If you feel that you just don't get it, which is fine. However it is a real emotional attachment for a lot of people in this country, aside from people's families perhaps the most important emotional attachment.
UK General Election - 12th December 2019 | Con 365, Lab 203, LD 11, SNP 48, Other 23 - Tory Majority of 80
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If you feel that you just don't get it, which is fine. However it is a real emotional attachment for a lot of people in this country, aside from people's families perhaps the most important emotional attachment.
Oh yeah, I completely appreciate that.
So is white pride.
I don't believe that's true in this country. In the US that's definitely a problem, but as a half black person myself, I've never experienced anything like that in the UK.
TLW said:
Theresa May's policy is the one the conservatives need to pursue on social care, but I don't know whether it is electorally viable.
Then you'll know better than me about where we're at there. But I don't half worry that the gap between our current English Nationalism and White Nationalism is actually quite small and that tipping point doesn't seem distant.
I totally agree with your analysis of how Brexit shaped the election and the mistakes with Labour's position. It was always a very hard ask to make the election about anything other than Brexit, but Labout could have done much more to stop yesterday being a second Brexit Referendum. As you've alluded to, the biggest mistake was trying to straddle the Brexit divide instead of just picking a side and moving on to salient punchy policy that appealed to people who voted the opposite way.
I agree with every word of what you said except for the conclusion that we need a centre-left party in a world where the centre is falling apart.
Yesterday, Labour voters either decided to stay home, or vote for the far right. The Lib Dems performed awfully in 2019. Change UK is perhaps the least effective political movement in British history. Globally, Clinton lost the working class (and the election) to the least popular candidate of all time.
Who are the voters we win back by moving to the centre and when has it worked anywhere besides maybe France since 2015?
I don't think so, I don't think the majority of British people are racist. Actually quite the contrary, I think Britain has been the country best at doing integration in the world, and it's a record we should be proud of.
This Conservative government ran on the most centrist manifesto in my lifetime. To call them far right is disingenuous.
I think Brexit destroyed all notion of this.
Not true in my opinion, Brexit will preserve this.
The entire campaign was about stopping integration, pulling out of it, and saying no to immigration and the supporters took great glee in telling foreign people to feck off because we voted them out afterwards. Everything problem that we have was blamed on the people who are trying to integrate with us who were in turn vilified and abused. How on Earth does any of this reflect well on our record of integration.
Brexit is a deeply insular project, its complete antithetical to the whole notion of integration, in fact the leave campaign capitalised on vitriolic scare-mongering of foreigners, it's what served as a motivation for many to vote to leave. Since the leave vote hate crimes have shot up immeasurably and foreigners have felt considerably less safe and welcome. I don't see how anyone could come to the conclusion it would strengthen Britain's tolerance.
I disagree, I think that was how the remain campaign successfully managed to frame the campaign for a lot of remain voters, but wasn't true of the reasons on the ground. Cummings and Elliot are adamant (and I agree) that had Banks/Frarage not got involved leave would have won by a much greater margin.
This is all remain framing, and I haven't seen evidence of it.
First of all, I was calling the Brexit Party far right, not the Tories. Although we don't have detailed polling data yet the steady Tory vote and the turnout decline between 2017 and 2019 in a lot of mining-belt seats would indicate that rather than Labour voters switching to the Tories, they either didn't vote or switched to the Brexit Party.
Secondly it's difficult to call them centrist when they have kicked most of their centrists out and absorbed the Brexit Party since Johnson became their leader. Finally let's not pretend the Tory party ran a conventional election campaign positioned anywhere on the ideological spectrum, they ran a Brexit referendum campaign.
This just tells me we have to start rethinking working class as a political group of people. The working class of today I don't think wear it as a badge of honour as in the old days because a heck of a lot of time has passed since the traditional working class jobs like coal mining and ship building up north were lost.
I'm judging this on the fact there hasn't been a Labour leader not named Tony Blair who has won an election in forty years. Blair who formed New Labour after the old school left kept losing elections and losing big. He made a historic mistake with Iraq no doubt about it. But in 1997 when he won 418 seats and 2001 when he won 413 seats totally annihilating the Tories, Iraq was not a problem.
There's no easy fix, except for changing the voting system to one where votes = seats. An unspoken demographic issue for Labour is that marginal constituencies are constantly haemorrhaging the sorts of people who vote Labour. If you're a politically-conscious young person growing up in a small town in post-industrial England odds are you'll either move away to uni at age 18 and never come back, or you'll move to your nearest big city in your early 20s because you're sick of working in a Spoons and living at your parents' house. Easily 60-70% of my extended group of mates from when I was 16 have left for Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester or London - there's nothing to keep people here and very little to draw people back.
I haven't listened to it, but two people wouldn't prove anything. There are always crazies.
For me, they've kicked the remainers out rather than the centrists. The remainers had become extreme by not agreeing with the result of the referendum.
We don't move back to the centre, that would be a mistake. The policy positions were immensely popular, corbyn due to the press coverage and the brexit position was not. We need a clean leadership now who plebs can get behind, keep the popular left wing policies, regain the core labour vote lost due to brexit, and instead of appealing to moderate tory voters or waffling lib dems by moving to the centre, you use the grassroots movements and the activists which have been pretty decent for labour in 2017 to go after the 35%+ marginalised traditional non voters, the types who were galvanised by the brexit leave campaign. knock door to door and bring these people into the fold and show them they haven't been abandoned.
There's plenty of more out there.
This election had shown that a majority of the country wanted the government to get on with things. By being 20 of c.300 MPs not allowing the government to move forward with their agenda, it was the remainers being extremist.
You're serious? Fine I'll humour you:
Brexit 'major influence' in racism and hate crime rise
The Home Office's own report on this
But please do explain how Brexit will heal the divide?
You're serious? Fine I'll humour you:
Brexit 'major influence' in racism and hate crime rise
The Home Office's own report on this
But please do explain how Brexit will heal the divide?
As I've said above I think Banks and Farage harmed the Brexit campaign. The sharp increase after each decision is obviously worrying bit the tendline is the same.
But that two person perspective is twice your extremely one person perspective.
I think that along with the public perception of Corbyn and his dismal popularity, the premiership of Tony Blair was perhaps the biggest reason why the 'red wall' fell as dramatically as it did last night. I was canvassing in seats in Greater Manchester and Durham, and New Labour was repeatedly pointed to as the reason for disillusionment with electoral politics. As you mention some of this will be down to his generally falling popularity post-2001 and Iraq. But I think equally if not more it is due to the understandable perception that New Labour let them down.
Moving away from anecdotal evidence, I just can't see how Blair's success can be replicated in today's political climate. In a purely practical sense, there'a not really a Blair-style leader currently in the Labour party. Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham would probably be the closest two but I can't see either winning back leave seats in the North of England, Cooper barely kept her own seat. Also, Brown and Miliband showed that Blairism / centrism is usually not the golden ticket. I understand that the result yesterday will rightfully cause a lot of people to look at the 2017 election and gaining of 40% of the popular vote in a different light, but in a post-financial crisis, post-EU referendum political landscape I can't see how neoliberal centrism / enlightened pragmatism can result in electoral success.
Ah, you must be a Brexiteer!
I think there's a lot of truth in that, but the remainers tended to be the centrists.
I guess we'll see what his government brings forward as a legislative programme because the manifesto and the majority clearly leave a lot of room for manoeuvre. If we have become Singapore on Thames in 5 years, I shall bump this thread and give you a hearty 'I told you so'!
O'Brien's the voice of people whose entire political analysis stems from their insecurity about their intelligence and who consider themselves a character because they use words like 'cockwomble' and 'wankpuffin'.
I'm still very grumpy...
Grumpy enough to remind folk that the political wing of the Wankpuffins got 11.5% and their leader lost their seat.
The problem with this interpretation is that Boris, Cummings and co will have no interest in compromise, and have no need to cooperate with people across the aisle. Through constantly trying to push through Brexit they've eventually managed to secure Brexit and get a mandate for their own politics.
Obviously Labour need to moderate their approach after last night, but compromise should be a starting point and not some vague endgame; they still need to have a principled set of policies and ideals which will appeal to the electorate and improve their lives.
The irony of James O'Brien raging at the leftist echo chamber from the comfort of the one where him and 5 other people are convincing themselves that David Milliband could have sold a second referendum to the electorate in Bishop Auckland.
I don't think you can really blame Blairism for 'last night'. Corbyn ran on a radically different manifesto and lost two successive elections. And in his 2017 defeat he won more seats than he did last night - their historic fall is his fault. And he was deeply unpopular as well. This seems to be getting used by some people as a vague footnote but it's central to his defeat. People didn't like him. For a brief period in 2017 they were neutral on him. But aside from that they thought he was shit.
But you're absolutely correct in saying Blair's premiership was one which saw a profound disconnect between the party itself and a lot of their traditional voters. Indeed, the voting decline for the party itself between 1997 and 2005 demonstrates that to an extent - by the end New Labour were riding on apathy and a poor opposition more than anything else, and the new voters they'd gained would flock back to the Tories at the first possible opportunity, with the added caveat that Labour were also alienating their leftist working-class voters in the meantime.
So yeah, a straight return to Blairism won't work. His entire approach may have worked for a while but was built on dodgy foundations where you could simultaneously boost the public sector without really increasing taxation at all. A lot of the more leftist policies and ideals can be kept, in that regard. Many of them poll well. But the approach has to change. The ideas need to be marketed better. I'd argue they probably need to be simplified - in a sense Labour could probably done down the ideological rhetoric and just convey their nationalisation and redistributive agenda in a way which shows it'll benefit working people and empower them.
You're up that way aren't you? I was born in Rother Valley. Grim times.
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