LivDiv wrote:

So the idea would be that every GE the current MP would be on equal footing to anyone else who fancies a go at it?

Yeah basically. You have to be nominated by a threshold of people, so you don't have 300 people on the ballot. The party machine will get the nominations for the incumbent, anyone else has to do it themselves.

They wanted to boot out the people not loyal to Corbyn more easily is my feeling on the motivation. I think also it will allow easier manipulation based on organisation in a way that Dominic grieve nearly got booted out by his constituency party.

Interesting video from 2014:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1212720852304875520

Nandy doing a good job of endearing herself to me this morning. Anyone who can actually deal contemptuously with the vapidity, shallowness and anti-intellectualism of today’s interviewers (aka tv personalities) gets my respect:

https://mobile.twitter.com/ashcowburn/status/1219908856379314176

I don’t know how the vote works but I would have Nandy as my number 1 and Starmer as my number 2. If it’s only one vote I would have Starmer.

mistercrayon wrote:

I don’t know how the vote works but I would have Nandy as my number 1 and Starmer as my number 2. If it’s only one vote I would have Starmer.

Alternative vote, so you can have Starmer as second preference, and if Nandy is knocked out first your vote goes to him.

Yeah, the preference part is the same, what's changed is how each part of the vote is weighted.

The biggest difference is that in that election, MP's/MEP's, party members, and affiliate members were each weighted at a third. So the smaller voting block had a hugely oversized weighting. That one was quite interesting. David was the choice of MP's and party members, but Ed the choice of affiliate members, who were the biggest block. But as they had equal weighting, David came out on top first round. If it were run on todays system, Ed would have been the frontrunner.

RedDave2 wrote:

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/uk-to-prioritise-eu-trade-deal-over-one-with-united-states-1.4147733?localLinksEnabled=false&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=UK+to+prioritise+EU+trade+deal+over+one+with+United+States&utm_campaign=lunchtime_latest_digest I mean, what was the fucking point of all this...

TAKING BACK CONTROL

AndCallMeCharlie wrote:

RedDave2 wrote:

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/uk-to-prioritise-eu-trade-deal-over-one-with-united-states-1.4147733?localLinksEnabled=false&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=UK+to+prioritise+EU+trade+deal+over+one+with+United+States&utm_campaign=lunchtime_latest_digest I mean, what was the fucking point of all this...

TAKING BACK CONTROL

I can only equate it to plugging out your controller in the middle of a 2 player game of FIFA just so you can run of with said controller. You've taken back (your) control(ler)

Genuine laugh out loud - amazing how little has changed

I want more substance from my articles criticising Labour. Let's take this one on:

The chances of the Labour leadership contest flaring into any kind of life currently seem remote, especially when it comes to meaningful debate about the party’s crisis. There are occasional flashes of candour, such as Lisa Nandy’s insistence that “if we do not change course, we will die, and we will deserve to”. But the contest’s default position is embodied by its two frontrunners. Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey have so far displayed one common trait: trying to convey a sense of purpose while saying nothing much at all.

Can't see why a statement as vague and meaningless as "if we do not change course" (from what? to what?) is in any way more purposeful as RLB's or Starmer's statements.

According to YouGov, among skilled manual occupations Labour received only 31% of votes, compared with the Tories’ 49%. Among semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers, the percentages were 34% to 47%.

Useless stats without context. What are these numbers historically, over the last 5/6 elections, say since 1992? Has there been a trend one way or another? Even devoid of historical context, why does Labour necessarily have to pander to certain groups, if we have decided (later in the article) that old ideas of class and "top down lumping in of groups" is not the way to go?

Labour’s 2019 manifesto represented this unchanged impulse in spades: if it had a central idea, it was to deliver to a monolithic body of people it called “the many”, massively expanding the reach of government via spending programmes and nationalisation, while leaving the basic structures of the state untouched. Some of the policies were popular in isolation, but the public recoiled from the whole package for many reasons – some bound up with trepidation about the cost, others that cut straight to the left’s failure to understand that 1945 was a long time ago.

The manifesto was a mess, at least in terms of how it communicated the ideas and how it mashed them all together without any warning / announcements / preparation for them. But: what is Labour if it is not supposed to represent the many? What were the many reasons? Why is "lack of understanding that 1945 was a long time ago" one of them, what does this even mean?

The central state remains the only means of taxing the rich, regulating big business and setting frameworks for climate action. But try selling the idea of big government to people well acquainted with the regime at their local jobcentre, those who have tried to get an unresponsive public sector to help their disabled child, or the multitudes whose experience of the state often boils down to endless form-filling and half-hour waits on phone lines.

"we need big government, but everyone hates big government" OK thanks for that. Or are you saying that 10 years of Tory defunding and austerity (and previous tory governments swathes of deregulation and under funding) should somehow be laid at Labour's doors? After all who can be blamed for shitty jobcentres, lack of state care for disabled and elderly? Granted, new labour were obsessed with ranking and recording and measuring, which resulted in too much bureaucracy. But is this what this guys wants? I mean it's not clear throughout the article what he wants, but maybe his point has passed me by?

There is a modern version of this problem, bound up with a combination of old-fashioned statism, Labour’s increasingly middle-class makeup, and the way the left’s focus on the politics of attitudes and behaviour sometimes teeters into shrill intolerance, not least online. By comparison, Conservatism’s eternal promise is that its supporters will be left alone. Millions of people will always vote for that – not just because it represents a quieter life, but because it chimes with the internet age: the fact that people now have a voice, and don’t like being told what to do, or who to be.

There's that old-fashioned again. Maybe Harris thinks our trains are better run by monopolies? Oh noes middle class people (who they, actually?), at least some of them, like Labour! And they hate working class (who they, again?)! And then a general point that millions of people will always vote Tory for obvious reasons, useful point. In what way, pray, does a Tory government "tell people what to do" less than a Labour government? As for who to be, I take this as an implicit criticism of social progressivism, however much Harris tries to hide it: lots of people simply don't like homosexuals, are xenophobic, and are now deeply unhappy that Labour seems to stand for all sorts of weirdos like transexuals and immigrants. Lots of these people also are white working class (?) who traditionally voted Labour, but don't like trans people or immigrants. Seems to me they're the ones stuck in the last century.

Labour’s lost heartlands are synonymous with angry men, nostalgia and “social conservatism”. They are not really like that at all: large swaths of Labour’s lost territory are smattered with trailblazing social projects, often run by women

I simply cannot parse how these two things cannot both be true. Is Harris really implying that the women who run these trailblazing social projects didn't vote Labour? And what have they to do with the angry white men who probably didn't vote Labour, when they used to before?

As old narratives of class and heavy industry have faded away in these places, some people have hung on to identities based on place and nation. Yet these are much more complicated than the caricature of stupidity and racism: witness the fact that a third of ethnic minority voters backed Brexit.

Wait so how do modern class lines (whatever they may be) intersect with voting again? And wait ethnic minorities cannot themselves be bigoted against immigrants, women's rights, LGBT rights, other ethnic minorities? Interesting points!

Contrary to the laughable top-downism seen recently in Momentum offering its members a yes/no verdict on candidates its high-ups had already picked

Ah just time for your daily momentum scare story but...what's this? momentum represents less than one in ten labour members? and is no way representative of anything other than itself? I mean I'm not a great fan of Lansdale and other momentum operators, but why propagate the lie they are all-powerful in the labour organisation?

I just don't see any real substance here other than "Labour is in crisis and localism is the only solution" which happens to be Starmer's key points in his latest round of articles and interviews; and defence of "traditional" labour voters who, if the Vox pops and labour panels on C4 are any guide, could kindly fuck off out of the party as far as I'm concerned.

Thank you for articulating my thoughts Funk.

I'm broad-brushing in the same way as Harris but if you're taking about the 'many' and then you start going on about homelessness, food banks, bus services and executive pay, you aren't necessarily talking about details that apply to the many. Not in direct ways that are about their every day lives. People that work, aren't on the breadline, have their own transport and aren't interested in macro economics or politics in general. This group is primed to think Labour are about to start wasting and spending their money on a whole load of other stuff. Handing out freebies. 

My Dad is in that group, 30-40k bracket before retirement, and recently confessed that he has "voted selfishly" and voted Tory a lot of the time. I didn't have a particularly good answer for him. That he was not voting selfishly but actively against his own interests by allowing governments to make sure he works long hours for depressed pay than he otherwise might have done. It wasn't really working though. It's a point of pride how much he's grafted.

Comparing the 2017 and 19 elections to past ones probably isn't that helpful though. Brexit is such a massive factor.

mistercrayon wrote:

I think what it says (to me) is that the patriarchal idea of socialism is anathema to a lot of Britain (and crucially to enough of Britain spread across constituencies). There are too many instances where Britain has rejected bigger government and gone for something that’s closer to home (ie in their eyes) to suggest that this big socialism will win elections. I think it is not in enough people’s guts. You can pick examples on the progressive side - the SNP success I imagine relies a bit on being rooted not in London. And even the labour movement comes from the idea of local communities with common ideas of solidarity. For me there’s enough in there to suggest there are ideas worth thinking about. And let’s also not forget that John Harris has probably put more work than most MPs even to see what Britain looks like in different places.

I'm not forgetting that Harris has put the miles in, and this article doesn't invalidate or worsen any of his previous work exploring communities and shining interesting lights on all sorts of opinions.

I just think this piece is bad for reasons outlined above. I particularly don't agree with you that there are any ideas in there worth thinking about, other than localism which is already popular with the labour leadership candidates he's so keen to criticise as out of touch.

I don't think it says very much about socialism that we didn't already know: that a lot of people don't trust the state to manage large projects and services. The thing is, of course, that the 2017 and 2019 manifestos were absolutely not presenting a socialist agenda, at least not in terms I understand. They advocated state control over crucial public services which are currently served by actual or quasi monopolies, often state supported at that. And mostly, when you ask people what they'd prefer, a majority say state control of health, water, railways is preferable.

He mostly just re-iterates something I think we already know: that a lot of people, as described by Monkey, don't feel represented by Labour any more - these people tend to be older, white but not always, and have decent long lasting jobs and pensions and a house and have worked hard all their lives so don't see why they should support these snowflake transexual millennials who are always on their expensive smartphone whilst studying for Mickey Mouse degrees - ie: typical tories, who just happened to vote for labour because their communities historically did.

The idea that people feel betrayed by Labour and therefore had no choice but to vote Tory simply doesn't stand up under any scrutiny.

Brexit is such a huge factor in that swap, but imo it merely accelerated many of these people's switch to Tory; they'd have got there in the end like Monkey's dad.