Ditto, New Labour echoed and gleefully reminded people of the 'something of the night about him' description of Michael Howard and handed out versions of his CV! They didn't just go 'eh, when the Forced Choice (TM) happens it will be fine'. Need to actually have a plan for the Forced Choice (TM).
The final closing argument re: Howard in 2005 was "economic stability is at risk. Your mortgage is at risk. Your job is at risk", frankly, none of which was in any way true.
I mean, it was, but the election was irrelevant to that.
Yes, fair point, but you know what I mean.
A lot of people seem to have convinced themselves that the Starmer strategy is a deliberate masterly inactivity. It's not, but even if it were, no winning government has ever gone quiet and just gone 'well, the opposition is just self-defining as extreme'. They went out and labelled it as such.
The thing is, though, what the government is doing is working. Small boats' arrivals are falling, deportations of foreign offenders have increased, the asylum backlog is a shadow of what it was a year ago. Asylum claims are now being processed in months rather than years. Report that.
I’m not a reporter, but I have actually written all of these things. You should read what I write not lecture me on what you *imagine* I’ve written.
I know a number of people who work for the HO who are tearing their hair at out at the yawning gulf between the clear trajectory of progress, progress which they have worked themselves sick to achieve, and the way the media is uniformly reporting things.
The government chose to pursue a chimera on immigration, it’s not surprising that they are not getting thanked for it.
And keep on adopting a right-wing framing in all of their comms about it
Medieval doctors never got thanked, no matter how much blood the leeches drank
Just one quibble: small boat arrivals aren’t falling. You need to live in the real world.
Working? Dear Lord! Nothing is working because this all migrant issue is nonsense. It won’t change a bit the real life of people. Even if the 30000 immigrants in the repurposed hotel (because better remember they are not actual hotels with concierge and breakfast in bed) vanish in a night no one
single UK citizen life will improve and the fanatics will move to the next non existent problem. Labour needs to point out that what Reform is saying is BS, bring facts and start doing what really the country needs. Fix the NHS, tax the very rich and companies, go after…
tax evasion that is estimated to be £5.4 billions just on 2020/21. That would fix the country and chop the legs of Reform. Instead Reform and Labour idiocy got even people on the left believing that their problems are due to people with less than them that represent 1% of the whole UK population
To reiterate: literally *NONE* of this stands up to any scrutiny as an argument, but it did something that this Labour party is never gonna do without major changes (win re-election).
I am genuinely not entirely sure what the government’s main criticism of Farage to the electorate *is*?
He isn't competent enough to deport all the immigrants seems to be the one they're going with today. We're going to deport them better
Exactly that. Every *other* politician wants to think they’re cleverer, more subtle, than Farage… but look who’s do dominating the news whilst they’re on their hols.
They really have boxed themselves in; can’t do Trump attack (yet), don’t want to do Brexit (despite it being a huge blot on NF’s record) and don’t want to do immigration- so they’re left with a vague attack around public spending and a quote he gave on the NHS years ago
The obvious attack is to call him out over his claims on Brexit and his history of rhetoric around immigration- very easy to make it values lead and strong. Farage has terrible personal ratings despite how Westminster lobby and co treat him
You know that tweet about "Your going to the camps!" "Its 'you're'" Well imagine if that was the entire political strategy of the government of a G7 nation
Look here, kid...i am not like your dad ok? I know what its like to be a young guy. You have certain things you want. You want a girl and a pint and an insane racist policy on immigration. I want that too...i get it...and you think nigel is fun and hip...but you cant have TOO much fun
this has actually made me even more depressed so kudos
Hope it also inspires you to push the Greens and the LibDems to do the naming and push the messaging locally and nationally against the Fascist Reform Party and to repeat it every week in multiple different ways through the Starmer tenure. For, if not, Starmer WILL hand the UK over to the fascists.
Reform would sow the same kind of “reset” as their across-the-pond counterparts are currently doing. The problem for Starmer is that he can’t label this accurately and weaponise it without alienating the man he’s desperately trying to be best friends with.
In the counterfactual world, I reckon the 2005-10 Tory term would have faced substantial economic headwinds, especially 2nd half of it Opposition leader Brown would have been well placed to claim it was fine under his stewardship...
Agree with most of this SB analysis. Suspect many *other* politicians like to think they’re cleverer, more subtle than Farage. Actually he’s canny, e.g: taking advantage of the Westminster public-school calendar to fill the news vacuum. Relatively, current Lab seem tactically dozy, complacent.
I thought going into 2024 that Starmer's "let the 20s Tories be 20s Tories" was an intentional strategy. It seems "say nothing" is Starmer's default position and it just happened to work out that one time.
I honestly believe he thinks results will change minds. But the public aren't an intelligent judge with the ability to process complex information. They need to be led by the hand to the point Labour need to make, which is Farage is a lying racist grifter who will make their lives worse not better
I think this is like how the 2015 Lib Dem campaign was "look at our record on harm mitigation!" which went really well
But it didn't work out that time, they only got 34%! That could easily have gone horribly wrong if the votes fell differently and set the tone for the lack of popular support/buy-in
That 34% is arguably boosted by tactical would-be LD or Grn voters too, in Con-Lab or Ref-Lab seats
I mean, if your argument is that Starmer's victory was even more down to dumb luck than I thought, allow me to present no resistance or dissent
I hope Starmer's strategy is built on the 2024 US Election. Democrats couldn't have been clearer in pointing out Trump's horrifying political positions. But in the end "it's the Economy, stupid" - inflation and the lack of feel-good factor out-weighed everything else. Hence Labour's focus on growth.
Exactly. It should be as simple as, saying "When people say who they are, believe them."
It’s like with the argument that people will vote for them when they see the improvements in public services - first you need to fund them & second how will people know it was you when you respond to people claiming you actually spent their taxes on child sacrifice with nowt more than a wry smile
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"
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
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".
Starmer is not a leader. A leader with courage would point out that Farage is really talking about immigration and his ultimate fantasy of remigration.
American democrats did that about Biden. Don’t make the same mistake the US did.
the opposition (which is now firmly identified by Labour as Reform UK) is only extreme in presentation, not policy
So Farage spins the narrative, the media lap it up and propagate it and you want opposition parties to spend their time responding to what Farage does I disagree, opposition parties need to give an positive vision rather than given yet more publicity to Reform’s batshit policies
keep going like this and next election Reform will have the absolute majority
'If we go down this road you, Reform-curious voter, will be risking x horrific thing happening to you personally', where x has a grain of truth but is extrapolated to absolute worst case scenario. What Remain should have done, in retrospect.
Had forgotten this! In light of what we know happened a couple of years later, this hits seriously differently.
Yes, as Marwood rightly points out, which slightly undercuts my boy scoutish 'this was a vile calumny against Howard' line.
You can also see, within the argument, the problem New Labour would face against Cameron because the situation basically flips for the self-same reason!
Yeah - one genuine asset Farage has is that he is *not* tainted by association with the Conservative record, and you can see why Labour are keen* to go 'remember, he agreed with Truss'. *Or at least, when they wake up from one of their Bagpussian slumbers
I always felt that was rather distasteful and played nastily on him being half Romanian.
Yeah, the 2005 campaign against Howard had a grimy underbelly to it IMV.
But then the Tories did campaign with "Are you thinking what we're thinking?"
Yeah, it was a grim campaign by Michael Howard and a grim campaign against him.
Oh, both can get in the bin
turned out nobody was, though
Totally - it was a combo of that and quiet antisemitism.
Antisemitism? In the Labour Party? Unthinkable.
Forced Choice only works when their fear of the alternative is greater than their loathing of the government this also requires the government to act like the alternative is something to fear