The 'reject your eyes and ears' around this is quite grating. On one side, "trust the plan"; on the other, "ThIs iS wHAt They ReaLlY tHInk". When it's so clear that the little strategy that does exist is badly misguided electoralism that reeks of insincerity and can't deliberately work.
It's true of the govt at large too. Nobody in and around Labour can cope with incompetence as an explanation for its issues, so keep imbuing things with hidden genius or hidden malice as appropriate.
Had an exchange with a Corbynite a while ago. Got him to say he valued ideology over competence. 😨
Utter nonsense, clueless right wing Starmerite fool. 🤡
Parklife!
I regret that I can only retweet this once.
Do they know they more-or-less got Hanlon's Razor backwards?
This is true and so so depressing.
There is a large chunk of truth to this but I do think a degree of ideological underpinning - nostalgia for who Labour’s base *should be*, reactionary inclinations of individuals, and a broader tendency to paternalism on the Labour right towards minorities - makes visibly bad decisions easier.
Like, most of what has gone wrong - from the Treasury to the Home Office - in some way stems from people at the top trying clever-clever 5D election tactics, but without the necessary understanding of electoral dynamics or policy implications to pull it off for the government or party.
I know you guys don't believe this self-publicized origin story, but a lot of it really is the sort of thing you would do if you thought you had defeated the BNP in Barking by paying attention to local concerns and hoping that they would implode of their own accord.
Yes, but there’s an important missing part on there too, which is the actual local improvement bits.
Then again, the change may have started before 2010 but a lot of the impacts will have been felt much more afterwards, by which time he was gone. (Because only so many voters need casework done in a given year and they matter more in off-year elections anyway.)
Also from UKIP to SWP every political party agreed the BNP were small minded nasty racists. If you go back and have the PM, LOTO and the leader highest poling party (who weirdly is not one of these two) all pretending that the BNP was making a good point. Then I don't think the bins matter.
But I think the Barking Strategy plays right into that. What do you say when somebody says "that nice Nick Griffin is going to kick out the immigrants and then my Tracey will be able to play in the street without getting filthy"?
DON'T say "Nick Griffin's a racist and a Fascist" "immigrants make a positive contribution to society in lots of ways" "it's not the fault of immigrants if the street's dirty" DO say "we've listened to local people and brought in a new street-sweeping rota which we think you'll be happy with"
Scale that up to the national scale and here we are - although, as Stephen said, they don't seem to have a scoobie what the equivalent of improved street-sweeping is, which rather undermines the entire strategy. (It's a bloody awful strategy, to be clear, but at least it makes a kind of sense.)
And I don't know why the majority non racist political parties had lost their voice on this, and so much in the past year? Like, is it really as simple as Trump and X making them think the British public is not what it is?
It changed in 2016 when politicians got spooked that nationalist voices won a majority vote. The line became, ‘you’re against the people’ if you weren’t anti-immigration - and it’s really been a spiral since there.
Getting high on your own* supply is the top occupational health hazard of being an electoral strategist. (* ignoring your heavy debt to luck and external factors)
has been known to seriously affect your eyesight too.
Seems to me that Starmer could never be a salesman, but what he ought to be good at is making clear, reasoned arguments for his views, backed up by evidence. The fact this isn't happening hugely reinforces your point, fwiw.
If someone is prepared to enact - and loudly promote - racist, ableist or transphobic policies to win an election, then that person is racist, ableist and transphobic. That isn’t me “imbuing things with hidden malice”. That’s just identifying obvious, actual malice.
It doesn’t matter if they’re less malicious than others. It doesn’t matter if they’re motivated by political gain instead of eugenics. They are *still* knowingly and deliberately causing harm. Literally - malice. It’s perfectly possible for Labour to be incompetent and malicious *at the same time*.
This is true of all organisations. Thank you.
“Difford’s Razor” “Never ascribe to genius that which can be more adequately explained by incompetence…”
The basic litmus test for "is the Labour Party in disarray and without a project" is "are lots of people interviewing Lord Glassman"
The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise Maurice Glasman having sex with his wife.
*onstage at a working men's club* "My wife left me, she said its because she doesn't agree that the working class is characterised by a desire for an ethno-religious community that modern liberals have robbed them of"
Its not as catchy as the old "to secure for the worker, either by hand or bu brain, the full fruits of their industry via the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and in the process making sure Maurice glassman gets his leg over"
Not that I disagree, and if I was in charge Glassman would have been expelled ages ago, but the litmus test for "is the Labour Party in disarray?" is surely "does the Labour Party exist?".
Yes, it's weird to think it first became prominent when Miliband was leader because he's one of the least obviously Blue Labour ministers in the Cabinet, but the point is that BL is something that thrives in a vacuum.
That said, I think it's possible that (for several reasons) the House of Commons just isn't a very good incubator for ideological thinking anymore. Progressive people need to catch up to that and offer some kind of alternative to the Blue Labour ecosystem.
I woukd suggest the eco-system has degenerated. There's no think tank and there's been no theoretical work done since the original policy book
That doesn't really matter though; the fact it's the only real ideological framework being advanced post-Corbyn means it has influence one way or another
I do think people generally overrate the importance of think tanks staffed by highly skilled people churning out detailed reports vs. a totalizing ideological framework with a small group of well-connected true believers pushing it
Yes you really convinced me of that actually. Lots of very clever people grinding out wonky technocratic solutions is not useful if you have no reason to do that
The original idea behind Blue Labour was to be a "plug and play" political project/agenda that could be adopted wholesale by the Party. Obviously it ended up as something else but the theory was sound.
I said this to a friend a few months back. They are a staunch Lab activist of the centre left. They pushed back a bit, but not much. It is incompetence. They weren't ready for government. I can't believe they weren't ready, but here we are.
I don't quite believe that it's just fully insincere electoralism. The /Green Street/ Rule applies here: anyone distinctly keen on the "oh alas, for noble reasons of strategy I must disguise myself as a ruthless far-right hardman, so that they will embrace me as one of their own" notion is, well …!
theonion.com/in-retrospec...
And you know, when Glasman tells you who he is and who he's confident McSweeney is, you should at least give him some credence.
See also "realism"/"salesman putting Honest before their name".