General Election 2019

[AngryOfTuebrook]

You'll be shocked to know that media coverage of the parties during the election campaign fell short of a scrupulous standard of fairness and balance.

 

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/press-hostility-labour-party-election-campaign-2017_uk_5dfb51f0e4b01834791bed1c?ncid=fcbklnkukhpmg00000008&fbclid=IwAR1A5OtjmwpoilQy57n46_30U5he1VJt3vinInRbE8C2BFBQjN6HHQyau3I

 

 

[an tha]

Taking back control....

 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/dec/21/andrea-leadsom-approves-takeover-of-cobham-defence-firm-by-us-company

[Rico1304]

I have a cunning plan...

 

 

[Mudface]

9 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

I have a cunning plan...

 

 

Looks like an over-reaction to the 2017 election- in that case, a more 'New Labour'- run campaign prioritised defending the seats of Blairite MPs. As a result, they missed out on a string of seats which could likely have been won if extra resources had been devoted to them. This is obviously a horrible miscalculation the other way, the emphasis should have been on defending their Northern leave seats and consolidating the previous gains.

[Barrington Womble]

From David milliband in the observer today. I think he's pretty spot on, but I know that view will not be shared on here. 

 

The next leadership team needs to recognise the fundamental errors that made Labour unelectable

David Miliband

In 2017, Corbyn’s defeat was diagnosed as a victory. Now, the danger is that the excuses outrun the facts again

• Labour: After the debacle, what comes next?

 

Published:07:05 Sun 22 December 2019

 Follow David Miliband

Jeremy Corbyn speaking in parliament, flanked by Dawn Butler and Diane Abbott. Photograph: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/PA

At three successive elections in the last decade, Labour has failed to address the reasons for its defeat. The consequence is simple. We lose again. The electorate send us back to the classroom. This time, a similar failure, a further relapse into denial, and the result could be fatal for the party and the communities we are supposed to serve. The question for the party is fundamental: are we really serious about getting back into government? If not, then it is the political graveyard not just the classroom that beckons.

In 2010, Labour won eight seats out of 210 in the south of England outside London. But we were told that the problem was the Blair legacy, even though we had won many of those seats in the Iraq-stained election of 2005. We underestimated our opponents and moved into the comfort zone of talking to ourselves.

In 2015, Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership by attacking our time in government. Reforms to the Labour leadership voting system, by limiting the role of MPs, further reduced our connection to the real electorate: voters. The result was a Corbyn leadership which failed to command the confidence of MPs or ultimately the public.

In 2017, a defeat was diagnosed as a victory. We significantly increased our vote share but not our number of MPs against the worst Conservative campaign in living memory. We were sold the category error of confusing opinion poll support for individual policies with support for the programme as a whole.

Now in 2019, the danger is that the excuses outrun the facts again. The voters could not be clearer. It is not only Corbyn who needs to be replaced, but his politics: the ideology, the worldview, the theory of political change.

Labour literally repelled voters in 2019. “Out of touch” does not capture the full awfulness. Voters were all too in touch with what the Labour leadership stood for. Incredible promises were all too well understood. So was the unctuous sectarianism of the leadership clique. Together they came to be seen as more of a risk to the country than Brexit – even though every study shows that it will cost the poorest communities the most.

John McDonnell said at the 2017 party conference that the more dire the situation a Labour government inherits, the more radical would need to be its efforts. Fair enough. The greater the inequality, the greater the need for remediation. There was and is an appetite for a step change from austerity that is serious about redistribution and wealth creation.

But there is a corollary. The greater the proposed radicalism, the greater the credibility needed of the policy and and the plan and the team to make the changes. Labour failed on all counts. Every extra promise weakened the appeal of all the promises.

Credibility is scorned by the hard left. We are told it means sucking up to the establishment

Credibility is scorned by the hard left. We are told it means sucking up to the establishment. Or taking Tory positions. Rubbish. It is about recognising that people with the least have the most reason to be risk averse about taking a chance on the future. And we should take our cue from them. If you are proposing to make a big change in someone’s life, they want to be sure that you know what you are doing. Radicalism without credibility is just posturing.

In America they say an election campaign is an MRI on your character. Yet the leadership culture was toxic. The failure to acknowledge, never mind address, antisemitism is a moral scar. The sectarianism addressed at those who disagreed with the edicts of the leadership was disgraceful. Remember it was only the early election which called off the hounding of MPs with deselection. Eddie Mair called Boris Johnson a “nasty piece of work”. Voters rightly concluded the same about Labour’s hard left.

Of course Brexit was an issue (though smaller than Corbyn and his promises). But the Labour evasions over three years exacerbated the problem. So neither leavers nor remainers were happy. Doing a deal with Europe in three months. Then refusing to campaign for or against it. It did not add up. There is no evidence that Labour MPs who backed a second referendum did worse than those who did not. It was the leadership decision to support the Tory call for an election before Brexit was resolved that was terrible hubris.

The agenda in 2023 or 2024 will have important differences from the present. But the choice of the electorate will be driven by many of the same questions. Whether the values of the Labour leader and top team offer a progressive patriotism. Whether the vision of the party speaks to the real issues facing the country. Whether the plans can be explained, paid for and delivered. Whether the team represents the aspirations of the country. Whether the leader is actually a leader.

Attlee passed this test. So did Wilson. And Blair. Only three Labour leaders have ever won a working majority. Let’s learn from the successes and not split the difference with the failures. It would be absurd to say the policies should be the same. I don’t propose a rerun of 1997 any more than of 1945. But the politics – the clarity, the positioning, the orientation to the future not the past, the capacity to lead – is timeless. That is what I will be looking for in the leadership candidates.

The next leadership team needs to show the British people that they recognise the fundamental errors of policy and character that made Labour unelectable. Its apology needs to be profound and real. It needs to rebuild Labour as a broad church. Merit, not sect, needs to drive promotion. Labour in local government – where more is being done with less resource – needs to be an emblem of what Labour can do. And the policy agenda needs to show flexibility not rigidity. Public ownership has its place in a mixed economy. But if nationalisation is the single transferable answer to every economic problem, no one will believe it.

I am convinced that Brexit is the biggest foreign policy disaster since appeasement in the 1930s. But if Brexit is even half as bad as I think it will be, then the choices at the next election – about priorities, about tax and spending, about the sustenance of the UK, about the relationship with the EU – will be even harder than at this one. The overriding task for a new Labour leadership is to show that it has the imagination and competence to address them, free of the dogma that doomed the party in 2019.

Angry? Worried? You bet. I am currently the most recent Labour foreign secretary. I don’t want to be the last Labour foreign secretary.

• David Miliband is CEO of the International Rescue Committee. He was Labour MP for South Shields from 2001 to 2013

[Jairzinho]

Got as far as "hard left".

 

One of Corbyn's team's errors was going along with the idea that any of this stuff was radical, and that saying as much would be a vote winner. 

 

 

[Scooby Dudek]

21 minutes ago, Jairzinho said:

Got as far as "hard left".

 

One of Corbyn's team's errors was going along with the idea that any of this stuff was radical, and that saying as much would be a vote winner. 

 

 

The hounding of M.P.s with deselection was when I stopped.

[Gooch]

Good article, don’t like the bloke but there’s some hard truths in there that need addressing if the party is going to have any hope of getting back into power.

[Dougie Do'ins]

 

 

 

[SasaS]

With a 70-year old boomer as a Labour leader, surprisingly little support among the over 65s.

[sir roger]

I knew David Milliband was so wedded to the Labour party that he got a titty lip on and ran away to America when he lost the leadership election, but I had no idea he had joined Thunderbirds.

[Creator Supreme]

4 minutes ago, sir roger said:

I knew David Milliband was so wedded to the Labour party that he got a titty lip on and ran away to America when he lost the leadership election, but I had no idea he had joined Thundercunts.

 

[Rico1304]

17 hours ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

 

 

 

About as relevant as being top of the league at Christmas. 
 

‘if only the young and naive were in charge we’d be fine’

[Gnasher]

22 hours ago, Jairzinho said:

Got as far as "hard left".

 

One of Corbyn's team's errors was going along with the idea that any of this stuff was radical, and that saying as much would be a vote winner. 

 

 

You did better than me I only got as far as his name.

[Gnasher]

16 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

About as relevant as being top of the league at Christmas. 
 

‘if only the young and naive were in charge we’d be fine’

If the naive little iddies were in charge we'd at least have a slimmer chance of our homes being flooded or dying in a bush fire in Australia 

[Dr Nowt]

Simple, just don’t go to Australia.

 

[Rico1304]

1 hour ago, Gnasher said:

If the naive little iddies were in charge we'd at least have a slimmer chance of our homes being flooded or dying in a bush fire in Australia 

They don’t like racists though. Be careful what you wish for. 

[Sugar Ape]

There’s been a lot of soul searching within the Labour Party since last week’s election. Why did they face their fourth consecutive defeat at the ballot box, and fall to their lowest number of seats since 1935?

To try and better understand what went so wrong we have spoken to nearly 500 voters since the result who voted Labour in 2017 but defected this time. Given that Labour’s vote share fell by nearly 8%, this was clearly the key dynamic of the campaign, and understanding why these voters left might help the party better understand how they can win them back.

Voters had clearly gone off Jeremy Corbyn

 

The biggest reason for defection, mentioned by 35% of those surveyed, was Jeremy Corbyn and his leadership. Most people didn’t expand on this, just mentioning the leader by name. This is consistent with the drop in Jeremy Corbyn’s favourability we have seen since 2017 and has clearly alienated voters.

 

In our first poll after this election just 21% of voters had a favourable view of the Labour leader, compared to 46% who did so straight after the election in 2017.

 

Brexit created difficulties for the Labour campaign

Brexit was close behind the leadership issue, with one in five (19%) saying it was their main reason for defecting.

 

Whilst it is clear that support for a second referendum was a large part of this, and there were twice as many Leavers who defected over Brexit than Remainers, that isn’t the whole story.

 

Firstly, because there was still a substantial minority of voters who still left the party because they didn’t believe the party to be Remain enough.

 

But also because of the way that the party’s view on Brexit interacted with views of the party’s leadership. When we polled earlier in the year on why they were going off the Labour leader, the main responses were around Brexit.

 

The data then showed that it wasn’t just due to his position being too far towards Remain (just 3% thought this) or too far towards Leave (just 6% said this), but rather the fact that he doesn’t seem to have any position at all - making him look weak and indecisive.

 

In total 13% of respondents mentioned that he had been too weak on Brexit, and not taken a decisive stance.

 

That message is clearly coming through again in this latest data, with many people saying that they felt the party looked weak because of the decisions they had made on Brexit.

 

But the party clearly struggled with other policies as well

With Brexit dominating the discussion so far, it is also important not to forget the importance of other policy areas, which was mentioned by 16% of those who abandoned Labour.   
 

In most cases, this was to do with the economic policies proposed in the manifesto and a feeling this time around that they are undeliverable and would cost too much.

 

This is consistent with polling before the election, which showed that the majority (63%) thought that Labour’s policies are not realistically deliverable, and that the party would not deliver on its promises.

 

A significant minority left Labour to vote tactically

The final significant element that lead to a drop in Labour’s vote share is tactical voting. There was a lot of discussion of tactical voting in this campaign, with pro-Remain websites pushing people towards it in order to stop Brexit.

 

In total, 10% of voters said this was the main reason they didn’t vote for Labour this time around. Unsurprisingly, this rises to 15% among Remain voters who left, but is the main reason for just 3% of Leave voters who left.

 

These voters will almost all have been in seats which Labour didn’t have a hope of winning anyway (because of the nature of tactical voting) so will not have made a substantial impact on the result.

[Bjornebye]

Apparently Arlene Foster has been getting pumped by her driver and has been booted out of her house. 

[lifetime fan]

8 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Apparently Arlene Foster has been getting pumped by her driver and has been booted out of her house. 

A blind driver???

[Bjornebye]

2 minutes ago, lifetime fan said:

A blind driver???

Must have been mate. No sense of smell either because she looks like she reeks. 

[Dr Nowt]

Some brave fuckers out there, I tell you.

 

Bet you won’t see him at The Pride of Britain awards though. Shameful.

[Creator Supreme]

29 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Apparently Arlene Foster has been getting pumped by her driver and has been booted out of her house. 

I've just been sick in my mouth!

[Gnasher]

5 hours ago, Rico1304 said:

They don’t like racists though. Be careful what you wish for. 

Who the Aussies? 

[Colonel Bumcunt]

I love how the Leavers think all this Brexit lark is now done and dusted.  It's so far from done, it's hilarious to watch them leering over Twitter, baiting 'lefties', fuck em, let them have their moment of levity, before the storm hits.

 

One thing I love is how the right don't see the threat of Dominic Cummings.  

The lad is Rasputin, he got in Johnson and Gove's ear and they offered him the Earth to get their campaign over the line....but at what cost. 

 

That man is not a Tory.  He's a fox with the keys to the hen house.  He's going to boil the piss of the Tories, they let him into the inner sanctum and now he's far too dangerous to get the wrong side of.  He doesn't see Ministers as his equal, he doesn't even see the PM as his equal, he could taken down the entire place if they piss him off, if they renege on whatever deal they had. 

 

As for the deal, it's not about money, his 90k salary, peanuts.  He's an ideologue, his blog posts are an insight into his mind, he wants to smash the place to pieces and press reset.

 

Johnson is Tsar Nicholas II.  War is about to break out over Brexit, and he will be required to attend to the obvious carnage about to befall the country.  Cummings is not interested in rebuilding trade links, that's not his interest at all.  He's lurking, leaning against pillars in the lobby of the commons, smiling, knowing he walks among them but without any fucking scrutiny from the public or the ministers.  He wants to rebuild Westminster, decision-making, priorities.  He doesn't give a shit about their manifesto and other such lies they've told to get over the line.  That's not his concern, he doesn't have a seat in danger, his seat is permanent, right at the top of the pile. He just sends out the oversized infant to do the PR bits.  

 

One wonders if the best thing left-wingers could have done was to vote Tory.  Cummings is not Corbyn, but he's a lot closer to Corbyn than he is to Johnson. 

 

Cummings time in Russia is a mystery to everyone.  Some unconfirmed rumours about an airline he ran for a short while, laughable.  He took a sabbatical from politics once he was last kicked out of government, while working with Gove, and during the sabbatical he just read books.  His passion is for Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist.  

 

Quote

 

After two years in the heart of government, Cummings is brutal about the psychology of those who go into politics, even if he is likely to exclude his former boss Gove from his assessment. He claims: "Many are dominated by the pursuit of prestige, refusal to admit errors and by a desire to react to media coverage which is much simpler than problem solving or management and provides a comforting illusion of activity."

In a description that viewers of The Thick of It would recognise, Cummings describes the atmosphere of Westminster politics as "constant panic, but little urgency. Almost everything takes months if not years longer than necessary. Many organisations cannot fill senior posts with people who can reliably spell and manage simple processes like answering correspondence." Ministers struggle to keep in control; some, he writes, "have resorted to FOI-ing their own departments to get vital information".

Cummings also proposes that ministers should be given powers to fire civil servants. Choosing brutal, militaristic language, he says: "The most important change in Whitehall is human resources rules. Until it is possible to replace people quickly in the same way that healthy armies fire bad generals … major improvements are impossible."

 

Quote

The way the media reports this is inevitably distorted. If you go back to the Euro campaign in 1999, how many chief executives and chairmen of FTSE 100 companies were speaking out on this? I think two. Two out of 200 people. Did that represent the reality of what businesses in Britain thought about the Euro? Of course it didn’t. Did it represent what CBI members thought? Of course it didn’t. What it represents is that the establishment and the people who set the rules have a lot of power. Too much power in my opinion

Quote

If you look back at history, most important PR and propaganda was invented by the Communist Party.