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Knives are out for Keith if even the Grauniad is publishing a steady stream of "Labour in Disarray" opinion articles. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/keir-starmer-support-politician-national-mood Now we know: Keir Starmer won’t generate a surge of support Keir Starmer’s speech this afternoon was billed as his “make or break”, his “turnaround” moment, the biggest hour of his career. As if it would be the talk of the school gates, top of the agenda at every Wetherspoon’s. As if. In a week when there have been punch-ups on forecourts and soldiers readied to drive petrol tankers, a 90-minute soliloquy by any opposition politician is barely going to register in the public consciousness. That is perfectly natural; far more troubling is how little the public’s concerns impinged on the consciousness of anyone in the conference hall. The Labour leader rattled through a perfunctory list of the factors behind the giant cost-of-living squeeze – fuel bills, empty supermarket shelves, the imminent cut to universal credit – and blamed the lot on the government, while giving little indication of what he would do differently. Then he settled back into the well-worn patter of failing Labour leaders, from Gordon Brown to Jeremy Corbyn: conference, let me tell you who I am. Advertisement For their part, most delegates dutifully stood and applauded every couple of minutes, alternating with hecklers. It was a kind of pantomime, in which Starmer put in a decent performance in front of an audience visibly wishing him well. It should garner him kindly headlines, but it will be long forgotten by the time Boris Johnson opens his mouth next week in Manchester. “It will not take another election defeat for the Labour party to become an alternative government,” declared Starmer. Yet no one I’ve spoken to in his party – whether on its right wing or its left, whether MPs or advisers or council leaders – expects him to win the next election. “It is Schrödinger’s cat,” one of Labour’s most powerful local government bosses told me after watching his leader on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday. “He is asked about an election that he will never win, and refuses to disclose policies that he will never enact.” What we have seen in Brighton most of this week is not a Labour army preparing for almighty battle, for bloody noses and crack’d crowns. It is a party caught plotting, looking past its current leader and idly eyeing up possible replacements. “Make or break?” said one seasoned MP and a former frontbencher. “He’s already broken. He has been since losing Hartlepool, only just getting over the line in Batley and then getting buried in Amersham,” he said of the three spring byelections. Outside the conference hall Starmer is a loser, runs the argument, so he must be a goner. And on both wings of the party, they sigh: we never imagined he could be so bad at politics. Such pre-emptive obituaries of a politician only a year into the top job are rather too definite. The next few weeks could prove crucial in shaping our politics. Just after the benefit cuts and end of furlough comes what could be a tough budget and spending round. Given how close these events are and how profound they will prove, Starmer should have spent a lot more time addressing them. At a time when it’s as hard to score a gallon of diesel as it is to see your GP, and even friendly newspapers implore the prime minister to “prenez un Grip”, Johnson is by no means guaranteed his longed-for decade at Number 10. Nevertheless, it is now impossible to imagine his Labour counterpart ever commanding a surge of enthusiasm or interest, even from the ground troops who will eventually go door-knocking for him. The top seafront attractions this week have been a past leader, in Jeremy Corbyn, the deputy leader (Angela “scum” Rayner) and a would-be leader (Andy Burnham). The great ghost haunting Labour this week was that of a leader who left almost a decade and a half ago. Starmer now has Tony Blair’s speechwriter, one of his communications officials and his great consigliere, Peter Mandelson. The references to Blairism in Starmer’s speech got increasingly arch. “Education is so important I am tempted to say it three times!” ran one joke. For the Blairites, the secret to electoral success is to be seen to be antagonising your own party. Those advisers will have been rubbing their hands each time a heckler shouted about nurses’ pay. The observers who have wondered this week just why the leader is fussing about party rules rather than fuel bills, and attacking Corbyn not Johnson, miss the point – this is how Starmer’s team believes the electorate will be won over. It is what they call “doing a Kinnock”, a reference to Mandelson’s first boss in politics. Except it didn’t win any elections for Neil, and it won’t for Keir. Nobody has outlined the dangers of this strategy better than the late Stuart Hall. In his classic essay, The Crisis of Labourism, written in 1984 shortly after Neil Kinnock was elected Labour leader, Hall noted that the new man “shows little sign as yet of becoming a popular political force, as opposed to a (not very successful) electoral machine. Apart from the issue of the health service,[he] has shown little understanding of the need to confront the real basis of Thatcher populism in the country at large… [Kinnock] has no feel for the language and concerns of the new social movements, and that is dangerous.” Without that, warned Hall, Labour would ossify into mere bureaucracy. Swap Kinnock for Starmer and Thatcher for Johnson, and you have about as good a summary of our moment as any that will be published this week. The great paradox is that it is Old Etonian Johnson who sits atop a social movement. He has morphed the Tory party into the Brexit party, his regime feeds off the splenetic energy of talk radio, and his advisers know precisely which stories to feed the Telegraph’s desire for competitive victimhood. Never mind that this is a party funded by shadow bankers and trumpeted by media oligarchs, and whose core voter is a wealthy pensioner in the home counties; Johnson wants to build a hegemony that stretches up through the Midlands to the north-east, and whose chief identity is a post-Brexit, weaponised Englishness. He acts the tousle-haired insurgent. Starmer, by contrast, spends his days auditioning for the role of red-faced, purse-lipped manager, perennially disappointed in us, his ungrateful customers. “Labour is under new management,” he declared last summer. At times today, it felt as though we were sitting through the best speech ever delivered by the head of the Crown Prosecution Service. But a politician’s speech, reading the mood of the moment or weaving his own story into that of the country? Not that. Leave aside the obvious irony of the party of Labour bragging about its managerial “competence”, it is badly out of sync with both the realities and the rhetoric of the “gently caress business” era. Starmer rules out nationalisations; the Tory government takes over yet another rail firm. A Survation poll presented at Brighton shows that 69% of potential Labour voters agree that “the economy is rigged against ordinary people”, while 74% want more public ownership of assets. These voters would run a mile from anything termed “radical”, but in practice those are the policies they pick. The mood for what the LSE professor Jonathan Hopkin terms “anti-system politics” is still very much alive. Sadly it is being served by Johnson’s Tories, not Starmer’s Labour.
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Sep 30, 2021 07:07
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And this is from succlib prime Rafael Behr of all people. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/28/labour-keir-starmer-replacement-opposition-leader Labour looks aimless because it’s already searching for Starmer’s replacement Anational fuel crisis coinciding with Labour’s annual conference was good and bad news for Keir Starmer. The bad news was that most of the country was too busy worrying about petrol supplies to notice what the opposition was doing in Brighton. Or maybe that was the good news. On balance, it helps when the Tories spectacularly fail at running the country. Flagrant uselessness in a government is a vital step towards persuading people to vote for a replacement. But it is not sufficient. The opposition has to look ready. Relegation from the top of the news agenda might, perversely, have done Starmer a favour. With a veil drawn over the proceedings, the public can still imagine that somewhere there is a Labour party chastened by successive defeats, united behind a leader with a plan for winning back trust and a talent for explaining what is broken in the country and how to fix it. That imaginative leap is made harder by exposure to the actual Labour party. A common gripe about Starmer this week has been a lack of initiative in response to the fuel farrago. A dynamic leader might have seized the moment, or at least seized 15 memorable seconds near the top of the 10 o’clock news. But seizure is not Starmer’s style. There was nothing spontaneous in the campaign that won him the Labour leadership last year. He trod a ponderous path to victory, avoiding traps and swerving positions to avoid offence against left and right. I went to work for Keir Starmer because he promised to unite the party. I regret it now Simon Fletcher Read more Methodical risk aversion has been ineffective so far against Boris Johnson. When Labour gets frustrated in its fight against the Tories, it defaults to fighting itself. The Corbynite left is incensed because Starmer promised continuity and is delivering rupture. Andy McDonald, the shadow minister for employment rights, resigned on Monday, accusing Starmer of reneging on a pledge to “maintain our commitment to socialist policies”. A charge, widely aired on the conference fringe, is that a Blairite cabal has captured Starmer’s office and is working its way through the mid-90s playbook to marginalise the left. But bafflement at the leader’s strategy is not confined to any faction. Plenty of Starmer’s supporters think it was perverse to kick off the conference with an attention-repelling public wrangle over internal party rules. The outcome was a win for Starmer on the most significant revisions. It will be harder for a radical left caucus to get a candidate on the ballot paper in future leadership contests and then re-enact the grassroots mobilisation that propelled Jeremy Corbyn to victory in 2015. But even MPs who support the changes (some of which protect them from what they see as vigilante ideological deselection by local activists) think the process was mishandled. There was, they say, insufficient strategic preparation for the battle, and poor communication of the goals. Rancour was maximised inside the conference hall, while the message of renewal and repudiation of Corbynism failed to reach a wider audience. There is something peculiar about a leader so new to the role stamping his authority on the process by which his successor will be chosen. Starmer is still a relatively fresh figure in the eyes of the country, yet here he is squandering limited political capital on an argument that draws attention to his best-before date. When Tony Blair rewrote clause IV of the Labour constitution, he was using an internal theological dispute to send a wider signal. He was advertising the party’s accommodation to the settled facts of a privatised economy. (The scale of that acquiescence is still disputed but no one doubts that the point got made.) Starmer seems to want symbolic distance from Corbynism without saying what the symbols represent in the real world. All might become clear on Wednesday when the leader delivers his keynote address. Even if he wows the conference hall and his winged rhetoric soars to the top of the evening bulletins, the party will be relieved but not reassured. The weakness that has been exposed in Brighton is not something that can be fixed with florid phrases (although a few of those wouldn’t go amiss). Nor is it a problem of ideology (although left and right think the solution is purging each other). The conference has been marked by a deficiency in political craft – working the party and media machinery with agility and guile, so that by the end of the day the talk is all about your chosen subject, on your preferred terms. Some have that skill intuitively; others learn it on the job or surround themselves with pros who handle it. But Starmer looks lonely at the top. His mandate from the membership is wide but shallow. He has no tribe. Many MPs support him, but not for what he believes or in the expectation that he can win an election. They see his function as a doorstop against the hard left. The job, although few say so openly, is to squat the leadership for long enough to drive through structural changes that will benefit the next generation of candidates, who can get organised in the meantime. That calculation reflects brutal political arithmetic. Overturning Johnson’s 80-seat majority in one go requires a seismic electoral event of epoch-shaping magnitude. Such quakes cannot be summoned from the earth by wishful thinking. The likeliest scenario at the next election is an erosion of the Tory position, giving Labour a better shot at Downing Street for the election after. That is the real reason why the conference has felt detached from the daily news. The leader might think he is treading the road to government, but he is surrounded by people mapping routes for his replacement. The slow-motion contest is well under way. Any Labour figure with a high profile, or even a low one, is presumed to be a candidate: Angela Rayner, Rachel Reeves, David Lammy, Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham (always), Yvette Cooper (again). The roster changes. Names rise and fall in the speculative race – painted wooden horses on a rumour carousel spinning jauntily on the Brighton beachfront, with a queasy-looking Starmer carried along for the ride. And all that the public hears is the repetitive strains of the hurdy-gurdy, reminding them of a faded attraction, somewhere off in the distance, going round in circles.
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Sep 30, 2021 07:08
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bessantj posted:One of the guys I work with did 4 years for, I think, manslaughter and he's a pretty decent driver. It can be difficult for people with criminal records to get a job so as long as they're competent then this cold be a real route into employment for them. These are Tories operating the program though. The only route it will lead into is indentured servitude and exploitation of the prisoners assigned to the jobs, and enrichment of the connected private contractors hired to run the program. To be fair, you'll get the same result if Keit's Labour party were to run the show.
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Sep 30, 2021 11:14
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a pipe smoking dog posted:It's an amazing headline on two levels because Kteith is an op. Destroying the opposition is his loving job and he's doing very well at it.
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Sep 30, 2021 14:57
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