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

And it's not as though Corbyn will ever seek the leadership again, so why are you so obsessed with seeing him agree to be shamed?

The Corbynophobes should have let it go at gettting a different leader.  It never needed to be about trying to force everyone who ever stood with the man to either renounce him or be driven out of the party.  

Corbyn never ignored the spreading of "Jewish conspiracy" talk- all there was was fair comment about interference in the party by the Israeli government, which has nothing in common with that, since the Israeli government is simply a government- and he never blocked disciplinary proceedings against anyone of whom there was strong evidence they'd expressed actual antisemitism

As to the mural-  all that happened was that he hadn't noticed it was torn down and asked why.  Since the mural was gone and it wasn't coming back, what difference did it make?

And why, when Corbyn has been out of the leadership for months, can you STILL not accept that it's time for Starmer to move on and focus solely on attacking the Tories?

There is no reason at all to refuse to let this go.

Corbyn was proved innocent of AS himself-you yourself have admitted he was-  he has endorsed the report's recommendations.  

A decent human being would admit that was enough.

He has nothing to apologize for, and it wasn't his fault that the party's outdated disciplinary process has caused essentiall every disciplinary complaint made about anybody over anything drag out endlessly.  And he streamlined the process, which led to 350 people being expelled for AS.

There's no evidence that he even knew there was discrimination against the ultra-Orthodox in ONE constituency, and he clearly never stopped anyone who was actually guilty of AS from being expelled.

So...again...what else COULD he have done?  No Labour leader has the power to order summary expulsions of people who are simply accused of something. 

And on this issue, there have been numerous false accusations...such as 90% of the 200 accusations Margaret Hodge made, so why should an accusation of AS be taken as proof of guilt in and of itself?

Why should Corbyn be forced to say something that is tantamount to agreeing that he deserved the hate campaign on this?

It's enough that he endorsed the EHRC recommendations.

And Labour's stagnation in the polls- it's pretty much where the party was in the polls for most of Corbyn's tenure- is proof that the voters are not rewarding Starmer for tormenting and continuing to smear his predecessor on this

nicky wrote:

Ken, why is everything you post just a repetition of something you tat you previously said that was previously refuted? Repetition does not make it true.

When

I said that Labour got a boost in the polls when it "turfed"  Corbyn I meant his recent expulsion, not when he "voluntarily" stepped fown as leader, before he was pushed after the biggest loss since 1935,

Labour of course got a big bump in the polls then too, which belies your delusion that Lanour can only win by endorsing Corbyn's positions. 

Actually, there was no dramatic change in Labour's poll ratings when Corbyn was suspended-he hasn't been expelled, btw: - and the most recent polling shows a drop in Labour support, so you have no valid grounds for arguing that the actual electorate is share's your obsession with erasing Corbyn from public life.

He's not leader anymore.  He's not going to ever seek the leadership again, and it doesn't threaten Labour's chances at the next election for Corbyn not to be forced to choose between exile and saying things that would be taken as endorsing the unjustifiable smear campaign the PLP and the media waged against him. 

Here's now little Starmer's persecution of Corbyn has achieved for Labour:

Opinion polling for the next United Kingdom general election - Wikipedia

It was in the high thirties to the low forties for most of Corbyn's tenure- that's where it is now.

And the polls continue to show strong support for Corbyn's policies, while there's been no indication that Labour has actually gained any ground as a result of Starmer moving to the right of those policies.  Overall, he's been stagnant in the polls for the last few months.

the popularity ratings Corbyn had in his last few months are not a valid measure of anything.  Those were the man's popularity ratings after he had announced his retirement from the leadership, when the effects of the venomous lie campaign waged against him were still at his peak.

Starmer has not led Labour to a sustained, dramatic increase in poll support when compared to where it was under Corbyn for most of his tenure.

And in any case, nobody's talking about Corbyn becoming leader anymore, so there's no reason he shouldn't even be allowed to sit as a Labour MP.  The public are not demanding that Corbyn be banished from political life and Labour go back to Blairism- Starmer recognized that the public want Labour to be a left-wing socialist party when he made his Ten Pledges.  Without those pledges- pledges to be "continuity Corbyn" on the issues- Starmer would never have won the leadership.

And since winning it, the main reasons Labour has had a long, slow increase in polling support are that 1) Starmer is not being relentlessly demonized and vilified in the press and by his own MPs (you'd have to concede that that makes a major difference in any party's poll ratings) and that nobody is talking about Brexit- Starmer has said he won't try to stop and everyone in the UK accepts it as a settled issue now).

BTW, since you've mentioned policies, would you finally be willing to say which actual policies associated with Corbyn you have an issue with- or explain to the rest of us how far you think Labour can go to the right of those policies without having to relinquish any moral right to call itself Labour?

You concede, implicitly, that going all the way back to Blairism is not an option, that the public don't want Labour to be the second Conservative Party again- so would you engage an actual discussion on the issues for once?

That's what the whole purpose of this thread was about, and for some reason you couldn't tolerate that discussion happening and felt you had to derail it by insisting that Corbyn hadn't been punished enough for whatever crimes he is supposed to be guilty of.

More on the pointless damage Starmer is doing to the party.  And the drop in the most recent polls prove the public isn't cheering him on on this.

Keir Starmer accused of threatening free expression with ban on discussing Corbyn suspension, as left-wingers stage NEC walk-out | The Independent

In any case, that poll shows that Starmer is giving his party no electoral boost whatsoever in refusing to end his war against Corbyn.

It was one thing to say Corbyn shouldn't be leader.  Now, he isn't leader.  There's no justification in actually trying to push the man out of the party entirely, and there is no justification in continuing to act as though Corbyn's supporters are a hotbed of antisemitism.  They aren't- and the small number of people actually implicated in that prejudice have essentially all been disciplined.

The country wants Labour to move on.

Why can't Starmer accept that?

(Self-delete. dupe post).

All this still leaves the question:  Why could the Labour Right never, at any point in this, try dialog?

Why could it never accept that this was about ideas and that the '15 and '16 leadership results meant that the party rank-and-file wanted a clear break with the 1997-2015 policies and acknowledge this by making some effort to work with the Left majority and meet them at least some of the way?

Why did they have to insist on nothing short of crushing the movement for change within the party?

And with the party's support stagnating in the polls now, why can't they admit that they've been at least somewhat wrong in the way they've handled all of this?

A rising generation of socialists is leaving Labour now.   It's possible they will never come back.

Socialists, not "Trots"...not "Stalinists"...just left-wing democratic socialists-  people who had just as much right to claim a place in Labour as anyone else.

No one is coming in to replace them, and the polls Josh and I have both cited prove the electorate isn't rewarding Starmer for his antidemocratic brutality on this.

Why can they not see that it's time to bend, that's time to switch from implacable arrogance to conciliation and openness?'

And once more, why can't they admit that this is about ideas and not any particular people?

He went away when he stood down from the leadership.  There's no good reason to insist that he vanish from public life. 

And I don't want him back as leader.  You keep acting like I do, but I don't.

All I'm saying is that Starmer needs to end the war against Corbyn and against the left- and Starmer has been fighting not just against the "hard left"-first of all, there is no such thing, there is just the people who oppose austerity and military intervention, on the one hand, and the people who support those things, such as Blair and Starmer.  It's just left vs. right, and if Corbyn and his supporters are erased from Labour, that won't leave anybody in the party who fundamentally disagrees with Thatcherism.  What Blairism is, after all, is simply the delusion that Thatcherite economics and Labour social values can co-exist.  What Blair's time in office proved was that they really can't.  And what the 2010 and 2015 elections proved was that Blairism is not only immoral, but politically extinct.  Brown and Ed Miliband both ran as absolute Blairites, and both of them made the exact same showing that Tony Blair would have led Labour to in those elections.

What you still don't get was that Corbyn's election was never about him as an individual- it was the Labour rank-and-file categorically stating that they wanted a total break with Blairism, and especially with those in the party-like Harriet Harman and Liz Kendall, who wanted Labour to move to the RIGHT of Blairism.

If the PLP had accepted the need to do that, and had made it clear that they wouldn't block all left candidates from the leadership ballot to replace him, Corbyn probably would have stood down almost immediately after winning the leadership.  Instead of doing that, the PLP, as you know full well, refused to settle for anything short of complete erasure of all socialists- there was never any such thing as a Corbyn-hating socialist- and all vestiges of socialism.  He never wanted to be leader and never expected to win the leadership contest.  

Why can't you admit that the PLP's intransigenc played a major part in Labour's problems, and that their preference for, initially, the essentially Thatcherite Liz Kendall and the pro-austerity "Blue Labour" candidate Yvette Cooper, then Owen Smith the Pfizer lobbyist, and now the authoritarian, antisocialist and increasingly unpopular Keir Starmer- the same Keir Starmer who just sold out the Labour Remainers he had pandered to to undermine Corbyn in 2019- is all the evidence we need that they have no better idea of what the ideal Labour leader should be than anyone else in or near the party.

There aren't any votes Labour could get, but only if Corbyn vanishes from public life, and clearly Keir should have left Corbyn and his supporters alone once he became leader.  

Starmer has nothing to gain by running Labour the way David Lewis- the person I think you see as the model left-of-center political leader ran the NDP- especially since Lewis, with his pointless hostility toward's the New Left and Quebec's right to self-determination, cost the party unmeasurable numbers of votes by "distancing" the party from socialists and sovereigntists- the nine seat gain of 1972 was the weakest showing the party could have made that year- helping drive a generation out of political involvement without winning the support of any other groups in doing so- ran the NDP from 1971 to 1975.

Starmer and Labour would be in a much stronger position now if he had agreed that his election as leader was the moment to end the war against the left, not escalate it.  He had no votes to gain by sacking RLB over nothing, by contuining the AS smear rather than admitting the time had come to put it to rest, or by trying to force Corbyn to respond to the EHRC report- a report whose findings Corbyn endorsed, btw- by essentially agreeing that his supporters deserved everything the Tory media and the PLP said about them on the issue.

Starmer had a chance to unify Labour and work for victory.  He refused to take that chance and refused to do what he was supposed to do as opposition leader, which is to focus solely on attacking the Tory government and present compelling radical alternatives- in the present situation, any non-radical policies would be useless and irrelevant- to what that government is doing.

The poll about the overall public's view of Starmer's treatment of Corbyn showed only 50% backing Starmer on the suspension at the time.  Since the poll I posted above shows a solid increase in the percentage of Labour members opposing Starmer on this- 48% opposed now, compared to only 32% in the first poll- it is likely that overall public opposition to the suspension has grown.  

And since the poll I just quoted was weighted to count more people who had voted for Starmer in the leadership race than those who voted against him, it is likely that opposition to the suspension within the party is even larger than the poll indicates.

So again...why not just end the war against Corbyn and let him be an "elder statesman" figure and a voice of conscience in the party?

Corbyn isn't a monster, and it's clear that his enemies in the PLP are just as responsible for the 2019 loss as he is.

Why can't you admit that the vendetta needs to end and that Starmer should be working now for unity in the party rather than retribution?

BTW, that poll I showed you 

josh wrote:

nicky wrote:

It is unfair to say that Starmer reignited the "civil war". If anyone did that it was Corbyn who made a silly denial that anti Semitism was a problem in the Labour party when great efforts were being made to eradicate that disease.

And Ken, dont you find it remarkable that the Survation poll shows that fully half of Labour members want a former leader suspended?

You vastly overstate things in saying there is a lack of confidence in Starmer. The poll shows no such thing. Starmer's personal approval is quite robust.

And you ignore polls that show that the vast majority of the public approved of Corbyn being suspended if not expelled.

Corbyn's so-called leadership was nothing less than a curse on the Labour party. If he cared at all for the party he should just go away.

He never denied it but said it dramatically overstated for political reasons.  And it was.

 

Indeed.  The fact is, there had always been a small about of AS in Labour.   If Corbyn had denied that, he wouldn't have streamlined the disciplinary proceedings and overseen the expulsion of 350 party memeber-too many, indeed, but a very small number out of 0ver 600,000

It's just that he rejected the ideas that A) There had been a sudden, massive increase in AS when he himself became leader; B) That his supporters and allies were radically more antisemitic than anybody else in the party; and C) The criticism of the Israeli government, or a principled refusal to support Zionism- an ideology for which there is no reason to keep demanding support, since the State of Israel are forms of AS, and that the only way to oppose AS is to be 'a Zionist, without qualification".

Why should he have been obligated to agree with those untrue ideas just to prove he wasn't abetting bigotry against Jews or Judaism?

And also, how do we account for the fact that, prior to his election as leader, nobody ever accused Corbyn of abetting or ignoring AS?  

If Starmer had focused solely on what he is SUPPOSED to be doing as opposition leader- opposing everything the Tories are doing and attacking nobody BUT the Tories- things like this would not be happening:  

Starmer and Evans score own-goal as CLPs switch to no-confidence votes in response to ban on pro-Corbyn motions – SKWAWKBOX

If the PLP had the right to pass a no-confidence motion in Corbyn, the CLPs have the right to pass one against Starmer.  

And the time in which anyone could say that Corbyn's leadership victories didn't count but Starmer's somehow does is now well behind us.

Also, in the Survation poll on Starmer's decision I showed above, 75% of those polled said that the 2019 policies should not be abandoned.

Therefore, Starmer has no justification for making any significant rightward moves on policy at all, and doing so would only damage Labour's chances at the next election.

Starmer and Davies are trying to bar discussion and voting on these motions.  You would agree, in the name of any notion of internal party democracy, that they have no right to do that.

And it is a devastating setback to Starmer that almost half his party opposes his bloodyminded intransigence on this point.

It looks more and more as though Starmer wants to drive all socialists out of the party-there is no such thing as an actual significant number of socialists who back him on this- and even you would have to admit that if he succeeded on that, and in erasing all socialist policies as he clearly wants to do-  and the vast majority of the party doesn't want him to do, Labour will have no reason to exist and essentially no one will want it to exist- because there is no longer any perceptible difference between "social democracy" and Toryism.

Labour without idealists, without dreamers, without people who struggle for a fundamentally better world, would be pointless.

Based on your refusal to admit that it's time for the war against Corbyn and his supporters to end, you clearly want Labour to reduce itself to being a party like that...but why? 

The polls prove that there's no great public desire for Labour TO reduce itself to that, or to have it be a party that anathemizes everyone who wants things to be significantly different than they are now, in the way they couldn't be significantly different if Labour lowered itself to Blairism and unquestioning support of the discredited myth of "humanitarian military intervention" again.

If there was any real public support for Labour becoming the party you want it to reduce itself to, the CUK would not have failed to win a single seat and would not have been held to a total of 10,000 votes in the whole of the UK.