Nick Tyrone's Blog, page 12

Here are the three strategies the Left keep reaching for that never work

I promise this article won’t be the kind of thing you could read in a right of centre publication that goes something like this: all these liberals being liberal are just so silly. Can’t they see that they have to lie down and accept that the voters are right-wing? This, to be clear again, is not what I am about to say.

Yet the Left also needs to stop imagining ways to victory that are extremely unlikely to work and in fact, have been proven a few times already not to lead to success. The first classic of this type is the “younger voters” strategy. Forget about anyone over 45 – a Labour majority will be built on mobilising younger voters alone! Except that this doesn’t work for several reasons. One is First Past the Post; younger voters tend to be clustered in a few places, like university towns, London and other large cities. Of course, there are younger people everywhere in the country, but in a lot of it there aren’t enough of them to win seats if every middle-aged and older voters goes another way. Also, the younger you are, the less likely you are to vote. Many left of centre pundits have predicted the end of this trend over the years and yet it it is always proven to still be in force when another general election comes and goes.

The next myth is the “non-voters” nugget. This is a real favourite of the far-left – if everyone who never votes comes out and votes Labour, we’ll win a landslide! All we have to do is be extra-radical and this will work! Except, it never does. The one time a “get the non-voters out” tactic worked for anyone at all was the 2016 EU referendum, when Vote Leave used it very effectively. There is no proof at all that a radical far-left agenda will get these voters out to vote Labour. In fact, there is plenty to suggest that this strategy does not work at all for any centre-left party.

Finally, there is the “let’s just concentrate on our new heartlands, the cities of England, and don’t sweat the loss of the red wall seats”. Again, you have the First Past the Post problem – you aren’t going to win enough seats to get a majority under this strategy, even if it works as effectively as it possibly can. If Labour want to do this, they have to become way more liberal than they are now, which I don’t see any energy for. We have a situation in which the Lib Dems have the perfect mindset to take all of these seats but their target electorate don’t like them because of tuition fees and the coalition with the Tories; Labour have the brand for this bunch but don’t really understand them. It is a real tragedy for the left and centre-left in Britain.

Why not come up with a competent, left of centre pitch to the public that doesn’t alienate large portions of the electorate for a change? I mean, as opposed to wishing the electorate were something different and then making strategy based on this non-existent mass of people? I don’t know, it might just work – and it’s worth a try given the other stuff doesn’t work in the slightest.

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Why the Bernie Sanders campaign sucks – and what that means for politics in the US, the UK and around the world

Super Tuesday did not go as planned for Bernie Sanders. The results are still coming in as I write this, but it looks like he’ll only win California, Colorado, Utah and Vermont, with Biden sweeping the rest. It’s still a decent set of results for Sanders in the abstract, but he was looking to emerge as the undeniable frontrunner. Instead, Biden has stormed ahead of the pack.

Supporters of Sanders are already attempting to blame anyone but themselves and their guy for this relatively poor result. Elizabeth Warren splitting the “progressive” vote is one doing the rounds. Instead, they need to look at their own campaign and realise that it has been terrible and that if they want Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic nominee in the autumn, they had better change things quickly.

I do not live in America, nor am I American, and although I am a politics nerd nothing can make up for those two things. I have been watching the Democratic primaries closely, however, and I can say these are the major things about Bernie Sanders’ campaign that have struck me thus far:

Bernie talks a lot about attacking things; sometimes this includes the Democratic party itself, albeit usually in veiled terms;His supporters have spent a great deal of their time saying Pete Buttigieg is not “a real gay”, which is a poor look to say the least;Bernie, when looking for a positive example from another country, weirdly reaches for Cuba as opposed to say, Denmark.

I actually want to like Bernie Sanders. I really do. I think he is a powerful public speaker, unlike Corbyn who always sounds like he’s giving the eulogy at the funeral of someone he doesn’t particularly like. His healthcare reforms are desperately necessary. A lot of people in Britain have no idea how bad it is in America in terms of healthcare costs. I am haunted by reading a focus group report from Kansas from when Trump first got elected in which one of those taking part said he was terrified about Obamacare being axed because the programme had meant his healthcare insurance bill every month had come down to “only” $2,000 a month for him, his wife and three kids. Jesus, what was it before Obamacare? This guy was spending 24 grand a year for a healthcare plan which didn’t include deductibles or even the fact that he could still be refused care for any number of reasons. He was paying more for his healthcare than 98% of British taxpayers pay for not only a healthcare system that will always treat them but absolutely everything else, meaning schools, motorways, the army, etc.

This is what is so wrong with Sanders’ campaign – if he went hard on healthcare as his primary issue, I think he would not only win the nomination, but beat Trump as well. Particularly with the current Coronavirus scare focusing minds, healthcare is front and centre in American consciousness. He could attack his fellow Democrats for not being radical enough on healthcare and hurt Trump with the fact that the current president has done nothing to make the situation better despite saying he would when he ran in 2016. I think it’s a no-brainer that this should be the underlying basis for the entire Bernie Sanders campaign.

Instead, Bernie is following a Corbynesque route of scattergunning all over the shop. Bernie will fix everything in one term! Not only healthcare for all by roll out of Medicare, but 1.6 trillion dollars of student debt covered by the federal government! Lots of other stuff that costs massive amounts of tax payers money! Some ultra-woke stuff most swing voters hate! Oh and Cuba is a positive role model! I used to defend Bernie against accusations that he was an American Corbyn. Now, I’m not so sure that was ever wise. He has the same scary followers, people who seem more interested in pursuing a cult of personality than making their country a better place. This rhetoric of being “truly socialist” and looking to smash everything down is awful as well, when in fact they have solid, convincing arguments at their fingertips.

Bernie should have attacked the other nominees on their healthcare plans and nothing else. It would have put them on the spot and gained Sanders traction. Instead, it’s been the usual far left crap about the “establishment” halting the progress of their “movement”. Instead of ranting about tearing things down, Sanders should be talking about what he has to offer both the Democratic party and America. He should be trying to convince swing voters, both in the primaries and in the presidential election he has to assume he will face, that is he is their guy instead of telling people who don’t agree with him they are wrong. Like Corbyn, he is enjoying playing to his core support way, way too much.

Bernie Sanders’ campaign, at least thus far, has totally sucked. The fact that he has got to where he has is down to his huge support base and the fact that he is an effective fundraiser, organiser and speaker. He won’t get any further if he doesn’t understand that people don’t want a revolutionary – they want someone who can help them improve their lives. The lessons are there for the Labour Party in the UK, although they have been there in front of them for some time already – tell people how you are going to make their lives better. Stop going on about the establishment and movements. In an age when the Right have alighted on talentless chancers, all the Left has to do to win is be more visibly competent, which shouldn’t be difficult when the bar is set so low. But the Left keeps losing because it can’t seem to grasp that this is the fight; they keep trying to out-outrage the Right, which never works. A lot of us Centrist Dad types would vote for left-wing candidates and parties if they spent more time talking about the issues in a convincing way and less time talking about “democratic renewal”. Maybe one day soon, they’ll get it, but probably not in time to save Bernie’s bid to be the Democratic nominee.

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Sadiq Kahn’s rent control pledge and London NIMBYism – the problems of the metropolitan left

Sadiq Khan has decided to built his entire mayoral campaign on rent controls. I’m not exaggerating for effect: he has declared the upcoming London mayoral contest to be a veritable “referendum on rent controls”. I was wondering whether to vote vote Rory Stewart or Sadiq Khan in May – Sadiq has thankfully made it easy for me to go Rory now.

There are three main reasons why I don’t like Sadiq building his campaign on rent controls. The first is that rent controls themselves are a bad idea. There are a lot of reasons why they don’t work as intended; I will only cover the most obvious. While it helps many of those already renting, it has a negative impact on those who wish to get into the rental market over time. It inflates the market outside of those under rent control making properties within the rent controlled purlieu gold dust, meaning no one moves unless they absolutely have to. This creates a logjam for those looking to rent, with younger renters unable to find anywhere to live, particularly as less people rent out properties as it becomes less lucrative to do so. Landlords also have way less incentive to do upkeep, since they can’t get market rate for a better looking property. The rental housing stock depreciates, both in terms of quality and quantity.

The second reason I don’t appreciate the sitting mayor making the upcoming plebiscite a referendum on rent controls is that Khan has argued against them in the past and I don’t appreciate the hypocrisy. The third and final reason I’m not up for this is that imposing rent controls across London avoids the real solution to the housing problem in the city, which is to build more housing in London, something which should be easy to do given the extreme value of the land combined with more than enough brown-field areas to use. But there is a reason that’s a tricky road for Khan to take: left-wing London NIMBYism.

I have seen this first-hand. I live in Camberwell-Peckham borders and I have watched the neighbours I have who are most like me – people who have bought the freeholds on their property at market rate, meaning they are well-off, as opposed to those renting from the council – argue against any and all development of new housing. The most common argument they give is that new developments will “destroy community cohesion”. The second is that the current brown-field sites should be used to “create jobs”, in other words, that we should have, I don’t know, a factory or something there. When it is pointed out that people need more places to live, they say that the new developments “don’t contain enough social housing”, even if that isn’t the case, technically speaking. Also, if the new developments don’t have enough social or affordable housing within them by your estimation, why not argue that point? Why not organise petitions to get more social housing built – instead of arguing against any development happening whatsoever?

My hunch is that this type of metropolitan, left-wing NIMBYism – these are all Labour voting types, if not Green – is done not really because those involved are worried about how much social housing stock we have, or the cohesion of communities they actually live in yet talk about as if they were somewhere hundreds of miles away, but because they don’t want a lot of noisy building works going on nearby, all to create housing that will lessen their views of the nearby park while possibly hurting the value of their own property. And here’s the thing about NIMBYism: I don’t mind it so long as it is done in an honest, straightforward way. People are completely allowed to argue for their own interests. Just don’t dress it up as caring about the poor; as if what you’re doing is some sort of righteous giving back when in fact you’re being selfish.

I get that Khan doesn’t want to take that on – to face down NIMBYism within his own side. He’s being a lot like the NIMBYs I live amongst – acting in his own self-interest while dressing it up as standing up for the poor and helpless. And that’s why I won’t be voting for Sadiq Khan for mayor this time round.

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The Suez crisis and the dream of the US trade deal that lives on and on – and how it is always discussed on the wrong terms

At the heart of the right-wing flavour of British Euroscepticism lives a dream trade deal with the United States of America (for reference, the heart of Lexit is communism in one country, so take heart, things could be even worse). It has always been there, going back to the mid-2000s and the rise of UKIP. This idea that we could “unshackle” ourselves from the corpse of continental Europe and become “equal partners” with the US.

People who don’t want the UK to do a trade deal with the US, ie most of the left and a healthy tranche of Remainers, always point to the wrong things – chlorinated chicken, the supposed threat to the NHS. It plays on the Leavers terms and assumes that such a trade deal is more likely than it really is. A much better criticism of a potential trade deal between the UK and the US is that unless the UK is prepared to accept a deal that is very economically lopsided towards the US, there won’t be a trade deal between the two countries. This is why I keep saying that a no deal Brexit really is a no deal Brexit – the UK would be looking to try going without trade deals with anyone at all for at least a period because HMG’s expectations are way out of kilter with reality.

Beyond the basics, the reason a UK-US trade deal will be tricky is because the UK is desperate for it and the US doesn’t really need it. At all. America is careful with the trade deals it gets involved in and slants them heavily toward being favourable to themselves. The reasons for this are simple: the US is the richest country in the world. It owns the world’s reserve currency (for now). On top of all that, the place is a veritable continent unto itself – in practical terms, it doesn’t really need trade deals with anyone. The UK, it is obvious to point out though I shall, has none of these advantages.

The Suez crisis looms large in the right-wing Eurosceptic imagination. It is evoked a lot, something you’ll note if you sit through a fair few Bruges Group panel events (which I wouldn’t recommend, incidentally). There is a fantasy around Brexit that in leaving the EU, the UK can “take its rightful place in the world again”. This, again, means being “equal partners” with the US. But the US never deals with anyone on equal terms – it is part of their basic modus operandi. They lay out conditions favourable to the US right at the start of any trade negotiations – if the other country isn’t prepared to agree to them up front, America walks away. Again, because it can.

The Department for International Trade has today put out its own impact assessments on what a UK-US trade deal could mean for Britain. In a scenario where the trade deal isn’t so great by their expectations, the positive impact on UK GDP per year would be a measly 0.07%. All right, what happens if we get a whizz bang of a deal with the Americans? GDP goes up 0.16%. And bear in mind, their so called worst case is way, way too positive given the misconceptions they are plugging into the whole thing. For contrast, leaving the Single Market and Customs Union at the end of this year looks set to have a negative impact of -5.00% on GDP over the next fifteen years. But hey, sovereignty and all that.

The first line of today’s DIT document on UK-US free trade reads: “The UK will be a champion of free trade and will seek Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with like-minded democracies.” Well, yes, except for all of the ones in continental Europe, of course. All because those Euro types supposedly want to impinge on our sovereignty. Chaps, if you don’t like UK sovereignty being diminished, I wouldn’t cheer so hard for a UK-US free trade deal if I were you.

Given we’re leaving the EU, I myself would love a solid UK-US free trade deal to happen, so I am not arguing against something here to which I have an ideological objection. I just do not see any of the discussion around its probability, the likely hurdles involved, and how the US actually conducts trade negotiations giving me any cause for optimism that this government can pull it off. Perhaps they are prepared to sign a really bad deal with the US to say they got it done, figuring no one will understand the detail. The more I think about it, the more I figure this might be the scenario we end up with.

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Why the 50,000 customs officers story is so symbolic of these ridiculous times we live in

The most amazing thing about the 50,000 customs officers story is the way that the government subsequently handled it. The Road Haulage Association put out a press release this week detailing that around fifty-thousand more customs officers will be needed to deal with the load of new paperwork post-Brexit. This is because they estimate that the number of tariff related forms will jump by 200 million a year from the current 50 million. All right, another business interest group putting out dire Brexit warnings, nothing new there.

What then happened should have been shocking but wasn’t because we live in ridiculous political times. When questioned about it in the House of Commons, Michael Gove all but admitted the figure was bang on by telling the House that it would be feasible to hire that many people over the course of the remainder of 2020. A spokesperson later admitted that the 50,000 figure was “not far off”.

Brexit was supposed to be about reducing red tape – not creating five times more of it in measurable terms. I know this is just getting added to the list of things the Tories figure don’t matter, like Boris not showing up in the north when the floods happened or not dying in a ditch when October 31st came and went. Except that all this stuff is piling up and at some point something they don’t think will matter will start to matter. Particularly given on April 4th there will be someone in the basically now vacant leader of the opposition post again. The Starmer team have figured out that all of the Tories blanking the BBC means that Labour can have all of their people on the airwaves all the time, hogging those slots. Something has got to give, surely?

I think Boris and those around him may be confusing the fact that most people want to “get Brexit done” as evidenced by the general election result with the idea that they will then accept anything that happens as a result. That they will buy the “blame the EU” line, when they are much more likely to get upset at their own government. That’s why a lot of them voted to Leave, remember – blaming the EU isn’t going to wash any longer, HMG owns it all.

The cost of the 50,000 customs officers and higher tariffs will be passed along to consumers. These increases could be steep. This may well rebound badly on the government, amongst all of the other things that could go wrong for them Brexit-wise. The other problem Boris will have is that the Tories are fast becoming a high spend, protectionist party. Surely the ideological tension created will start to make itself felt inside of the Conservative party. Javid’s speech may be a sign of things to come on that front.

The ultimate point of this article is that this week the Tories all but announced that the upshot of Brexit will be existentially more red tape and far less free trade – and yet no one really blinked. This is evidence of how crazy things have got. Yet this can’t go on forever. Political gravity eventually reasserts itself. It might happen sooner than the Tories think.

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Here’s the problem with the Lib Dems trying to convince voters of their “progressive” credentials

I have by chance spoken to a few Lib Dems over the past fortnight about the state of the party and what they see, if any, as the chances of recovery. The answer I got back, in slightly different forms, went something like this: the Lib Dem activists and most of the parliamentary party see themselves as closer to Labour than the Tories. Given this, the party needs to reconnect with “progressive” voters and win them back, particularly in Tory-Lib marginals.

I am usually then given examples of Tory-held seats in which if everyone who voted Labour in 2019 had voted Lib Dem, the Lib Dems would hold the seat. They then ask: how do we get these people to see that voting Lib Dem in these seats is the only way to stop the Tories winning the next general election?

There are numerous problems with this theory and I will begin with the basics. Imagine the Lib Dems manage to convince everyone that they are Labour’s little cousin again and that a vote for the LDs is a vote against a Tory majority. This will be tricky in and of itself, which I’ll come onto, but for now just imagine that they have managed this. What about all those people who vote Lib Dem in these places who don’t like the Labour party, yet also don’t like the Tories and see the Lib Dems as a genuinely centrist option? Or what about those who see the LDs as the none of the above pick? What I’m saying here is, whatever you gain from the Labour voters with this strategy, you might lose the other way – and possibly in bigger numbers. Also, Labour have a hardcore vote; people who still, even after Corbyn, would only ever vote Labour, no matter what. It is thus debatable how much of the Labour vote is actually available.

I would also point out that just because the Lib Dems are running in a Tory-Lib marginal, this does not mean that being more left-wing in these seats will help you win them. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that in some of these seats at the very least, this is definitely not the case. Look at Taunton Deane. Now a very safe Tory seat, it was held by Jeremy Browne between 2005 (when it was the slightly different Taunton constituency) until 2015. Browne won and held the seat with what I would describe as a “nice kind of Tory” approach. He was Toryish both culturally (he fit in well at the rugby club) and on economic issues, but was socially liberal. This worked there. Or David Laws in Yeovil, another seat which is now becoming a safe Tory constituency (a 16,000 majority at the 2019 general election). In fact, in a lot of old Lib Dem seats in the southwest there is a very strong anti-Labour vibe. Being Labour’s friend will surely make the Lib Dems incur an electoral penalty of some significance in these seats? And they are the ones the Lib Dems came second in at the 2019 GE, so these are the target constituencies.

Yet even if convincing those who see themselves as on the centre-left to vote LD at the risk of alienating centre-right voters is in fact the right solution to the Lib Dems’ electoral woes, the next problem comes in trying to convince this cohort to plump for the Lib Dems at all. Many Liberal Democrat activists said they had huge problems on the doorstep because Jeremy Corbyn was so electorally toxic; many voters didn’t feel they could risk Corbyn becoming PM and so they voted Tory. Again, this suggests that going full-fat Labour-friend has electoral issues all on its own – if a lot of their potential electorate would vote Tory to avoid Corbyn, it surely suggests that being seen as too Tory with these voters isn’t the issue? – but let’s park that for now. The Lib Dems other major doorstep headache in the December election was that centre-left voters liked the party’s Brexit position, often much more than Labour’s, but couldn’t forgive the coalition years.

In order to get these voters to finally let go of coalition anger and see the Lib Dems as part of their centre-left tribe, I can see only one possible solution: have every Lib Dem spokesperson who gets a media slot for the next four years say over and over again that if there was another hung parliament, the Lib Dems would never, under any circumstances, go into government with the Tories and would only ever try and form a government with Labour. I think four years of that and it might get through in time for the next general election. I want to stress the word “might” here; it is possible that nothing would work. That’s at the very least what it would take though – relentless message discipline, every Lib Dems saying the Labour-friendly line until they want to puke. Again, I don’t think this is a good idea because I don’t think the strategy is sound. But I’m saying that if you wanted to pursue this strategy, that’s what it would take.

To give you my own, very personal view on the strategy: I have voted Lib Dem at every general election I have ever voted in. Usually out of dislike of the two main parties and all of the other minor parties more than anything else. Yet if the Lib Dems decided to paint themselves as “Labour-lite”, weirdly the thing it might do more than anything else is convince me to vote Labour. I don’t mind if Keir is boring, and if it comes down to a choice between the Tories and their Brexit bungling or the Lib Dems who have made themselves a sort of non-party, why not vote Labour?

I think I have a better idea. In a political climate where it looks like we might have a dull Labour party plagued with in-fighting and a Conservative party about to do something very stupid with Brexit, we could have a Lib Dem party that has its own voice and a new, bold policy prospectus. I think voters are crying out for choice and by deciding not to give it to them, I don’t understand why the Lib Dems should even continue to exist. If the LDs simply want to help create a Labour government, why not just melt into the Labour party completely? What is the point of the party if it exists only to serve a larger party that is already there and is only impeded by the existence of a third-party trying to snatch their voters? I’ll leave that with you.

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How the government is starting to remind me of the Yes to AV campaign – and that certainly isn’t good

Long time readers of this website will have known me to compare things in politics with the Yes to AV campaign a fair few times in the past. All I can say is that the Yes to AV campaign was such a perfect distillation of how not to do politics, that rare example of the perfectly terrible political campaign, it echoes through the ages. Whenever something reminds me of it, I know it will almost certainly end in tears.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2010 general election, electoral reformers spotted an opportunity. It looked like the Lib Dems, longtime champions of changing the electoral system, were destined to hold the balance power in any new government. Now was the time to strike. They had one small problem, however: no one who isn’t either a Lib Dem or a weird electoral nerd (and I will leave you to distinguish between those two things) gives the slightest shit about electoral reform. But this wasn’t going to stop them, oh no. They took to astroturfing, big time. Paid for protests and social media campaigns that looked like a bunch of real people were now worked up into a frenzy about the Single Transferrable Vote. It was reasonably successful. In fact, it was so successful that it convinced the people who had done the astroturfing – in other words, those who knew for a positive fact that the groundswell for electoral change was complete bullshit – there was a mass movement out there waiting to do whatever it took to change the voting system. This “movement delusion” became the backbone of everything that went wrong for Yes to AV.

It appears something similar has happened to the Tory Eurosceptics, who for reference, are now in charge of the country. They started the calls for no deal Brexit a few years ago as a tactic – a way to scare the EU into giving the UK a better trade deal. I spoke to a few Eurosceptic Tory MPs at the time who talked about actually going through with a no deal Brexit as “madness” and that “it will never happen”. They reasoned that pushing no deal in fact made no deal less likely because it would cause the EU to “see sense”. Yet now, they have swallowed their own BS whole; they, like the electoral reformers a decade ago, have accepted as reality something they should know isn’t true because they started the untruth themselves. The no deal Brexit they thought of as ridiculously impossible, something that would be a disaster, is now their assumed goal. They tricked a lot of people into believing this – what’s really amazing is that they seemed to have tricked themselves along the way.

This is one of the things about politics that is rarely acknowledged; the way a whole bunch of people gathered together toward a common goal can start to seriously chip away at each other’s sense of reality. How the unthinkable becomes the norm as even those who know better via their own experience start to believe in lies. It’s how a lot of very bad things have happened throughout history. It’s how a no deal Brexit might come to pass as well.

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Here’s the main problem with all political parties at the moment: the memberships

What has become received wisdom is that modern politics in the West is too removed from people and their every day concerns. That parties have become too remote. While there is truth in this, the solutions all parties have taken on board to combat this problem have been the wrong ones in reaction to this issue and have even made things worse. While all parties have made the mistake I am about to lay out, the parties of the Right have done it way less and it has directly benefited them at the ballot box.

The way parties have tried to reach out is by giving their members more say in everything from policy to who is the leader of the party. This is a massive error for several reasons. One is that being a member of a political party is a very niche thing these days, which means that the concerns of the membership are going to inevitably be removed from most people’s mainstream worries. In other words, the parties have taken power away from what is perceived to be an out of touch elite and given it to a group of people who are even more removed from most voters’ lives. Instead of the outreach helping the parties to be more grounded, they have moved even further away from the electorate.

You can see it clearly in the Labour leadership contest. Where once upon a time, not all that long ago, a Labour leadership candidate had to appeal to the membership, the unions and the PLP at the same time, now the membership is the whole electorate. And the candidates are scared of the membership. Really scared. All of the candidates are. Everyone is giving RLB a hard time for accepting questions that were framed in an anti-semitic way, yet I do understand to some extent why she did. When the membership have as much power as they do in the Labour Party, taking on the nut jobs is incredibly risky.

The worst thing is, this increased power of the membership results in bad policies being trotted out that the MPs arguing for them know are bad policies. It means everyone is putting the membership on, for a start, and also that policies are worse than they would otherwise be. If this was a think tank, fine, but it’s the official opposition – they are creating policy ideas that might be what the next government puts into action. That members are making it worse is a big problem.

The Conservatives have been able to change their spots and keep winning so much over the last decade in large part because their accountability to the membership is so weak. They didn’t have to fear the membership when making large scale directional changes recently, going from a party dedicated to economic conservatism to one that, as the prime minister might say, spaffs money up the wall. Being less accountable to their membership made the Tories closer to the whims of the electorate.

So, what’s the solution? I think parties of the left just need more balance when it comes to the power of their memberships. For instance, the left of the Labour Party wants the members to have more power in terms of deselecting sitting MPs? Fine – but in return, it has to go back to the way things were pre-83 and the PLP has to have 100% of the vote in terms of selecting the leader of the party. That way the PLP will always be happy with the leader – and you’ll never get the ridiculous situation you had in 2016, where 80% of the PLP voted no confidence in the leader and he carried on anyhow. The trade off is the membership has more of a say in who the MPs are int he first place.

As for the Lib Dems, keep the membership as the electorate for the leadership contests but allow the parliamentary party full say on policy. The way the membership micromanages policy within the Lib Dems is dysfunctional and results in either wacky policy or lukewarm policy. This would streamline the party and make it exponentially more efficient.

The Tories basically have the balance right – which, again, is a notable part of the reason they keep winning elections.

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My review of the Labour leadership leaflets – all three covered (sort of)

The actual starting gun to the Labour leadership contest has now been fired. Ballots go out over the next couple of days, meaning voting for the next Labour leader will be commencing very shortly. As a registered supporter this time round, I have been at the receiving end of all of the contenders’ leafletting. I thought I would take the time to review each one’s content; to talk about the literature they have each sent out to try and woo my vote.

LISA NANDY

As if they were racing to get to me, the leaflets from Keir Starmer and RLB landed on my doormat at the exact same time. That was several days ago and yet I still have nothing from Lisa Nandy’s campaign. This has caused me to react several ways. One is to feel sorry for the clearly under-funded nature of her campaign as compared to the other two. The second is to feel that perhaps a strategy error was made here – I am a registered support, not a member, so shouldn’t the Nandy campaign be targeting me hard given they have a good chance of persuading me to vote for them? I mean, I could be someone who signed up to vote for Jess Phillips and now I’m looking around, wondering whether to go Keir or Lisa. Anyhow, I haven’t got anything, so it is with regret I have to give the mark of 0/10.

KEIR STARMER

This is obviously the best of the bunch, but that is saying very little. A good picture of Starmer on the front of the leaflet, but a bad slogan – “Another Future is Possible” is way too close to the Lib Dems’ dogshit “Build a Brighter Future” for my liking. Opening it up one level, things improve, messaging wise. The “A Life Devoted to Fighting Injustice” panel on the side reminds you that he has a decent CV in the fighting for the oppressed department, as in, he’s actually done stuff to help people less fortunate than himself as opposed to blabbing on about how no one understands what socialism means. It also reminds you that he is genuinely working class, the son of a toolmaker and a nurse. The larger panel has the slogan “Integrity, Authority, Unity”, which is a way, way better slogan than the Lib Dem-lite one on the front, which is confusing since they should have put this on the front instead. It communicates succinctly Starmer’s credentials. This is followed by testimonials from a variety of people, some the expected Labour MPs and trade unions types but also with some people who aren’t even visibly associated with Labour, so some extra marks for that. Some of which are lost again with the fact that the leaflet folds out into a poster of Keir that’s a little bit much, as well as a reminder on the back of his ten pledges, which remain truly terrible. Over all, I’ll give it a 3.5/10.

REBECCA LONG-BAILEY

Okay, I just wanted to get this out of the way off the top: that logo, man. It is fine if Rebecca Long-Bailey was a heavy metal band in 1982, not so good for anything else. Right, now I’ll move on.

There is so much to say about this leaflet. It almost perfectly summarises what is wrong with the modern left and it fits in your pocket. It starts by telling you that RLB is the only candidate with a path to power mapped out and ready to deliver. Or you could say her plan is “oven ready”, only that sort of effective sloganeering is way beyond the RLB campaign. Then there is more of the movement crap that the left fails to understand turns everyone outside of their bubble off completely before we get to RLB’s record, one we should “trust”. That is: she wrote some shit for the last manifesto, a platform from which Labour lost over 50 seats; she stayed in Corbyn’s cabinet through all of the numerous reasons to quit; she voted against the Conservative Welfare Bill in 2015. And uh, that’s it. Jeez, Becky, that puts Keir Starmer’s ten year unpaid battle in the McLibel case to shame, doesn’t it? In all seriousness, RLB is young and relatively inexperienced. Run with the pluses that brings instead of trying to talk up her record.

Then we come to her four pledges. Now, I will give her one point for having only four instead of Keir’s ten. Yet I have to then dock half a point because the four pledges are even worse than Starmer’s in every imaginable way. Under “aspirational socialism”, we are told that RLB’s socialism is “socialism for the majority”, which given she was a member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and gave his leadership a 10 out of 10, there is considerable electoral data to refute. There is a whole pledge dedicated to “Empowering our Movement” which is even more cringe-worthy than you might expect. It contains a bunch of vague crap that acts as the styrofoam to cushion the real point of this pledge: we’re going to deselect everyone standing, baby, everyone. Pledge four is entitled “A Democratic Revolution” and is a pitch for all the Lib Dem voters out there, so numerous are they. Yet even the Lib Dem pitch is half-arsed. How about this for a convoluted sentence worthy of a Corbyn-era Brexit document: “empower a constitutional convention to explore proportional representation”. Like most other things in the leaflet, RLB wants to present herself as some sort of socialist radical but then becomes mealy-mouthed about pretty much everything of substance.

Then on the back we get Lavery and McCluskey telling us why RLB will win the next election. Great. I am tempted to give this a 0 out of 10, but that feels like cheating so it’s: 1/10.

Everything in politics is relative. In this contest, Starmer really is the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Yet it looks certain to be enough. Hang up those snazzy Keir posters, kids, he’s your golden hope for 2024.

The post My review of the Labour leadership leaflets – all three covered (sort of) appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

The border down the Irish Sea issue – and where it goes from here

Since the EU referendum came and went in 2016, leaving destruction and woe in its path, Ireland has been a thorn in the Eurosceptic’s side. What to do in order to avoid a hard border between north and south came to dominate negotiations between the UK and the EU during Theresa May’s premiership; one could even convincingly argue that it was the Irish problem that did for her time in office.

Boris came up with a very Borisesque way to deal with the Irish border question once he became prime minister: just sod everyone’s concerns about it for now and put the border down the Irish Sea, essentially ceding Norther Ireland to Ireland, at least in customs terms. That got him a Withdrawal Agreement that his whole party could sign up to – what was left of it at the time, anyhow – and allow him to go into a general election with an “oven ready deal”. It worked. Except now he’s got the small problem of having signed an international treaty that puts a customs border down the Irish Sea. Thus far, the plan for now is again highly Borisesque: just try and pretend he never agreed to this plan of action, at the very least in his dealings with the British public. Brandon Lewis, the chap Boris replaced Julian Smith with as Northern Ireland Secretary, put it beautifully yesterday:

“I think it’s safest not to get too caught up in rumours and stuff in the press over the weekends. We are focusing on our main job. We have always said we want to make sure there is unfettered access between GB and Northern Ireland, we’ve always as a government obviously gone by the rule of law and we will continue to do that.”

You said it, Brandon. That mainstream press, reporting on the actual contents of an international treaty your government signed up to a matter of weeks ago instead of whatever crap comes out of “Number 10 sources”. The question, as always with Boris, is: does this denial of the reality of what is in the Withdrawal Agreement amount to some part of HMG’s “bluff” to the EU in order to “strengthen our hand”, or is the UK seriously going to ignore the contents of an international treaty they signed and then had voted through parliament only a few weeks ago? The latter idea is not as impossible as it seems. If you are going for no deal with the EU and look set to try out a “no trade deals with anyone” model, I guess sticking to your agreements becomes less important. I mean, if you aren’t going to sign anymore agreements with anyone, why not, I guess? I suppose this is what real sovereignty looks like.

As Boris Johnson himself has said on the issue:

“The only circumstances in which you could imagine the need for checks coming from GB to NI, as I’ve explained before, is if those goods were going on into Ireland and we had not secured, which I hope and I’m confident we will, a zero tariff, zero quota agreement with our friends and partners in the EU.” The only way there will be check on goods between GB and NI, in the PM’s own words, is if there isn’t a zero tariff, zero quota agreement between the UK and the EU. Which on current trajectory, there won’t be.

I have the distinct feeling we have not seen the end of the Ireland problem. The government will have to deal with it for real at some point in the near future. Sacking your attorney general does not change the contents of international treaties, unfortunately for Boris.

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