It's all pretty academic anyway, as I reckon Long-Bailey's already been anointed.
Populism dominates the electoral agenda, and I can see no reason why that is going to change. Indeed, if you read Goodwin & Eatwell's (dry, even-handed, ultimately horrifying) book on populism, they are of the opinion that it's only going to grow. With the best will in the world, Long-Bailey is no populist and would probably - and, I dare say, rightly - be proud of that. But she'll never lead Labour to victory.
I think we could be looking at a decade in the wilderness unless something extraordinary happens. It's always possible that a Long-Bailey stitch-up might provoke something extraordinary. We live in interesting times.
"We all have flaws, and mine is being wicked."
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks 1951
I think there's plenty of time left in the process yet, I'm not sure Long-Bailey is so nailed on. But we shall see.
We are indeed recipients of that famous curse about interesting times, huh. I do think Labour are going to have to pick a hard path now between pragmatic media-friendly stuff and pure principles. I may be wrong but feel like the media deck is so stacked against them that it's futile chasing the former too hard, they need to find alternative ways of persuading people about the latter.
The thing is, what does "media-friendly" even look like these days? The entire media sphere is struggling to adapt to the post-print/post-broadcast world, and it seems that the non-traditional means of consumption, such as social media advertising, are being heavily weaponised by the right. They're controlling the narrative by fair means and foul, and no amount of solid principles can stand up to it when people don't even realise how much they're being manipulated.
> there's still a zillion Guardian (etc) columnists filing opinions like "We need someone like David Milliband" for some reason.
That's OK -the people being targeted by the nefarious social media tactics probably aren't reading the Guardian, and aren't going to vote for him regardless, but probably not for the reasons the Guardian columnists think. If Labour want to come back from the abyss, they need to look at why so many so-called "safe" Labour seats turned out not to be safe after all.
I'm still trying to get my head round it all myself, but it really does seem that Corbyn was absolute poison to people across a wide and diverse range of demographics. The IRA stuff stuck. The Hamas stuff stuck. The scruffiness stuck. The not watching the Queen's Speech probably stuck. The fence-sitting on Brexit meant neither side trusted him. The fact that he's a beardy throwback to some kind of '70s TV sitcom version of Labour with a wee cap and an allotment.The belief that Labour's financial policies are unworkable stuck. People STILL don't seem to understand how tax bands work. His attitude to Scotland and the SNP meant that up here, I saw plenty of Facebook posts from people voting SNP urging their English friends to vote Labour.
My Facebook feed was filled with lots and lots of people who were very enthusiastically pro-Corbyn, but if I dipped into Boomerspace*, all kinds of anti-Corbyn stuff was cropping up, organically or otherwise.
*I figure there needs to be a term for the bits of social media that are occupied by the less technically savvy. I mean, we've all been at it since long before social media was even a thing, but we are a tiny majority, and there's a huge parallel world of crappy Facebook "share if you agree" posts and people who actually read the comments under newspaper articles and people who share stuff about suspicious vans to their local area's Facebook groups, and all that kind of shite, and if we grew up thinking that "cyberspace" was kind of a rubbish term of t'interwebs back in the early 2000s, then it follows that "Boomerspace" is a perfectly acceptable term for what I'm describing. Mainly because when I thought about calling it "The Gammonsphere", I did a bit of a dry boak.
Someone in the Guardian did a good analysis a couple of weeks ago of how the demographics worked against Labour in these formerly industrial "safe" seats -- the young all hived off to cities for work, leaving behind their cranky OAP parents who tend to vote THAT way and are fed up with politicians of every stripe, but want to send a 'message' of the cut-off-own-nose kind. Kind of a passive gerrymandering when the constituencies aren't appropriately (+ timely) redrawn to reflect that.
“Tim Hortons is launching a new ad about how Gretzky first met Horton — and the story behind it is fascinating”
I could get with Boomerspace. It reminds me of that Innerspace film as well which for some reason resonated with me as a kid.
Regarding the Scotland thing, I'd understood that Scottish Labour was a poisoned well a good bit before Corbyn came to his late prominence, and did a fine job of getting itself torched in Scotland over the independence referendum and other things around that time. It seemed like he'd (or the entire leadership?) more or less abandoned any prospect of getting it back again now. I've not followed things at all closely up there though.
Yeah, Labour's been fading to irrelevance in Scotland for years now, especially after the referendum, when people realised the dichotomy of them siding with the Tories against independence and the SNP in Scotland, but promoting policies suspiciously similar to those of the SNP in England. Corbyn's always come across as not quite understanding why Labour have declined so much in Scotland, and while the SNP indicated they would be open to some kind of working arrangement, it was rebuffed by Labour and used as a negative thing by the Tories.
This is the unroll of a Twitter thread which I thought captured the problems the electorate had with Corbyn pretty well. It's couched in harsh terms - particularly the second tweet - but after that, it's rarely unfair. I think it also demonstrates why the current wine in a new bottle won't help.
"We all have flaws, and mine is being wicked."
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks 1951
It shouldn't be trashed, of course, but it probably needs to be tempered - I think the youth vote was attracted to an idealism that deterred the oldies.
"We all have flaws, and mine is being wicked."
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks 1951
In the run-up to the 2014 referendum, we got told that independence would lead to us being leaving the EU, the end of the NHS in Scotland, currency collapse, an economic downturn and so on and so forth. All of the arguments about why it was such a bad idea were then flipped for the Brexit referendum.
I'd rather England left the UK, but will happily take Scottish independence instead.
