There's obviously many very good reasons to oppose Lab leadership.

But even if Starmer was replaced, I'm fairly confident that the overall direction of the party would remain almost exactly the same.

Why?

THREAD:

This is not just because the SCG has essentially no serious contenders - it is mainly due to two structural factors:

1) The current views of current party party members, and

2) What I tend to call 'electoral gravity'.

On (1), the centre of gravity in the party has shifted.

We know from polling of members (Survation + YouGov) that they:

- recognise a need for 'compromise'

- are willing to 'compromise'

- are pretty happy, overall, with how things are going, and indeed with the leadership (Starmer approval was 60%-34% in Survation's recent poll).

And point 2 (which I'll explain in a moment) is what is driving the membership to accept compromise - put simply, they love the 2019 manifesto, but don't think they can win with it, and so are willing to let some things go if doing so allows them to win an election.

So, Starmer is essentially the candidate members arrived at to hit a sweetspot between ideology and electoral performance.

Whatever you or I think, members are broadly happy with how things are going in respect of that.

That is to say - although some think the election of Starmer was a freak incident; a surprise that should have never happened - I actually now think it was essentially inevitable.

RLB never had a shot, regardless of how her campaign went (and it was bad!).

And on point 2 - it seems clear that Labour strategists have settled on the idea of focusing on winning back 'left wing social conservatives' - the kind of voter Labour lost en masse in 2019.

Hence the move towards the centre particularly on the auth/lib axis.

There's a recongition that Labour has largely become a party for social liberals and nobody else - the result of which (under FPTP) will probably always be electoral failure.

You can, of course, support social liberal policies whilst having social conservatives back you.

But it's also true that you're not likely to win back social conservatives by focusing on messages which specifically alienate them - this is the thinking behind the (IMO, morally dubious) move away from liberatory politics.

This is recognised pretty much across factions - even much of the Labour left recongises this, and that's why they wanted to triangulate over Brexit (though, as discussed elsewhere, such an approach would likely have fared very badly in 2019 for a variety of reasons).

Ruling out the (IMO, very small at present) probability of an SCG candidate winning the leadership, I would fully suspect that under any leader - Rayner, or even a BME leader like Nandy or RAK - Labour's approach would not differ wildly from its present one.

I don't find it pretty (and some of the calls have been bad ones), but the overall strategic direction is pretty logical if your end goal is 'win the next election'.

I would add that - because Twitter is dominated by some of the most socially liberal people in the country, it's easy to think that a strategy which alienates *you* must be alienating vast swathes of the population - especially if your acquaintances are in the same demographic.

But I'd almost argue that, to an extent, it's mutually exclusive to align with the socially liberal Twitter demographic *and* key groups of swing voters.

There's certainly ways of balancing it, but I don't think you're going to win over the tails of the distribution.

[By 'tail of the distribution', I mean the small number of people who have views far removed from the rest of the population - they might be entirely logical and reasonable views, but nonetheless they are extreme in a statistical sense - see the shaded area on the illustration]

And in electoral politics, you forgo the tails of that distribution - because there's not many votes to be found there, to be blunt (which is why Corbynism was never electorally optimal, even if it saw some successes - it essentitally targeted Green voters on the fringes).

So, to reiterate - it's *political gravity* pushing Starmer in that direction - that's why he's done an about-turn on Brexit, and is why he's at times taking what might be seen as cowardly stances.

And I strongly believe practically any other leader would be doing the same.