This is my experience of the reformed trigger ballots, others will have different ones.
The new rules did not make much difference. Only one MP failed to obtain renomination after losing a trigger ballot, although five lost their ballots. Some may have been saved by running out of time and or a lot of people stood down. However we i.e. the Left are losing because people aren’t turning up, and they aren’t turning up because we don’t know who they are and many of them have given up on us as leaders of the Corbyn project. People have not engaged in this process and it is not because of the fact they didn’t get a phone call or email. (There may be one or two places where piss poor organisation by the left had led to failure, and some where they ran out of time.) In some cases, the surviving MPs must be seen to genuinely have the support of the CLP membership.
We i.e. the Left have driven people away through our sectarian and indecent behaviour. We have failed to renew our leadership. The momentum database is now too inaccurate to be useful, inaccuracies which incl. CLP/Branch Membership facts.
Those that support the incumbents are often better Labour Campaigners then we are, (except for some of our Trotskyist friends) and many of our recent members and new members first experience of the Labour Party is on the doorstep.
While this is controversial people are leaving! (Or were until the election.)
We need to discover nice, we need to build ward socials, and meet more people. Supporting Corbyn isn’t enough because people can think they do that by supporting him in the coup and voting for the JC9. They don’t have to support us, and don’t in many cases because we don’t talk to them.
In addition, by driving for All Member Meeting governance, we have ignored Branch activity and let them fail.
We have been looking in the wrong place.
ooOOOoo
This was originally written on 16th October.
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Some good points. The sectarian nature of many on the left can be damaging. I find the culture of group think, pile on and the absurdly purist but one dimensional nature of quite a lot of left activists quite irritating at this point.
It is not heresy if you don’t agree 100% with every aspect of left thinking or every utterance by Jeremy or RLB. In fact an approach that seeks to silence voices that offer alternative views or ideas is on its way to self destruction. There is also a horrible tendency to spread rumour, or unsubstantiated nonsense around as gospel because it suits a particular bias narrative. Argue your point but do it with facts or at the least decent logic. T quote W. Edwards Deming: “In God we trust; all others bring data.”
The left is losing and it needs to get its head around this fact. Stop denying mistakes and begin a genuine process of examining the failures (they are many) and learning from them. Th depressing thing is that I see very little sign of this happening.
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