Labour Party Conference

Hindsight

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Lincolnshire
STEPHEN BUSH
september 23 2019, 12:01am, the times
Corbyn revolution has failed to take Labour
stephen bush
Botched attempts by the hard left to oust moderate Labour MPs as well as the deputy leader show the limits of Corbynism
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At first glance, the big story at Labour conference is about the combat between its major players: the successful attempt by Jeremy Corbyn’s allies to limit sharply the powers of the deputy leader, Tom Watson, in the event of a vacancy at the top, and the unsuccessful effort to scrap the post entirely.
Yet the most important story in Labour politics doesn’t involve Corbyn or Watson. It’s a story that can be told in five names: Lucy Powell, Jim McMahon, Bambos Charalambous, Neil Coyle and Vicky Foxcroft. They are just five of the Labour MPs to come through the party’s new-look reselection processes unscathed.
At last year’s conference, the Labour leadership negotiated two small but, they hoped, significant tweaks to the way that the party decides whether or not sitting MPs should be reselected as candidates. Under the old system, sitting MPs needed to pass a trigger ballot — if more than half of their local party branches voted to keep them on as an MP, then they were readopted as the candidate. If they didn’t, then the local party held a fresh contest, with the sitting MP automatically on the ballot paper, but with other candidates free to run against them.
But the system came with an added twist: while the number of local party branches affiliated by members was capped at the total number of council wards in any given constituency, the trade unions and other affiliated bodies could add as many party branches as they wanted. In practice, that gave the leaders of local and national trade unions a veto over any attempt deselect an MP.
Now MPs must secure the votes of two thirds of both ordinary ward branches and affiliated branches to avoid a full contest. At a stroke, Corbyn eliminated the trade union veto over trigger ballots and made it significantly easier for party activists to get rid of their MPs.

The change signalled the final victory of Corbynism over Labour: in addition to its successive landslides in leadership elections, its majority on the ruling national executive committee, its control of the general secretary and the large pro-Corbyn majority on the conference floor, it had secured changes that would allow it to remake the parliamentary Labour Party at will.
Although the change to trigger ballots is not the only reason that seven MPs decided to break away from the Labour Party and form their own new party, for several of them it was the final push. In a very real sense, Change UK was born at the Labour Party conference of 2018.
However, the feared — or hoped-for — defenestration of Labour MPs doesn’t seem to be happening. Nor has the survival of Labour MPs been confined only to those who have adopted a posture of outward loyalty to Corbyn. Neil Coyle, the MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, is Labour’s most vocal and vituperative Corbyn critic — yet he has been reselected. Lucy Powell, the MP for Manchester Central, has committed the double heresy of criticising Corbyn and supporting plans to take Britain out of the EU and into the European Economic Area, in close co-operation with Conservative MPs. She has also been reselected. So far, the only MP to fall foul of the new rules is Diana Johnson, the Hull North MP, a quietly effective backbencher on the right of the party, but she is the victim of bad luck rather than an organised conspiracy, and is far from the scalps imagined by Corbynites.
Why does this matter? A clue lies in five other names: George Eustice, Victoria Atkins, Andrew Murrison, Lucy Frazer and Nusrat Ghani. They are the names of five Conservative junior ministers who are generally acclaimed by both their civil servants and their colleagues for their ability to get projects done and delivered. You know that old saying that behind every great man is a great woman? Well, behind every successful secretary of state is at least one great junior minister who has done a great deal of the heavy lifting, both in managing projects and taking legislation through parliament.
Corbyn has big and radical plans to reshape the state and the economy, and will announce a host more at conference this week. But most of those plans require cabinet ministers and junior ministers who are both ideologically attuned to the project and have the talent to carry it off. Corbyn has barely a handful of MPs in the first group and even fewer tick both boxes. That’s one reason the Labour Party’s radical programme is so patchy.
Added to that, many of his plans will require the support of parliament, and that so many of his vocal critics are being reselected means that he is less likely to get it. Take the plans, announced by the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, to scrap Ofsted. The policy is a longstanding demand of the teaching unions and is regarded on the Labour left as an essential plank of removing what they see as damaging market mechanisms from our education system. But it is also seen by many Labour MPs as a retrograde step that would leave schools unaccountable to parents, leading to lower grades and worse standards.
The other problem is that good junior ministers — and opposition frontbenchers for that matter — are where a party’s future leadership contenders sharpen their talents and hone their skills too. One way or another, this is likely to be Corbyn’s last Labour Party conference as leader of the opposition: whether he goes as a result of electoral defeat suggested by most of the opinion polls or because he again defies expectations and becomes prime minister.
If he loses, then one problem that the Corbynites have is the vanishingly small number of impeccably Corbynite candidates available to replace Corbyn. Of course, Corbyn’s own experience, when he defeated three New Labour candidates to win the leadership, shows that you only need one candidate if the membership find you sufficiently appealing. But his experience as opposition leader shows there is a limit to what you can achieve if you don’t have a large parliamentary core of supporters — something that will be more acute if Labour loses seats, because its Corbynite candidates are concentrated in seats the party took in 2017 and which are vulnerable in the coming election.
And that’s the real story of Labour’s conference: for all the institutional dominance of Corbynism, for all that the policies are undoubtedly a departure from what has gone before, while the parliamentary Labour Party remains broadly unchanged, Corbyn’s revolution will remain incomplete and under threat.
Stephen Bush is political editor of the New Statesman
@stephenkb
 

arcobob

Member
Location
Norfolk
The venom displayed by some of the Labour politicians is quite chilling.

Just seen Chakrabati foaming at the mouth about ‘posh boys from their rah schools’. Quite ironic as Corbyn’s top team is packed full of public schoolboys. In any case who bloody cares where someone went to school? It’s not like most kids have a choice anyway.
It is a popular theme at Labour conferences, the jealousy bile and inverted snobbery going hell for leather to trash something that ain`t broke rather than address problems in order to fix things that are. It is easier to destroy than build or repair and if it catches a few votes it is a sacrifice well made in their view
 

tje

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
North Hampshire
And further more she sent her son to Dulwich ...only 20k a year !!!!


The venom displayed by some of the Labour politicians is quite chilling.

Just seen Chakrabati foaming at the mouth about ‘posh boys from their rah schools’. Quite ironic as Corbyn’s top team is packed full of public schoolboys. In any case who bloody cares where someone went to school? It’s not like most kids have a choice anyway.
 

Boohoo

Member
Location
Newtownabbey
The venom displayed by some of the Labour politicians is quite chilling.

Just seen Chakrabati foaming at the mouth about ‘posh boys from their rah schools’. Quite ironic as Corbyn’s top team is packed full of public schoolboys. In any case who bloody cares where someone went to school? It’s not like most kids have a choice anyway.
Haven't checked any of this but most of it is likely true
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br jones

Member
Jim Pickard, Chief Political Correspondent YESTERDAYPrint this page51 Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party began its annual conference as one of the most leftwing mainstream political parties in Europe. At the end of the four-day event it had moved even further to the left. During the gathering in Brighton, shadow ministers desperate to shift the narrative away from Brexit and Labour’s internal rows rolled out a series of eye-catching policies. They included £60bn of loans for people to buy electric cars, £6bn a year of free care for the elderly and a new state-owned company to produce generic medicines. On the floor of the hall, even more ambitious initiatives were voted through, not all with the leadership’s backing. Some Labour MPs believe Mr Corbyn’s supporters are trying to embed radical policies in anticipation of the 70 year old stepping down — if he loses the next election — and being replaced by a more pragmatic “soft left” successor. Mr Corbyn’s team argued that people are desperate for radical reforms after years of wage stagnation, spiralling house prices and a looming climate emergency. But there are MPs who fear the sheer scale of some of the new initiatives could unnerve potential voters. Delegates voted for an “Abolish Eton” motion which would effectively scrap private schools by withdrawing charitable status, slashing tax exemptions and seizing control of all “endowments, investments and properties” held by private schools. They shrugged off union concerns to endorse a 2030 net-carbon target that would involve large-scale state intervention to replace all fossil fuel power plants, petrol and diesel cars, as well as millions of household gas boilers at a pace that most experts believe would be impossible to deliver. The radical environmental initiative also expanded Labour’s policy on nationalisation to include the so-called “big six” energy suppliers, such as British Gas. The UK’s main opposition party had previously only targeted the energy network companies, including National Grid. Finally, on Wednesday members voted in favour of extending full voting rights to all foreign nationals living in the UK, closing all immigration detention centres at the next election and backing free movement of people. The move threatens to undermine the party’s existing manifesto, which promised that freedom of movement would end “when we leave the European Union”. The problem Corbyn faces though is that people judge, rightly or wrongly, on whether a politician seems competent . . . he’s polling worse than any other leader since the 1970s, they don’t seem to think that he is Ben Page, Ipsos Mori And while Mr Corbyn otherwise managed to hold back the tide on Labour’s Brexit policy — defeating a plethora of constituency motions pushing for an explicit Remain position — there was a point where it looked like the leadership’s position was going to be defeated. Opinion polls suggest that Labour is not likely to form the next government, not least because of Mr Corbyn’s low ratings. In a recent FT poll, only 14 per cent of voters thought he would make a better prime minister than Boris Johnson. YouGov research suggests that half of those who voted Labour in 2017 now want a new leader. Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos Mori, the polling firm, said the public was not averse to some of Labour’s policies, for example renationalisation and higher taxes on the rich. “The problem Corbyn faces though is that people judge, rightly or wrongly, on whether a politician seems competent . . . he’s polling worse than any other leader since the 1970s, they don’t seem to think that he is.” Senior figures in the party brush off the polls, citing the 2017 election result which saw Labour’s 25-point poll deficit nearly overturned during the course of the campaign. But Mr Corbyn’s critics point out that the political landscape is very different today than in 2017. “They seem to have fallen victim to the prism of that result, which is that ‘everyone said we’d screw up and we did better than expected’, some of them think they actually won two years ago,” said Alastair Campbell, former head of communications for the party. “The difference this time is that nobody imagined Theresa May would turn out to be such a bad campaigner, and in 2017 no one thought Jeremy could win so people could do a Labour protest vote without thinking Labour would get into power.” Jeremy Corbyn’s radical Labour conference Supporters of the Labour leader see the new policies as evidence of the party’s democratisation, with the membership seizing control of policy development, sometimes at the expense of the leadership. “The status quo is profoundly unjust, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a leftwing party, with leftwing members and a leftwing leader, comes up with leftwing answers,” said Tom Kibasi, director of the IPPR think-tank. “You hear different theories about why this is happening, like is it about defending Corbyn’s legacy, but sometimes the most obvious explanation is the right one, which is that leftwing people want to do leftwing things.” But while senior figures welcomed many of the new motions, they face a dilemma at the next election. For example, while shadow ministers hailed the 2030 carbon target, in private some are worried about the unprecedented level of state intervention it would entail. Nor are they enthusiastic about nationalising the Big Six, a policy that was proposed by Mr Corbyn in 2015 but was subsequently dropped. Likewise John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, argued in vain behind the scenes that expropriating assets from private schools would be illegal. “It may look messy but what you’re actually seeing now is grassroots members forcing a lot of new policy through, sometimes with the help of smaller unions, and it’s exciting,” said one figure from Momentum, the pro-Corbyn campaign group
 
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SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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