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goddamnedtwisto posted:Lib Dems did not cost us meaningful amounts of votes in the vast majority of seats we lost. Stop looking at national numbers, or we're doomed to ever increasing majorities in zone 2 and third party status in parliament. https://twitter.com/paulhilder/status/1205598555097980928 note also that low/unenthusiastic turnout is also dangerous for Labour; it doesn't have to break Liberal to be problematic, as long as Con is strong enough to take the seat too at a large level though, I struggle to see this strategy that retakes the 'red wall'; these places will continue to shrink and depopulate, and the young and educated will move to those new Labour strongholds in the cities, where they will vote in large numbers in party OMOV votes for leaders and policies that they support https://twitter.com/election_data/status/1206646112184160258
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Feb 1, 2020 11:54
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goddamnedtwisto posted:The votes we lost to the Lib Dems were in Remain-voting seats which were and remain pretty safe Labour territory, melty places like Westminster and Richmond excluded. It cost us *at most* a dozen seats even if you include gains we might have expected to make like Two Cities. They were abandoned by the historical force of changes in the means of production; actually-existing command economies could not make labour-intensive heavy-industry towns sustainable and neither could the entire developed West in the decade before it turned to neoliberalism. This distinction matters - Labour in 2020, like every other social democratic party for two generations, has no plan and no ideas for turning back that particular clock. The newdealiest of Green New Deals will not locate labour-intensive heavy industry work in the Bolsovers of England; its work will be neither labour-intensive nor, in the main, heavy. This aspect is well and fine nationally, but do not make for a bright future for small towns, and we all know it; if you were a young man (or woman), you would still emigrate for the cities; nothing in the Labour vision actually reverses that and there is much that encourages it (like... say... mayoral rent control)
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Feb 1, 2020 14:33
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I'm genuinely baffled that no senior Labour people seem to grasp that the easiest argument against Scottish independence (at least from a Westminster perspective) is "We don't really blame you, the Tories have hosed this country up, but we want to unfuck it" in - obviously - slightly more flowery terms. There are some reasons to doubt this... for one, it has never been true in Quebec, also a left-wing nationalist movement in an Anglospheric liberal-democratic context that thoroughly displaced the non-regionalist left as a force in its region... recessions eroded support for independence rather than amplified it, a pattern that rapidly became so entrenched that Quebecois separatists began accusing the Canadian federal government of secretly plotting recessions that would keep Quebec in the federation. There are some commonalities with the contemporary Scottish insurgency, e.g. a certain optimism (albeit on the left) that the federal government will 'come to the table' for economic reasons and hence will offer good conditions post-secession, at least as good as they are now, and that economic links will not really ever erode... no comment on any resemblance to a certain English kulturkampf There has never been a political question where the left does not feel that the underlying empirical cause of all unhappiness is insufficient leftism, of course - any exception is but a brief flight of false consciousness - but if one asks Scottish independence supporters why they support independence, a great many cite sovereigntist motivations -  (LAC polls) Brexit does throw a spanner into this, albeit perhaps not the one that one might think 
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Feb 8, 2020 16:01
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Ouch, but perhaps not surprising in Zone 2 https://twitter.com/CLPNominations/status/1226139468073185280
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Feb 8, 2020 16:49
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I'm just going to go ahead and ignore the Quebec comparison because the two situations are completely different in every aspect other than "non-ethnic nationalist movement", and drawing parallels between them is as useful as talking about 3rd-century Roman politics. "gently caress Scotland" as a theory has to be taken with care; BES after BES shows that Scottish people are not and have never been substantially leftward on 'the issues' than E/W people and a great deal hinges on the perception (rightly or not) of high-handedness or lack of consultation rather than contending that outcomes in a self-governing Scotland would actually be different. As Corbyn himself vividly demonstrated, triangulating into a position that *feels* leftist but giving &c is certainly possible, but would itself be contingent on a personal style and credibility that is not available to others in the Labour left fold, even personally anointed successors. I don't think the option is open to ScotLab any longer; no matter what they do, their best hope may be to survive as a minor party and not shed seats to the dedicated minor parties in the Scottish Greens and Scottish Lib Dems. Westminster will continue to wipe them out under FPTP. Holyrood will favour tactical joint opposition with the Scottish Tories because of the SNP juggernaut in a PR system. Labour MSPs will want flexibility to tack leftward or rightward of Labour E/W on-the-fly moving forward just to remain viable; giving the impression of waiting for orders from the English party is itself going to be toxic for an MSP. This includes pitching ScotLab as 'the real socialist party ostentatiously neutral on the Scottish question because SOCIALISM IS THE REAL QUESTION, COMRADES' (which I note is very different from your earlier pitch as the return-to-national-sanity party) - there will still be many times such a party will want to deviate from... say... a Labour E/W left leadership that, for E/W reasons, decisively resolves to keep nuclear missiles and in particular to keep parking them in Faslane. Corbyn might have managed to steer ScotLab back to relevance, but he instead expended - or was obliged to expend by wider political circumstances, perhaps - his considerable political capital on instead triangulating a different dicey national question. This was a sui generis opportunity, I think; Labour has run out of grizzled 1980s veterans of the party struggle (one notable aspect of the current crop is how young all their political careers are) ronya fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Feb 8, 2020 |
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Feb 8, 2020 17:59
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feedmegin posted:Im not sure an English bloke from North Islington doing that would be a good look tbh. Scottish Labour kind of has to fix itself but this is a bit of a tricky chicken and egg problem... Glasgow is pretty darned Remainy, and the swing away from 2017 gains is noticeable It turns out that there are some former Labour heartlands that matter and some that don't
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Feb 8, 2020 20:38
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Labour can have a credibly independent ScotLab if it doesn't transparently machine to select leadership loyal to the LOTO incumbent by pitching it as a vote of confidence (cough), and then set out to undermine and humiliate anyone whose loyalty seems to waver (cough) It's not going to do this, at least not for a long time, due to an institutional history of Scotland being a place for the ambitious to cultivate relationships, isolated from machinations in England, that can then be channelled into a career at Westminster. It is the upward mobility that makes it an everpresent danger to the faction in power, so in practical terms it's not going to be let alone, especially if its leaders start making a show about how independent they are. The 'branch office' charge works because it's believable, and it's believable because it's historically true If ScotLab isn't credibly independent, then at least policy handed down from on high should not be toxic in Scotland if the party wants to prioritize Scotland. It's true that this would complicate issues south of the border, and it's hard to make the math work out, so the party might choose not to do so.... and indeed it probably won't.
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Feb 8, 2020 21:02
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OwlFancier posted:I wonder what starmer's view on immigration is now, curious to see if they're done a complete flip rhetorically. https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/labour-party/news/109529/keir-starmer-says-he-would-bring-back-eu-freedom to be honest this surprises me (that either candidate figured that staking out an attention-grabbing stance would benefit them) maybe their campaign teams know something we don't...
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Feb 10, 2020 04:54
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Efficient door knocking is premised on the idea you can't change minds much and that one's main hope is turnout - that if you just ask people who are willing to consider voting Labour to actually show up, they will feel significantly more obliged to show up, and those few percentage points will move the needle for you It's very much turnout oriented; the idea that you change hostile minds with a 15 minute conversation is assumed to zero or thereabouts (probably negative given that you will motivate them to show up to vote adversarially) It's perpetually tempting to flee to high-concept theories of mass ideology and political consciousness, but in a politics where rainfall is known to substantially alter turnouts, it's perhaps a little more akin to thinking up ways to persuade more people to show up and donate blood, mechanically speaking. Appeals to life-altering impacts of mass politics seem to wilt in the face of getting wet, so clearly it's other things putting marginal votes in the box
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Feb 10, 2020 17:31
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I suspect the polls of members understate RLB's position - a month is a long time to cut into post-defeat gloom to persuade folks to pull a lever, and Corbyn will surely appeal again for her sometime in March
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Feb 12, 2020 16:31
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Rail subsidies are indeed regressive. Much UK inequality is between subregions rather than within subregions, and for rail to make sense, it must interlink areas with large populations, which tend to be the productive cities. It is nonetheless possible to double down on this on the argument that people from those poor regions can move, as people do, to rich areas and thereby benefit from the infrastructure there, but this is not how politics tends to work. All this is noise however - the party of trains-and-tuition-fees socdems who desperately want to believe that their middle-class subsidies are actually the stuff of radically principled ideology (DECOMMODIFICATION!) , and the party of those who think this instinct can be thusly channeled into subsidies for the long-term disabled or unemployed, have been in ascendancy for four years and the structural reasons for this ascent don't seem to have changed. ronya fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Feb 12, 2020 |
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Feb 12, 2020 17:15
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The nature of the beast is that if Starmer ekes out a contentious victory he will find it practically very difficult to work with the members of RLB's faction, because leading Labour is deliberately structured to be intensely vulnerable to procedural vetoes, petty sabotage, and bad-faith exercise of discretionary powers (measures which, in another light, are called 'democratically decentralizing power away from the leader's office') and vice-versa if RLB wins The UK is simply not large enough to simply find a new pool of untainted personnel from elsewhere, either, so their choice in advisors and ops people will tend to naturally limit itself (and, again, vice-versa). And having people to fill back-end careerist roles - poorly paid, horrible hours, where one's main payoff is being able to shape the unexciting stuff which can't get out the membership vote but do substantially govern most of the party's operational life - are what make the party apparatus tick
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Feb 12, 2020 17:36
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Guavanaut posted:Declare every Corbynist's opinions mostly monetarist, otherwise distribute information failing to indicate correlation across transport investment as opposed to nationalization. .... 
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Feb 12, 2020 17:38
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Another point: Corbyn/McDonnell could make significant concessions to anti-immigration sentiment, City fears, private schools, austerity and welfare cuts, Brexit, etc. without supporters revolting. Remember when Corbyn went to the polls with a manifesto which actually kept more of the Welfare Reform and Work cuts than the Lib Dem manifesto? I don't think RLB would be given the same degree of largesse, never mind Starmer...
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Feb 12, 2020 17:46
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Guavanaut posted:It should probably be done through policy and not public shouting, in the same way that Tories funnel billions to hardline Islamic autocracies in the Middle East but never talk about it. once you start down the merry path of peace thorough policy - quid pro quos and de-escalation and deliberate ambiguities - you inevitably stop confronting regional power brokers so that they can retain the support of their own respective camps whilst coming to your particular favoured table if you care about historic injustice, it's going to be a bitter pill to swallow. Bobby didn't die for power-sharing, as his sister later said
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Feb 12, 2020 18:04
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Communist Thoughts posted:pretty good I found this take on it to be an amusing one, in the circumstances
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Feb 15, 2020 20:01
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The UK has more means to pressure Serbia into recognizing Kosovo as a sovereign state, noting that the UK has actual notional responsibility to contribute to Kosovo's defence in its NATO KFOR commitments and still has boots on the ground there today. The should-Kosovo-have-its-own-credible-army-with-sovereignty-within-its-internationally-recognized-borders question is an actual and live evolving question today, rather than in the Palestinian case where it is hypothetical. The UK is an actual major and influential party in that question of whether the Kosovar state, as it actually exists as an imperfect democracy with a, let's say, aspirational attitude toward achieving inter-ethnic equanimity, with several hundred thousand Kosovar Serbs within its borders, should be allowed to police said borders, as opposed to the Serbian position that only the NATO force established by UNSC 1244 should be allowed to do this (with the obvious dynamic that contributors to this NATO mission would like to draw down their missions which would leave Kosovo unable to resist Serbian fait accomplis). And if you enjoy arguing over totally incredible one/two state solutions, Serbia does continue to recognize Kosovo as an autonomous province of Serbia. It goes without saying that Kosovo maintains otherwise, and the peace process will accomplish some outcome that sacrifices some of Kosovo's sovereignty for a permanent settlement which Serbia recognizes; the only question is how much. But are these really the issues of principle that matter so much to you? Nobody expects Labour leadership candidates to voice hardline opinions on the ethics and morality of former Yugoslavian nationhood however; I/P has a special status. Miftan suggested, many threads ago, that the Labour left views it as a white settler colonial question rather than as yet another foreign conflict amongst untold numbers of foreign conflicts; this strikes me as essentially correct. ronya fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Feb 16, 2020 |
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Feb 16, 2020 07:56
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Guavanaut posted:Yeah, I think it's this. Like with South Africa, it's not just that they established a white supremacist settler state, it's that they did it by kicking out the British Empire and replacing the 'no withdrawal until stable majority rule' policy with settler ethnonationalism. 'White' is questionable, and not even in the same way Afrikaaners could and did contest the ability of the FCO to bargain away their position, much less Ulster British to assert Britishness... as I understand it, if elections in Israel were held amongst those of European descent alone, their conservatives would not be close to a voting majority (although the activists who assert a Mizrahi identity often hail from the left, those actually of Mizrahi descent often occupy peripheral towns far away from the multicultural cities, are less educated, and support Likud...). As the wave of post-colonial states go, Israel is already now in its fifth generation of political leadership; frames of reference do evolve... The curiosity of a labour party being unable to command majorities amongst the working classes for ethnic/sub-ethnic cultural reasons should be familiar to us, of course. Likewise activists being unable to command relevance amongst those for whom they wish to speak. These aren't really alien phenomena, but because it's happening elsewhere, white British politics hasn't quite noticed It bears more than a little resemblance to the movement of the longstanding question/obsession of the magnitude of the 'colonial drain' or ethnic divide-and-conquer during the Raj from the dying Indian socialist left to the rising Indian ethnonationalist right, whilst their British leftie correspondents sometimes don't notice and are occasionally played for useful idiots in the Indian dynamic. But at some point the British side will notice that the political terrain has shifted, I think... the greatest opposition to the viciousness and transparent self-serving greed of European imperialism was not over its adventures in India or Africa, but in China, as a reformist project for more than a century, and it faded remarkably quickly as the winds began to shift.
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Feb 16, 2020 13:35
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ask Mélenchon how well that's worked
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Feb 16, 2020 14:58
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https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1229038574294765570 Will be interesting to see how this shakes out, Cummings may see a test of his importance to Johnson in other news, Starmer is seeing the wind blow due Long-Bailey https://www.twitter.com/politicshome/status/1228975197182668800 https://www.twitter.com/PolhomeEditor/status/1228969201613901824
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Feb 16, 2020 16:04
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Ms Adequate posted:Essentially that if fetus is person then abortion can never be acceptable even for rape and incest (Unless lives are actually threatened in which case existing medical ethics come into play), or it's not person then abortion can never be done for a bad or wrong reason (Except forcing it on the mother). Doing something that would make life worse for the future person wouldn't be okay because that's harming someone who will exist, but aborting someone by definition eliminates the future person who would be harmed, so I... can't see a non-contradictary way out of this? the knife-edge ethical theory here emerges from holding that coercion across a personhood boundary is the only wrong in this ethical framework - not only is it wrong, but it is the only wrong, beyond which it is not possible to spell out moral bads... in a philo 101 sense, the usual litany of objections is: - wherein animal rights in this framework, and if so, it seems problematic to argue for a single personhood status in the universe of objects - likewise the very old, the very young (paging Peter Singer to the courtesy telephone, please) - does family play any special role in this framework, are there natural obligations to close relations (however defined) at all. Parenthood after all does not end at childbirth. Do parents have any unique obligations to their children different from, say, children in general (it would be possible, albeit quite strange, to argue that parents exercise no special duties whatsoever with regards to their own children compared to anyone else's) - bodily integrity as sacred personhood seems to play an outsized role in this framework, hence Thomson's argument from the violinist to highlight the point. This opens a can of worms, ranging from hot-button topics like vaccination, circumcision, etc. to more pedestrian questions (challenge: explain the ethics of trimming a squirming baby's fingernails without invoking a consequentialist argument...) lots of ways to explore the topic
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Feb 17, 2020 07:56
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OwlFancier posted:Killing people isn't actually wrong because the person suffers for it, it's wrong because if everyone went around killing each other (overtly, too much) society wouldn't work, and also because it causes people who are still alive to suffer for the loss. say you are in a position to kill people peacefully in their sleep and all bystanders will regard it as a natural death (in that Harold Shipman way). Is that morally wrong in this framework?
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Feb 17, 2020 08:04
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OwlFancier posted:Well yes because you are still inflicting the death on the bystanders, some of them might not have to experience it otherwise, owing to dying first. You are also denying them access to the person, access which, I would assume, is probably a net good thing for them. I don't believe there are very many people in the world who are a net bad influence on it that can only be alleviating by killing them, though if you can imagine a person like that that's definitely a candidate for a situation when killing people is justifiable. eg: eating the rich. ok the italic bit made me lol. Well played, sir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs ronya fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Feb 17, 2020 |
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Feb 17, 2020 08:12
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Thoughts after a look-through: - there's a great deal of chatter about the doctorates/stemminess, but it strikes me as something that is relatively easily tweaked. The main thing the doctorate seems to buy here is flexibility - the doctorate entitles the applicant to seek a completely unrelated job offer, whereas the shortage route mandates a particular job (note that either way one still needs that job offer). This does seem to be a tweak introduced from the top since it was not present in the earlier white paper in late 2018. - the main point is that the numerical quota is suspended and the statement commits to removing it. You may recall this was the main Tory attack line on the Points-Based System that existed 2008-2010. The party line was only eventually reversed by Javid at Home - the Tier 2 salary requirement has decreased (from £30k to £25.6). The skills threshold for the T2 visa has also fallen from RQF6 (bachelor's degree) to RQF3 (A-level equivalent). This represents an enormous liberalization for non-EEA migrants. Only about a tenth of the cohort in India enters higher education, but about a quarter finish post-secondary education. That is a lot of people! - the policy statement does make clear that the goal is to impose requirements present for non-EEA migrants on EU migrants in para 38 quote:In its latest report, the MAC modelled the impact of salary and skills thresholds on the EEA migrant population. It estimated that, under their recommendations, around 70% of resident EEA citizens arriving in the UK since 2004 would be found ineligible for either a skilled-work, family or Tier 4 visa given their current (2016-18) characteristics. The MAC suggest that these changes could bring both costs and benefits to the UK, and highlight ‘estimated impacts at the macro level are small’. All in all it seems like a massive liberalization for non-EEA migrants and a huge clampdown for EEA migrants relative to the status quo ronya fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Feb 19, 2020 |
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Feb 19, 2020 18:29
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One obvious impact is a drastic shift back toward South/East/Southeast Asia to fill programmers, nurses, social work, etc roles on the shortage list, since these countries have explosive numbers of English-speaking people with at least a post-secondary qual
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Feb 19, 2020 18:39
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You do already have to speak English for the Tier 2 EEA migrants don't, but they tend to be able to pass for white
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Feb 19, 2020 18:53
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I've said this before, but the voting public really does have fundamentally inconsistent expectations of the immigration system. One can construct a majority fully in favour of generous family reunification rights and generous access for "deserving" aslyum seekers/migrants (loosely defined), much more generous than the actually-existing status quo. One can also construct another majority in favour of much lower levels of immigration, much lower than are reckoned actually achievable even with unrealistically harsh or utterly impractical conditions. The median voter appears to juggle both attitudes at the same time... These are widespread attitudes and notably are not special to the British or English outlook; they are also prevalent in other countries with different demographic makeups, social outlooks, political drifts, etc. Attitudes to immigration are generally negative and have very little actual association to national levels of economic privation or lack thereof. There has never been and there never will be ready support for higher immigration levels outside of the social elite. The contradictory demands of the public have allowed governments and politicians everywhere to rig the debate to pursue essentially pragmatic outcomes... the most toxic part of the policy discourse introduced by the Conservatives was the quota, which instead undermined the ambiguity and allowed the red tops to call for ever lower and lower quotas (even as those same red tops hastened to defend 'deserving' Windrushers, notably in terms of their contributions to postwar Britain). People are essentially innumerate and any number larger than zero is only too easy to spin as outrageous. We should be glad, I think, that the quota seems to be exiting the stage without much complaint from the usual suspects. ronya fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Feb 19, 2020 |
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Feb 19, 2020 19:10
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I don't think that's a reasonable fear, outside of the generic background radiation of racialist incidents, being that there was a very similar pitch of English-speaking requirements in 2008, in 1993, in 1986, in 1981, and in 1971 (when the English language requirement was first imposed by the Immigrants Act). There is a nascent movement on the UK left to adopt an Ardern-style political calculus of pitching increased asylum rights in exchange for sharply reduced general levels of immigration (by pitching a rejection of economic migration as a gesture against the idiom of the deserving migrant), as a kind of wink-nudge to the frothy racist crowd who don't think any migrants are deserving... there were shades of that during Conference 2019 already. One has to be careful there, I think...
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Feb 19, 2020 19:50
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Sanitary Naptime posted:Before anyone pulls out a social attitudes survey or whatever, I’ll remind you that across the UK, labour policies are almost universally the most popular ones but that sure as poo poo doesn’t reflect the active voting population. The problem for Labour since the 1980s is not "are our individual policies popular relative to the Tory offering" but "do people trust us to pursue these policies in government"; it is why Kinnock struggled so much even after filing off the unilateral disarmament, withdrawal from Norn Iron, &c The non-voting skew does have an effect, but one can adjust for having voted in the past election; even amongst likely voters the truism of popular Labour planks but endemic Labour distrust is an enduring one
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Feb 20, 2020 07:17
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https://twitter.com/BBCNormanS/status/1230508100819595264 https://twitter.com/PolhomeEditor/status/1230534718199869442 I think it's still likely for RLB to win the leadership race; this might have legs ronya fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Feb 20, 2020 |
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Feb 20, 2020 19:12
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The Big Once Again Asking For Your Financial Support
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Feb 21, 2020 07:25
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You can always fling it at the Botometer if you are suspicious. This isn't foolproof - the "tells" are by now well-documented and won't pose any serious barriers to a dedicated bot writer who intends to evade them. Twitter assigns the user's name plus 8 random digits if they register with Twitter on the mobile app. Most human users affected by this will go on to change their handle, because it will appear in tweets made to them and it's kind of jarring (this is likely the first time such a user will see that others see their handle, as opposed to their display name). However, if they're just quietly lurking and don't tweet much and aren't tweeted at much (most people are not Extremely Online after all), then their odds of their tweets showing up suddenly in your feed or social network are pretty darned low too. If it's showing up suddenly in your feed, maybe it's happenstance that it managed to catch the eye of a user who could pass it on. Or maybe it's a bot network that has now decided to cash in on their submerged bot accounts. In the circumstances, in most cases it'll be the latter. Without any network analysis, "Timbo75948987" does have some sketchy aspects - no bio. One picture for both banner and avatar; could be stock imagery. Never posts photos or media. - doesn't actually tweet much from a quick eyeball of the tweet history. It is virtually all replies or retweets of a mix of high-impact handles and obscure ones. This could be a human doggedly scrolling down other people's replies to look for people to argue with but that would get old fast surely? - seems to have too many followers - many of the replies are in a broken English that could be from a natural language generator On the other hand: - if it is from a generator it is astonishingly coherent. Consider this tweet, which is surely near and dear to this thread's heart: https://twitter.com/Timbo75948987/status/1180500856736751618 (even this kind of thing isn't a guarantee - if the other user is also a bot then they could just be replaying a conversation from the dataset! But from a look the other user seems real enough).
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Feb 22, 2020 21:10
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On that point:quote:To be and remain eligible for membership, each individual member must:... There's the dodgy email that got sent out, but even so if you tell party staff that you're not on the roll for personal reasons, don't be entirely shocked if they revoke your membership; you might not even have to flounce in a huff for that to happen. Many slipped through during the registered-supporter surges - but party members are actually required to be on the roll, or have a good reason for why they're not on it.
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Feb 22, 2020 21:33
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baka kaba posted:Yeah and arguably the guy has a good reason, that's why he's complaining. I'm not saying it's not really in the rules, just why is it at all? Cerv's explanation makes sense, but they should still be flexible about it so people aren't excluded It would delegitimize the mandate produced by the membership - quote:The NEC shall issue procedural guidelines on issues relating to membership from time to time, including a code of conduct on membership recruitment. In particular, the NEC wishes to highlight the following areas of potential abuse of membership rules: "But why is it disreputable, I consider it perfectly fine to vote in party ballots but not vote at elections as a matter of principle" is a turtles-all-the-way-down question, though. Claiming someone else's identity altogether escalates it from "having a laugh" to "criminal misdemeanour". I don't think outright false pretences fraud is the principle threat envisioned, but rather mobilizing disengaged people who do not intend to vote for Labour as a party... (I note here that this used to be a danger envisioned from the left about the right until circa ~2016ish; the left used to believe it tended to do worse, not better, by having low-engagement people participate in party processes).
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Feb 22, 2020 22:26
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baka kaba posted:"where eligible" There's a certain frame of political mind, thoroughly marinated in a tacitly neoliberal outlook, that is stunned to learn that political parties might impose any kind of duty upon members besides a monetary fee... it would not shock me if this user is amongst them. (assuming he is a real person who is conveniently a white working class Traveller construction worker lifelong anti-fascist street fighter veteran who subscribed to twitter in Dec 2018 and instantly began replytweeting UKpol and virtually nothing else... such people exist out there, but well before there were Twitter bot armies there were the sundry trolls and sockpuppets... it's hmm-worthy at the least) The old CLPD objection was that "armchairs" would be disproportionately influenced by the Tory press (as opposed to the "activists" much-ballyhooed in the old parlance). The old conventional wisdom was that the "armchairs" tended to vote for the Labour right whereas the "activists" tended toward the Labour left. Hence the CLPD objected to OMOV and, when this battle was lost, objected to postal ballots, proxy votes at motions, synchronizing voting cycles so that low-turnout selections could co-occur on the same ballot card with the high-turnout ones, &c. - anything that would diminish the power of machining local activists to show up at low-turnout branch meetings (it was still waging this battle as late as the Mandelson-led Millbank review in the oughts). The ideal CLPD process was the annual delegate election to GCs with public ballots cast in person. Conversely the Progress types similarly always assumed that the "armchairs" would indeed tend to back them - that there would always be masses of working-class voters who would never vote for a leftie but would tribally still show up to vote for Labour and in Labour for non-left candidates, and hence the great mass of the armchairs would overwhelm the left-wing activists and the perennial left candidate. The best laid plans of men, as we now know... I don't think you're coming from an unreasonable perspective, but it does illustrate the depth of change in the party to primarily view it as a free-associational movement of a political banner embraced in common as individuals, rather than one with a natural demographic constituency anchored in social class. As to whether it should be in the rules in our brave new neoliberal identity-as-consumption world... well, there is the problem Cerv put a finger on. In the old model where someone from a working class background is assumed to have an inviolable place in the party of Labour even if all they do is show up to curse at pinkos, there's no real reason to detect masked attitudes and bad faith. Class is a material characteristic. But if it is a subscription to a club membership, then suddenly this kind of disambiguation will be critical... I think it would depend on many factors outside the party's immediate control. If the LDEMs continue to see no hope under FPTP and begin to see locals as a resource-draining trap (say), then it's assuredly the case that Labour will see many members who assert that they are true red Labour but coincidentally oppose everything the Labour incumbents stand for. Or likewise in Scotland members who assert that their place is in the Labour party but they regretfully believe that only the Tory candidate can keep the Nats out of their Westminster seat. Not that they endorse the Tory candidate, oh no, that's just their read of the polling. &c... Five years after the Corbyn surprises, it doesn't seem necessarily the case that low-engagement members will be reliable supporters of the hard left of the party; a great deal depends on Momentum's continued cohesion and effectiveness in whipping this kind of vote to shape critical selections. I think it does, for now, but its edge might be closer by the time any big rule changes settle in. It's a one-man Lansman vehicle presently (in a literal sense) but it might not always remain so.
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Feb 23, 2020 11:36
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namesake posted:The conclusion is clear - from 2015-17 the attempts at reconcilation with the Labour right were the correct approach because the ideological leanings of party members and the public weren't really known. From the 2017 GE they were demonstrably known and favouring the left. At that point we should have asserted our strength, pushed for open selection to get out the rightwing or force them into silence and gotten Tom Watson fired while refusing to accept the anti-semitism attacks as legitimate criticism, encouraging the development of other leftist media outlets where people didn't have to hear liberals making things up every day and using that drive and effort to embed activism and social political organisations in communities. this seems like a representative statement of a common inthread thesis, so let me lay out the obligatory counternarrative - v far from obvious, especially in retrospect, that the left-wing read of GE2017 that was popular until ~May 2019 (that it was about notionally left-leaning policies* and that voters don't really care about Brexit) was the correct one - * rather hard to square that pitch with McD's strenuous effort to emphasize iron discipline across 2016 - remember that mandatory reselection was debated and failed during Conference 2018 - it got knifed not by the party right, who spent 2018 being largely irrelevant, but instead the left-wing trade unions. Who is this 'we', kemosabe? Wind back to 2018 and recall that elaborate power struggle between one Corbyn faction aligned around Lansman and another Corbyn faction aligned around UNITE veterans - Formby, Murphy, etc. If there is any self-reflection to be had, it must include recognizing that the Labour left in fact controlled all party roles of import after the 2017 NEC elections and attributing a vicious intra-left fight to the right or soft left is questionable at best - on 'alternative media', outlets like Skwawkbox were/are firmly aligned around the UNITE wing; e.g., it reacted to the drama at Conference in a... curious language (compare). - recall that nonetheless the left did manage to push through some triggers. The reselection process then failed to replace the MP with a left-backed candidate - Margaret Hodge and Diana Johnson were both re-selected. It is very hard to see how selection could force a majority sufficient for self-censorship and dutiful silence - a party that voted 40% for the soft left of Owen Smith is going to have a significant fraction of dissenters that will control at least some significant share of MPs - likewise the left did not lack for notables who did publicly advocate that the anti-semitism attacks were illegitimate criticisms, not least of which a former Labour Mayor of London.... one problem is that it's not possible to simply silence the topic; the left does not lack for people who, unprompted, will table I/P issues first (that remark that left-wing Conference rallies have more Palestinian flags than Union Jacks is cutting because it's true). The intensity of feeling on this leads to endless bikeshedding, most visibly demonstrated in the IHRA+ episode in 2018 with its multiple, contradictory messages on the position from an NEC that was supposed to have aligned on it before announcing it (having Lansman pitch it as more rigorous in the Graun even whilst McDonnell was on TV pitching it as less rigorous was, let's say, amusing; at least some of the media frenzy is self-inflicted).
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Feb 23, 2020 23:44
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I've just had a magnificently the biggest problem there would be that in October the positions were still reversed - the left were confidently calling for an early GE but the centrists in Labour and outside it were resisting it (in favour of that unicorn of the public vote)
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Feb 23, 2020 23:53
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thought - what if the Centrist All-Stars deliberately forced an early election last year to prevent President Sanders from blowing all their THE LEFT ISN'T ELECTABLE bullshit out of the water?
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If Corbyn wants to make a public intervention in RLB's favour, around now would be the time to do it, before too many members have filled out their ballots.
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Feb 24, 2020 19:42
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https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1231939769891946496 https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1232045640554831873 https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1232050311012978689 https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1232050907304615936 filed under 'predictable', perhaps...
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Feb 24, 2020 22:30
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Rayner has surely noticed by now that her stepping aside has not been correspondingly reciprocated by RLB's team... Skwawk is openly editorializing for Burgon against Rayner now too Might make for some awkward cabinet meetings in the future if RLB wins (Deputy or not, Rayner will almost certainly get a shad cab appointment) At some level this is "well you should have polled better at the Momentum ballot which was already massively rigged in your favour" but it's the stuff that makes for distrust in the future
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Feb 25, 2020 10:16
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