Tagged with elections

Do MPs have a “greater mandate”?

Tony Blair poster 1983. He knew a thing or two about ignoring party members

Tony Blair poster 1983. He knew a thing or two about ignoring party members

Constitutional specialist Vernon Bogdanor wrote recently in the New Statesman

The Labour Party is composed of three main elements – the Parliamentary Labour Party, the trade unions and the members. But the PLP is the most important, given that it represents the nine million people who voted Labour in 2015, and any future Labour government will be responsible to MPs. A government is not, ought not, and cannot be constitutionally responsible to the few hundred thousand party members outside parliament, who represent nobody but themselves and who are, in Labour’s case, apparently, three times more likely to be well-off urban professionals than the population as a whole. (Emphasis added)

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The Cruddas Report and winning in 2020

CruddasReportCoverThe independent inquiry by Jon Cruddas and others, ‘Why Labour lost in 2015 and how it can win again’ has just been published (late May 2016), although much of the material has already appeared. It does I think deserve another look, as there is fresh material, it is serious, as opposed to just being a means of attacking Corbyn, and it poses the ultimate question. Its conclusions are, I believe, largely but by no means completely wrong, and I will try to explain why. Continue reading →

The Left needs to unpack what “Electability” really means

Blair-ClintonThe candidacy of Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour Party leadership has stimulated the party’s old debate surrounding the Left and “electability”: supporters of the Islington North MP claim that elections are won by a clear and confident statement of one’s ideas, whilst opponents universally claim that elections are won, always and in any circumstance, by limitless and feral Right-wingery, which is referred to as occupying the “centre ground”.

The version of history used to support the latter claim is often selective and disingenuous: New Labour is portrayed as Labour’s first attempt at a “centre-ground” strategy, rather than a third attempt after two instances of abject failure under Neil Kinnock, the original “moderniser”. Forgotten, too, is the way in which Labour’s long-term demographic base and its reservoir of public good will were steady and disastrously eroded by the same Blairite/Brownite political machine that had successfully delivered the goods in 1997. Continue reading →

Ed Miliband needs to challenge the UKIP surge

At the time of writing (15:47) UKIP has won 78 seats and is averaging 25% of the vote in the wards where it is standing. That is quite something. Not only is it making the Tories look stupid and the Liberal Democrats look irrelevant, it makes Labour look like they haven’t the nous to be an effective opposition.

This is to change. As Rafael Behr has written in his New Statesman column this week politicians have two choices; they can yield or defy. The Labour leader clearly has an eye, at least, to the latter.

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