 What do you think is going on? What is Tom Watson playing at? They've had several years to come up with some policy differences with Jeremy Corbyn. They had the Owen Smith Leadership Election campaign during which they didn't dare articulate policy differences with Jeremy Corbyn. They didn't dare come up with policy differences during the snap election. They thought that by leaking the manifesto they were going to, you know, mock the Corbyn's policies and just show up what an extremist he was. Turns out they were rather popular, so after that they haven't been able to articulate any policy different disagreements. Look, I think we should be very wary of anything that suggests overestimating Tom Watson's abilities. He was good in his time, as Morrissey sang. He was a very adept, parliamentary maneuverer and wrangler. He was good at twisting arms. He engineered the downfall of Tony Blair. We can't thank him enough for that. Right, exactly. He did the right thing. Obviously not necessarily for the right reasons. He ensured that Blair stepped down when he was becoming a liability. But he's had always that very narrow repertoire of backstage maneuverings. And politically his strategy has become a disaster. So of course we know that historically he positions himself on the right wing of new labor. So what I mean by that, I suppose you should say, he positions himself on the authoritarian nationalist wing, right? Not the cosmopolitan, open-ended sort of international swing. And not particularly socially liberal either. So when he was running Liam Burns' campaign and they defined themselves mainly by running against the Lib Dem and portraying the Lib Dem as drips who were soft on asylum seekers, soft on drugs, soft on team gangs, soft on immigrants. So this was in the Hodge Hill by-election in 2004, the campaign leaflet read, Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers. Yeah. He later took responsibility for that very leaflet. He sort of apologized, but I mean. Well, to be fair, he never stopped. I mean, look at his involvement in Sean Simons' West Midlands mayoral campaign, catastrophic mayoral campaign. I mean, Labour should have walked that election and they lost to a dismultory. And Sean Simons is a bit of an idiot and always has been. He was back in the day when he was, I think, some sort of student activist, Blairite, but he ran on the basis of what was it, take back control, the Brexit slogan. And everything, the whole literature was designed on a Brexit basis. I think Watson also had some involvement in the pretty awful Stoke by-election campaign where it was run with the English nationalist motifs. And we're going to bring back the mills and go back to the way it used to be before all those people came over. So, I mean, obviously that was insinuated. They didn't actually say that. But so I think Watson is an adherent of a political strategy that has been shown to fail time after time and in fact has contributed quite significantly to Labour's serious electoral decline after 1997. Okay, in the aftermath of the snap election, Tom Watson was one of the few people to put a neck out along with Gloria de Piero and Phil Wilson, a few others. And the interesting thing about all these people is that though they don't come from different wings of new Labour, so Phil Wilson is a leader of open Britain. So it's a remain coalition. But Phil Wilson is also a Blairite who wants to get tough on immigration. So it's one of these things where, well, it's not a you immigration that's the problem, you know, that kind of thing. He also writes, I remember after the 2017 general election, he had a fairly poorly researched piece which said that Labour have abandoned the working class because he was looking at those constituents that have the traditional white working class in them, completely ignoring and invisibilizing anyone who were on low incomes living in cities. So in response to that, I remember looking up, because that was based on where Labour did the worst, was in seats with the highest white working class or traditional working class in the sort of Gold Forb sent seats. But if you actually looked it up, the 20 seats with the most, I think kids on free school meals, about 18 of them voted Labour. So it's a really warped view of class, which means that you say Labour is meant to serve the traditional working class. And if we get votes from black and brown people in cities, that's kind of incidental. Yeah. Well, and I mean, also, I think this definition of class is just awful. It's rooted in a kind of culturalist nostalgia. It has nothing to do with real sociologically realistic definition of class relations. But that, beside the point, I mean, I was about to refer to the article that you just describing because it was one of the series by Watson, Piero and a few others. And they all represented a socially and nationally conservative response to Corbinism. And basically, the argument was, crucially, now that we've had this stunning success, thanks to Jeremy Corbyn, we feel that we now need to broaden our appeal and slightly modify our agenda so that we can reach out to the C2s, sort of who are slightly semi-skilled working class voters according to this schema based in small towns and suburbs and so on. And the argument was that the reason why they hadn't been won over was because Labour was too lefty on things like national security and immigration. So it needed to wave the flag more. So this is what I think Tom Watson wants. In terms of his actual concrete politics, that doesn't mean that that's the same as what he can actually deliver in terms of a Labour leadership and so on. But I think that would be clearly what he would be pushing. What he wants, obviously, is to provide some sort of organised framework in which the currently marginal but nonetheless powerful forces of the Labour right can develop some sort of common sense among themselves. Because I think they know that they can't get rid of Corbyn in the here and now. But I think they also know that nothing is guaranteed in politics and some years of pressure and attrition and maybe some disaffection over Brexit or some other issue. We'll start to open up some of the pro-Corbyn membership to more right-wing arguments. So you think it's about winning over the membership to some degree? Historically, Labour right's never been particularly good at working with the membership. So for example, the Labour right in the 1980s almost exclusively worked through the union bureaucracy and the parliamentary groups until eventually they realised they needed to reach out to the union, student union branches, they needed to reach out to constituency branches and so on. But to be honest, demoralisation did a lot of their work for them so that when they finally did get around to talking to the members, they had that should a thank for winning the members over and I guess that but I think they do want to talk to the members. I just think they can't help aggrandising sort of first of all aggrandising their traditional concerns and obsessions but also aggravating the average member. I mean it's kind of gratuitous the way that Tom Watson intervenes. For example, that video statement he made, there were many odd things about that but the oddest thing I thought was his whining about identity politics. I mean he was just, he was talking about a split that occurred which according to him and others was motivated in large part by Brexit and racism, antisemitism and he's complaining that identity politics has caused all this or this antisemitism. Is that what he means? What does he mean? Does anybody know what he means? Yeah when I read what I mean there was the the very dark reading of it potentially true which is that it's it's that the reason there's an antisemitism problem is because people have sided with Muslims. I mean that was what some people were saying on Twitter. I don't know if that's what you should read into it. I mean the other idea is that one of the reasons for the level of the degree of hostility within Labour because a lot of this is about civility, right? It's that people are taking politics somewhat too seriously and getting too angry at their MPs is because people are dogmatically wedded to to their faction in the party. So to Corbynism I'm a Corbynite and everyone else is evil I suppose. It's potentially what he's pointing to I don't know I don't want to put my myself in his shoes. I mean in a way I think by talking about his ideas we're giving him too much credit. Tom Watson has never appeared to me as an ideas man and I think what's interesting about this this grouping he's made is that he's trying to position it as a sort of talking shop for Labour MPs on the back benches to start to pull their way in to start to move Labour policy in a particular direction but they still haven't come up with any particular ideas. So the one thing they say is look we back all the economics this is obviously a tig the independent group have gone down a bit of a more sort of Blair right new Labour-y we don't want to nationalise stuff but Tom Watson they've said we're basically fine with the economics we're going to say some sort of buzzwords about the new digital economy even though I mean I'm sure there's no sort of factional barrier to them doing that within the approved mechanisms in fact it's been Tom Watson's job for the last three years and he hasn't done anything but besides moving on from that they've said it's about foreign policy because what they've tried to see as a wedge issue basically between Corbyn and the electorate is the idea that everyone now loves Corbyn's economics but his foreign policy is a bit wacky a bit anti-nato a bit anti-nuclear and so we're going to shift the Labour Party in that direction the problem is Corbyn's already conceded on all of those things so I mean are they going to be a lobbying group for Trident because we're already pro-trident are they going to be a lobbying group for staying in NATO because we're already staying in NATO I mean it's it's as if they're pitching themselves against the Labour Party from 1983 because they think that some people in the leadership might share those attitudes but when the people who who potentially are a bit anti-nato and are a bit nuclear which is some of the people in Corbyn's office probably Corbyn himself they haven't tried to assert that over the party so so the one the one area they've decided to battle on or where they're pretending to battle Tom Watson et al is is an issue on which they've already won I mean I think what is going on I don't think this is about ideas is and I think it makes sense I think it's relatively smart is that they recognize that the one place they have in the Labour Party with some power is on the parliamentary benches they recognize that because they've all sort of had their tails in between their legs since 2017 they haven't really utilized the bargaining power the leverage they have from that position as they could have done I think Tom Watson has recognized that if they unite if they sort of as we know on the left if you the workers united I mean they're not really workers but you know people united have have more influence and I think what he's trying to do is gather about ATMPs who can say if you don't do XYZ we'll leave and the alternative to doing that is them just sort of waiting to individually get picked off some of them get picked off in deselections some of them know they're never going to get a promotion and I think what he's saying is instead of us getting picked off one by one and melting into a relevance let's go out with a big bang all 80 of us unless we can wrestle some control back from the party so I think we'll see an ultimatum at some point to John Mcdonald to Jeremy Corbyn to say I mean the ultimatum could be something like call off deselections it could be something like put XYZ person into the shadow cabinet or all 80 of us will go at the same time and that would be damaging I mean I think we have to look at it as a as a build up to coup 2.0 I don't think it's about ideas at all