Yep, you do that a lot.
It’s bee ell eee tee see aitch.
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Would have thought it equally possible that we could well be seeing coalitions rather than clear majorities for a long time since we would then be into the age of 4-party-politics.
Parliament by committee - 
A Labour split doesn’t bode well on more than just the one level.
Here is an exclusive preview of tomorrow’s headline in the Guardian.
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The situation in the Labour Party is a bit more complex than that and is a problem of their own making. First, you’ve got that whole situation where the rightiest candidates are in the leftiest seats. The plan at the time was to give them a job for life, ensure they never lost their seat and could be part of the permanent PLP machinery. Any splitter there has lost their seat, and believe me, they do know this. It won’t change the electoral calculus any, but it will mean that those seats have MPs that are actually onboard with the manifesto.
What will change governments are the marginals. This is where your question becomes important for the actual result of a general election. It’s already where the majority of campaigning is focused. Liverpool CLPs, for example, routinely campaign in Warrington South.
I don’t think a breakaway party will take much of the vote, and here’s why. First, where do they get their base of support? I’m just back from a CLP leadership nomination meeting. I saw more than one person ardently campaign for Owen Smith, yet still state they would never leave the party and continue under Corbyn. They may not be presently convinced that Corbyn is the right leader, but there is no danger of them becoming something else. They stated that they would support the democratic mandate.
Next, where do they get their money? If the majority of subs paying members stick around, and they will, the they can’t rely on sheer volume of membership fees coming in. They won’t be getting any more money from the unions. Their main source of funding is going to be corporate, instantly delegitimising them.
Finally, and connected to that last point, if they do become something else, the gloves will be off. There’ll be no more keeping it comradely from the Labour Party leadership. Why would they need to? Every attackable aspect of that party will be fair game. The toys-out-of-the-pram way it was formed, the anti-democratic activity, the bullying, the smearing and the likely fact they’ll have fuck all in the way of policy.
Originally posted by @pap
Originally posted by @Bearsy
Are we on same page? I’ve no doubt Corbyn Labour will do better than Split Labour, but if general election comes round and Split Labour are still going, they will take *some* percentage of core voters from Corbyn Labour, and his aspiration to become Prime Minister and conduct investigation into women’s wages, will be fucked, if it isn’t already. Tories are big winners here srs.
The situation in the Labour Party is a bit more complex than that and is a problem of their own making. First, you’ve got that whole situation where the rightiest candidates are in the leftiest seats. The plan at the time was to give them a job for life, ensure they never lost their seat and could be part of the permanent PLP machinery. Any splitter there has lost their seat, and believe me, they do know this. It won’t change the electoral calculus any, but it will mean that those seats have MPs anyway.
What will change governments are the marginals. This is where your question becomes important for the actual result of a general election. It’s already where the majority of campaigning is focused. Liverpool CLPs, for example, routinely campaign in Warrington South.
I don’t think a breakaway party will take much of the vote, and here’s why. First, where do they get their base of support? I’m just back from a CLP leadership nomination party. I saw more than one person ardently campaign for Owen Smith, yet still state they would never leave the party and continue under Corbyn. They may not be presently convinced that Corbyn is the right leader, but there is no danger of them becoming something else. They stated that they would support the democratic mandate.
Next, where do they get their money? If the majority of subs paying members stick around, and they will, the they can’t rely on sheer volume of membership fees coming in. They won’t be getting any more money from the unions. Their main source of funding is going to be corporate, instantly delegitimising them.
Finally, and connected to that last point, if they do become something else, the gloves will be off. There’ll be no more keeping it comradely from the Labour Party leadership. Why would they need to? Every attackable aspect of that party will be fair game. The toys-out-of-the-pram way it was formed, the anti-democratic activity, the bullying, the smearing and the likely fact they’ll have fuck all in the way of policy.
This post. Tory rule for the next 10+ years. In a nutshell.
That’s certainly not what I was aiming for. I put a bit of effort into that post, including my “working out”, if you remember your maths days.
If there’s something there you disagree with, I am all ears.
Ah, no. Sorry, Pap, that wasn’t really the point I was trying to make. More the fact that, as well thought out and expressed as your post may have been, there’s no disguising the fact that the whole thing is a fucking mess.
A Labour that was united to any degree would’ve had a real shot of skewering the Tories after the referendum debacle/fallout. No chance of that happening now.
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Originally posted by @pap
Originally posted by @Bearsy
Are we on same page? I’ve no doubt Corbyn Labour will do better than Split Labour, but if general election comes round and Split Labour are still going, they will take *some* percentage of core voters from Corbyn Labour, and his aspiration to become Prime Minister and conduct investigation into women’s wages, will be fucked, if it isn’t already. Tories are big winners here srs.
The situation in the Labour Party is a bit more complex than that and is a problem of their own making. First, you’ve got that whole situation where the rightiest candidates are in the leftiest seats. The plan at the time was to give them a job for life, ensure they never lost their seat and could be part of the permanent PLP machinery. Any splitter there has lost their seat, and believe me, they do know this. It won’t change the electoral calculus any, but it will mean that those seats have MPs anyway.
What will change governments are the marginals. This is where your question becomes important for the actual result of a general election. It’s already where the majority of campaigning is focused. Liverpool CLPs, for example, routinely campaign in Warrington South.
I don’t think a breakaway party will take much of the vote, and here’s why. First, where do they get their base of support? I’m just back from a CLP leadership nomination party. I saw more than one person ardently campaign for Owen Smith, yet still state they would never leave the party and continue under Corbyn. They may not be presently convinced that Corbyn is the right leader, but there is no danger of them becoming something else. They stated that they would support the democratic mandate.
Next, where do they get their money? If the majority of subs paying members stick around, and they will, the they can’t rely on sheer volume of membership fees coming in. They won’t be getting any more money from the unions. Their main source of funding is going to be corporate, instantly delegitimising them.
Finally, and connected to that last point, if they do become something else, the gloves will be off. There’ll be no more keeping it comradely from the Labour Party leadership. Why would they need to? Every attackable aspect of that party will be fair game. The toys-out-of-the-pram way it was formed, the anti-democratic activity, the bullying, the smearing and the likely fact they’ll have fuck all in the way of policy.
That’s a good analysis in a lot of ways, and I think you’re absolutely correct that a fourth party won’t win an awful lot by way of seats in a general election. They may well have some by-election successes, but in a full contest only those defectors with a significant personal vote in their constituencies are likely to get in.
There’s a very obvious parallel to draw here, of course, and I fear that things will turn out much the same if there is indeed a split in the Labour Party. The parallel, as I’m sure you’ll know before I say it, is with the SDP in the early 1980s. They were the media’s darlings, they did well in a number of by-elections and gained a few MPs that way as well as by defections from Labour. But by the time of the 1983 general elecion, in alliance with the Liberals, they returned a massive 23 seats.
Not that this did Labour any good. With a leader much loved by the membership but mercilessly ridiculed by the tabloids, a prime minister whose popularity had soared (from a spectacularly low base) thanks to the Falklands conflict and, crucially, a third party taking Labour votes, the Tories ended up with a massive majority. In seat after seat the anti-Tory vote was split between Labour and Liberal-SDP Alliance, allowing the tories to win a load of seats that would otherwise most likely have gone to Labour. The Tories had 42.4% of the vote, Labour 27.6% and the Alliance 25.4%. And what did that mean in terms of seats? Tories 397, Labour 209 and Alliance 23. Even in 1987, with the Tories’ vote share about the same as 1983, Labour up to 30.8%, Alliance 22.6%, the Tory majority was still massive - C 376, Lab 229 Lib/SDP 22. And something of this sort is exactly what I fear may happen in 2020.
You’re right that the Labour brand (if you’ll forgive the use of the term) is very strong. The begetters of the SDP clearly believed that they could attract Labouur members and voters unhappy with Foot, Benn et al. They were, for the most part, wrong. The SDP never gained the sort of membership levels of Labour, and eventually merged completely with the Liberals. We did, of course, end up with an SDP government. It just happened to call itself Labour.
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One favour Corbyn could really do himself is calling May out on her shitty tactics. He doesn’t need to be personal to point out that she’s avoiding the question, and he did so very successfully when he six-quizzed Cameron on the tax credits issue. Very difficult to do that when you’ve the likes of Jamie Reed heckling him from the Labour backbenches.
There are certainly parallels between a possible Labour Party split and the SDP breakaway in the early 80s; but, as I see it, the closeness of these parallels revolves around how many Labour MPs break away from Corbyn. There is the possibility that the breakaway faction (if it happens) will be large enough to form the official opposition – this wasn’t the case with the SDP – and the relatively higher profile this would bring could make a lot of difference regarding such things as public perception, media exposure, funding etc.
Of course, breakaway MPs will, I suppose, have to be deselected by their CLPs and will come under pressure to submit themselves to an immediate by-election, and this alone will more-than-likely prevent many from splitting. However, as I understand it, breakaway MPs can’t be forced to resign their seat, so some may decide to ride out any storm, safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely to face a GE for another 4 years, by which time the political landscape will have changed.
Whatever happens, it’s hard to see the Tories not gaining from the current Labour Party strife.
This is an interesting video. It’s the BBC Wales Leader’s Debate that took place ahead of the general election last year. I had seen a small snippet of the video online, in which Leanne Wood owns Owen Smith.
I thought that might be a tad unfair, so decided to watch the whole thing. Personally, I wasn’t too impressed with Smith, although I’ll leave the viewer to form their own opinions.
What is striking though, is simply how much Corbyn has changed the political landscape in a year. Smith’s words are often met with jeers or derision. The Labour Party was somehing few people liked or had any time for, had no radical ideas and were as onboard with the Tories with the implementation of austerity.
The main thing Smith bangs on about is bedroom tax. That was a Labour Party playing the Conservatives’ script, a party that honestly didn’t know what it was, didn’t have any ideas of its own and belatedly started defending itself on its economic record. By the time Ed Miliband actually did so, and said it was the fault of the banks, the message was so completely ingrained that it just sounded like a lie, despite the opposite being true.
Well worth a look for a glance at Owen Smith, but more interesting because it was only a year or so ago.
Was just at the Corbyn launch in Manchester. The place was packed. JC spoke well.
That’s an interesting point. I’d be willing to bet, though, that there wouldn’t be anything like suffiicient MPs defecting to form the official opposition. They may not like Corbyn, but they’d realise that their prospects of remaining as MPs at the next general election will be a whole lot better if they’re standing for Labour MPs rather than as representatives of some new, as yet unnamed party.
The begetters of the SDP hoped and thought that they’d attract a significant number of Labour MPs to join them, but in the end it didn’t happen. There may be more if it happens this time around, as the old party loyalties aren’t the same as they were back then and politics is seen far more as a career; even then, though, a lot of Labour MPs will reckon their career prospects are better with the Labour Party than elsewhere, all the more so if they’re in safe seats.
Sadly, I can only agree with your last point.
So a slightly longer account of the JC leadership launch. I was meant to be there, for a start. If there was ever a day when everything lined up just right, timing wise, today was it. Arrived just before two, and managed to snaffle the last seat in my section.
The speakers were of varying quality, but all brought something decent to share. The least capable speaker had one of the best stories to tell. She’s the first female Asian councillor in Oldham to be elected, a fact that I am sure will surprise Mr Sanchez 
Claudia Webbe, one of the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance slate for the NEC, gave an oddly phrased but effective and passionate attack on the Tories and a defence of our traditional values.
The best speaker before Corbyn took to the stage was probably Richard Burgon. If Corbyn ever does relinquish the leadership, they’ll want someone with that sort of fire to go up against the Tories. I’ve only really seen him in one on one interviews before. Didn’t know he had this in him.
I’ll have to have a review later, but Jeremy Corbyn was probably the most assured I’ve seen him. He went over the last nine months, detailed what he saw as the five ills we need to sort, and finished to a 2K standing ovation. Most definitely preaching to the converted. There was a lot of applause and solidarity throughout.
It wouldn’t be a left wing gathering if there wasn’t one total disaster. They had this idea to put phone banks up, live on the big screen. The comms were shaky enough, but it’s not a superb spectacle to look at when you’re sat in the Lowry.
One phone bank even had a German Shepherd dog there. It was not manning, or indeed, dogging the phones, fortunately.
Brilliant 
Jeremy Corbyn’s launch vs Owen Smith’s launch. Blairism really is dead. #LabourLeadership #CorbynForLeader pic.twitter.com/vS9zhlKBH7
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I’m tempted to take you up on your bet, Fowllyd, but there are still too many unknowns for me do to so with any confidence of winning.
You and Pap are right to point out the long-standing value attached to campaigning under the ‘Labour’ banner. Pap is also right about the importance of union funding etc.
However, there’s nothing to stop a breakaway party choosing a name that includes ‘Labour’ in the title; although, as I think Pap has also already pointed out, they would do best to avoid adding ‘New’ or ‘Real’! As for funding, I believe any new party forming the majority opposition would probably (though not definitely) end up qualifying for parliamentary Short funds. There is also, I suppose, the possibility of independent private funders stepping forward.
As for breakaway MPs thinking their prospects of being re-elected in the next GE would be better served campaigning under a Labour banner, a couple of points: first, I suspect that many of them will agree with Flahute that Middle England won’t ever vote for Corbyn; second, as I said in my previous post, some of them might be prepared to gamble on the political landscape being completely altered in four years time.
Another factor I think is relevant refers back to your post drawing parallels between the media’s treatment of Michael Foot and Corbyn. Unfortunately, like you, 
I am old enough to remember the similarities in the way the early 80s media – not to mention Spitting Image! – lampooned Foot’s scruffy dress sense and unpolished manner of conducting himself etc. However, I seem to remember the media back then had much more respect – albeit, at times, a grudging respect – for Foot’s principles, especially following the support he gave to Thatcher’s government during the Falklands’ War; and I don’t recall him ever being accused of condoning ‘thuggery’ within his party … at least, not to the extent to which Corbyn is being accused.
From my distant vantage point I have to rely on the say-so of those closer to events in order to gauge the validity of these allegations; however, if these allegations end up sticking to Corbyn, and he remains Labour leader, then the cachet attached to the Labour banner will be tarnished; and, for some, it will be tarnished beyond the point at which they see an advantage in being associated with it.
Although the Labour Party haven’t always been my natural home, so to speak, I have a lot of respect for what they have achieved for the people of this country over the years; therefore, I hope they can sort themselves out soon.
I think you’re picking the wrong 80s comparison when looking at the abuse remark. To get a better idea of why Corbyn’s supporters are being demonised, you’d probably be better off looking at how the miners were portrayed during the strike. A concerted effort to portray them as the enemy within was made.
I genuinely think that some of the people involved in the propagation of this myth need to be investigated for abuse of public office at some point in the future.
A great example would be the case of Angela Eagle. There are many in the Corbyn ranks that believe that she was simply used to make way for Smith, and feel a bit sorry for her. Being somewhat closer to events, I don’t really have much sympathy. Her local constituency party implored her to support Corbyn after the coup broke. She did the opposite, so they met and passed a no-confidence motion in her, their democratic right.
On the day of her leadership launch, there are reports that a brick is thrown through her constituency window in Wallasey. This is a national fucking news story, and moreover, it’s wrong. Eagle shares a building with loads of other people. The window that was put through was a stairwell window at the back of the office - a window into a communal area. They patched it up with Labour sign, giving the impression that Eagle’s window had been done.
Enter Jane Kennedy, Labour Police and Crime Commissioner, who unbelievably for someone in her position, implicates Corbyn supporters as well, and you have an “abuse” case ready to go, that Angela Eagle spends hammering on during her launch day. We’ve seen other MPs demand that Corbyn do something about it as well.
At the very least, it was hugely irresponsible of public officials to push this narrative. No arrest has been made, even now. You do not have to cover your bonce in Bacofoil to suggest that the whole thing, brick chucking and all, could have been manufactured. I certainly don’t remember this fuss when my front window got put through in Holland Street.
Loads of other examples. Jess Phillips, who famously said she’d “knife Corbyn in the front”, called sexism on the Laura K petition based on about 5 comments out of 33K. Someone did the analysis.
The abuse thing is, in the main, absolute bollocks. While I am certain that there is a tiny proportion of people that support Corbyn and are abusive dicks, the vast majority of the abuse is being manufactured to order, amplified beyond credible belief, in an attempt to make Corbyn supporters Enemy Within II.
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John McDonnell is on Marr at the moment.
Very powerful interview in which he addresses the accusation that a staffer broke into an MPs offices.
He’s coming across as very earnest and has just spoken directly into the camera to address Labour members and MPs.
Will post a clip after the show.
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If the ‘abuse’ is real, why don’t the ‘victims’ report it to the police? The penalties for abuse have been increased recently.
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Haven’t seen the Marr piece but that story read as MP resigns post and refuses to vacate office rather than Corbyn aide bullying.
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