[Yug]

My half-formed ramblings on Finkelstein's piece.

Not so much Starmer, as the electorate rejecting serious socialism. Making Labour a "Party of modest reform within the capitalist system" has made it far more acceptable to the people who hold the keys to government - the electorate. Without them on-side, you can profess to be anything you like, but will never get anywhere near the "corridors of power".

Anyway, what's so good about holding the same views for decades without taking in new ideas and amending your views, however slightly, to reflect the changing world around you? Especially when those views were already becoming outdated and societally unacceptable when you first professed to hold them.

My personal view on this?

Starmer's right. Corbyn's wrong. End of..

Milliband Sr was right. The hard left will never be anything more than a minority faction within, and holding back, a much bigger and more successful political machine.

[Andy McDandy]

In the voting booth, people are naturally cautious and selfish. Promise to fix the system, and you'd better assure people that the bits of the system that are working just fine won't be altered.

"Everyone gets taken care of" doesn't win as many votes as "You'll be OK, and that poor unfortunate sod will get a hand up too".

[Tubby Isaacs]

Interesting by Peter Tatchell on the 40th anniversary of the Bermondsey by election.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... m-it-today

He doesn't dwell much on the homophobia (which he's talked a fair bit about before), but there's more on the local politics. He sees his allies as having transformed Labour's moribund rightwing group with their energy. And I think there's probably something in that- Labour in Southwark did better than in other areas in the 1982 local elections, where they faced the double problem of the SDP and the Falklands dominating the news.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Sout ... l_election

Some of it though is, to my mind, just silly.

Despite these problems, the rightwing Labour council leader, John O’Grady, was determined to build a lavish new town hall. He was also seen as insufficiently robust with property developers who wanted to take over Bermondsey’s Thames riverside and force out working-class people to make way for lucrative office blocks and luxury flats for the rich.

The council wanted to bring in development and jobs in an area heavily derelict? Are working class people incapable of working in offices or something? And were these really "luxury flats"? Sure they wouldn't have been cheap, but this is 40 years ago. If you're rich, you probably don't think "I know, I'll move to Bermondsey!" In the late 90s, I recall signs everywhere saying "luxury flats", when it basically meant "standard private flats". I don't get what's in it for the left to talk like estate agents.

Then there's this stuff.

I set out a vision of transforming Bermondsey’s grim, multistorey slab housing estates into an“urban garden city” of houses with gardens, tree-lined streets and pocket parks. We also persuaded Southwark council to decentralise its services to local hubs, to make them more accessible and accountable to local people – and to improve the speed and efficiency of council estate maintenance and repairs.

Green spaced round council estates? Nobody thought of that before.

Decentralisation was a bit of a fashion on the left at this time. Don't know how it went in Southwark, but it was disastrous in Islington and contributed to the child abuse scandal. But doubtless some good came of it. Shouldn't the rightwing reactionary council get some credit?

Of course, lots of the problems Labour had were national rather than local anyway. The impression of lots of Labour voters was that a bunch of shouty twats had taken them over who thought recapturing a territory invaded by fascists was beyond the pale. Lots of them gave out the message that Labour in government had been a disaster. Funnily enough, that wasn't an obvious incentive to put them back into government. So how would the Tatchell group have come across?

Creative protests were used to raise awareness and press for change. There was a “stop the traffic” rally against the closure of St Olave’s hospital. To oppose property speculators, we occupied HMS Belfast on the Thames and a block of luxury flats on the riverside, hanging gigantic banners: “homes not offices” and “people before profit.”.

This stuff isn't always popular, is it? Hospital closures are the easiest thing to protest against- your by-election Lib Dem does that (I expect Simon Hughes did). Often, in central London with hospitals everywhere, it was reasonable to rationalise.

A lot is made of how outward looking his local party were, but I find that hard to square with the drubbing they gave Tatchell. Maybe the homophobia would have done for him anyway but the swing was the biggest ever. Michael Foot didn't want Tatchell as a candidate, and hard to see him as part of a rightwing reactionary clique. Foot obviously saw the wider problems, if the local Labour Group didn't.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Bit of a contrast here with Tatchell, from a Labour councillor at the same time (who'd run and won as an independent by the time of the by-election),

https://southwarknews.co.uk/news/community/47297-2/

This was the time of the docks and related industry dying, which gave eager activists like Coral a real purpose: ‘As an elected councillor I had a wonderful time; the London Docklands Development Corporation was set up to bring work back to the borough and we wanted their money,’ Coral says excitedly. ‘An awful lot of money was needed from them to make improvements – I got us about £20m.’

By contrast, Peter tells us, he got a grant from GLC to build a park and an adventure playground.

[Andy McDandy]

"We did a demo and moaned about the idle rich, so we should have won by default".

Student politics.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Tatchell doubtless put in the hours and impressed local Labour members, but he'd not been a councillor or anything, and had only lived in the area for 4 years. I wonder if that came across well, given that the previous MP had been there since 1946 and had been born in Southwark in 1913. Tatchell was Australian too.

He'd written about "more militant direct action" in Tribune per wiki, which the SDP seem to have run with. Perhaps not helpful in a by-election. And pretty incredible that the local party thought they'd stick it to Michael Foot by reselecting Tatchell. That made Tatton Tories reselecting Neil Hamilton look good.

[Youngian]

In the following GE, Bermondsey CLP decided to be more pragmatic and select a straight choice local candidate John Bryan. And a member of Militant, lose again to Simon Hughes.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I see there was another candidate in between, John Tilley, who ran in 1983.

He was an ex MP who'd resigned from the frontbench over Michael Foot's support for the Government on the Falklands. Probably hard for anyone to make much headway in the short period before the general election, but that doesn't sound like they were trying very hard.

[Tubby Isaacs]

[Tubby Isaacs]

As ever, the stuff BTL is a treat. She ran for another party, she should be banned!

[Oboogie]

I've had to explain to a number of people on Twitter that Labour Party rules only apply to members of the Labour Party.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

I think (Abers will correct me) that you cannot rejoin if you ran for or actively supported/were a member of another party at any time in the previous five years, although this can be waived.

Of course if you did so as a member you would be ejected, but she did not.

[Oboogie]

Exactly. These eejets have apparently never heard of MPs "crossing the floor" - for example.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

And it's not up to the leader to accept her or not, it's down to the chair of the constituency branch she is joining.

[Did I do a malaphor there?]

[Abernathy]

I think you're right about the five years, Malc. Even then, I think the NEC can exercise discretion. Salma Yaqoob tried to join our CLP about 7 years ago, and our CLP EC objected vehemently, prompted by our then MP, Roger Godsiff. She didn't get in. Not that there is any usefully direct similarity between Yaqoob and Luciana Berger.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

In our case we expelled a member - a very good one - whose conscience led him to campaign for an anti-abortion candidate. It was a sad thing to do, but the case was open and closed.

[mattomac]

"We did a demo and moaned about the idle rich, so we should have won by default".

Student politics.

Even student politics has moved on. It’s a certain branch of them.

[The Weeping Angel]

They'd have probably have saved time if they'd just written our favoured candidate lost so we're off

[Tubby Isaacs]

They might have a point there. 3 out of area candidates looks a lot.

[The Weeping Angel]

That may be the case but it does irratate when instead of giving the reasons as to why they've been blocked they go running to LabourList or to Micheal Crick and go on about how they've been blocked because there a proper socialist and then we get the Momentum spokesperson who I asuume is on speed dial at Labour List going on about local democracy which they couldn't give a shit about under Corbyn.