love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

report will blame Corbyn, ignore 2017 and overemphasise the scale of defeat ... yawn.

Do you agree that Boris Johnson/Keir Starmer...

Is best to negotiate with the EU:
Johnson: 39% (% who agree)
Starmer: 31%

Is able to stand up for Britain's interest abroad:
Johnson: 40%
Starmer: 34%

via @OpiniumResearch

— Britain Elects (@britainelects) June 18, 2020

even when Starmer is having public thoughts of necrophilia with Vera Lynn, the gbp still prefer a Tory to him and he's not even had a concerted campaign of hate against him yet! Fucking two-time loser in the making here.

those are questions for headbanging cultists, not mild mannered legal beagles

The 2019 defeat taken in the context of the long term decline of post Blair Labour tells a different, or at least one a bit more complex than Corbyn's fault.

Argh it's raining on my phone and my posts are getting even shitter!

If Starmer was a beagle Labour would be 20 pts ahead!

report will blame Corbyn, ignore 2017 and overemphasise the scale of defeat ... yawn.

That thread gyac linked to is worth reading in its entirety - it suggests the report does none of those things.

EXC: Here's an overview of Labour Together's inquiry into 2019 election defeat, overseen by MPs incl Ed Miliband, per source

It addresses threat posed by Boris Johnson, Labour's relationship with working class, what went wrong under Corbyn and long-term trends since Blair

1/10

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) June 18, 2020

I'll check it later because of rainy phone syndrome

was listening to a bbc report giving a very bland history of De Gaulle's wartime exile in Britain and his bbc speech to Vichy France, some bollox to do with Macron's visit. It didn't include all the mutual mistrust, questions of De Gaulle's legitimacy and the absolute murderous hatred between him and the British govt. It's almost like some things never really changed!

Says biggest factors in election loss were Brexit ‘by a country mile’, Corbyn's unpopularity and too many policies.

Predictable enough. The last one is still the most infuriating in terms of audience rejection.

Labour lost 1.7m Leave voters and 1m Remain voters.

Bit surprised it wasn't the other way round here though.

Tories succeeded in turning out 2m more non-voters - mainly older white men, "leave minded", wanted to "Get Brexit Done" and/or stop Corbyn from being PM

I guess there was always the question of whether Brexit-voters could be bothered to turn up for another GE with just a little more persuasion and scare-mongering that it might not happen. I wouldn't have thought social media played any significant role here* and it all came through trad media and word of mouth in precipitous Labour seats. 2 fucking million though...

If they didn't hit the ceiling on that the big post-Brexit issue for the far right recruiters might be black people crossing into the UK by boat. Might not play so well up North but Farage is already well into this and will be PM in another ten years.

*but apparently Tory party destroyed Labour on Facebook - fair enough as Labour went after young new voters

was listening to a bbc report giving a very bland history of De Gaulle's wartime exile in Britain and his bbc speech to Vichy France, some bollox to do with Macron's visit. It didn't include all the mutual mistrust, questions of De Gaulle's legitimacy and the absolute murderous hatred between him and the British govt. It's almost like some things never really changed!

Did it mention his speech in Edinburgh with its fulsome praise for Scotland as France's oldest ally... against the English? He left out the last bit out but everyone knew what he meant.

by the time De G relocated his govt in exile to Algiers, Churchill was trying get parliament to end all British support for him. Hence there was genuine gratitude to the BBC from the Fourth Republic, who commissioned some crappy painting to thank them for their invaluable propaganda services, but not so much goodwill towards the British establishment!

lol why the fuck does Question Time still exist?

What? I thought this was Friday!

apparently not

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/18/radical-proposals-in-lib-dem-policy-review-suggest-shift-to-the-left

The Lib Dem review into why they should continue to bother seems to hint again at repositioning themselves somewhere between Labour and the Greens, which is probably good news for the Tories.

Lib Dems really know how to leech off Labour voters, in this case the disaffected young Corbyn left wing.

Whether shouting "Plastic Bags!" will do anything to counteract remains to be seen.

innocent kids who don't know what a Lib Dem is almost as important a section of their support as Graun journalists

The LibDem brand is so fucked it's impossible to see this working except among people who don't remember the coalition. They're probably going to do something dumb like elect Ed Davey anyway.

It's nice when you've got the luxury of switching between supporting policies that kill the disabled and then doing lip service for ones to play to easily impressed Corbynites, like switching football shirts. wankers!

I have a policy winner for them - universal basic scampi fries

surely universal braised squirrel stew

i would desert people's socialist Kerr Starmzy for UBSF tbh

tbqh, i can't see the Corbyn left wing switching to the Lib Dems vs staying in Labour / switching to Greens / staying at home.

Their best bet has always been to position themselves as the less garish face of British conservatism and doing anything else will kill their base.

idk they have a peculiar base

i mean for one thing whatever they position themselves as everybody except naive 18 year-olds knows they're Tory Zero

they were a moderating force during the coalition years, things would have been at least 0.00001% worse without their triumphant carrier bag charge!

probably some pensioners died of the Rona because of re-using carrier bags!

Another interesting thread about Labour’s 2019 performance

Thread:

We've published our report into why Labour lost the 2019 election (and the 3 before that). I'll post highlights and a link to the report below. /1

For the quick version there's a good write up here in @HuffPostUK courtesy of @paulwaugh: https://t.co/S9II5tYhfB

— Mike Buckley (@mdbuckley) June 19, 2020

i don't believe the headline there for one second, at least not in terms of the conclusions drawn

Level 3 dudes, Level 3!

50 new hospitals now is it?

How on earth could the Tories outdo Labour on NHS pledges unless without severe confirmation bias in play?

yeah nobody voted Tory because they thought they'd do more for the NHS, but the bullshit might've worked as a good "I Was Brave" sticker for idiots who were gonna vote for them anyway

It was probably enough to neutralise the NHS as an election issue in some areas I think and that was a deliberate part of the Tory strategy but clearly not the main issue. The idea they could repeat that trick in four years time stretches credibility given what's happening.

I am incredibly sceptical that anyone thought the Tories would improve the NHS but i wonder how effective their messaging was in undermining the Labour argument that they were going to dismantle / privatise / run it into the ground.

reading the Labour Election report. Just through the summary section, steeling myself before going into the 'A Historic Defeat' analysis. outwith the expected stuff, there are some interesting bits:

I'm pleased to see them call out the importance of Scotland. I still think it was insufficiently recognised in the last election that Labour stood absolutely no chance of a majority without making gains in Scotland, something that was clearly not going to happen. As the report says"

If Labour does not reverse its fortunes in Scotland in a significant way, it would need to win North East Somerset from Jacob Rees Mogg to form a majority government.

Looking forward to diving into that section. <looks to camera>

Signs that they're looking into Labour's org structure, which is something that really hits you as a member. It may have the virtue of being a structure designed to enable Labour's diverse groups and (sorry) stakeholders, but it is, by all accounts, pretty painful to engage with and effect change through.

A lot of the issues with our ground campaign relate to old fashioned, highly bureaucratic, siloed and hierarchical organisation that has not been brought up to date and methods of campaigning and communication that do not fit modern reality

I think one really important point that comes up a few times in the summary is the lack of reflection on the 2017 defeat:

The swing away from Labour in our heartland seats in the 2017 election, masked by the much better than expected result, foreshadowed our 2019 defeat. The Conservatives made significant gains in 2017 in seats they would go on to win in 2019

The perhaps understandable mood of self-congratulation (and in some cases bitter astonishment sit down Kinnock) meant the party didn't engage enough with the issues evident in the defeat.

Poor organisation. This one I find astonishing and has to be laid at the door of the leadership:

It was unclear who was in charge with insufficient lines of accountability for decision making. There was an unrealistic target seat strategy that was not evidence based. Hard decisions on seat targeting and prioritisation were avoided.

Really interested to see the full analysis of this.

Underfunding of digital infrastructure and also falling behind the Tories on digital campaigning:

Our digital infrastructure was underfunded and inadequate. Candidates and local party campaigners found it very difficult to access and use the tools or support necessary to wage the campaign online consistently enough. Some of these systems were creaking in 2017, but the lack of internal reflection meant that issues went unresolved

(note again the failure to deal with 2017).

They are right to say that there should not be a complacent expectation that vote share can only go up:

There are 58 seats across the country which only require a small swing away from Labour to the Conservatives to be lost. Given the long-term trends set out which are particularly stark in some places, there is no evidence that these trends are abating. This should be of primary concern

It's good to see them naming priorities and focus areas.

One thing makes me slightly nervous – having been involved in reasonably large overhauls in companies a couple of times now, the scale of the challenge requires focus - structured (and often slow) improvement of things a piece at a time over years) - but the scale of the challenge also means there's an 'everyone everywhere' language used, which destroys that focus. You *have* to prioritise. So it alarms me slightly when i see in the space of a single bullet point

"We need an agreed strategy about the voters whose support we must win to form a government to build a majority winning coalition"

and

"Labour must be the agents of change, and the party of big economic change for the whole country and every part of it, reaching places and people who have been held back."

The report closes by saying that tough decisions will need to be made, which is undoubtedly true, and I look forward to seeing these identified in the rest of the report (too often ime 'tough decisions' are talked about and everyone agrees, but they're not actually identified, because hey, not everyone who agrees that tough decisions need to be made agrees on what the decisions should be).

Final word on the factionalism, which is called out a couple of times, in what is probably necessarily neutral language, ie the blame being evenly shared around. In a party organisation you need to rally round the leadership, and if you don't do that you are to blame – i think the melts and shit-talkers have a lot to answer for here. However, it does seem likely (see the organisational point above) that some aspects of Corbyn's leadership did end up contributing to a silo mentality, even if I think the blame is far from evenly spread here.

it would need to win North East Somerset from Jacob Rees Mogg

this actually looked doable after GE17 is the thing

oh yeh, this is depressing:

The consistent nationwide growth in Conservative support since 2001, particularly marked in some places where seats became vulnerable, prepared the ground for the significant increase in seats in 2019.

f'ing tories.

I think 2017 probably fuelled a lot of hubris in senior Labour circles and some of the media people surrounding them, "don't listen to them, these people were wrong two years ago and they'll be wrong again", which also feeds into a failure to take note of the warning signs in seats they ended up losing.

I read somewhere that it was the biggest combined fall in both seat numbers and vote share in any single election so it probably was a historical defeat but the conditions next time will be entirely different. If there's any Parliamentary term in which historical and political norms could be completely upturned it's probably this one, and we're only six months in.

in other news, government's going to go really hard at tfl isn't it.

KPMG to review TfL's finances after £1.6bn government bailout

Actually it is partly linked, because one factor called out in the report is what i would file under 'popular misconceptions' or 'getting labour to take the blame':

A long-term lack of engaging, relevant year-round campaigning and Labour locally taking the blame for austerity has fuelled mistrust in Labour and the view that we are the ‘establishment’ Party in areas that have seen little investment over many years

Labour are ~still blamed by some people for the GFC (that fuckin note), those who aren't still banging on about rubbish in the streets anyway. But also (and this is where it's relevant to that TfL thing), the association of local government with lack of investment, rather than the devastating levels of central gov defunding of local government that's taken place. (This is not to say that established Labour councils aren't a problem - I live in Lambeth - but if they're being associated with lack of local investment, that's proximal blame for distal cause.

The LibDem brand is so fucked it's impossible to see this working except among people who don't remember the coalition.

A not inconsiderable cohort I would suggest.

I read somewhere that it was the biggest combined fall in both seat numbers and vote share in any single election so it probably was a historical defeat but the conditions next time will be entirely different.

By the same token I had been meaning to check whether it was the biggest number of seats gained by a party with the smallest increase in actual votes.

There was a piece by Tim Mongomerie in the NS yesterday (yeah I know) and he was saying that the Tories have already lapsed into the government-by-clique-and-yes-men bunker mentality that it took Thatcher years to get into. Every party that runs an operation like that fucks up eventually.

On that myth of incumbency thing, there was a good line by Lammy this week where he said "you've had ten years". Labour should be repeating "you've had over a decade" ad nauseum for the next few years.

got to admire the chutzpah of some tory I heard this week still doing the old Labour behind 07/08 crash speak, it was stretching credibility when it was new, but what the heck it works!

That was Therese Coffey right? Protesting they'd spent ten years fixing what Labour broke in...a tenth of that time.

yeah that's the one!

xpost to Matt DC

yes, i thought lammy really hit home with that. one of the mystifying aspects of the last election was the way johnson was able to shrive off ten years of tory austerity with his bumper book of bullshit.

still, i don't think it removes the need for a serious structural review of the sort the report is suggesting.

i am hypnotically fascinated at how shit this government is, and also whether it makes any difference. if you don't care about people in your country, and don't really mind if there are structures in place to help them, then you can achieve your aim of a shrinking state both through ideology and the chaos of incompetence. they seriously don't know what a good job looks like, people like hancock are totally incompetent, and johnson is at the moment running a split cabinet that seems to absolve him of any responsibility other than doing his stunt turn as leader.

one aspect of government shitness is its complete inability to do anything without him present, most evident while he was in hospital, but still a major factor now, with him clearly still ill. I think it's because he has an paradoxical status: almost a sort of cult figure, who won a huge majority through nothing other than saying what people wanted to hear in a blustering imitation of no nonsense rhetoric. There is no structured sense of policy (the policy by telegraph article deadline approach is obvious), just johnson as rhetorical motif, which makes it impossible for proxies to occupy his space, as they do not have the same aura. However, it's paradoxical because another element i would imagine is not wanting to be associated with a historic failure, so holding back and seeing which way the cookie crumbles in the public eye.

ah lads remember when DomCum couldn't possibly survive the week? what a year that was

say what you like about DomCum, but at least he isn't Starmer!