Internal turmoil: working alongside the party leader, Andrew Fisher encountered a lack of enthusiasm from senior party colleagues The lack of enthusiasm from senior Labour staff in the party’s HQ was dispiriting, as my supposed senior colleagues met to discuss our election tactics. Thankfully, we had been working on a series of proposals – some of which had launched the previous week – in the run-up to the scheduled local elections that May. Theresa May announced she would be calling an election after all. ![]() On April 18 2017, a podium was placed outside No10 Downing Street. With a new shadow cabinet, and Jeremy reconfirmed as party leader in September 2016, we had a chance to develop the sort of programme that had inspired people to join Labour in record numbers and to vote for Corbyn to become their leader. In the summer of 2017, two-thirds of the shadow cabinet resigned and launched a coup against the elected leader. Jeremy had appointed a broad-based shadow cabinet in an attempt to demonstrate pluralism, but the frontbench acted as a block on any radical policy. Nevertheless, from late 2016 we had begun planning for an election, and I had started preparing the core policies that would be unveiled.Įarly election: PM Theresa May in Downing Street to announce 2017’s polling dayįor the first nine months of Jeremy’s leadership, the Labour frontbench had been a virtual policy desert. Since Theresa May had succeeded David Cameron as Conservative leader and Prime Minister in the summer of 2016, there had been repeated speculation that she would call an early General Election – something which she denied. Luckily too, I had also managed to borrow (actually, take) a bit of shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s office budget for some policy polling in early 2017. ![]() Thankfully my team of four was amazing – as were many of the policy advisers that worked directly for shadow cabinet ministers. Having been the policy chief in Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the Labour leadership in 2015, in December 2016 I was made the Labour Party’s executive director of policy and was responsible for writing Labour’s manifesto.Įven then, I was denied operational control of the policy team in Labour HQ – and so I had a team of just four staff in the Leader’s Office and no budget to commission further policy work. They got quite different public responses. ![]() For the many, not the few: Jeremy Corbyn at the launch of the 2017 Labour manifestoįive years ago this week, we were in the middle of the 2017 General Election campaign – a week in which both Labour and the Conservatives launched their manifestos.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |