The King Is Dead - Good Riddance!

Philip Collins has written the best political column I've read in a long time which contains some 'killer' lines for the Labour as the party elects a new leader.

I particularly enjoyed the following observations:

"Shouting pieties into the void, Mr Corbyn carried on as if nothing had happened."

"So far Sir Keir Starmer, the clear favourite, appears to be auditioning for the leading man in a gritty and miserabilist Ken Loach remake of A Very British Coup."

"Ms Phillips will not be cowed out of telling the party the truth it knows but wishes to avoid — that their own choice as leader in 2015 was a catastrophe."

"In peacetime Labour has only found, in Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, two winners. Since 1945 Labour has had 11 leaders, of whom three have won elections (Attlee, Wilson and Blair)."

"Labour has to abandon the canard that its manifesto was popular. The public was not fooled by its catalogue of free jewels. It was obvious that Labour was an incredible party of government and Mr Corbyn an incredible leader."

"Labour is now ten years into opposition and has only just got rid of its worst ever leader."

The truth hurts sometimes, but the truth is that Jeremy Corbyn and his 2019 manifesto managed to supersede Labour's 1983 election programme as the 'longest suicide note in history'.  

  

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/labour-has-to-bury-corbyn-if-it-wants-to-win-bh7c36mtc


Labour has to bury Corbyn if it wants to win

By philip collins - The Times

The Tories could be beaten at the next election but only by a leader who recognises how abjectly the left has failed


The Labour Party loses so often it is tempting to think that, at some level, it must enjoy the experience. Something about the retained self-righteousness, the continued purity, the unsullied refusal to bend towards electoral whim accords with a party whose advocates are so tediously fond of reminding you of the importance of their values. Watch Jeremy Corbyn’s extraordinary performance on Wednesday at the first prime minister’s questions since he delivered Labour’s worst election result since 1935. Shouting pieties into the void, Mr Corbyn carried on as if nothing had happened.

There is a risk that the contest to replace Mr Corbyn is conducted in the language of impending doom. So far Sir Keir Starmer, the clear favourite, appears to be auditioning for the leading man in a gritty and miserabilist Ken Loach remake of A Very British Coup. His opening remarks have all been about standing on the picket line at Wapping and the importance of attending the Durham Miners’ Gala.

It is a good job his first name is Keir. Imagine the uproar if his parents had called him Tony. Only Ramsay could be worse.

Most leadership candidates play to the gallery to some extent but the risk of pandering is that it can be hard to escape later. The main effect of campaigns is usually not to change the result but to define the candidate. Sir Keir started out talking like a loser and he needs to shift quickly into the idiom of victory. This is because Sir Keir is very likely to win.

The error of the left in this contest was in letting John McDonnell retire. Quite apart from the folly of choosing once again politics that have been decisively rejected, Rebecca Long Bailey is too new to politics to be ready to lead.

The left vote is likely to splinter as plenty of young Momentum activists prefer a candidate (Starmer) who fought the good fight on Europe and plenty of others know that another way of spelling RLB is IDS. Barry Gardiner would not have suggested he might run if he did not think the support of Len McCluskey and the Unite union could be up for grabs.

The prospect that the left really does not have a candidate is causing all sorts of excitement among Labour supporters of the Blair and Brown vintage. Their true candidate is Jess Phillips, who will invigorate the contest with candour even if she does not win. Ms Phillips will not be cowed out of telling the party the truth it knows but wishes to avoid — that their own choice as leader in 2015 was a catastrophe.

Frankly, anyone who ever thought Jeremy Corbyn would be prime minister doesn’t know what they are doing. The mysterious one-off election of 2017 blinded the Labour left into the belief that all the rules of British politics had been repealed and that it was now possible to win from the left. They haven’t and it is not; the Labour Party never wins when the left is in control.

In fact, the Labour Party does not win very often, whoever is in control. Since 1979 there have been 28 years of Tory government, which will stretch to 32 by 2024, and only 13 years of Labour, all of which were won by Tony Blair, the unperson. By 2024 Labour will have been out of power for 14 years.

In peacetime Labour has only found, in Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, two winners. Since 1945 Labour has had 11 leaders, of whom three have won elections (Attlee, Wilson and Blair). Attlee and Wilson also lost elections and so join the seven other losers (Gaitskell, Callaghan, Foot, Kinnock, Brown, Miliband and Corbyn) in Labour’s roll call of failure.

The only two who were unbowed were John Smith, who died before fighting an election, and Tony Blair. Of the 13 leaders of the Tory party since 1945, only three have not become prime minister. They were William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, all seen off by Blair.

It might be wise, therefore, to listen to what the man has to say on the matter. In a long article just after the election Mr Blair wrote that “the Labour Party is presently marooned on Fantasy Island. I understand would-be leaders will want to go there and speak the native language in the hope of persuading enough eventually to migrate to the mainland of Reality. But there is a risk that the only people speaking the language of Reality to the party are those that don’t aspire to lead it.”

This is advice Sir Keir Starmer would be well advised to take to heart because he could, conceivably, win. Not just win the Labour leadership but, with the correct platform and political position, win an election.

The Conservative Party is going to find government difficult. The economy is fragile and its new coalition of voters in the Midlands and the north will be impatient for the benefits of the policies that Boris Johnson has yet to devise. The Tory victory contains a lot of marginal seats and, 14 years into Tory rule of one kind or another, a Labour leader who looks and sounds prime ministerial could definitely win in 2024.

That will require a political choice. Labour has to abandon the canard that its manifesto was popular. The public was not fooled by its catalogue of free jewels. It was obvious that Labour was an incredible party of government and Mr Corbyn an incredible leader. Emily Thornberry, whose leadership campaign is struggling to take wing, now declares that the people around Mr Corbyn worried her. This is the gang she was campaigning to put into Downing Street. It is a good thing the rest of us acted on what she thought rather than what she said.

The early stages of the leadership contest have been an attempt, by all except Ms Phillips, not to besmirch the magnificent legacy of Mr Corbyn. The candidates are scared of their own party but they must not be. Sir Keir will find, much as Ed Miliband did, that if he does win a victory by pandering, then betraying that victory later is harder than it might seem. Better to win a victory you are proud of, and which is serviceable later, than one you are forced to disown.

If the winner were able to stand on a firm platform there could be a glimpse of light for the Labour Party. After the Thatcher victory of 1979 Labour took a detour through its hard left and gifted power to the Tories for 18 years. By 1983, four years in, Neil Kinnock had begun the slow process of recovery.

Labour is now ten years into opposition and has only just got rid of its worst ever leader. Time is short and, as Auden wrote, history to the defeated may say alas but cannot help nor pardon. We will find out now if they are serious about winning or not.

The King Is Dead - Long Live The Queen! (08/01/20)

Rebecca Long-Bailey has joined the race to become the new Labour leader and is apparently part of a continuity Corbyn 'dream ticket' along with Richard Burgon who is standing for election as deputy leader.

In setting out her election stall Rebecca gave Jeremy Corbyn  '10 out of 10' for his leadership despite the fact that Jeremy generated the worst performance ratings of any leader in Labour's history.

Doubling down on her theme that the voters, rather than the party leadership were wrong, Rebecca added:

“I don’t just agree with the policies, I’ve spent the last four years writing them."

Now I don't know what's happened to Denis Healey's famous old maxim 'When you're in a hole, stop digging!', but Boris Johnson and the Conservatives must be rubbing their hands with glee.

Meanwhile Sadiq Khan the Labour Mayor of London says that voters 'got it right' in deciding to give Corbyn the thumbs down. 

Good for him - well said!

  

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sadiq-khan-voters-right-to-shun-jeremy-corbyn-3fmm5lsqd

Sadiq Khan interview: voters right to shun Jeremy Corbyn

By Rosamund Urwin - The Sunday Times

Khan with Luna on Tooting CommonRAY WELLS

Sadiq Khan admits that he believes voters “got it right” on December 12. “Hand on heart, did we deserve to win the general election?” the Labour mayor of London asks. “Probably not, so the British public got it right.”

Khan, who is standing for re-election on May 7, calls the result “catastrophic”. He is at pains to reject Jeremy Corbyn’s claim Labour “won” the argument, stating baldly: “We lost the argument.”

I meet Khan and his labrador Luna on Tooting Common, south London. As Labour’s most popular serving politician, according to YouGov, his life is a stream of selfie requests: “Only twice have I said no. Once when I was rushing to catch a plane, the other when I was at A&E with a family member.”


In the 2016 mayoral election, Khan won the largest personal mandate of any politician in UK history, and will be courted by all the leadership candidates. He will not reveal who he backs until later in the campaign, but friends expect him to support Sir Keir Starmer.

Khan, 49, does not want a “coronation”, but says there is one attribute the new leader must have: “I want a winner. The candidates need to persuade us members that they have the best analysis of why we lost, and to set out the path to victory.”

He rejects the idea that the next leader must be female. “It should be the best person for the job,” he says. “You shouldn’t be excluded because you’re a man, but I do find it disappointing that the Labour Party hasn’t had a woman leader.”

Starmer’s other problem is that his seat, Holborn and St Pancras, is in London. The capital has become a byword for privilege in Labour.

“The prime minister is a Londoner who went to Eton,” Khan bats back. “The idea you can’t win an election because you’re a London MP is nonsense. And London is a tale of two cities: you’ve got areas with Michelin-starred restaurants and a proliferation of food banks.”

Khan was not consulted on holding a general election by the Labour leadership.

“Many of us thought it was a foolish thing to do, [as] it was an election chosen by Johnson to suit himself,” he says. “If your opponent thinks it is a good idea, why would you want to agree to it?”

He believes those advising Corbyn were “hoist with their own petard”: “They thought that the 2017 result was an aberration, that we should have won, and with one final heave, we would win in 2019,” he says. “Now we have at least five years of a Boris Johnson, hard-Brexit government. Those who were responsible for that decision need to put their hands up.”

Should Corbyn have accepted more of the blame? “What Jeremy and those around him should have the humility to recognise is [they] let Corbyn be Corbyn, and we got pasted,” he says.

Khan believes Labour needs deeper change than at the top. “It’s not just about changing the lead singer, it’s the whole band,” he says. “The music was wrong.”

He reels off reasons Labour lost. “I probably knocked on more doors than any candidate, and people didn’t have confidence in the party and our values,” he says. “They thought we were making promises just to win votes. And they thought we were a racist party because of our failure to tackle anti-semitism.”

It is the last part that pains Khan most. A Muslim, his first act as mayor was to attend a Holocaust memorial.

“We’re Labour, a party that’s about anti-racism,” he says. “For the leadership not to understand the impact of us being seen to condone anti-semitism is heartbreaking. We’ve demonstrated a breathtaking lack of emotional intelligence — or humanity.”

He has Jewish friends who did not vote for Labour because they felt it was racist. “And you know what? If a dog barks, and a duck quacks . . .” He tails off and does not finish the analogy, but adds: “It’s a disqualification to be Labour leader if you don’t understand it and don’t have a clear plan to address it.”

Does that mean throwing people out? “You’ve got to. If someone takes us to court, so be it. The ease with which Alastair Campbell was chucked out for talking about voting for another party, and yet you have anti-semites still in, beggars belief.”

He is tired of the “what-aboutery” deployed to defend Labour. “Sure, the Tories may be Islamophobic,” he says. “That doesn’t concern me. The standards I expect from Labour are higher than other parties.”

He points to the case of the former Labour mayor, Ken Livingstone. “He said things that were clearly anti-semitic,” Khan says. “He remained a Labour member for two years until he quit. He wasn’t kicked out.”

Unless anti-semitism and racism are dealt with at their roots, they become “normalised”, he adds. “It is toxic. I met decent people who said, ‘It’s a bit smelly, this anti-semitism stuff,’ and they didn’t vote for us.”

The other problem on the doorstep was Labour’s muddled position on Brexit. “People who voted remain didn’t think we were authentically remain, and people who voted leave didn’t think we were credibly leave. It was the worst of both worlds.”

He believes Johnson has misled voters. “People think it will all be signed, sealed and delivered on January 31,” he says. “But then we have 11 months to sort out a deal with the EU, or else we fall off a cliff edge. All those problems in Operation Yellowhammer could still happen at the end of the year. That’s not gone away, it’s been put on pause.”

Khan opposed Brexit but sees it as an opportunity for greater devolution to the regions, including London. He would like more powers over education, business rates and house-building.

“There’s no point in taking back control if it means Brussels will go to Whitehall — Brussels should go to City Hall and town halls around the country,” he says. “I don’t argue for London to get more resources, what I argue is for us to be in charge of the resources we have.”

Khan took over from Johnson at City Hall in 2016. “Boris had checked out two years before,” he claims. “He got to cut the ribbons to the projects begun by Ken Livingstone, but there were no ribbons for me to cut. There were messes to clear up, and projects to begin.”

Victory in May is expected to come easily for Khan. YouGov has him 27 points ahead of the Tory candidate, Shaun Bailey. His worry is voter complacency.

Khan frets that Labour is on a losing streak. “Elections can be habit-forming: you can be habitual winners or habitual losers,” he says. “And I want us to win.”