| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 07:21 - May 23 with 941 views | Dubtractor |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 00:24 - May 23 by Axeldalai_lama |
This whole thread sums up politics in this country. There are relatively well engaged political types jabbing seven shades out of each other about the specifics of left/centre left/centre/centre right. And blaming each other saying it's all the other sides fault. Meanwhile there's actual reform and supporters, and the absolute refusal to engage and enter into any reasonable accountability, bar offensive sound bites and sly digs, before stepping off and watching it burn, are patted on the head and treated like necessary endearing relatives, instead of the problem that is eating this country from the inside out. [Post edited 23 May 7:00]
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Nailed it. |  |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 07:39 - May 23 with 896 views | jasondozzell |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 00:24 - May 23 by Axeldalai_lama |
This whole thread sums up politics in this country. There are relatively well engaged political types jabbing seven shades out of each other about the specifics of left/centre left/centre/centre right. And blaming each other saying it's all the other sides fault. Meanwhile there's actual reform and supporters, and the absolute refusal to engage and enter into any reasonable accountability, bar offensive sound bites and sly digs, before stepping off and watching it burn, are patted on the head and treated like necessary endearing relatives, instead of the problem that is eating this country from the inside out. [Post edited 23 May 7:00]
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Don't agree.
This is the Labour right/Labour Together playbook.
Throw your hands up and point at 'factionalism' on the left when in reality the only factionalists are these people themselves!
The left has been purged for years now. So what is happening is on the people who wrecked everything to wrestle back control 10 years ago. Why won't they own it? |  | | |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:12 - May 23 with 839 views | StokieBlue |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 07:49 - May 22 by Benters |
She’s not just any woman though is she like your Mum or Granny? |
It's definitely right to focus on the person being abused and not the abuser.
SB [Post edited 23 May 8:13]
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| Avatar - M101 - Pinwheel Galaxy |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:16 - May 23 with 821 views | Benters |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:12 - May 23 by StokieBlue |
It's definitely right to focus on the person being abused and not the abuser.
SB [Post edited 23 May 8:13]
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You did it again.
Edited the post after a little pop at me.
Anyway enjoy your day.
Me? Well I’m going to hang my washing out then go for a lovely walk.
B. |  |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:19 - May 23 with 820 views | StokieBlue |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:16 - May 23 by Benters |
You did it again.
Edited the post after a little pop at me.
Anyway enjoy your day.
Me? Well I’m going to hang my washing out then go for a lovely walk.
B. |
The context of my post is exactly the same, I have not changed it at all - it's still a pop at you because your posting is horrible.
Lovely stuff, I'm going for a walk as well.
SB | |
| Avatar - M101 - Pinwheel Galaxy |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:23 - May 23 with 813 views | Dubtractor |
For the avoidance of doubt on this, the issue is less with the verbal abuse, which will happen because of human nature. I don't doubt that Farage gets plenty of abuse too.
None of that is good and it will be unpleasant to the receiving end of it.
But in a country where two politicians have been murdered in recent times, I find it pretty disgusting for a political party to actively encourage people to be more confrontational to public figures. | |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:38 - May 23 with 759 views | SuperKieranMcKenna |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 22:44 - May 22 by jasondozzell |
This is desperate stuff. It's okay to admit that you were wrong if you backed this horse.
Sensible pragmatic centrism is a disaster in this era.
Let's take this one by one.
Firstly, we absolutely are still in a period of extreme austerity. Where do you think the money for military spending is going to come from? They are cutting budgets. Councils are bankrupt.
They've cut disability benefits, overseas aid, civil service, raised national insurance.
Look at the state of the public services.
This government is no believer in Keynesian economics and you know it.
Strawman argument over NHS spending. Nowhere did I suggest that just adding 1% of GDP solves everything. Again you know that.
And finally the Custer's Last Stand of the 'sensible grown ups in the room' - the argument that taxing billionaires wont create unlimited money. No it won't. But you're misunderstanding a fundamental part of the argument (quite apart from lower taxation for the wealthy being morally wrong).
Billionaires don't create more wealth with that money. They just buy assets. Which in turn locks everyone out of the housing market etc.
Billionaires made huge amounts of money during COVID.
I'd quite like some of that money working to help ordinary people. Not sitting in bacnk accounts making grotesquely rich people even richer.
It's not 1997. It's 2026.
If you don't wake up to it, it will be Farage. [Post edited 22 May 22:49]
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Delusional so I’ll leave it there, council tax has gone up significantly - again you really don’t understand what austerity is (hilariously you even note Labour raised tax and NI). Incredible.
And I have no kind of affiliation with Labour, not a member or particularly aligned with them, they were just the least worst option. That they have all these petty internal power struggles is actually a turn off.
I’ve no objection to billionaires paying more, but I can safely say it’s incredibly naive to think their money is just in a bank waiting to be taxed as you put it. Most of it is not liquid and very easy to offshore ownership to shell companies in more efficient tax regimes. That’s why the Greens projections have largely been discredited. Ironically, the much maligned Streeting has put forward the most pragmatic and realistic option- bringing capital gains tax in line with earnings. The wealthiest draw much of their passive income this way, and it’s a lot more difficult to hide those income streams. |  | | |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:45 - May 23 with 722 views | GlasgowBlue |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:23 - May 23 by Dubtractor |
For the avoidance of doubt on this, the issue is less with the verbal abuse, which will happen because of human nature. I don't doubt that Farage gets plenty of abuse too.
None of that is good and it will be unpleasant to the receiving end of it.
But in a country where two politicians have been murdered in recent times, I find it pretty disgusting for a political party to actively encourage people to be more confrontational to public figures. |
Politics seems to have got a lot nastier. People with different political views are no longer your opponents, they are your enemies.
We can trace this sort of stuff back to John McDonnell who encouraged the public to confront politicians in the street and the “lynch Esther McVey“ comment. |  |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:50 - May 23 with 705 views | Dubtractor |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:38 - May 23 by SuperKieranMcKenna |
Delusional so I’ll leave it there, council tax has gone up significantly - again you really don’t understand what austerity is (hilariously you even note Labour raised tax and NI). Incredible.
And I have no kind of affiliation with Labour, not a member or particularly aligned with them, they were just the least worst option. That they have all these petty internal power struggles is actually a turn off.
I’ve no objection to billionaires paying more, but I can safely say it’s incredibly naive to think their money is just in a bank waiting to be taxed as you put it. Most of it is not liquid and very easy to offshore ownership to shell companies in more efficient tax regimes. That’s why the Greens projections have largely been discredited. Ironically, the much maligned Streeting has put forward the most pragmatic and realistic option- bringing capital gains tax in line with earnings. The wealthiest draw much of their passive income this way, and it’s a lot more difficult to hide those income streams. |
The reality is that the public sector was kneecapped by the tory/lib dem austerity measures, and has not been able to recover.
The current government is not applying austerity measures, but costs of things like adult social care are rocketing faster than funding can keep up. | |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:50 - May 23 with 702 views | Mullet |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:45 - May 23 by GlasgowBlue |
Politics seems to have got a lot nastier. People with different political views are no longer your opponents, they are your enemies.
We can trace this sort of stuff back to John McDonnell who encouraged the public to confront politicians in the street and the “lynch Esther McVey“ comment. |
It's as old as civilisation itself, but instead of being written in fragments of scrolls it's amplified around the world instantaneously and built up more and more by social media.
The current climate of hate fuelled by the right in the past decade is very much a reckless abuse of that phenomena.
When two jabs got his digs in people largely cheered him on because it was seen as good thing, that the bloke who went after him was an asshole who crossed a line. Now you've got people sat behind their keyboards cheering on that sort of thing and worse and you can't reason with them or take the temperature down.
This thread is a good example of that. |  |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:55 - May 23 with 676 views | BlueSmoke |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:50 - May 23 by Mullet |
It's as old as civilisation itself, but instead of being written in fragments of scrolls it's amplified around the world instantaneously and built up more and more by social media.
The current climate of hate fuelled by the right in the past decade is very much a reckless abuse of that phenomena.
When two jabs got his digs in people largely cheered him on because it was seen as good thing, that the bloke who went after him was an asshole who crossed a line. Now you've got people sat behind their keyboards cheering on that sort of thing and worse and you can't reason with them or take the temperature down.
This thread is a good example of that. |
How's calling everyone you disagree with a nazi working out for you? |  | | |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:55 - May 23 with 662 views | GlasgowBlue |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:50 - May 23 by Mullet |
It's as old as civilisation itself, but instead of being written in fragments of scrolls it's amplified around the world instantaneously and built up more and more by social media.
The current climate of hate fuelled by the right in the past decade is very much a reckless abuse of that phenomena.
When two jabs got his digs in people largely cheered him on because it was seen as good thing, that the bloke who went after him was an asshole who crossed a line. Now you've got people sat behind their keyboards cheering on that sort of thing and worse and you can't reason with them or take the temperature down.
This thread is a good example of that. |
Everybody cheered on Two Jags punching that bloke didn’t they?
Edit. I think lines are being crossed more now. A few years back Rees Mogg had his home vandalised and a few weeks later he was abused outside his home and the abusers started on his young kids.
I recall a few on here cheering this on, with one particular specimen posting “chat shit get burned”. [Post edited 23 May 10:31]
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:56 - May 23 with 665 views | SuperKieranMcKenna |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:50 - May 23 by Dubtractor |
The reality is that the public sector was kneecapped by the tory/lib dem austerity measures, and has not been able to recover.
The current government is not applying austerity measures, but costs of things like adult social care are rocketing faster than funding can keep up. |
Agreed, however both taxation and government spending has increased to almost record levels. Even when he’s wrong about austerity, and every single metric shows he’s wrong he still doubles down. It’s Trumpian.
At the end of the day, public services aren’t going to improve overnight, spending is up but things like the NHS need time to actually implement changes. Social care like pensions is unfortunately also seemingly an area where nobody wants to make any radical changes for fear of turning off voters. | | | |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:57 - May 23 with 662 views | Mullet |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:55 - May 23 by BlueSmoke |
How's calling everyone you disagree with a nazi working out for you? |
How's making stuff up going for you with this log in? I get you think you're some sort of semi-anonymous, clever outsider taking pops at people, but there's a wide range of people on this thread who I disagree with across the spectrum.
The racist, nazi ones get called that. You claiming that's wrong is your issue. | |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 09:38 - May 23 with 586 views | DJR |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 00:24 - May 23 by Axeldalai_lama |
This whole thread sums up politics in this country. There are relatively well engaged political types jabbing seven shades out of each other about the specifics of left/centre left/centre/centre right. And blaming each other saying it's all the other sides fault. Meanwhile there's actual reform and supporters, and the absolute refusal to engage and enter into any reasonable accountability, bar offensive sound bites and sly digs, before stepping off and watching it burn, are patted on the head and treated like necessary endearing relatives, instead of the problem that is eating this country from the inside out. [Post edited 23 May 7:00]
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But you're not going to beat Reform by bad-mouthing them, so an analysis of and debate about why Labour has got into the mess it has is surely worth having.
Indeed, the Labour party itself is having such a debate, albeit limited by the existence of its manifesto.
And don't forget Labour only got into power on 34% of the vote, and with 500,000 fewer votes than in 2019, when faced with probably the most unpopular government ever.
At the end of the day, Reform ain't going to be defeated if the Green/Labour/LibDem vote is split equally as it is now, and it is only an increase in the Labour vote that will prevent a Reform victory, so they have to come up with something far more compelling than they have to date. [Post edited 23 May 9:43]
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:14 - May 23 with 536 views | positivity |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 04:03 - May 23 by Benters |
Hint hint hint….
Or maybe I agree with GB and his posts about the Jewish community.
Have a nice day Big Al. |
nonsense, you support a party led by a man with well-documented anti-semitic views.
you think rupert lowe, who would happily "remigrate" all jews is a decent bloke. | |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:15 - May 23 with 530 views | Axeldalai_lama |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 07:39 - May 23 by jasondozzell |
Don't agree.
This is the Labour right/Labour Together playbook.
Throw your hands up and point at 'factionalism' on the left when in reality the only factionalists are these people themselves!
The left has been purged for years now. So what is happening is on the people who wrecked everything to wrestle back control 10 years ago. Why won't they own it? |
Of course you don't. It's much better sport the way you do it.
Learn your lines, who to attack, know the ones who will bite and what to say to them so you feel in the right. Even your reply here is full of worn cliches you've clearly learnt to spit at who ever comments on these threads. It has absolutely no relevance to me as a general commenter on a thread I happened to see and yet I'm part of a playbook and factionalism.
It all achieves the square route of feck all, but makes you feel better. Meanwhile the actual culprits and the ones initially called out for being genuinely abhorrent are emboldened by the lack of accountability and encouraged that they cause this funny little bit of counter infighting, and that in fact the centrists are the problem.
As I say, I'm just a passer by not some hardened political poster, you do you, good luck to you. |  | | |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:16 - May 23 with 517 views | positivity |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:45 - May 23 by GlasgowBlue |
Politics seems to have got a lot nastier. People with different political views are no longer your opponents, they are your enemies.
We can trace this sort of stuff back to John McDonnell who encouraged the public to confront politicians in the street and the “lynch Esther McVey“ comment. |
it goes back way further than mcdonnell, but agreed that it's got much nastier in the last decade | |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:31 - May 23 with 476 views | lowhouseblue |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 08:45 - May 23 by GlasgowBlue |
Politics seems to have got a lot nastier. People with different political views are no longer your opponents, they are your enemies.
We can trace this sort of stuff back to John McDonnell who encouraged the public to confront politicians in the street and the “lynch Esther McVey“ comment. |
for some people, on the left or right, politics has become their identity. at least online. they want it to publicly define who they are and determine how they are seen. it is how they project their value as a person and their claim to moral worth. it becomes a matter of absolute certainty, black and white, and fundamental to the person they want to project. it is then impossible for them to accept the possibility of legitimate alternative views. other people no longer have different political views - instead they are failed human beings, lacking intellectual capacity and / or moral worth. politics online descends into quasi-religious moral certainty. |  |
| And so as the loose-bowelled pigeon of time swoops low over the unsuspecting tourist of destiny, and the flatulent skunk of fate wanders into the air-conditioning system of eternity, I notice it's the end of the show |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:31 - May 23 with 470 views | giant_stow |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:16 - May 23 by positivity |
it goes back way further than mcdonnell, but agreed that it's got much nastier in the last decade |
Personaĺy, i'd put most of the blame on social media and how it seems to amplify semi-mad voices. |  |
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| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:37 - May 23 with 441 views | DJR |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:15 - May 23 by Axeldalai_lama |
Of course you don't. It's much better sport the way you do it.
Learn your lines, who to attack, know the ones who will bite and what to say to them so you feel in the right. Even your reply here is full of worn cliches you've clearly learnt to spit at who ever comments on these threads. It has absolutely no relevance to me as a general commenter on a thread I happened to see and yet I'm part of a playbook and factionalism.
It all achieves the square route of feck all, but makes you feel better. Meanwhile the actual culprits and the ones initially called out for being genuinely abhorrent are emboldened by the lack of accountability and encouraged that they cause this funny little bit of counter infighting, and that in fact the centrists are the problem.
As I say, I'm just a passer by not some hardened political poster, you do you, good luck to you. |
You may not care because you are a passer by but I was a Labour party member of long standing (I didn't vote for Corbyn) who resigned because of the takeover of the party by a narrow clique.
The following rather long article from Neil Lawson of Compass back in November is good on this, and as I predicted at the time the project has all ended in tears because groupthink doesn't lead to properly debated policies which stand up to scrutiny.
"The Starmer-McSweeney tendency is sinking Labour
Their tiny faction is dragging social democracy into an abyss
You can only put faction ahead of party and country for so long. In the world of ideas, policies and personalities feuding is inevitable. And from its inception, two world views have battled for influence in Labour. On one side those who want capitalism to be actively reshaped or even replaced; on the other those who only see the feasibility of its amelioration.
Between different groups from the Fabians to Tribune, from Bevanites to Gaitskellites, from Jenkinsites to Bennites, there has been a struggle between these two worldviews. The winners of factional struggles have always exerted some degree of bureaucratic control over policy and positions. Favourite sons and sometimes daughters, have been parachuted into seats, placed in the House of Lords, elevated to the Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet, while the conference and the NEC have been manipulated to reflect one side over the other.
Within reason this is healthy. The contestation of ideas and people creates better ideas and people. Balanced factionalism tests people and positions and makes the party stronger.
But something unprecedented happened to Labour in 2020. It was hijacked by a tiny clique of people and turned away from its historic mission to create a fairer society, let alone one that is much more equal.
What is different about now is that those who tightly control the party machine do not recognise the validity of other views and work not just to be the dominant voice in Labour, but the only voice. Those who do not share their highly particular and rigid perspective are not viewed as opponents but enemies. In attempting to control Labour they are killing Labour.
So how has a party with fierce rivalries and sometimes bitter competing groups, moved from healthy and nuanced factionalism to hyper-factionalism and even potentially post-factionalism, in which a once diverse and plural party with different wings and different voices becomes a narrow monoculture?
This is the story of what’s happened and what it means for both Labour and our democracy.
The crucible is the 2015 Labour leadership election in which Liz Kendall, standard bearer of a very desiccated form of late Blairism, secured a grand total of 4.5 per cent of the membership vote. This stood in some contrast to the 60 per cent enjoyed by the winner, one Jeremy Corbyn. The key conclusion drawn by Kendall’s small band of humiliated right-wing faction fighters was that their politics had zero chance of taking an open route to the leadership. For them the clear lesson was that control could only be won cynically through subterfuge. To achieve that in the short term meant masking their project to get it through the majority soft left Labour party membership. In the long term they could only rule by ridding the party of anyone who wasn’t part of their 4.5 per cent.
The ’mastermind’ of the Kendall campaign, who learnt these bitter but important lessons, was Morgan McSweeney.
The second decisive event which accelerated the shift to hyper-factionalism was the 2017 general election, when against the odds Corbyn won 40 per cent of the vote on the kind of mainstream social democratic manifesto unthinkable during the Blair or Brown years.
But for McSweeney and his fellow travellers this result was simply viewed as impossible. In his worldview victory could only be secured by the most cautious compromise with the forces and interests of the establishment. The reality of the highest Labour share of the vote since 1997, and the mobilisation of thousands of young activists, therefore had to be made unreal. Corbynism wasn’t just deemed undesirable but unfeasible. So, the now evidently possible had to be made permanently impossible.
They therefore started airbrushing the result from history and worked to sabotage the chances of it happening again. Peter Mandelson is on record as saying he would work every day to undermine Corbyn, while Tony Blair strongly inferred he would rather see a Conservative government than one led by Corbyn. Behind the scenes, as detailed in Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, party bureaucrats worked to undermine the 2019 election campaign, diverting money from target seats, and funnelling it to their preferred candidates. Corbyn was undermined at every turn by people who now demand unswerving loyalty to their leadership.
To be clear. This is not a defence of the politics of Jeremy Corbyn. He was – and remains – a politician lacking many of the essential skills of leadership. But the programme on which he stood in 2017 was popular and largely reflected a post-crash reality that capitalism needed to be reined in once more.
And here is the real tragedy of Keir Starmer, the 10 pledges that he stood on for the leadership in 2020, in effect “Corbynism without Corbyn”, were exactly the kind of policy ideas the party and the country needed. But the pledges weren’t offered as a genuine attempt to create a mildly social democratic future but instead as a cynical ploy to win the leadership, so that once in office McSweeney and his acolytes could turn against those policies and the people who backed them. Like the American GIs in Vietnam, the justification was that “to save the village you must burn the village”.
Once in office, they secured control of the NEC, replaced the General Secretary with one of their own and appointed all their best faction fighters to key jobs in the party and eventually the government. The key move was to ensure their candidates were selected for the 2024 general election. The list is long and dispiriting, but some stand out, such as Luke Akehurst, a McSweeney stormtrooper on the NEC who parachuted himself into the safe seat of Durham; Morgan McSweeney’s wife being found a seat in Scotland; Faiza Shaheen being shamefully turfed out at the last moment in Chingford.
At the same time, as this author found out, activists’ historic social media records were scrutinised on an industrial scale and anyone not in line with them had their membership suspended, a useful tool to take people out when there are key votes or selections going on.
In all this what mattered more than the action taken against candidates, MPs and activists, was the self-censorship people imposed on themselves for fear of being disciplined. Labour members prize the political and social life the party affords them, whether that’s the PLP or a local party. And they feel a deep loyalty to the party and at least to the office of the leader. Such weakness was exploitable.
The haunting phrase of one anonymous Labour briefer from this small faction over fears Muslim voters were being put off the party by its policy on Gaza in 2023 was of a dog “shaking off the fleas”. That took the othering of members of your own side to an extraordinary new level.
Alongside this endeavour to once and for all reshape the party in their image came the ideological and policy transformation of the party, which in part had the same factional purpose in mind. Policy positions were taken not just because they were deemed to be right economically or socially but because they actively alienated much of the membership. From the winter fuel allowance to Gaza, no policy offence was big enough to both symbolise Labour was no longer Corbynite and to encourage members to resign from the party. With alternatives to the left in the shape of Your Party and especially now the Greens, but many just giving up, rumours from within Labour suggest the membership is now as low as 200,000 from a high of over 500,000. If that is the case, then the threat to Labour’s continued survival is now existential.
The Starmer-McSweeney project is profoundly anti-democratic internally and externally. It silences any alternative voices within and applies the same coercive approach to the country without, because under our wretched first past the post voting system most of the electorate must resort to the least bad option. Up until now the media showed little interest in what has been an internal party affair, the narrative being the Tories needed replacing and Labour under Starmer was now in safe hands to do so. The self-proclaimed grown-ups were back. But no one really looked under the bonnet to see what was there.
Because this was a project that only knew how to win control of the party and then the state, not how to run a country. People skilled only in the art of party faction fighting had no interest and little ability to think about how to change the economy and the state. Not being the Tories, not being Jeremy Corbyn, them being in total control, that was enough. So, unlike Labour in the run up to 1997, they never did their intellectual homework. There was no deep thinking, no vision and no programmatic policy agenda, not least because that was what Corbyn did and therefore had to be eschewed. But it’s much worse than that. Their success at being faction fighters, the determination to eradicate all their enemies has left the government with none of the bandwidth or the culture to think through how you run a complex economy and society. Not least who you run it with.
Because government today demands not just the skill to navigate complex systems, but the ability to negotiate with others how decisions are made and then implemented. We are witnessing the breakdown of the old state and old delivery mechanisms. Central controls and diktats no longer work. Saying, as the Prime Minister regularly does, that he will simply double down when faced with every setback, or roll his sleeves even further up his arms, is a hopeless response to what is needed. Their increasingly obvious failure to even be competent technocrats is a direct consequence of their hyper- factionalism.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Ezra Klein made the case for a broad church in the Democrat Party to revive their fortunes, the same applies to Labour. He does so by quoting Bernard Crick from his 1962 classic text In Defence of Politics where Crick argued that “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.” This honouring of difference is not just morally right but instrumentally and intrinsically essential to good progressive governance.
This late-stage crisis of Labour should be seen in the context of not just the long-term crisis of global socialism but more specifically the ameliorative strand of social democracy that, since Tony Crosland’s 1956 Future of Socialism, was based on sharing the proceeds of growth. This later approach fuelled Labour through to the Blair years. But it was also based on the gains made by the post war Labour movement, and the vast array of ideas and countervailing forces in society and the economy that wrestled a better deal out of capitalism. The decline of those countervailing forces, most notably the unions, and then the global crash denied Labour both the proceeds of growth to share and the movement to back it.
Today the only change mechanism the party has is bureaucratic control, and that is breaking down. In the absence of ideas there is only a machine. And where there should be negotiation there is only imposition. To maintain their grip, what starts with deceitful promises to Labour members ends with grannies being dragged into police cells because they dare to oppose a genocide. As their project inevitably crumbles and they look beyond Starmer, the same trick will be turned, to gesture left and red-wash themselves to appeal to a membership that like so much of the country is to the left of them. But for all that Wes Streeting and others praise the victory of Zohran Mamdani, the machine they sit on top of would almost certainly have blocked him from being a candidate in the first place.
It was sheer audacity that, at the height of the Corbyn-Momentum era, a tiny group of people, led by Morgan McSweeney and Steve Reed, now the Housing Secretary, ran a clandestine campaign to secure control of the party and the country via the Orwellian named Labour Together. But today we have an administration revealed as narrow, shallow, brittle and alarmingly defensive. It was always going to unravel. You can only put faction before party and country for so long. Because while you can bureaucratically control a party for a while, you can’t control a country in the same way. The victory of Lucy Powell in the deputy leadership election shows even their control of the machine is now slipping. And the launch of Mainstream (which the author is co-founder of), along with the revival of the Tribune Group of MPs, shows the vast bulk of the membership still want essentially the programme Starmer promised them in 2020, along with a return to internal party pluralism. Meanwhile the shocking by-election result in Caerphilly a few weeks ago shows an electorate willing to back an alternative to Reform, but only if it is deemed progressive.
As things stand, Keir Starmer has the lowest ratings of any prime minister in history and Labour is at its lowest point ever in the polls. Of course, governing is hard, pragmatism should rule and people should be given time and a chance. But there is simply nothing remaining in this project intellectually or culturally to suggest it can reset the party or the government in the ways that are needed. Indeed, quite the reverse. Because of their hyper-factionalism it’s more likely they will pave the way to a Reform government, especially if they leave first past the post in place. The only hope they offer is that other parties are worse than them.
Back at the 2017 general election Wes Streeting, the poster boy for the Morgan Tendency, was felt to be in trouble in his Ilford North seat. Momentum, the fleas on the dog, got wind of his plight and redirected their activists to the seat to help save him, which they did. This is what Labour should be, robust in their differences, but certain that the real enemy is without, not within. Labour is dying because it’s being denied the oxygen of debate and difference. It is time for the party to breathe once more." [Post edited 23 May 10:41]
| | | |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:41 - May 23 with 421 views | lowhouseblue |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:31 - May 23 by giant_stow |
Personaĺy, i'd put most of the blame on social media and how it seems to amplify semi-mad voices. |
it amplifies mad voices. but it also - not just social media but all the types of media which have been expanded and promoted by social media - amplifies a certain personality type. it was already happening with the cult of celebrity but social media has massively turbo charged it. in real life self-obsessives and narcissists are a small proportion of the population, but social media etc has made them an ever increasing and ever more dominant part of what we see and read. it really distorts the world we encounter. | |
| And so as the loose-bowelled pigeon of time swoops low over the unsuspecting tourist of destiny, and the flatulent skunk of fate wanders into the air-conditioning system of eternity, I notice it's the end of the show |
| |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:43 - May 23 with 409 views | DropCliffsNotBombs |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:37 - May 23 by DJR |
You may not care because you are a passer by but I was a Labour party member of long standing (I didn't vote for Corbyn) who resigned because of the takeover of the party by a narrow clique.
The following rather long article from Neil Lawson of Compass back in November is good on this, and as I predicted at the time the project has all ended in tears because groupthink doesn't lead to properly debated policies which stand up to scrutiny.
"The Starmer-McSweeney tendency is sinking Labour
Their tiny faction is dragging social democracy into an abyss
You can only put faction ahead of party and country for so long. In the world of ideas, policies and personalities feuding is inevitable. And from its inception, two world views have battled for influence in Labour. On one side those who want capitalism to be actively reshaped or even replaced; on the other those who only see the feasibility of its amelioration.
Between different groups from the Fabians to Tribune, from Bevanites to Gaitskellites, from Jenkinsites to Bennites, there has been a struggle between these two worldviews. The winners of factional struggles have always exerted some degree of bureaucratic control over policy and positions. Favourite sons and sometimes daughters, have been parachuted into seats, placed in the House of Lords, elevated to the Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet, while the conference and the NEC have been manipulated to reflect one side over the other.
Within reason this is healthy. The contestation of ideas and people creates better ideas and people. Balanced factionalism tests people and positions and makes the party stronger.
But something unprecedented happened to Labour in 2020. It was hijacked by a tiny clique of people and turned away from its historic mission to create a fairer society, let alone one that is much more equal.
What is different about now is that those who tightly control the party machine do not recognise the validity of other views and work not just to be the dominant voice in Labour, but the only voice. Those who do not share their highly particular and rigid perspective are not viewed as opponents but enemies. In attempting to control Labour they are killing Labour.
So how has a party with fierce rivalries and sometimes bitter competing groups, moved from healthy and nuanced factionalism to hyper-factionalism and even potentially post-factionalism, in which a once diverse and plural party with different wings and different voices becomes a narrow monoculture?
This is the story of what’s happened and what it means for both Labour and our democracy.
The crucible is the 2015 Labour leadership election in which Liz Kendall, standard bearer of a very desiccated form of late Blairism, secured a grand total of 4.5 per cent of the membership vote. This stood in some contrast to the 60 per cent enjoyed by the winner, one Jeremy Corbyn. The key conclusion drawn by Kendall’s small band of humiliated right-wing faction fighters was that their politics had zero chance of taking an open route to the leadership. For them the clear lesson was that control could only be won cynically through subterfuge. To achieve that in the short term meant masking their project to get it through the majority soft left Labour party membership. In the long term they could only rule by ridding the party of anyone who wasn’t part of their 4.5 per cent.
The ’mastermind’ of the Kendall campaign, who learnt these bitter but important lessons, was Morgan McSweeney.
The second decisive event which accelerated the shift to hyper-factionalism was the 2017 general election, when against the odds Corbyn won 40 per cent of the vote on the kind of mainstream social democratic manifesto unthinkable during the Blair or Brown years.
But for McSweeney and his fellow travellers this result was simply viewed as impossible. In his worldview victory could only be secured by the most cautious compromise with the forces and interests of the establishment. The reality of the highest Labour share of the vote since 1997, and the mobilisation of thousands of young activists, therefore had to be made unreal. Corbynism wasn’t just deemed undesirable but unfeasible. So, the now evidently possible had to be made permanently impossible.
They therefore started airbrushing the result from history and worked to sabotage the chances of it happening again. Peter Mandelson is on record as saying he would work every day to undermine Corbyn, while Tony Blair strongly inferred he would rather see a Conservative government than one led by Corbyn. Behind the scenes, as detailed in Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, party bureaucrats worked to undermine the 2019 election campaign, diverting money from target seats, and funnelling it to their preferred candidates. Corbyn was undermined at every turn by people who now demand unswerving loyalty to their leadership.
To be clear. This is not a defence of the politics of Jeremy Corbyn. He was – and remains – a politician lacking many of the essential skills of leadership. But the programme on which he stood in 2017 was popular and largely reflected a post-crash reality that capitalism needed to be reined in once more.
And here is the real tragedy of Keir Starmer, the 10 pledges that he stood on for the leadership in 2020, in effect “Corbynism without Corbyn”, were exactly the kind of policy ideas the party and the country needed. But the pledges weren’t offered as a genuine attempt to create a mildly social democratic future but instead as a cynical ploy to win the leadership, so that once in office McSweeney and his acolytes could turn against those policies and the people who backed them. Like the American GIs in Vietnam, the justification was that “to save the village you must burn the village”.
Once in office, they secured control of the NEC, replaced the General Secretary with one of their own and appointed all their best faction fighters to key jobs in the party and eventually the government. The key move was to ensure their candidates were selected for the 2024 general election. The list is long and dispiriting, but some stand out, such as Luke Akehurst, a McSweeney stormtrooper on the NEC who parachuted himself into the safe seat of Durham; Morgan McSweeney’s wife being found a seat in Scotland; Faiza Shaheen being shamefully turfed out at the last moment in Chingford.
At the same time, as this author found out, activists’ historic social media records were scrutinised on an industrial scale and anyone not in line with them had their membership suspended, a useful tool to take people out when there are key votes or selections going on.
In all this what mattered more than the action taken against candidates, MPs and activists, was the self-censorship people imposed on themselves for fear of being disciplined. Labour members prize the political and social life the party affords them, whether that’s the PLP or a local party. And they feel a deep loyalty to the party and at least to the office of the leader. Such weakness was exploitable.
The haunting phrase of one anonymous Labour briefer from this small faction over fears Muslim voters were being put off the party by its policy on Gaza in 2023 was of a dog “shaking off the fleas”. That took the othering of members of your own side to an extraordinary new level.
Alongside this endeavour to once and for all reshape the party in their image came the ideological and policy transformation of the party, which in part had the same factional purpose in mind. Policy positions were taken not just because they were deemed to be right economically or socially but because they actively alienated much of the membership. From the winter fuel allowance to Gaza, no policy offence was big enough to both symbolise Labour was no longer Corbynite and to encourage members to resign from the party. With alternatives to the left in the shape of Your Party and especially now the Greens, but many just giving up, rumours from within Labour suggest the membership is now as low as 200,000 from a high of over 500,000. If that is the case, then the threat to Labour’s continued survival is now existential.
The Starmer-McSweeney project is profoundly anti-democratic internally and externally. It silences any alternative voices within and applies the same coercive approach to the country without, because under our wretched first past the post voting system most of the electorate must resort to the least bad option. Up until now the media showed little interest in what has been an internal party affair, the narrative being the Tories needed replacing and Labour under Starmer was now in safe hands to do so. The self-proclaimed grown-ups were back. But no one really looked under the bonnet to see what was there.
Because this was a project that only knew how to win control of the party and then the state, not how to run a country. People skilled only in the art of party faction fighting had no interest and little ability to think about how to change the economy and the state. Not being the Tories, not being Jeremy Corbyn, them being in total control, that was enough. So, unlike Labour in the run up to 1997, they never did their intellectual homework. There was no deep thinking, no vision and no programmatic policy agenda, not least because that was what Corbyn did and therefore had to be eschewed. But it’s much worse than that. Their success at being faction fighters, the determination to eradicate all their enemies has left the government with none of the bandwidth or the culture to think through how you run a complex economy and society. Not least who you run it with.
Because government today demands not just the skill to navigate complex systems, but the ability to negotiate with others how decisions are made and then implemented. We are witnessing the breakdown of the old state and old delivery mechanisms. Central controls and diktats no longer work. Saying, as the Prime Minister regularly does, that he will simply double down when faced with every setback, or roll his sleeves even further up his arms, is a hopeless response to what is needed. Their increasingly obvious failure to even be competent technocrats is a direct consequence of their hyper- factionalism.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Ezra Klein made the case for a broad church in the Democrat Party to revive their fortunes, the same applies to Labour. He does so by quoting Bernard Crick from his 1962 classic text In Defence of Politics where Crick argued that “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.” This honouring of difference is not just morally right but instrumentally and intrinsically essential to good progressive governance.
This late-stage crisis of Labour should be seen in the context of not just the long-term crisis of global socialism but more specifically the ameliorative strand of social democracy that, since Tony Crosland’s 1956 Future of Socialism, was based on sharing the proceeds of growth. This later approach fuelled Labour through to the Blair years. But it was also based on the gains made by the post war Labour movement, and the vast array of ideas and countervailing forces in society and the economy that wrestled a better deal out of capitalism. The decline of those countervailing forces, most notably the unions, and then the global crash denied Labour both the proceeds of growth to share and the movement to back it.
Today the only change mechanism the party has is bureaucratic control, and that is breaking down. In the absence of ideas there is only a machine. And where there should be negotiation there is only imposition. To maintain their grip, what starts with deceitful promises to Labour members ends with grannies being dragged into police cells because they dare to oppose a genocide. As their project inevitably crumbles and they look beyond Starmer, the same trick will be turned, to gesture left and red-wash themselves to appeal to a membership that like so much of the country is to the left of them. But for all that Wes Streeting and others praise the victory of Zohran Mamdani, the machine they sit on top of would almost certainly have blocked him from being a candidate in the first place.
It was sheer audacity that, at the height of the Corbyn-Momentum era, a tiny group of people, led by Morgan McSweeney and Steve Reed, now the Housing Secretary, ran a clandestine campaign to secure control of the party and the country via the Orwellian named Labour Together. But today we have an administration revealed as narrow, shallow, brittle and alarmingly defensive. It was always going to unravel. You can only put faction before party and country for so long. Because while you can bureaucratically control a party for a while, you can’t control a country in the same way. The victory of Lucy Powell in the deputy leadership election shows even their control of the machine is now slipping. And the launch of Mainstream (which the author is co-founder of), along with the revival of the Tribune Group of MPs, shows the vast bulk of the membership still want essentially the programme Starmer promised them in 2020, along with a return to internal party pluralism. Meanwhile the shocking by-election result in Caerphilly a few weeks ago shows an electorate willing to back an alternative to Reform, but only if it is deemed progressive.
As things stand, Keir Starmer has the lowest ratings of any prime minister in history and Labour is at its lowest point ever in the polls. Of course, governing is hard, pragmatism should rule and people should be given time and a chance. But there is simply nothing remaining in this project intellectually or culturally to suggest it can reset the party or the government in the ways that are needed. Indeed, quite the reverse. Because of their hyper-factionalism it’s more likely they will pave the way to a Reform government, especially if they leave first past the post in place. The only hope they offer is that other parties are worse than them.
Back at the 2017 general election Wes Streeting, the poster boy for the Morgan Tendency, was felt to be in trouble in his Ilford North seat. Momentum, the fleas on the dog, got wind of his plight and redirected their activists to the seat to help save him, which they did. This is what Labour should be, robust in their differences, but certain that the real enemy is without, not within. Labour is dying because it’s being denied the oxygen of debate and difference. It is time for the party to breathe once more." [Post edited 23 May 10:41]
|
This reminds me - I must give War and Peace another try. |  | | |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:58 - May 23 with 353 views | Axeldalai_lama |
| Reform's response to this is actually disgusting. on 10:37 - May 23 by DJR |
You may not care because you are a passer by but I was a Labour party member of long standing (I didn't vote for Corbyn) who resigned because of the takeover of the party by a narrow clique.
The following rather long article from Neil Lawson of Compass back in November is good on this, and as I predicted at the time the project has all ended in tears because groupthink doesn't lead to properly debated policies which stand up to scrutiny.
"The Starmer-McSweeney tendency is sinking Labour
Their tiny faction is dragging social democracy into an abyss
You can only put faction ahead of party and country for so long. In the world of ideas, policies and personalities feuding is inevitable. And from its inception, two world views have battled for influence in Labour. On one side those who want capitalism to be actively reshaped or even replaced; on the other those who only see the feasibility of its amelioration.
Between different groups from the Fabians to Tribune, from Bevanites to Gaitskellites, from Jenkinsites to Bennites, there has been a struggle between these two worldviews. The winners of factional struggles have always exerted some degree of bureaucratic control over policy and positions. Favourite sons and sometimes daughters, have been parachuted into seats, placed in the House of Lords, elevated to the Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet, while the conference and the NEC have been manipulated to reflect one side over the other.
Within reason this is healthy. The contestation of ideas and people creates better ideas and people. Balanced factionalism tests people and positions and makes the party stronger.
But something unprecedented happened to Labour in 2020. It was hijacked by a tiny clique of people and turned away from its historic mission to create a fairer society, let alone one that is much more equal.
What is different about now is that those who tightly control the party machine do not recognise the validity of other views and work not just to be the dominant voice in Labour, but the only voice. Those who do not share their highly particular and rigid perspective are not viewed as opponents but enemies. In attempting to control Labour they are killing Labour.
So how has a party with fierce rivalries and sometimes bitter competing groups, moved from healthy and nuanced factionalism to hyper-factionalism and even potentially post-factionalism, in which a once diverse and plural party with different wings and different voices becomes a narrow monoculture?
This is the story of what’s happened and what it means for both Labour and our democracy.
The crucible is the 2015 Labour leadership election in which Liz Kendall, standard bearer of a very desiccated form of late Blairism, secured a grand total of 4.5 per cent of the membership vote. This stood in some contrast to the 60 per cent enjoyed by the winner, one Jeremy Corbyn. The key conclusion drawn by Kendall’s small band of humiliated right-wing faction fighters was that their politics had zero chance of taking an open route to the leadership. For them the clear lesson was that control could only be won cynically through subterfuge. To achieve that in the short term meant masking their project to get it through the majority soft left Labour party membership. In the long term they could only rule by ridding the party of anyone who wasn’t part of their 4.5 per cent.
The ’mastermind’ of the Kendall campaign, who learnt these bitter but important lessons, was Morgan McSweeney.
The second decisive event which accelerated the shift to hyper-factionalism was the 2017 general election, when against the odds Corbyn won 40 per cent of the vote on the kind of mainstream social democratic manifesto unthinkable during the Blair or Brown years.
But for McSweeney and his fellow travellers this result was simply viewed as impossible. In his worldview victory could only be secured by the most cautious compromise with the forces and interests of the establishment. The reality of the highest Labour share of the vote since 1997, and the mobilisation of thousands of young activists, therefore had to be made unreal. Corbynism wasn’t just deemed undesirable but unfeasible. So, the now evidently possible had to be made permanently impossible.
They therefore started airbrushing the result from history and worked to sabotage the chances of it happening again. Peter Mandelson is on record as saying he would work every day to undermine Corbyn, while Tony Blair strongly inferred he would rather see a Conservative government than one led by Corbyn. Behind the scenes, as detailed in Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, party bureaucrats worked to undermine the 2019 election campaign, diverting money from target seats, and funnelling it to their preferred candidates. Corbyn was undermined at every turn by people who now demand unswerving loyalty to their leadership.
To be clear. This is not a defence of the politics of Jeremy Corbyn. He was – and remains – a politician lacking many of the essential skills of leadership. But the programme on which he stood in 2017 was popular and largely reflected a post-crash reality that capitalism needed to be reined in once more.
And here is the real tragedy of Keir Starmer, the 10 pledges that he stood on for the leadership in 2020, in effect “Corbynism without Corbyn”, were exactly the kind of policy ideas the party and the country needed. But the pledges weren’t offered as a genuine attempt to create a mildly social democratic future but instead as a cynical ploy to win the leadership, so that once in office McSweeney and his acolytes could turn against those policies and the people who backed them. Like the American GIs in Vietnam, the justification was that “to save the village you must burn the village”.
Once in office, they secured control of the NEC, replaced the General Secretary with one of their own and appointed all their best faction fighters to key jobs in the party and eventually the government. The key move was to ensure their candidates were selected for the 2024 general election. The list is long and dispiriting, but some stand out, such as Luke Akehurst, a McSweeney stormtrooper on the NEC who parachuted himself into the safe seat of Durham; Morgan McSweeney’s wife being found a seat in Scotland; Faiza Shaheen being shamefully turfed out at the last moment in Chingford.
At the same time, as this author found out, activists’ historic social media records were scrutinised on an industrial scale and anyone not in line with them had their membership suspended, a useful tool to take people out when there are key votes or selections going on.
In all this what mattered more than the action taken against candidates, MPs and activists, was the self-censorship people imposed on themselves for fear of being disciplined. Labour members prize the political and social life the party affords them, whether that’s the PLP or a local party. And they feel a deep loyalty to the party and at least to the office of the leader. Such weakness was exploitable.
The haunting phrase of one anonymous Labour briefer from this small faction over fears Muslim voters were being put off the party by its policy on Gaza in 2023 was of a dog “shaking off the fleas”. That took the othering of members of your own side to an extraordinary new level.
Alongside this endeavour to once and for all reshape the party in their image came the ideological and policy transformation of the party, which in part had the same factional purpose in mind. Policy positions were taken not just because they were deemed to be right economically or socially but because they actively alienated much of the membership. From the winter fuel allowance to Gaza, no policy offence was big enough to both symbolise Labour was no longer Corbynite and to encourage members to resign from the party. With alternatives to the left in the shape of Your Party and especially now the Greens, but many just giving up, rumours from within Labour suggest the membership is now as low as 200,000 from a high of over 500,000. If that is the case, then the threat to Labour’s continued survival is now existential.
The Starmer-McSweeney project is profoundly anti-democratic internally and externally. It silences any alternative voices within and applies the same coercive approach to the country without, because under our wretched first past the post voting system most of the electorate must resort to the least bad option. Up until now the media showed little interest in what has been an internal party affair, the narrative being the Tories needed replacing and Labour under Starmer was now in safe hands to do so. The self-proclaimed grown-ups were back. But no one really looked under the bonnet to see what was there.
Because this was a project that only knew how to win control of the party and then the state, not how to run a country. People skilled only in the art of party faction fighting had no interest and little ability to think about how to change the economy and the state. Not being the Tories, not being Jeremy Corbyn, them being in total control, that was enough. So, unlike Labour in the run up to 1997, they never did their intellectual homework. There was no deep thinking, no vision and no programmatic policy agenda, not least because that was what Corbyn did and therefore had to be eschewed. But it’s much worse than that. Their success at being faction fighters, the determination to eradicate all their enemies has left the government with none of the bandwidth or the culture to think through how you run a complex economy and society. Not least who you run it with.
Because government today demands not just the skill to navigate complex systems, but the ability to negotiate with others how decisions are made and then implemented. We are witnessing the breakdown of the old state and old delivery mechanisms. Central controls and diktats no longer work. Saying, as the Prime Minister regularly does, that he will simply double down when faced with every setback, or roll his sleeves even further up his arms, is a hopeless response to what is needed. Their increasingly obvious failure to even be competent technocrats is a direct consequence of their hyper- factionalism.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Ezra Klein made the case for a broad church in the Democrat Party to revive their fortunes, the same applies to Labour. He does so by quoting Bernard Crick from his 1962 classic text In Defence of Politics where Crick argued that “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.” This honouring of difference is not just morally right but instrumentally and intrinsically essential to good progressive governance.
This late-stage crisis of Labour should be seen in the context of not just the long-term crisis of global socialism but more specifically the ameliorative strand of social democracy that, since Tony Crosland’s 1956 Future of Socialism, was based on sharing the proceeds of growth. This later approach fuelled Labour through to the Blair years. But it was also based on the gains made by the post war Labour movement, and the vast array of ideas and countervailing forces in society and the economy that wrestled a better deal out of capitalism. The decline of those countervailing forces, most notably the unions, and then the global crash denied Labour both the proceeds of growth to share and the movement to back it.
Today the only change mechanism the party has is bureaucratic control, and that is breaking down. In the absence of ideas there is only a machine. And where there should be negotiation there is only imposition. To maintain their grip, what starts with deceitful promises to Labour members ends with grannies being dragged into police cells because they dare to oppose a genocide. As their project inevitably crumbles and they look beyond Starmer, the same trick will be turned, to gesture left and red-wash themselves to appeal to a membership that like so much of the country is to the left of them. But for all that Wes Streeting and others praise the victory of Zohran Mamdani, the machine they sit on top of would almost certainly have blocked him from being a candidate in the first place.
It was sheer audacity that, at the height of the Corbyn-Momentum era, a tiny group of people, led by Morgan McSweeney and Steve Reed, now the Housing Secretary, ran a clandestine campaign to secure control of the party and the country via the Orwellian named Labour Together. But today we have an administration revealed as narrow, shallow, brittle and alarmingly defensive. It was always going to unravel. You can only put faction before party and country for so long. Because while you can bureaucratically control a party for a while, you can’t control a country in the same way. The victory of Lucy Powell in the deputy leadership election shows even their control of the machine is now slipping. And the launch of Mainstream (which the author is co-founder of), along with the revival of the Tribune Group of MPs, shows the vast bulk of the membership still want essentially the programme Starmer promised them in 2020, along with a return to internal party pluralism. Meanwhile the shocking by-election result in Caerphilly a few weeks ago shows an electorate willing to back an alternative to Reform, but only if it is deemed progressive.
As things stand, Keir Starmer has the lowest ratings of any prime minister in history and Labour is at its lowest point ever in the polls. Of course, governing is hard, pragmatism should rule and people should be given time and a chance. But there is simply nothing remaining in this project intellectually or culturally to suggest it can reset the party or the government in the ways that are needed. Indeed, quite the reverse. Because of their hyper-factionalism it’s more likely they will pave the way to a Reform government, especially if they leave first past the post in place. The only hope they offer is that other parties are worse than them.
Back at the 2017 general election Wes Streeting, the poster boy for the Morgan Tendency, was felt to be in trouble in his Ilford North seat. Momentum, the fleas on the dog, got wind of his plight and redirected their activists to the seat to help save him, which they did. This is what Labour should be, robust in their differences, but certain that the real enemy is without, not within. Labour is dying because it’s being denied the oxygen of debate and difference. It is time for the party to breathe once more." [Post edited 23 May 10:41]
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This in itself is telling. So the untouchable, uncontrollable unpalatable right are excluded left alone and avoided, whilst those who actually have thoughts and ideas about a bigger picture they want to see for the country are subjected to reams and reams of intellectual bombardment.
No one needs to be specifically insulting to the right either, that's a straw man. Just denounce all the bad stuff they do, counter their constant factual inaccuracies and drill down into what they actually want, much like you seem to be happy to do with those you deem worthy/unworthy enough of your in depth analyses. I think quite a bit of the problem is that it is creeping more and more mainstream to be horrible, racist adjacent and right wing, without challenge, this needs to stop and more light should be shone on the wrongs they perpetuate, not just avoid it and blame the other-other side. [Post edited 23 May 11:10]
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