Five years ago today, Theresa May announced she was making a statement in Downing Street ...
... despite repeated assurances that "I'm not going to be calling a snap election", she called a snap election 🧵
The subject of the statement was not announced, speculation swirled: Had a Royal died? Was she resigning? Was she calling a snap election?
May wanted a bigger majority to deliver Brexit, and said the election was about two issues: Brexit & leadership
The press was enthused
The pollsters at the time confirmed the confidence of the Tory press:
ComRes put the Conservatives on 50% and Labour on 25%.
YouGov had the Tories on 49% and Labour on 24%
Despite the polls, there was confidence in Corbyn's team that the ground could shift and Labour could make gains
A positive strategy was put together: to register voters, to engage non-voters & mobilise members to campaign in Tory seats
Such optimism was not shared in Labour HQ
Labour HQ's proposed strategy was to write-off marginal Labour-held seats, fund Labour seats with majorities of 5000+, with no offensive targets
Despite this approach being rejected, we now know from #Labourleaks report that a secret operation was established to channel funds
It's also worth recalling that Theresa May's personal polling was extremely strong at the outset of the campaign ... hence why her strategists opted for "strong and stable" as the slogan, and personalised their campaign around her ...
Within days, the 'For the Many, Not the Few' slogan had encapsulated Labour's framing of the election
The slogan - an adaptation of Shelley's "Ye are many, they are few" - summed up the core tenets of Corbynism: for public ownership, redistributive taxation and anti-austerity
With internal division suppressing Labour's output for much of the previous 2 years, this was the first time since the summer of 2015 that the policy platform - on which Jeremy Corbyn had been overwhelmingly elected as Labour leader - had got a decent airing. It proved popular…
As Kavanagh & Cowley write in their review of the election, "separating out the impact of Corbyn (as party leader) and the party manifesto (which only existed in that form because of Corbyn's leadership) is close to impossible"
In the 2017 election, the Labour vote increased by more between elections than at any time since 1945 - up 9.6 percentage points and 3.5m votes.
It also marked the first time since 1997 that Labour had gained seats in a general election.
🧵ends
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In 2015, 2017 and 2019, the Labour manifestos set out policies on the Winter Fuel Payment and on social care costs.
In 2024, the manifesto was silent on both.
Call me a cynic, but I think they may have been planning these cuts in advance ...
🧵
In 2015 (Ed Miliband was Leader), the manifesto said
🔴“Labour supports measures to cap the costs of care”
🔴“We have taken the tough choice to restrict Winter Fuel Payments for the richest five per cent of pensioners”
The Reeves policy removes the WFP from c.90% of pensioners
In 2017 (Jeremy Corbyn was leader), the manifesto pledged to:
🔴“place a maximum limit on lifetime personal contributions to care costs, raise the asset threshold below which people are entitled to state support, and provide free end of life care”
🔴And:
Today marks the beginning of the end of the 30 year failure that was privatisation of Britain's railways.
This afternoon MPs will debate the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill - which will see private rail franchises taken into public ownership as they expire.
🧵
Public opinion was against the privatisation of British Rail 30 years ago, and has remained against it ever since.
Most polls show about a two-thirds majority in favour of rail public ownership, including a majority of Tory voters.
In 1993, in his final conference speech, Labour leader John Smith said:
“There is barely a single person in this country outside Downing Street who thinks it is a good idea to privatise British Rail”
But Smith tragically died in May 1994, and Blair junked renationalisation
Benn was a former Cabinet Minister, one of Labour’s longest-serving MPs, and an inspirational figure on the Labour left for decades … he inspired me 🧵
Although he never led Labour, or even held one of the great offices of state, he is in the rare company of having a political philosophy named after him: ‘Bennism’.
He left a legacy Labour party reform, anti-war activism, constitutional reform, and popularising politics ...
The thing Benn had, that too many politicians today lack, is not only political principle but a philosophy
A socialist, yes, but Benn was above all a fundamentalist for democracy – that’s what drove his socialism
Democracy was the golden thread that ran through his politics ...
19 councils have had requests for 'Emergency Financial Support'* agreed by Government
As I've said for a few years now, the crisis in council finances is not a few bad apples, but the whole barrel-load of austerity passed on by the Government
*This isn't funding. It's debt. 🧵
Councils in England are getting c.£15bn LESS in central government funding than they were in 2015.
This announcement does not provided any of these 19 councils with a penny more from Government
Instead, it allows them to sell council assets to pay for under-resourced services:
So, to be clear, councils are selling off their assets to pay for statutory services (children in care, adult social care, housing homeless, etc) because Government has cut council funding and not increased funding to meet rising demand.
The Chilcot Report was published showing that Tony Blair exaggerated the case for war, that Iraq posed no military threat to the UK, that Blair had committed the UK to war come what may, and that there was no post-invasion strategy 🧵
Military families who had lost loved ones in the war called for Blair to be prosecuted for war crimes. Sadly, 7 years on, the alleged war criminal remains at large.
This is how the nation's newspapers reacted ...
In the House of Commons, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the invasion was an “act of military aggression” that “fuelled and spread terrorism across the region”