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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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”
Nigel Lawson was undoubtedly the most influential Chancellor of my lifetime.
Although in his later years he was rightly regarded as a French villa-dwelling Brexiteer hypocrite and a climate change-denying crank, in his prime he reshaped the British economy and state ... 🧵
As Thatcher's longest-serving Chancellor he was key to her project
“our policies aimed at a conscious break … with the entire post-war political consensus … to change the change the entire culture of a nation from anti-profits, anti-business, government-dependent lassitude”
The Thatcher Government under Lawson privatised, liberalised and deregulated.
They tore up the social-democratic consensus of post-war Britain instituted reforms Lawson characterised as “pro-profit, pro-business, [with] robustly independent vigour and optimism”