It’s a winter election and I just don’t think you’re going to have hordes of people fired up to stand in the freezing cold for a political rally.
And it doesn’t look good that he appears to have sent his dad to make his excuses. Diddums.
Can someone explain how Jo Swinson became party leader? She is young and inexperienced, but unlike, say Buttigieg, who is obviously intelligent and talented, she just comes off as average. Did the Liberal Democrats have no one better? It’s a huge missed opportunity given the limitations of Johnson and Corbyn and the fact there is a large anti-Brexit constituency which has no other party to go to. With a better leader this could have been a breakthrough year for the Lib Dems.
When is the last time Britain had such deeply unimpressive party leaders as Johnson, Corbyn and Swinson ? I am guessing the answer is pretty much never which is deeply worrying given the huge challenge of Brexit that the next leader will likely face.
Well, now we’ve got our ‘black swan’ event - but whether it hurts Johnson or helps him remains to be seen.
This is not just a British thing. Canada had the same issues. Just to name two recent examples:
Stephane Dion became leader of the Liberal Party (at the time the official opposition). He is big on environmentalism and federalism (as opposed to Quebec separatism; Mr. Dion is from Quebec). Unfortunately he is not media trained and does not have charisma. He basically surprised everyone by winning the leadership, and was then demolished in the election.
One of Dion’s rivals was Bob Rae, who decades ago was the premier of Canada’s largest province… which made him fantastically unpopular. I’ve read books about how bad he was, and yet he was seen as more competent than Dion. However Rae could not possibly have won the election (for different reasons than Dion). Rae had been kicked out of office after only one term, so maybe the Liberals didn’t want to vote for a proven loser.
Andrew Scheer is the leader of the Conservative Party. He won the leadership by a fraction (less than 2%), falling behind the more charismatic Maxime Bernier until the last ballot (when the everyone-but-Bernier movement supported Scheer). Bernier is basically Canada’s Trump, and I think if he won the leadership things would have gone much worse for the Conservatives. (Bernier launched his own party, but didn’t manage to win a single seat. Scheer actually won the popular vote by one or two percent, but this was mainly due to winning massive support in only one region in the country.)
To figure out how Swinson won, it’s probably necessary to analyze her rivals. They may have been worse.
The primary process (or leadership election process, whatever it is called in whatever country) seems to be broken, especially with today’s hyper partisanship. Far too often the winner is whoever is most extreme and is able to recruit the most new members to the party. What wins leadership campaigns rarely wins elections. Of course, the fact that totally unsuitable candidates can win locally (rather than losing to more suitable opposition candidates) causes problems too. This isn’t a specific comment about Ms. Swinson. She’s a centrist and beyond her being a very strong Remainer I know nothing about her.
IMO, if Labour had a pro-Remain leader, Remain may have won the referendum. Corbyn has charisma (somehow), at least among young people, which is how he won his leadership campaign and why he still has support in his party. It’s not possible to eject him, just like Trump will not be found guilty by the Senate (even if he’s caught on live TV saying “I wanted a quid pro quo”). The polls are tightening (apparently his pie-in-the-sky manifesto is more popular than Boris Johnson’s pie-in-the-sky manifesto) but Corbyn is essentially running for minority leadership. I think a lot of Britons might be upset at the thought of him winning, even if they agree with the platform, because he will have to negotiate a new deal with the EU (I don’t know what he would do differently), pass that deal through a minority Parliament, then hold a second referendum…
So I guess I’m less interested in how Swinson became leader, and more interested in how Corbyn remained leader. Labour Remainer members did themselves a disservice by continuing to support him.
Corbyn won because the alternatives were Burnham, Cooper and Kendall, all of whom were continuing in the tradition of Ed Miliband in promoting a “Tory-lite” watered-down Blairism version of the Labour Party. All three gave pat, pre-prepared answers to every question, regardless of whether they actually answered the question being asked. None of them demonstrated any interest in what the party membership cared about, particularly with regard to austerity.
Corbyn, conversely, actually answered the questions being asked, opposed austerity and appealed to the young and the left-leaning who had felt that Labour had abandoned them. The fact that he has no leadership skills to speak of is, to put it mildly, unfortunate. I’d been hoping from the beginning that Corbyn would force the party to reconsider what it actually stood for and then an actual more competent leader would emerge to challenge him and Labour could move forward, but apart from a tepid bid from Owen Smith no one seems to be either inclined or capable to try to grab the reins.
That will depend on the election result. But it will require someone to do so from within the new direction the party’s taken under Corbyn, just without his personal limitations and the more rigidly purist acolytes at the centre of his operation.
/s/swan/narwhal/g
I’m afraid I don’t agree with this analysis, at least for Canada at the federal level. Both of the two major parties, Liberals and Conservatives, have similar leadership systems, designed to ensure that the winning candidate has general support in the party across the country. It’s not just a popular vote of the party members.
That system does in fact weed out extremists within the party. Take the last Conservative leadership. Candidates like O’Leary drop out early for lack of support. Candidates like Trost go nowhere. And candidates like Bernier, who advanced radical (by Canadian standards) positions on immigration and supply-management trigger an “anybody-but” movement against them.
And the statement that winning leadership doesn’t lead to electoral success just make no sense to me, sorry. In 2013, Justin Trudeau won the leadership on the first vote, with over 70% of votes cast and 80% of constituency points. And two years later, he won the general election with a good majority, taking the Liberals from third party status to majority government, something no other party leader has done in Canadian history. The Liberal leadership process certainly translated into electoral success.
By contrast, the Conservative leadership conference went to 13 ballots before Scheer won in a squeaker. To me, that’s a sign of a divided party, not a flaw in the leadership process.
Well, OK. But what’s the alternative that does the same job? Because Labour’s great strength is meant to be its activist base who are more prepared to doorknock and GOTV than the much smaller and much older Conservative membership. But a 2017-style performance is going to need (among other things) a motivated membership - especially as it’s December.
That said, there have been some small pro-Labour shifts in the polls - an average of a couple of points shaved off the Tory lead in the last week. It’s got some way to go, but equally the way the seats and voters are distributed, Tories need more than c.6% lead to get a majority so narrowing down rather than overtaking may be “good enough”. There’s still quite a way to go though. The decline of the Lib Dems may bring some Labour waverers back into the fold; there’s also tactical voting at play. But you still feel the Labour campaign needs a bit of kick up the arse.
She is indeed mediocre and is hardly alone in Westminster in that regard - unfortunately she also lacks that likeability fairy dust that effective political communicators have in their DNA, she badly rubs the electorate up the wrong way. I guess in fairness a national campaign either makes or breaks you, it’s not really possible to know how a person will perform as it’s such a giant step up from local or Westminster-focussed party politics
I think the biggest talent vacuum has to be in labour and is a huge missed opportunity for the left, in hindsight. JC couldn’t run a bath and can never be elected, but if he had someone younger and credible to hand over to a year or so ago, once he had shored up his powerbase, then that would have been a huge play. Not old, talented, on the left of the party, electable - it’s asking a lot and not sure that person exists.
Rebecca Long-Bailey is being talked about as the anointed successor.
It would be nice to see Labour pick a female leader (Beckett and Harman only having held the role in a temporary sense).
Swinson had a close association with Vince Cable, the previous Liberal Democrat leader, which undoubtedly helped. Also, although comparatively young, turning 40 early next year, she’s a party veteran. She was first elected to Parliament in 2005, and served in Government with Nick Clegg when he was Deputy Prime Minister. Personally, I tend to think of the 21st century Liberal Democrats as the nice, middle-class, centre-left party. Swinson fills that niche pretty strongly. As a campaigner, I think she’s made two mistakes. On Brexit, she shifted the party from pursuing a second referendum to outright Article 50 revocation. That probably alienated some soft Remainers who wanted to respect the first referendum, but were willing to accept a second referendum was fair given the tumult in Parliament. The other mistake is that she hasn’t established the Liberal Democrats as a clear alternative to both the Conservatives and Labour. She needed to go on the attack, generating soundbites the media would report. Against the Conservatives, the easy target is to attack Johnson’s character. Against Labour, attack Corbyn and McDonnell’s spending plans. Whatever Swinson is saying is barely being reported, which means it’s not interesting. So instead of being “the” third party in the election, the Liberal Democrats are just one of the “other” parties in the election while the Conservatives and Labour battle it out.
Her or Angela Rayner would both be a big step in the right direction (though neither a stellar candidate IMHO) - both just a bit too inexperienced to take the baton this time round. Rayner in particular would be tough I reckon, she’s pragmatic, compelling life story and can represent the left without being weighed down with the usual ideological nonsense that just steals oxygen.
Compared to other UK election threads, this one is incredibly slow moving.
I’m pretty sure that’s a comment on this election - it’s been pretty dull with no major incidents positive or negative for any party, just a grinding out of planned campaign strategies. There’s a lot at stake in this election, but none of that has really come to the fore, somehow.
A poll released at midnight shows the conservative party with a 14 point lead. It was the same polling company that in 2017 had it narrowed down to one point in the last days of the election. It looks very ominous for Labour. Boris Johnson is a moron but all he’s had to do was repeat his canned line of getting brexit done and then just run down the clock.
Rebecca Wrong-Dailey as she’s better known. She’s dreadful. The labour voters I know who hate Corbyn talk of his close associates in pretty damming terms and she’s high up the list for criticism. I find her smug, self-satisfied and intensely annoying and the only benefit she’d bring is that she isn’t Corbyn. She has the same demeanour as Corbyn though and has been his uncritical lap-dog and enabled him to be the worst labour leader in my living memory.
Perhaps but I think the might be best to concentrate first of all on choosing a leader who can command a decent amount of respect amongst a) the back benchers, b) the electorate. their gender is, and should be, irrelevant.
Sure, but if it starts to seem like Labour is incapable of either recruiting, retaining or appointing women who are meet those qualifications then that is going to be a problem. In any individual leadership contest, it might just so happen that the best candidate is a man - but it’s happened in every leadership contest Labour have ever had, which cannot be said of the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish Conservatives, Scottish Labour and even UKIP. That’s a series of coincidences which can’t be expected to last much longer without people beginning to wonder what it is about Labour that means it can’t produce a woman who commands sufficient respect among the backbenches and the electorate.