Why the Labour Party will not elect a woman

[PersonaNonGarter]

Just seen the Britain Elects poll of Labour members. Keir Starmer ahead on 31% with Rebecca Long Bailey on 20% and Jess Philips on 11%.

The Labour Party is too male. Even though women desperately need representation, Labour continue to romanticise heavy industry (manly) over the needs of eg retail workers (woman’s work). And even the recent Woke intake are steeped in this rose tinted Marxist Down Pit crap that lauds traditionally male roles.

So yeah the candidates might look like the women are putting on a good show. But a man will win.

In the absence of sparkling charisma, I'll take competence and high level analytical ability any day.

100% yes.

I’ll take competence too, makes a welcome change

I don’t think picking Johnson apart in the Commons is that important compared to sorting out the mess of a party. They spent the last few years fighting each other and slating the only Labour leader to win elections in 50 years. Why would anyone vote for them when they wouldn’t even vote for each other?

Also it highlights Johnson’s untrustworthiness and flakey behaviour

Blair is said to have charisma but he also had smarmy levelled at him so a flip side. He did well though of course

@noblegiraffe the mess in the party needs to be sorted of course, BUT Labour can't just be inwardly focused while Brexit is happening - they need to be able to seize on all the issues that will erupt so that the 'sunlit uplands' story can be challenged. The Tories successfully established the 'Labour spent all the money' after 2010 in part because there was no real challenge to them blaming Labour for the financial crisis. Labour have to keep on pointing out that a) The Tories own Brexit now 100% and b) it's not going to go very well. That can't be allowed to slide onto the back burner. They're going to have to do that while also having a major party rethink. Not ideal but got to be done and currently Starmer is best placed to keep attacking the detail of what Johnson and Cummings come up with. The party review can't be all the work of one person anyway.

I would like to see a left wing party get back into ascendancy who are defined more by a love of working class and poorer people as opposed to being more motivated by a hatred of the rich

Corbynism goes well beyond a hatred of the rich. It is antagonistic and antipathetic to business. The starting point for Corbynism is to assume the worst motivation- "screw the workers" is assumed to be the primary motivation.

And then there were the attempts to dictate how a business owner should run their business- all that guff about 4 day weeks and employees being entitled to set the hours they want with little regard to business needs.

This misdirected ire wasn't aimed just at the super rich.

I'm part of a partnership business. I take home well above average wage but I have time and money invested in that business and around 300 people rely on me and my and partners to make sound business and investment decisions to keep their jobs safe. Corbynism simply does not understand that. According to Corbynism I'm evil and oppressive and deserve to have half or more of my earnings taken from me.

The next leader needs to be someone who can win an election in 5 years time. As much as I'd like that to be a woman, I can't help feeling Starmer is best placed to do it.

A Starmer/Cooper ticket would be ideal.

Starmer is very pro women as was evidenced by his time as DPP. Women stand to gain more by having Labour in power with the right leadership that by merely having a female leader.

I don't know, however, if he knows what a woman is but would be fab if he'd do a MNHQ webchat so we can find out.

The swing needed to win an election in 5 years is too big, the leader after this one needs to be electable. This one needs to lay the groundwork.

Earlier on in the thread I posted a comment and some thought for some reason I was attacking Starmer.

Not in the least I was trying to point out as others have now done party politics is no longer about the policy and aims of the party.

And this is to do with how news is reported in this country. It has become a personality contest. And most of the electorate go along with that. ie prefering a man who has been shown to lie, be incomptent, constantly changes his mind, and basically will do anything to be PM. ie Johnson who ran away from the difficultly created by Cameron stepping down let Theresa May take the fall. And he is happy to be the voter friendly face of the ERG .

So nobody discussed Labour in terms of their policies, and I think the comments about Brittain not being solialist just isn't true. The creation of the NHS and the housing policy after the war weren't about "resetting the country" it was about responding directly to the aspirations of those who fought and survived the war.

And yes the Tories got in after, but compared to now eg the MacMillan never had it so good government was left of what is not called central politics.

I grew up in a family of wishy washy liberals (not party) and the sort of opinions I heard then would now be categorised as left.

It isn't about the electorate being stupid but about the fact that once the media gets into a trend of demonising someone, unless you spend hours unpicking the relentless comments of the airheads who endlessly drone on on tv etc., you just get submerged in it. So many of the comments on here are directly quotes of tv punditry.

That's why I said party politics is now a joke. Personally once an election is called I would ban any part of the press from commenting or even reporting. There would be a sort of fact check panel to go through the manifestos. And we would have to decide on policies we thought would be best for the country not whether someone could muck about on a slip wire or cry in public on demand.

But most of us dont want to do the hard work of actually understanding what is going on, which just accept the slogans pumped out at us.

I am not saying that in every instance nationalised industries and services are better, but when you look back at the negative impact of bringing in private companies to run services, whether social service care provision, housing, prisons, etc.,etc., how can anyone think this was a good policy? And Labour under Blair bought in PPI and committed councils and NHS Trusts to be in debt. Servicing the debt to private companies has been far more onerous on us than paying of the debt to the Americans following WWII.

I am not a Labour Party supporter by the way, but I just think someone needs to stand back from the nasty bullying that in fact comes from the media so that every politician is game playing them, not bothered about us.

I cant undersand when so many highy sucessful european countries have semi if not totally nationalised railways that so many people seem to respond as though we are letting in some demons. The irony being of course, that as a country we aren't quite the business orientated one we think we are, and most of our railways are run be other european railway companies.

But the media never reports that. They just go with the reds under the beds nonsense. A media research department looked at the coverage during the elections and it turned out the Guardian had the highest number of inaccurate reports about Corbyn and anti semitism.

I am not blaming the electorate but I do think we seem to have lost our critical facilities. Just look at the sheer absurdity of tv news going out to interview people about Brexit and they get the reply, just get it done. What does that mean. You wouldn't say that about having an operation, or some building work.

There is something seriously wrong about how we think about and discuss politics. And in the mean time, actual parties are themselves made up of splits and vendettas, but the media only choosed to highlight the ones that suit the agenda of the publisher and editor.

We don't need a new Blair.

Blairs failings filtering through are why a significant part of the electorate drifted to the right.

Blair did many things that were good, but the failure of centerists to acknowledge and take ownership of where the Blair administration failed are a massive part of the problem here.

This is what let the far left and far right in because there was a void of critical self examination and taking responsibility for errors. It was a massive amount of arrogance.

It's centrist voters who do need to consider this and why they have not been able to address the issues of the last 5 years adequately. (clue its about proper understanding of democracy and its underlying foundations but equally not about this will of the people shite.).

The superficiality of politics combined with spin and arrogance of middle classes is at the heart of everything we are seeing now.

@AriadneAufNaxos And then there were the attempts to dictate how a business owner should run their business- all that guff about 4 day weeks and employees being entitled to set the hours they want with little regard to business needs. .... I'm part of a partnership business. I take home well above average wage but I have time and money invested in that business and around 300 people rely on me and my and partners to make sound business and investment decisions to keep their jobs safe. Corbynism simply does not understand that. According to Corbynism I'm evil and oppressive and deserve to have half or more of my earnings taken from me..

(fewer staff but) Snap! completely agree with this.

I’m northern, very working class roots. Labour are no longer my party, not only do they not represent me, they would drive a truck over everything I’ve done to improve life for myself and my family.

Meanwhile, a friend who is a privately educated, childless, metropolitan socialist idealist and descendent of an Indian Viceroy who employs a couple of eastern europeans to clean and garden for him so considers himself egalitarian, who thinks everything should be nationalised and everything people have should go to the state when he dies (vast family assets in trusts so they don’t count as personal property, apparently), was Corbyn all the way.

Labour have lost the plot, they have nothing in common with their traditional voters, the working class who don’t want to be patronised and taxed to high heaven just in order to see Labour in power. That is borne out in the election map. Male or female leadership is irrelevant, they need someone who will put an end to —Militant— Momentum’s stranglehold.

bold fail, strikethrough fail. gah.

So nobody discussed Labour in terms of their policies, and I think the comments about Brittain not being solialist just isn't true. The creation of the NHS and the housing policy after the war weren't about "resetting the country" it was about responding directly to the aspirations of those who fought and survived the war

Er yes it was responding directly to those aspirations but there is no logic to then say the UK is or wants to be a socialist country in the way Corbynism wants socialism.

There is far too much evidence that socialism does not work and far from supporting and encouraging aspirations works against them.

Blair did many things that were good, but the failure of centerists to acknowledge and take ownership of where the Blair administration failed are a massive part of the problem here.

But there’s also the failure of the left to acknowledge that Blair did anything good. They demonise him more than those posters ever did. I saw Angela Rayner post on twitter about how useful SureStart had been to her when she had her children and bloody hell the replies ripped her to shreds. She was a Blairite who should immediately resign from the party in disgrace.

I agree that the way we do politics is ridiculous. The older I get, the more society seems to be crazy eager to polarize along any possible fault line. But I think it's really reductionist to attribute this to any one cause. Has the media played a part? Yes. Has the internet? Yes. Has austerity? Yes. Educational policy? Yes. Queer theory? Yes. Consumerist attitudes? Yes.

So how on earth do you fix all that? Simple answer, you can't, because humans are diverse, a jumbled bag of stupid, clever, blinkered, visionary, conservative and progressive.

All you can do is accept nuance, let people speak about their situation and views without shouting them down if you disagree with them, make your case in the public square, based on the best possible information available and persuade people fairly.

There is no utopia on the horizon, and there certainly isn't a socialist paradise coming any time soon. The world is going to change in the next ten years as enormously as it has in the last ten. If we cannot find a better way of communicating with each other, a lot of those changes are going to cause untold damage.

to the state when THEY die. double gah.

This is Dan Jarvis's take on the election result:

labourlist.org/2019/12/lessons-from-campaigning-in-the-labour-heartland-seat-of-barnsley/

He was considering running for leadership before Christmas. One thing's for sure: they'll have a hell of a job trying to accuse him of sympathising with terrorists.

I think it's significant that Nigel Farage appears to have targeted his seat specifically.

noblegiraffe I think Labour is best serve opposing the Conservatives in contrast to trying to both oppose Conservatives AND themselves.

Labour should have a look to how well the snp have done in Scotland on a social democratic just left of centre position.

I'd love Jess Phillips to be PM but sadly doubt it will ever happen ...

Just out of interest I looked for the origins of these figures.

So first off it is an ESRC funded project and as has come up on other threads their ability to run a genuine unbiased survey is highly dubious.

The figures were arrived at by excluding all the dont knows, but doesn't say how many that was. Only just over 1,000 members were surveyed so the results may be just the opinion of 500 people!

This is just the sort of ridiculous misdirection by the media happy to boost the CVs of academics who need to churn out pointless verbage to get grants.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/01/poll-of-labour-members-suggests-keir-starmer-is-first-choice

What would be more useful is to find a way for Labour to genuinely consult with its members. But already that is fraught as some no doubt think those who joined via the cheap membership scheme aren't genuine members. (And I doubt if all Tory members were canvased that half of them would agree with Boris let alone the Cummings project.)

Quite honestly it seems it would make more sense for one of the reality shows to do a mass survey of the UK where the electorate draws up a list of things they want, and then a bit like Dragons Den prospective parties put foward how they would achieve the top 10 / 20 wish list.

The Party system is broken. Not just because of FPTP but because the media which is the medium through which people get their information if not a clear glass, it is a distorting lens.

FloralFestiveBunting - I agree with much of what you have said, but I dont think I can ever remember a time where it seems that politicians lying and it being known they lied is something people just shrug their shoulders.

BJ has already broken some of his election policies and there are no screaming headlines, but just the papers amplifying his hypocritical sentiments about cant we all just get on. Given the sheer vitriol that the faction in the Tory party that got him elected inflicted on their own colleagues and then Leader, it is just beyond credibility that the media is prepared to act as his vacuous mouth piece.

Most people want the right person for the job, whichever sex they are.

I remember when Tony Blair came to power, I was excited, genuinely, as it was all about the future and shaping the future

With Rebecca long Bailey she harped on about how working class she was, with her father a dock worker being constantly stressed under Thatcher

I don't care about working class "credentials" neither do I think a miner's daughter or son is better qualified to decide the future than anyone else

So your dad was a miner? I don't care.

And neither did lots of actual miner's kids, many were able to vote for a typical Eton toff!

Labour is mired in identify politics, but honestly, who cares?

At least Keir Starmer does not patronise the electorate like Long Bailey does with her four Yorkshiremen act

their ability to run a genuine unbiased survey is highly dubious.

They got the last Labour Leadership elections completely correct.