Thread by @MarkHazard2020

Labour Party may be charged with taking its traditional working class support for granted whilst pandering to urban youth, a minority of whom, admittedly, were at least born into the working class. Labour went into #GE2017 pledged to scrap universal university tuition fees ...

... on its first day in office and with a perceived intent to, at some point, write off outstanding student debt, incurred to pay for tuition fees. Only a minority of 18 to 21 year olds go to university, a disproportionate number of them are drawn from the middle and upper class.

In comparison, Labour had no hard edged pledges on education for the many whose offspring do not expect to go to university. In prioritising scrapping fees, Labour pandered not just to urban youth, but also their families etc. It also planned to leave in place £7bn out of £9bn ..

... of working age Tory social security cuts, including the benefits freeze that even IDS said was a measure too far. Labour set aside, provisionally, a sum of money for Sure Start that wouldn't have wholly reversed Tory cuts in the programme let alone allowed for additional ...

... investment in it. Labour's 2017 Conference saw Momentum lobby members to vote against a substantive discussion of Corbyn's Social Security policy, in favour of a beflagged, pointless, virtue signalling debate on Palestine. A love in that failed to change Labour's settled ...

... policies on the topic. This farcical display, understandably, was widely reported in the media and was hardly visual and oral evidence that Labour under Corbyn was reaching out to the voters that Corbynistas said Labour had lost and would come home to that self styled ...

... champion of the working class, Jeremy Corbyn. At its parallel The World Transformed Conference, People's (snigger) Momentum held a number of workshops. This was one such. I had until yesterday thought it rather arrogant of a bunch of middle class puppies and ageing hounds ...

... to determine the politics of the working class. It had never occurred to me to think that they thought they were working class. The exclusion of BAME from the working class for the exercise is evidence of Labour taking another group of voters for granted. BAME may be ...

... predisposed to vote Labour, still, because high profile members of the Tory Party are not the sort of folk with whom many may easily identify. That may not be assumed to be a permanent state of affairs going forward. In the 1960s, it used to be said, if you're not part of ...

... the solution then you are part of the problem. Many of those Corbyn attracted into Labour have exacerbated an existing problem. Momentum, primarily set up as Corbyn's Praetorian Guard to protect him from enemies both within & without the party were disposed to make matters ..

... worse. The organisation, unintentionally one hopes, somewhat similar to the SS, still provides a home for the dross of the Far & Hard Left with a fair few anti-Semites & similar thrown in for good measure. Momentum provides a bodyguard for Corbyn, remains outside the ..

... formal structure of the party & is led & owned by Jon Lansman, a staunch decades old ally of Corbyn. It now plans to preserve Jeremy's legacy. You would think a Hard Brexit, the achievement of which Corbyn contributed, & an 80, now 81 seat majority for Boris Johnson was ...

... sufficient memorial enough?

... It is, incidentally, extremely insulting to claim, as some do, that Momentum is akin with the Fabian Society. I don't doubt there are some genuine, principled people, may be even a large minority, within Momentum, but surely its time the ...

... organisation was wound up now it has no raison d'etre? Courtesy of Hartlepool, we are hearing from the likes of "Meddling" Len "Lexiteer" McCluskey and, surprisingly, Khalid Mahmood about Labour being disconnected from a portion of its traditional support. I'm sure Nandy ...

... and Cruddas will riff off the latter's book to offer their own analysis. Nandy is, arguably, the dimmest, most ambitious, nakedly opportunist Labour leadership contender of recent years. One minute lecturing the party on its moving away from its roots, the next planning to ..

... sit on the panel of a fringe group meeting at Labour's 2019 National Conference with a founder of the BDS movement, with its overtones of Nazi era boycotts of Jewish businesses and, none other, than down with the proles McCluskey and at Labour leadership hustings in 2020 ...

... making a complete ass of herself in grubbing for votes amongst party faithful.

Nandy is actually a fully paid up member of the bourgeoisie she mocks, but, in her head that cannot be, because she sits for a seat like Wigan and not one in North London.

https://twitter.com/MarkHazard2020/status/1379026442898571265?s=20

Nandy is a case study in how worse things might become for Labour. On at least two separate occasions, she has publicly uttered Delphically, "There is a wealth of mining experience in my constituency." She whines about the unfairness of Manchester and Liverpool being the ...

... economic drivers of the North West without, as far as I am aware, giving grounds for private sector investment in Wigan. She sneers at the work of think tanks in London, but in Wigan patronises a think tank in Bolton, set up by a former professional gambler turned ...

... self taught, amateur psephologist, who worked for UKIP at a by election campaign and provided practical support to the Leave Campaign. The Centre for Towns waxes lyrical about the plight of places like Rhyl and Wigan, but the last time I looked was still majoring in data ...

... cutting. May be it has finally dawned on Nandy & Ward that a Hard Brexit makes it even less likely that places like Rhyl & Wigan will attract serious private sector investment. It won't stop, I imagine, Nandy thinking that a bit more public money spent in her constituency ...

... will be a catalyst for socio-economic regeneration. Nandy is a close ally of Keir Starmer, who, in endorsing Johnson's Hard Brexit deal painted himself into a corner and Labour into a position where it will never have a credible economic policy ...

https://twitter.com/MarkHazard2020/status/1386694141942321153?s=20

... sufficiently attractive to a business community, many of whom feel spurned by Johnson's two word business strategy, his cavalier approach to the Brexit negotiations and his response to what has predictably come afterwards. Nandy attended the launch of Jon Cruddas's book ...

... on the afternoon of Tuesday 4th May. Some of us gave Corbyn a kicking for attending a similar event, on the same Tuesday before the same set of elections as last Thursday when he should have been out on the stump. From what I could gather from the recent interview with ...

... Cruddas in The Guardian about his new book, he didn't bother to consult much, if at all with his constituents about the opinions he sets out therein about what they want from life. I noted references in the interview to tired old ideas like works councils, worker directors ..

... the wasting of public money on hard skills training of the unemployed ... The latter is a default position for politicians of all stripes. If you train them, it is believed, the jobs will materialise just as the course ends & requiring the exact skills taught on the course.

My Dad was amused by the talk of works councils and worker directors. Ideas that never go out of fashion amongst some on the left. If Cruddas had bothered to visit Toyota in Burnaston, he would have learnt of the seventy year old management philosophy the company has followed ...

... for all that time with one exception. The company has driven power and responsibility down within its structure and funds the training of its workforce to be capable of continuously improving the quality of the cars they produce. At Burnaston, in a normal year, they mass ...

... produce 150,000 cars to bespoke standards. My Dad, who, like me, was born into the white working class in North Birmingham, started out his working life on the shop floor, but ended it as management. A shop steward for many decades, he tried to persuade the management ...

... of the plastics company where he worked for most of his adult life to adopt the approach of Toyota. They didn't. The company kept on shrinking stuck in the mindset of yesteryear, referenced by a certain Boris Johnson in 2013. Enlightened trades unionists like the inclusive ..

... management approach at Toyota, fostering as it does less confrontational, more productive inter-actions between representatives and bosses. Cruddas and Nandy, neither of whom seem to have had, what many of their constituents would regard, as proper jobs are seemingly ...

... unwilling to risk having their theories challenged and to themselves question their cherished beliefs by contact with real people and businesses. Better to create and foster stereotypes that providence evidence for your ideas than start from scratch. If you think I'm being ..

... hard on Nandy then reflect on the fact that Nandy 'lost' the referendum election results of 2016 for the whole of the English Midlands in March 2017 when delivering a key note speech on her Small Towns thesis at an IPPR Conference. The results fundamentally undermined her ...

... argument.

Labour now finds itself in the ludicrous position of having in Keir Starmer, a leader, born in the white working class to a nurse & a toolmaker, who has recruited as his senior adviser a middle class woman with a degree in Politics from the University of York ...

& an MSc in Global Politics from Birkbeck at the University of London, who has written a book on the working class, to reconnect him & by extension the Labour Party with his roots.

The proportion of Labour's membership estimated to be ABC1 increased from 70% under Miliband ...

... to 77% under Corbyn.

That still leaves 23% of the membership as C2DE with whom Starmer might have consulted before hiring Claire Ainsley as his senior policy adviser.

jodatu.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/why…

May I say how amused I was to learn of Khalid Mahmood's intervention in the debate yesterday. I won't dwell on CLP politics and the very parochial issues that may be behind his piece. However, in my time as a member of the Birmingham Labour Party I have never heard much, if ...

... any discussion of Israel/Palestine. I have heard significant talk about Kashmir. One may contend that it is not a pukka Labour Party meeting in Birmingham, if the topic is not raised in a question and answer session with a rambling discourse, inviting from the chair, "Is ...

... there a question in there, comrade?" I have not heard how the Muslim membership of the Labour Party in the city of my birth, reacted to a lot of mostly white, middle class folk materialising from nowhere and getting within a year or so a debate on Palestine when they'd ...

... been spending decades trying and failing to get one on Kashmir. Labour Party policy on both issues, decided at conferences past, is to encourage the stakeholders in both issues to abide by the relevant UN Resolutions. A considered position unlikely to alarm the average ...

... voter in Hartlepool, Islington, Wigan, Dagenham or Perry Barr or almost anywhere else in the UK.

Going forward Labour has options. Ideally, Starmer needs to scrap Corbyn's pledge to do away with universal university tuition fees, kicking off a policy review from scratch; ...

... look at the nuts and bolts of Labour's Campaign strategy prior to #GE1997, including the loose alliances it formed with other parties on issues like electoral reform; look to learn not just from the failures of Thursday 6th May, but the successes, too, thin on the ground ...

... though they may be; end amateur hour in the Labour Leader's Office and nonsense policy announcements like the one below; remember Labour partly won in 1997, because it crafted a Manifesto combining policies with wide appeal with initiatives designed for specific groups ...

... amongst the electorate. Some Corbynistas gave the game away early on by saying Labour had done nothing for them in office. Middle class, graduate white collar workers were unlikely to have benefited from the NMW and similar, but I bet they liked the FoI Act.

End paralysis by focus group. They have their place in policy formulation, but they should inform the process, be about discussion of ideas, including sense checks and not compromise the ethos of the party or lead to wishy washy positions.

https://twitter.com/MarkHazard2020/status/1379447201483608064?s=20

These focus groups and the conclusions drawn from them are understood to have contributed to the decision that led Starmer to recruit their organiser as his senior adviser.

jodatu.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/the…

During the 2017, Labour leadership election Owen Smith produced an interesting set of policy ideas, including the one discussed herein.

They are surely worth rolling into any policy process.

jodatu.wordpress.com/2021/01/02/kei…

A process that should involve folk from outside the party drawn from the centre left, centre and centre right.

Is Starmer up to it, though?

He is, at heart, a manager. DPP's are risk averse by nature. Starmer also seems uncomfortable with consultation and delegation.

Where some speak of people of somewhere or nowhere, Starmer spoke of places not people in his New Year Message for 2021 ...

Sadly, Starmer presents, too often, as a Speak Your Weight Machine.

jodatu.wordpress.com/2020/12/31/kei…

“I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation."

"If he sees suffering, privation or injustice he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control."

"He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine.”

Aneurin Bevan in an interview with Robin Day on 28th April 1959.

jodatu.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/is-…