Who the fuck is Brian Rose?

[RedRooster]

4 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

The Labour Party surely know that the media is against them. That knowledge should, more than almost anything else, inform their election strategy. If the newspapers are against you, how do you counter that and work outside of that system? How much more funding do you put into party political broadcasts, into social media advertising, in to old-fashioned doorstopping and canvassing, and basically everything you can do to work so that the newspapers aren't people's primary means of forming an opinion of your policies?

That's the question that I don't think any Labour leader has found the answer to yet. The last Labour PM to actually win an election did have influential sections of the media on his side. 

The Tories are also fantastic at weaponising social media, and using it to knowingly spread falsehoods. Labour tries to use it, but while they've exaggerated and use hyperbole, they don't tend to brazenly lie in the way that the Tories do. I'm not suggesting they should, but how do you counter an opponent that is willing to spread bullshit, that also has a friendly media that will not call them out on this. 

It's a monumental challenge. If Labour comes out with a positive message, or strong policies, the media will pick it apart. If Starmer or Corbyn were, for example, if we did not have an NHS right now and Labour were to run on a platform of creating one, the press would tell us all how stupid and ruinous this would be (much as you see in America), and it wouldn't happen. 

It's deflating as fuck, but I don't think there's an easy way out of this at all. 

[BomberPat]

14 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

If Labour comes out with a positive message, or strong policies

A boy can dream.

[RedRooster]

Just now, BomberPat said:

A boy can dream.

Starmer has definitely been underwhelming. My heart sinks a little every time I hear a political pundit say that he's not going to hammer Johnson for issue X because doing so "doesn't poll well", or "indications are that it doesn't strike a chord with the voters" - because fuck doing the right thing, or acting on principle. 

[Jazzy G]

It's all Trump and the fake news. If you can put 4 massive lies out there and one really shitty policy decision people will be so busy trying to discredit the lies that the really shitty truth gets a pass. There was an election briefing about it I remember seeing in the run up to the 2019 General election. Trump's so busy banging on about hydroxy chloroquine and "the Chinese virus" that you forget about the kids being ripped away from their families and stuck in cages by ICE agents. 

"We're going to lower council tax." but kiss your minimum wage goodbye, so you're still not going to be able to afford it... 

[Dead Mike]

7 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

 

It's a monumental challenge. If Labour comes out with a positive message, or strong policies, the media will pick it apart. 

As Pat rightly said anyone expecting a fair showing from the British media is deluded. All the complaints about Corbyns treatment by the tabloids just made Labour look like whiny toddlers & served to reinforce the 'Snowflake' stereotype which is electoral kryptonite. 

There is no way out of this. At least for a long, long time. Anyone expecting that '20 point' bounce just because of a change of leader is as dense & out of touch as the Corbynites who wanted more of the same after the worst defeat in living memory. You can't spend 3yrs calling your historic voting base thick racists then feign surprise when they turn on you.

Cummings & Bannon played the last term perfectly, they shifted politics from being policy based to being about emotions & feelings. The Lab 2017 manifesto was popular, people were concerned of the impact of Brexit & it led to the Tories only winning by 50 seats. Knowing that Brexit was going to be shitshow they were forced to move the goalposts and play to Johnson's strengths (and Labours weaknesses).

By 2019 'Brexit' had nothing to do with our trading relationship with the EU. All those skinheads marching through London, carrying homemade gallows & screaming about 'wanting their country back' weren't passionate about regulatory divergence on agricultural standards! It was Britain vs Johnny Foreigner. The 'Brexit election' was Boris who believes in Britain, waves the flag & has the 'Churchill spirit' against an IRA supporter who won't sing the national anthem. 

I genuinely can't see how this can be undone in under a decade? Even if Johnson goes and Hunt/Sunak take over its a reset for them rather than a continuation. 

 

TLDR - we're screwed for yonks.

[BomberPat]

it doesn't help that Labour have been invisible.

Starmer has done fuck all to highlight what a bad job the Tories have done of handling the pandemic, or Brexit, or the general governance of the country and those still suffering under austerity politics. It's not even that Labour haven't offered an alternative, they've barely drawn attention to the need for an alternative. This should have been a single issue election, and Labour failed to have anything to say on that single issue, or anything else that matters to people at the moment. Like RedRooster said, everything has been opposition by focus group rather than having any kind of defining principle or moral centre. It feels like they tried to do for Labour what David Cameron did, initially, for the Tories - effectively, find a leader that's blandly competent and enough of a blank slate that you can project whatever you like on to them - but they've failed at even that. 

It's most frustrating because now is exactly the time to be hammering the Tories. If you can't bring about significant social change during, or immediately after, a national or international crisis, you're never going to be able to manage it during business as usual. If Continuity New Labour weren't obsessed with going scorched earth on the remains of the left-wing of the party, they could have pointed out how Corbyn's push for free/nationalised broadband would have been hugely beneficial during a year that many of us have spent working from home and home-schooling. Corbyn pushed against "vaccine nationalism" and advocated for the waiving of vaccine patents - a policy now adopted by Joe Biden, but still not by the Labour Party, meaning that we have a Labour Party that, on at least one issue, are to the right of the United States government! 
 

Labour has given us absolutely no reason to vote for them, and perhaps worse still they're showing a complete inability to reckon with why no one is voting for them. We can talk about the media being arraigned against Labour, but they haven't needed to print any negative stories about the Labour Party because Labour have had fuck all to say. You can't blame the media for this election.

We've had pundits and MPs this morning saying that the lesson is that Labour under Starmer haven't done enough to distance themselves from Corbyn, even though "we're not Jeremy Corbyn" has been the only consistent message they've put out. Even though they've secured fewer votes under Starmer than under Corbyn, it still manages to be Corbyn's fault. If Corbyn lost, there were people calling for his head. If Starmer loses, not only is it somehow still Corbyn's fault, but he's allowed time and second chances to lose again. Meanwhile, you get Peter Mandelson suggesting that Labour lost Hartlepool because people were voting in protest against Labour choosing David Miliband in 2010! It's frankly fucking insulting after years of the left-wing being called out of touch and obsessed with ideological purity and party factionalism to hear the bigwigs of the party come out with such utter bollocks.

 

I don't think it's as simple as patriotism vs. "anti-British" or "woke" or anything like that, though that plays into it. The simple truth is that the Tories stand for something, and Labour right now doesn't. Corbyn was a blip, and the last decade and a half has just been the continuing collapse of the New Labour project, and the sooner the authentocrats and spin doctors realise that, then they might be able to rebuild. But they've shown no proclivity towards facing up to that fact.

Edited May 7, 2021 by BomberPat

[Jazzy G]

The first past the post bollocks is the real problem here. Where your vote is cast tends to be more important than how your vote is cast. 

[Dead Mike]

2 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

it doesn't help that Labour have been invisible.

Starmer has done fuck all to highlight what a bad job the Tories have done of handling the pandemic, or Brexit, or the general governance of the country and those still suffering under austerity politics.

Well, that's provably untrue. He's highlighted the cronyism, inconsistencies, failures & lies throughout qt every PMQ's. The issue is that the public simply don't care. 

[RedRooster]

34 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

Well, that's provably untrue. He's highlighted the cronyism, inconsistencies, failures & lies throughout qt every PMQ's. The issue is that the public simply don't care. 

Or is it because journalists have failed when it comes to explaining why it matters? 

Take the Dyson/ventilator texts, for example. At face value, that actually seems quite reasonable. Johnson was working hard to secure ventilators to save lives, right?

That was the excuse rolled out on most outlets, including the broadcast media who are supposed to be more neutral in stance. 

However, very few journalists bothered to mention the fact that companies that actually had working ventilators ready to go were completely ignored by the Tories, even though some actively reached out to offer their services. 

By the time the Tories actually walked down that avenue, the ventilators had been sold to other countries (and the NHS in Scotland). This is cronyism that had the potential to cost lives. 

46 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Labour has given us absolutely no reason to vote for them, and perhaps worse still they're showing a complete inability to reckon with why no one is voting for them. We can talk about the media being arraigned against Labour, but they haven't needed to print any negative stories about the Labour Party because Labour have had fuck all to say. You can't blame the media for this election.

Have to say, I bloody love reading your political posts @BomberPat, whether I agree with them or not they're always thought-provoking and brilliant to read. 

Anyway...you're absolutely right. Starmer ignores a lot of Johnson's corruption because he's been advised that actually addressing it would be unpopular. However, by ignoring it he ends up sending the message that it is actually OK. I just don't agree that it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Starmer also has a tendency to avoid calling a spade a spade. I'm not going to pretend Nicola Sturgeon is perfect, but take this incident: 

Sturgeon isn't afraid to call Fransen a racist and a fascist. Now, this is obviously an extreme example and I don't want to out and out say that Starmer wouldn't do the same thing. However, he has, in the past, been in situations where he has been forced to engage with problematic viewpoints, and, as in the example from LBC I've linked to, he's failed to call them out for what they are in the way that Sturgeon did. 

If you're too scared to call a racist viewpoint out for what it is, frankly, you're failing as a political leader and as a human being. 

While Johnson is busy trying to pretend that he has principals, Starmer is actively making it look like he has none at all. 

[Dead Mike]

3 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

Or is it because journalists have failed when it comes to explaining why it matters? : 

. 

If you're putting your faith in Britain's majority Tory press to highlight Tory failings I feel you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

What corruption have Labour ignored though? The PPE contracts, failed track & trace, Dyson tax issue, undisclosed funding etc have all been highlighted repeatedly. Genuinely interested to see where the perceived gaps are? What's been missed?

[Keith Houchen]

10 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

Dyson tax issue,

With all the My Little Crony shit going on, it’s staggering to me how little the brother of the PM landed a cushy job at Dyson just before the texts has been reported. I think the Peter Stefanovic video being ignored and unreported is a fine example of bias. 

[BomberPat]

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I agree with Dominic Cummings' interpretation of the results more than pretty much anyone else I've read today - it's a long thread, with a lot of nonsense "beta/gamma" psychobabble and London-centric stuff, but good stuff in there;

 

Basically, appealing to "centrism" is doomed to fail, because the "centre ground" as espoused by pundits and politicians simply doesn't exist. The average person is a hodge-podge of viewpoints from right and left, not a cosy compromise between the two - for example, most people support tighter immigration controls and tougher sentences for criminals but also much higher taxes on the wealthy than are currently being espoused by either party. The importance is the message of how a politician reaches different people with a message that appeals to them, not trying to be all things to all men. 

He talks about how Leave's success in the EU Referendum came from a concerted effort to ignore the conventional wisdom of political pundits, and to reconfigure the political landscape on different terms to right/left/centre, and that was a staggering success that took most people by surprise. Labour have failed to play to that landscape, or to reconfigure the landscape in their own way - which is something Blair accomplished in '97. 

He also talks about politicians being too focused on media reality and not actual reality, and how Labour can't compete with Boris Johnson as a media politician, so need to really focus on reality, but have completely failed to do so, or to capitalise on the accidents of politics and so on. It's interesting reading, and I'm 100% on-board with the ideas about the myth of the centre, as surprising as it is to find myself nodding along with a Dominic Cummings rant.

 

I think, more than anything, voters are put off by politicians who feel like politicians first and public servants second. By that I mean the overt media polish, the stage management, the party line non-answers to questions, and a fixation on the bureaucracy of politics and the factionalism of party politics above and beyond the actual acts of getting out there and helping people. Jeremy Corbyn suffered in this regard, though largely not of his own making, because he was constantly involved in intra-party in-fighting that meant he was constantly "playing politics" whether he wanted to or not. Keir Starmer has suffered from this entirely of his, and the party's, own volition. Compare that to someone like Andy Burnham, who looks on track for a landslide win and largely because he comes across as an ordinary bloke prepared to stand up for his constituents, and not a "politician". 

[Carbomb]

2 hours ago, BomberPat said:

The Labour Party surely know that the media is against them. That knowledge should, more than almost anything else, inform their election strategy. If the newspapers are against you, how do you counter that and work outside of that system? How much more funding do you put into party political broadcasts, into social media advertising, in to old-fashioned doorstopping and canvassing, and basically everything you can do to work so that the newspapers aren't people's primary means of forming an opinion of your policies?

At the risk of sounding repetitive and one-note, I believe that Labour would be in a much better position had they stayed in touch with the roots they claimed to have, i.e. as a political representation of the mass of labour, and the co-operative movement. Had they organised at grass-roots level, dedicating resources and activists to helping people set up co-operatives and push the union movement en masse, we would have a huge chunk of the population witnessing and experiencing for themselves the benefits of socialism in action, and not just perceiving the narrow definition of government provision, with which the right can then scare the population with the usual narrative of "The taxes!"

As has been said, we're fucked for yonks, and a big part of that is because Labour's real political advantage is based on laying years, decades of meaningful groundwork at a social level, which they haven't done. Blair was the most egregious example, but he wasn't first, of a Labour leader moving the party away from the very reason they were supposed to have been founded in the first place. Instead, Labour is now playing on the same pitch as the Tories, on which they will be hammered on a regular basis.

[BomberPat]

Absolutely. It frustrates me no end to hear Corbyn supporters routinely maligned as middle class interlopers and entryists, and then the blame get placed at Corbyn's feet for losing "working class support". No, working class support has been taken for granted ever since Blair, and very little meaningful work has been done to win it back - and considerably more was done under Corbyn than under Starmer. 

Seeing Continuity New Labour argue that a return to the politics of Blair would somehow win back working class support, when he probably shoulders more blame than anyone aside from maybe Gordon Brown for losing working class support, and when his electoral success came from taking the working class vote for granted and winning over middle class voters, is infuriating. For as long as they continue to see the New Labour Project and cosy centrism as the key to electoral success, in stark contrast to all reality, they will continue to fail. The direction Corbyn was starting to take the party will be seen in the future as their last hope of salvaging themselves from this mess unless someone else does a better job of it, I firmly believe that, he was the only person to offer something beyond the terminal decline into irrelevance from Miliband to Starmer to whatever comes next.

It's all the fault of the PR machine that had countless people inside of politics and the media and nobody outside of that bubble convinced that the notions of "electability" and "grown up leadership" are somehow immutable concepts in no way impacted by issues, voters, or elections. 

[BrodyGraham]

3 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I agree with Dominic Cummings' interpretation of the results more than pretty much anyone else I've read today - it's a long thread, with a lot of nonsense "beta/gamma" psychobabble and London-centric stuff, but good stuff in there;

 

Basically, appealing to "centrism" is doomed to fail, because the "centre ground" as espoused by pundits and politicians simply doesn't exist. The average person is a hodge-podge of viewpoints from right and left, not a cosy compromise between the two - for example, most people support tighter immigration controls and tougher sentences for criminals but also much higher taxes on the wealthy than are currently being espoused by either party. The importance is the message of how a politician reaches different people with a message that appeals to them, not trying to be all things to all men. 

He talks about how Leave's success in the EU Referendum came from a concerted effort to ignore the conventional wisdom of political pundits, and to reconfigure the political landscape on different terms to right/left/centre, and that was a staggering success that took most people by surprise. Labour have failed to play to that landscape, or to reconfigure the landscape in their own way - which is something Blair accomplished in '97. 

He also talks about politicians being too focused on media reality and not actual reality, and how Labour can't compete with Boris Johnson as a media politician, so need to really focus on reality, but have completely failed to do so, or to capitalise on the accidents of politics and so on. It's interesting reading, and I'm 100% on-board with the ideas about the myth of the centre, as surprising as it is to find myself nodding along with a Dominic Cummings rant.

 

I think, more than anything, voters are put off by politicians who feel like politicians first and public servants second. By that I mean the overt media polish, the stage management, the party line non-answers to questions, and a fixation on the bureaucracy of politics and the factionalism of party politics above and beyond the actual acts of getting out there and helping people. Jeremy Corbyn suffered in this regard, though largely not of his own making, because he was constantly involved in intra-party in-fighting that meant he was constantly "playing politics" whether he wanted to or not. Keir Starmer has suffered from this entirely of his, and the party's, own volition. Compare that to someone like Andy Burnham, who looks on track for a landslide win and largely because he comes across as an ordinary bloke prepared to stand up for his constituents, and not a "politician". 

I'd have agreed with you on Burnham before his bid to be Labour leader. He always used to come across as a sensible, grounded MP, very much in tune with his base. Unfortunately once he made that bid for leadership, he went through the PR machine and came out looking and sounding like a centrist sex doll. The stand off on the Covid funding did him wonders from a perception stand point, but certainly amongst my friends the Mayoral position was very much seen as a chess move to get him back towards the leadership run. It'll probably work, but I'm still dubious.