Nick Tyrone's Blog, page 13

What Labour does not seem to understand – and why this will continue to drag them down

During the period between the EU referendum result becoming known and the December 2019 general election, a three and a half year epoch unto itself, many Remainer commentators found it astounding that no matter how many things the Leave campaign had stated were visibly disproven (“we hold all the cards” became “they are bullying us”), very few Leavers changed their minds. I think a lot of Remainers did not understand the power of the “Get Brexit Done” mantra and both Labour and the Lib Dems did not absorb the fact that they had to fight directly against it if they wanted to stop a Tory majority from happening. This is because neither party really understands Brexit in a cultural sense.

It is obvious now that Labour have never got that Brexit is a culture war – and they clearly still don’t understand that now. The reason almost no Leavers really care about what Brexit means in practice, or are willing to experience wartime living standards (supposedly) in order to have Brexit happen, is because Brexit became totemistic of the wider culture war we’re all involved in shortly after the 2016 referendum and has become ever more so since. Part of the reason for this is the Leave campaign made the referendum about picking a side in the culture war and it stuck.

This problem for Labour is reflected in the way you will hear party figures say the loss in December was all about Brexit without understanding the first thing about what they are actually trying to say. To tell us that by seeming too Remainery, Labour lost its Leave voters, but then going on to tell us that babies are born without sex is to demonstrate how Labour simply does not understand even the basic shape of the problems they face. They still think of Brexit as an event; the technical process of Britain leaving the European Union. If that’s all it was, no one would be this upset about it. It has become about picking a side. And yes, we’ve left the EU, but the culture war rages on. And Labour act like they don’t want to pick a side before then running to the extreme end of one of the sides in the war. They then wonder why parts of their core electorate no longer vote for them.

The only viable options for Labour post-EU referendum were either go full-on liberal Remainery and stick with that; this would have allowed them to run with most of the woke stuff to their heart’s content. Or, they could have understood the culture dimensions to Brexit and tried to mitigate for this factor. They were closer to doing this than doing the former; but they did it clumsily without really getting it. From the looks of how the leadership contest is playing out, they still don’t get it.

I’m not suggesting that Labour ape the Tories and go hardcore against immigration, or that they become highly socially conservative. I just think they need to understand that they are in a culture war and they need to start fighting back as a result. The Right is winning, hands down, at present. Labour needs to take apart the Leave mindset and figure out how to move forward. Be liberal but in a way that makes sense and isn’t tuned in solely to the whims of political extreme teenagers. A case can be made for a liberal immigration policy – God knows, someone has to – but Labour are nowhere near making it at the moment. Hell, they haven’t been making it for the past decade.

So long as they continue to frame themselves in a way that allows the Tories to cannibalise enough of their old working class vote, Labour will struggle to get enough seats off the Tories to force a hung parliament, never mind win an election. What I’m really saying here is, Labour need to form an electoral coalition capable of winning a general election under first past the post and then form their messaging and strategy around this coalition. This is sort of Politics 101; which makes it all the more strange how far Labour are from doing this at present.

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This is the economic theory the Tories really seem set to test at the end of this year. To say it’s risky would be vastly understating it

The weirdest thing about the political times we live in is that the government has pledged to make a revolutionary change at the end of this year and no one is really addressing what that might mean. Part of this is Brexit burnout; part of it is that we just had a general election in which “get Brexit done” was the winning slogan and so most people seem to really think this is the case, even though we’re still in the Single Market and Customs Union until the end of the year. A commenter on my blog unconsciously put it perfectly when he said I was being overly doom and gloomy about no deal possibilities at the end of the year given all predictions of doom and gloom haven’t come to pass thus far. That’s because we haven’t actually left anything of any economic consequence yet and when I say “anything” I do mean anything at all. It’s like saying scientist’s estimates of what damage a huge asteroid might do if it struck the Earth have all been proven wrong because no giant asteroid has hit the planet over the last few years. No one’s predictions of doom and gloom about Brexit have been proved or disproved because for all intents and purposes, we haven’t really left yet.

The relevant question concerning Brexit now is this: is the government’s no deal posturing just the shittiest bluff in world history or are they seriously going to go through with it? I’ve become convinced that what amounts to no deal with a few caveats is now the most likely thing to happen at the end of 2020, either by design or by accident. This means a large theory about how the world works in the 21st century is about to get tested on one of the largest economies in the world. All large economies have trade deals with other large economies, particularly those which are geographically close to them. No countries trade on WTO rules alone, but some have very few trade deals worth a lot. All of the countries in this latter category are poor; amongst the poorest in the world. However, we have no real idea how much those two things are connected – the poverty and lack of trade deals, I mean. Yes, there are theories galore on this subject, of course, but no one has ever tested it on a grand scale before. It is possible that a country with an economy the size and scale of Britain’s can operate without trade deals perfectly fine, I suppose. However, it is also very possible that it cannot. All current economic theory points to it not being able to do so very effectively at all, just to throw that in here. However, the Brexiteers do have a point when they say we don’t absolutely know for sure. That’s because no other country has been crazy enough to test this out previously. We’ll see in December whether or not our government is crazy enough to give it a go.

That’s what Brexit has come to: a huge experiment to test the value of trade agreements. I’ll give the Leavers this – if they turn out to be right on this one, it will turn a lot of assumptions about the way the world works upside down. Could be exciting? Aren’t you glad that they are gambling the livelihoods of millions to give this dry run a stab?

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The bad takes on the Irish election just keep on coming from the right. Here are the most choice examples

Suddenly, everyone in the right of centre media is an expert on Irish politics – in their own minds anyhow. The fact that Irish politics means as much to the British centre-right all of a sudden is testament alone to how well they have played their hand in the Brexit negotiations so far – not that these centre-right Irish politics “experts” are self-aware enough to have gathered this much.

The bad takes obviously support their Brexit position and have several common myths that run through them all. Here are the most prominent amongst them. Note: I myself am not an expert on Irish politics, nor do I wish to present myself as one. But I know the basics, which is enough to demolish most of the crap being peddled in this country about the Irish election.

Myth 1: Varadkar failed to get a majority, which is supposed to be extraordinary. Except that his party, Fine Gael, didn’t come into the election with a majority and would not have expected to have got one this time round. They expected to do a lot better, but under an STV voting system in a multi-party system, getting a majority is really, really difficult. Whenever this myth appears in an article, it shows that the pundit in question probably isn’t even aware that Ireland has PR electoral system and you can pretty much ignore the rest of what they have to say as a result.

Myth 2: Varadkar was “punished” by the Irish electorate for his Brexit stance. This comes in a few flavours. One is a straight up Brexity fantasy that the Irish electorate just rejected Fine Gael in large part because Varadkar was anti-Brexit and sided with the EU over Britain, and the rejection occurred because the Irish really, really want to leave the EU. For reference, the most recent poll I’ve seen on this issue conducted in Ireland had 92% REMAIN, 7% LEAVE, 1% DK. Most right of centre pundits are smart enough to avoid this ridiculous overreach and instead peddle a softer version – that Varadkar went “a little too far” in siding with the EU and that this annoyed Irish voters. There is nothing to suggest this is true and a lot to suggest it isn’t. What seems most likely is that the most important part of Brexit from an Irish perspective – avoiding a hard border on the island – has been avoided (although the British government seem to be rolling back on commitments here, so who knows, really) and job done, Varadkar isn’t needed on this front any longer. A bit like how the UK elected Attlee to be PM after the war instead of Churchill – now that the war is over, a wartime leader isn’t needed and what the people want sorted now is housing and healthcare. The greater vote share for the left of centre party, which is how a lot of younger people saw Sinn Fein, suggests that bread and butter issues loomed larger than Brexit, which makes sense.

Myth 3: Connected to Myth 2, that somehow any other Irish Taoiseach would have played the Brexit game any differently. That Varadkar was extreme in this sense. Wrong – anyone else doing the same job would have done the same things almost to a T. Irish politics demanded as much.

Myth 4: That Ireland has been “hung out to dry” by the EU. This one seems to stem from the fact that Ireland is now complaining about higher contributions post-Brexit. This is basic European politics and is another one of those things the Eurosceptic Right cling to as a sign that the EU is falling apart in front of our eyes. Ignore.

Myth 5: That the EU has been malicious in asking for alignment in avoiding a hard border between the north and south in Ireland. The example given here is Switzerland, which supposedly has a “free-flowing” border with its neighbours while not being in the Single Market or Customs Union. One, it doesn’t have a free-flowing border at all – it has extensive customs checks at the border, which anyone who has ever crossed it, particularly in a lorry, can attest to. Also, it is only as “free-flowing” as it is because it took ten years to nail down a sector by sector deal with the EU that keeps it in the SM in several sectors. Last time I checked, the UK do not want to take ten years to nail down something similar. I should mention that a lot of the same pundits peddling the “free-flowing Swiss border” myth at present are the same ones who a year ago were telling us that the Canada-US border is “free-flowing” as well. If you have ever crossed between either of those two countries into the other one by land, you will understand how ridiculous this whole argument is – the Canada-US border is one of the most restrictive, hardcore borders I have ever crossed.

I could go on, but I’ll leave it there. 2020 seems destined to be dominated by Brexit-orientated fantasies on the Right of which their bad takes on the Irish general election are only a subset. The Brexiteers won their election, so I suppose I should let them have their victory lap. Reality bites in 2021.

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A review of the latest Lib Dem Party Political Broadcast

To my all my non-Lib Dem readers, an apology and a plea to bear with me. What follows is more than simply a review of the latest attempt by the Liberal Democrats to explain to Britain who they are in two minutes and forty-five seconds. It’s about what constitutes the centre-ground in these fractured times and why that matters.

To the video at hand: the production value is actually pretty good for a PPB, particularly one made outside of an election period, although this went out to their mailing list only, as far as I can tell, so perhaps it is meant for the local elections in May. Anyhow, if you can’t find it, here it is:

https://www.libdems.org.uk/ppb-feb20?utm_campaign=ppb_feb_2020_play_button&utm_medium=email&utm_source=libdems

I tried to embed it and it didn’t work, which is strike one against it if you want to be picky like that. Anyhow, it’s got some shots of alarm-clock Britain doing its thing cut with a head and shoulders shot of Ed Davey giving us the messaging. Ed is decent enough in the video. The whole thing would be very good, in fact, were it not for one, tiny problem: the video is completely and totally free of substance.

We are told that the Lib Dems stand for the following things: ensuring the NHS is properly funded, reversing cuts to the police budgets, protecting the environment, building high-quality transport links across the UK, and finally, investing in education. I’ll start with a positive here. It’s good that the Lib Dems have mentioned actual bread and butter issues instead of the usual fringe Lib Dem stuff; there is no mention of weed or electoral reform to be seen. However, if you look at the five things they have mentioned in the video, one thing stands out beyond anything else – they are all couched in terms that almost no one could disagree with. Everyone wants a better NHS and school system. Almost everyone wants to protect the environment. The vast majority of people like the idea of more police on the streets. The only one that is even vaguely straying into the realms of the controversial is the transportation stuff, but the wording is so vague as to avoid stepping on almost anyone’s toes.

In politics, particularly these days, it is important to stand for concrete things. Particularly if you aren’t one of the two major parties and thus cannot depend on a core vote that will turn out regardless of how vague you are on policy. This means taking a stand on issues that will gain you some followers and lose you some at the same time. If you want an example of how to do this effectively in the UK, look at Farage. You know where he stands on the major issues of the day. He hasn’t been afraid to go so far as to become a hate figure for many, while a hero for another cohort. This is what draws people to a small political party; the idea that it stands for something no one else does.

The Lib Dems, therefore, need to stand for something real, something that will make them some enemies but will also cause a whole other group of people to feel like the party might in fact be for them. They need to stand out in other words, and talking in platitudes about how they care about the NHS, education and policing numbers isn’t going to cut it. It isn’t going to come close, in fact.

But now we’re getting to the heart of the matter: what is that “something” going to be? And this is where the problems for 21st century centrism and liberalism really lie. Is the centre economically liberal or statist? All right, it will be a bit of both, but in what combination and what would that look like? What is distinct about the liberal economic offer that sets it way apart from what either the Conservatives or Labour are saying? There is a huge space open now that the Tories have become so statist, but do the Lib Dems, for instance, want to pitch themselves economically to the right of the Conservatives in a real and meaningful way? And you all want to better fund the NHS – okay, how are you going to do that? Raise taxes? On whom and in what way?

Until liberals can be about something definable again, they will exist on the fringes of British politics. The last election proved that just being anti-Brexit was never enough. Why are liberals anti-Brexit exactly? What were the essentials of European membership that made it so vital for their vision of the UK? I’ve heard a lot about bleeding blue and gold without coming close to hearing this articulated. Now that we’re definitely leaving, the ability to figure this out just became that much more important.

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Why Boris Johnson isn’t as safe in Number 10 as most presume – here’s a way he could be out within a year

I know, I know – wishful thinking, right? And before some of you out there get your hopes up that what my headline refers to is a change of government, i.e. Keir Starmer might be prime minister this time next year, think again – the Tories aren’t being removed from power anytime soon. Yet Boris isn’t as safe as the stonking general election victory makes it seem. He’s not going in the next couple of months, but I think his period of invincibility could turn out to be shorter than currently assumed.

For a start, there is Brexit. Increasingly, it looks like it will be a very sudden, hard break with the EU, possibly by accident. It’s entirely plausible that January 2021 brings some disasters for Britain. If this happens, the easiest thing to do will be to blame the Johnson/Cummings nexus; be rid of them and then move on with a new leader. Boris himself showed how easy this is to do – remember the “I’ve only been prime minister for 120 days” line? In an age where the Labour Party are rubbish, the Tories have a lot space to reinvent themselves at will. If a hard Brexit happens and is bad, most of the Tory voting public will not turn against Brexit, at least not yet. They will look for a scapegoat and just blaming the EU alone won’t cut it. Johnson could end up in the position Theresa May fought so hard to avoid – being in the hot seat when a damaging hard Brexit hits and becoming the fall person for the ensuing chaos.

Beyond Brexit, what’s important to bear in mind about Johnson’s premiership are two things. One, he’s already done the bit they needed him to do, i.e. win an election. That out of the way, he’s completed his crucial task, meaning he is called upon now not to be rubbish given that two, no one in the parliamentary party actually likes him very much and they certainly don’t trust him. Of course, no Tory MP will actually say this in public at present for good reason. But that has to be factored into the equation. If the Cummings circus gets more and more out of control and people within the cabinet never mind the wider Conservative party start to feel more and more annoyed by it all, the turn against Boris could begin. Even if it is slow, once it has begun it becomes hard to reverse.

When Johnson became PM, I thought he’d bring back proper cabinet government out of a sense of good politics; let the secretaries of state run their departments with a great deal of autonomy in order to a). get stuff off Johnson’s plate and b). to build up on-going good will towards Boris. Yet he’s done almost the precise opposite, letting a chancellor walk because Number 10 wanted to suck everything into its orbit. This puts a huge amount of pressure on Boris to deliver and not screw up. He should have learned from Theresa May – when you hoover everything up into Number 10, you carry the can for it all and let everyone else in the cabinet off the hook. This could end up playing very badly for Boris.

Again, I’m not saying go down to the bookies and place a bet on Johnson not being PM this time next year. I’m simply saying he isn’t invincible and that at some point soon he will be called upon to deliver, Labour Party problems be damned. And he’s still Boris, i.e. not actually very good, so there is that to consider.

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Another nationwide referendum? Find details here on the latest wacky caper British politics might be about to inflict on us all

And the shitshow rolls on. Today, we have an immigration policy unveiled by the government that makes no sense, even on its own terms. They want say they want to prioritise for skill not salary, so that we can get social workers and health care professionals from abroad as needed. Okay, great. Except that salary is still going to be a benchmark and it will still be set too high for social workers and a lot of health care professionals to get visas. Yet do not fret, fair Britannia: Priti Patel was on the media this morning telling us to chill because apparently social workers will “obviously be valued”. So, for clarity, in spite of the system intentionally being set up in a way that will not allow the NHS to hire from abroad to fill certain key gaps because the salary bar is set too high to do so, the value of “value” will magically solve these problems. As usual, none of this has been highlighted by the political media who on one side are careful to cheer the government forward and on the other, want to talk about how intersectionality deals with questions of how hairdressers are a front for transphobia.

In the midst of all this fun, you might have missed this little news item: Tory MP Robert Halfon, who has had some decent ideas in his day and I don’t mean that sarcastically, has come up with a doozy of a terrible, awful idea that even in an age plagued with a glut of terrible, awful ideas manages to stand out as terrible and awful. He has suggested that we hold a nationwide referendum on the BBC licence fee. I’m not kidding. I know you’re now going “Stop making weird shit up, Nick, things are bad enough as is without you inventing weirder stuff. Satire is dead, don’t you know.” No, seriously, I even have to hand Halfon’s quote on the matter:

“They say that we own the BBC but we have no role in it. This would be about a democratisation of the BBC. To coin a phrase, it’s time for viewers to take back control.”

Oh. My. God. Yes, Robert because the last nationwide referendum we had worked out so bloody well. Really, to coin a phrase, brought the country together. I am now begging all MPs of all parties: stop trying to create more referendums. They are terrible, they are a shit way to do democracy, they should only ever be used in extremis and even then, with a great deal of thinking about whether a referendum is really necessary. Stop suggesting them! Now that the Tories have a comfy majority, the least I would have hoped is that we would see a return to good old fashioned representative democracy. You know, where the government actually decides things and then does them, as opposed to dithering over every difficult decision before wimping out and then holding a bleeding nationwide plebiscite on the matter.

Tories, listen: either keep the licence fee model that we have or get rid of it and go to a subscription model. I know which I’d prefer – the status quo – but I’m not in government, you lot are. Just make a decision and suffer the political consequences of it. And let’s not have any more referendums, please? On anything at all.

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Why the Andrew Sabisky incident was not a one-off – and why there will be plenty more where that came from

The Downing Street career of Andrew Sabisky was very short-lived. Much has been said already about his interesting angle on eugenics and marital sex, so I won’t rehash them here. The only thing I will say is that I find it odd that Dominic Cummings puts out a very long blog post requesting “weirdos and misfits” in a search for “cognitive diversity” and ends up picking a guy who could have emerged from a factory that churns out stereotypical Tory young men. Why ask for different and then choose someone who looks and sounds like most of the interns working at CCHQ at any point over the last thirty years?

Yet for all the hoopla that was created, the Conservative party are going to emerge from this incident completely unscathed. This is because instead of learning from their errors, the Labour Party are stuck in some sort of death spiral that Keir Starmer is going to have to be a secret political genius to help them emerge from within the next four years. On a day when a Tory prime minister would not directly deny that he shared the position of one of his advisers that black people were less intelligent than white people, we had a contender for the Labour deputy leadership stating on television that all children are born sexless. I can’t think of a worse place for the Labour leadership contest to go right this second apart from the trans-rights black hole. Help me here, I need to get this straight: the Corbynistas think that the party was too Remainery for their old working-class voters, but the way to win them back is by publicly ripping each other to shreds about what qualifies as a man or a woman? I’m not saying the trans-rights debate isn’t important – I’m saying that there are very few things it would have been less helpful for the Labour leadership contest to have become about.

Meanwhile, Corbyn hogs the leader of the opposition chair, essentially rendering it de facto empty. We don’t really have a leader of the opposition at the moment, and it’s not yet clear whether we will have someone effective in the role come April 4th given how low the leadership contest has sunk. We even have RLB and others hinting that Corbyn could be allowed back into the shadow cabinet is which twenty shades of unhelpful to a party that should be trying to move on. I would say it’s like the Labour Party have come to a point where they actually enjoy losing, but that’s facetious and doesn’t get to the root of the problem. The Left are sucked into some sort of weird death spiral, getting deeper and deeper, further cementing the Right’s hold on power. I genuinely think they might next start openly debating whether Stalin’s purges and show trials weren’t good ideas after all. I’m being serious here – I don’t think we’ve reached the bottom for the Left yet.

This is why there will be more Andrew Sabisky style incidents in the future. For now, the eugenics and the icky incel posting were too much for public consumption, but give the Left another year of talking to their own navels and we might see people with current National Front memberships in key government positions being met with little more than a shrug. Say what you will about press scrutiny; we have a system of government that relies on a strong opposition keeping the government on the straight and narrow. Years and years without that have had an inevitable unbalancing effect. If things go on as they are, expect it all to get a lot worse.

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Here is a breakdown of what is so incredibly terrible about Keir Starmer’s “ten pledges”

I really want to believe that Keir Starmer will be good. I want to believe that he will offer up the strong opposition that Corbyn has been so unable to provide. A couple of days ago I even tweeted: “There isn’t really a party or even portion of British politics I like at the moment. I’m pulling for Keir Starmer to be Labour leader mostly – and solely – because he isn’t visibly insane. That’s what I’m clinging to here.”

Then came yesterday and Keir’s ten pledges. They are bad. Actually, they are more than bad – they are excruciatingly terrible. They have made me genuinely fearful of what Starmer’s time as Labour leader might be like.

First of all – and I want to get this out of the way – the pledges are horribly written. They employ a management speak throughout that is distracting and unhelpful, although perhaps it is used because distraction is essential here; it is to make it seem like there is more substance on hand than is actually the case. I could go on about this for pages, so I’ll limit myself here only to the examples that are the most egregious.

Under pledge nine, “Equality” (which isn’t even a pledge in the loosest sense, but I’ll come back to that) we have this sentence: “Pull down obstacles that limit opportunities and talent.” Obstacles don’t limit, they bar any progress at all. That is what makes them obstacles. Under pledge three, “Climate justice”, we have: “Put the Green New Deal at the heart of everything we do.” If this is at the heart of everything, why is it in pledge three, not one? If this is the heart of the enterprise, shouldn’t you have led with this and then elaborated on how the Green New Deal affects the rest of the pledges? Or is the “heart” thing just bullshit speak to sound green enough to the target audience?

Another problem with the way it is written is that it often isn’t clear whether it is a prospectus for a Labour government or a plan for opposition and blurs the line between these two states of being in a nonsensical way that is clearly used to obfuscate. Take this line: “Support the abolition of tuition fees and invest in lifelong learning.” If you’re in government will you abolish tuition fees or not? What does “support the abolition of tuition fees” mean as a sentence? That Labour will vote for it in the unlikely event the Tories put it forward? The first half of the sentence only makes sense if Labour are in opposition (and not very much sense at that) and the second only makes sense if they are in government (since how else do you have the power to invest in anything). What a mess. Or how about: “Stand up for universal services and defend our NHS.” What does the “Stand up” here actually mean? Would a Labour government really make all public services universal? As an example, would that mean if for whatever reason I wanted to attend my children’s primary school as a 47-year-old student, I should have the right to do so? Most of the pledges feel like they were written in a way to sound appealing to Labour activists without actually meaning anything at all.

Yet while the pledges lack substance throughout due to their poor composition, where there is substance it is in pursuit of very bad public policy. “Introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights at the heart of foreign policy.” So, a Labour government wants to pass an act that limits its own ability to militarily intervene, regardless of circumstance? Also, if you put “human rights at the heart of foreign policy”, won’t that mean militarily intervening in some instances? Rwanda, anyone? Ot here is all of pledge five on “Common ownership”: “Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water; end outsourcing in our NHS, local government and justice system.” Beyond the fact that nationalising all of those things would be stupid, the pledge isn’t even promising to do that. Again, the word “support” here is inserted to blur meaning. Would Labour nationalise all of these services or not? “End outsourcing” throughout the NHS? That would cost a massive amount and cause huge disruption. Is Starmer saying he would be happy to disrupt the NHS, causing actual harm to people, for ideological purposes? This is one of the few things in the pledges that has no wooly language at all, so I have to take him at his word here.

“Defend free movement as we leave the EU.” Do I take this to mean Labour are going to shout about it in opposition but then decide what to do in government when they get there? As a government, you either reinstate free movement of people from and to the EU or you do not; “defend” is a meaningless word in this context. Pledge nine, “Equality”, is completely abysmal: “Pull down obstacles that limit opportunities and talent. We are the party of the Equal Pay Act, Sure Start, BAME representation and the abolition of Section 28 – we must build on that for a new decade.” That’s it – that’s the entire pledge. The leading candidate to be Labour Party leader in 2020 has nothing new to say about equality, one of the main reasons the party exists, and no actual policies on the subject at all. Just, “We’ve been good on this in the past, so trust us to be good in this area again in the future. At some point when we manage to think of some policies, which we are unable to at the moment for some reason”.

I could go on for thousands of more words about how bad the ten pledges are because every word, every sentence, is terrible, but I’ll leave it there. I don’t know why Starmer felt the need to put this out. He’s ahead in the race and looks set to win by a landslide. He could have released something simple outlining some basic things he would do as Labour leader. He did not have to make ten pledges that mostly don’t pledge anything and where they do, tie Starmer into making extremely bad policy decisions.

I have signed up to vote in this contest as a Registered Supporter. Before yesterday, I had decided to vote for Starmer. Now, I’ll vote for Nandy. The ten pledges have led me to seriously question Keir Starmer’s judgement and how well he might do as Labour leader. We can only hope this is an unfortunate blip.

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Here’s a big problem facing the Tories no one is talking about

It’s been mostly good news for Boris Johnson on the Labour Party front since the general election. An unnecessarily elongated leadership contest resulting in Corbyn hanging around like a very bad smell has helped dampen any scrutiny of what the government has been up to. People talk about Boris employing dead cat strategies but it hasn’t really been needed; the Labour Party have been a deceased feline factory on the Tories behalf. Today, Keir Starmer has come out with ten pledges, one of which is around public ownership of utilities. And there is another nearly two months to go of the charade.

This masks the problems the government will face in the near future. One is around how to handle the no deal plus cliff edge that they have inflicted upon themselves and the country. If it goes badly, the Tories will own it as they are attacked from all sides; the Farage gang will say that Boris botched Brexit due to incompetence; Labour will say that they could have handled it all better while angling for implementing Norway Plus. If they think they can just blame the EU and get away with it, well, that might wash but I don’t it will be as simple as that.

Yet there is a bigger problem. The Tories need to make Brexit work on a more involved, permanent level. They need to make rejoining logistically very tricky. What I mean is, they need to get those trade deals with the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc, and they need them fast. This, whatever elements of the right of centre press will have you believe, will be extremely difficult. All of these countries will be aware that Britain is negotiating from a weak position. This is just basic politics – if you know that you’re dealing with a negotiating partner that doesn’t have a deal and needs one quickly, you have the upper hand. The Tories could come to a point where they need to choose to either walk away from bad deals or to just sign up to bad deals and hope for the best. Either route has consequences; not signing up to any deals strengthens the argument in ten years time that Brexit was a mistake. You basically have nothing to show for it. Perhaps they don’t care about what happens in ten years time. If I was a Brexiteer who really cared about leaving the EU permanently, I would give it some thought.

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The latest awful turn in the Labour leadership contest shows how much existential trouble the party is in

It is fair to say that the Labour leadership contest has been a total nightmare for the left of the party. Rebecca Long-Bailey was the one to beat after Corbyn announced after the general election that he would resign at some point in the sort of near future. She was going to have Momentum and Unite backing her officially, Labour HQ and the NEC unofficially. Only if her campaign was monumentally bad would she be under serious threat.

It has gone much, much worse for Long-Bailey than anyone could have ever foreseen. Keir Starmer has done little to become the overwhelming favourite other than look good in a suit and not say anything stupid. It has been more than enough. It even started to look like a contest that threatened to be explosive was going to be dull in the end. Starmer would win, handily, and then slowly bring the party back to respectability. There would be the occasional bump, but no civil war.

That got blown to pieces this weekend with Labour HQ accusing the Starmer campaign of hacking into the Labour membership database and data scraping. This appears to be linked to a story around the Long-Bailey campaign having access to the party’s “Dialogue” phone bank system, which would have allowed not only the campaign but its volunteers access to sensitive information on all of Labour’s 500k members. Party HQ suspended this activity last week.

Now it is saying that Starmer’s campaign hacked into this same information, which smells distinctly dodgy given who runs Labour HQ. It appears to the casual observer like the Left is trying to use its sources of power to derail the Starmer campaign – and according to some rumours, possibly try and get Starmer kicked out of the leadership contest altogether.

I don’t think the outright Starmer exclusion will happen. It would essentially be putting a bomb under a weakened Labour Party and detonating it. If Long-Bailey became leader because Keir Starmer was forcibly removed from it for reasons that were opaque at best, then I don’t see how the Labour Party could ever recover. Not only would people walk away in their droves or a split occur, but even if every MP stayed in post, the party’s reputation would be permanently damaged. Long-Bailey’s leadership will have been fatally poisoned before it even started.

Yet even just having this row demonstrates the challenge facing Starmer if he becomes leader. The Left will clearly resort to anything they think they can get away with in order to cling to the levers of power within the Labour Party. Starmer’s goal of quietly pulling the party back to sanity has been shown to be almost impossible; the tankies will not go easily or without a fight.

This means that Keir will have to spend way more time fighting internal battles than he would have hoped. Whatever the end result of this Labour in-fight, one thing is for sure: the Conservatives’ grip on power just became a little tighter.

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