(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Meanwhile, the Labour UK Party [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-21 I’ve written a few diaries now and then about the Labour Party in the UK, usually in the context of a long-smouldering antisemitism crisis under its hapless previous leader, the tankie Jeremy Corbyn, who in 2019 led his party to the worst Parliamentary result since “A Night at the Opera” was released — the 1935 Marx Brothers movie, not the Queen album. Time to catch up. LIKE I WAS SAYING In the last general election, 2019, Labour not only let Boris Johnson win, but gifted him a stonking eighty-seat majority, giving him plenty of room for the shenanigans that eventually caught up with him and forced him from office. The Politico poll of polls for “Westminster Voting Intention” — meaning Parliament — had the Tories up over Labour by a dozen points the day of the December 2019 election, and by the following April, Corbyn’s last month as party leader, that lead had grown to twenty points. But Boris Johnson is the UK version of Trump: self-involved to the exclusion of all else, recklessly in love with himself, and willing to tell the lie of the day if it kept him in power. “Partygate” scandals about his flouting of COVID isolation protocols at various illicit Tory staff gatherings — a contrast exacerbated by the heartbreaking photo of the Queen sitting alone at the funeral of her husband and royal consort, Prince Philip — ate away at his popularity, and by December 2021 the “voting intention” polls were tied, and then Labour took the lead. About a year ago Johnson was finally forced to resign, and his replacement ... THE BALLAD OF LETTUCE LIZ I could go into detail, but then this paragraph would be longer than Liz Truss’s actual time in office. She proffered a national “mini-budget” so clearly and irresponsibly borrow-cash-and-give-it-to-the rich that within a week of its announcement the UK markets had a catastrophic wobble that drove up interest rates sharply, signaled economic incompetence, and led to an immediate “oh, sorry, didn’t mean it.” (Here’s Krugman.) Because the practice in the UK is to lean toward short-term home mortgages, it isn’t just those who have recently bought a home who get affected when the interest rates shoot up. Lots of people felt lots of pain, and still do. She resigned on her fiftieth day as PM, putting her in the history books as having served as PM for the fewest days of any PM in history. In an indelible act of political commentary — well, let’s let Wikipedia tell it. Here is a link to the page you’re redirected to when you look up “The Lettuce.” It’s her epitaph. When she took office, Labour was up ten points. When she left fifty days later, Labour was up thirty points. Rishi Sunak, her successor as Tory party leader, clawed back about ten points of that lead, but the damage looks irreversible. Labour went from twenty points down to a comfortable eighteen points up. Boris, by the way, ended up being forced to resign from Parliament altogether this June, as continued Partygate karma met up with him. party conferences The Tories and Labour both recently held their annual party conferences. Labour’s current leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is a centrist capable of giving a competent speech but not a natural barnstormer. Starmer’s approach has been called “Operation Ming Vase” — as in, he’s carrying a large but potentially fragile lead, and is not in the mood for grand sweeping gestures. Much of this is the Napoleon aphorism about not interrupting your enemy as they make a mistake. But there are those who think Starmer needs to take it up a gear, and there are those who say he’s doing just fine as it is, and that he’s not wrong to keep his powder dry. Right before his Liverpool conference address, someone rushed the stage and covered Starmer in green glitter, in a protest for electoral reform (proportional representation rather than first-past-the-post). Starmer literally brushed it off, took off his jacket rolled up his sleeves, and gave the barnstormer nobody expected. The general consensus is that the glitter bombing freed him up, knocked him out of the rote speechifying groove and into something uncharacteristally direct. He looked — and this is not his usual mode — like he was having fun. The Guardian headline tells the tale: “Keir Starmer enjoys ‘glitter-bomb bounce’ in polls as Tories fear only an economic upturn can save them.” ReCENT PAST AND NEAR FUTURE The Tory brand is in the toilet. In the last couple of days there have been some by-elections in in-cred-ibly solid Tory seats that went Labour by an astounding swing. Labour is now in the “warning ourselves not to get cocky” stage, because the Tories don’t actually have to call an election until the bitter end of 2024 and are going to hang on to what they’ve got for as long as they can. The general sense I get from the press coverage is that the general election won’t be called at the very very very last moment, and will likely be next summer or fall, although of course it’s anybody’s guess. For what it’s worth, the betting markets in the UK have a Labour victory payout about 1/6, implying about an 85% chance, and the Tories at about 4/1, implying about a 20% chance. CORBYN CLEAN-UP Corbyn is stuck between floors. He’s still a party member, but his egregiously awful response to the EHRC ruling that Labour had illegally discriminated against Jews on his watch lost him “the whip” — that is, the right to say he’s a Labour MP rather than merely an MP. The Party spelled out what he needs to do to get the whip back, but Corbyn is above such petty considerations. (It’s a bit Jim Jordan-y. He thought he could prevail against the intraparty opposition to him by whipping up enough noise. It failed.) He will likely run as an independent for his Parliamentary seat. Labour will almost certainly run a Labour candidate against him. So Corbyn will be running, not only without the party apparatus behind him, but with the party apparatus actively against him. He still might win, given that he’s been in the seat since I think 1983 (around the time he had his last original thought) and the Corbynistas are super-duper-ultra-loyal to Corbyn, but the betting markets are only giving him about a one-in-six chance. [Edit, new paragraph] Starmer has been very clear about the de-tankification of Labour, and the left wing of the Labour party — the folks who gave Labour Corbyn — is howling about how they are being ignored and even being forced out of the party. The structural grip the Corbynistas had on the party has been shattered. The Corbyn faction was quite certain that there was no road to Labour victory that did not go through their doors, and the polls are showing something quite different. Labour’s message is very clearly “We are no longer Corbyn’s party.” And it’s working. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/21/2166566/-Meanwhile-the-Labour-UK-Party?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/