Posts Tagged ‘Rob Marchant’

Antisemitism is bad enough right now, without trying to frame actual Jewish allies

28/11/2023, 09:23:59 PM

by Rob Marchant

If the horrific news coming out of Israel and Gaza resulting from Hamas atrocities were not sufficient, the last six weeks have been the worst period of antisemitism in living memory, not just in Britain but in many other parts of the world.

Some Labour figures have not exactly covered themselves in glory: if you can manage to live with the cognitive dissonance of framing the “ceasefire” narrative as a neutral one, rather than one which helps Hamas; or recent serial hate marches as “peace demonstrations” – as it seems both Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan were able to, not to mention a highly-predictable Jeremy Corbyn – you are not going to get to common sense or coherence any time soon.

However, at national level, Keir Starmer has largely avoided the platitudes of his predecessors and has managed to hold a sensible line with his Shadow Cabinet in not “both-sidesing” the Hamas atrocities and the civilian casualties resulting from Israeli counter-attacks. This all in the face of Chicken-Licken comment pieces predicting imminent, and terrible, splits in the party over this stance, which in the end have turned out to be rather overblown.

In difficult times, then, Labour has managed to truly move on from the Corbyn years and not fall into the trap which has recently befallen the Spanish, Belgian and Irish prime ministers, in wetting the bed on this issue. Bravo to Starmer.

So far, so good; until we come to last weekend’s Sunday Times piece, in which it was revealed that Rosie Duffield MP, one of the very few MPs to stand up and be counted as a Jewish ally when antisemitism was rife in the party and is, let us not forget, a vice-chair of the APPG on antisemitism, has not yet been added to the approved parliamentary candidates list, despite having been reselected for Canterbury seat, on grounds of a complaint over alleged antisemitism.

You what, mate?

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Unfinished revolution: is Labour’s conversion to a party ready for power complete?

07/10/2023, 09:46:50 PM

by Rob Marchant

Philip Gould’s book, The Unfinished Revolution, was an emblematic tome of the late 1990s, documenting New Labour’s lead-up to governing in 1997. But in the 2020s, have we yet reached where we need to be?

Polls: clearly good. Policy programme: we are making respectable progress and cutting out the mad, or madly-expensive, stuff. Tick. Tick.

News management: we are perhaps not yet as ruthlessly disciplined as we need to be, but we seem to be getting a lot less accident-prone than we were even this time last year. And, looking at our opponents this last week, the Tories are hardly the well-oiled spin machine they once were. Good, although room for improvement.

Party management: we are working through the disciplinary cases, and expulsions have happened. While there are still – anecdotally at least – a lot of cases about antisemitism, the party has come a long way. A number of the more cranky and toxic members who joined under Corbyn have left of their own accord, often joining the Greens. It doesn’t bear thinking about how the party would have responded at Labour conference to the awful events in Israel during the Corbyn years and the coming days will be a highly visible test of how Labour has changed.

There have been some rule changes, which last week caused a ripple of protest from the usual Corbynista suspects, but the story is thin gruel: although it may have been paused or ignored during the Corbyn years, the requirement that conference motions need to be contemporary was put in place at least twenty years ago, to stop endless debates about long-dead issues making conference unspeakably turgid[i].

There are also some disciplinary-tightening measures, making it easier to expel those supporting candidates outside the party, aimed at cleaning the Augean stables of our local parties which, after the infiltration from outside that went on in the Corbyn years and some of the nuttiness which still persists in some of our backbenchers and councillors, seem more than welcome. Err on the side of caution if you aspire to be a party of government.

Damage limitation: some of the previous legal actions, such as the defamation case with the Panorama whistleblowers – which the outgoing regime first caused and then somewhat unhelpfully left David Evans’s new team to clean up afterwards – have been settled, and at least there are no new ones being triggered. But some are still pending, including that against former LOTO chief of staff Karie Murphy and four others over the “LabourLeaks” debacle, and may be expensive; the party is trying to kick it into the long grass post election but on that decision, as it were, the jury is out.

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The Corbynite rump is now decamped to the Greens. Good riddance

11/09/2023, 11:16:24 PM

by Rob Marchant

It was always going to happen that – as former MP and party stalwart Tom Blenkinsop would likely have it – the entryists would ultimately exit, once they could see the battle for the soul of the Labour party had been lost.

The only question was to where. Would it be the SWP? The Lib Dems? The perhaps ironically-titled “Peace and Justice Project” of the man himself, a man who has famously apologised for numerous dictators and terrorists over his long career?

As a result of some admittedly anecdotal and yet still quite convincing evidence, we can now see.

Last Wednesday my admittedly flippant tweet, the gist of which was that a vote for the Greens was ultimately a gift to the Tories, triggered a deluge of responses from hundreds of piqued keyboard warriors over the next forty-eight hours.


As you can see in the comments, a few were polite; most were not; a few quite unpleasant and a small, unhinged minority – using anonymous or fake names, of course – had clearly been trawling through my historic Twitter feed, trying to dig up dirt, and then accusing me of various misdemeanours ranging from bigotry to much worse.

I had seen this pattern before, of course, but not for some time – my path had not crossed with the Corbynite Twittersphere in recent months. Of course: Labour’s generous poll lead against the Tories was taking all the wind out of their sails. The argument that Corbyn had in 2019 “won the argument”, after the party’s crushing defeat to Boris Johnson and his crew in that year’s general election, had been farcical at the time; it now seems like an invitation to outright derision. Starmer is unarguably doing far better in the country than his predecessor.

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Keir’s Spanish lessons

27/07/2023, 10:44:52 PM

by Rob Marchant

It would be easy for Labour to derive some trite answers from the result of Sunday’s general election in Spain, where many international commentators were holding their breath.

In the end, wily PM Pedro Sánchez managed to frustrate the advance of the far right – which almost got back into government for the first time in half a century – and may well end up continuing to run the country after all. Hurrah, a victory for Western social democracy.

The quick and comfortable answer for Labour to take away is this: in the end, given a stark choice in times of hardship, people saw through right-wing populism and agreed that the left are the good guys, who will look after their needs. The needs of the many won over needs of the few. The left is on its way back.

Sadly, this is not the right lesson.

Sanchez has, a little like Joe Biden, managed both to do some good things, and meanwhile seriously irritate many electors in the political centre who would otherwise vote for him. The radical end of the global left, spearheaded by the likes of the Democrats’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is starting to drive us all a little crazy.

Spain, which has enjoyed a leftist government for the last five years, is little different. The uncomfortable truth is that the Spanish leader has, and only maybe, clung on by the skin of his teeth, when he could potentially have won a comfortable second term. Being a smart political operator, he gambled that most Spaniards would recoil so much at the thought of neofascists in government, that he could avert disaster, and therefore brought forward the election five months in a “back me or sack me” move. He turned out to have made a smartish bet.

But not only may that trick not work next time, one also has to ask why he ended up in such dire straits that he had to resort to it in the first place– that so many voters disliked the Socialists so much, that they could come that close to putting Franco’s unpleasant heirs into government in their place. The best Sánchez can hope for now is an unstable, rainbow coalition, in hock to the demands of nationalist parties.

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The coming implosion of the SNP sees Starmer and Sarwar finally inching towards common sense

12/03/2023, 11:09:29 PM

by Rob Marchant

As the SNP ship is seen to drift, perhaps inexorably, towards a disastrous new era with Humza Yousaf currently its most likely captain, we have to ask ourselves how they ended up here.

As John Rentoul rightly argued on Twitter last Friday, the party has been in decline for some time, of which Sturgeon’s exit is a symptom rather than a cause. One cannot help but think that more is likely to come out about their funding irregularities; but the trigger for the final dam-burst was clearly Sturgeon’s decision to die on the hill of gender self ID, a highly unpopular – not to mention fundamentally damaging to women’s rights, and unworkable – policy.

Rather than listening to Scottish voters, Sturgeon then decided to double down so hard, that she triggered the first-ever invocation of Section 35 the Scotland Act; that is, an overruling of the bill by Westminster.

Crying “an affront to democracy” when you simply do not like the law as it stands makes you look foolish; and one use of Section 35 in a quarter-century of devolved government is hardly evidence of heavy-handedness by Westminster, rather of checks and balances operating exactly as they were designed to.

The sum total of all this has not only undermined the SNP as a credible political force, but has almost certainly set the SNP’s touchstone, the cause of Scottish independence, back years if not decades.

But that is only the start of the SNP’s woes. For a start, think of the hand dealt to Sturgeon’s successor: the party’s electoral hegemony, despite its lacklustre record in government, has arguably been the result of poor competition to replace them. That is, it is largely the near-collapse of its erstwhile big rival, Labour, since the mid-2000s, which has allowed them to continue in power with such so little actually delivered. This is unlikely to change.

Next, now the benighted self ID policy has gone through to become law, there will undoubtedly be  a consistent drip-drip-drip of media fallout from it; of a similarly shocking variety to the perfectly timed case of self-identified transgender rapist “Isla” Bryson, slated for a women’s prison despite the obvious bad faith of the man’s declaration as transgender.

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Labour MSPs should be ashamed of themselves

29/12/2022, 06:54:19 PM

by Rob Marchant

The following piece has been liberally linked with information sources – we would ask that readers check them out, but they are not for the faint-hearted.

It’s certainly been an historic year in British politics but, even in the last few days of the calendar, it seems we still have the ability to squeeze out the last drop of “history”.

In this case, it is one of those occasional moments when parliamentary votes become historic in retrospect, but not in a good way; where the actions of political leaders are so poorly thought-out that they ultimately result in years of embarrassment and regret.

Like the serial 2019 rejections of a half-decent EU Withdrawal Agreement under Theresa May, in favour of Boris Johnson’s final, shambolic one. Or the 2013 Syria vote, where Ed Miliband’s opportunism and Cameron’s bungling unwittingly triggered the collapse of any chance of international intervention to prevent the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Such a moment occurred last Thursday for the SNP, whose vote in the Scottish Parliament to allow that country’s citizens to decide what sex they are with no legally-enforceable proof, it is difficult to see as anything short of disastrous.

To the uninitiated, self ID means, in the name of “trans rights”, that any Scottish male will soon be able to declare themselves female – and any female male – by filling in a few forms and paying the princely sum of £5. They can then get all their government records changed to the opposite sex and, crucially, those who are men can legally insist on access to women’s spaces, in direct contravention of the single-sex exemption enshrined in the UK’s Equality Act.

This is a development that, if most of the public were made fully aware of it, would likely think insane.

However, it is not just the SNP: Labour MSPs also voted for this*, even though they did not need to. Their votes were unnecessary, they could have abstained or voted against and the SNP would still have won. But they were whipped to vote for the bill, because the top team seemed to actually think it was the right thing to do; their collective reputation now in the bin for nothing.

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In all this chaos, Labour’s chance is now, at this conference. And we are still perfectly capable of making a pig’s ear of it

20/09/2022, 10:45:13 PM

by Rob Marchant

As every political journalist will tell you, this by-election or this conference is always the decisive one, the one which changes everything. Of course, it is a journalist’s job to make a story more interesting and engaging than it actually is. But in this case, that argument might just have a point.

Labour, under a leader nearly two-and-a-half years into the job, is in a decent place. Largely thanks to Boris Johnson’s long-overdue implosion and his replacement by a less-than-inspiring alternative PM, Labour is riding high in the polls. In normal times, he would be looking like a shoo-in for an election in two years’ time.

But these are not normal times, if anything has been remotely normal in Britain these last few years.

After Brexit, Covid and now a worsening economic crisis, we end up in the bizarre position of having changed both prime minister and head of state in the same week. The normally phlegmatic British public is now in an emotional place, with some perhaps even subconsciously reassessing this country, its place in the world, and what kind of a place we would like it to be.

In the midst of all this confusion, like an object randomly falling from the air, plops the 2022 conference season. No doubt, Liz Truss will be aiming to come out of it looking like a powerful, well-supported primus inter pares of an A-list team. This will be a challenge: as the Conservatives’ fourth leader during the last six years, the look is more like the dismal fag-end of a long period of one-party government. But it is up to Labour to make it so.

Turning to Starmer, we can see a creditable progress which has been made since the Corbyn nadir. The sixty-four million dollar question is, though, has Labour changed enough to be ready for government?

We might first look at history: last time Labour was out of power, it took twelve years to reinvent itself from its turning point, which we could reasonably claim to be Kinnock’s 1985 conference speech. Starmer has had just over two. So, if he has really managed the necessary turnaround, he has done it in double-quick time. Or rather, six times as quickly.

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The real work for Keir Starmer starts here

16/07/2022, 09:47:50 PM

by Rob Marchant

Given that Boris Johnson’s prime ministership, however corrupt and venal it may have been, was always made of glass, one hopes that Labour’s leader and his team have been preparing for this sudden change at the top.

It is true that Johnson himself benefitted greatly from having, in Jeremy Corbyn, a disastrous figure as his initial chief opponent. And it is certainly open to question whether he would even have won against a half-decent opposition leader.

But just as the outgoing prime minister has benefitted from facing Labour’s worst-ever leader – as did his two predecessors – across the despatch box Starmer must also recognise that he has been the lucky recipient of the Tories’ own historic low point.

A man who was never going to last the distance, Johnson’s main gift has always been his success in selling undeliverable promises in the campaigning stage. But, to use Mario Cuomo’s adage, he could not handle the “governing in prose” stage.

If his only real achievement in government was to “get Brexit done”, then it was a Brexit that polls now show even most Leavers unhappy with. As it is, he has departed under the cloud that has followed almost all his other jobs; the cloud that all that have followed his miserable trajectory over the years predicted he would.

What, then, of a leader who is significantly better than Johnson, by the simple expedient of not being Johnson? We might look at the field of Tory candidates for the leadership and be uninspired. But we have no reason to believe there will not be a marked bounce in the polls for them, whoever is chosen. And that incoming PM will now very likely have two years to get their feet under the table before a general election.

There is an obvious conclusion to all this: Starmer now needs to up his game.

While we should not dismiss that he has made a great deal of progress in cleaning up the party, and gradually steering it towards being a party of government, he is not there yet. And, with Johnson’s political demise imminent, any honeymoon for Starmer’s leadership is now definitively over.

There are three areas which urgently need attention.

One: as Dan Hodges has pointed out, without the convenient own goals that Johnson has consistently provided in the guise of Partygate, Jennifer Arcuri, crony contracts during Covid, and so on, Starmer will need to tack from the personal to the political. No longer can Johnson’s personal failings be his stick to beat the Tories with.

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Starmer is doing well, everywhere except defending women’s rights

15/02/2022, 07:40:44 AM

by Rob Marchant

The best part of two years ago at Uncut, we set out eight things that then-incoming leader Keir Starmer would need to fix, in order to get Labour’s rusty ship back in seaworthy condition, after the battering of the Corbyn years.

Three were a slam-dunk: the party quickly got a new General Secretary after the terrible Jennie Formby; Starmer has ignored Momentum, while they have split and withered on the vine; and the NEC has been wrested away from the Corbynites. So far, so good

Four more were more tricky areas and were never going to be resolved quickly, but Labour has still made progress.

On antisemitism, there is clearly still work to do. The antisemites are not all gone: there are eminently reasonable, moderate Jews on the liberal-left who do not yet see the party as detoxified, and not without reason. The party’s bungling of Corbyn’s suspension did not help. On the other hand, the relationship with the Jewish community has undoubtedly improved, for example, to the point of Dame Louise Ellman feeling that she could rejoin.

On the others: Unite’s stranglehold on party funding has not yet been broken, although the union’s own money problems and a less Labour-centric General Secretary at the helm means that it certainly has reduced its influence and may well reduce further. The Scottish party is not rebuilt but, in Anas Sarwar, it has its first credible and effective leader in years. It has allowed a number of people who left over antisemitism to rejoin, but of those who left to form Change UK and stood against Labour in the 2019 election, none have so far rejoined. This seems tragic, given the unique circumstances of their leaving: they were principled resignees not political opportunists.

All this is cautiously good news: even if all the damage of the Corbyn years has yet to be undone, solid, if sometimes frustratingly slow, progress is being made back towards sanity.

It is only on the eighth and final point, where we come to the ‘D’ in Labour’s report card: “Get the party into a sensible place on trans self-id”. And that is not just because there is a clear moral imperative to defend the hard-won rights of women, now under attack. It is because it has the same potential to corrode the party and its public image as antisemitism did during 2015-20.

It is, in short, the new antisemitism.

If you think that a stretch, first bear in mind that Starmer’s first-ever conference as leader last September was very nearly derailed by car-crash interviews with David Lammy and Starmer himself, when asked basic questions on womanhood and women’s rights.

But if there were a point in time which would underline to Keir Starmer precisely why he can no longer afford to sit on the fence in the debate between women’s rights and trans rights, it was surely this last weekend.

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How not to lose culture wars

06/10/2021, 10:32:23 PM

This piece is part of a new book “Labour’s Reset: The Path Back to Power”. Click here to download it. The book looks at the barriers for voters in picking Labour, what the party can do in opposition to tackle these issues and the type of policy platform that would attract switchers to Labour at the election

by Rob Marchant

What is a culture war? From dictionary.com: it is ‘a conflict or struggle for dominance between groups within a society or between societies, arising from their differing beliefs, practices, etc.’

Culture wars are nothing new, but they are currently higher profile than ever, arguably because of (a) the political trend towards populism at home and abroad, and (b) the magnification of disagreement and polarised viewpoints via social media, providing the tools for instant public reaction. Whatever the explanation, it is clear that culture wars form a noticeable part of the current political Zeitgeist.

As a political party, you may not always get to win the culture war – sometimes, you may need to do the right thing in advance of public opinion, as Labour did in the 1980s on gay rights. However, it is useful not to lose them, and Labour seems to have been doing just that on some subjects.

Two major examples are antisemitism, where the new leadership has demonstrably taken the ‘right’ side but seems sluggish in following through to the end; and the vexed issue of trans rights, where the leadership has managed to stifle almost all debate and in doing so managed, seemingly oblivious, to alienate a large swathe of its female membership.

Not only have they surged with the proliferation of social media, but they have both used institutional capture as a way of determinedly promoting their agendas. Far-left entryists took over Labour for half of the last decade; and Stonewall’s worryingly driven zealots have spread themselves over large parts of Britain’s public and private sector, promoting equalities law not as it is, but as they would like it to be.

But there have been other examples over the last decade: ‘taking the knee’ may have been something that the public bought into around Euro 2020, but the linked association with the Black Lives Matter organisation ultimately turned out to be problematic. Being anti-austerity was justifiable, but the UK Cuts movement and the 2011 London demo were decidedly not; Ed Miliband was left with egg on his face. Labour’s association with such single-issue movements over the last decade has generally later turned out to look unwise.

So, here we set out a few thoughts for Labour on how not to lose the culture wars:

1.Think carefully before wading in and do not pick the stupid side. There are often issues around a ‘culture war’ position that need to be considered; for example, are we getting into one or more of the following?

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