Keir Starmer at it again..

[The Saturday Boy]

Where I think electability comes into it is that Labour need to persuade both previous Conservative and indeed now SNP voters to want to vote Labour. And the big political shift is the Conservative Party has lurched miles to the right leaving a lot of centrist leaning votes to be hoovered up. The Johnson purge pissed off a lot of people.

That’s what Starmer seems to be trying to do. I’m not sure Corbyn could get those votes (although he did get mine I suppose!).

This is interesting. Your comment above isn't a general smear of the left employed by some others recently...there was a reason why you voted Corbyn and there's no way you could be described as a "lefty".

In 2017 I voted with great enthusiasm for the polices being put forward at that election by Labour and Brexit wasn't a big issue for me. To put that into context, I have voted Labour at every election since I turned 18 because I am anti Tory and where I live only Labour can beat the Tories in a general election.

In 2017, many centrists voted for Labour. The reasons for this are myriad, for some it will be anyone but a Tory (tactical voting), others an anti-Brexit sentiment and then there would be those who believed in the policy offer. This is no different to any election, people have different reasons for voting. By 2019, Labour was such a mess that they would have taken a hit in all those groups - many anti Tory voters would have looked at other options (or not voted), Brexit had become a non-issue for the Labour Party as they were no longer seen as an anti-Brexit vote and their policy offer was made up on the hoof.

2017 Labour was electable because in that moment they had a number of factors working in their favour - factors that they managed to screw up over the course of the next two years. I am not a conspiracy theorist about this, Labour's failures between 2017 and 2019 were of their own making. Corbyn should have gone in 2017 but frankly there were no credible alternatives to him and the left wing infighting was just getting into full swing...forget about external factors, Labour was imploding from within.

Corbyn got more votes than many of his predecessors, he gets that number from across the centre, centre-left and left vote. Does he win in Tony Blair territory, generally no but in 1997 Stephen Twigg took Michael Portillo's seat....Labour won the same seat in 2017 and 2019 having not held it since 2005. Only Tony Blair (1997 and 2001) and Harold Wilson (1970) have secured a higher percentage of the vote than Corbyn in 2017. For all his supposed unelectability, something happened in 2017 that suggests otherwise.

That said, it is a moot point, for all the arguments about 2017, ultimately he lost the election and was not Prime Minister...2017 is not evidence that he was unelectable though. Paddy voted for him.

 

[prawnking]

It's interesting to drill into different kinds of defeats, but they're still defeats, and they still leave the party we've both voted for since 18 in the back seat

 

[Elephant Pyjamas]

It seems to me that to be "electable" Labour feel that they need to be pretty similar to the Tories (hopefully without the corruption)

Which to me at least, is very depressing.

 

[prawnking]

Which to me at least, is very depressing.

You should have been a Labour voter in the 80s like my poor dad

It's a cliche, but I'll never forget how euphoric the win in '97 was, and that was only due to dragging the party into the modern age, and making it difficult for the Tories and press to use' lefty smears'.

Corbyn and co forgot all about that lesson, whether because they didn't agree with it, or felt it wasn't relevant, or (my opinion) they were happy just controlling the party and being the contrarian and the critic and didn't actually desire to govern.

But I've always thought this is a conservative (small c) country and not a natural socialist environment at all really. You have to be smart and cautious if you actually want to make changes to people's lives.

And isn't that the point? To improve things for working people, not just fight ideological battles with other Labour voters who aren't 'true'

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

I did vote Labour in both 2017 and 2019. In my constituency I voted for Emma Reynolds who I believed genuinely was a superb MP. Unlike the current Conservative incumbent.

Now obviously there is a convoluted argument about whether you vote for the constituency candidate or the national leader in UK politics and everyone’s mileage can vary there. I would say in my opinion that my vote for Emma Reynolds was by extension a vote for Jeremy Corbyn at the time.

It’s no secret I was a Conservative for years and years. But my idea of conservatism was Kenneth Clarke and that sort of area of the political spectrum. The Johnson purge was actually a final straw as I voted labour when May was prime minister (I think the whole change started from the whole Brexit mess which I thought was the greatest act of self harm in recent UK history).

I wanted the Conservatives out. I had huge misgivings about Jeremy Corbyn for sure but he would have been better than a Conservative government immediately post Brexit (or so I thought then as I had the incorrect view that he would try and reverse the referendum which is now clearly not the case). I have misgivings about Kier Starmer too, but frankly if the Conservatives win the next election it really is hell in a handcart territory and that cannot happen. Not that I can be voting really as I am now the other side of the world.

 

[Kenny]

Now obviously there is a convoluted argument about whether you vote for the constituency candidate or the national leader in UK politics and everyone’s mileage can vary there.

At the next election I will very much be voting for the candidate.

It's a straight Tory v Lib Dem battle here (although 2 years ago it was a case of you could put a blue rossette on a Tractor and it would win by 20,000 votes for the Tories)

Our new Lib Dem MP is very good and I hope she gets an extended stay in this seat.

 

[Templeton Peck]

If Labour win in 24, I've got real fears about what will come next if they spend their time in office not really doing anything. Let's hope I'm very wrong.

 

[Kenny]

If Labour win in 24, I've got real fears about what will come next if they spend their time in office not really doing anything. Let's hope I'm very wrong.

Question on that one though is do you think it will be worse than we have now?

Corrupt, clueless and only in it for their own gain (or their mates gain). Whoever wins the next election has a tough job as we have been royally fucked over by the current Government but if the current lot win, they will take that as a sign they we are happy for them to continue to bend us all over and do whatever they please.

 

[Tredman]

I get TP’s point - if labour don’t deliver change and improvements voters will turn to the only alternative - an even more nasty racist Tory party.

 

[Kenny]

I get TP’s point - if labour don’t deliver change and improvements voters will turn to the only alternative - an even more nasty racist Tory party.

If they get hammered at the next election, surely they will look to go back to their normal standing on the right and all the oddballs will fuck off to GB News and the like and talk bollocks and support the Reform Party?

If we return in 2029 with a Government led by an even more extreme Tory Party we are all fucked. We will certainly get that if they win in 2024 though

 

[prawnking]

I think they've exhausted the ERG, Brexit, far right, UKIP, Anderson/Braverman shite personally, and will be looking to get moderate and Cameronesque again

 

[Kenny]

I think they've exhausted the ERG, Brexit, far right, UKIP, Anderson/Braverman shite personally, and will be looking to get moderate and Cameronesque again

If they win the next election though, the shite Braverman tries to push through is given the thumbs up. 5 more years of doubling down on that.

 

[lemonjelly]

I think they've exhausted the ERG, Brexit, far right, UKIP, Anderson/Braverman shite personally, and will be looking to get moderate and Cameronesque again

really? nothing about the direction of travel suggests that. There seems to be a growing voice that is more right wing about various aspects of the party, and fringers are becoming a lot more mainstream (see gb news etc)

 

[Elephant Pyjamas]

I think they've exhausted the ERG, Brexit, far right, UKIP, Anderson/Braverman shite personally, and will be looking to get moderate and Cameronesque again

Do you? Why?

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

The Tories only care about power, there's no kind of base for that nonsense outside their own weird little club(s).

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

No. That is a fringe given oxygen by one Rupert Murdoch.

 

[Templeton Peck]

It's the most right wing parliament in my lifetime and it's been moving that way for 40 years. There is still further room on the Right unfortunately - anti-Green, asylum seeker camps, freeports, health insurance, weaker trade unions, lower food and work standards. That's just off the top of my head. I believe the goal of people like Mogg is to turn us into a 51st state. Some of these things will be made to sound very attractive to people whose living standards have been falling since 2010.

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

I agree with you. The lurch to the right is a horrible dangerous thing and it needs eradicating. I don’t recognise the Conservative Party I ever voted for (my first national election vote would have been 1992).

 

[pr0sl0]

I think they've exhausted the ERG, Brexit, far right, UKIP, Anderson/Braverman shite personally, and will be looking to get moderate and Cameronesque again

Definitely some Tories who will recognise this, but I think it's wishful thinking to expect it to happen within the near future.

Their voting coalition is currently held together by spite and fear more than anything, and the "sensibles" were cleared out in 2019 by Johnson's purge. Take even the most optimistic forecasts for seats left at the next election under current polling (in the ~150 sort of range) and in those safest of safe seats they tend to also be some of the most bugnuts weirdos.

The New Statesman has a nice seat prediction site, which also seems to be one of the more favourable towards the Tories of the different projections I've seen: https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2023/02/britain-predicts-who-would-win-election-held-today

Under the current polling average as I look today (Lab 46/Con 26) they say 153 Tory seats left, and the "big" names you'd expect to make a run for party leader in there include... Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat, Michael Gove, Christopher Chope, Kim Malthouse, Gavin Williamson (lol), Theresa May (double lol), Steve Barclay, Suella Braverman (yikes), Priti Patel (double yikes), Oliver Dowden, James Cleverley, Andrea Leadsom (triple lol), Michael Fabricant, Chris Grayling, Matt Hancock, Robert Jenrick, Sajid Javid...

Out of that lot you could maaaaaaybe make a case for someone like Javid, but this model is pretty weak on tactical voting, and most of that list are vulnerable to even just a little vote transference (they model Javid's winning margin as only 0.8%). Everyone in that list after Fabricant has a modelled margin of less than 5%. Totally plausible that they end up with <100 seats, and a rump party with a complete lack of any fresh talent to do the whole "modernising, tack to the centre" thing.

Things can still change but I can't see any world where Badenoch doesn't end up walking the post-election leadership contest, and she is just as addicted to culture wars bullshit as the worst of them.

 

[Sniffer]

Javid is quitting at the next General Election isn't he?