Nick Tyrone's Blog, page 9

Why Ed Davey and the Lib Dems’ Ramadan fasting stunt is such a bad idea

For those of you not following the minutiae of the Liberal Democrat party at the moment, which I imagine is almost all of you, Ed Davey is leading many members of his brigade, MPs and councillors, to fast for Ramadan. Your first question here should be: why exactly? Has Ed Davey and many other Lib Dems converted to Islam? Well, no.

They appear to be doing it as some sort of solidarity gesture with British Muslims. In the tweets and videos on the subject, they keep referring to “showing Muslims they aren’t alone” in what they are doing. This is a bad idea for a lot of reasons and instructive of how, months after running the most disastrous political campaign in history, the Lib Dems are bad at politics fought anywhere other than the local level.

The right who have bothered to pay attention to the stunt are attacking it for being a virtue signalling exercise. For being a cynical attempt by the Lib Dems to try and take the Muslim vote from Labour. And I can see their point. Yet if this was the worst thing about the Ramadan solidarity exercise, I would give it a pass. No, the worst thing about it is that it is patronising, not just to Muslims but to anyone who is religious. It misunderstands religion so completely as to be embarrassing. And I say all this as an atheist.

This line about “showing Muslims they aren’t alone” in pursuing a fast at Ramadan is embarrassing. The fast hasn’t been forced upon them. It is not something that some other group of people is oppressing them with. They have done it by choice as an act of faith. It is religiously significant for them to do it every year. You cannot “show them they are not alone” in enacting the rituals of Ramadan; by the very definition of what any religious faith is, they are completely alone in this. It is part of what makes a Muslim a Muslim, just as taking communion is part of what makes a Christian a Christian. Christians don’t feel “alone” in taking communion, at least in any pejorative sense.

I very much hesitate to use the term “cultural appropriation” in any context seeing as how ridiculously it has been used in the past decade. But I think it is the only term that applies here. Indulging in a Muslim ritual, visibly labelling it as such, while not converting to the religion is weird and creepy. Imagine for a moment if Sajid Javid decided he wanted to take communion for a month to “show Christians they are not alone” while not converting to Christianity. It would piss a lot of people off and I don’t need to be religious to understand why. Religion is a deeply important part of religious people’s lives, not some random lifestyle accoutrement. Its symbols and rituals have a deep meaning to believers. To casually dip in and out of a religion’s rituals in a visible, public way, particularly for a political organisation whose motivations in taking part in such a thing needs to be robustly questioned, seems offensive to me. It is patronising of Islam, in my opinion. I mean, I’m not a Muslim so I have no idea if any Muslims will be offended. I just know they probably should be, at least as much as they can work themselves up to be offended by anything the Lib Dems do.

Why are the Lib Dems so bad at this stuff? As I saw Lib Dem after Lib Dem appear on my Twitter feed yesterday talking about how spiritually meaningful they found taking part in Ramadan was for them, I had horrible flashbacks to the general election campaign. Build a Better Future and a pathological avoidance of challenging the Tory Brexit line. It isn’t that they are bad at politics – it’s like they are supernaturally bad at it. In the Ramadan stunt, they have found something that will come across as pandering, virtue signalling and hucksterish to a large section of the electorate, and yet also manages to miss its intended target and potentially offend the people it was being used to suck up to. In other words, it is perfectly bad politics; the kind of thing you would do if you were an enemy of a political party and somehow infiltrated its HQ.

This stuff hurts my heart. We need a liberal party in Britain, badly. The Lib Dems not only don’t seem up to it, but don’t seem to even want to do the job.

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I have a new book out now. It’s called “Politics is Murder” and follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. The plot takes in Conservative Party conference, a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s available here:

The post Why Ed Davey and the Lib Dems’ Ramadan fasting stunt is such a bad idea appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Why liberals should stop being condescending about St George’s Day

Today, as most of you reading will already know, is St George’s Day. It is England’s national day. Each year on this date, several things occur. One is that a certain portion of the population gets out their crosses of St George and revels in their idea of Englishness. This is sometimes benign, it is sometimes nasty, but it mostly the former. Another portion of the population, meanwhile, tries to look down its nose at the very idea of St George’s Day. The fact that St George was Greek, spent his whole life in Asia Minor and never came to England once gets brought up ad nauseam. St George’s Day becomes symbolic to liberals every late-April of everything they don’t like about England at the moment, which unfortunately includes a majority of the nation’s population.

I think liberals fighting this battle are being silly. This is an unneeded annual fixture in the ongoing culture war. By complaining about St George’s Day every year, liberals are just fuelling the idea that circulates on the right that only they care about the country and that liberals are openly disdainful of the place. They are unnecessarily fuelling the culture war. They are also leaving England’s national day to the right.

My suggestion is that liberals should ideally try and reclaim the day, using it to celebrate what they like about England. Yet I realise I’m asking for the moon on a stick with that, so I ask this instead: could liberals just ignore the day if they don’t want to take part? Why wind up those on the right they disagree with on what is just a day that means something to a group of people even if means nothing to them? Don’t both the left and liberals push the idea of people being allowed to enjoy days of celebration that have particular cultural resonance to a group of people living in Britain? For instance, I don’t celebrate Eid or Passover, but I wouldn’t think to belittle those that do. What I’m saying here is, can’t you extend this idea to those within your own country who just want to celebrate their own national day? Can’t we be liberals and allow space for those we disagree with to do their thing when it isn’t causing any harm?

I know what the answer to this is. Yet I can still feel annoyed about it.

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I have a new book out now. It’s called “Politics is Murder” and follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. The plot takes in Conservative Party conference, a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s available here:

The post Why liberals should stop being condescending about St George’s Day appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

This will be the biggest impediment to Labour winning another election – and it’s not the Corbyn gang’s antics

The one thing that has managed to break up the news cycle a little bit over the past couple of weeks, away from CoVid and the government’s handling of it, has been the latest shitstorm within the Labour Party. The departing Corbynistas have burnt the crops behind them like fleeing Russian peasants, trying to send this message: if we can’t have the Labour Party, no one can. I like many others have speculated that the ongoing bad behaviour of the far left will keep bringing Labour down, no matter what Starmer does. And this is obviously going to happen, given what we’ve seen already. But I don’t think that’s Labour’s biggest problem.

Scotland, you might say. This is a huge impediment to a Labour a majority but all they can do is become more presentably competent, which they have a start on in electing Starmer leader, and hope the SNP flame starts to fade, which it will eventually. If Labour returns nationally, in other words, I think it may return in Scotland, although there will probably be a significant lag there.

No, the biggest problem I think Labour faces is getting the voters it lost in England, in 2019 back. Just as those voters hung on through a lot of years where they were less than impressed with the Labour Party for varying reasons, I believe that now that many have voted Tory, getting them to vote Labour again could be more difficult than is often talked about. There is sometimes an assumption made by some on the centre-left that a lot of working class voters “loaned” Boris a vote in order to “get Brexit done”, and will thus return to the fold fairly easily next time, particularly now that crazy grandpa has returned to the allotment. I’m not so sure about this. There is an anti-Labour culture that has built up around the country and appears to still be on the rise. It is tricky to see how Starmer moves in a way that convinces the Lib Dem types they need while getting the blue wall seats voting Labour in majority style numbers again. As in, I think the biggest problem Labour might have is available pool of voters that would even consider voting Labour. It goes beyond Remain/Leave and City/Town/Countryside into brand problems that are now monumental in scale.

Blair was able to build on the fact that there was a group of voters, ideally geographically placed under First Past the Post, who religiously voted Labour. The Miliband/Corbyn years have chipped away at this base until we saw what happened in 2019. The one hope Labour has is that these are volatile times and we have a Tory government that isn’t exactly brilliant. The winds could shift quickly in Starmer’s direction for reasons we couldn’t have foreseen even a few months ago. Yet when people say “Labour have a mountain to climb” they really aren’t exaggerating. If anything, it is mostly underestimated how tough it will be for any leader to get Labour a majority not just in 2024, but anytime in the next 20 years.

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I have a new book out now. It’s called “Politics is Murder” and follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. The plot takes in Conservative Party conference, a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s available here:

The post This will be the biggest impediment to Labour winning another election – and it’s not the Corbyn gang’s antics appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Here’s why Keir Starmer will never be accepted by the far left and what that means for Labour’s immediate future

Starmer ran on a platform of uniting all factions of the Labour Party. This was an admirable one in many respects – that it was also the most politically advantageous strategy to have adopted, we will leave to one side for now. Yet as soon as he was leader, the backstabbing by the far left began almost immediately. They weren’t going to let a national crisis stop them from leaking and then shouting as loudly as possible about a report that put all of the blame for the internal anti-Semitism issues down to Blairites trying to smear Corbyn. This was a warning shot to Starmer – if you don’t do exactly as we would like, we will come after you. Soon. Very soon. We are biding our time, in fact, ready to pounce at any moment.

What Starmer should take out of this is that the far left can never, ever be appeased. They are like the hardcore Brexiteers in the Conservative Party – nothing is ever ideologically pure enough for them. They didn’t get the person they thought they could control into the leadership chair and now they are fighting a rearguard action to keep hold of the Labour Party. It doesn’t matter that Starmer put Corbynistas in shadow ministerial roles – as is clear already, they are just going to use these positions to make life difficult for Starmer. Embarrass him and dare him to sack these MPs from their roles so that the far left can then go after Starmer for a “purge”.

He probably has a grand plan for how to handle all this, Starmer. He’s played the politics of this perfectly so far and I wouldn’t put it past him to out-think the collective might of the far left. Yet he must surely know by now that they can never be truly brought over. All right, some of them who were just blowing with the Corbyn smelling wind, fine, but the true believers will never take him as their leader. Corbyn remains the eternal king, now in exile. Long-Bailey, the rightful heir. They will want to undermine Starmer with the membership as much as they possibly can since they are all that matters.

Starmer should change the rules as to how the Labour Party elects leaders as soon as the politics will permit. This may not be for some time. Go back to the thirds methods that existed before Miliband screwed it up. It will be the best way to wipe away the stain of the last ten years of Labour’s dive into incompetence away.

For now, the new Labour leader needs to weather this storm and not do anything drastic. The far left are itching to show he’s a Blairite in soft left clothing. As ever, the balance between not seeming like a neoliberal centrist dad and making the Labour Party electable again is Keir Starmer’s number one challenge. This past week has demonstrated how difficult the far left is going to make that for him.

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I have a new book out now. It’s called “Politics is Murder” and follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. The plot takes in Conservative Party conference, a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s available here:

The post Here’s why Keir Starmer will never be accepted by the far left and what that means for Labour’s immediate future appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Why free speech is under threat in a post-Covid world in ways we haven’t begun to seriously consider yet

Free speech as an issue has had a hard time of it over the last ten years. A large section of the left has given up on the concept of it completely. That this has happened at the same time as the rise of the “I’m literally a communist” meme is not coincidental. The portion of the left which has been in the ascendancy over past decade would love to see the portions of the press it doesn’t like – the centre-right newspapers, the BBC, well, pretty much all of the press, actually – either shut down or “corrected for use”. This has spread into the academic world with puzzling results. Meanwhile, free speech has become a clarion call on the far right, being used to try and shut down any and all critiques of various viewpoints in the name of anti-political correctness. Caught between these two forces, those who are passionate about free speech have sometimes had a tricky time having their defence of it taken at face value.

These are just the challenges facing free speech in liberal democracies. While all this has gone on, the world at large has become an unsafer place for journalists, writers and free speech generally. Turkey has gone full blown authoritarian in a power grab by Erdogan, closing down what free press the country previously had; Russia had got even worse on this front, closing down discussion within its borders more and more while simultaneously spreading as much disinformation as it can outside, creating a huge problem for defenders of free speech in regard to the issue of genuinely fake news; China has tightened its already unyielding grip on information within its confines.

With all of that as the backdrop, we now face a massive crisis that has really only just begun. We are probably going to be living with CoVid19 for a couple of years at least. In order to try and keep the spread of the virus relatively at bay, we have accepted a massive state intervention into all of our lives. With this may come much more surveillance by the state for a variety of disease control related reasons in the years ahead. We have accepted this because we accept the premise as to why it has been instituted. Yet as history shows, state interventions can be tough to roll back once they have served their appointed use. Take for example the idea of trying to stamp out false information regarding the virus and its spread. While this could be well-intentioned in some respects, it would be easy for it to become draconian and impinge on other areas of wider discussion. As an example, it could make the press more fearful of whistle blower type stories, however well sourced, for fear of falling foul of new laws on what information is and isn’t allowable under UK law.

This is before we get into the next CoVid related risk to free speech: the economic downturn will directly affect the newspaper trade, leading to what will likely be smaller budgets for investigative journalism. At at time when proper journalism might be more required than at any point in the last half a century, it could become economically unviable.

I’m speaking in hypotheticals because none of this has begun in the UK yet. Yet I worry that in a political world in which masses of people accept more restraints on freedom of speech as the supposed price of safety, we end up with a much less free society. We have already seen how much pressure the issue of freedom of speech can come under already; imagine it in a post-CoVid world where mass surveillance is taken for granted and speaking against that is seen as speaking against people’s safety?

What I’m saying is that protecting freedom of speech is about to become a whole lot more difficult and complicated – at a time when it was already difficult and complicated. We can never forget that freedom of speech is the most important freedom as it is the one from which all other freedoms flow. This doesn’t get said enough these days.

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I have a new book out now. It’s called “Politics is Murder” and follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. The plot takes in Conservative Party conference, a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s available here:

The post Why free speech is under threat in a post-Covid world in ways we haven’t begun to seriously consider yet appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

No, Labour did not almost win the 2017 general election. Here’s a breakdown of why – and why this is important

Corbynistas now cling with desperation to the idea that the Labour Party almost won the 2017 general election. It is all they have left, I suppose, the betrayal myth; we came so close and if it hadn’t been for internal saboteurs, we’d have got over the line. Look how close we got anyhow! Except in any sort of objective examination, the Labour party came nowhere close to winning the 2017 general election. No. Where. Close.

The myth is built upon the notion that Labour came within 2,000 to 2,500 votes of victory. The source of the idea stems from an Independent article, published on June 9th, 2017, the morning after the general election had taken place, under the headline “Jeremy Corbyn was just 2,227 votes away from chance to be Prime Minister“. At least, I feel pretty sure this was the earliest iteration of this idea – there were plenty of copycat articles to follow that week. The basic thesis here is that had Labour got exactly the right number of votes in seven marginal seats that fell to the Tories, Labour would have “won the election”. These seats were: Southampton Itchen, Pudsey, Hastings and Rye, Chipping Barnet, Thurrock, Preseli Pembrokeshire, and Calder Valley. If 2,227 people who had voted Tory in these seats had voted Labour instead, they would have fallen to Labour by one vote each.

Now, there are several obvious problems with this theory already. One is that we have a first past the post system, and while saying Labour was 2,227 votes short of an extra seven seats makes it sound dreadfully close, this is actually a long way off. In the 2019 general election, the Lib Dems came within 2,743 votes of unseating Dominic Raab in Esher and Walton, which I wouldn’t describe as almost unseating the Foreign Secretary myself. Of course, some Lib Dems probably would. Actually, that’s what this “we came within 2,227 votes of winning the election” thing reminds me of most – it’s very Lib Demy. I’m not sure that’s the comparison most Corbynistas hanker after.

But you know what? I don’t even need any of the last paragraph to debunk this theory that Labour came very close to winning the 2017 general election. I’ll give the Corbynistas their precious 2,227 votes exactly where they need them so they can take those seven seats off the Tories by one vote each. For the sake of what follows, they are theirs. So, what happens if Labour gets those seven seats off the Conservatives in 2017? They won the election then, right? No, not even remotely close. An extra seven seats would have given Labour 269, which if you are a keen observer of British politics you will note would still have put Labour someways off the 326 needed to have an outright majority in parliament and even way short of the 321 needed for a nominal majority when Sinn Fein, the speaker, etc are taken out of the equation. More than 50 seats short in fact, which is a strange way to call something a victory. So, what the hell are the Corbynistas on about then? Well, remember they took these seven seats off of the Tories, which means instead of the 317 the Conservatives actually ended up with, they now have 310. Even hooking up with the DUP only collectively gets them 320. If you add Labour’s 269 to the SNP’s 35, the Lib Dems 12, Plaid Cymru’s 4 and Caroline Lucas, you get 321. A one seat majority over the Tory-DUP configuration! Which means Corbyn would have been prime minister! Right?

Well, except it’s a huge stretch to think the Lib Dems would have jumped on board with this rainbow coalition automatically. It’s funny to me that the Corbynistas consider the Lib Dems to be horrible yellow Tories who are just itching to be back in bed with the Conservatives – but then assume in this little fantasy that the Lib Dems would have helped Corbyn form a government for certain. I suppose in return for another EU referendum? But that wasn’t even being talked about by Corbyn or his people at the time, so this is another stretch. The SNP would have demanded a second Scottish referendum – and for the UK government to not pick a side. In addition to these major consideration, those parties would have only agreed to vote for a Queen Speech that they could all live with as well. So, at best you would have had Corbyn’s agenda massively watered down. Those members of the PLP that the Corbynistas so despise would have had massive power to derail a more radical agenda as well, almost certainly with Lib Dem and some SNP help.

Beyond all that, even if somehow this rainbow coalition did agree on an initial Queen’s Speech, it would have been hard to see it lasting more than a year – at least under Corbyn’s leadership. It would have fallen apart as soon as everyone outside of Labour got what they wanted, which would have been quickly. Then, we would have had another election that the Tories would have won.

Perhaps you don’t agree with every aspect of the scenario that I have laid out above. Fine. But I don’t see how you can still tell me that getting 269 seats is winning a general election. It isn’t. It isn’t anywhere close. That is just a psephological fact. I do feel some sympathy for the Corbynistas’ world crumbling around them but in politics it is always better to face up to the obstacles in front of you honestly – and to do that you have to evaluate the past honestly. Labour lost the 2017 badly. Not as badly as 2019, but still pretty badly.

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I have a new book out now. It’s called “Politics is Murder” and follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. The plot takes in Conservative Party conference, a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s here:

The post No, Labour did not almost win the 2017 general election. Here’s a breakdown of why – and why this is important appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

“Politics is Murder” – by way of explanation

My latest book, “Politics is Murder” is out today and I thought I would take a moment to tell you a little bit about it. It is the fictional account of a female serial killer, Charlotte Heard, who works in Westminster. She is employed by a failing think tank that nonetheless pays her well and allows her to accrue contacts on the way to fulfilling her true ambition, becoming a Member of Parliament. She then uses her “talents” to secure a CEO role. Her master plan is moving along nicely.

Then one morning, the police show up at her door. She is being accused of a murder – one she had absolutely nothing to do with. Is she being framed? Why would someone frame her given her actual crimes? Charlotte has to figure this all out while evading the law and soon her life is in grave danger.

That’s the basic plot. I tried to make it work as a thriller and it has the structure of a who-done-it. But the raison d’etre of the novel is to satirise the last year or so of British politics – and it’s this element of the book that I’m most interesting in hearing from readers of this blog as to how well it works. Throughout the novel I skewer – pardon the pun – all sides of the political divide. I try and give a look into the Westminster bubble that I’ve never seen explored in any previous fiction; to bring to light what is wrong with it. I did this using fiction because one, it gave me licence to explore things that could have come across as heavy handed if dealt with in a non-fiction book and two, it allows me to reproduce thinly veiled accounts of real events under the guise of everything being fictional. Yes, some of this stuff happened (not the murders, just to be clear!).

My editor describes the book as “House of Cards meets Killing Eve with hints of Coen Brothers and early Tarantino”. I invite you to tell me if that’s accurate or not. If you like the book – and even if you don’t – I would ask you to leave a review on Amazon. It can be tough to get them for an unknown hack such as myself, so the more the merrier. Thank you to everyone who checks the book out, I appreciate it. Thanks as well to Headline Books and Hachette UK for publishing the novel.

Here it is (clink on the link below):

The post “Politics is Murder” – by way of explanation appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Starmer and Labour will have to have an answer to the debt problem that is inevitably ahead

The right are clearly a little rattled by having a competent leader of the Labour Party in situ once again. It has been a long time since this wan’t the case and they got used to living in a world where the head of the opposition was an open joke. Yet despite all that, Labour still faces a huge uphill climb. One of the problems it faces is how to respond in a post-Covid or even an ongoing, we have to live with CoVid world for a bit.

This is not helped by the fact that portions of the left are assuming that because a Tory government is looking to spend its way out of this crisis, that this means the argument for larger government will be unassailable from here on out. In fact, I am starting to feel sure that at some point in the next five years, depending on how long this crisis takes to play out, we could have a period of harsh austerity that will have widespread public support. Labour will have to have an argument to counter what may be the Tory line that because we spent to get out of an unforeseen crisis, that means we now have to tighten down public spending for a bit.

This could create a trap for Labour, one they have fallen into a few times in the last decade. I can see Labour wanting to make the compassionate argument; that we have asked people to make tremendous sacrifices in a time of crisis and we cannot take away their public services now. They will also want to say that a new round of austerity will hit the poorest and the most in need. Whatever the merits of these points, they are not the way Labour should go about arguing against post-CoVid austerity if the Tories go down that road.

Instead, they would need to make a reasoned argument against it. They would need to come up with ways of explaining that working households across the land will be worse off under these Tory plans – and have an alternative plan that is reasonably easy to get across while sounding solid and thought out. What form that would take I don’t exactly know yet, but Labour would need a counter to the inevitable Tory claim that Labour spending plans want to bankrupt our grandchildren.

I realise I am asking here for the Labour Party to start thinking about the rebuttal to an argument that isn’t being made at the moment and may never be required. On the other hand, this is a useful exercise regardless. Labour needs to find a way to make a larger state which spends more on public services appealing to a whole range of voters who were turned off by the Corbyn project. They cannot fall back on “the CoVid crisis has made us all socialists now” idea – one way or another, they will get caught out by this. Since 2008, the left has assumed again and again that events will make their arguments for them. They had better start coming up with some credible ones of their own now.

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Tomorrow, I have another book coming out. It’s called “Politics is Murder” and follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. The plot takes in Conservative Party conference, a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s out on April 9th, but you can pre-order here:

The post Starmer and Labour will have to have an answer to the debt problem that is inevitably ahead appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

What Keir Starmer becoming Labour leader tells us about party politics in the current era

A well-known and liked journalist posted something along the lines of “Keir Starmer becoming leader of Labour proves I’m right in 1,000 words – off you go” on Twitter this week. The reason I bring this up is because I am about to do the exact opposite; Starmer becoming leader proves most of the things I felt politically convinced of over the last few years incorrect. His victory has helped me understand this.

One thing I was wrong about was the idea that Labour had been lost to the far left. Now, Starmer may fail to properly re-professionalise the Labour Party. He may fail electorally and then see the party becoming taken over by the far left once again. Yet the fact that he was able to not only win but win handsomely and on the same day essentially take over the NEC leaving him able to stamp his will on the party, demonstrates that Labour wasn’t as far gone as I had thought.

This leads directly to the bigger thing I was wrong about. I cheered on people like Chuka Umunna, figuring that centrists stomping out of the Labour Party to create a new centrist party or to join the Lib Dems and try and professionalise them was the right move. I thought Starmer had signed up to be on a boat that was going nowhere and eventually he’d just have to resign himself to that or quit politics. But he was wrong and I was right; staying in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and keeping his head down on everything except Brexit, which is the policy area where Corbyn deviated the most from his followers by a significant margin, led directly to him becoming the next leader of the Labour Party by a significant margin.

What Starmer’s victory is synonymous with is the final victory of the two party system over any challengers. Everyone who left their parties or had the whip removed and never had it reinstated over the last couple of years is no longer in parliament. Every single one of them lost their seats. The importance of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party as the only two meaningful parties has been proven in the most ruthless manner; Starmer is only the full stop to that sentence.

This goes against what a lot of the discussion in Westminster over the past ten years has been around where political parties are headed. The coalition government, the rise of UKIP, the subsequent rise of the Brexit Party were all used to push a narrative that the two party system is in irreversible decline. Except Starmer sitting at the top of the Labour pile is the best proof you could ever want that this has not proven to be the case. The man who sat in the shadow cabinet, mostly quietly biding his time, is the one who is victorious, not the rebels who made a big show of stomping out.

I’m not saying those who left the Labour Party were wrong to do so. I’m simply saying that they paid the price for doing so with their political careers. No one is going to do that again inside of a generation, not unless they are willing to commit career suicide. Yes, you can point to lots of reasons this has turned out to be the case that have come from beyond the boundaries of the two main parties: the Lib Dems running the worst election campaign in political history, the shitshow that was Change UK, Farage losing his nerve and folding to Boris. Yet again, this only shows how difficult it is to do meaningful politics outside of the two big parties. As much as Corbyn tried to turn the Labour Party into a socialist student debating society, he didn’t succeed, even with all of the levers at his disposal. The Labour Party was too large to defeat.

I think the two party system has reasserted itself with such vigour because we are in such a polarised time with little room for nuance. People are now divided into teams and if you aren’t on one of them, you will get lost in the storm. Which is problem for someone like me since I don’t really like either of the teams enough to join one of them.

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This week, I have another book coming out. It’s called “Politics is Murder” and follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. The plot takes in Conservative Party conference, a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s out on April 9th, but you can pre-order here:

The post What Keir Starmer becoming Labour leader tells us about party politics in the current era appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Evaluating Keir Starmer’s initial shadow cabinet picks

Yesterday, the new leader of the Labour Party – and how good does it feel to say that, regardless of what you think of Starmer? – made his initial shadow cabinet picks. They were just the top jobs but they still give us some indication of what Starmer’s leadership is going to be like, at least the first stage of it.

It gave me the impression of someone who knows he has the left of the party waiting to jump down his throat and call him a Lib Dem as quickly as they can and is looking to avoid this early fight. So, he picked much more sensible MPs to hold top shadow cabinet jobs – in fairness, this wasn’t tricky given the poor standard under Corbyn – yet often chose figures who were already in the shadow cabinet, isolating Starmer from “purge” claims (although, they are being made anyhow, of course). Anneliese Dodds as chancellor as a perfect example of this – someone who was already in the shadow ministerial team under Corbyn, in the shadow Treasury team itself, in fact. Starmer gets someone who is both much more credible than the previous holder of the job, yet can’t be seen as part of a centrist coup. It can be explained as a promotion from with the shadow ministerial ranks. Same goes with Nick Thomas-Symonds – a man whose Labour credentials cannot be questioned who was in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, holding the security brief. Again, a much more credible person walks into the role who cannot be called a Blairite by anyone who isn’t a loon.

Rachel Reeves needs to wait things out with a still impressive shadow Cabinet Office role – giving her a top four job would have been too much ammunition for the left, clearly. Jonathan Ashworth stays as shadow health secretary – many wanted Rosena Allin-Khan to get the brief, yet it makes sense not to reshuffle this position at a time of national crisis (Allin-Khan’s time will come). Nick Brown remains chief whip, the lone shadow cabinet survivor of all of the internal Labour Party wars, another bloke whose Labour credentials cannot be besmirched.

That leaves the only slightly strange appointment: Lisa Nandy as shadow Foreign Secretary. Not because I don’t think she’s up to it but more than it seems a little tokenistic – I need to give Lisa a big job and this is the only position left after I’ve slotted everyone else in, sort of a thing. Perhaps I’m being harsh; yet I just saw Nandy taking a big public service portfolio like transport. I hope she does well in the role and makes this paragraph look unfair in retrospect.

Most of the truly awful people in the shadow cabinet, the ones who made Labour look terrible every time they opened their mouths, have been moved on. Starmer’s strategy is clearly to make the frontbench way more competent while not scaring the soft left at the very least too much to start with, while blunting the inevitable hard left critiques that he is a Lib Dem centrist dad. Given Starmer has played the politics of the past few years better than almost anyone in Britain, I wouldn’t underestimate him.

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This week, I have another book coming out. It’s called “Politics is Murder” and follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. The plot takes in Conservative Party conference, a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s out on April 9th, but you can pre-order here:

The post Evaluating Keir Starmer’s initial shadow cabinet picks appeared first on nicktyrone.com.