The powerbase in Labour is more in flux than you might think. One surprising development from Corbyn's election as leader was the reduction in influence of the trade unions over the leadership. In the past, Labour leaders have needed to horsetrade with unions to secure their support. Corbyn's support (in the two leadership elections of 2015 and 2016, and his powerbase ground campaigning machine in the 2017 general) came from the youth movement / Momentum.

When Corbyn first won, the unions demanded that McDonnell (who the union leadership has bad history with as he'd been involved in cases supporting union members against union leadership) not be appointed Shadow Chancellor....Corbyn, secure in a powerbase outside the unions, could ignore them. Of all the attacks that were targeted against Corbyn, we never heard 'in the pocket of the unions.' Instead, Corbyn could keep his preferred union man McCluskey close, giving Unite a disproportionate voice and antagonising the rest of the union movement. The other unions generally kept quiet though because they approved of Corbyn's policy agenda.

This reorientation in the powerbase of the left from unions to the youth movement had a number of implications. In the 1980s, the Bennite left was much more focused around the unions and the chosen battleground to take on Thatcher was the strikes. This was more northern-based and more working-class based. But also partly explains why when Thatcher won landslides in 1983 and 1987, Labour MPs piled up huge majorities in the northern heartlands.

The Corbynite left based around the Momentum style youth movement was more spread around the country, more based on young people, more middle-class but also was drawn from a mixture of movements: the ones that had been on Stop the War campaigns, protests against tuition fees, and now the eco-movement, Extinction Rebellion etc. These don't have easily identifiable leaderships to work with like unions do.

At first the reorientation from unions to these movements was an asset to Corbyn. They were young and energetic, skilled at spreading messages on social media, didn't have the old negative baggage that the unions had. Over time though, these caused problems...

First, the antisemitism stuff tends to come from the Stop the War / Free Palestine part of this coalition. It's less dominated by young people and has a lot of aggressive angry activists who like being provocative to raise the profile of the issue. They also live in a social media bubble where commentary that breaches the IHRA guidance on antisemitism is normalised.

Second, the youth part of this coalition was almost exclusively Remain, and lobbied hard for a second referendum and pulled Corbyn reluctantly to that position against his instincts.

Third, their policy focus is more eco-left than traditional class-struggle left, its why why Labour got pushed to the Green New Deal. This isn't necessarily a vote loser for them but they are closer to Greens than traditional Labour.

The challenge for the new leadership is going to come from harnessing and controlling these movements. Although I opposed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I think a lot of the stop the war / free Palestine groups are problematic - they contain a lot of people who normalise antisemitism. You can take reasonable policies on these issues without embracing these groups. Corbyn had long history as a figurehead for these groups. The youth vote is also instinctively going to coalesce around the most 'remainer' candidate, as they will want to reorient the party towards a future Rejoin campaign. Keir Starmer will be their natural preference.

I thought it would take longer than one day before the truth comes out. The nurse numbers are now over 10 years and his promise to retain current employment legislation and environmental protections will be removed because what he said in October to get his deal through no longer stands.

Some very interesting points there.

The race to succeed Corbyn will be influenced by a lot of pretty varied factors. Any winner will in some ways represent a surprise.

Labour need to make a better choice then either Corbyn or Ed Milliband.
They should have chosen David Milliband instead of Ed and they need to realise that if they go down the route of "ideological" left wing policies (as they've had under Corbyn's stewardship), they will be in perpetual opposition.
To have been annihilated by a dysfunctional Tory party, that itself was split down the middle and had to try and come from behind in the polls, tells yo everything you need to know about their chances of government.
On the plus side, the issue of Brexit should be gone by the time the next GE comes around but, to make it back into no 10, they will have to go back to the Blair type policies (obviously without an Iraq war to screw them over).
They must realise that there just aren't enough of the electorate who share their views and that they have to change.
Even with change, there will very likely be 2 terms of Boris - unless of course he has one of his own moments of madness - we can but hope.

Interesting points but a couple of issues have shown the strength of the unions within Labour - the move 2030 to 2050 for carbon zero and the second referendum which was almost entirely a Unite/unions suggestion/requirement.

The problem Labour have is the arrogant youth who all work in safe well paid media jobs: Owen Jones, Ash Sakar, Grace Blakeley who sit on high and look down on the rest of us. They all have a significant presence on social media and spout to the Momentum crowd. You watch them on TV and their pouting arrogance does Labour no favours. They come from the "You must be stupid if you disagree with me" the Blakeley/Campbell spat on 5Live on Friday showed the huge chasm between these two sides of Labour.

Starmer has no chance - it has to be a women and Momentum want Long Bailey, it would great if they had either Jess Phillips or Angela Rayner but they wont. For me Lisa Nandy ticks a lot of boxes but whether she is has the gravitas I don't know. Love to see Laura Pidcock as deputy - she is one argument away from self combustion.

He can get through Parliament OK now if he removes commitments on employment legislation and environmental protections but it makes the EU much less likely to offer him an attractive deal, so we'll either be in for extended transitions and much longer period of wrangling or the whole no deal stuff rearing its head again next year.

No deal will be less attractive to Boris now he is secure in power as he will know he has to mop up the consequences. Although he does have a decent majority, it's similar to the one which Gordon Brown inherited in 2007, and that melted away after the financial crisis, so he's not secure from electoral consequences if there's a major economic shock.

I agree these types are overexposed and annoying. These types are just commentators, they are not policy thinkers. They haven't got any experience in policy development or delivery. I'm all for young people being involved in campaigning but they need to have some humility that they aren't experts. Owen Jones has taken contradictory positions over time. Ash Sarkar is basically confrontational and immature. Both of those two need to reflect on whether they are putting off more people than they are winning over.

Grace Blakeley has more about her than those two but she thinks she is more intelligent than she really is. I've seen her speak alongside academics and you can see the contrast. The academics are more considered, more reflective and acknowledge what we know and what is uncertain. Blakeley immediately launches in to her view of the world and tells people this is how it is. She wrote that book called Stolen and has had a lot of publicity off the back of it but some academics quickly picked up basic misunderstandings that she has included in her book and that should have been cleared up if she'd peer reviewed and proofed it properly. It's the classic weakness of the young. She's probably got top grades in school and university and been pandered too and told that she's a superstar so she goes out with the confidence that she's right, and blunders in to mistakes. She also doesn't seem to show much self-awareness of when she is wrong.

At that age it's fine to be involved but you should be listening and learning more and lecturing / transmitting less. The problem in the era of social media is that it gives people like that a platform and an adoring audience.

Does he want a trade deal with the EU because he does not want to include any possibility of an extension beyond the 31/12/2020. I guess he is pinning his hopes on Trump.

Quote ="Scarlet Pimpernell"I thought it would take longer than one day before the truth comes out. The nurse numbers are now over 10 years and his promise to retain current employment legislation and environmental protections will be removed because what he said in October to get his deal through no longer stands.'" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 1576502501

Quote ="Scarlet Pimpernell"I thought it would take longer than one day before the truth comes out. The nurse numbers are now over 10 years and his promise to retain current employment legislation and environmental protections will be removed because what he said in October to get his deal through no longer stands.'" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 1576502501

He may be, but without a trade deal with the EU, the UK economy will be far worse off than it was before, and any benefits from a deal with the US will be negligible compared to what is lost from access to EU markets. The US are just not in the business of opening up their markets to foreign competitors - their trade deals are very aggressively negotiated in their favour - even before Trump - so a deal with the US will be America First and not to the benefit of the UK.

Boris will know that walking away from the EU for no deal will have only short term political benefit, and he doesn't even need that next year anyway as the next election will be 4 years away. But it will lead to an economic decline that will hit the northern/midlands regions where there is still a manufacturing base that exports to the EU very hard. By 2024 if there has been a decline and higher unemployment, people won't say 'well done Boris for walking away with no deal in 2020', they will be angry at their economic situation.

Also he will need to watch the employment figures. Under Cameron and May we've been at or approaching full employment for a while now, which has mitigated the effects of austerity. If an economic downturn /recession hits following Brexit and a lot of people who previously earned wages are forced in to dealing with the state safety net they will realise just how much it has been reduced and how brutal it has become. It's easy to be supportive of measures to 'tackle scroungers' when you don't think you'll lose your job yourself but in those northern / midlands regions there aren't many jobs around when a major industry starts getting in to closures. If unemployment rises then the reality of dealing with DWP, benefit sanctioning and food banks will reach a lot of people who currently don't think it's an issue for them.

Putting a fixed date to agree a trade deal with the EU into law means either he must agree to what the EU offer of he walks away. If he reduces employment protections to make us more competitive at the expense of the work force than the EU will not offer us a deal anyway.

Indeed - who will blink first and does anyone believe that we will leave with a deal ??
He (Boris) is certainly going to please the "I just want us out" voters, the ones that Email Thornbury mentioned (allegedly)

I think those that want Brexit don’t really care if we leave without a trade deal. I regret they have been brainwashed into believing that we are something we are not which is a leading force in the world.
I guess time will tell but it unfortunately will be too late for the current generation who are facing years of uncertainty because of the votes of those at the wrong end of their working lives. The problem is further compounded by the election of Johnson and the ERG.

At this point, it's the actual working majority that is the problem, in that Johnson and the right of the Tory party can pretty much please themselves.
Although many people have (rightly) not forgiven Blair for our part in the Iraq conflict, if Labour want to ever regain power and especially as Scotland is now, politically speaking, a write off, Labour will have to find a way to take the centre ground.
This wont sit well with staunch left wing Labour supporters, who will once again accuse this o as a move to create "red Tories" but, only with this type of compromise and one hell of a lot more universal appeal, will they ever stand a chance of regaining power.
My two kids cant comprehend that Scotland used to be dominated by Labour MP's - John Smith must be turning in his grave with the current political landscape north of the border.
Labour has abjectly failed with all of the previous leaders from the left of their party. Foot, Kinnock and Corbyn, together with their brand of concentrating so much of their policy on the very poorest in society just hasn't worked.

Whoever they select must be squeaky clean or the right wing press will vilify them. I wonder if the press would be happy if Labour proposed a change to their code of practice much like Johnson is doing with the BBC and Channel 4.

We were talking today about who should be the next Labour leader, and it was mentioned that whoever it is will need to have a spotless past, otherwise the Mail, Sun and Express will just go with the usual Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Communist smears which have the old Tory duffers pooping in their easy-waist, mail order slacks.

I threw a ringer in, and everybody laughed, until they realised he'd be absolutely perfect to throw the gutter press the biggest curve ball this century... Nigel Farage. Imagine the 360 degree turn the right wing rags and shock jocks would have to make! Not only that, he'd be able to hold their golden boy Johnson's feet to the fire on Brexit. I think he's a big enough chancer to actually take on the job, too.

I regret Farage is even more right wing than the current Conservative party albeit they are getting closer. My choice would be Starmer but I suppose the press would have a go because he is a Sir and therefore proof the party is no longer connected with the working class.

The EU has more power on that one because the potential cost savings to businesses from slashing EU employment regulations are not going to be enough to counter the costs the EU can apply from forcing the UK to accept their standard 'rest of the world' tariff levels. The UK won't be able to use employment rights to draw inward investment away from the EU.

If they really wanted to reduce the cost of employment they would do away with the minimum wage, which is a UK government thing and has never been an EU policy. Sajid Javid seems to want to increase this!

The employment rights that were in EU law that the UK would be able to strip away are in:

- Working Time regulations: biggest one being annual leave entitlement, other than that the right to rest breaks and rules on how many hours you can do in a certain period. You could allow more extreme long-hours of working, but most industries don't use those anyway.

- Agency Worker regulations: require firms to treat temporary staff the same as permanent staff, you could remove these but again it will only benefit certain businesses and isn't going to be a huge dividend to firms.

- Rules around redundancies: this covers stuff like being required to consult with the workforce before redundancies. Again lots of firms might prefer this but it's not going to be a saving that drives investment decisions.

- Maternity rights: mostly small businesses that would welcome the removal of these, not the ones who would be potentially looking to relocate from the EU

- Discrimination protections: you can make it easier to fire people on the basis of things that are currently protected characteristics but again this isn't going to be a big ticket money spinner.

A lot of those kind of deregulations would just attract negative publicity that outweigh their value to businesses, and would help Labour brand the Tory party as the 'nasty party'.

I think they need to take a nuanced look at where the public are. On some issues they lean to the left, on others to the right. Even Boris has noticed this and some of his talk about scrapping State Aid rules so that the state can support struggling industries, state-driven local regeneration plans, increased spending on public services, not to mention this guff about 'The People's Government' are straight out of the rhetoric of the Old Left. One of the ironies is that when you add Brexit in to the mix, this Conservative government is actually implementing some of the policies of the Labour party under Michael Foot in the 1980s which were seen as dangerously extreme at the time and would have been vigorously opposed by Thatcher!

I think the public is left-leaning on issues like:
- they think the state should start building houses again
- they think investment in public services is a bigger priority than tax cuts
- they support taking back some parts of the privatised industries in to public hands (eg rail, possibly water), but not stuff like broadband
- they are broadly supportive of stuff like same sex marriage
- increasingly they are concerned about damage to the environment
- aside from those on the extremes of the generational divide debate, they recognise that younger generations have a lot of stuff stacked against them

The public is right-leaning on issues like:
- national security, they are scared of terrorism and want to make sure the security services are supported to keep us safe (although I think post-Iraq they are sceptical about military interventions overseas)
- I think they are more willing to accept some compromises on personal freedom in the interest of keeping us safe than they were in Blair's day - I reckon ID cards would have had more support now than when he tried it.
- law and order: people have no time for those who disrupt the lives of law-abiding citizens, especially in poorer areas where they face the brunt of living near anti-social families, gangs and so on. They want criminals to be locked up and kept away from them rather than 'rehabilitated' etc.
- immigration, when you get past the xenophobes and bigots, most of the population don't mind being treated by a migrant doctor, they aren't keen on immigrants competing with them for lower paid jobs, they certainly don't like the idea of anyone from outside taking the UK for a ride by being able to exploit the welfare system.

I think a Labour leader who took some of the Corbyn agenda, on limited nationalisation, more progressive tax system to fund increased spending on public services and green investment, without the scattergun approach of stuff like free broadband, and who was free from any hint of 'anti-UK' sentiment (ie previous associations with IRA/Middle Eastern terror groups), and strong on issues of law and order, would be well placed to recapture a broad coalition of public support.

Blair himself came in to prominence, when he was Shadow Home Secretary during a time of a crime wave (a lot of measures of crime in the UK peaked in the mid 1990s), when the Tories veered between Ken Clarke's excessively laid back manner and Michael Howard's 'prison works'. Blair spoke articulately about the problems crime was causing in the poorest communities and linked the experience of poverty to being in neighbourhoods where you lived in fear rather than the more affluent areas where crime didn't affect you so much. That message really resonated in the 1990s.

Farage would do anything for the right price or media exposure!

On a serious note, Starmer would be the obvious choice. But as you say, the working class would be suspicious of him being a Sir (awarded for services to law and criminal justice, and a title he prefers not to use), despite the fact his dad was a toolmaker and his mother a nurse, and despite the fact the working class have just wilfully voted in droves for a priviliged Old Etonian, whose path through life has been paved with gold, and whose only contribution of note to the working class has been spreading lies about bendy bananas, prawn cocktail crisps and smoked kipper packaging.

Why would the working class be suspicious of Starmer's social background? It's not like Johnson and Farage grew up in coal mining families?

There must be an academic study available somewhere to explain this phenomenon. I can't get my head around it.

When I heard people say they were suspicious of Corbyn's long-standing social campaigning because he was a 'middle-class Londoner', then in the next sentence, without a hint of irony - "but I like that Jacob Rees-Mogg fella, he's a card".

Some people are happy to follow a leader, regardless of their views, even if said leader is a total T***.
There are plenty of examples in the history books and I believe that the Trump and Johnson premierships are, ironically, largely as a result of austerity, with the masses happy to vote for a change - of any sort.

The writing was on the wall for Labour before the last election and it's just a pity that, during the last election, Corbyn has some bounce in the polls, lulling Labour and many of their supporters that he was actually a credible leader, with credible policies.
Having said that, I believe that Labours utterly inept Brexit policy is the main reason for their antihalation but, most importantly, it was definitely not the reason that they lost.

Corbyn was butchered in the media and press and again , it's important that they have aspiration for success in their new policies and not just protection for the very poorest, commendable as that may be.

I think you're wrong about that - large sections of the big policy stuff were very popular with the public; including the nationalisation of utilities and such.

Where I think you are right, is that the Brexit policy killed us off - Corbyn was forced into a strange and untenable position by people like Keir Starmer, because they are ultra-remainers who insisted on the PV being included; so Corbyn tried to find a grown-up way to include that by saying he'd stay neutral and implement the result, but it was far to ambiguous and easy to attack. And of course this was a Brexit election.

There's also the fact that Corbyn has been the target of an unprecedented and vicious smear campaign, not just from the Tories, but from the RW media, the BBC and a large contingent of his own MP's - the Blairite rump - who hate the members, and yearn for a return to the halcyon days of New Labour, when they could pretend to be socialists and thereby maintain their place on the parliamentary gravy train, because they represented no threat to the established order in this country. It's not a coincidence that Blair is the only Labour leader that the Murdoch evil empire has ever endorsed.

The battleground in 5 years time will be interesting; Brexit will be a wholly Tory mess, and Johnson will have failed to deliver on his key and seemingly made up on the spot promises - and that's quite aside from any new scandal which could emerge at any moment, given the character of the man. He won't represent change, and his tousle-haired posh boy schtick will have worn decidedly thin.

With regards to the Labour leadership - I'd go for Angela Rayner; and I'll do everything I can to resist Keir Starmer or Jess Phillips, both of whom would be a disaster in my view.

Labour's problem is they preach about being the party of the working class yet none of the people running the party come from the working class. Even Milne went to Winchester then Oxford - how can the strategist with that background relate to the working class. Corbyn is another never had a job outside of politics, all those that came through the union route wouldn't have worked in a real job, they will have full time working for the union paid for by either the public sector employer or a private employer. A lot of the main Labour shadow cabinet come from a legal background, Starmer, Thornberry, Long Bailey. Phillips worked in the family quango, Nandy a public quango. Then you add the aforementioned young activits: Jones, Sakar & Blakeley who come from a media background then you add Momentum: Lansman - Cambridge graduate no jobs outside of politics, James Schneider - Winchester then Oxford worked in the media etc. Wherever you look in Labour you see privilege no connection to grass roots.

Much was made of the Brexit situation - the Tories has as many Remainers as Labour - probably more - so why didn't they have the issues Labour had? Possibly because it wasn't really Brexit it was Corbyn and trust in him and the wider Labour party.