Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

That would be a massive competition law violation.

Yeah. I very much doubt they'll have done that because of that - and the risk would be very high. The CMA has very strong powers (see recent set-to with Facebook).

What I think is more likely is that no-one wants to be first - a little bit like the banks with ATM charges (I think this will also end as we move more cashless). But once one moves and takes the hit, I think the rest will follow very quickly. I think there is probably a covid angle to this of there aren't many people on holiday using roaming charges so this is a very good time to do it with minimal customer push back right now - by the time people are paying it's too late.

Ok look I have never been to Ireland but there is no fucking way Frenchness has no cultural component to it.

That's fair, and you're right about culture - but that isn't linked to anyone and is, instead, sort of open on a civic basis.

"Leave campaigners 'surprised' by decay in relations with EU, says David Frost"

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/24/brexit-campaigners-surprised-by-sour-relations-with-eu-says-lord-frost

Ever get the impression that we don't have our top brains working on brexit?

I think he's probably right though. I think their assumptions were wrong.

There was an interesting YouTube chat between Tim Montgomery (a Leaver) and David Gauke (a Remainer) who are both Tories about what they got wrong and there's a reasonable bit of common ground. But some of it is stuff like this where they just didn't understand Europe or the EU's attitude.

Also it's clear from loads of things over the last six months that this government does not want a relationship with the EU outside of the TCA - that has consequences.

I bet while giving pandemic contracts to buddies didn't destroy him, this will.

Maybe - but aren't they quite similar allegations/queries? It's being questioned if he gave a job as a non-executive director (part-time, normally 1-2 days a months for £15k pa) to a woman who he's possibly having an affair with.

Edit: And amazing how covid regulations are becoming a sort of new moralism. Picture on the news: "was this reasonably necessary, as under the covid regs?"

[Sheilbh]

Although all the clips of Hancock saying people need to take responsibility plus when he said Neil Ferguson should go because the "rules are for everyone" make this very difficult.

I think Johnson might keep him round as a human shield (plus to avoid setting any precedent around infidelity ), but I can't think of anything more likely to enrage British public opinion than that type of hypocrisy.

[Sheilbh]

Looks like a really, really grim day in Batley and Spen.

First of all there was a Muslim activist from Birmingham - he was involved in the anti-LGBT education protests there - being quite aggressive to the Labour candidate on the streets. George Galloway denies any connection to this - but as I say, as is often the case with Galloway campaigns, there's been a lot of really unpleasant stuff circulating and he deliberately stokes community politics in the worst way. The guy's issue was largely over Kashmir - Kim Leadbetter was actually stood next to a local British-Kashmiri Labour MP (Naz Shah) and, of course, Labour's policy on Kashmir (and Israel-Palestine) is the same as it was under Corbyn.

It felt particularly unpleasant knowing that Leadbetter's sister was murdered in the streets of that constituency where she was now being harassed. I think she dealt with it very well though I did particularly like that she walked away having said she's happy to talk about anything but she won't put up with people just shouting at her or over her on the street.

But secondly you had a George Galloway "free speech" rally because he has now become a complete Red-Brown candidate. So as well as his usual pitch to Muslim voters which he's been doing for the last 20 years and the old school socialism stuff, Galloway's new bit is about ousting Starmer and about being anti-woke (I think especially on LGBT issues - which allows him to unite conservative Muslim voters with conservative white voters). So because of that we had Laurence Fox also joining the campaign for George Galloway - Laurence Fox was an actor but has since carved out a space as an anti-woke (and anti-lockdown/covid-sceptic) grifter including a London mayoral run.

There was other stuff too but this campaign is just an open sewere now - homophobia, nativism, anti-semitism, bullying and really personal abuse, culture war nonsense and religious fundamentalism - and that's all just on the fight between Galloway's Workers Party and Labour. I'd also note that I hope the alternative left media have a long hard look at themselves after this campaign after all the quite generous profiles/articles they've done about Galloway because he is running as the anti-Starmer candidate. Just all very, very depressing.

Meanwhile Galloway ran for election in Bradford I think in 2017 and promised that he would donate any unused campaign funds - about £15k from the final campaign report - to local food banks. Shockingly it's now being reported that he didn't donate that money and it's now unaccounted for.

[Josquius]

Fingers crossed people are smarter than to vote for Galloway. He obviously won't win, but has a big potential to draw votes away from labour.

Or hey.
Double fingers crossed that the voters Galloway draws away with his anti woke stuff are of a BNPy variety and would otherwise have went Tory. Unlikely however.


Also on Hancock...is it just me who on reading the headline thought "Wait what? Matt Hancock is getting it on with the racist from the Mandalorian? Good going son...but never saw that one coming."

[Tamas]

 

That's why people here and the West in general should look at Poland, Hungary, and the USA (Trumpism) - a fall to autocratic hate-filled third world madness is always lurking in the back and will jump on the opportunity to gain power if given the chance.

[Sheilbh]

Sadly I think Galloway pre-dates all of that. I remember his campaign in 2005 in Bethnal Green and Bow (which was successful) where he ran against Oona King, a mixed race Labour MP with Jewish heritage - and as well as stuff about Britain being at "war with Muslims", there were persistent reports of Galloway's activists bringing up King's Jewish heritage in their door-stop campaign. And he had that weird combination of quite extreme Islamic fundamentalists plus the Socialist Workers Party as an activist base. It was an incredibly nasty campaign.

So was the Bradford West one which he won in, I think 2012 - and the re-election campaign (which he lost) where he was going around allegedly waving Naz Shah's nikah (Islamic marriage certificate) because she said she was forced into marriage in Pakistan when she was 15 and he said the nikah proved that she was 16 and a half and she was telling a lie to defame Muslims. I think he subsequently lost the libel case against her.

He's one of the worst people in British politics. And what makes it even worse is that he runs in and sometimes wins these seats in incredibly deprived - and is a dreadful MP. He does none of the constituency work that other MPs do. He basically uses his position to make speeches in the Commons about, for example, Palestine or Kashmir, he uses them to raise money for his succession of dodgy charities that get shut down under allegations of misuse of funds, or to help promote his show on Russia Today or Press TV - and he doesn't help in any way the people who elected him.

He rocks up, stirs up community tensions a lot and runs an incredibly dirty campaign, then he's off to London to make his money and moves on to the next constituency

[Tamas]

Sadly I think Galloway pre-dates all of that. I remember his campaign in 2005 in Bethnal Green and Bow (which was successful) where he ran against Oona King, a mixed race Labour MP with Jewish heritage - and as well as stuff about Britain being at "war with Muslims", there were persistent reports of Galloway's activists bringing up King's Jewish heritage in their door-stop campaign. And he had that weird combination of quite extreme Islamic fundamentalists plus the Socialist Workers Party as an activist base. It was an incredibly nasty campaign.

So was the Bradford West one which he won in, I think 2012 - and the re-election campaign (which he lost) where he was going around allegedly waving Naz Shah's nikah (Islamic marriage certificate) because she said she was forced into marriage in Pakistan when she was 15 and he said the nikah proved that she was 16 and a half and she was telling a lie to defame Muslims. I think he subsequently lost the libel case against her.

He's one of the worst people in British politics. And what makes it even worse is that he runs in and sometimes wins these seats in incredibly deprived - and is a dreadful MP. He does none of the constituency work that other MPs do. He basically uses his position to make speeches in the Commons about, for example, Palestine or Kashmir, he uses them to raise money for his succession of dodgy charities that get shut down under allegations of misuse of funds, or to help promote his show on Russia Today or Press TV - and he doesn't help in any way the people who elected him.

He rocks up, stirs up community tensions a lot and runs an incredibly dirty campaign, then he's off to London to make his money and moves on to the next constituency

Pre-dates what, history? I meant this as a general peril, there was certainly no lack of it in the 1930.

But thanks for the details on this I barely picked up just hints from the news.

[Sheilbh]

Fair - and I have zero doubt that in the thirties he would have been a very happy Stalinist-sympathising member of Labour or full-blown Stalin-backing member of CPGB, fully opposed to fascsim until about August 1939 etc

This Channel 4 News piece gives a flavour of what's going on - the interview with him about 1-3 minutes in is typical of his style:
https://www.channel4.com/news/batley-and-spen-by-election-labour-fights-to-hold-off-tory-challenge

Edit: Also I just hate that line "have you got someone on camera saying that about me? No. So I'm supposed to take your word for it?" It goes to so many things right now.

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/24/keir-starmer-tells-pm-to-ditch-yacht-and-tackle-antisocial-behaviour

Keir Starmer is calling on Boris Johnson to scrap his plans for a "vanity yacht" and instead spend the money on tackling antisocial behaviour.

Pledging to make Labour "the party of law and order", Starmer highlighted the blight of antisocial behaviour, such as off-road bikes and high-powered cars being raced through residential neighbourhoods.

"As chief prosecutor, I saw far too many examples of crimes perceived as 'low-level' not being tackled quickly enough before they escalate," the Labour leader said. "People can end up afraid in their own homes, or scared to go out at night."

In a sign that Starmer may be heeding the pleas of his MPs for him to attack Johnson more forcefully, he added: "I not only understand deeply why tackling antisocial behaviour is needed, but I'm frustrated by the prime minister's priorities. His multimillion-pound vanity yacht isn't addressing people's everyday concerns. Labour will scrap it and fund crime fighting instead."

...

[garbon]

When you see the Hancock video it is so much worse.

[Sheilbh]

Oh no - The Sun have released footage of the clinch between Hancock and his lover. This is the one thing we didn't want to happen.

Think he'll probably have to go - the only question is how much political capital is Johnson willing to expend keeping Hancock round as a human shield.

It's times like this when you really feel the ineffectiveness of Labour/Starmer. I just think of Blair/New Labour's attitude of more or less disdain and contempt towards the government over it's various scandals and ability to turn to the people and say "you deserve better than this". I don't think Starmer has the range.

Edit: Also astonished at how quickly this guy got the Shaggy parody up:
https://twitter.com/munyachawawa/status/1408453493053067268?s=20

[Tamas]

Oh no - The Sun have released footage of the clinch between Hancock and his lover. This is the one thing we didn't want to happen.

Think he'll probably have to go - the only question is how much political capital is Johnson willing to expend keeping Hancock round as a human shield.

It's times like this when you really feel the ineffectiveness of Labour/Starmer. I just think of Blair/New Labour's attitude of more or less disdain and contempt towards the government over it's various scandals and ability to turn to the people and say "you deserve better than this". I don't think Starmer has the range.

Edit: Also astonished at how quickly this guy got the Shaggy parody up:
https://twitter.com/munyachawawa/status/1408453493053067268?s=20

Yeah plus this law and order talk above, wanting to sound like a Tory. If people want a Tory in power (which most of them clearly do) they will vote Tory. Surely, there must be some viable politics between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn?!

[Sheilbh]

Law and order ("tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime") was a big Blair thing as was anti-social behaviour, which is where ASBOs come from.

But - and this is the big issue - this just sounds like a 90s tribute band. I can see a case for building a law and order thing around Starmer - former Director of Public Prosecutions etc - but I don't think this is how you do it.

It must be coming up in focus groups as a big issue, but it just doesn't seem wildly connected to anything. I think you need a narrative to pin you ideas onto - and I think you maybe need some connection between vanity yacht and fighting crime, because when that came up it felt like it was very random.

The reason Blair and Brown worked isn't because they were tough on law and order or prudent on public finances or whatever other policy fetish people have. It's because they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted to do and a pretty convincing story of what was wrong with Tory Britain and how they could fix it. You know, they had a strategy - and I still don't see one from Starmer.

Edit: And on the problem for Hancock - I'd be very surprised if this is all the Sun have. I imagine they have enough material to run for a few days yet.

[Sheilbh]

I thought this was a really interesting thread:

Robert Saunders
@redhistorian
Can "everyday politics" breathe new life into the Left, in an age of populism & popularisation? Really interesting discussion on the @MileEndInst podcast, featuring @colm_m, @mds49
& @ea_robinson, inspired by Marc Stears' recent book: "Out of the Ordinary"
https://anchor.fm/mile-end-institute/episodes/Out-of-the-Ordinary-with-Marc-Stears-and-Emily-Robinson-e13csoh
As I argued here last month, "If there is one lesson that Labour desperately needs to relearn, it is its faith in ordinary people". http://gladstonediaries.blogspot.com/2021/05/starmers-first-year-signal-and-noise.html
As @mds49 noted, one challenge for the Left is that it rightly wants to talk about big ideas & heroic changes; but as soon as it does that, it risks becoming detached from the experience & language of normal life. I wondered whether there's a longer-term reason for that?[cont...]
Until the mid-C20th, even the most radical reformers had a language that was grand, heroic & inspiring, but also part of the rhythm of everyday life: the language of the Prayer Book & the King James Bible. Campaigns to abolish slavery, win votes for women &build welfare states...
... could promise the New Jerusalem, the coming of the kingdom & the gift of "our daily bread". They could lead their people out of slavery, lay the axe to the root of the tree & speak to the better angels of our nature, in familiar words & phrases rooted in collective activity.
In that respect, secularisation may have been a problem for the left: so much of its thinking & speaking is drawn from a religious age, but the words no longer "land" in the same way with a wider public. Perhaps another reason why the "ordinary" & the "awesome" have moved apart?

I think this is a challenge for Labour and the wider British left - which was not inspired by Marxist theory but Christian socialism and the English radical tradition (Milton - who Michael Foot loved - Hazlitt etc). There was a common rhetorical framework for its frankly utopian ideals: "This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing". And in Britain I think this is a specific thing of the left - the heartlands of liberalism and then Labour in Britain were in the non-Anglican areas such as the West Country, Wales, Scotland etc which had a strong tradition of preaching. The Tories - in Anglican areas - have always been a bit more cynical/Vicar of Bray-ish and has less of a history of great orators.

It strikes me that it might also apply to challenges around the rhetoric and politics of climate - do we have a language to describe the consequences of failure when we are shorn from the language of the apocalypse? Is that awesome threat too distant, and our lives now divorced from that school of rhetoric (including secular rhetoric) linked to Christianity - do we have a way to make it real and connect it to our normal lives in a way that 3 degrees higher temperature doesn't?

The article he linked to was also interesting and sort of linked to what we were talking about with Labour's challenge:

Starmer's First Year: The Signal and the Noise

A year ago, as Keir Starmer strapped himself to the mast of the Good Ship Labour, I joked that "leading the Opposition is not so much a job as a multiple personality crisis". Twelve months later, as he picks through the wreckage of his first big electoral test, Starmer could be forgiven for wondering in what role he has been cast: as the captain, the albatross, or the first violin, bravely playing on as the ship goes down.

From a historical perspective, it is hard to reach a judgement on Starmer's first year - because no Leader of the Opposition has ever had a first year like it. He inherited a shattered parliamentary party, reduced to its lowest number of MPs since 1935; a party that was broken financially, divided ideologically, and under investigation by the EHRC for institutional anti-Semitism. The political landscape was being rewritten by Brexit, while Covid had suspended the normal rules of both politics and economics, in a way that left little scope for traditional opposition. The vaccine has handed the government an almost unprecedented public policy success: one that is experienced directly by almost every household in the country. Nearly everyone in the UK has either been vaccinated themselves, or has a parent, grandparent or loved one who has been vaccinated. It would be hard to think of another government programme in peacetime that has carried such a powerful (and personal) political punch.

So the challenge for the Labour Party, as it reflects on the last year, is to separate the signal from the noise. What is temporary or contingent - like, perhaps, the vaccine bounce - and what is lasting or structural? And what lessons might it draw from the party's history?

Must Labour Lose?

Losing elections is not an unfamiliar experience for the Labour Party. In the whole of the twentieth century, it won a comfortable working majority only three times: in 1945, 1966 and 1997. Tony Blair, who has just turned 68, is the only man alive to have led the Labour Party to a general election victory. He is one of only two Labour election winners to have been born since the party was founded, more than 120 years ago. Labour has only once won a comfortable majority from Opposition [1], and until 2005 had never completed two full terms in office.

The reasons for that are partly structural. Labour has never been able to match the Conservatives financially and is grotesquely under-represented in the press. For most of its history, the party has been locked out of at least one part of the United Kingdom. Only once, in 1945, has it out-polled the Conservatives in the South of England, a region that returns about a quarter of the House of Commons, and it currently holds just one seat in Scotland.

Factionalism is not new either. Labour has always been an uneasy coalition of forces, that have wrestled for control of the party. Even Clement Attlee, the secular saint of the Labour movement, faced at least three attempts to remove him from the leadership - one of them on the day he became prime minister in 1945. Harold Wilson plotted against trade union leaders, secure in the knowledge that they were also plotting against him, while Neil Kinnock had fist-fights in the toilets at the Labour Party Conference.

Because Labour aspires to represent a particular cohort of the electorate - because it cares intensely about who its voters are - it has always been vulnerable to social and economic changes that threaten to undermine its electoral base. In the 1950s, concern centred on the so-called "affluent worker", who owned a television, a car and increasingly thought of himself as "middle class". In the 1980s, the decline of heavy industry, the sale of council houses and the decline of trade union membership struck terror into the hearts of Labour strategists, threatening as they did to abolish the party's core vote.

For that reason, the fear that Labour might never win again is also far from new. As early as 1908 - less than a decade after the party was founded - the dockers' leader Ben Tillett asked in a celebrated pamphlet Is the Parliamentary Labour Party a Failure? In 1960, an influential book by Mark Abrams and Richard Rose posed the question Must Labour Lose?, while the 1990s saw much ink spilt on "Labour's Southern Discomfort" and the rise of "Mondeo Man".

In one respect, Labour might take heart from these memories. After each of those crises, Labour did win again - and won well. Political parties do not have a divine right to survive, but nor are they doomed to disappear. That is especially true at a time like the present: an age of extraordinary political volatility, when the impossibilities of one day become the conventional wisdoms of the next. If the Conservative Party, in 2019, could go from 9% in the European Elections to a landslide General Election win, Labour can also turn its position around. But that will require honesty about the scale of its problems, creativity in the search for solutions, and humility about its relationship with the electorate.

Building Back Better

So what might Labour learn from its past?

Whenever Labour has won, it has offered a positive and optimistic vision of the future - and persuaded people it can deliver it. In 1945, it was the "New Jerusalem": the "Modern Mecca" of the welfare state. For Harold Wilson, it was a country forged anew in the "white heat" of the "technological revolution". In 1997, it was Oasis, D-Ream and "New Life for Britain". In each case, that optimistic vision was set against an account of the costs of Conservative rule: from the "hungry thirties" and the Great Depression, through the "thirteen wasted years" of 1951-64, to the "22 Tory tax rises" of the 1990s.

Offering a compelling vision of change is not just a matter of policy. It requires good story-telling, that links together an account of the past ('how did we get here?'), an analysis of the present ('where are we now?') and a programme for the future ('where will we take you?') Labour is currently struggling with all three elements of that package.

Whatever his other faults, Boris Johnson is a very skilful story-teller. He consistently sets the vaccine success, freeports, spending announcements and even the demise of the Super League within a larger story about Brexit, "Global Britain" and "levelling up". He offers an optimistic vision of what Britain stands for and where it is heading under his leadership. Labour may think that story is bunkum, but it can't just play the grim reaper, polishing its scythe and waiting for night to fall. It needs to give people reason to hope for a Labour government. That requires it to tell the public what Labour likes about the country, what it thinks is holding it back, and why voters should believe that their lives will be better if Labour is in power.

If, as Keir Starmer has predicted, Covid is to usher in a more social democratic age, Labour will need to shape how people understand and remember this period. It will need to tell a story about why Britain was so unprepared for the crisis and why the effects were felt so unequally. It must offer an account of the government's failures during the crisis that goes beyond "incompetence" - an explanation that carries little political charge - and that links problems with out-sourcing, testing, contracting and schooling to the political values that underpinned them. But the party also needs to show how the best of this crisis speaks to Labour values - solidarity, collective provision, public service and equality - offering a template on which a future government could build.

That story needs to be matched with serious policy work. In the 1930s, at the lowest ebb in Labour's electoral fortunes, it launched the most ambitious policy exercise in the party's history. The result was the first detailed policy programme Labour had ever generated, which set out much of the agenda for the 1945 government. In the 1990s, New Labour launched a really serious attempt to rethink what the Labour Party was for, in a world where the Cold War was ending, Britain was moving to a new kind of service economy, the male-breadwinner model was breaking down, and issues like gay rights and racial equality were moving up the agenda. That programme did not solely come from the right of the party: it drew on the work of Eurocommunists, cultural theorists, left-wing councils, the TUC and external groups like Charter 88. We might disagree with the conclusions it reached, but Labour needs that ambition again now.

If anything, the need for new thinking is more pressing today than it was in the '90s. Issues like climate change, the gig economy and the fracturing of the United Kingdom were barely on the agenda twenty years ago. Now they require urgent solutions. Brexit has returned great swathes of policy-making from Europe to Westminster; yet it remains wholly unclear what Labour proposes to do with those powers, save to regret the reason for their existence.

Addressing these questions will carry Labour far outside its intellectual comfort zone. The Labour Party was founded in 1900, at a time when British politics was moving away from the constitutional questions that had dominated the nineteenth century, and towards the economic and distributional questions that would dominate the twentieth. If politics is now moving back towards constitutional and cultural questions, Labour will need to orient itself to a political environment in which it has few deep roots. If it fails, it risks being as stranded in the politics of this century as the Liberal Party was in the politics of the last.

Dropping the Ming Vase

If it is to tackle these questions effectively, Labour will need to avoid three historic failings.

First, it has to find a way to manage its internal divisions. It is no coincidence that the worst periods of Labour infighting - the 1930s, 1950s, 1980s and the last six years - have all seen it plunged into electoral exile. By contrast, Labour's most successful governments brought together people from radically different traditions. The Attlee government harnessed the talents of men who were barely on speaking terms. (Told that Herbert Morrison was "his own worst enemy", Ernest Bevin replied "Not while I'm alive"). Wilson's cabinets stretched from Tony Benn to Roy Jenkins and from Barbara Castle to Denis Healey. Even New Labour, in its early years, brought together figures as diverse as David Blunkett (formerly of the "Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire"), Chris Mullin (who edited Tony Benn's speeches), the Eurocommunist Geoff Mulgan and civil liberties campaigners like Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt.

That is not only a challenge for the leadership, but for the party more broadly. Labour cannot survive a social media culture in which the most anodyne statements are cast as acts of war. There is no middle course to be steered between the mutually-incompatible ultimatums being fired off by every section of the party, whether on Brexit, Corbyn, electoral reform or the next manifesto. What Labour needs is not 'unity' - which usually means "agreeing with me" - but the ability to disagree fraternally. Only then will the pluralism of the Labour tradition become a source of strength, rather than an engine of disintegration.

Second, Labour needs to break its historical reluctance to take defeats seriously. Labour has an unhappy tendency to inhale its own myth. Because it thinks of itself as the party of the people - or, at the very least, as the party of the working class - it consistently struggles to explain election defeats, except by invoking some extraordinary external shock or internal betrayal. In Labour mythology, it would have won in 2019, if not for Brexit; it would have won in 2017, if not for treason at party HQ; it would have won in 1983, if not for the Falklands; and it would have won in 1978 if Callaghan had not dithered until the following spring. From the Zinoviev Letter and the Campbell Case to the Post Office Savings Scare, the Bankers' Ramp and the Treasury estimates in 1970, Labour history is riddled with excuses that prevent it engaging honestly with its own failures. It should not wait for a fifth successive defeat before doing so today.

Finally, Labour must resist a tendency to conflate opposition to "Toryism" with hatred of "Tory voters". All Labour's election winners have understood that good people can vote Conservative - and that the task of the Left is to win them back again. Attlee had been a Conservative himself; Wilson was married to a Conservative, while Blair's father had hoped to be a Conservative MP. That did not prevent them from trying to draw Tory voters back to Labour, but it inoculated them against the 'Tory Scum' rhetoric that too often disfigures the party.

This is not simply a question of manners; it affects how the party understands its electoral dilemma. Labour sometimes talks about Brexit voters, or Red Wall voters, as if they belong to a degenerate alien species; as if the dilemma facing the party was whether to pander to their prejudices or to bid them good riddance, in search of a more elevated electorate elsewhere. Yet the voters that deserted Labour in 2019 were not bigots, xenophobes or class traitors. As recent research by YouGov demonstrates, they held many of the same social attitudes as voters in other parts of the country. They cared about their families, their communities, and the wider country. If they saw the Conservative Party, or Brexit, as a better vehicle for those aspirations than the Labour Party, that should be a cause for reflection, rather than recrimination, on the Left.

If there is one lesson that Labour desperately needs to relearn, it is its faith in ordinary people. Labour should be confident in its ability to win the electorate back for a progressive vision of politics - and, indeed, to believe that those voters might have something to teach it about what progressive politics should look like. But that will require the party to talk with voters, and not simply at them, and not to treat elections as a moral test that the public has sadly failed.

In short, Labour should be serious about the scale of the challenge, but optimistic about its ability to meet it. Doing so will require good faith from all sides in the party, and a greater humility in their relations with the electorate. If they fail, the party will lose again, and again, and again; and that will let down not just the Labour Party, but the people for whom it claims to exist.


Notes

These comments are based on remarks to the Mile End Institute webinar on "Keir Starmer's First Year" on 11 May 2021. The full event, with Caroline Flint, Anthony Wells, Ailbhe Rea, Eunice Goes and Patrick Diamond, can be watched here.

[1] In 1997. Strictly speaking, Labour won from Opposition in 1945, but it had just emerged from five years of government as part of the wartime coalition.

[garbon]

Edit: And on the problem for Hancock - I'd be very surprised if this is all the Sun have. I imagine they have enough material to run for a few days yet.

You were right as they've already move on to reporting about how they watched her pack up her car a few hours before the initial story went out and also a story on them being boozed up together 2 weeks after the office rendezvous.