I was amused to read this from the BBC this morning. It appears it doesn’t matter how LEFT Labour is. The suggestion is that Labour can be as hard Left as it wants..with the sole caveat that it also has to be economically credible. Which it never has been. Onwards, comrades..
Ed Miliband did not lose election because he was too left wing – study
“Study” in this context (like the acronym “BBC”) is just another name for Leftist crap.
A BBC promoted study is reliable only in one respect, that you could write the conclusion before the “Study” is commissioned.
Since I am sure that BBC staff did not dip into their own pockets to fund this.
Since I am a TV licence payer.
I feel entitled to ask, what connexion does this have to reporting the news?
It is therefore outside the remit of the BBC.
Just another, of the millions of examples, of a flagrant example of BBC bias.
Just another, of the millions of examples, of wasting the licence fee.
Time for a Muslim-like cutting down to size of these scum.
sorry, but where are you finding the info that the BBC spent any licence fee money on this? So far as I can tell the study was by the IPPR (The Institute for Public Policy Research) paid for it. The IPPR was warned by the Charities Commission that it ‘appeared too close to Labour’ , and describes itself as ‘progressive’.
David, you can’t be left wing and economically credible. It’s just a known fact. To start with you have to believe that the cloud fairy has planted a magic money tree in your garden.
And yet again we see the dark hand of the IPPR involved and quoted without even that media sop to even handedness ‘left leaning’. Of course ‘bunch of neo-Marxist loonies’ might be a bit too much to expect but at least some indication of where they stand would be fairer.
“The current director is Nick Pearce,[2] a former Head of the No. 10 Policy Unit and special advisor to David Blunkett”
Read former commissar from peoples republic of Sheffield
The elephant in that particular room was surely Ed himself, I know we should be above personality politics but that man could have lost votes in his sleep. People just didn’t take to him, right or left it didn’t matter, he was never going to win. No mention of the UKIP factor either, because like it or not, and the labour leadership don’t, that’s where some of their votes went. Voters are given one version of the state of the nation by politicians, but only have to step out of the front door to see the lie exposed.
Don’t forget this is a bit of naval gazing by left wing politicians !
“But – and it’s a huge but – the chart shows only the answer to a question about how left wing voters thought Labour had become.”
So, not a question about how left Labour were, but how they were perceived. “The British Election Study interviewed 20,000 voters in March and immediately after the general election”
But what does the report actually say, and has the BBC been manipulating / economical with the truth – again?
‘The second red herring is Labour’s left–right position – that is, the question of whether Labour was either overly or insufficiently left-wing. Generally, our data shows that people were more likely to vote Labour in 2015 when they thought the party was more left-wing, and less likely to vote Labour when they thought it was centrist. Figure 8 shows the ‘predicted probabilities’ of voting Labour based on a statistical model of BES respondents’ positioning of Labour on a left–right scale. The respondents who were most likely to vote Labour were those who saw Labour as sitting on the left of the political spectrum, with the absolute peak coming in at around 2 on this 0–10 scale – slightly to the left of where respondents placed the party on average (the vertical line). This suggests there is very little to the argument that Labour was too left-wing to attract voters. At the same time there is not much to support the argument that Labour was not left-wing enough. There was very little difference in the likelihood of voting Labour between someone who thought Labour sat at the left-most end of the scale (0) and someone who saw it as just left of centre (4) – it is only when people saw Labour as sitting to the right of this point that support really drops off.’
So the report actually says “there is not much to support the argument that Labour was not left-wing enough”
“There are three points to bear in mind before these analyses are interpreted as meaning that Labour should be more left-wing. The first is that our analyses also show that perceptions of the economy were very important (as were leadership ratings). We don’t yet know whether it is possible for a party to be viewed both as strongly left-wing (or strongly right-wing) and as competent on the economy. The second is that, to win, Labour needs to win in Conservative-held seats, and arguably among Lib-Dems who have recently voted Conservative, and among Tory-leaning Ukip voters – as well as among others who voted Conservative in 2015. Labour needs to gain the support of centrist voters who didn’t vote for Labour in 2015 for reasons other than Labour’s left–right position. The third is that the above results are based on 2015 vote choices, and our analysis suggests that whatever Labour’s left–right position, Labour was unlikely to win in 2015.”
It seems from the report that the BBC have been highly selective at best, and downright dishonest at worst. It might not matter to Labour voters how far the party is the the left, but if Labour is to win an election it needs to attract voters who have voted for other more centerist parties, and they’re not going to do that if they move the left.
Bias by selective interpretation?
Report here:
http://www.ippr.org/juncture/learning-the-right-lessons-from-labours-2015-defeat
“the BBC have been highly selective at best, and downright dishonest at worst”
In other words the usual fare from the Leftist spin merchants which are BBC news and current affairs.