Can you replace passion and vision with ‘4,000 calls to join a Zoom with Starmer or Rayner’?
The bizarre, arid landscape of the centrist Labour party has again been revealed as the party’s leadership desperately try to whip up some activity and make up for its lack of vision and backbone.
Labour has now prepared a ‘Dialogue Rewards’ programme that will supposedly incentivise members either to make calls for the party or to join a call ‘bank’ – but it’s a stretch to call them ‘rewards’ in the normal sense.
‘Incentives’ range from a thank-you text (!) from deputy leader for ‘just’ 250 calls, to invites to Zoom events – though whether you have deputy leader Angela Rayner on the Zoom or Rayner and Keir Starmer depends how many calls you plough through. The ‘top’ prize for a local party ‘bank’ – the ‘gold medal’! – is Rayner attending your CLP meeting, although with the current spate of suspensions of elected officers as Labour continues its war on members’ free speech, it’s far from clear that many CLPs will have anyone to set up or run the meeting in the first place:
Picture the scene: a 55-year-old man, who’s worked since he was 16, gets a phone call from some young adult – who’s reading off a script super fast so s/he can get the call over and done with and can add it to the tally and move one step closer to meeting Keir or Angela. Is that grizzled working-class bloke ever going to respond “well I’ve spent all my life thinking this way politically but that crib sheet you’ve just read out has blown me away. Put me down for Labour from now on“?
One well-placed Labour source told the SKWAWKBOX:
I get the feeling they’re really overvaluing Angela.
The reality of Labour’s lack of direction and appeal was already clear from the party’s unseemly pursuit of wealthy donors to replace the tens of thousands of grassroots donations that Starmer’s lurch to the right and adoption of Stalinism have killed off. But the resort to such ‘incentive’ programmes – and the delusion that they are incentives – broadcasts it in high-definition widescreen.
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