Jeremy Corbyn Ready to Get Started Again
B e conscientious what you lot enquire for. Labour relentlessly demands a general ballot, and may attempt to bring ane virtually in the fall, but is the political party in good shape to fight what will be i of the most critical campaigns in our modern history? When I put this important, all the same neglected, question to ane senior figure in the party, he responded with edgeless candour: "No, we're non ready. Not remotely ready."
Let's pause it downward into 5 components: candidates, leadership, messages, mobilisation and money. In each category, Labour faces difficulties. Some are relatively mild. Other handicaps are astringent and difficult, fifty-fifty impossible to address in the very little time that may be left before an election is upon usa.
Labour will be outgunned financially. Tory donors who went on strike during Theresa May'due south tenure are opening their chequebooks for Boris Johnson. The Conservatives won't have a problem spending up to the £20m limit on election campaigns; Labour sources believe they won't become close to that figure. High-value donations take dried up under Jeremy Corbyn. That is not surprising – his remaining devotees would probably say that information technology is a virtue – since Labour'southward policies are not friendly to wealthy individuals. The lack of high-value donors was compensated for by the surge in the political party's membership during the "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn" period. The party started working on the basis that this would endure and ready budgets on the assumption that it would have a minimum of 500,000 members.
As adulation of Mr Corbyn has deflated, so has the membership. Party insiders report that the number has fallen beneath the one-half-million mark, unravelling those upkeep assumptions. The trade unions volition endeavour to help out, but their ability to do so has been crimped. Union political funds were depleted by the 2017 entrada and Tory-introduced changes to the police force, which requires new recruits to actively opt in before some of their dues tin can be put in a political fund, have made it harder for the unions to throw a financial lifeline to Labour.
When an election is on the horizon, whatsoever party likes to take well-established parliamentary candidates working closely with local activists and using every ounce of their combined free energy to ready for the contest. In an act of spectacularly terrible timing, the Labour leadership has chosen this autumn to unleash what i shadow cabinet member predicts will be "mayhem" in local parties. Beginning in September, all Labour MPs will be exposed to potential deselection, a procedure that starts with a "trigger ballot". This is a sort of confidence vote and, when lost past an MP, it can pave the way for their removal. This volition happen in three waves. In London, Neil Coyle and Margaret Hodge volition be in the showtime wave. It is surely not a coincidence, as the old Marxists used to say, that both these MPs accept been fierce critics of Mr Corbyn. On Merseyside, some well-informed observers think that every single Labour MP, except Dan Carden, volition be threatened with deselection. That would include Louise Ellman, the last Jewish Labour MP on Merseyside.
The struggle to defend themselves against trigger ballots is consuming the energy of Labour MPs and dividing local parties, simply when they should exist preparing to exercise boxing with the Tories. The rules and how they should be interpreted are open to dispute, and then there will be challenges, legal and otherwise, past Labour MPs targeted for eviction. Some may determine to stand as independents, splitting the Labour vote. So Labour faces the prospect of heading towards an autumn election in the centre of a rancorous and divisive deselection process that will make the party look brutal, fractured and incompetent.
We already have an fantabulous idea how the Tories will fight an election. They started megaphoning their messages from the moment Boris Johnson stepped into Number 10 and put his political party on a entrada basis. The Tory trio of central letters will exist on Brexit, law-breaking and the NHS. These are the issues that unremarkably come in the acme 3 when pollsters ask voters what concerns them most. The Tories don't expect to win on the NHS; they seek to neutralise it as an issue. On law and order, where Mrs May was vulnerable at the last election because of cuts to police numbers, the Tories are striving to reassert their traditional advantage and hope a hard line on crime will help push button Brexity Labour voters into the blue column. On Brexit, they look to attract the no-deal and permit'due south-get-information technology-over-with segments of the electorate. Tory staffers have been told that all go out is cancelled.
In that location's no matching sense of urgent preparation for an imminent election on the Labour side. A summertime of listless candidature has not antiseptic what messages the party wants to prioritise. Labour is also struggling to settle on a sustained line of attack confronting the new Tory leader. Emphasising an "anti-austerity" theme worked well in 2017, but the worry of some on Labour's frontbench is that this will accept less salience when Mr Johnson is splashing effectually cash on schools, wellness and the police force, even if it is often funny money.
The largest and most unresolved question for Labour is whether it volition fight a Brexit election as an unequivocally anti-Brexit party. If an autumn ballot cancels the political party conferences, the manifesto policy will exist decided by what is called a "Clause 5 meeting", composed of the shadow cabinet and the national executive commission, the latter dominated past Mr Corbyn'south allies. A less equivocal position on Brexit might recoup some of the disillusioned voters who have migrated to the Lib Dems, the Greens and Nationalists. The party chairman, Ian Lavery, and Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, are ferociously opposed to making that shift. Others fright that it is merely too late now. According to people who accept seen it, the political party'due south private polling suggests that many Remain voters volition doubtfulness the sincerity of a terminal-minute conversion.
Mobilisation, the capacity to get out your supporters on polling twenty-four hours, matters a lot. Fifty-fifty after a decline in its paid-up followers, Labour still has many more members to send out on to doorsteps than the Tories and has historically performed well in what strategists phone call "the basis war". The anxiety is that near of those who were in charge of the successful ground endeavor in 2017 have departed Labour headquarters, which has seen a big exodus of experienced staff in the past two years. Social media was a vital tool of mobilisation at the last election. Labour was far superior at using cyber-campaigning to rouse supporters, propagate memes and create political dividing lines to the party'south advantage. Labour cannot rely on having that border once more. From the moment Mr Johnson arrived at Number ten, the Tories started testing reaction to Facebook ads featuring him. The Vote Leave campaign veterans who now populate Number 10 and Conservative campaign headquarters are ruthless exploiters of digital politics, where there are few laws to regulate behaviour.
Which brings me to leadership. A Tory entrada headed by Boris Johnson will obviously be radically different to the hapless attempt fronted past Theresa May. Tories regard him as an infinitely improve political salesman and so practice many senior Labour people. "He could hardly be worse than her, could he?" remarks 1 shadow cabinet fellow member. He is much more of a Marmite political leader than she was, which is a source of Labour hope. "We will exist able to mobilise our supporters' loathing of him much more than than we could against May," predicts one Labour apostle. Against that, Labour'southward entreatment to the country will be led by some other Marmite politician. And Mr Corbyn is non the novelty he once was. He is much ameliorate known to voters than two years agone and what they have learned they have generally disliked. When asked who they adopt as prime minister, he is easily bested past his Tory rival.
His fans will reply that nearly anybody, including me, underestimated the Labour leader's ability to plow around a entrada in 2017. Maybe he can be Comeback Corbyn again and surprise anybody a 2nd fourth dimension. Information technology would be arrogant to categorically assert that he tin't. It is, though, fair to point out that every poll conducted in the past 4 months has given the Labour leader a negative approval rating of -40% or worse. Fifty-fifty Jesus Christ just had the one resurrection.
I don't know how an autumn election will end. I practice know that this is not an encouraging place for Labour to start. Most of the political party's senior personnel know it too.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/18/mr-corbyn-wants-a-general-election-but-is-his-party-ready-to-fight-one
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