Labour loses control of Broxtowe as 20 councillors leave the party

Twenty Labour members of Broxtowe District Council in Nottinghamshire have resigned from the party.

The Guardian report says:

In a statement, the councillors – who will now sit as part of a new Broxtowe Independents party – said: "It is with a heavy heart that we can no longer be in a party that has abandoned traditional Labour values under Keir Starmer's leadership."

They were particularly critical of the cut to the winter fuel allowance, the bus fare increase and Labour’s plans to scrap two-tier county and district councils, which are to be merged to create large unitary authorities.

Radulovic said: "I believe the concentration of power in the hands of fewer people, and the abolition of local democracy through the current proposals of super councils, is nothing short of a dictatorship, where local elected members, local people, local residents will have no say over the type and level of service provided in their area.

"I have therefore been left with no alternative. I cannot support and will not support another centrist government intent on destroying local democracy and dictating national policy from a high pedestal."

It may be significant that the person the Guardian found to speak in favour of the Labour Party was Anna Soubry, the former Conservative MP for Broxtowe. Readers may also recall her as a leading member of the failed centre party Change UK, even if they couldn't remember which of its several names that party ended up using.

I am pleased to see that Labour's proposals for local government are meeting with opposition, at least within the party itself. 

The Evening Standard praises those Lib Dem election stunts

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A comment piece by Jack Kessler in the Evening Standard understands:

Following the catastrophic 2015 general election, the Lib Dems haven't even been the third party of British politics. Yet under successive leaders, they have frequently punched above their parliamentary weight, based on an understanding that they must be different in order to generate the oxygen of publicity. They need to be, for want of a better word, a little bit wacky. And in Ed Davey, the party can boast a leader who has turned this into an art form.

If you remember anything about the Chesham and Amersham by-election of 2021, it will be the image of Davey destroying a model blue brick wall with a small hammer, while a bunch of activists held up yellow placards. It was a gimmick, obviously, but a brilliant one. 

This also explains why Davey has this week fallen into Lake Windermere while paddleboarding, got wet (again) on a Slip 'N Slide in Somerset, and cycled down a very steep hill in Wales, where his team appeared disappointed he failed to fall off.

The Lib Dem leader is happy to look a little silly if it means his party picks up two dozen seats in their traditional battlegrounds of the West Country and the South of England, where they can reasonably convince voters they are the lever to pull for those most concerned with ejecting the local Tory MP.

And I like his conclusion:

Ultimately, the Lib Dems do a pretty good job of being the Lib Dems. And as Change UK ably demonstrated, it's harder than it looks.

Chris Leslie joins the bailiffs

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Sitting on the front bench, Tony Blair surveyed the massed ranks of his parliamentary intake and then lent over to Gordon Brown.

"It’s weird,” he said "but there’s a guy back there who’s the splitting image of the boy who does your photocopying." 

"That is him,” Brown replied. “He’s your new MP for Shipley."

That boy was Chris Leslie. So good was his photocopying that he was parachuted into the safe seat of Nottingham East after he lost Shipley and eventually became Ed Miliband's shadow chancellor.

Then he left Labour to join The Independent Group and scorned any thought of an electoral pact with the Greens or Liberal Democrats:

He said a tie-up with other pro-EU parties "wasn't ever on the agenda", adding: "I don't think it will ever be likely because we are starting something new. We are not joining the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party."

Instead, Mr Leslie urged Lib Dem members to switch allegiance and join Change UK, saying the "emergency situation" of Brexit required "a completely fresh overhaul of the centre-ground".

As it turned out, neither Leslie nor his new party, with its ever-changing name, proved attractive to Nottingham East's voters. In last year's general election he finished fourth with 3.6 per cent of the vote.

Now he has emerged as the new chief executive of the trade body for the debt collection industry, the Credit Services Association.

Brynley Heaven, who once wrote a guest post for Liberal England, comments on Twitter:

for a brief period, Chris Leslie was always in the media invited into studios to explain how cuts were unavoidable, Keynes was impossible and misery was the right medicine for the precarious and the poor. Now he has an exciting & poetic opportunity to see some of ideas bear fruit

— Brynley Heaven (@BrynleyHeaven) July 19, 2020

Looking back at Change UK a year on

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As Tim Adams reminds us in the Observe, a year ago Britain boasted a new centre party.

It kept changing its name, but it will probably go down in history as Change UK - if history bothers to remember it at all.

The group was launched in February 2019, when seven MPs left the Labour Party and I wrote:

It is hard to see much hope in the statement of values their Independent Group has published. It is hard to imagine anyone reading it and thinking: "At last someone has put into words what I have been feeling all these years." 

Rather than the launch of a new movement, I see seven individuals who have succumbed to the hard left's perennial tactic of making life so unpleasant for those who oppose them that they eventually walk away from the fight.

The Tories who joined shortly afterwards seemed to be having more fun, but I think I was right.

Perhaps because they had made their careers in the Labour Party, which had plenty of safe seats, the seven did not appear to have the stomach for a fight.

If you doubt me, read Gavin Shuker's explanation of why the new party declined to join others in endorsing a single Remain candidate in the June 2019 Peterborough by-election:

"We all agreed to stand down any candidates we might field in favour of a genuinely independent, pro-People’s Vote and pro-Remain candidate who had expressed an interest and intention to stand. 

"However, senior Labour figures, including senior figures campaigning for a People’s Vote, made it clear that they would strenuously disrupt the campaign and obstruct an independent Candidate, driven by fears that it would harm their party in Peterborough." 

But there was one thing the new party could have done to make an impact.

Its statement of values, as far as I can recall (the link in my original post no longer works), assumed that Brexit was bound to take place and made vague statements about what the world should look like afterwards.

But what Change UK should have done was call itself Remain or The Remain Party.

That would have given them a clear identity and quite possibly put them ahead of the Liberal Democrats in the opinion polls.

I don't think it would have brought them any seats in the December 2019 general election, but it would have caused us huge problems.

The moral is that a new centre party needs a clear appeal to the voters and to offer something the Lib Dems don't. Change UK failed to do either.

Stephen Dorrell has joined the Liberal Democrats

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Stephen Dorrell, who was health secretary in John Major's government and a Change UK candidate in this years's European elections, writes behind the Sunday Times paywall:

The slow-motion disintegration of the Conservative and Labour parties is the key political fact of 2019. Brexit is the immediate detonator, but the underlying causes run deeper and create the opportunity to reshape politics.

He goes on to say that this reshapaing

requires liberal Conservatives and social democrats to break cover from their respective parties and join the Liberal Democrats in a big liberal tent. 

It isn’t just a question of “joining the Liberal Democrats”; by joining, their objective is to expand the Liberal Democrats to include fellow liberals from different backgrounds, all of whom are committed to delivering the reform of our politics that is so urgently needed.

And he concludes:

It is time for them to break their shackles and join with the Liberal Democrats to build an effective voice for a modern, liberal Britain. That is what I have done.

Dorrell was Conservative MP for Loughborough and then Charnwood between 1979 and 2015.

On becoming exasperated with Heidi Allen

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So the Tiggers have changed their name again - they are now The Independents - and will be less of a party in future.

But there was another, less amusing, development involving Heidi Allen yesterday. She also announced the launch of Unite to Remain.

According to The New European:

The independent MP for South Cambridgeshire, who will lead the initiative, said the group will follow the blueprint of what is happening in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election, where both Plaid Cymru and the Greens have agreed to stand aside in order to support the Liberal Democrat candidate, who is seen as having the best chance of defeating the Conservatives and bringing a seat to the Remain cause.

But the parties listed here are getting on very well with no help from Heidi Allen.

And when the Tiggers did involve themselves involved in a by-election - in Peterborough - it all turned shambolic.

Who can forget Gavin Shuker's explanation of why there was not a single Remain candidate?

He said:

"We all agreed to stand down any candidates we might field in favour of a genuinely independent, pro-'people's vote' and pro-remain candidate who had expressed an interest and intention to stand. 

"However, senior Labour figures, including senior figures campaigning for a people’s vote, made it clear they would strenuously disrupt the campaign and obstruct an independent candidate, driven by fears that it would harm their party in Peterborough."

If there is a vacancy for a group like Unite to Remain it is for one that can bring in the SNP and parts of the Labour Party. And for that task you do not want a recent Conservative MP.

Even then there are problems. The Scottish Liberal Democrats have clearly concluded that there way back to significance is to unite the Unionist vote in the seats we held until 2015. Working with the SNP will not be easy for them.

I agree with Nick Tyrone: the Tiggers should accept the way the tide is running and join the Lib Dems.

Heidi Allen should be aware that if she continues down her present path, she may well find South Cambridgeshire Lib Dems putting up against her at the next general election out of sheer exasperation.

The Lib Dems have not been tribalist enough

Back in February, when Change UK was launched, I wrote:

Remembering the endless hours expended on seat negotiations by the Liberal Party and the SDP, I would be tempted to pursue a selfish strategy if I were in charge of TIG and it had grown into a national party. 

I would give the Lib Dems a clear run in the seats they hold and in another dozen where they had realistic chances of winning. After that, I would stand a candidate in every seat in the country and let the Lib Dems stand against me if they dared. 

So low is the present Lib Dem support across much of the country, I would reason, that if we can’t supplant then we TIGgers have no future as a party anyway.

Now things have turned around - and that post is a reminder of how quickly it happened - that has become good advice for us Liberal Democrats.

You often hear the criticism that we are too tribalist, but that is a libel.

Chuka Umunna joined the party and was made our Treasury spokesperson the same weekend, and I have not read a whisper of criticism of him or that promotion.

Back in the 1980s the Liberal Party, which was supposed to be far more fractious than the modern-day Lib Dems, did David Steel's bidding and stood down in half the seats in the country to make room for the SDP. You can't  get much less tribal than that.

A fairer criticism of Liberals and Liberal Democrats over the years would be that we have been too prone to the belief that the route to success lies in giving in.

If only we give up enough of our beliefs and policies, runs the logic, if only we stand down in favour of someone else in enough seats, we will be swept to power.

You sometimes get the idea we believe we are an obstacle to Liberal government and not its greatest hope.

So I will now apply my advice from February to my own party.

I would not have a problem with our standing down in favour of the Greens in constituencies where they have a realistic hope of winning and we have none. But there are not many seats like that.

Nor would I have a problem with standing down in favour of Change UK, though I can think of only one seat - Heidi Allen's South Cambridgeshire - where that would be worth doing.

But we should stand candidates in the huge majority of seats and let other parties decide whether or not to put up against us.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Breakfast with Freddie and Fiona

Change UK was a British political party that flourished briefly in the spring of 2019. 

When I sent this off to Liberator it was topical satires. Honest.

Saturday

Who should I meet at breakfast but Freddie and Fiona? It transpires that I have invited them for the weekend, though I cannot remember doing so. I am reminded of the day I set the dogs on what I took to be a poacher, only to find he was the leader of the Portuguese Liberals whom I had brought here to stay after meeting him at the National Liberal Club.

Be that as it may, the two of them are full of their new party. It is called Change UK – at least they tell me it was last time they checked. They plan to “replace the Liberal Democrats”, if you please, because we are too associated with austerity.

I hasten to change the subject and ask them if Jeremy Browne’s scheme for selling the unemployed to an offshore bank, developed while they worked for him, came to anything. They go rather quiet after that. Then, fearing for their immortal souls, I urge them to attend St Asquith’s the next day.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• A bicyclist arrives from Kettering
• Orphans in the rafters

The Tiggers change their name again: Welcome to The Independent Group for Change

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First it was The Independent Group. Then it was Change UK. Then it was Change UK - The Independent Group. Then it was ForChange_Now.

Today it became The Independent Group for Change.

The Tiggers, as I shall always think of them, have been forced into this latest change of name following complaints from the owners of the Change.org petition site.

They had hoped to register with the Electoral Commission as Change UK, but the Shropshire Star (who else?) explains that a statement from them sets out how:

Lawyers from Change.org disputed the group’s right to register as "Change UK" with the Electoral Commission ahead of the European elections. 

They explained how “under threat of legal action” by Change.org, which could have seen “each MP being sued personally” and with no time left to register a new party name, Change UK “felt we had no option but to sign a legal agreement” to ditch the name following the election. 

They added: “We are now legally obliged to make a formal application to the Electoral Commission, to amend our name by 15th June, so today we are applying to register ourselves as ‘The Independent Group for Change’ and will await the Electoral Commission’s decision.

This 'new party' business is harder than it looks.

Change UK spent £1300 on Facebook ads saying it was campaigning to remain in the UK

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There are welcome signs that the experience of the European election has unbounced the Tiggers.

Change UK are now making noises about the importance of cooperation, and I look forward to working with them and, I suspect, eventually absorbing them. We shall acquire some good and interesting people in the process.

But while we can still laugh at them, let me repeat this story from the Guardian:

Change UK has run a last-minute Facebook advertising campaign to try to shore up its support amid dismal poll ratings for the European elections, but most other parties have mostly avoided large spending on online campaigning. 

The upstart pro-EU political party, formerly known as the Independent Group, spent £87,000 on Facebook adverts in the seven days up to Wednesday, becoming the biggest single political advertiser on the social networking site, following predictions it could fail to elect a single MEP and faced with the potential resignation of the party’s interim leader, Heidi Allen. 

Not all Change UK’s adverts have hit the spot. In one example highlighted by iNews, the party spent at least £1,300 promoting Facebook adverts saying it was campaigning to “remain in the UK”.

Six of the Best 866

"Time and again, right from the beginning, they have made such basic errors in their thinking, their planning and their execution that if they’re to be remembered by history at all, it will be as an object lesson in how not to launch a political party." David Herdson is damning on the many failures of Change UK.

Mark Paine is one person who was originally attracted by Change UK but soon decided to come home to the Liberal Democrats.

"Children, vulnerable people and general members of the public can suffer long-term effects from participation in these kinds of reality show, and broadcasts can have serious unintended consequences not only for them but also for family, friends and work colleagues too." The psychologist John Oates on the dangers of reality television and the responsibilities of production companies.

Barbara Rich makes the case for keeping Mr Justice Byrne's annotated copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover in Britain. The annotations were made by his wife, Lady Dorothy, who sat beside him throughout the trial.

Simon Matthews has been to see Red Joan

A City relic is traced in deepest Hampshire by A London Inheritance.

Pointless offers a warning to Change UK

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Change UK - or the Tiggers, as I still think of them - announced their Euro candidates today.

There are some names I recognise, notably the former Conservative cabinet minister Stephen Dorrell.

I note, however, that he is standing in the West Midlands rather than the East Midlands, where he was an MP for 36 years.

With Dorrell and a few other people we politicos have heard of - Rachel Johnson, Gavin Esler - the Tiggers must be feeling pleased with themselves.

But they should not feel too pleased.

Last year I pointed out how little most people know about politics:

Pointless is almost a mirror image of Family Fortunes, which rewarded contestants for being average not for being clever. 

Yet there are two subjects where Pointless contestants generally know little and find the thought they might know something to be so unreasonable as to be amusing. 

One is British politics and the other is geography.

After I had posted that, "the admirable Alwyn Turner" sent me the link to a post he had written in 2013.

It was about a round in Pointless that year where 100 people had been asked to name as many politicians as they could remember who had served in the Labour cabinets of either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. That is, any cabinet member between 1997 and 2010:

Top of the list was John Prescott, named by just 15 out of the 100 people. 

Then came: Ed Miliband - 13 out of 100 

Ed Balls -13 out of 100 

David Miliband - 12 out of 100 

Jack Straw - 7 out of 100 

Alistair Darling - 7 out of 100 

Peter Mandelson - 4 out of 100 

David Blunkett - 4 out of 100 

Clare Short - 2 out of 100 

Mo Mowlam - 1 out of 100 

Margaret Beckett - 1 out of 100 

We never found out whether my nominee, Ivor Richard, made it into the pointless category, because there were simply too many names to go through. But amongst those who rated not a single mention were: Andrew Adonis, Andy Burnham, Jack Cunningham, Charlie Falconer, Patricia Hewitt, Derry Irvine, Donald Dewar, Frank Dobson, Geoff Hoon, Margaret Jay, Alan Milburn and James Purnell.

So, as I say, the Tiggers should not feel to pleased with themselves tonight.

Incidentally, this second post was quoted without attribution on the Today programme by a Leading Political Commentator, who unfollowed me on Twitter when I pointed this out.

But I'm not bitter.

The Independent Group feels more sad than hopeful

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Today's announcement by seven Labour MPs that they were leaving the party did not feel hopeful so much as sad.

It is hard to see much hope in the statement of values their Independent Group has published. It is hard to imagine anyone reading it and thinking: "At last someone has put into words what I have been feeling all these years."

Rather than the launch of a new movement, I see seven individuals who have succumbed to the hard left's perennial tactic of making life so unpleasant for those who oppose them that they eventually walk away from the fight.

After the victories of Trump, Corbyn and Leave, it is hard to say anything in politics is impossible. But it's hard to believe today's events will prove the start of something big.