Labour is going to have a relaunch, rehash, restatement of objectives, desperate appeal to the disenchanted, or something else that someone in their team might want to call it this week.
A lot of nonsense has been written about it over the weekend, and no doubt much more will be before Keir Starmer steps up to a podium to deliver words in his own particularly uninspiring style on Thursday.
I suspect nothing I can say can add much value to this debate, bar repeating the one thing I have said repeatedly for more months than I care to recall now, and that is that Labour has not a hope of persuading anyone that it has anything useful to say unless it funds a story to relate, and setting a few targets will not come close to approximating to that.
As a result, I cannot see how anything that Labour can say this week will in any way restore public faith in it, unless, that is, it has suddenly found a story. I suspect that it hasn't. In that case I also suspect, as I have done for a long time, that Starmer will continue to fail.
I could be wrong, but I doubt it. This government is very obviously failing, which its neoliberal credentials always guaranteed that it would, and without really radical change nothing will alter that.
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John Harris said much the same in The Grauniad today – and in the checkout queue at Lidl but thats another story.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/01/labour-relaunch-government-nigel-farage-donald-trump
Trump won not because he gained much new support, but mainly because Democrats stayed home. Labour is heading for a similar defeat in 2029, unless they find a way to inspire their supporters.
Trump won because the Biden Administration did not deliver “direct tangible benefit” to individual citizen even though his policies massively helped the country as a whole. People want “direct tangible benefit” to their individual household.
The Democrats did NOT stay home. Many livelong Democrat voters actually voted for Trump because they BELIEVED they would get “direct tangible benefit” from Trump that they did not get from Biden.
Much comment has been made about Starmer/managerialism = optimise what is in place – even if what is in place does not work (which in many areas, is the case). This is in keeping with the Single Transferrable Party concept – new faces/no change. Looming in the corner are climate-related disasters (South Wales?) which demand the sort of fresh thinking/action which LINO is functionally incapable of delivering. The Uk is in a terrible place when people start turning to Reform (to replace the STP) when faced with climate-induced disasters that Reform deny. (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/30/aberfan-welsh-valley-coal-tip-labour-reform-uk-storms). Note how there is no money, apparently, to fix the South Wales problems, but there is money available to throw at, e.g. London & the South East, HS2 being but the most egregious recent example.
I read that article. The final paragraph where the Reform spokesman is directly quoted denying climate change, and claiming that these storms have always been a regular occurance, are very scary.
Thank you and well said, Mike.
May I, please, shed some light on Mike’s points from my engagements with the former shadow Treasury and Business teams and the likes of the Labour in the City Network.
Mike: “LINO is functionally incapable of delivering.”
Many, if not most, of the advisers and the likes of the LCN have either gone straight into politics from university or after some, but not many, years in the civil service, often the case with the Blair secondees. Few, if any, have experience like Mike, Clive Parry, John S Warren and Richard. Not only are they not familiar with the issues and technicalities, they are not interested, either, and don’t want to be shown up by engaging with the gentlemen I cite above. In a profession that requires being a courtier or courtesan even, the only ability / experience that counts is getting close to or in power and staying there. Fixing problems are a distraction and not what they are qualified to do or in politics for, an issue amplified by the(ir friends in the) MSM getting people on air who are not experts in anything, vide assisted dying, where I never saw a doctor speak. In any case, these problems aren’t problems for the PMC. The LCN lot are rarely in big finance itself, but work in PR and perhaps legal in tandem with client firms. They often seem superficial.
Mike: “There is no money, apparently, to fix the South Wales problems, but there is money available to throw at, e.g. London & the South East.”
These are provincial concerns. The above may even think that is “little Englander”. They are not interested, especially if insecure provincials running away from their backgrounds and are seduced by the big smoke, big apple and west wing. As above, fixing problems are a distraction and not what they are qualified to do or in politics for. French and Irish engineer friends are staggered by how the UK handles infrastructure and how corrupt the process is. They have worked here and note that optimal local solutions, often using infrastructure long out of use, but that can be resurrected, are often disregarded. Why? One reason is that there won’t be a photo opp with the monarch, then QE2, if there’s no big project.
I’m hearing more and more about the Aberfans out there. I dread to think. I wonder how far this alarm reaches in Whitehall and its level of registration. Mike is right about LINO. Treasury officials are no better. Richard and I have long argued that the Treasury* needs to be broken up.
*Not unrelated, I also think the Foreign Office’s imperial splendour and network of palatial embassies in some capitals is not helping with the UK having to find a role after empire and brexit.
Thanks.
Much to agree with.
The total lack of professional experience of these people scares me.
Have the ever actually taken responsibility for anything – and had to worry about it? Or is it all just a game.
I do seriously wonder.
So true. Domain knowledge has been sacrificed for ‘innovation’ usually by people who have no idea what they are doing, with no concept at all of joined up thinking because the default position is always to create business units that extract transaction costs rather than a process that supposedly delivers a service.
I mean, look at our railways.
In the Guardian when the ‘reset’ was announced yesterday, it said that in the ‘reset priorities’ immigration was not mentioned (Starmer having a special ‘speech’ regarding the immigration figures last week – trying to outflank Farage).
Adam Bienkov has a brilliant take on Starmer’s immigration positioning here:
https://www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/opening-the-borders-to-nigel-farage?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=64cns&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
It is Morgan ‘crush the left’ McSweeney who is driving this, and driving Starmer and Labour into peril in the future, if this anti immigrant rhetoric carries on.
Thank you, Duncan.
It’s not just peril for Labour.
This son of immigrants and his parents, 80 last month and here since May 1964, are making plans to leave in the next couple of years. We aren’t the only ones. Last summer appears to have been a watershed. There was a wave of racist attacks in mid-Buckinghamshire, where my parents have lived since 1968, unheard of since the late 1990s.
Trapped in their neoliberal fantasy world of 1990’s politics and economic policies and with blairite advisers crawling all over them whispering in their ears, it would be a miracle if they could see the reality of the world around them let alone imagine a better one.
It should have been so easy the country is broken literally in pieces.
The rallying cry of rebuild repair and renewal should have carried a government with any imagination through it’s first term and set up a second.
How would an opposition respond to a government that had repaired a great deal of the damage caused by 14 years of Tory incompetence and corruption, even the MSM would be struggling to create a negative narrative.
From day one it should have been bold and courageous, but Starmer Reeves and Streeting are cowards by any political standards and they are currently ensuring their own demise as sure as night follows day.
Thank you to Richard above.
Richard: “The total lack of professional experience of these people scares me. CS: You are not the only one.
Richard: Have the ever actually taken responsibility for anything – and had to worry about it? CS: No. That means accountability. Deflection is the name of their game.
Richard: Or is it all just a game. CS: It often feels like it / they are acting out the West Wing. An American friend / former colleague and a French journalist and I have discussed. They have observed.
Richard: I do seriously wonder. CS: You are not the only one.
I thought the pandemic, not just Brexit, would have exposed them, but no.
R to CS: you are right
Thank you, Richard.
Thank you to PSR.
Over the week-end, a friend and I met and stayed overnight in London. We travelled by train. The number of carriages were limited and crammed to an unsafe and unhealthy degree. I left her ladyship at St Pancras yesterday night. The two trolleys hidden were broken. The number of carriages on her service to the east midlands were again limited and crammed to an unsafe and unhealthy degree. What she paid for the week-end return amounts to an annual ticket in the likes of Paris, Frankfurt and Zurich.
Starmer never ceases to horrify me,now I read he has spent time having lunch with the Friends of Israel as Guest of Honour……..he has no idea how horrific this is.
Thank you, Bridget. He’s been a regular for years. This year is different.
Readers and Richard may not be aware that every June until the pandemic, Parliament hosted a reception for Britons serving in the IOF. That was never reported until 2020 when the Jerusalem Post wondered if the event would go ahead due to the pandemic. The report was soon scrubbed from the internet. As it happens, the 2020 edition was cancelled. I don’t if the event has been resurrected, but it’s not in Parliament in any case.
Richard, Labour are prisoners of their own convictions and experience. Neoliberalism has worked for
them and their families. The neoliberal policies pursued for years now just need adjustment not transformation. A bit more inclusion, a bit more investment, a bit more here & there. The ec CEO of the Resolution Foundation now a Labour MP, former HMT insider said much the same the other day. Saying something like “we just need to stop mucking things up and all will be fine”.
Tbh I thought oh dear. Labour can’t be a vehicle for change any more they have had their day. The People must search for alternatives and unfortunately Fascism will be one of those on offer.
He is an exceedingly arrogant neoliberal