Thread by @mafevema

Excellent from @Neal_Compass.
Trying to decipher why Labour rejects PR & #ProgressiveAlliance& whether it can change (answer: very unlikely)
prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/labou…

The scale of the electoral mountain Labour must climb is eye-watering. It would need the same sort of historic swing that achieved a landslide in 1945 or 1997 simply to eke out a bare majority of one (which would today require a gain of 124 seats).

With no sign of the SNP hold on Scotland weakening and the possibility of punishing boundary changes kicking in, outright victory would surely take an intellectual and organisational effort of a sort of which there is no sign around the Leadership.

But instead of grasping it at conference, Starmer made the bald claim that to get a Labour government you need to vote Labour. Even if your goal as a voter is to put him in No 10, this is abjectly untrue in, for starters, the 80 seats where the Lib Dems run the Tories second.

Seasoned conference observers &campaigners all agree that if the Leader’s Office had wanted to shift 2 or 3 of the unions, such as USDAW, from anti-PR to neutral or nudged Unison from neutral to pro-reform, they could have done it. But they didn’t.They wanted FPTP. The question

is why?
The only rational basis for choosing no power over a shot at shared power is that the advantages the Labour machine derives over the third and fourth parties by its guaranteed second place is too great a gift to give up.

As one tweeter put it after the conference, for the party machine “hegemony of opposition is more important than power.”

Labour is, and maybe can only be, the creation of the institutions and struggles of the late Victorian era. Its abiding sentiment is rooted in a mix of Leninism and Fabianism, which shared a managerial centralism.

At its worst the Labour machine practices a politics of abuse, almost taunting its own electorate and membership for having “nowhere else to go.” FPTP is the means to enforce this “them or us” binary choice.

Corbyn did no more and no less to advance the cause of PR pluralism than Starmer has done. They are both machine politicians.

Given the premium on controlling the machine, there is no room for compromise or negotiation with other factions any more than there is with other parties. It is always all or nothing. Us or them

Salvation for progressive hopes lies in coming to understand that pluralism is not a sign of weakness, but a profound modern reality—and therefore a strength. It must be embraced not just instrumentally, for the purpose of winning, but as an intrinsic good in itself.