As this weekend's post-mortems of the Gorton & Denton by-election get under way its worth making the key point that I'm sure will be made anyway:
Its not so much that Labour voters have abandoned the Labour Party, but more the Labour Party has been abandoning its Left voters for years;
the lesson of Thursday is taking the Leftish for granted only works when there is no Left alternative.
If Thursday changed anything, it made that much, much clearer!
yes, I didn't leave Labour, Labour left me.
Yesterday morning on BBC R4 they explained how Labour was not just facing an 'insurgency' from the right with Reform but now also am ''insurgency' from the left with the Greens.
My conclusion was the BBC doesn't know what insurgency means.
Also Stormer in his post by-election statement was bashing the green for wanting to leave NATO and legalise drugs. 🤔
The guy is a complete idiot.
As someone recently reminded me English words mean precisely what the speaker wants them to mean.
So for the BBC's political editor it means threat.
@ChrisMayLA6 This process has been happening in Scotland and Wales a lot longer than it's been happening in England. In Scotland it lost the party power a long time ago; in Wales, the impact has been partially hidden, because so much of the population lives in a small corner of the country where hatred of the English right means that Labour could steadily lose support and still (just about) win - so they've been teetering on the edge of collapse for twenty-odd years without much realising it.
But then, this isn't just a product of the current leadership taking voters for granted. The endless internal squabbles that have defined the party's entire history have all been built upon the belief that Labour's support has nowhere else to go. Periods when the left of the party have driven voters away - like in the early 80s or early 30s - were founded upon the same problem.
The 126-year-old question is: how do you stop the Labour party from believing that the Labour party is always the single most important issue of the day?
@ChrisMayLA6 The people who voted Green were the same people Tony Blair told to "get a heart transplant" or the surge of Labour members when Corbyn was leader (he of twice getting more GE votes than Starmer).
The Greens aren't "splitting the Left". They're just… Left.
I think the Starmer clique saw them as the 'wrong sort of member'
@ChrisMayLA6 @TimWardCam @KennyPark @Sarahw
Compared with the more traditional practice of selling leadership votes for £25?
@Sarahw @KennyPark @ChrisMayLA6
They did ask, there were leaked panicked internal Labour emails about it.
"If Corbyn wins a general election due to all the new Labour voters, then it will be very difficult for us to retain control of the party" was the takeaway mood of those emails. "Us" here means the Blairites, the professional party staffers recruited directly out of university politics and think tanks.
As ever, the Iron Law of Institutions holds: people inside an institution will tend to be willing to sacrifice the institution's overall good in order to ensure their factional control over that institution.
@passenger @KennyPark @ChrisMayLA6
Yes, Corbyn was stitched up not just by the media, but also by his own party.
Far too radical to actually be allowed to govern, even for his own party.
But now Starmer seems to emulate Reform rather than offering an alternative.
@Sarahw @KennyPark @passenger @ChrisMayLA6 among the many deep shames of the Labour Party is the outstanding fact that many of them - led by Blair - explicitly preferred Boris to JC, and actively campaigned on that basis. I remember watching Jess P on a breakfast show before the JC election where he narrowly lost, thoroughly undermining him. On national TV.
It was extraordinary. And here we are
@JimmyB @Sarahw @KennyPark @passenger @ChrisMayLA6
Well Blair was always known as "Tory Plan B"
New Labour was NEVER of the Left
Whilst gaining nothing on their Right.
Will Labour shrink to a rump, simply implode, merge its remnants into Reform?
The "Starmer is a decent man" narrative is clearly nonsense and the bulk of their MPs are cynical careerists. All are participants in their 'authentic zeitgeist whisperer of the (1950s) working class' religion.
There is maybe a niche for a revamped Harold Wilson (of whichever gender) as part of a parliamentary alliance against the hard Right.
It certainly looks like epochal territory.
Yes, interestingly there has been a general rehabilitation of Wilson in the last decade, and so his sort of Labourism may be due for a renewal on the back of that... but whether that would be enough to save Labour from implosion is an altogether different matter.
If we end up with a spectrum, where does a 'Heseltine' party of the centre Right come from? That is another unknown and potentially another part of the dynamic. Spawning from the Conservatives seems no longer an option.
I told my Labour MP this months ago. Hopefully the message will now sink in to the leadership.
@ChrisMayLA6 Labour has felt entitled to the votes of the left.
Labour didn't learn it's lesson from loosing Scottish voters and having the SNP be in charge of Holyrood for nearly two decades now. For about the same period of time I've felt that the greens are more to the left.
Labour still feels entitled to our votes. The party needs to be put out to pasture.
Dig of the Stump
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon
JeniParsons
Ray McCarthy
Nömenlōony
Houba
Eliza MB
RolloTreadway
Mark Burton
Kenny Park
Sarah W
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE
Jen
Dan Hatton
Passenger
JimmyB (he/him)
CockneyLaurie
Walrus 🏴
LionelB
Simon Zerafa
Esther Payne 