Dave’s got a very good post up about ‘loyalty’. Go read it, because he’s mostly spot on. I’ve left a longish comment there relating back to my recent post on Purnell’s strategic calculations.
I’m also reminded (a lot) of Hirshman’s seminal 1970 study ‘Exit Voice and Loyalty: Decline in Firms, Organisations and States’, which looks at the strategic options open to political/business actors, and which ties in at a theoretical level with the resource dependency framework I talked of here.
Now, it seems, the time for exit has come for many senior politicians. The power base they allied themselves to is gone.
The challenge now is to create a new grassroots power base. Gone now is the time for Sunny’s recommendations (critiqued by Dave) about ‘persuading’ MPs to rebel appropriately, because the roles can be reversed.
Suddenly, some in the Parliamentary Labour Party are looking somewhere for their support and power base that they have not looked to for a generation – the mass, or perhaps I should say rump, of the Labour party, and even those other long ignored allied institutions, the unions.
Those in the PLP , like but not only John McDonnell (link to PCS speech here),who have looked to them before their support and credibility suddelnly look strong.
Now, I suggest, may be the time for John McFall to step forward, for example.
You might be interested in this, when the elections are over and you have some spare evenings now and again.
http://the.earth.li/~juliet/thesis.pdf
TLGO
Thanks for dropping in. The thesis looks facsinating and I’ll certainly give it a good look sometime very soon.