Worst election result ever? TUSC gets zero votes

by Phil Burton-Cartledge

tuscAfter getting routinely thumped by the Elvis Loves Pets party in the Eastleigh by-election, where else can your vote go except … down? Continue reading →

Chuka seeks to “weaponise” Swindon

by Andy Newman

Chuka and DempseyChuka Umunna’s odd decision to launch his leadership bid with an embarrassingly amateur video filmed in Swindon may come back to haunt him. It is hard to disagree with Dan Hodges’s assessment at the Telegraph that:

Formally announcing his candidature via a Facebook video filmed in the centre of Swindon, it was pretty obvious what Umunna was trying to do – refute the charge that he only appeals to a London metropolitan elite. Just in case this message was missed, he then sledge-hammered it home by insisting: “I also, frankly, wanted to get out of London and say what I was going to do here, because of course, we’ve got to be winning in a place like Swindon”.

Unfortunately, it didn’t have the desired effect. The video, which appeared to have been shot on an iPhone, made Umunna look a bit like a student embarking on a media studies project. In fact, as the good people of Swindon circled obliviously around him – he looked a bit like a documentary maker producing a film about an obscure Amazonian tribe: “Chuka’s World”. The overall effect was that by attempting to rebut a negative he merely ended up focusing attention on that negative.

Continue reading →

How the election was won – smears, bogus ‘successes’ & the Left’s failure at rebuttal

by Bryan Gould

lynton-crosbyDemocracy is a messy and unpredictable business. The response to the British general election may well be to shrug one’s shoulders – and perhaps to enjoy the discomfort of all those pollsters and pundits who got it wrong. Perhaps the popular will is harder to read than we thought.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps what we have seen is a demonstration that the popular sentiment on political issues can be manipulated; after all, we have now seen a series of election results around the globe – in Australia, New Zealand and the UK – which have produced similar results following the use of similar techniques. Continue reading →

It’s going to be a long five years

by Phil Burton-Cartledge

2eqdqfkI really didn’t want to be writing this. At the very least I was hoping to have a Kremlinological geek out over possible coalition combinations. But no. The worst came to pass. Not only were the Conservatives the largest party, but contrary to everything I’ve written about them this last two-and-a-half years they scraped the thinnest of majorities. The lesson there is never think the Tories win elections from the centre ground when they can rally irrationality and fear to their standard.

So here we are. Five more years of Osborne, May, Shapps, Hunt, IBS, Hammond, Soubry, Fallon … a grotesques’ gallery if there ever was one. Yet what we do know with certainty is the one man who won’t be there is Dave, who will swan off when he feels his work is done – presumably after the referendum on EU membership. Continue reading →

If Osborne cuts £30bn as promised, he can’t achieve his deficit reduction targets

by Michael Meacher

scissorsOsborne is now mooting an emergency budget within the next few weeks to lay the foundations for the £30bn fiscal consolidation (aka cuts) to be announced in the autumn spending review. It is made up of £12bn welfare cuts, £13bn reductions in departmental expenditure (aka cuts in public services), and £5bn in tax avoidance measures. What is not immediately apparent is that, if the NHS, schools and overseas aid budgets continue to be ring-fenced, the cutbacks in unprotected and sensitive expenditure like defence and the police will have to be as high as 18%. Continue reading →

Don’t let Chuka take us back to not-so-New Labour

by Barney McCay

Chuka_at_Lambeth_College-2In less than 36 hours after Ed announced his resignation, Chuka Umunna launched his leadership bid. The news, for many on the left, hammers home just how disastrous Thursday’s defeat was. We had woken up on May 7 expecting a Prime Minister to take office in the coming days who genuinely bucked the trend. Miliband, unlike his counterparts, seemed to be in it for the right reasons. In stark contrast to the sinister motives lurking behind the sweaty-Eton-juice of Cameron’s forehead, he offered something honest. He wasn’t airbrushed, he didn’t pretend to support football teams he knew nothing about, and he provided a vision that tried to bring the Labour Party back to its roots. Continue reading →

Harman pre-empts return to shadow cabinet elections by announcing reshuffle

by Jon Lansman

shadow cabinetHarriet Harman has this morning announced a new Shadow Cabinet team before the first meeting of the new parliamentary party due this evening.

She is, of course, entitled to do so according to the rules of the parliamentary party. These were amended four years ago at the request of the then leader, Ed Miliband, to abolish shadow cabinet elections which had long taken place annually when the party was in opposition – a move which the same MPs had rejected only a year earlier. Continue reading →

On the centre ground and the politics of aspiration

by Phil Burton-Cartledge

pot-of-gold-at-end-rainbow-reveal-loopTony Blair’s enduring, if banal, insight is that parties win elections from the centre ground. Labour has to be where most of the voters are in order to win seats enough to govern. While in one sense true, in another the centre ground is a many legged beast. And each body segment has its own direction of travel.

It’s not the done thing to believe the polls these days, but they have consistently shown support for nice lefty things like nationalisation of utilities and the rails, properly funding the NHS, rent controls, and a host of other causes we hold dear. And they also show the salience of some regressive views – antipathy toward immigrants, and hostility to those dependent on social security. Continue reading →

Blairite propaganda that “Miliband paid price for lurch to left” is nonsense

by Michael Meacher

turn leftIt’s already being said by the Blairite rump that Labour lost because Ed Miliband took the party to the left. The fact is that the New Labour governments were well to the right of the vast majority of Labour supporters, and clearly needed correction, but let that pass. This last-ditch attempt to re-launch the manifestly failed Blairite project ignores the meaning of everything that’s happened in the last 5 years. Ed Miliband was right to see that the banks and finance sector, the corporate elite, and the media had far too much power and had abused it by inflating their own income and wealth at the expense of everyone else and by seeking to suppress all those forces, notably the trade unions, that stood up for the poor and dispossessed. Continue reading →

Labour will not win until it rejects the politics of austerity

by Mike Phipps

Austerity is failingIrrespective of who succeeds Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour Party, there needs to be a thorough-going discussion about its future strategy. On one side, there will be a new offensive from the remnants of New Labour, claiming it was the radicalism of the 2015 Manifesto that was the cause of Labours dire showing. While some of these policies may have inspired the print media to plumb new depths in fear  and hate-mongering, the idea that these policies were inherently unpopular should be treated with extreme caution.

Firstly, Labours lead over the Tories on the NHS was in double-digits throughout the campaign. A majority of voters – even of Tory and UKIP voters – favoured rail renationalisation and other policies that put public services ahead of deficit reduction. This policy lead explains why Conservative tactics relied so much on demonising Miliband as an individual and why the long political campaign focused on such a narrow range of issues. Continue reading →

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