> My heart sank every time Corbyn (or several others) was faced with a difficult
> question and almost always muffed it, or fell back on waffle. I can't believe
> they weren't better briefed on some of these really obvious questions.

i.e. They're useless and learned nothing from last time.

> I thought the manifesto was superb, but I also thought it was a huge error of
> judgement to only reveal the key features at the 11th hour.

Four day working weeks is a great idea, but I doubt the average idiot on the street understands why, so it's a terrible thing to put in an opposition manifesto if you want to be taken seriously.

Also, consider the difference between "we're going to invest in improving broadband for everyone" vs "we want to take control of your Internet access". One of those is going to be far more popular than the other.

> As for the pledges promising everything to everyone, one of the points that
> needed to sink in in particular was that the spending was modest and similar
> to the levels of public spending and investment across Europe.

How often did anyone say "we're not overspending, we're matching the spending of [insert country with succesful economy]"? Or "here's the spending of previous Labour governments. Here's Tory government spending. Can you spot the difference?"

Who should be the new Labour leader? To my mind, Rebecca Long-Bailey would be a disaster and, if she stayed the course, would hand the Tories another decade in power. There's no point in changing the captain if the new one isn't going to change course. She also has some of the presentational issues that did for Corbyn: a lack of warmth on screen and an instinctive belligerence that can prevent her from apologising, even when that would be the most effective strategy. Although she has good working class credentials, in a sense she's left them behind and speaks primarily that same middle class, public sector, HE faction of the party that Corbyn does.

The effective end of Remain as an option can be seen as a potential gift for Labour: the Brexit project is wholly owned by the Tories now, and if the UK fares badly by it (as EU interest should ensure), the the Tories own the mess.  An effective Opposition leader could mince Johnson at the despatch box over the next five years.

Incidentally, I will be astonished if Labour doesn't adopt a policy of electoral reform. They'd have done so much better if this election had been conducted under PR. If they adopt it as a manifesto pledge for the next, they know that they will have the tactical vote of all the smaller parties' supporters.

Not sure yet. Maybe Rayner. Needs to be somebody female, ideally not London, not too associated with Remain. Whoever it is will get a monstering from the press so they will have to be tough and ideally not have too many open goals already. They need to keep Labour’s membership and ground campaigners in while trying to bring back some of the centre of the party to stop them self-sabotaging. Maybe just purge the right of the party and be done with it? 

I think it will be trivial for the conservatives and media to blame the brexit mess on the EU, the metropolitan liberal elite, immigrants, the feckless poor, basically anybody but themselves. And people will lap this up because otherwise they’d have to question their own choices and votes. Absolutely nothing for the Tories to worry about here. 

PR would be very nice. It would need a lot of buildup to stand a chance, the way all recent referenda have gone doesn’t give me much hope that the electorate have much time for a nuanced position,

 

Would electoral reform require a referendum if it was a pledge in the manifesto of a winning party? I just had a little google trawl and I can't find anything.

The party in power (Trudeau Liberals) here had PR in their first platform then promptly forgot about it. Good job too, or they likely would have lost the October GE.

I don't know, actually. It seems quite a big change to be able to 'just do' but perhaps so. I wonder how it'd be implemented? The trick would be that to get it done that way you'd have to get elected with a solid majority, and then presumably set a date for your own government to be most likely weakened by the PR followup. I bet that's hard to swallow at the time. 

 I think that's one of the major impediments to change without cross-party support. As soon as any party starts to believe it could command a majority, the inclination to introduce a fairer system wanes fast. And if they're in power, all the more. Cf. what Smiffy just said re: Canadia. I imagine that any smaller parties offering a pact to support an electoral reform-supporting Labour party (or electoral reform-supporting Tory party, I guess, should hell freeze over) would try to bake the commitment in before they found themselves in the position to break their word.

I see Rebecca Long-Bailey's name is being touted by "senior Labour figures" (so they say and I'm relying on the accuracy of press gossip which is probably wrong). I think she would be a mistake for purely practical reasons. The sad truth is that we live in an age where competence and "strength" are disproportionately linked to performance in front of a camera, or at least in front of a reporter and RL-B comes across as a bit charisma-free and easily flustered. I'm not picking on her in particular. The Labour ranks are packed with people seriously in need of coaching in interview and presentation skills. They probably won't bother though, which is sad, because there seems to be a prevailing myth that somehow their essential goodness will shine though when all that shines through is bewilderment and lack of preparation. 

As for and brexit mess: I agree. The Tory party will simply blame everybody except themselves. It's a manoeuvre that comes naturally to them. I also believe that Johnson will move to entrench the Tory position with boundary changes, voter ID, possibly crippling the BBC and removing Channel 4's charter, changes to the law so that Government legislation and decisions cannot be challenged as they have been over the last year or two.

PR? Absolutely, but I don't see it happening. In fact, as an alternative, I would vote for a formal and permanent coalition between all the parties to the left of* the Tories, but since tactical voting has been a bit of a non-starter and the left and right of the Labour party hate each other more than than the Tories, that's a non-starter too. 

*although the left/centre/right metaphor shouldn't do too much work

McDonnell is doing his best to promote her and his endorsement, whilst Marmitey, will marshall a lot of £3ers. Jess Phillips would be my preference for these populist times: she's quick-witted, a media natural and manages an easy 'of the people' vibe. Her centralist position would persuade a lot of the old skool Labour ex-members back into the fold. I also think she'd run rings around Johnson at the dispatch box. But she's anathema to the Corbyn camp, so I wonder whether that's unrealistic.

I agree completely - I don't know enough about the candidates (and still, they're not official candidates even yet) but Long-Bailey does seem likely to mean we go through the whole thing again like Groundhog Day.

A PR coalition I just can't see, ultimately the Lib Dems are not nearly as cosy and 'left' as they present themselves, which is why they're happier going into coalition with the Tories and even when they're not doing that seem to "accidentally" enable them anyway through dipshit decision-making. So that leaves Labour with the nationalist parties and the Greens, pretty much. Is that enough, if it could happen? I suppose whatever Farage's mob call themselves this week might be on board since they'd stand a great chance of some seats in this new world.

Some temporary electoral reform coalition promise would be interesting. I suspect it'd be easily batted aside in the campaign by the Tories as being weak and indecisive etc though. Especially if the persuading was done as limply as AV or Remain again.

Phillips is certainly anathema to me. I don't see myself as Corbynite particularly but I guess I'm from that side of the party. I mean, Murdoch rags like the Times are promoting tweets that she should be next leader, so presumably the conservatives would be very happy to see her in charge, that ought to be enough alone to put many off.

I find it hard to imagine forgiving her some of the shit she's come out with in the past few years; I'm thinking particularly her comments about Dianne Abbot but plenty else besides. Strikes me as a greasy opportunist with little underneath to back up the bluster. Maybe that's more successful now in these De Pfeffel times but I'm unhappy at the idea of giving in to it.

It's all pretty academic anyway, as I reckon Long-Bailey's already been anointed.

Populism dominates the electoral agenda, and I can see no reason why that is going to change. Indeed, if you read Goodwin & Eatwell's (dry, even-handed, ultimately horrifying) book on populism, they are of the opinion that it's only going to grow. With the best will in the world, Long-Bailey is no populist and would probably - and, I dare say, rightly - be proud of that. But she'll never lead Labour to victory.

I think we could be looking at a decade in the wilderness unless something extraordinary happens. It's always possible that a Long-Bailey stitch-up might provoke something extraordinary. We live in interesting times.

I think there's plenty of time left in the process yet, I'm not sure Long-Bailey is so nailed on. But we shall see. 

We are indeed recipients of that famous curse about interesting times, huh. I do think Labour are going to have to pick a hard path now between pragmatic media-friendly stuff and pure principles. I may be wrong but feel like the media deck is so stacked against them that it's futile chasing the former too hard, they need to find alternative ways of persuading people about the latter.

The thing is, what does "media-friendly" even look like these days? The entire media sphere is struggling to adapt to the post-print/post-broadcast world, and it seems that the non-traditional means of consumption, such as social media advertising, are being heavily weaponised by the right. They're controlling the narrative by fair means and foul, and no amount of solid principles can stand up to it when people don't even realise how much they're being manipulated.

I agree, but there's still a zillion Guardian (etc) columnists filing opinions like "We need someone like David Milliband" for some reason.

Instead of Leveson 2 we're going to lose what little the first one achieved now too. I don't have any kind of answer to this one at the moment.

> there's still a zillion Guardian (etc) columnists filing opinions like "We need someone like David Milliband" for some reason.

That's OK -the people being targeted by the nefarious social media tactics probably aren't reading the Guardian, and aren't going to vote for him regardless, but probably not for the reasons the Guardian columnists think. If Labour want to come back from the abyss, they need to look at why so many so-called "safe" Labour seats turned out not to be safe after all.

I'm still trying to get my head round it all myself, but it really does seem that Corbyn was absolute poison to people across a wide and diverse range of demographics. The IRA stuff stuck. The Hamas stuff stuck. The scruffiness stuck. The not watching the Queen's Speech probably stuck. The fence-sitting on Brexit meant neither side trusted him. The fact that he's a beardy throwback to some kind of '70s TV sitcom version of Labour with a wee cap and an allotment.The belief that Labour's financial policies are unworkable stuck. People STILL don't seem to understand how tax bands work. His attitude to Scotland and the SNP meant that up here, I saw plenty of Facebook posts from people voting SNP urging their English friends to vote Labour.

My Facebook feed was filled with lots and lots of people who were very enthusiastically pro-Corbyn, but if I dipped into Boomerspace*, all kinds of anti-Corbyn stuff was cropping up, organically or otherwise.

*I figure there needs to be a term for the bits of social media that are occupied by the less technically savvy. I mean, we've all been at it since long before social media was even a thing, but we are a tiny majority, and there's a huge parallel world of crappy Facebook "share if you agree" posts and people who actually read the comments under newspaper articles and people who share stuff about suspicious vans to their local area's Facebook groups, and all that kind of shite, and if we grew up thinking that "cyberspace" was kind of a rubbish term of t'interwebs back in the early 2000s, then it follows that "Boomerspace" is a perfectly acceptable term for what I'm describing. Mainly because when I thought about calling it "The Gammonsphere", I did a bit of a dry boak.

Someone in the Guardian did a good analysis a couple of weeks ago of how the demographics worked against Labour in these formerly industrial "safe" seats -- the young all hived off to cities for work, leaving behind their cranky OAP parents who tend to vote THAT way and are fed up with politicians of every stripe, but want to send a 'message' of the cut-off-own-nose kind. Kind of a passive gerrymandering when the constituencies aren't appropriately (+ timely) redrawn to reflect that.

I could get with Boomerspace. It reminds me of that Innerspace film as well which for some reason resonated with me as a kid.

Regarding the Scotland thing, I'd understood that Scottish Labour was a poisoned well a good bit before Corbyn came to his late prominence, and did a fine job of getting itself torched in Scotland over the independence referendum and other things around that time. It seemed like he'd (or the entire leadership?) more or less abandoned any prospect of getting it back again now. I've not followed things at all closely up there though.

Yeah, Labour's been fading to irrelevance in Scotland for years now, especially after the referendum, when people realised the dichotomy of them siding with the Tories against independence and the SNP in Scotland, but promoting policies suspiciously similar to those of the SNP in England. Corbyn's always come across as not quite understanding why Labour have declined so much in Scotland, and while the SNP indicated they would be open to some kind of working arrangement, it was rebuffed by Labour and used as a negative thing by the Tories.

This is the unroll of a Twitter thread which I thought captured the problems the electorate had with Corbyn pretty well. It's couched in harsh terms - particularly the second tweet - but after that, it's rarely unfair.  I think it also demonstrates why the current wine in a new bottle won't help.