would spot that.
J-D 04.19.20 at 1:06 am
If you choose to fight out of your weight, there’s not much I can do about it. If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
The sources cited by Chris Bertram don’t mention any examples of this. If you can produce figures to demonstrate its frequency, that would be interesting. If you can’t, you’re just blowing smoke.
The implications of this statement contradict each other. Using the word ‘indeed’ implies that you are agreeing with me, but writing that it is ‘strange’ contradicts what I wrote, that it would be strange.
Perhaps it will (I didn’t need you to tell me that), but then again, perhaps it won’t. The heavens have not granted oracular powers to me, and they haven’t granted them to you, either.
J-D 04.19.20 at 6:24 am
I looked at the article that was linked. At first I got as far as this:
It took me a few years to notice the pattern, but in my experience when somebody uses scare-quotes in that way, three times out of four it’s an indicator that the person is full of crap. Still, I thought, this article might the fourth-time exception, so I went back and read the rest of it to see what there was to it.
If somebody tells you that it’s easy to imagine how the deal would have gone down, and that they’re sure of it, although they can’t verify it, that may be enough for you to accept their conclusions. It’s not enough for me.
I admit I didn’t read the whole of this one, but here’s the beginning:
Now it’s true that the Florida, Arizona, Illinois, and Wisconsin primaries were not deferred in the same way that the Ohio primary was, but that obviously suggests that there must be some reason why the same thing didn’t happen in all those states. If there was a motive for not deferring the primaries, wouldn’t that motive also affect Ohio? The article mentions that the Governor of Ohio deferred the primary. If there was a plan behind what happened, why wouldn’t he go along with it? Well, on checking, it turns out that the Governor of Ohio is a Republican. As far as that goes, it makes sense that a Republican Governor would have no motive to assist in a plan concocted by the DNC. The problem is, it turns out that Arizona and Florida also have Republican Governors; and the Democratic Governor of Wisconsin would have deferred the primary if he could, but was thwarted by the Republican-controlled legislature and courts.
Primary elections are run by the States, not by the DNC. The possibility of rigging an election always exists (although not all elections are in fact rigged), but if the Democratic primary elections were rigged, whether to thwart Bernie Sanders or for any other purpose, and whether it was by the mechanism of not deferring them or by some other mechanism, they can only have been rigged by the States in which those primaries were held, not by the DNC.
Hidari 04.19.20 at 8:33 am
‘Perhaps it will (I didn’t need you to tell me that), but then again, perhaps it won’t. The heavens have not granted oracular powers to me, and they haven’t granted them to you, either.’
Well apparently they have, because I can tell you now, no disciplinary action will take place against these staff, and even in the unlikely event that I am wrong about this, and that disciplinary action does take place, the changes of any of them actually being expelled from the party (for this) are absolutely and precisely zero.
As for the rest, it’s one of the little fantasies of British life that nobody chooses the career of an MP (which pays £70,000 pa and which provides a ‘pathway’ into a world of consultancies and contacts which can lead to MPs becoming seriously wealthy, and even more wealthy after they quit) while thinking of the financial renumeration. People go into business to make money, people try to become senior doctors and senior civil servants and senior academics for money (amongst other reasons), people go into showbusiness to make money, that’s life. Many, perhaps most, aspiring politicians choose to become an MP because it’s an extremely ‘cushy’ (if you are in a safe seat) and well paid job. Sure there are other reasons. But money is a key one. It’s literally insane to think of it any other way. Asking for evidence is like asking for evidence that people who play the lottery want to win a prize. It’s true by definition.
And asking for evidence that MPs tailor their principles (such as they are) to gain money is again facile. Ceteris paribus, would you rather have money or none? The question answers itself. Not all MPs will make this decision of course, some have principles, but as we saw with the MP’s expenses scandal, most MPs will work the system to get money, even if the means by which they achieve this goal are completely unethical. This is not arguable and not up for debate. Quod Erat Demonstratum. It has been proved.
J-D 04.19.20 at 10:15 am
I’m curious to know why you’re interested in my p.o.v. I could respond by saying that my p.o.v. is that of a person who is interested in understanding how politics works, but I’m not sure how far that would go towards answering whatever questions it is you have in mind. If you asked me something more specific, I’d do my best to answer.
I’m offering past history not as evidence of what is certain for the future but as evidence of what is possible for the future, unless there’s other evidence to suggest that it isn’t possible any more. If somebody had said in 1911, ‘Just because the Liberal Party has won elections in the past, that’s no reason to think it will future’, that would have been literally true, but in 1911 there was no good reason to think that the Liberal Party would never win another election: in 1911 it would have been reasonable to treat future Liberal Party election victories as a possibility and unreasonable to treat them as an impossibility. By contrast, in 1925 it would have been reasonable to expect no further Liberal Party election victories. The point is not just that things changed between 1911 and 1925, but that it is possible to identify specific changes which had destroyed the Liberal Party’s future prospects of election victory. A relevant question now, therefore, is whether it is possible to identify specific changes since the last Labour election victory in 2005 which have destroyed the prospect of future Labour election victories.
Well, if somebody argues that it’s so, isn’t that enough to prove it’s true? No, it isn’t: not even if he’s argued it for a long time; not even if another person makes the same argument.
The rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party has taken away from the Labour Party the majority of seats in Scotland which it used to hold, and that makes it significantly more difficult for the Labour Party to win UK elections, but significantly more difficult is not the same thing as impossible. The Labour Party won more English seats than the Conservative Party in 2005, and the rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party has not destroyed the prospect of that happening again.
One thing I know about the hegemony of the DC in Italy is that it lasted a long time, but another thing I know about it is that it disintegrated over the space of a few years. That’s not enough to prove that the same thing will happen to the Conservative Party, still less it is it enough to prove that the same thing will happen to the Conservative Party over the next few years specifically, but it does show what’s possible for any political party: yes, for the Labour Party, and yes, also for the Conservative Party. It’s possible that either or them (or even both of them) will collapse in a short space of time, but what’s the evidence that it’s actually happening to the Labour Party right now?
People change from one political party to another for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons have to do with political positions/programs/policies. A person might say ‘this party is not as left-wing as it used to be, I’m going to leave it for a more left-wing party’ (or, equally, ‘this party is not as right-wing as it used to be, I’m going to leave it for a more right-wing party’). A person might also say ‘even if the party hasn’t changed, I have; I’m more left-wing than I used to be [or ‘more right-wing than I used to be’] and I’m going to change party for that reason’. A person might also say something like ‘I’ve always been an environmentalist [or a Scottish patriot, or whatever it might be] and now that the Green Party [or the Scottish Nationalist Party, or whatever it might be] exists, I’m going to leave my old party to join it’.
Another kind of reason for leaving one party for another might be something like ‘my old party’s ineffective, it’s going nowhere, it’s achieving nothing, I’m going to try another party which has better prospects of getting something done’.
Leaving the Labour Party for another party because that other party better suits you in terms of what it stands for is a rational assessment, assuming you’re not mistaken about where the Labour Party stands or about where the other party stands. But leaving the Labour Party for another party because you think that other party has better prospects of getting something done is only a rational assessment if there’s some basis for concluding that the other party actually does have better prospects of getting something done, and I can’t figure what the basis for that conclusion would be, unless, perhaps, that other party is the Conservative Party. Apart from the Conservative Party, there isn’t another party in the UK which has, at the national level, better prospects than the Labour Party of winning elections, forming governments, or getting legislation through Parliament. (The SNP has better prospects than either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party at the Scottish level, and that would be a rational basis for choosing to join the SNP for somebody who was focussing at the Scottish level rather than the UK level.) Next year there might be such a party, next month there might be such a party, but right now there isn’t. The Corbynites have not, as you suggest they should, broken away from the Labour Party to form a new party of their own: why do you suppose they haven’t? I suppose they haven’t because they consider that such a new party would have worse prospects, not better prospects: is there any other possible explanation of what they’re thinking and doing?
Collin Street 04.19.20 at 12:48 pm
I don’t know, perhaps you want to suggest that a minority of ratfuckers in the Cabinet can prevent it from making decisions.
Yes. That is in fact exactly what I am suggesting. Cabinet, parliament, the party rooms, your local volunteer group, whatever: if more than a third of the votes are in the hands of bad-faith actors, then you cannot guarantee that any coherent set of decisions will be made. [and because effective action invariably requires multiple decisions to be aligned, no coherent set of decisions means paralysis].
In the UK, decisions are made by party-rooms and by cabinet, so if you control a third of those groups you can often paralyse the government.
[can’t always, of course. It depends on exactly what the splits among the good-faith actors and whether anyone’s looking to see if this sort of thing’s happening. “As long as less than a third is suborned you can guarantee coherent decision-making” is thebest case scenario; a lot of approaches — like ignoring the issue entirely — do worse than that, are prone to failure with far fewer than a third suborned. OTOH, note that it’s “can guarantee”; a system that can’t guarantee coherent decision-making can still have coherent decision-making an awful lot of the time.]
Tm 04.19.20 at 3:36 pm
Reading the discussion thread, I have to wonder whether some commenters here imagine it was ever easy for leftists to win elections. Folks, left parties have always had a hard time electorally, for reasons that should be obvious if you think about it. (What else would you expect to happen when you attack the status quo?)
How often and for how long have leftists been in power post WWII in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy etc? Look it up on Wikipedia. If you want to be purist and not count Blair, Clinton or Schröder, it looks really bleak. Even if you do count them as somewhat leftist, you can’t avoid the conclusion that the right or center right has won far more elections than the left in most countries where elections are held, and that is true even in the post war period that some retrospectively imagine as a kind of social democratic golden age.
What conclusions one draws from that observation is up to each of us. I conclude that electoral politics is as important, and as hard, as it ever was, and progressive movement politics remains as essential, and as hard, as it ever was. And further, without wishing to downplay the nefariousness of the actions described in the OP, I remain convinced that conspiracy theories are poison for progressive politics. The reappearance of anti-DNC demagoguery by self-styled Sanders supporters (who btw are undermining Sanders’ own political strategy) – I really like how the DNC is responsible for the Republican decision not to postpone the Wisconsin election, as the DNC had explicitly demanded – alas is further proof that some people will never learn.
J-D 04.19.20 at 7:11 pm
Hidari
You contradict yourself when you claim oracular powers and then write ‘even in the unlikely event that I am wrong’. An oracle never acknowledges any possibility of being wrong, no matter how remote.
Not claiming oracular powers, I like to check for facts.
It’s easy to get a figure for the salary of an MP in the UK. You’re out of date, you know that? The base salary of a backbench MP (ministers and some others get more) is over £80,000. Hmm, oracular powers not manifesting. It’s also fairly easy to get a figure for median income in the UK and observe that every MP earns several times as much as that. It’s fairly easy to look up information on an individual MP and get information about occupation before entering Parliament. It’s not so easy to find out what their incomes were before entering Parliament, so the chances are that some of them were taking a pay cut by going into politics, but the information about median income is enough to justify the conclusion that a lot of them were earning less before they entered Parliament, and when people try to get themselves jobs with higher incomes than they’ve already got, it’s reasonable to suppose that the money is an important motivating factor for most of them.
It’s no secret that official investigations found that a number of MPs had abused their expense allowances, and it’s reasonable to conclude that if there were cases confirmed by official investigations there were almost certainly also cases not confirmed by official investigations: and there’s no motive for abusing expense allowances except the money.
It’s easy enough to check for information about what employment MPs have found since leaving Parliament. I started by checking on Labour MPs who chose not to contest the 2017 and 2015 elections, or who resigned from Parliament after those elections: I didn’t find information about post-parliamentary employment for all those I checked, but I did for some. Heidi Alexander became London’s deputy mayor for transport: it’s possible that pays more than she earned as an MP. I expect the salary of that position is published somewhere, but I haven’t checked. Michael Dugher became chief executive of UK Music; that’s not a trans-national corporation, but it’s possible it pays more than he got as an MP. It’s possible UK Music publishes information about executive salaries: I haven’t checked. Steve Rotheram became Mayor of the Liverpool City Region. Andy Burnham became Mayor of Greater Manchester. (Fiona Mactaggart was a millionaire by inheritance before entering Parliament and presumably remained one after leaving, so it seems unlikely money was a motivating factor for her.) Tristram Hunt became head of the V&A. Jamie Reed became Head of Development and Community Relations for Sellafield Ltd. Sadiq Khan became Mayor of London. Huw Irranca-Davies went into the Welsh Assembly, where he became a minister. Glenda Jackson has returned to acting. Nick Raynsford is Chair of CICAIR Ltd and Deputy Chair of Crossrail Ltd. Joan Walley is a part-time member of the Electoral Commission. Hazel Blears is a director of The Co-operative Group. Peter Hain is employed by Ince Gordon Dadds–aha, there’s one! I was confident I’d find one if I looked long enough. Yes, it can happen that a Labour MP leaves the House of Commons and then gets a job with an international corporation. I didn’t know of any specific examples before I started checking, but I would have been surprised if there were none. I’m sure if I continued checking, I would find more. But knowing that there are examples of Labour MPs who have gone on to corporate jobs since leaving politics tells us nothing about the frequency of it. My checking also reveals plenty of examples of Labour MPs who have not gone on to corporate employment.
roger gathmann 04.19.20 at 9:08 pm
It has been a decade. The center-right sabotaged the closest Labour got to having a minority government. In Scotland, Labour is down to what, one? They are not coming back. In 2017, Corbyn’s organization and Momentum collected and got a lot of people involved that would make a marvelous structure for a new Left party. It isn’t that a new Left party is going to win – the Tories have hegemony now and will probably not be removed for a long time. But with Labour changing into what its leadership wants it to be – a sort of Liberal Democratic, Third way party – and the Left forming its own party, I’d say the British political system would be aligned more naturally among its constituencies and ideologies. If there was once a reason for the Left to try to struggle with the center in the Labour party, that reason is gone. The context has changed, just as it did for Europe’s “left†parties when they went right and left their working class constituencies. Those parties broke up or the Greens or other parties attained parity.
It is, in the current situation, really odd for Labour to remain the same. Is there an argument for it beyond inertia?
Between the end of the Liberal party’s competitiveness at the end of the 19th century and 1925, there was a change in circumstances. Well, same thing is happening everywhere. Certainly in a Britain that really might not even look the same in five years, if Scotland leaves and Ireland unites.
J-D 04.20.20 at 3:01 am
The fact that you are suggesting it is insufficient basis for concluding that it’s true.
Collin Street 04.20.20 at 7:50 am
(They don’t have to be bad faith actors either! If they’re Just Plain Crazy you get the same results, although practically most of the time the JPC will effect less disruption at the same concentration)
Hidari 04.20.20 at 8:04 am
@69
Yes but conspiracies do happen, don’t they? For example, the events to which the OP refers. If that’s not a conspiracy (essentially a conspiracy to hand the election to Theresa May) what is it?
My point is not that the radical left is flawless and innocent. It’s that they too frequently adopt the most facile and bourgeois of all fantasies which is that the Powers That Be are ever going to sit idly by and hand the radical left the keys to the Kingdom because we live in a ‘democracy’. This will never happen. And both Corbyn and Sanders were far too sanguine that this would happen, and far too (wilfully) blind to the forces arrayed against them. For example, Sanders should have been far more aggressive towards (e.g.) Biden in the recent Democratic nominations battle. Likewise, Corbyn should have pushed for reselections post 2017 and attempt to remove at least some of the bad faith actors (MPs) who were constantly working to undermine him. Instead he constantly held out the hand of friendship to his enemies. But bullies only ever perceive that as weakness.
CF also the Syriza debacle. The problem with the radical left, I’m afraid, is that they are generally far too nice, especially to people who will always despise them.
Collin Street 04.20.20 at 10:45 am
The fact that you are suggesting it is insufficient basis for concluding that it’s true.
“Nuh-uh”? Seriously? Is this the best you can manage, after all I’ve given you and all you’ve been asking for? This is bullshit.
You’re not acknowledging anything told to you except that which you can raise a disagreement to. Not just me, every single post you’ve made in this thread — every post I can recall you making in any thread — is about how other people are wrong in some respect, usually in tedious detail explained tediously. Without any particular consistency of thought or even evincing a memory of what was previously argued, by other people or yourself. I mean, I’ve given you the reasons up-thread, and I know you’ve read them because you’ve responded to them … but all that’s out of your brain now, now that you can complain I haven’t explained myself in full again in this post.
[you’ve not expressed agreement that I can recall. Have you learned nothing, or are you merely ashamed to admit it?]
Relentless hostility is a great way to stop people expressing disagreement with you but it’s not a very good way to find your own mistakes and it’s certainly not a good way to make friends, or to make people want to help you.
[your behaviour was never particularly good, by the way, but it’s clearly been getting worse — pickier, more focussed on invalidating others — over the past little while. That which cannot continue must stop: better on your terms than those of others, I think. Finding a different hobby for a few months seems advisable]
Collin Street 04.20.20 at 10:47 am
Seriously, I’ve spent literal hours here J-D and you think “nuh-uh!” cuts the mustard?
FFS.
Tm 04.20.20 at 10:55 am
rg 71: If the UK were a multi-party democracy with proportional representation, it might be natural that the Labour Left breaks away and forms its own party. But the UK election system guarantees that such a break would result in exactly the unbreakable (for at least a generation) right-wing hegemony that you are talking about.
Likewise @74, if the US were a multi-party democracy with proportional representation (or something resembling it), the emergence of a left party would be natural and would certainly have happened long ago. And Bernie Sanders might be one of the leaders of that left party, and it would make sense for him to attack the centrists in the Democratic party more aggressively because progressive voters could vote for that left party without wasting their votes and thereby guaranteeing the victory of the faschists (which is what Trump’s loyal base are, faschists). But given the unbreakable two-party system, such a tactic would be suicide for the left, as Sanders very well knows and as you also know very well and all of us in this forum know. Sanders cares about political outcomes and he doesn’t want to destroy the US left (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/13/21219537/biden-sanders-endorsement-2020-democratic-primary).
The fact that the US has such a shitty political system is hard for the left but it doesn’t mean the left has no options. They can still promote left candidates on many levels, the primary system makes this actually easier than e. g. in the UK. It does mean that these leftists have no realistic choice other than working within the umbrella of the Democratic Party. Whether we like this or not really doesn’t matter, it’s a fact we have to acknowledge.
Hidari 04.20.20 at 11:21 am
@71
Far be it from me to concede a point to the repellent scumbags of the ‘Liberal’ ‘Democrats’.
But one thing that they really do have a point about is the UK’s grotesque FPTP electoral system. This system, which its dwindling band of supporters claim is to ‘avoid extremist parties coming to power’ (‘Joker-laugh-in-Batman-gif’) is exquisitely tailored to ensure ‘outside’ third party challenges never come to anything. If we lived under a system of Proportional Representation then the radical left (i.e. in a part of its own) might have a chance. As it is, there is so much institutional inertia in favour of the ‘traditional’ parties it’s very difficult to see an alternative emerging. But the Labour Party is clearly dead. So where do we go from here? No path seems obvious (in England…there are obviously alternatives in Wales, Scotland and NI).
steven t johnson 04.20.20 at 12:55 pm
Hidari@74 “CF also the Syriza debacle. The problem with the radical left, I’m afraid, is that they are generally far too nice, especially to people who will always despise them.”
What Syriza debacle? Syriza from the beginning stood for iron commitment to the cardinal moral principles of the EU, namely, hard money, budget discipline and no industrial policy. And, implicitly, it stood for an equally iron commitment to repudiating anything KKE, especially Grexit. The infamous OXO was about endorsing Syriza, which meant, against leaving the EU. So, Syriza stayed, at any price. The idea Syriza failed because it was too nice to the EU covers up that Syriza put the EU above everything else. Since that’s what they stood for, saying they were too nice to win their goals doesn’t make any sense. They certainly weren’t too nice to the KKE.
Lurking in the background is some vague notion of the EU as a true Christendom, where the lions will lie down with lambs, especially as opposed to the Godless threats so happily conquered in 1989. The EU as the incarnation of niceness versus the Satanic malice of totalitarians ignores what the EU is.
J-D 04.20.20 at 11:46 pm
In the UK, in 1964, 1997, and 2010, parties which had been in opposition for over a decade returned to government, and there are also examples from the USA, Germany, Canada, Australia, Greece, Sweden, New Zealand, and Ireland. That doesn’t demonstrate that it’s inevitable that Labour will return to government–it isn’t–only that a decade in opposition is by itself an insufficient basis for drawing conclusions.
The fact that something seems natural to you is insufficient basis for drawing conclusions about how likely it is to happen.
It is not clear which examples are being referred to here.
The bare fact that circumstances (indisputably) change all the time is insufficient basis for the conclusion that the changes over the next five years will be unfavourable for the Labour Party. They might, but then again they might not.
rogergathmann 04.21.20 at 8:02 am
75, you are right about the U.S. I think the parallel between the U.S. and the UK systems is not a very tight one – my argument is that the UK is much more like Italy or France than the U.S. In the U.S., the Dem party is very much alive. One can credibly think that it will win elections, take over the senate and the house of representatives, the exec branch, etc. The Ds seem mostly recovered from the abysmal Obama years, when they lost state after state – I’ve read that roughly 10,000 positions were lost between state and national positions. The UK however is in a different position. There’s no parallel to the Scottish debacle in the states, or to Brexit. There is a much larger black and Latinx population in the U.S., meaning that a party simply appealing to the white settler descendants is going to have to engage in heavy vote suppression to win. In Britain, there is no way a third party left party would win right now. But there are a lot of reasons to think that they would take a big hunk of Labour with them, the part that is younger, that is eager to take on the establishment, etc. The Tory advantage is that its more “moderate” members would love to go all far right, so they have no problem absorbing the most rightward splinter groups. Labour centrists, on the other hand, are earnest. They really believe in the power of the marketplace, and well constructed nudgery that would align the state and enlightened capitalism. They’ve, in effect, taken the party down that path. The left simply doesn’t have a home there. To my mind, the long term solution is ending the Labour party as it is. True, there are huge barriers to the success of a third party – but the Lib Dems actually managed to have become part of a coalition, meaning that they have had more power in notional terms in the last decade than Labour. What happens when Labour loses the next election, and the one after that? What possible path is there to a labour gov?
J-D 04.21.20 at 11:37 pm
We neither of us have oracular powers. I don’t know the results of those future elections, and neither do you.
Of course, by definition, a party that loses an election doesn’t form a government: this is true for the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, or any hypothetical newly formed government. Therefore, again by definition, the possible path to forming government for any party is not to lose an election but instead to win it.
Faustusnotes 04.22.20 at 3:26 am
Hidari’s assertion that centrists and right wingers only go into politics to make money is ludicrous. Thatcher went into politics to change British society, as did brown, and to say otherwise is just idiocy. But worse than idiotic, it’s paralyzing: if you think that people do everything for money when their real agenda is a lifelong crusade against abortion or a desire to completely remake society or outright fascism, you will completely miss what they’re really doing. It’s a dangerous fallacy.
Also there are no lessons in this for sanders, who is the exact opposite of Corbyn. Corbyn is a staunch lifelong party member loved by the membership who had to be undermined by the office folks because he was so good at winning the members’ votes. Sanders is a fair weather friend who has no respect for his party, has never supported its mission, isn’t popular with the membership and cannot win a vote amongst them even when he got to rewrite the voting rules in his favor. Sanders is a millionaire landlord gadfly loser, whereas Corbyn is a committed socialist and lifelong campaigner who is very competent at campaigning. Once again, hidari and Cian sacrifice all reason at the altar of their millionaire landlord idol.
To get back to the topic of the op, these people are class traitors and should be driven out of the party. Sadly, I doubt Starmer will do so. I am deeply depressed to imagine the last thing stopping us from building a better Britain might have been members of the Labour Party, and I hope left wings of other Labour parties (eg in Australia) will learn from this and improve their ability to ratify Kyoto the right in future.
Faustusnotes 04.22.20 at 3:27 am
Ratify Kyoto was meant to say ratfuck. Damned autocorrect is undermining my path to victory and must be purged.
Comments on this entry are closed.