Meanwhile in the Labour Party...

[crazy canuck]

What would constitute "democratic socialism in our lifetime," and when that's reached would the Labour Party say I guess we've achieved all we need to?

Presumably the people within the Labour party who wish to attain democratic socialism will work to maintain it and those who ascribe to another form of politics will attempt to move the party and the country in that direction - you know politics as usual.

[The Brain]

Is Labour still relevant? How many antisemitic parties does the UK need?

[crazy canuck]

They will always be relevant.  Whether they are competitive will depend on the next leader.

[garbon]

They will always be relevant.  Whether they are competitive will depend on the next leader.

I'm not sure that's necessarily true. The could become irrelevant if another party were to rise in their place.

[crazy canuck]

They will always be relevant.  Whether they are competitive will depend on the next leader.

I'm not sure that's necessarily true. The could become irrelevant if another party were to rise in their place.

Fair point.

[Razgovory]

I fail to see how you fail to see.

The blind leading the blind.

[Sheilbh]

I can see a few glimmers there, some small cracks.
Its definitely true that Corbyn and the media aside, the reason Labour lost was less about individual policies and more about a lack of focus and strategy. Instead of concentrating on some core election winning policies they just kept throwing out new ones. Which, nice as they were, just distracted and made others less believable.

Also if you have loads of nice, popular, expensive policies that haven't been introduced to the public before (eg free broadband) so it's a surprise - they're not thrilled. They just don't believe you and if they don't believe the manifesto is credible then it doesn't how many popular policies you have.

But moaning about Tory lite. You can really see the appeal to the idiots on the far left there. And have to love the sly dig that the centre left aren't real socialists.
Labour has to stop doing this. Corbynites have entirely swallowed the Tory narrative that everything that is wrong is because of Labour, they happily go along with saying Blair was absolutely awful and then saying "Yeah but he wasn't real Labour!".
They have to stop letting Tories write the narrative.
Was Blair perfect? No. Should he have accomplished more? Yes. Was he a million times better than anyone since? God yes.

GORDO!

This is who Corbyn and his team are though. They are factional politicians. As I say you can see it with the way they're endorsing Burgon (one of the crew) over Dawn Butler (voted for Burnham in 2015) or Rayner (voted for Ed Miliband in 2015) despite the fact that both of the last two are far, far better candidates and broadly agree on policy with them. They may agree but they're not in the team.

Nandy- what I've seen of her I'm not a fan. Whether surrendering on brexit would have won the last election is a question that will forever go unanswered, now isn't the time to do that
Though wouldn't it be fun if Varadakar keeps his job and she becomes PM? Half-Indians FTW.

Interesting. I thought you'd love Nandy. She's the first memed leadership candidate ("all I want is functional bus network" ), all about devolution and regionalism and actually using the regions as a campaigning base for the national party - e.g. the Preston model, the way Labour councils are disrupting the energy market etc.

On Brexit - I remember when May's deal was voted down and the two groups who were cheering was remainers and hard-core Brexiteers. And at that point I thought someone's made a catastriphic misjudgement, and I wasn't sure who. Now, in retrospect, I do wonder if remainers would've have been better doing what Nandy and Kinnock were doing and instead of betting everything on a second referendum they spent their time trying to shape Brexit. If they'd turned up to Nr 10 and said - we have 70-100 votes that can pass your deal but we want full alignment on workers rights, consumer rights, the environment, customs union, the Norway model whatever.

Starmer remains my first choice. The only real point against him is that he's a man... Which...Well I'm all for equality and it would be great to one day see a female PM who isn't utterly horrid, but excluding the best candidate just because they have the wrong bits isn't right.

I think his pitch was excellent, but I'm not concvinced by him and I don't know what his solution is to where Labour is.

His record as DPP will come up and it will be a liability. I think it'll hurt him in the Labour campaign first (lots of very dodgy prosecution decisions with the police), but then some of his record will hurt him vs the Tories too (the collapse in rape convictions and trials started on his watch partly due to some policy decisions).

Edit: There's a new contender!

Barry Gardiner's going to throw his hat into the ring. Apparently Unite and some of the other Corbyn inclined unions are a bit worried about RLB and have approached Gardiner to run. Older white man, years in Parliament, very popular with the grass-roots.....what could possibly go wrong.

[Josquius]

Interesting. I thought you'd love Nandy. She's the first memed leadership candidate ("all I want is functional bus network" ), all about devolution and regionalism and actually using the regions as a campaigning base for the national party - e.g. the Preston model, the way Labour councils are disrupting the energy market etc.

I've not seen this bus quote. Good if so.

On the Preston model. Eghh.... That's a tricky one. The trouble with the way it is now becoming a talking point is it seems to be in the wrong form.
There are too basic ways the preston model can go which I call the north Korea model and the polder model. With populist brexit things very much seem to be blowing towards the former. A belief that Britain is excellent and doesn't need anyone else and the entire reason the north is so poor is london actively sucking out wealth. This is the kind of idiocy that sees some in the north opposing HS2.
I'm more in favour of a polder model. Buy local where possible, but local doesn't necesarily mean in the same town. Inter-City rivalries are a huge problem that really holds the north back.
Make efforts to focus spending in steadily building places up to a level where they can stand as working class bastions, free of the lumpens tides, connected to the country and world at large in a virtuous cycle of wealth creation.
It's harsh and means some more remote areas will have to wait until it is their turn. But its the most efficient way to use our resources. Spread the core areas well enough and most people should benefit from them even if they don't directly live in them. The every town for themselves approach that some seem to see as the way forward is little different to what we have now.

On Brexit - I remember when May's deal was voted down and the two groups who were cheering was remainers and hard-core Brexiteers. And at that point I thought someone's made a catastriphic misjudgement, and I wasn't sure who. Now, in retrospect, I do wonder if remainers would've have been better doing what Nandy and Kinnock were doing and instead of betting everything on a second referendum they spent their time trying to shape Brexit. If they'd turned up to Nr 10 and said - we have 70-100 votes that can pass your deal but we want full alignment on workers rights, consumer rights, the environment, customs union, the Norway model whatever.

Labour were doing that though. The problems were
1: they were also pushing for an election that may didn't want.
2: may was too committed to a hard Brexit and didn't want to be seen to be selling out her party.

[Sheilbh]

On the Preston model. Eghh.... That's a tricky one. The trouble with the way it is now becoming a talking point is it seems to be in the wrong form.
There are too basic ways the preston model can go which I call the north Korea model and the polder model. With populist brexit things very much seem to be blowing towards the former. A belief that Britain is excellent and doesn't need anyone else and the entire reason the north is so poor is london actively sucking out wealth. This is the kind of idiocy that sees some in the north opposing HS2.
I'm more in favour of a polder model. Buy local where possible, but local doesn't necesarily mean in the same town. Inter-City rivalries are a huge problem that really holds the north back.
Make efforts to focus spending in steadily building places up to a level where they can stand as working class bastions, free of the lumpens tides, connected to the country and world at large in a virtuous cycle of wealth creation.
It's harsh and means some more remote areas will have to wait until it is their turn. But its the most efficient way to use our resources. Spread the core areas well enough and most people should benefit from them even if they don't directly live in them. The every town for themselves approach that some seem to see as the way forward is little different to what we have now.

I don't think her point is everyone should do the Preston model:

This change starts with empowering people to make change themselves. We've been a decade out of power in Westminster, changing our leaders, and commissioning reports and focus groups from offices in central London just to hear what is happening in the country. If we were trying to reinforce the sense that we just don't get it, we couldn't do better than this.

Yet out there in the country, Labour is creating change – from Preston council, which has used local assets to grow the economy, to Nottingham, which set up its own energy company to help the poorest. As shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change, I brought 60 Labour councils together to defend the Paris agreement and cut the UK's carbon footprint by 10% by switching to clean energy. Quietly and unsung, we disrupted the power of the big six energy companies. It is this on-the-ground activism that will pave the way back to government.

I think after an eleciton in which it was striking how little used Andy Burnham, Steve Rotherham etc were used that actually building up with local government success and ideas isn't a bad idea.

Labour were doing that though. The problems were
1: they were also pushing for an election that may didn't want.
2: may was too committed to a hard Brexit and didn't want to be seen to be selling out her party.

I don't think it's a Labour issue - though I don't buy for one second the idea that the Labour leadership and Theresa May would ever do a deal - I think it was a little wider about remainers. If you talked about negotiating what Brexit should look like, even if it was trying to make it a soft Brexit, then you'd be outflanked by second referendum remainers. The gravity of the hard-line leavers and remainers destroyed any chance of compromise, and then the leavers won the election.

[Sheilbh]

Another point that may mean nothing - or maybe it does.

Clive Lewis (who won't get the nominations to go to the next round but is running for leader) has suggested separating the Scottish Labour Party in part, to enable them to take a non-unionist position on independence. Striking and follows on from Corbyn's luke-warmishness, it's interesting how it's been figures in the English Labour Party who basically seem to sympathise with Scottish independence, while in Scotland the people who are still in the Labour Party are often there because it's the left-wing unionist party.

This isn't entirely unprecedented mind. Before Ruth Davidson won the leadership of the Scottish Tory Party, her main competition was proposing separating the Scottish Tory Party from the national model (though remaining unionist) on the CDU-CSU model.

[mongers]

All of the candidates, saving perhaps RLB, are a step up (return to normalcy) for the Labour, as the ordinary man or women in the street can relate to them and understand where they're coming from unlike Corbyn, who appealed most to the party activist and some of his opinions were ideological pure but baffling to many. 

[garbon]

The Thorns passed the first hurdle by the skin of her teeth!

[Sheilbh]

First hustings for the Labour Party.

These have been a little controversial because they were basically all in places Labour did well which may not be the best approach when you've just lost 60 seats. I think they have now added a few areas.

By all accounts it was a dreadful format - 40 seconds per response so no real debate just soundbites. All quite low energy. Philips was the only one who tried to attack/go for other candidates' ideas. Thornberry apparently quite good. But it doesn't feel like this changed anything.

Lisa Nandy also did well in her interview with Andrew Neil which is positive.

[Sheilbh]

Jess Phillips dropped out

Some current mood indications in Labour

I really, really hope Long-Bailey loses because those 32% need to fuck off into the Greens/Lib Dems/Socialist Workers


Corbyn would win again. (Also as a long-term Wilson fanboi I'm delighted at the way his reputation's come up again).

[Josquius]

The second makes me cry. The Blair hysteria most of all.

The last... Sounds weasley. Labour from its foundation was about creating a better society and improving the lot of the working class and by extension the very working class ourselves. The middle one stinks a bit too much of those who moan labour is out of touch because it isn't racist. White working class tribalism is not labour.