What do the Labour party need to do to stop their slow death?

[flashbac]

I'll start:

Starmer needs to stop acting like a rabbit in the headlights and actually stand for something. He has no charisma or gravitas. We want someone with a personality. Stand for something Starmer!

Stop pandering to the 'red wall'. Inspire people to vote for the party with some good policies instead of flip flopping about.

Have some inspiring and uplifting policies like:

• Free childcare for working parents
• making public transport normal and affordable
• subsidised green energy initiatives to help householders lower energy bills eg solar panels etc

And they NEED to distance themselves from that anti science TWAW stance. I'm all for being kind but a blanket dilution of what 'woman' means is regressive.

@sashagabadon

Where is/ was Labour with the recent PO / Horizon scandal? They should be all over that and supporting these people ( normal working people trying to keep their small post offices afloat) and yet nothing. It’s a perfect “Labour for the working people “versus private industry and crap computer systems and people have been sent to prison/ lost their lives. And yet you hear nothing about it from Labour at all?! It’s baffling. Maybe the people involved aren’t the right type of victim and yet they are, normal working class people. Not heard a single Labour MP even mention it

Exactly, you would have expected Labour to be all over this like a rash and yet tumbleweed, it's left to Labour's most hated newspaper, the Daily Mail, to keep banging the drum about it whilst the Labour Party obsess about pronouns.

Labour were in power when the post office scandal happened weren't they? Which is probably why they are keeping quiet now. Don't want people to point it out. Though Tories could have fixed this quicker.

@Bythemillpond

I don’t think Blair’s wooing of the media was solely why he won. I think he did what a lot of Labour leaders don’t do. He recognised that even if someone was born poor and working class it didn’t mean they wanted to stay poor and working class They wanted help to earn enough to own their own house and car and instead of complaining about rich landlords and bosses they wanted to be able to be the very thing that subsequent Labour leaders despise

This is really true. Corbyn’s reliving of 1970s trade union battles, completely ignores the plumbers, builders, small business owners etc. The constant attacks on “the wealthy”, romanticism of “the poor” by middle-class people whose lives are so removed from the actual grimness of an edge-of-city council estate; it’s a massive turn off to the actual working class who (shock horror!) aspire to be successful, earn more, live in a bigger house. At the time of the last election, I lived in Bristol. All the Labour candidates were eager to be photographed in the trendy inner-city areas of St Paul’s, Easton etc. They’re a very photogenic mix of multiculturalism, hipsters, middle class vegans. It’s presented by the likes of Jezza’s pet Marvin Rees as “the gritty inner city, look how in touch with the poor I am”. But the actual poor people in Bristol have long since been shipped out to some truly grim estates in Hartcliff, Lawrence Weston, Knowle West. Places the blue-hair and quinoa crowd literally don’t know exist.

[quote Schonerlebnis]@Watermelon1234 what’s the obsession with woke ? Can’t working class people be woke ? A little bit of cheeky condescension going on there lol.
The thing is many labour policies have been expropriated by the tories.
Someone obviously thinks they will appeal to the ‘working classes’ [/quote]
Anyone can be woke, but in my (admittedly limited) experience, I find most people I know (on varying salaries and at different stages in their lives) generally are more bothered about healthcare, employment, policing, crime and the justice system and education, rather than trans rights etc.

I don’t know if I’m working or middle class and couldn’t care less tbh, but any party who focusses on the above will win my vote.

Another example in the last election was that labour would not accept the result of the brexit referendum and in a democratic country that was appalling.

Need to become more centre left.
Most people sit somewhere between centre right and centre left. Extreme politics either side puts people off.

Women’s rights.

Giving more to those that genuinely need benefits, not encouraging those that can work to claim benefits.

Better and affordable childcare provisions for those struggling financially/seeking work

Being less woke

Plus all of this:

Bythemillpond

I think the problem with Labour is their war on anyone who wants to better themselves by starting a business or getting a better job that takes their salary over into “rich” section of society who need to be punished for earning more.
I think Blair’s Labour did well in 1997 because it took account of people who might have been at the lower end of the income scale but wanted to work theirselves up.
I get the impression that if you are a small business person under a Labour government now that you are the enemy and need to be brought down a few pegs so you are reliant on the state.
How dare you want to become part of the rich elite.

Maybe someone can put it better than I have
but the amount of people they appeal to with this impression is getting smaller and smaller.
People don’t want to be thought of as incapable. Yes they might need help to get going but not the sort of help that keeps them stuck.

A lot of their politics is about bringing down the rich not helping those at the lower end to climb up.

I was overjoyed when KS win the leadership over those three other pathetic candidates. Unfortunately he's lost my support because he can't say what a woman is. I mean really...?

The labour party have completely lost their way.

Unfortunately they're completely dependent on the current population of woke sixth formers and Twitter users actually staying woke and never changing their mind, and the generation below them also staying woke and not ever changing their mind through eg contact with the real world, and then everyone else dying out.

So it's a long time waiting until they're elected.

@jasjas1973

I know we were ready to go if Labour got in. Many of the people we know in our area had a plan that could be put into action if they needed to move quickly

We are selling up and we still don’t know if we will stay or go

Where would you go?

Jasjas am I right in saying you are moving to France - maybe you are already there. What will you do if Le Pen gets in?

[quote Schonerlebnis]@Watermelon1234 what’s the obsession with woke ? Can’t working class people be woke ? A little bit of cheeky condescension going on there lol.
The thing is many labour policies have been expropriated by the tories.
Someone obviously thinks they will appeal to the ‘working classes’ [/quote]
The current iteration of 'woke' tends to be totally divorced from the lives of ordinary people though. I teach in an university and the kind of things the students think are light years away from most ordinary people's lives. It's no longer just generally progressive opinion: you have to be from a really niche kind of background (often but not always white, privileged, and young enough to have had limited life experience) -- it's all the usual stuff, the most important things being shouting at other people about "white fragility", pressuring others to put pronouns in their Zoom identifiers and policing "terf rhetoric", campaigning to legalise "intersectional sex work", and so on. They are often very politically engaged, but on things like the importance of "bdsm ethical porn", eradicating "kink shaming", campaigning for gender neutral toilets, and so on. Lots of clicktivism and the extremes of Twitter politics. They aren't even that bothered about climate change (though lots are vegan activists); it's almost all around policing ideas about gender and "queerness" and so on. I've had some truly eye-popping conversations with young women about how they think the foremost issue for feminism is centring men - not just in trans politics, but about how including men in feminism is the most important task ahead for women because it's the job of feminists to "bring everyone to the table" I like my students, but I have to say that they really do think some confused and misguided stuff right now.

The thing is that a lot of Labour activists (and I'm a former party member) are fully signed up to all of this now, and these are the main obsessions of the young middle-class university-going Left. But they have no interest in or knowledge of the lives of, say, ordinary women with children, or issues like childcare, education, healthcare (unless it's something like accessing trans healthcare), and they aren't interested even in issues that would have been big things even ten years ago like the disappearance of legal aid, voting reform/PR, Israel/Palestine and so on. They care about race, but their understanding of race issues is very limited and dominated by US internet activism, so they struggle to understand what, say, might be important to the British Asian community.

When you think about the kind of ordinary people a previous poster wrote about upthread, who would have been natural Labour voters ten, twenty or thirty years ago, those people's thoughts are on tax credits, childcare, healthcare, maternity services, employment rights, housing, economics, basic costs. The Twitter politics of intersectional feminism and compelled pronouns and "queernomics" genuinely sounds ridiculous to them. They don't want their elderly Muslim mother being told she's bigoted if she doesn't want to share a hospital bay with a trans woman. They don't want their daughters being perved at by teenage boys in unisex loos or being told "kink" is normal and healthy. They are worried about food inflation and whether they can afford the after school club fees and whether there is going to be restructuring at work. The kind of stuff that obsesses the Owen Jones Bromentum crowd and the young woke isn't stuff you can largely justify being obsessed with when you have kids and people to look after.

Labour needs a radical rethink on its key priorities if it's going to attract lots of people back, and it's not that any of those priorities have to be stolen from the Tories. They just have to be actual traditionally leftwing policies like employment, education, healthcare, childcare, women's rights. Blair appealed to voters not only because of the charisma, but because the policies New Labour focused on in the first and second terms were things like employment rights, wage legislation, schools, healthcare, tax credits, community centres. In the last ten years the Tories dismantled huge swathes of this by stealth and why is Labour not making a giant fuss about this and promising to restore it?

On reading this I think the party are beyond redemption. Far too toxic. Really depressing because it means we are stuck with these ruthless speculating, corrupt tory bastards for years to come. They can do no wrong it seems. Every week there's a scandal or a gaffe and nobody seems to bat an eyelid and we have no opposition.

Excellent post stack

stack wins post of the day. Can you please screen shot to Starmer?

There's a world of difference between Labour policies - actual policies - and the sort of stuff that appears on social media.

Actual Labour policy is focused on wealth creation, funding the public sector, help for small and medium businesses ...

All the stuff people in here say they want.

Nothing about pronouns. No shift on women's rights.

And Starmer has moved - consistently -away from Corbynism.

The Corbynists know this and are both furious and mounting a campaign to get rid of Starmer.

But ... there's a huge problem. Which I think is made really clear on this thread:

How would you know all that?

Our media is dominated by coronavirus. Labour are massively out of power - with an 80 seat majority for the Conservatives, the Opposition, led by Starmer, is almost an irrelevance.

Meanwhile, the click bait 'Leftism' of Owen Jones dominates social media.

It's incredibly hard to compete against someone whose aim is to generate attention for himself and his niche area at the cost of actually helping a political Party win votes.

The narrative about what the Labour Party actually stands for at the moment is very much at variance with its policies at the moment.

To me, it's utterly contaminated by a really niche version of 'progressivism'.

What do you do about that? I don't know the answer - but I think Labour needs to find an answer. And soon.

And, yes, the treatment of Rosie Duffield on Twitter is key to that. It's beyond a disgrace.

People can disagree - but bullying of the like she has been subjected to is unacceptable.

One problem is that it's on Twitter, rather than within an organised political space - so it's hard to discipline. But ... something needs to be done about it. It's poisonous.

As for the culture stackofcats identifies ... well, my feeling is that people - especially young people - experiment with ideas. However, you expect something different from an actual political Party.

One of the madnesses of recent politics has been the absorption of ideas such as those - at the cost of materially-grounded policies - into the mainstream, Parliamentary Left. It didn't work with the electorate, did it?

But, again, there is a huge difference between the policies and economic/social strategy the Labour Party currently have and that extra-Parliamentary politics.

The problem is that it seems very few people know that.

Reading this thread has made me think that Starmer needs to make this very, very clear.

For example, Owen Jones has virtually no purchase within the current Labour leadership. He had a whatsapp hotline to the previous administration.

No more.

He's totally out in the cold.

But people still identify his social media rantings with Labour.

This clearly needs to change.

So, in short, my wish would be for Starmer to be a bit more vocal about what he's done. Particularly about creating a clear firewall between Labour as the Party that seeks to govern and the wild 'progressives' who are really out of touch in their demands and behaviour.

That is depressing Stark
The stuff I loved and made a real impact on my particular life when I was a youngish mum of 2 and working 4 days a week was sure start ( loved our local centre and visited it loads and it was definitely not all middle class mothers either) , help with nursery costs, increasing mat leave from 6 months ( child 1) to 9 months ( child 2) made a huge difference. Also I noticed the money put into early years education with good facilities, good playgrounds.
I think Labour need to do more of this stuff, it was positive life affirming stuff rather than the everything is terrible, everyone is racist and everyone is oppressed narrative. Identity politics is a cul-de-sac of misery and woe leading to community disintegration and I’m surprised more people don’t see it this way in the Labour Party.

It really is awful, though.

Common-sense tells you that you are not going to get into power by effectively telling women you will make it OK to make prostitution a job like any other. Not when many women are in Universsl Credit and know that they will be the ones having to do sex work.

It's just bonkers.

People grow out of that sort of politics when they gain a little life-experience - and empathy.

And yet that narrative is one that the current Labour Party is saddled with.

The Labour Party really needs to separate itself quite firmly from what are, in fact, fringe idea, with no purchase on people's reality or aspirations.

And Labour need to do it soon, visibly, and firmly.

Nothing about pronouns. No shift on women's rights.

Kier Starmer is on record as saying he wants to reform the GRA, and repeats the mind numbing trans rights are human rights and transwomen are women mantras. He won't or can't express any firm commitment to uphold or extend women's rights.

And, yes, the treatment of Rosie Duffield on Twitter is key to that. It's beyond a disgrace.

People can disagree - but bullying of the like she has been subjected to is unacceptable.

One problem is that it's on Twitter, rather than within an organised political space - so it's hard to discipline. But ... something needs to be done about it. It's poisonous.

Kier Starmer is too craven and cowardly to stand up and unequivocally condemn the abuse Rosie Duffield has been subjected to, it matters not where or whom it comes from. It's disgraceful that he has remained silent, offered no support whatsoever to her and the reason he has failed to stand up and be counted for Rosie is because he is frightened the Twitter mob will turn on him, that is not a quality of a leader more a damning indictment of one.

The British public, the Labour Party and their supporters deserve better.

The twitter mob has already turned on Starmer though. Did you read the comments about him that have gone on pretty much since he was elected.
@thecatfromjapan you are spot on too

Policies and manifestos count, but they need a charismatic likeable leader who is convincing and instills confidence. Starmer comes across as a wet whiner, his deputy comes across as a sulky teen and her lisp unfortunately does not help when public speaking.

To have a decent opposition we need a strong, likeable leader.

Spend more time advocating for progressive public services, fair taxation, workers' rights, challenging Tory cronyism, and spend a little less time paying attention to blue haired student activists, fringe groups and the Owen Jones fan club.

I'm willing to bet that Starmer wouldn't reform the GRA at the cost of women's rights, Bronwen. But you're right - I shouldn't have to telepathically guess that.

And, yes, the silence in Rosie Duffield's bullying is inexcusable.

In fact, I really think that this is where Starmer needs to act.

Social media is the Achilles heel for Labour. It's utterly toxic.

I do wonder if Labour shouldn't stick their necks out and insist on a social media behaviour policy as a proviso of membership.

And enforce it. Harshly.

Problem is, politics is run on a shoestring budget and there is little ability to actually track down and kick out members who do this.

Maybe a few high-profile members being kicked out would do the trick?

@Juliettebravo

The twitter mob has already turned on Starmer though. Did you read the comments about him that have gone on pretty much since he was elected. *@thecatfromjapan* you are spot on too

I've not seen anything to the level that Rosie Duffield has experienced but if that's the case then what other reason is there that he has remained schtum about the abuse directed at her? Either he is afraid of the backlash to him or he thinks Rosie Duffield deserves the abuse, both reprehensible in a leader of any political Party.

@BronwenFrideswide

you can't win anyone's vote by making them feel small or insignificant or stupid, even if they are

You were doing so well up until this last line TeacupDrama, perhaps stop sneering at and treating people you want to vote for you with such patronising contempt.

Exactly

I'm willing to bet that Starmer wouldn't reform the GRA at the cost of women's rights, Bronwen. But you're right - I shouldn't have to telepathically guess that.

That sums it up really doesn't it, what does he stand for, what does he propose, why is he so lily-livered about sharing his intentions?

thecatfromjapan -- *There's a world of difference between Labour policies - actual policies - and the sort of stuff that appears on social media.

Actual Labour policy is focused on wealth creation, funding the public sector, help for small and medium businesses ...

All the stuff people in here say they want.

Nothing about pronouns. No shift on women's rights*

I think a huge problem is that party policy is not just the manifesto and Twitter -- it's also local party activism - which is often closely working with student activism - and local government, as well as in-party official caucuses and groups like LGBT Labour. So there is actually genuine capture of "official" party policy on this kind of issue, especially at local party and local government level.

I come from a working-class Northern area where people are largely tribal labour voters. But they look at this kind of stuff - where students are calling for a former councillor to be dismissed from their job for resigning rather than sign up to the TWAW stuff - and they can't believe it. My dad was flabbergasted at the idea that a woman could lose her job over saying that biological sex exists! Older boomer women in particular - always a really important vote share - are hugely turned off by this kind of stuff, and it isn't just happening on social media, sadly.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cambridge-row-over-transphobic-porter-kevin-price-8bb7px950

@TruelyWonder

Labour were in power when the post office scandal happened weren't they? Which is probably why they are keeping quiet now. Don't want people to point it out. Though Tories could have fixed this quicker.

The issue was first raised in 2009, Labour left power shortly afterwards.

There were at least 2 inquires under the Tories, both said there was no evidence any monies had been stolen! one even said Horizon had issues!

Yet nothing done.... but somehow this is portrayed as a Labour failing.....