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Devon Malcolm

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Honestly, we can all laugh at the notion of Tommy Robinson managing to accomplish anything in politics, but considering the world we now live in I would not be surprised to see him play a part somehow, especially if this Brexit thing falls apart.

A lot of people voted for Brexit for reasons that can only be described as horrible, and those people won't just go away if this somehow is dealt with in a way they don't like. Or even if it's dealt with in a way that they do like. Leaving the EU isn't the end game here for the majority of them. 

I'm as bad as anyone for living in a rather safe, middle-class centre-left bubble in my day to day life, and I sometimes do forget that the vast majority don't think like the people I deal with on a daily basis. If they did we wouldn't have the 'Tories in power, and Brexit wouldn't be happening.

Britain is a right-wing country at the moment, so anything is possible.

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Yep. There's certainly the precedent of an individual whom others find to be stupid and laughable becoming the rabble-rousing representative of people who feel cheated. I don't imagine there's much difference between history's earlier incarnations of regular people endorsing the far-right and the angry everyman of today. They wouldn't have seen themselves as anything but righteous just as today's Robinson supporters do.

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Another thing to consider when it comes to the idea of Robinson doing anything in real politics is his image. We all heard about how Trump managed to accomplish what he did because he was (wrongly) seen as being different from those who populate the mainstream US political scene.

It's fairly safe to say that the public at large in the UK are thoroughly cheesed off with mainstream politics. Who wouldn't be? All this Brexit shite, the voting for and against deals, politicians leaving their parties and starting new ones, and the general shiteness of seeing the likes of Boris and Finknottle on our televisions constantly.

Robinson, for all his faults, looks and acts like the cheeky lad who comes round to do the windows at your office on a Tuesday afternoon and chats with the girls who are out on a smoke break, or who gets sent round by the council to fix the leak under the sink. Like it or not, there's a reason he is where he is. He's the workman who your mum thinks is a "nice boy" because he's full of banter and has a cheeky smile, he's the guy who can't walk down the main street in your town without being stopped multiple times because he's lived there all his life and knows absolutely every cunt who walks past.

He's the arsehole who gets arrested for assaulting someone in the pub but who still gets the benefit of the doubt, because although he's "not an angel" he's "not that bad a lad."

Now, I know we can all say that he isn't that guy, and that it's all just an act. But is it? Because in my experience most of the guys who fit that description that I remember from school share much of the same views that little Tommy does. And sadly there's more of them than there are of people like those who post on here.

The number of times I've heard in pubs during discussions about the little twerp from someone who seems relatively clued in that he's "not that bad" and that "despite not agreeing with everything he says, he's not far wide of the mark" astonishes me.

I honestly believe that if there was a general election and he stood under the UKIP banner in a well chosen area he could do quite well. Because he's different from the shite we're seeing at the moment, and he manages to do what the majority of our politicians simply seem unable to. He can connect with the regular Joe in the street, and the regular Joe in the street for the most part can be summed up as "not racist, but...." and "has nothing against most Muslims, but...."

Depressing stuff for a Monday morning really.

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Luckily in my experience those types of people who are  in the bracket of "im not racist but little Tommy is right when he says...." are usually the same types of people who say "Why bother voting they're all the same." The reason they have such lazy simplistic views of what they consider problems is because they're lazy and simplistic. If they can be roused we'll all be fucked. 

I've literally only ever met, in my day to day working class life, one UKIP supporter who was eloquent and reasonable and actually stated his case well. Anyone else who's been to the right in their views have pretty much copy and pasted their opinions from that weeks newspaper headlines and probably don't even know how to vote.

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5 minutes ago, Mr_Danger said:

Luckily in my experience those types of people who are  in the bracket of "im not racist but little Tommy is right when he says...." are usually the same types of people who say "Why bother voting they're all the same." The reason they have such lazy simplistic views of what they consider problems is because they're lazy and simplistic. If they can be roused we'll all be fucked.

That's exactly my point. If someone like Robinson can appear on the scene and we see voters who normally don't give a shit saying "wait, he's not a berk in a grey suit with a posh accent, he's a lad in jeans and a Fred Perry shirt who likes the football and a pint. I'll vote for him!" then it could spell some trouble.

7 minutes ago, Mr_Danger said:

I've literally only ever met, in my day to day working class life, one UKIP supporter who was eloquent and reasonable and actually stated his case well. Anyone else who's been to the right in their views have pretty much copy and pasted their opinions from that weeks newspaper headlines and probably don't even know how to vote.

See, I'm not sure I'd go that far. It's easy to listen to someone who isn't well-spoken, reasonable and eloquent and think "yeah, you're a numpty who probably can't spell," but that's usually not the case. 

Earlier in life I worked with a load of guys, all different ages on building sites and so on, and while they didn't particularly give a flying fuck about the political discussion of the day it wasn't because they were too stupid to watch QT or read the big-boy newspapers. It was because they didn't identify with them and chose not to.

What they did was tune in when a Nick Griffin or a Farage was on QT because it interested them, and they buy the redtops because they want to read the football news during their lunch break. These guys were clued-in and savvy in other areas of life. Ask them about the GDP of the UK in the aftermath of Brexit and they'll tell you to piss off, but put a bookies coupon in front of them and watch them work out the combined winnings of sticking a tenner acca on which includes 6 football games of varying odds and a few horse races. They aren't idiots.

It's not only easy to dismiss the right-wing majority (which is what we have at the moment, a majority) as buffoons, but dangerous. There's a fringe element of right-wing nutters, the type who are far-right and complete fucking scumbags who are morons, but for the majority who sit on that working class right of centre spectrum it would be dangerous to dismiss them as idiots who probably don't know how to vote.

It wasn't that long ago that those working class voters were the backbone of the left-wing socialist cause. They've not all switched over to a right-wing viewpoint because they suddenly became stupid overnight.

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The parliamentary system in general wouldn't allow a Tommy Robinson to rise in the same way Trump did in the US. He'd have to do what Farage never could even at the height of his powers - actually win an election - and even then it would only grant him a minority voice in parliament, as UKIP aren't an electoral force by any measure.

I've mentioned while talking about Akala in the books/reading thread that part of the reason I think the working class are overlooked is that when we talk about "the working class", the word "white" is always implied. When we're talking about the working class leaning towards right of centre, if you define "working class" by income bracket, that doesn't ring true - several studies on voting intentions by household income show Labour still out-performing the Tories up to around a £30k household income. But because when we say "working class", we mean a white British working class, the ethnic minority and recent migrant families that make up a significant percentage of that lower income bracket are invisible to all the politicising of class issues.

As a result of that, we tend to make these mad sweeping generalisations about "the working class", treat Brexit as an angry working class vote despite that demonstrably not being the case (as I've often said - for all the think-pieces about the working class feeling "left behind" or underrepresented by modern politics, no one asks the residents of the Leave-voting home counties if they feel "left behind", because it doesn't fit the narrative), and act as if the working class are only ever one grievance away from voting for outright fascism. Which does an immense disservice to the people you're talking about - a politically disengaged, but intelligent, working class.

In many ways, "working class" is more significant as a cultural signifier than an economic one to a lot of people - many continue to identify as working class based on their upbringing, rather than current status; it's a label I still kneejerk identify with, despite being a civil servant, that most middle class of professions.

 

Touching on the tabloids you mentioned, I think this is a big part of the right-ward lean of the country. Of course, our tabloids have always been right wing, but increasingly it will be the only source of news many people read, aside from social media. A broader range of entertainment channels means people without existing interest are unlikely to be watching TV news every night, so if the only news you consume is right wing tabloid fodder, that's going to reinforce your world view.

Once upon a time, if I disagreed with something in the paper and you agreed with it, we could argue that and hopefully reach an understanding, even if neither of us altered our view significantly. Because we'd both be exposed to roughly the same information. But social media individualises the "news" we see to such an extent, that if you're already right-leaning, your Facebook feed will reinforce this in a way that mine won't, so what you then read in The Sun at work will reflect what you see fed to you on Facebook. And I can't challenge that world-view, because we're not given the same information - it's not like we've both seen the same political advert and came away with different interpretations, I can't know what's on your news feed, so there's a complete dearth of empathy there. 

The question should never be phrased as smugly as "how do we educate these people?", but how do we chip away at the mechanisms that actively alienate these people from politics, and at the mechanisms that drive further wedges between us?

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15 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

As a result of that, we tend to make these mad sweeping generalisations about "the working class", treat Brexit as an angry working class vote despite that demonstrably not being the case (as I've often said - for all the think-pieces about the working class feeling "left behind" or underrepresented by modern politics, no one asks the residents of the Leave-voting home counties if they feel "left behind", because it doesn't fit the narrative), and act as if the working class are only ever one grievance away from voting for outright fascism. Which does an immense disservice to the people you're talking about - a politically disengaged, but intelligent, working class.

Yeah, I actually believe the opposite is true. I think most "working class" people are actually only a few steps away from voting for left-wing parties and policies. As you say, they're not stupid, but there are a few who are very angry and some would even say desperate.

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3 hours ago, David said:

Yeah, I actually believe the opposite is true. I think most "working class" people are actually only a few steps away from voting for left-wing parties and policies. As you say, they're not stupid, but there are a few who are very angry and some would even say desperate.

A big part of that is that the mainstream parties that have traditionally identified themselves as being left-wing or liberal have badly let down the people they claimed to champion. It doesn't matter that New Labour weren't all that left-wing in reality; with the help of the media, they were seen to be such, and in the same vein were seen to be tied to the global economic meltdown which impacted so many working-class lives. When you think the left's let you down, and that the centre's for the middle-class, where do you end up turning to?

Obviously, quite a lot of the working class didn't do that, but it would explain why so many did, despite it being so obviously against their own interests.

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There's also an element of "what have you done for me lately?", and the (again, very white) sense that if you're not the centre of the conversation then you're being overlooked or marginalised. There's a real sense, that has been weaponised by the right wing and the tabloid press, that "The Left" have neglected the working classes in favour of immigrants, ethnic minorities, LGBT+ rights, feminism and so on.

Of course, this overlooks the fact that taking an interest in other areas doesn't preclude you from also supporting workers' rights and, crucially, ignores the fact that there's no distinction between workers' rights and minority rights - the majority of immigrants and ethnic minorities in the UK are working class, LGBT+ rights affect working class gays just as much as the posh ones, and so on.

But it's very easy to frame the conversation as "champagne socialists caring about minority rights instead of the beleaguered working class", and the British Left are terrible at forming good counter-arguments to the narratives of the right and the media. 

A lot of this comes back to the idea that "Working Class" is a cultural label more than an economic one - people will talk about Labour no longer standing for the working class, but being too focused on Muslims and immigrants; communities that, by and large, are working class. To reference Akala again, I think it was you @Carbomb that posted the video in which he asks, "is Hackney not a working class community?". It's difficult to have these conversations if the words we use mean something different to me than they do to you - so one of us might be talking about working class as a purely economic category, that encompasses poor BAME families, while the other might be using it with a mental image of Auf Wiedershen Pet, or sepia-toned whippets and flat caps.

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1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

There's also an element of "what have you done for me lately?", and the (again, very white) sense that if you're not the centre of the conversation then you're being overlooked or marginalised. There's a real sense, that has been weaponised by the right wing and the tabloid press, that "The Left" have neglected the working classes in favour of immigrants, ethnic minorities, LGBT+ rights, feminism and so on.

Of course, this overlooks the fact that taking an interest in other areas doesn't preclude you from also supporting workers' rights and, crucially, ignores the fact that there's no distinction between workers' rights and minority rights - the majority of immigrants and ethnic minorities in the UK are working class, LGBT+ rights affect working class gays just as much as the posh ones, and so on.

But it's very easy to frame the conversation as "champagne socialists caring about minority rights instead of the beleaguered working class", and the British Left are terrible at forming good counter-arguments to the narratives of the right and the media. 

A lot of this comes back to the idea that "Working Class" is a cultural label more than an economic one - people will talk about Labour no longer standing for the working class, but being too focused on Muslims and immigrants; communities that, by and large, are working class. To reference Akala again, I think it was you @Carbomb that posted the video in which he asks, "is Hackney not a working class community?". It's difficult to have these conversations if the words we use mean something different to me than they do to you - so one of us might be talking about working class as a purely economic category, that encompasses poor BAME families, while the other might be using it with a mental image of Auf Wiedershen Pet, or sepia-toned whippets and flat caps.

There are several dimensions to this, and it all centres around the false notion of "Us vs. Them". The far-right, throughout history, has made a point of forcibly creating this perceptual disconnect, and then reinforcing it. One of those is something Trevor Noah discussed recently on The Daily Show, which is the offering of victimhood to white, straight, able-bodied, Christian people; Trump has utilised this to pretty devastating effect, telling a demographic which traditionally has had the upper hand at the expense of other groups but also been frequently upbraided for it in recent decades that they are just as hard done-by as BME people, homosexuals, disabled people, and Muslims. As a result, they view him as their political Messiah, and nothing he does will persuade them otherwise.

The left has also made a poor fist of destroying the disconnect illusion, choosing to exclusively "defend" the oppressed/attacked groups against this rage, instead of trying to make them all realise that "They" are "Us", and that they're directing their ire at the wrong people. This has imbued the left with a similar false image that theirs is the politics of the liberal middle-class, which they seem to have been equally weak at dispelling.

I'm afraid this is purely anecdotal, but the sheer number of working-class right-wingers I've met who try to claim "socialism is for middle-class elites who've never done a hard day's work in their lives" is mind-boggling. I usually reply by asking them how many unions do they know are made up of middle-class people, and they either bluster or ignore the question, which suggests to me that this current incarnation of right-wing politics is now approaching something beyond rationalism, and has now taken on a visceral quality in its most ardent supporters.

Edited by Carbomb
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3 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

which suggests to me that this current incarnation of right-wing politics is now approaching something beyond rationalism, and has now taken on a visceral quality in its most ardent supporters.

I think that's true of politics across the board seemingly becoming more and more partisan - from the evangelical Christians in America doing a full 180 on being the most likely to think a President's infidelity should rule them unsuitable for office to being the least likely to think it once Trump came along, to the redrawing of the political landscape into purely "Leave" or "Remain" terms in the UK. 

A lot of it comes down to what I've said earlier about social media killing empathy and context, and it being so much easier to coast through life without ever encountering a dissenting view than it has ever been outside of the most rarefied of communities. Never have so many people been so convinced that their world-view is fundamentally, irrefutably, correct. I don't think it's a coincidence that this has gone hand-in-hand with a rise in belief in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories - you can just pick and choose what's "true" now. 

But what the right are good at, which the left has rarely been able to counteract, is in crafting stories. "Donald Trump Will Make America Great Again", "Brexit Will Be Our Independence Day"; they don't need to be true, they just need to give the suggestion of easy solutions to complex problems. What's important is that the story is the centrepiece, the policies are almost secondary. New Labour managed it in 1997, they had a story. We don't now. The closest we came was "Corbynmania", but for a litany of reasons, that wasn't enough - particularly when it comes to Brexit.

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1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

But what the right are good at, which the left has rarely been able to counteract, is in crafting stories. "Donald Trump Will Make America Great Again", "Brexit Will Be Our Independence Day"; they don't need to be true, they just need to give the suggestion of easy solutions to complex problems. What's important is that the story is the centrepiece, the policies are almost secondary. New Labour managed it in 1997, they had a story. We don't now. The closest we came was "Corbynmania", but for a litany of reasons, that wasn't enough - particularly when it comes to Brexit.

That's always been the case. Scapegoating minorities is what the far-right do when people are suffering, because, through the strength of their conviction, they're seen to be offering a solution, when really it's just an easy out. Counteracting them is indeed difficult; usually what is destructive is easy to accomplish, and what is constructive isn't.

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I'm not sure about the majority of voters/the population being right-wing. At the last general election, which had the highest turnout since 1997, you only had 45 percent of the public voting for clearly right-wing mainland parties (Conservative + UKIP). You also had 45 percent voting for clearly/broadly left-wing parties (Labour + SNP + Greens + Plaid). You've then got around 2.5 percent of voters being in Northern Ireland (where it was pretty much an even split in as much as left/right wing applies there) and 7.5 percent voting Lib Dem, which is arguably a centrist party but certainly had a manifesto with leftwards policies (increased spending, public sector pay up, income tax rise to pay for NHS, corporation tax up).

 

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Stupid fucks, on all sides - the SNP motion kept all options on the table, it just said "let's put an end to it"

 

Get a deal passed in the house

if not, ask for an extension [probably would only be agreed for an election or 2nd referendum]

[vote on terms of extension]

If no extension, vote on no deal

If no, then revoke

 

What they basically said was "I want X, but I don't think I'll win, so I'll kick the can ever further down the road"

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