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

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!

that Vera Lynn tweet yesterday, was the worst thing I've seen from a Labour leader since Russell Brand went into Miliband's kitchen.

a cringe sandwich made with the blandest insincerity bread

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

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

There's a clarification that those are net figures - it lost more Remain than Leave, but also gained a lot of other Remain.

I've a definite sense of unreality when reading "no offer of a big change from Labour" - particularly considering what we've got in charge now.

Level 3 dudes, Level 3!

― Matt DC, Friday, June 19, 2020 10:46 AM (two hours ago)

So we are out of "transmission is high or rising exponentially", but still in "epidemic is in general circulation" - alien archaeologists of the future will probably conclude that this direction of travel was seen as a problem by the government.

I think we're just moving the alert level closer to the easing of lockdown which it's supposed to match.

tail/dog

either way there's a killer virus still out there, so I'm not.

Boris back in full give-the-rona-a-clip-round-the-ear-and-send-it-packing mode:

Boris Johnson later said to “watch this space” when asked whether distancing restrictions could be cut... The prime minister said: “We have to start thinking of a world in which we are less apprehensive about this disease … I hope, as we go forward into the autumn, people will be much, much more confident.”

Bit rich coming from a man who was breathing through a hoover bag a couple of months ago. The threat to you and your vulnerable loved ones, it's just all in the mind don't you see?

look there's barely a thousand people a week dying of it now

almost down to one hillsborough disaster per day levels

173 deaths yesterday. hillsborough + valley parade + heysel, people should be much more confident in 80s football stadium safety measures

We've just settled down now into a mundane sense of 1000-2000 deaths per week, possibly waxing and waning with the reintroduction and subsequent curtailment of mass events, and the govt cheerleading their incredible success at "beating" the pandemic while the public at large do their best to stay home. This will carry on indefinitely now I suppose, and the culmination of the Brexit project early next year will tip the UK economy into a terminal depression. Happy days!

Strange how most conservative voters vote that way because they want everything to stay as it's "always" been, and Johnson & co are revolutionary radicals who are forging a new, very un-British new economic order onto the country. They don't even bang on about law and order any more! What are the oldsters seeing in them?

Re: Labour having to win Rees-Mogg's seat, that constituency had a Labour MP up until 2010 (or at least a big chunk of it did, the boundaries were redrawn).

Working very closely with Apple and Google by not communicating with them or requesting meetings for weeks. https://t.co/ysfXEnPTDs

— Michael Veale (@mikarv) June 19, 2020

So it turns out that we had over 1000 people dying of covid a day for 22 consecutive days. Fuck.

think of it as a full to capacity mid-sized football stadium amount of people dying in a few weeks and it makes it seem even worse.

https://t.co/ObyH8Ul5Hg pic.twitter.com/JnFMvuvNEL

— Notts Momentum (@NottsMomentum) June 19, 2020

yes, but no...but yes actually!

A quick look suggests the most commonly read paper of those who didn't vote Labour in 2019 (having done so in 2017) is The Guardian (~10%) then The Daily Mail (~8%) and The Sun (~7). Just over half read no paper at all. But among those who 'stuck' with Labour 19% were Guardian.

— Paula Surridge (@p_surridge) June 19, 2020

Baroness Hyde trending, partly because -ho ho ho - she's done it again and also is trashtalking the left again. One loves to be lectured by the landed gentry but maybe stfu!

oh Hugh Laurie thinks government ministers shouldn't be allowed to even draw a salary until they have read the latest Marina Hyde column, great endorsement there - talking truth to power sister!

Marina Hyde as a safety valve for people's cynicism performs a really unhealthy function doesn't she? The better she does it, the worse it is. FBPE types are obsessed with being *right* (in a mixture between moral and 'well actually'/legal rightness), and would rather be cynically tickled on the tummy about their 'rightness' than think about how change that benefits people's material circumstances might be effected.

OpenDemocracy have put the first chapter of Anthony Barnett's Iron Britannia, Why Parliament Waged its Falklands War online, and it's well worth reading, especially cross-referenced with David Edgerton's analysis of 20thC politics (annoying on twitter tho innee).

• establishing belligerent consensus on small scale and peripheral items of nationalism
• category difference between Churchill and Churchillism (a 'chronic deformation' of which WW2 parliamentary consensus barnett suggests we live in now)
• empire as motive force of early 20th century conservatism (this is where I need to go back to Edgerton and his careful treatment of Liberal, Tory and Labour approaches to empire, nation and trade)

By continuing to exclude the restless Churchill from office, Chamberlain perhaps ensured that he would see the opposite and indeed, Churchill gave priority to military belligerency. Thus Churchill, who had initially welcomed Mussolini as an ally in the class war, became the most outspoken opponent of Nazism, because it was a threat to British power. There was no contradiction in this, but rather the consistency of a Toryism that in the last instance placed the Empire before the immediate interests of trade and industry

the fact we have a media class and commentariat incapable and not at all desiring of deepening an understanding of why, say, Churchill's statue is currently boxed in, rather trying to ensure you understand less after reading them than before really is bought home by a very small amount of reading outside our papers.

(forward to the new edition is also online)

"The better she does it, the worse it is"

there is probably some Pythagorean triangle or some anchor/hook type visualisation to prove this!

"David Edgerton's analysis of 20thC politics (annoying on twitter tho innee)"

yep, but don't forget he also described Ken Livingstone as "one of the more interesting and intelligent people from the UK left of the 70's/80's" in Rise and Fall, which would be a sick burn if that was the intention but I don't think it was!

right xpost. the thing that occurred to me is that she's like a return to the tonic in classical music, providing a sense of closure after the the main event turbulence (cummings, brexit, 1000 deaths a day) from the norm, resolving the disruptive social anxieties with her wit back to happy sense of adjusted normality.

lol this needs a 'in this TED talk I will..'/'i will not be taking questions today' somewhere.

lol xpost. about the most generous you can get with that livingstone assessment is that it means 'interesting and intelligent in the sense of being central to the framework of my analysis and providing an unwitting critique and support of it'.

Was thinking about this only yesterday, a whole body of smug online reasonable people steadily oscillating between "look how stupid this government is" and "I am shocked that the government has done this wicked thing" while the government calmly gets on with its political programme and sniggers at the idiots who think they can debate it

the way their majority enables contempt, laziness and indifference due to them being effectively unopposable as long as they manage the news cycle, i can only imagine that's a thing that's going to get worse.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ea8ZhSfWAAE7YmV?format=jpg&name=large

saying "fuck the political dept of the bbc and a million deaths on them" is not quite the same as suggesting some independent, strong healthy left-wing media would pop up in its place if it was privatised, which would be a ridiculous idea. Not that I've seen anyone who gets taken seriously suggesting that it would be a likely outcome. But I suppose such weak as piss strawmanning will do for Hugh Laurie and co!

I thought about checking out that Marina Hyde column and then I realised I just didn't care, its another bit of noise among thousands.

Meanwhile something that might turn out to be actually important is happening, which is that some Tory MPs appear to be reaching the conclusion that Boris Johnson is too weak and sick to run the country properly and might need to go. More to the point they are actually saying it - off the record at least.

https://members.tortoisemedia.com/2020/06/19/sick-man-boris-johnson-transcript/content.html

Also I haven't read all this yet but it's Matthew D'Ancona putting together first hand accounts of what it was like in Downing Street when the PM and others started getting ill and the sense of "what do we do now daddy's dead?" amateurishness is even worse than I imagined.

lol i spent ten mins writing up a bad post abt how corrupted regency and pre-transformation politics feels at the moment, with the corbs-project as the cato street conspiracy (multi-racial, too small, poorly conceived, always doomed), the acceptable resistance-opposition restricted to a bunch of half-measure gentry (the godwins, henry hunt in his fkn white hat), starmer as fox willingly entering the "ministry of all the talents" and bojo as er pitt the younger dying in office -- before the post was eaten up and demolished by me clicking on the wrong x

there are few ways the analogy works precisely (or at all lol) but i maintain that the feel is similar; we are in the dying phase of "the thing" but that dying is going to take its time

next up neo-peterloo

literally posting incomprehensible garbage now u love too see it

Who is mad King George in all this or is that all of us?

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