Which way forward for Labour?
JVL Introduction
In his analysis below Andrew Fisher, Labour’s director of policy from 2016 to 2019 argues that Labour is moving in the wrong direction.
Its new strategy director, Deborah Mattinson apparently believes that Labour’s task is to “lure back millions who defected to the Tories in 2019”.
But, says Fisher, remember that twice as many votes were lost to Lib Dems and Greens as to the Tories.
And remember what happened in 2017 when Labour had so successfully converted non-voters from 2015 into Labour voters
Labour should not to rush rightwards in search of the relatively small number of voters who went Tory, but focus on non-voters. There are more of them – and they tend to be working class, young or from ethnic minority communities.
But they need to be inspired – as they were in 2017.
Fisher’s excellent article is weakened only by its bizarre failure to mention under whose auspices the 2017 gains were made.
We have no intention of colluding in making Jeremy Corbyn a nonperson.
Who else in recent decades has been able to offer what Fisher says is necessary: a radical “strategy of inspiration”?
This article was originally published by the Guardian on Thu 5 Aug 2021. Read the original here.
Labour shouldn’t lurch to the right – it must get out the vote
The idea of winning back millions of Tory supporters is a misdiagnosis. The aim should be registration and participation
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Oh Jeremy Corbyn
Unfortunately, the foot soldiers have been expelled, suspended, resigned, retired because the leadership has demotivated them. Can’t see Progress lot getting their hands dirty.
I have no trust nor confidence in Starmer and co.
The other major lacuna was the failure to even mention the Labour Right’s sabotage in 2017 and its war against Corbyn, most notably via the ‘antisemitism’ campaign. Unfortunately Andrew Fisher bought into that campaign lock, stock and barrel.
Without a recognition that the Labour Right preferred a Tory government under Johnson to Corbyn then there really is no hope for the Labour left.
Only two days before the Mattinson “analysis” was given an airing in the Observer its sister paper The Guardian. published what amounts to the opposite perspective, put forward by Andy Beckett. This, oddly but convincingly, was based on a right-wing think-tank report on the “anti-capitalist” drift of younger people.
Personally I’m rather suspicious of any perspective not based in political principle but only on target demographics. That said, Mattinson’s approach seems completely wrong-headed anyway. For one thing it means that a Labour leader who everyone knows is a keen Remainer will have to drop that stance and appear utterly opportunistic.
The recent statement of policy regarding workers’ rights, however, is a positive step and we should be pushing to make campaigning around this a central project. The language in which this initiative is couched is cringeworthy patriotism, but that shouldn’t stop us at the grass roots from rallying our local CLPs to campaign around this.
Good article but you appear to have airbrushed Jeremy Corbyn out of the equation in error? Without him GE17 success would not have happened. And without internal treachery he would have been PM
Starmer’s fake labour party is a dead duck.With Starmer and his front bench determined to turn labour into a tin pot tory party, they have become unelectable. Starmer and his whole front bench must be removed,and kicked out of the labour party ,because they have proved to be self serving and totally untrustworthy.
All these Guardian analysers, and Labour Party chiefs know that if Corbyn was brought back into the Party and made Leader, the membership would explode again. Thousands would campaign for Labour and bring hope and optimism into a defunct and dreary main Party, which seems only to want to please and placate the Tories. Frankly, it is a Liberal party. Its name is an anachronism.
I first came across Deborah Mattinson and Philip Gould in 1986 when they made their initial presentation, based on their focus group “research”, to a joint NEC-Shadow Cabinet meeting. This was when I was the party’s chief press officer and Gould and Mattinson were early members of Peter Mandelson’s little known Shadow Communications Agency.
I doubted the rigour of their work then, but had that suspicion confirmed after the 2005 general election when I was invited at short notice by a focus group recruiter to fill her quota of men of a certain age. The requirement was that they be former Labour voters in the Hornsey and Wood Green constituency who had switched to elect LibDem Lynne Featherstone.
I explained that I lived just over the boundary in Islington North so wasn’t eligible on geographical grounds alone. But she said she urgently needed to make up the numbers for the company Mattinson was running at the time — and that there would be good food and drink as well as the cash fee in the usual brown envelope.
I couldn’t resist and duly turned up at the appointed location, a room above the Victoria Stakes pub at the bottom of Muswell Hill. Who did I meet there but many men who clearly were unfamiliar with that part of North London but who pretended a local knowledge when guided by the Mattinson company facilitator?
The most articulate group member was a taxi driver who claimed to have switched from life-long Labour supporter to Featherstone voter “to teach Tony a lesson for launching the Iraq invasion without a second UN resolution”.
Several others murmured their agreement during a guided discussion I found artificial and unconvincing — people singing for their supper that night and with future brown envelopes in mind it seemed to me.
At the end of the session we were told it had been run for a lobby for the elderly who apparently wanted to know if pension and retirement policies had been an important factor in our GE vote choice. (The “findings” of the focus group were subsequently used in the publicity material for a well-publicised national conference by the same organisation the following year.)
The cab driver and I left together at the end, him telling me he was a focus group regular who enjoyed the discussions as well as the fee and food.
I politely declined his offer of a lift home, saying I lived nearby and would be walking there. Did he live far away himself, I asked?
Yes, he said, he lived in Borehamwood, smilingly adding that he was a Labour councillor there and had met “Tony” the previous week at an LFI lunch.
Of course my experience could be untypical of the work of Sir Keir’s new strategist. But as she also produced very inaccurate “focus group” material on the eve of the critical Stoke Central by-election in 2017 in support of The Guardian anti-Corbyn narrative I continue to have my doubts.
Perhaps one day focus group raw data will be made available to members for independent scrutiny and evaluation before it helps form the basis of party campaigning. Until it is, I will remain healthily sceptical of the recommendations said to be derived from meeting real people.
Odd JC isn’t mentioned, maybe the author felt it unnecessary, or maybe he feared being expelled from the Party by the centrist zealots who are now running things?
Whatever the reason, the article exposes the myths and woolly thinking that pervades Labour under the current regime, they are living in 1997.
Personally I believe Labour would have won in 2017 if it hadn’t been for the fifth column, who repeatedly gave the MSM off the record and anonymous briefings against the leadership, and even actively worked against a Labour victory as the buried internal report showed.
I agree with previous poster who thinks that Andrew Fisher
feels constrained by the current ideology to expand on some of
his opinions.
The idea that it is worth employing expensive companies to
determine future strategies has surely been jettisoned now?
However the necessity of talking with and more importantly listening
to the electorate is surely obvious and who better than Labour Party members who volunteer to canvass. I hope that Ms Rayner thinks about
this when she enthuses about getting rid of “thousands” of the Labour Party.