The key question - the hard question - is the one @jemgilbert has asked elsewhere: why were Labour likely to lose in December, regardless of its position on Brexit?
You can argue that we could have held onto the 2017 position with some tweaks. But it's a wild leap to claim that that was a winning proposition by last December. It wasn't even persuasive to many members of the Party by then.
Labour's problems run much deeper than the Brexit issue. It still seeks to be the sole competitor with the Conservatives in a FPTP system when electoral geography almost guarantees that they will remain as junior partners in such a system.
(Even adopting a coalitional approach around constitutional reform isn't a winning proposition if the Party doesn't develop communicative assets that are a match for the right's propaganda machine, itself a coalition between 'respectable mainstream media' and the far-right ...
... Brexit was shaped as a wedge issue by an overwhelmingly pro-Conservative, anti-socialist comms regime. In 2015 people voted for the Conservatives because they feared that Miliband would be a puppet of Alex Salmond. There is no end to what the fantasy factory can produce.)
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Absolutely loved this conversation between @AyeishaTS @francesnorthrop and @KeirMilburn about Abundance, real and fake, on the @NEF podcast. FN makes such an important point about the current state's inability to recognise the capacity that exists in ... podbean.com/media/share/di…
@AyeishaTS @francesnorthrop @KeirMilburn @NEF ... particular places: a corporate type in a suit with a business, yes; people who know somewhere and have a deep sense of its needs and capacities, not so much. A big challenge for constitutional reform is to create a state that doesn't default to partnership with the rich ...
@AyeishaTS @francesnorthrop @KeirMilburn @NEF ... but has a deep affinity with a cooperative civil society. (This has preoccupied me for a while: it's one of the themes in my 2018 paper on constitutional reform for @DemocracyCollab: How do we connect a democratic state to a mutualised economy? thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/…
This is a useful way to think about how a mutualised BBC would differ from the current "public service" model. A BBC political reporter published an article on the 18th August. On the 20th a member of the public has tried to bring their attention to what they see as errors.🧵
As it stands there is no way to adjudicate between the professional journalist and the member of the public, even though the issues raised are incredibly important. In a mutualised BBC members' panels would be on hand to examine controversies like this, and make a determination.
The panel could take representations from interested parties and interview the journalist and their editors. They could then make a ruling, which would have to be publicised by the BBC at least as prominently as the original article, if they were found to be at fault.
In his latest explainer @garyseconomics touches on a key issue, the lack of seriousness in the media about how successful economic reform would need to organised. We need high-level, widely shared, discussion of what we've been doing since 1979 ...
... where it has led us, and we need to change our political economy to improve living standards for the majority against a background of geopolitical instability and climate change. But post-2008 the media prefer to believe one weird trick will be enough to appease the gods.
Again, we could have public media that organises and manages just such a debate, that tests all kinds of propositions against the evidence in a way that is compelling and enlightening to the citizenry, who themselves participate actively and directly in the process. But we don't.
🧵Highly paid BBC presenters who express astonishment at the very idea of taxing wealth aren't doing much to dispel the widespread perception, well documented in Ofcom's audience research, that they are 'out of touch with ordinary people.' ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/res…
From 2028 the BBC will operate under a new 10-year Charter. It's important that we have a broad and deep debate about its structure and operating assumptions before then. As the public lose confidence in the wider establishment there's a danger that the BBC will go down with it.
For example, the 2024 British Social Attitudes Survey talks of 'a stark decline in public trust' in the UK's governing institutions: a full 45% of us 'almost never trusted' politicians to put the nation's interests first.') natcen.ac.uk/publications/b…
FWIW, some thoughts on the influencer and the party / Stephenson and the left conversation. There's bound to be tension between the dynamics of the attention economy and the needs of political projects. Individuals empowered by platforms can rapidly build vast audiences.🧵
Those individuals are not tied to collectives, and are only really vulnerable to the platform owners (which can snuff them out, or promote them, at will). They can embrace left-adjacent themes and drop them as opportunities present themselves. (I am old enough to remember ...
... Russell Brand jousting with Paxman and being courted by Miliband in 2015.) But the left's response has to be to build collective agents that are themselves capable of reaching large audiences by dint of convening large numbers of individuals as rule-bound plural subjects ...
In the new NS podcast the team discuss a focus group in Sittingbourne and Sheppey, made up of Conservative to Labour switchers. One presenter, the one who doubted Corbyn had much of a personal vote in Islington, was "a bit taken aback at how punchy and disappointed they were."
It's striking that a political journalist needs to go to a structured focus group to find out what people outside Westminster are feeling. But I suppose this reflects the existing balance of power: voters are a background feature in a drama with only a handful of speaking parts.
Marr noted that politics outside Westminster was different, and that Burnham and Sarwar are more interesting and self-assured than most Cabinet members. But the podcast was 100% Westminster-brained, in that its premise was that 20224 Con-Lab switchers were key.