Paid Members Teedy Kay Posted May 9, 2021 Paid Members Share Posted May 9, 2021 48 minutes ago, Dead Mike said: Thiss is the tripe that's driving peoples voting choices, the rejection of 'wokeism'. Look at the reaction to Starmer supporting BLM? This is what people mean when they say 'Labour have abandoned the working classes' & are now the party of metropolitan 'luvvies'. Shit isn't it? Exactly this! And as shit as it is it needs to happen to appeal to the electorate. You don't have to turn your back on it completely, but dialling down the identity politics is now key to winning back seats. Or the party slowly dies like the Lib Dems have. Sadly Labour can't see that, which is clear by the promotion of Jess Phillips. I hope she does well especially as she does good work and she's got a half decent accent. But my Uncle Brian and Aunty Cath are genuinely gonna be rolling their eyes, because they know what she stands for, and it's not the 'everyday working class family'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperBacon Posted May 9, 2021 Share Posted May 9, 2021 1 minute ago, Teedy Kay said: I hope she does well especially as she does good work and she's got a half decent accent. Gonna need you to be more obvious with your sarcasm in future. Absolute state of this. If (and I'm taking this with a large pinch of salt) this is true, this is emblematic of what is currently wrong. "Send her out to talk to the working class". It's just patronising beyond belief. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Dead Mike Posted May 9, 2021 Paid Members Share Posted May 9, 2021 Whatever they choose to do it's largely academic at this point. The Tories have a minimum of 8yrs in power purely based on parliamentary numbers. I cant think of any realistic circumstances that could swing an 80 seat majority in a single term. You don't get to just reset & start from scratch by changing leader. The 'brand' is fucked. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Teedy Kay Posted May 9, 2021 Paid Members Share Posted May 9, 2021 Jess Phillip has done some significant and valuable work for issue's with regards Domestic Violence. Her accent is only half decent, as it's a touch too southern and whiny compared to the wonderment of a Wulfrunian accent, or any encapsulated in the Black Country dialect. I'm personally not a fan, as she was one of those continually opposed to Jezza, sorry Corbyn, from within the party. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Teedy Kay Posted May 9, 2021 Paid Members Share Posted May 9, 2021 3 minutes ago, Dead Mike said: You don't get to just reset & start from scratch by changing leader. The 'brand' is fucked. It worked for 'New' Labour. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Dead Mike Posted May 9, 2021 Paid Members Share Posted May 9, 2021 1 minute ago, Teedy Kay said: It worked for 'New' Labour. That was as much zeitgeist as anything else. Cast your mind back to the time, the Tories were old, grey & tired whilst Blair was knocking about with Oasis, there was a genuine feeling of excitement as we rode the wave of 'Cool Britannia'. It was the first election I could vote in and the public mood was very different, people had hope. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Teedy Kay Posted May 9, 2021 Paid Members Share Posted May 9, 2021 15 minutes ago, Dead Mike said: That was as much zeitgeist as anything else. Cast your mind back to the time, the Tories were old, grey & tired whilst Blair was knocking about with Oasis, there was a genuine feeling of excitement as we rode the wave of 'Cool Britannia'. It was the first election I could vote in and the public mood was very different, people had hope. The fundamental change in tack of Labour, as Blair, Brown, Mandelson, Campbell etc gripped the party and completely changed it's approach should never be ignored, the 'Cool Britannia' vibe definately helped, but it didn't really help draw in the Blue Rinse Brigade, and that draw was instrumental on the Landslide victory they got in 97. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keith Houchen Posted May 9, 2021 Share Posted May 9, 2021 Interesting to see if it’s true about Starmer having an affair. Do you think the tories would make political capital from it or would they be opening the door for attacks on Johnson? Also, I fucking can’t stand Jess Phillips either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Dead Mike Posted May 9, 2021 Paid Members Share Posted May 9, 2021 5 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said: Interesting to see if it’s true about Starmer having an affair. Do you think the tories would make political capital from it or would they be opening the door for attacks on Johnson? Course they will, politics is football now. You ignore the rapists on your team & lambast your rivals for the same behaviour. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted May 9, 2021 Paid Members Share Posted May 9, 2021 7 hours ago, Teedy Kay said: The fundamental change in tack of Labour, as Blair, Brown, Mandelson, Campbell etc gripped the party and completely changed it's approach should never be ignored, the 'Cool Britannia' vibe definately helped, but it didn't really help draw in the Blue Rinse Brigade, and that draw was instrumental on the Landslide victory they got in 97. The success of Labour in '97 was because they managed to win over the middle classes, the exact people now being blamed for dooming Labour now. Blair, and later Brown, took the working class vote for granted far more than the Labour of today do. The idea that repeating the same strategies of '97 now would somehow win back the exact people that Labour spent the subsequent decade alienating is utter madness, as evidenced by Starmer, and by Miliband before him, and by Mandelson thinking that this still somehow comes down to "picking the wrong Miliband" as if anyone outside of Whitehall gives the slightest fuck about that more than a decade later. Corbyn was rubbish in so many ways, but the politics he espoused actually spoke to people and represented a move away from the terminal death throes of New Labour that too many in the party are still desperate to pretend aren't happening. Labour are desperately out of touch, and the more they talk about "reaching the working class", the more apparent that is. It's Owen Smith pretending to be confused by a cappuccino, because he's stuck in a late '90s time warp where "cappuccino" is a byword for middle class poshness, and not something that literally everybody knows. The Tories and Labour are as out of touch as each other, but the Tories have never pretended to be the party of the working class in the first place. This thing is twofold (at least) - one side is that Labour and Green voters are, by and large, better educated and younger than Tory voters. They're graduates. The towns turning against Labour aren't university towns, and aren't exactly full of graduate level jobs. They've been let down by decades and decades of shit governance and lack of investment from the Tories, and at the same time they're suffering a brain drain and exodus of educated young people to the bigger cities that, by and large, are voting Labour or Green. So the FPTP system is fucking them. The other is the whole "wokeness" nonsense. Labour have done a shit job - as have practically everyone else - of countering the right-wing narrative, where "woke" is both a negative and sums up everything that anyone on the right might take umbrage with, and of wilfully conflating criticism with censorship. The main reason that Labour have been accused of abandoning the working class isn't because the Tories have better policies to support the working class - they obviously fucking don't - but because issues of equality and diversity are being framed as middle class concerns, and the Tories are gladly playing into prejudices where "class" has fuck all to do with economic brackets. The way people talk about diversity, about LBGTQ+ issues, or racism, it's framed as if this is an academic debate among the middle classes - as if the majority of people of other ethnicities aren't working class, aren't far more likely to be in lower economic brackets, or as if there's no such thing as gay or trans working class kids. Labour need to do better at framing these as being working class and pro-worker issues. I've been to far too many tedious political meetings, and the worst ones are those that devolve into arguing hypotheticals about diversity or prejudice on a purely academic level, but the best ways of managing that in my experience have been union leaders stepping in and pointing out actual practical steps that you can take to counter such things. Labour have done sod all in that direction for too long. In all things we let the right wing control the narrative - they jump on a buzzword or phrase, and then we keep using it, so they're always dictating the pace. It's infuriating. Something Dominic Cummings said in his analysis was that politicians are successful when they talk about counter-factuals and alternative histories. The Tories hammer on about Labour's track record with the economy, whether it holds up to scrutiny or not. It's a narrative, and it works. Labour need to point to where the Tories went wrong, what they'd have done differently, and why you should trust them now. For me, the extremely obvious one is free broadband - but, of course, that was a Corbyn policy so they won't touch it. They should be drawing attention to the fact that they pushed for it in their manifesto, that the Tories blocked it, and that it would have been a boon to everyone who was working from home, home-schooling, and so on. They're saying that the pandemic has prevented them from picking up any momentum, when a national crisis is exactly when opposition parties should be able to present an alternative vision for what comes next. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keith Houchen Posted May 9, 2021 Share Posted May 9, 2021 29 minutes ago, BomberPat said: The way people talk about diversity, about LBGTQ+ issues, or racism, it's framed as if this is an academic debate among the middle classes - Gove saying how people are fed up of experts is an example of this. It frames academics and intellectual pursuits as enemies of working people, despite every Tory minister being a university graduate. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Hannibal Scorch Posted May 9, 2021 Paid Members Share Posted May 9, 2021 Anneliese Dodds is demoted and Nick Brown removed as chief whip according to the BBC right now as part of the reshuffle. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vamp Posted May 10, 2021 Share Posted May 10, 2021 It's also possible that the majority of this country are self centred arseholes. They're fine with their lives being shit as long as other people don't have better lives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hoptimus Posted May 10, 2021 Share Posted May 10, 2021 The sheer arrogance of the Scot Tories is incredible. Pretty much setting the tone that the Scottish Government is a subordinate legislature to Westminster as Scotland within the UK should not have competence within the Scottish Government for Scotland to legislate a referendum bill on Scottish independence if Boris Johnson says no to a Section 30 order. If it was to go to The Supreme Court the EU and the rest of the world will be watching as well as the UN taking an interest. The flag shaggers are already circling. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperBacon Posted May 10, 2021 Share Posted May 10, 2021 Democracy behind a paywall. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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