Starmer As Labour's leader - what should he do?

In any case, there was never any reason for anyone to use the term "Corbynite" or to ever imply that support for him was a cult of personality.   Support for Corbyn's leadership campaigns was solely about the fact that voting for him was the ONLY possible way to get the party ever to change-and the 2010 and 2015 results proved that the party was never going to win another electio if it DIDN'T make a clear break with the 1997/2015 status quo.

It wasn't irrational to believe that the party needed to change, and it wasn't irrational for Corbyn's supporters to assume that, if he had simply stood down, the party would have gone straight back to Blairism and the door to change would have been shut forever.

Corbyn had flaws...all of us have acknowledged that...Corbyn himself has acknowledged that.  But it's silly for you to act like he should never have sought the leadership at all, given that all of the other candidates would have prevented any change from ever happening and given that their refusal to allow any change would have made it impossible for the party ever to have made any comeback at the polls.

If you felt that nothing mattered other than forcing Corbyn out as leader, you SHOULD have been calling on the PLP to accept that there needed to be radical change and you should have been pushing for a restoration of internal party democracy.  You should have accepted that guaranteeing that there'd be no erasure of the policies associated with Corbyn and no mass purges of those whose only crime was supporting the man would make it much easier to achieve your objective of getting Corbyn to stand down.  Yet you dismissed all of that, and acted as if those who did support the policies Corbyn's rise to the leadership embodied had no right to have won in the leadership vote and owed it to the PLP to simply renounce their victories in 2015 and 2016 and hand the party back to...well, to the people who had blown the elections Labour should have been able to count on winning in 2010 and 2015. 

Why is it that you never did that in any of the discussions we have ever had on this subject?

Why were you so stubborn and rigid about refusing to acknowledge that anything mattered other than removing Corbyn as leader?

Why were you so adamant in refusing to accept that Corbyn's victories in the leadership contest were a valid measure of what the Labour base thought the party should be standing for, and in insisting that the only opinions within the party that mattered where those of the PLP? 

There's no special wisdom or insight that comes from being elected as an MP-it simply means that you've somehow managed to persuade 10,000 to 20,000 people to vote for you.  If you stood in what was already a safe seat, you had no persuading to do.

Oswald Mosley managed to win a seat, for God's sakes.   So did Neville Chamberlain.  So did a father and son team of bigoted, reactionary Ulster whackjobs named Ian Paisley.  Why should what an MP thinks is the right approach for a party matter any more than what anybody else in the party thinks?

Based on your continued unwillingness to reveal what you think Labour should stand for, you seemed to think the party should have stayed exactly where it was before Corbyn took over-when it had blown two elections it would have won solidly if it had retained or re-introduced any aspects of socialist values at all.  The 2010-2015 zone was where the party would have stayed for the rest of eternity if Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, or Owen Smith-the man who never got anyone to turn up for his rallies during the leadership campaign, which tells you all you need to know about his potential at a general election-and if Liz Kendall had won, the party would have gone to the right of Blair/Brown/Miliband and possibly to the right of the Tories.

Starmer can't gain any votes for the party from going back to the 2010-2015 dead zone.  And yes, he has the right to choose his own shadow cabinet, though he needs to recognize that most of the party and most of the country aren't insisting that everyone who had even the slightest connection to Corbyn be treated as unclean.

But I want to take this discussion in a different direction.

For the first time ever...will you actually describe the policies you think Labour should fight the next election on?

On foreign policy/defense

On restoring the Tory benefits sanctions policy

On green issues

On Thatcher's antiworker laws

On economic renewal for Wales/the North/the North East/the Midlands

On the NHS

on social inclusion

on how it is to define "patriotism".

On the EU(I assume you are still a hardline Remainer-do you advocate pushing for any changes on the taxation/spending/nationalization restriction policies the EU imposes, restrictions that currently make socialism or even "social democracy" impossible for EU member countries-and if so, what would make you think the EU even can be changed?  Or are you arguing that Labour should still buy into the "end of history" canard?)

You have an obligation to say, at long last, what you think Labour should be about.

I assume you'd agree that just electing something that CALLED itself "a Labour government", without a commitment to radical, transformative change, would be pointless.  So what degree of difference between Labour and Tory policies on the major issues do you think should be a reasonable expectation? 

Also, why was it so important to you that Labour's leader be the guy who prosecuted Julian Assange and refused to prosecute the police who caused the death of Ian Tomlinson through the unprovoked, unjustified beating they administered to him?  It's not as though the voters will only elect Labour if it has a leader who thinks left protests SHOULD be violently suppressed, or who thinks it's fine for police to assault a man like Ian Tomlinson, whose only crime was not moving along fast enough to suit the cops.

contrarianna wrote:

 More details on the leaked report of concerted and treacherous betrayal by Labour elite to prevent a Corbyn-led Labour government over a right-wing Conservative government. The dirty work including fraudulent anti-antisemitism smears to throw the 2016 election in order to keep a moderate reformer out of power.   It includes citations by Nicky's anti-democratic lying slimy friends:

‘The People Have Spoken. Bastards’

Leaked Labour Report Shows Party’s Own Senior Staff Acted To Keep Corbyn Out Of Power
16th April 2020

A leaked internal Labour report now reveals that senior Labour figures were actively trying to stop Labour winning the general election in order to oust Corbyn as party leader. The 860-page document, ‘The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014 – 2019’, first leaked to Sky News, was the product of an extensive internal investigation into the way Labour handled antisemitism complaints.

The report includes copious damning examples of email and WhatsApp exchanges among Labour officials expressing contempt for Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who supported him, including other Labour staff, Labour MPs and even the public....

Reading through the leaked examples should induce nausea; the article concludes:

Closing Remarks

The newly leaked Labour internal document reveals the fear and disgust amongst many figures in senior Labour Party management towards socialism in the UK. So many Labour figures at the top simply could not bear the prospect of the mildly progressive Jeremy Corbyn reaching Number 10 Downing Street.

Where are the media headlines, interviews and extensive analyses of how senior insiders colluded for Labour to lose a general election? What about the betrayal of all those Labour MPs, staff and volunteers who worked to overturn a destructive right-wing Tory government? What about all those millions of British people who voted for a shift to a more just and compassionate society? A society in which the NHS is truly valued, the welfare and benefits system really does act as a safety net for all, radical carbon cuts in emissions are implemented immediately, and in which foreign policy is no longer guided by outdated and discredited brutal imperialism and the supposed need for a profitable ‘defence’ industry.

Is ‘democracy’ so unimportant – or so repellent – that the UK’s most highly-rewarded and prominent news media, editors and journalists can dismiss the revelations behind the 2017 general election with such superficial reporting or, worse, a disdainful silence? Especially given the present coronavirus pandemic, and the ever-looming climate catastrophe that threatens to overwhelm us all, the implications of stifling a rational leftward shift in British society, and the wilful refusal to examine what happened, are almost too horrendous to imagine.

DC & DE

https://www.medialens.org/2020/the-people-have-spoken-bastards-leaked-la...

Thanks for that link, contrarianna.  

If Starmer wants to bring the party together, he has an obligation to move against those who actively worked to prevent the election of a Labour government in the Corbyn era.  

The evidence is there.

The proof is there.

The right-wing bureaucrats were the problem, not Corbyn or the Labour Left.

Starmer needs to distance the party from the anti-Corbyn cabal-the TRUE "Conservative enablers"-or he will have no credibility as leader at all.

And no, in 2019, Corbyn was NOT in total control of his party-the PLP-the members of whose anti-Corbyn wing are all essentially Tories-what else would you call someone like Tom Watson or a vindictive anti-Irish militarist like Ian Austin?-openly attacked Corbyn throughout the campaign, refusing to stop spreading the AS smear even though they knew they were costing the whole party votes, and in many cases fought for the purely Thatcherite cause of Remain-a cause no one had any valid reason to be continuing to fight for after the referendum settled the issue)were able to carry on a relentless sabotage campaign while facing no disciplinary measures at all.

If repeatedly accusing your party's leader of ignoring a bigotry he has never ignored-while at the same time working actively to hinder that leader's ability TO discipline the handful of Labour members, such as Ken Livingstone, who are actually guilty of it-is not "bringing the party into disrepute", what is?

And why would they not stop even after the election campaign had started, when they knew, as they knew in 2017, that there is no valid means for a party to depose and replace leader during an election campaign-when they knew that even if they'd managed it to find a way to do so,  that no leader imposed during an election campaign as leader, under what would have have been an undemocratic process, could possibly come anywhere close to a credible showing in that election-and when they would have to have known that there'd have been no reward at the polls for trying such a thing?

Clearly, the only possible motivation the people who did all that could have had was to make sure the Tories won. 

And people who actually help the Tories win just to get rid of a leader they didn't like-and who they didn't like mainly because, unlike them, he thought Labour should be run democratically and from below by its paid members and supporters, the people who do the actual work OF trying to elect Labour governments, unlike reactionary bureaucratic elitists like MacNicol-should be punished if their irrational hatred of a particular leader caused them to actually do the party harm.

This is not the sort of thing that you can even come close to excusing by saying "nothing mattered more than removing Corbyn as leader"-because there ARE things that matter more than that-such as not trying to undermine Labour's chances in a general election in the name of removing Corbyn from the leadership.

Even if you had no use for the man, nicky, there is nothing that could possibly be so odious, and no policies he could have implemented as prime minister so thoroughly reprehensible as to justify deciding what MacNicol and his lot clearly seem to have decided-that it was appropriate for them, as paid staffers of the Labour Party, to make sure the Labour Party lost a winnable election and the Tories stayed in power.

Nothing Corbyn could have done could possibly have been worse than what May and Johnson HAVE done.

And since Corbyn IS in fact out as leader, there is no reason to protect any of the cynical reactionaries who did all they could to sabotage him when he still had the job.

Nobody in the wider electorate would reward Starmer for protecting them, or vote Labour when they otherwise would not have done so.

Yes, Corbyn had issues with personal popularity. 

All of which was caused, at least in significant measure, by the relentless corrosive attacks launched against said leader by the PLP and the right-wing party bureaucracy-with the anti-Corbyn MPs often carrying out their project of savaging the leader against the will of their own constituency parties-i.e., against the will of those who were responsible for those MPs BEING ELECTED in the first place-

It was an era where you had Labour MPs, DURING ELECTION CAMPAIGNS, attacking their leader and for all practical purposes campaigning for the Tories and the LibDems during election campaigns.

It was an era in which Corbyn could not move against the traitors in his own party and clearly seems to have felt he could not support the introduction of Open Selection for sitting MPs because of the fear that the anti-Corbyn wing of the PLP might try to form a second SDP-a fear that was vindicated when the hard right of the party-with one Tory brought in for cover-formed "Change UK".  Corbyn's big mistake there was in NOT introducing Open Selection and not as soon as it became clear that Change, unlike the SDP, had no popular support, which was demonstrated when none of the Change MPs stood down from their seats and fought by-elections as Change candidates against Labour-as soon as it was clear that the antidemocratic, antisocialist Labour Right had "nowhere to go".

It was an era where the PLP, in its undemocratic arrogance, essentially refused to accept the results of TWO leadership elections, refused to accept that the Corbyn leadership victories meant that the rank-and-file of the party itself wanted a clear break with Blairism-Brownism, and refused to treat the socialist commitment of the majority of their own party with any respect at all.

And it was an era when the most antiracist person ever to lead a major political party in the UK was repeatedly demonized with what everyone knew-and what the Labour Leaks now prove-were false accusations that that leader was indifferent to the need to fight AS and refused to discipline those guilty of it, when the Labour Leaks themselves prove that it was the right-wing party bureaucracy itself who deliberately delayed the disciplinary proceedings that Corbyn himself was eager to carry out-that Corbyn was always committed to fighting AS, it was just that he rejected the idea that criticism of what the Israeli government does to Palestinians, and principled opposition to Zionism on the grounds that it has become a permanently reactionary and oppressive nationalist movement are equivalent to AS.

Why couldn't those who raised the AS issue admit that there was a clear distinction between expressions of bigotry against people who are Jewish, or about Judaism as a series of cultural and religious traditions, on the one hand, and fair comment about the actions of a state?

Why should anyone have ever insisted on the demagogic idea that Zionism was now synonymous with everyone and everything Jewish?

Here is the crucial point, if all of the above is too long for anyone to read:

The original narrative behind the Starmer campaign, the narrative that Corbyn was not only a failure but an utter disgrace as leader, that he should never have been allowed to stand for leader, that anything and everything was justifie in the name of removing the man from the leadership because of his sheer irredeemability, that he was somewhere between an apologist for and an enabler of bigotry, has now been totally discredited.

Starmer must establish his own voice-this is something every Labour leader, every leader of any political party needs to to do.

But his point of departure must be positive, not negative-it must be about finding a way to better communicate a socialist message while democratizing the internal governance of his party, NOT about anathemizing his predecessor and everyone remotely associated with that predecessor.

They only way Starmer can gain votes is to communicate  a socialist message that resonates with the Labour Leave voters the second referendum pledge and the push to go allout Remain alienated, the voters in Scotland who were lost by the Labour Right in 2015 due to its arrogant, quasi-Tory stance on the Scottish self-determination, and the young voters it is in mortal danger of losing and losing forever if socialists and socialism are once again made welcome.

Why, you're right Aristototled24...Starmer is a Conservative enabler.  

And in any case, Corbyn is no longer leader, so there is no justification at all in continuing to attack the man-to vilify a perfectly decent and honest human being who never deserved the AS smear nor any of the other lines of attack the PLP-MacNicol cabal flung at him-or continuing to blame him for the 2017 and 2019 defeats.

The Labour rank and file do not want the massive swing to the right that you want, and the Labour Leaks prove that it was the MacNicol cabal, not Corbyn or his staff, who delayed disciplinary proceedings against the handful of actual antisemites in the party.

As to the future...what sort of policies do you think Labour should have, nicky?  The 2010 and 2015 results, after all, prove that there's nothing to gain from the party moving back to "the centre ground" and running, once again, on the kinds of manifesto the Tories could just as easily run on. 

And the truth is, Labour had been steadily losing votes on "centre ground" manifestos since 2001-if the LibDems had had anything remotely similar to competent leaders in the first twenty years of this century, they could probably have moved past Labour, at least in the popular vote and perhaps in the seat count, by 2005, had they done what a competent leader would have done and run as a center-LEFT party strongly opposed to the Iraq War and austerity and promising to be a party run from below, by the grassroots membership of the party.  The Greens might have done the same, to a smaller degree, had they been willing to engage working-class voters-and might do so at the next election if Labour moves as far right as you appear to want it to move, i.e., at least to the antisocialist, antiactivist Kinnock manifesto of 1992, a platform which stood for next to nothing and produced-a solid loss in what should have been an unlosable election.

It matters WHAT Labour stands for more than anything else, nicky.  Nobody out there in the wider electorate is still obsessed with seeing the party punish and anathemize the last leader, and there aren't any votes to be gained for doing so.

There are also no gains to be made from doing what you've been insisting the party do for the last few years and go all-out Remain or Rejoin.  The electorate in the UK largely regards that as a settled issue now-especially since the hardline Remainers refused, and continue to refuse, to do the work they needed to do in preparing an agenda and a strategy for changing the EU, for getting rid of the compulsory austerity, budget-balancing and privatization requirements the EU imposes, requirements which have destroyed electoral support for every pro-EU "social democratic" party which has agreed to abide by them.

Now that the leadership issue is put to rest, where do you want Labour to go on 

A) Spending and the social welfare state;

B) Economic revival policies for the Red Wall constituencies that votes Leave because E.U. membership brought them no economic benefits;

C) Thatcher's antiworker laws;

D) Internal Party Democracy;

E) What party members should be able to say on the Israel/Palestine issue without having to worry that they'll be falsely accused of AS:

What I've been trying to say to you, nicky, is that, since Corbyn is out, Corbyn is no longer the issue.  The point of this thread is to discuss where the party should go on the issues and on internal governance under its NEW leader-so can you please accept that the war on Corbyn and what his supporters stand for-things many if not not the majority of Starmer voters, outside the PLP, which itself is the only sector of the party that actually wants a major swing to the right-needs to end?  That "a healthy distance" from the previous leader is beside the point, that what ACTUALLY matters is finding a better way to communicate radical and socialist policies?

Yes, Labour lost in 2019.  We all KNOW that.

But it lost just as badly in the popular vote in 2010 and 2015, under the type of policies the PLP wants to bring back.  So there are no votes to be gained from the huge swing to the right going back to those policies would involve.

One thing that would help a lot would be Open Selection, before the next election, for all sitting Labour MPs.   A lot of the party's problems come from the culture of no accountability that dominates the PLP, where you have sitting MPs, most of whom are ONLY sitting MPs because they were imposed decades ago as Labour candidates by Kinnock and Brown against the wishes of their constituency parties.  These are usually people with no organic connection to the constituencies they represent, who only hold those seats because ANY Labour candidate would automatically win them.   The constituency parties-the people who do the work of actually keeping those Labour candidates in their seats, are usually treated with arrogant contempt by the MPs, since, for whatever reason, the MPs feel they owe then no respect and, well, nothing else.

Isn't it time to begin to ease that generation of MPs- a group which are very often out of step with what most of the party  wants-the vast majority of the party, including Starmer, accepts that Labour had no alternative but to reconnect with socialist and democratic values after years of Blairite autocracy, autocracy that no longer produced Labour victories-out the door?  

Isn't it time to give the constituency parties control over who is selected as Labour candidate in their constituencies, and to be able to be able to hold the MPs to at least SOME degree of accountability, rather than having the MPs act as though the CLPs are nothing but servants, there only to do what they're told?

nicky wrote:

If you are in favour of open selections, Ken, what do you say about this ?

Before the last election the Corbyn controlled NECimposed about 25 candidates , all Corbyn acolytes, on constituency parties without a vote. Surely you should be denouncing that.

I don't defend that. 

Never have.

If it happened, it shouldn't have happened and that's all there is to say about that.

There were no significant number of constituencies where a socialist candidate would have lost but a candidate making a big, pompous arrogant show of distancing herself from the leader would have won.  There were no constituencies, where the voters were saying "I'll vote Labour-but only if the Labour candidate is going join the continuing fight to oust the current leader". 

I agree that there should have been no such NEC intervention and supported Open Selection all through the Corbyn era, as you would know if you actually read my posts.  And again, the party has a different leader now, which makes anything the previous leader or that leader's allies may have done essentially a dead issue, and any continued campaigning against that past leader pointless.

So there, I've denounced that.  What the NEC did made no difference in how any constituency voted-there was never going to be any better showing made by anti-socialist candidates than socialist ones- but I condemn in on small-d democratic grounds, which is all that needs be said on the point.

I've always said no party leader should impose candidates in constituencies where Labour is trying to hold a seat it currently holds on the retirement or resignation of the previous MP, or seats currently held by parties.

I also think that the party should not intervene, except in exceedingly rare cases, such as that of a candidate being found to be guilty of criminal or other reprehensible activity.

But that is not the only issue here:

Under the present set-up, a sitting Labour MP essentially can never be held to any degree of accountability by her or his constituency party, and is basically guaranteed re-selection at every general election that MP wishes to fight, until such time as the MP either stands down, dies, or loses the seat.  

Would you not agree that this needs to change?  

That a constituency party should have SOME means of holding the MP they elected to some degree of accountability.

If that MP is moving further and further to the right, they should be able to push him to either stop, or to be able to remove him as candidate.

The same if that MP is taking a view on the leadership they don't hold-whether it be the MP being part of a plot to force out a leader the CLP supports, or keep in place a leader the CLP has turned against.  

And if the CLP has reached the conclusion that a particular MP, for whatever reason, needs to be replaced, they should be able to do that, right? 

An MP should not be treated as a parliamentary aristcrat, above the party rather than of it.

The same if that MP