Interesting Links for 25-09-2016
Thelonious Monk Creates a List of Tips for Playing a Gig: "Don’t Listen to Me, I Am Supposed to Be Accompanying You!"
(tags: music jazz advice )
Corbyn wins: what next?
(tags: labour politics uk )
To ship bikes safely put a picture of a tv on the box
(tags: bicycles shipping transport safety )
US Naval Academy to name its cyber building after
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Blair was failing. Brown failed. Milliband failed. New Labour had two shots at winning, and failed both times. Under Milliband they were decimated. Yet their only plan is 'Lets try it again for a third time? It will surely work this time! Maybe the other Milliband brother, the Torturer Over The Water, maybe he'll save us!'
And. No. If you've tried the same thing twice in a row and failed twice, it's time to try something different.
And you can see it, Corbyn has the exact appeal that people are looking for in politicians now, they want politicians who aren't smarmy career-politicians, they want somebody who seems like a real person, who connects on a real level. There's a reason Corbyn has lead the Labour party to the biggest membership it's ever had.
And New Labour seem absolutely intent on squandering it all. It's maddening. They would rather destroy their own party than admit they are wrong.
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If Corbyn has exactly the appeal people are looking for why are his personal approval ratings so bad?
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The less pat answer is that many ardent supporters on the left of the traditional Labour platform were happy to go along with Kinnock and then Blair and Brown and Mandelson as they presented a social democratic manifesto and competent government administration in a way that appealled to swing voters in marginal constituencies and therefore won elections and put in to effect a Labour manifesto, albeit one from the right of the Party's traditional platform. Over time the platform that they put forward became more focused on winning swing voters in marginal constituencies and chased them right-wards, a couple of major policy mistakes were made that appeared incompatable with Labour values (Iraq for starters and mostly) and the Labour party lost its reputation for effective competent administration. Many of those Labour left enthusiasts lost patience and left either the Labour Party or the compromise that Blair, Brown and Mandelson had negotiated.
Strategically the Great Crash of 2008 and technological and trade changes since the mid-90's put the kibbosh on the New Labour economic plan of letting the private sector grow the economy and then harvesting increased tax revenue to pay for more and better public services and re-distribution. The right of the Labour Party had no ideas to replace that in 2010 or 2015 and just sort of flapped about for a bit. (And continue to flap about at the moment.)
Power abhors a vacuum. Those on the traditional left of the Labour Party, both old hands and new, realised that with the right having run out of oomph they could have a go. They have responded to their opportunity with gusto and rushed to join and re-join the Labour Party. (And that has provoked a counter-joining movement from those who think Corbyn is the wrong leader.)
Hence we see a huge membership of the Labour Party. Many, but not all, Corbyn supporters. Personally, after my initial excitement had worn off just after his first appearance at PMQ's, I think they've backed the wrong horse.
Not does the fact that the Labour Party membership largely support him mean that he is popular with ordinary voters. There are 40 million of them. They outnumber the Labour Party at the ballot by some margin.
The things we can say with certainty about Labour Party members is that they are more left-wing than the average voter and they support the Labour Party more than the average voter and they tend to live in safe Labour seats. Half a million people who already supported the Labour Party joining, sending the Party a cheque for £3 or £25 so they can vote in a highly contested, potentially existential leadership election is not the same as persuading 5 million, or even 500,000 ordinary voters in marginal seats to give Corbyn a go. I don't think having half a million members translates in to winning a million more votes and certainly not in the parts of the country where the Labour needs to win those votes.
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My politicing problems with Corbyn include:
Corbyn is more like Cameron than Cameron was ever like Blair. He won't do the heavy lifting that Blair and Kinnock did. By that I mean he won't go and persuade enough of the other flank of his own party that he has an election winning strategy that will get them most of the important things they want but they in turn will have to go along with the Plan, with a smile on their face. I think Cameron did PR and I think Corybn does t-shirt slogans. This matters because unless he can persuade the sort of non-Corbyn enthusiasts who have been turning up to keep Labour winning marginal and semi-marginal seats to keep turning up UKIP will go through the North of England like Atilla the Hun.
He does not appear to be good at collaborating with those who disagree with him. Given that his best chance of becoming Prime Minister is as part of a Labour / Lib Dem / SNP government or as part of a Labour / UKIP government that is a weakness.
Corbyn has allowed himself to be presented to the general public as a shambling, disorganised incompetent. Having read what Thandie Degnam and Lillian Greenwood had to say about his management ability I think there is some truth in the presentation. (He should have known this was coming and prepared the ground, either externally by doing a proper job at PMQ's or internally by admitting to the PLP it was a problem for him and he had not ready answer. It's too late now.)
He does not pay attention to policy - see again Lillian Greenwood and the economic brains trust John McDonnel convened and which Corbyn appears to have taken no interest in.
He either doesn't understand or doesn't care how politics is currently actually done in the UK. He seems to take no interest in the news cycle, or PMQ's or picking off unpopular and damaged ministers. That the public see subtly and caution as equivocation and weakness seems to pass him by. He might be right that it should be done differently but it isn't done differently and won't be until half a million Labour members have spent a decade dedicately changing the way it is done. (They will not do this by not paying their BBC licence fee.)
He's not a gifted performer - which for someone who wants to change the ideology of an entire country in three years is a bit of a failing.
He does not appear to be preparing the Labour Party for the long march to success as a social movement. I've heard nothing from him that suggests that the Labour Party should be thinking in terms of decades not years for his approach to pay off. I fear those 500,000 members will be asked to throw themselves on the bayonts of the Tory Party keen to distract the public from Brexit and get no help from the Lib Dems who will dig in around their core message of liberal, pro-European progressiveness and hard work in target constituencies and the SNP who will dig in in Scotland (Saor Alba) and careful competent government and a message of thwarted anti-austerity.
I think he is largely not interested in winning an election in 2020 or 2025. I'm not convinced he's interested in winning an election in 2030 at which point he'll be 80. I'm not sure how his plan of not winning elections translates in to a change in the lives of people.
He's too proud, vain and stubborn to fall on his sword ahead of the 2020 election. He's damaged goods. I think he lacks the skill and interest to carefully pick a suitable successor, nurture them into a position of strength and hand over to them without tainting them with his failure or giving the game away too soon and making himself a lame duck.
(I have many problems with him in terms of his values and policies and attributes but that's a different topic.)
This doesn't mean that I think Andy Burnham or Owen Smith would have been better, just that Corbyn won't succeed in winning.
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I think the wisest course for the PLP would be to negotiate a common platform with Corbyn, get that out in public and stick to the day job of opposing the government of the day with vigour. I expect that platform will be somewhat to the left of recent Labour platforms. (I don't have a problem with that and I suspect that a sizeable minority of the public won't have a problem with it.) I think it would be wise if the platform was a minimal as possible to reduce the potential areas for conflict and that Corbyn agreed to not make up policy off the cuff.
It shouldn't be difficult to come up with some left-wing policies that have popular support. Re-nationalising train operating companies by allowing their franchises to lapse for example. A programme of investment in infrastructure in the North of England. Some improvements in the minimum wage.
I think any Labour MP who is deselected should resign and fight a by-election as Independent Labour and make it clear to Corbyn that that is what will happen (which might or might give him pause and might or might not help keep the cease fire but at least gives him fair warning of the consequences).
Then they watch him flounder about and hope not to be too badly beaten up in 2020. I'd expect the best case for them to be losing 20 seats to the Lib Dems and 20 seats to UKIP and losing some to the boundary review. That's not fatal. Corbyn would have to go, the bounds of acceptable policy will probably have been broadened out to include left of centre ideas and Corbyn's successor, either social democrat or democratic socialist, would have five years to do a competent job of running the Labour Party.
The PLP's only other option is the rather nuclear one of founding their own party or joining the Lib Dems en masse or some shadow Labour Party within the Labour Party.
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I think it's more that the Left had been feeling, for 15 years, that things were going the wrong way, but that they couldn't object too loudly, because it was working. As soon as it (inevitably, of course) stopped working they felt justified to point out that capitalism was a rotten edifice kept aloft on the backs of the poorest, and needed to be torn down.
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I think those statements are two sides of the same coin.
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Because I think there is one thing voters like to see, parties that are unified. And competent. Two things. Both that the Labour party has not exactly been shining with on either side of the divide of late.
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In the context of a government who is profoundly divided and has just lost a key referendum provoking the biggest national crisis since the Second World War.
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And while the government is profoundly divided, they've somehow managed to portray themselves as being not that divided at all. They've done a good job of keeping their stabbings behind the scenes, and putting out a unified and competent face to the public and media.
Contrast with Labour and the farcical chicken coup, the shenanigans of Angela Eagle. (And somehow she's still refusing to meet with constituents or release pictures of the alleged brick attack that probably never happened.) The inept handling of the voter purge and the attempts to rig the results.
But no, I mean, I don't think Labour can win in 2020. Under any leader. Another New Labour leader would be a repeat of the Brown and Milliband disasters. Corbyn will probably lose too. Labour need the Tories to self-destruct the country with Brexit to have any shot at winning power again.
They certainly can't do it anymore by triangulating onto swing-tories in middle-england though. That worked once, it won't work again. Things have changed. They can no longer rely on the old-labour core vote to stick by them while they chase the soft tory voters.
I mean, we had Corbyn speaking out about racism towards immigrants yesterday. Would any other of the Labour leadership candidates have had the guts to stand up and say hey, you know what people of Middle-England, immigration isn't actually a bad thing for this country?
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I think the days of triangulating on to soft Tories in middle-England are gone too. Mostly because the right of the Labour Party doesn't have a structured or principled base from which to triangulate and reach out for those voters. The economic strategy of Blair which was largely right in the 90's is not right in the 2020's and important parts of it turned out to be wrong (e.g. the speed of new job creation in areas of the country which had seen industries close down). You can feed soft Tories crumbs if you know how to bake the cake. If you don't have a firm foundation then you have nothing really to offer.
I hope I'm wrong about Corbyn. I'm not averse to the general drift of lots of his politics. It may be that the wheels come of the Tory's Brexit chariot more quickly and more explosively than I think and Corbyn starts to look good by comparison. Time will tell.
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(The other worrying thing is most of the smart people in the foreign office have apparently taken early retirement over the last few years, and there's not much functional efficient and capable civil service left in some really key parts of government.)
I really hope you're wrong about Corbyn too, because I genuinely do think he's our last best hope of saving British politics, and averting what I see as the almost-inevitable rise now of English Fascism.
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