Local Council By-Elections December 2015

Party	Number of Candidates	Total Vote	%	+/-  Nov	Average/ contest	+/-  Nov	+/- Seats
Conservative	20	8,464	33.3%	+12.5%	423	+31	0
Labour	18	7,228	28.5%	+10.2%	402	+57	0
LibDem	15	3,279	12.9%	-2.1%	219	-146	+1
UKIP	15	2,333	9.2%	+4.7%	156	+29	-1
Green	9	579	2.3%	-1.8%	64	-52	0
SNP*	1	1,236	4.9%	-6.1%	1,236	+2	0
PC**	1	167	0.7%	-3.1%	167	-45	0
TUSC	0						0
Ind***	8	788	3.1%	-17.0%	99	-357	0
Other****	5	1,307	5.1%	+2.7%	261	+95	0

* There was one by-election in Scotland
** There was one by-election in Wales
*** There was only one Independent clash
**** Others this month consisted of Guildford Greenbelt Group (145), Scottish Socialist Party (122), Ind Health Concern (725), Liberal Party (283), Yorkshire First (32)

Overall, 25,381 votes were cast over 20 local authority (tier one and tier two) contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. Three council seats changed hands in total. For comparison with November's results, see here.

Quite a busy month for a December, all told. The main story has to be the continued lag between Labour and the Tories, which is about the margin regularly given in the opinion polls. On this occasion it's worth noting that 14 of the contests were in Tory-held seats and only four in Labour's, and you expect that might add some distortion to the scores. It would still be nice for Labour to win a round of by-elections outright though.

UKIP may have lost a councillor to the LibDems, but December has seen them do much better than previously. Still firmly behind the yellow party, suggesting they're not out of the doldrums yet. Also the Greens are well down too. At this stage there's nothing to suggest this is anything but the usual month-to-month variance, but if it continues ... Anecdotally, we know many thousands of Greens have joined the Labour Party. Can the same be said for their voters?

An Essay in Self-Criticism

Quoting Mao is in thanks to John McDonnell's invocation at the dispatch box. With Stalinist revivalism in the air, I'm going to indulge another practice associated with China's unlamented Red Guard movement: the self-criticism.

Confession time. I've found getting my bearing in the new politics extremely difficult. That's inevitable I suppose as previous self-evident truths were upended in little over a couple of months. The amateur dramatics we've seen from commentators and MPs is entirely understandable - though not excusable. The universe they knew has evaporated and the party as a whole appears keen to forget it. In the new situation, political activity and writing as concerns the Labour Party and labour movement requires some reassessment - mine included.

Thinking about your own politics and dissecting them isn't an easy thing to do, but I think you could say my 'programme' - for want of a better word - had a number of objectives. The aim was to push Labour to the left, which has happened. The aim was to renew and reforge the links between party and movement, which the new leadership is committed to do. The aim was to shift the economic policy agenda to address issues around self-security, which Corbynomics is doing in a more consistently than Ed Miliband's half-arsed approach. The aim was to decisively break with market fundamentalism, which - arguably - left and right now agree on - the difference being a matter of degree. And the aim was to get as many people into the party as possible - and presently we're up 170,000 or so. On each of these scores, you could say the job is done or is at least now being taken seriously, and the question is how to extend and deepen them.

The huge great blue bottle in all the ointment as far as I'm concerned is how I voted in the summer. I.e. Not for Jeremy. Once the tax credit debacle catalysed support around his candidacy, surely as the left candidate it was down to self-identifying lefts to support him? If politics is about expressing one's identity, then yes. But as it's always about power and struggle, some analysis was required and I - reluctantly - concluded no.

Why? There was

electoral strategy, namely the seeming indifference much of Jeremy's support has to winning over Tory voters and the emphasis he wishes to place on mobilising non-voters. This approach has been gamed on Ravi's blog under the present boundaries. His best estimate puts us behind the Tories - assuming present Labour and Tory support stays where it is - and he also notes that the 2020 election will be fought on boundaries less favourable to our party. The next election is going to be a tough slog, and I'm sorry, I have very little time for anyone agnostic about us winning. Over the next five years the Tories are going to shaft our funding base and throw obstacles in the way of trade unions. And do we have to talk about what they have in store for our people as well? Can you imagine what could happen again if they win in 2020? I've got a good job and have no reason to believe my health will deteriorate over the next 10 years, but that could easily change. There are, of course, many millions not as fortunate as I and will suffer unless we get back into power at the first available opportunity.

And there is the development and strength of the left itself. Few, if anyone expected a left insurgency of this magnitude. But one should not cheer lead uncritically, like much of the far left outside Labour are doing, but to try and understand it in order to shape it. As far as I'm concerned the new member/supporter wave is not a 'social movement' as such, as per Scotland, but more like a mass affiliation of many ones and twos. It is a tendency attracted by Jeremy's unorthodoxy and amplified by social media. Some of it are former Labour people, but the overwhelming bulk are new to politics - that's if the membership surge we've had in our neck of the woods is anything to go by. If you like it is rootless, a variegated and individuated group of people in search of a social movement. As such, noting its rootlessness, it would be a huge mistake to take this as evidence of a much wider constituency waiting to gift us local election after European election after general election. The second related point here comes from an opportunity/risk analysis. A Jeremy leadership is likely to attract another wave of new recruits and strengthen the gravity of left politics generally. The problem is I cannot see how, in the absence of a catastrophe, that this will be enough to win an election. Even worse, an electoral defeat will be taken as a defeat for socialist ideas, just at the moment their revival is getting underway. There is, of course, never a right time for the left to make a play, and the opportunity Jeremy's candidacy represents is one that does not come along too often. Nevertheless, that is what I think - an early peak could see us stumble into an equally early trough.

The old perspective was premised on a gradual pace of struggle, of the party and the wider electorate coming around slowly to ideas and policies that pushed the cosy consensus, and that rebuilding the labour movement was a painstaking street-by-street and workplace-by-workplace process. Jeremy's successful leadership bid has short-circuited all that, but problems remain. Unfortunately, nothing has convinced me that the party under Jeremy's leadership can win a general election - in effect, the unexpected victory for the left has come too soon, and there is the risk of mistaking the influx of new members with a wider shift that just doesn't exist.

Still, there is no point lamenting theoretical schemes that have been brushed aside by events. The task is now to see whether there's anything that can be salvaged from it to make sense of the new situation. On pushing Labour to the left, we have to be clear what the new members represent. Those tens of thousands are a consolidation of the left, not a widespread radicalisation pulling masses into politics. Furthermore, there are many new faces turning up at party meetings but they are only a small proportion of the new membership. True, over the course of a year only about a third of my constituency party would attend a meeting anyway, and even fewer would do some campaigning, yet you might expect thoroughgoing radicalism would feed through greater numbers - particularly as Momentum was set up to harness this enthusiasm. It could be the bulk of the new members are very, very raw (I have encountered a few who didn't know the party had meetings), and equally it could be a faddy thing - the equivalent of sticking a ribbon on your social media account of choice. Neither are mutually exclusive, of course.

The leftism of the new members has exerted its power well enough though, much to the annoyance of moaning MPs, and Jeremy has proved adept in using them as an implied threat against actual and would-be rebels. No wonder he's set on e-polling the membership whenever a thorny issue comes up in the future (if that was the only stick I has vis the PLP, I'd do it too). That leftism, however, is very fresh - hence the perceived agnosticism towards questions of power and governance - though as Julian points out in the comments here, polling around this issue gives a question with two counterposed answers and no room for nuance. However, the problem with this leftism more generally is a lack of wider purchase. As out-of-touch and privileged the majority of the PLP are, their views are more representative of the country-at-large than the comrades of the leader's office. The opinion polls say this (remember, they overstate Labour's support), and the local by-elections are telling us this as well. One parliamentary by-election in a safe Labour seat doesn't say a great deal, I'm afraid. If anything, the push to the left is putting further distance between the party and the people we need to win over.

A start at reversing this is rebuilding the labour movement. Easier said than done, but historically the organisations of working people have reached further than the formal structures of the party. Unfortunately, Labour's new members haven't been matched by a similar uptick in union membership. The reaffiliation of the FBU, of course, is very welcome news, and one would hope the RMT follows suit soon as well as other unions who, for whatever reasons, have steered clear of the party. Bureaucratic relationships, however, are no substitute for forging real relationships between the party and the movement. If there are "established" Labour people worried by the activities of new members, few things are better for inculcating a sense of collective responsibility and pragmatism than active involvement in trade unions. Remember, it is a (never enforced) condition of party membership to be a member of a union also. This isn't simply a shibboleth, a stronger movement means a wider consciousness about the basic values of labourist politics, a (potentially) stronger community of solidarity that can be mobilised to resist Tory austerity and, not least, a larger number of people with a more favourable disposition to vote for our party. The more individual trade unionists there are, the more that can be recruited to the party, and the better it can reflect the universal interest - the interests of the huge majority that have to, are destined to, or have spent a lifetime selling their ability to work in return for a living.

The question is whether Jeremy is a help or a hindrance for achieving this objective, whether the party can become a repository of that universal interest. And the answer, as it has always been for all leaders, is both. His leadership remains a pull factor and recruits to the party far outweigh the - mostly inactive - numbers who've left, but at the same time - and I've only skirted the issue here - the electorate do not share his supporters' enthusiasm. In effect, and in a wry ironic twist, the new left in the Labour Party sometimes is and in the future will be a barrier to embedding the leftist politics and leftist common sense in the popular imagination. The careful-as-she-goes approach to rebuilding was overtaken by events, yet retains an overall relevance because of the new situation. If you can't take the people with you, all that is left is radicalism for radicalism's sake.

Self-critically then, it means carrying on as I have been doing these last few months on here. Trying to understand the Corbyn phenomenon while emphasising the importance of pragmatic considerations against the left, and taking the centre and the right to task for moaning and whingeing isn't going to win me many friends but, as I said, politics is about interests. The defence and projection of those on which our movement stands must always come first.

Ethnicity and Question Time

David Lammy early this month made waves in the Question Time obsessives' community by pointing out how limited the panel composition is. He wrote:

Within the meagre 9.2% of Question Time slots filled by a BAME panellist, there is a staggering lack of diversity. Black women have appeared just 16 times in five years, and 12 of those appearances have been made by Diane Abbott. Another two appearances were by South African black female politicians during the Question Time South Africa special in 2013. Bonnie Greer has appeared twice. There are about 1 million black women in Britain.

Similarly, almost 50% of the appearances made by black men were by Chuka Umunna. Together, it means that just two people have filled well over half of the slots given to black guests since 2010. As talented as they are, Diane and Chuka cannot speak for the entirety of Britain’s diverse black communities, just as Alan Johnson and Caroline Flint should not have to be the sole voices of the white working-class.

There is a similar lack of diversity when it comes to guests of Asian heritage. Again, the same few names dominate: Mehdi Hasan and Baroness Warsi, for example, have filled almost a third of the guest slots filled by British Asians. Analysis of the available data shows that, of the 63 appearances made by British Asian guests, just four have been by people of Hindu heritage. That’s 0.3% of total guest slots – five times less than we should expect given the UK population is 1.5% Hindu. Britain’s half a million Sikhs are also woefully under-represented.

David is basically right. Looking at Question Time seasons since September 2009 to July of this year, here are my figures:

	2009-10	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15
G/S	10/13	10/16	15/19	13/15	18/21	11/16
M/F	2/8	6/4	9/6	9/4	12/6	6/5
G/S %	7.3/6.6	7.1/8.5	9.3/9.6	8.8/8.2	11.4/11.1	8.1/8.5

G/S is number of guests and number of slots. 
M/F is male/female 
G/S % are the number of guests and number of slots occupied by black and minority ethnicity guests. 

I haven't broken guests down by self-reporting ethnicity, but there are obvious under-representation issues here. According to the 2011 census some 12.8% of the UK self-describe as a non-white ethnicity meaning there is still a bit of the way to go for Question Time to give racial minorities proportionality. 2013-14 was the year we came closest to it, and then it was thanks to the programme's first majority black panel in its history as it sojourned to South Africa for an episode. 

On the point about overusing guests, David writes "Question Time executives use their power to perpetuate the small “chumocracy” of white, patrician, Oxbridge-educated men making the same arguments, and excluding other voices that deserve to be heard." Yes, and no. What Question Time does, as I argued earlier this year is a bias towards the establishment. Where it comes to party representatives, it is my understanding that the whip's office normally picks guests for the show. Take the case of Sayeeda Warsi, for instance. There was a time when she was almost as ubiquitous as Nigel Farage, but she hasn't appeared for a while. Why? Well, she fell out with Dave. Her place in the Question Time Tory pantheon has got filled by Sajid Javid who, as far as the PM is concerned, is a very safe pair of hands. That said, I have no doubt the producers favour politicians who are prominent in some way which; under the ancien regime, Chuka Umunna certainly was. 

In a series of to-be-published papers, I will be setting out how since 1979 the guest pool has contracted from a guest list drawn from politics, journalism, industry (business and trade unions), academia, public servants to one more or less confined to politics, journalism, and celebrity - in other words, people who are in the extended networks of the show's producers. This general pattern is reflected in the composition of BME guests since 2009 - if they're front bench or have had occasion to grace other BBC programmes, they're in. For example, just eight guests are responsible for 56 out of 100 slots taken by BME guests in the six year period. Incredible. So yes, let's see some more variety on Question Time. 

At a time when (centre-left) politics has been shaken by a huge protest against an out-of-touch consensus, it's perverse that the BBC's flagship programme remains ridiculously narrow.

Star Wars for the Sega Master System

I haven't seen the new Star Wars film yet (no spoilers, please), but back in the dim and distant, during the early 1990s in fact, there was a mini-Star Wars revival well before the prequels and special editions were thought of. Spurring this flurry of interest was the release of several Star Wars games across several formats, including this one that hit European shores on the NES and Game Boy in 1992 and the Game Gear and Master System a year later. It spawned sequels for Nintendo's machines, and totally different 'super' games for the brand spanking new Super Nintendo. To be honest, by the time this had come out on the Master System I'd pretty much lost interest in games but just had to have it when it turned up in a lovely stack of carts found by one of my councillor comrades.

This game and I have a little bit of history. Up until 2012 Star Wars held the accolade of being the only NES title I had ever played, and that was briefly in a long-forgotten computer shop in Derby about where M&S currently stands. Or is it Debenhams? The game also kept me company when my brother borrowed it for his Game Boy and ... I was hopeless at it. Back then it was by far one of the hardest console games around. It had slightly slippery controls, the annoying NES "bounce back" (i.e. involuntary leaping backwards when hit/touched by an enemy - a feature of many 8-bit Nintendo games), enemies with annoying attack patterns, and weapons that were distinctly underpowered.

The game starts you off as Luke Skywalker flying about Tattooine in the old Landspeeder. The aim here is to find Obi-Wan, rescue R2-D2 from the Jawas (I don't remember them wielding huge guns in the film), and pick up bits and pieces before heading to Mos Eisley. This is where you hook up with Han Solo and you're off. Unusually for a film license, the levels, with some concessions to video game design, follow the plotting fairly closely. Once you're offworld you have to guide the Millennium Falcon through a first person asteroid debris field, then it's wander-around-the-Death-Star time, deactivating the tractor beam, rescuing Leia, and escaping the trash compactor (unfortunately, you don't replay Obi-Wan's light sabre duel with Darth Vader). With the platforming done, our heroes escape while fending off Tie-Fighters, before switching to the rebel assault on the Death Star and the final trench run - seen from above. It's a game that, rare for the time, brought together different styles under one roof. Nor was it a quick knock-off to capitalise on the lucrative licence; some thought has gone in to reproducing the film's key sequences.

The Master System port, gameplay-wise, is virtually identical to its Nintendo counterparts. The same "challenging" mechanics are present, except the graphics are spruced up and the soundtrack has received a decent makeover. For a system not known for its audio acrobatics, the programmers did a good job of wringing top tuneage out of the MS's weedy sound chip. And yes, it's bloody, bloody hard. It's one of them you would have needed weeks of spare time and infinite patience to get through 20-odd years ago - thank goodness for save states and walkthroughs.

What Master System Star Wars demonstrates, as well as its brethren on the other systems, is yet another marked shift in game culture. These modern views pan it for some distinctly unfriendly features, whereas upon its release Star Wars was very well received. As we've seen before, tough difficulty bordering on unfair was par the course in yesteryear. Thanks to hardware and memory limitations, games had to be relatively simple affairs. And yet they had to command enough attention to prevent the punter feeling ripped off, so a steep challenge was considered an appropriate answer to the challenge of game longevity. There is nothing in Star Wars that hadn't already featured in dozens of other 8-bit platformers. Irksome movement momentum, leaps of faith, unfairly-placed enemies, this was par the course. For players who either didn't grow up with the demands some games made, or if more mature players have grown habituated to having their hands held by modern interfaces, a game like this can appear downright disrespectful. But no, all it required was patience - if you expect instant pow-wow, you will be destroyed.

Overall, there's a good game here if you're prepared to take it on its own terms. Not a timeless classic, but a worthwhile spin.