Ken, remind me.
1. how many elections did Corbyn win?
2. How many elections did Blair win?
Not a valid comparison- Blair didn't have the corporate press, the BBC and 80% of his own MPs working all-out to destroy Labour's chances when he was leader. And Blair and his core supporters weren't being subjected to relentless false accusations of a bigotry everyone of the accusers knew they were innocent of.
NO one could have led Labour to victory under those conditions- and it was the Labour Right, a group that had no reason to place a higher priority on preventing the party from winning with Keir's predecessor as leader than they did on beating the Tories, and nobody has won an election on Blair's policies since 2005- the 2010 and 2015 GE's were run on continuity Blairite manifestos and each time Labour was held to 30%, a lower vote share than it took in 2019- and as I've repeatedly pointed out, the miserable showing of Change UK, which fought the '19 election on the continuity Blairite manifesto you want Labour to lower itself to, took 10,000 votes OVERALL, which proves, just as the disastrous May 6th local results, the humiliating by-election defeat in Hartlepool, and the just-barely scraped through- thanks to the hard work of left-wing Labour activists who campaigned hard for an unnecessarily right-wing Labour candidates and saved her from the defeat Keir almost consigned her to- that there is simply no broad public support for the idea that Labour should either go back to the outdated, useless irrelevant 1997 policies, or do what Jess Phillips clearly wants and go to the RIGHT of those policies- probably back to the obscenely right-wing and antiworker policies Ramsay MacDonald destroyed the party with in the early Thirties, when "Ramsay Mac" betrayed everything Labour stood for by responding to the Depression with cuts in already nearly-non existent benefits and the implementation of a demeaning, humiliating "means testing" process.
And I'd like you to answer me this for once...why would it be asking too much to expect Keir to be the leader he PLEDGED to be in the 2020 leadership contest- the leader who pledged NEVER to move the party to the right of the 2017 manifesto, and, in pledging to expand, not crush internal democracy, promised he would not do Kinnock-style purges as leader? Why couldn't Keir just have been THAT leader- and why couldn't he START being that leader now? Labour's poll ratings prove the voters didn't want the party to focus solely on attacking socialists-and yes, the people he's purged are just decent left-wing democratic socialists- next to none of them are "Trots" and quite frankly Trotskyism doesn't even exist in the UK anymore- while bowing and scraping to the Tories and making it sound like he'd change next to nothing if he did get elected?
So a return to the now non-existent "centre ground" is not an answer, and would justifiably be considered a betrayal to the half of all left-wing paid party members who voted to elect Keir leader.
If he wants to win, he needs to do the following:
1) End the purges- the party of democratic socialism should NEVER make it an expulsion-worthy offence to be a socialist;
2) Make it clear that, despite the way he's acted, Keir will NOT move the party back to the discredited and now-useless 1997 policies.
3) Apologise to young Labour activists for the way he has treated them- they are decent, hardworking, committed activists and idealists and Labour not only can't win if it drives them away, it can't survive into the next generation if they are kept as unwelcome as they are now.
4) End the AS Frenzy- The tiny number of people who actually were antisemites have been gone since before 2020 and nobody ever deserved to be accused of AS simply for being non-Zionist or simply critical of what the Israeli government does to Palestinians. Replace the IHRA- a document its own author has repeatedly stated he never meant for use as a legal document or in disciplinary proceedings- with the definition of AS in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism:
"Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)".
This covers any and all instances of ACTUAL antisemitism and excludes those things that should never have been called AS- there was never any reason, for example, that it should ever have been considered AS simply for a group of left activists to get into an argument with an MP who simply happens to BE Jewish, especially when the argument is on a subject that has nothing at all to do with the Jewish identity of that MP, such as that MPs treatment of a leader those activists support OR that MPs views on the I/P conflict.
It's time for Keir to admit that any issue regarding AS within Labour has been resolved and put to rest, and to make it ABSOLUTELY clear that comment on the I/P issue is essentially never AS. He also needs to stop acting as if AS is somehow the fastest-growing and most-prevalent form of bigotry in the UK- it';s actually the slowest-growing and least-held, and the Left has always opposed it just as much as he does.
4) Restore and expand internal party democracy- Labour has nothing to lose or fear from ordinary party members having a real say in what the party stands for, who it selects as candidates, or how the party is run.
5) Related to that, end the apparent ban on the selection of left-wingers as Labour candidates- Labour can't be WORTH electing if every candidate it nominates against a sitting Tory or LibDem or SNP incumbent is a "moderate", for god's sakes- nobody thinks there's any difference anymore between "Labour moderates" and the candidates of any party to their right. Even you, for example, can't seriously argue that it would matter who won in a parliamentary contest between Jess Phillips and her BFF Jacob Rees-Mogg. Labour can't win without the votes of the young and the Left, and it has no right to even ask for those votes if it's not going to allow anyone who isn't a right-wing cynic like Jess to be a Labour candidate.
6) Tell the right wing of the PLP to stand down at the next election- that wing of the party did nothing but damage in the teens- it has ideas, no policies, no vision of a different, better life other than getting its turn at the trough, and most of those people only hold their seats because they were imposed- in constituencies where the Labour candidate automatically wins, no matter what- against the will of their constituency parties. They are deadwood, they're past their sell-by date, they are hated by most of the Labour rank-and-file, and they need to just go.
7) When they go, let their CLPs select whichever candidates the CLPs themselves want. The people who do the work of electing and re-electing Labour MPs are owed at least some say as to who the candidates they are to work for actually are- and it's quite clear, based on the May 6th and Hartlepool results, that Keir and his "advisors" have no better idea of what makes an effective Labour candidate than anybody else in the party.
8) Keir has finally started doing mild attacks on the Tories- he needs to go further, attack them on a clearly ideological, structural level- he needs to attack greed, he needs to attack inequality, he needs to attack austerity and he needs to come out clearly against any notion of any further UK military intervention in the Arab/Muslim world.
If Keir goes big, Labour COULD win. If he keeps listening to reactionaries like Peter Mandelson- a man who hasn't been part of a winning election campaign in sixteen years- he can't.
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