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4 years ago I was tramping the streets of Birmingham and Coventry trying to limit the damage Corbyn's leadership had done to our chances of winning the election 1/ here's what I wrote three days later ...
2/ I said then we could turn things around in 5 years if we combined economic radicalism with mainstream Labour politics on crime, defence and national security ... I underestimated how badly Skripal had damaged us, how quickly Johnson's populism would fall apart, and how reluctant the left would be to learn lessons ...
3/ Some Labour ppl were saying we would need 10 years and to become a liberal party and achieve PR etc... I knew we could do it in 5 with the right leader... and because the left basically sidelined @labourlewis - because Lexit - it had to be Keir...
@labourlewis 4/ What still stuns me is the nostalgia industry around Jeremy. He's demoralised an entire generation of activists and compounded the errors of 2018/19 with his reaction to EHRC and Ukraine: not a single attempt to explain or account for failure was made...
@labourlewis 5/ To see activists in their early 30s living on the nostalgia of 2017 is truly disconcerting: I was in the Miners Strike and on the Poll Tax riot and in Prague and in the room with Syriza ... I live for the future: for a transformative Labour government. Still more...
@labourlewis 6/ ... to see "left" people learning nothing from 2019 defeat, and to go on parroting a Dolchstoßlegende four years on is truly mind blowing ... not even the CP, at its dumbest in the 1930s, got trapped in that kind of maudlin narrative. So...
7/ I want to see a left that is part of the Starmer project - that can fight the corner of trade unions, social justice campaigns, and climate radicalism - and mobilise against the resistance we will face in government ... not just from corrupt Tory business interests but from the far right...
@labourlewis 8/ If you'd asked me was this 👇🏽 a possibility at this time in 2019 I would have said "maybe". We should be proud of what we've achieved ✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼
@labourlewis 9 / Here's the whole snap analysis I wrote 4 years ago...
paulmason.org/wp-content/upl…
paulmason.org/wp-content/upl…
@labourlewis 10/ And here's what I said the night after the 2019 election...
https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight/status/1205632742349688832/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1205632742349688832¤tTweetUser=BBCNewsnight
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