General Erection 2019

[quote the raven]

Thats quite interesting......

The Second reading of the Withdraw agreement just passed with a majority of 124 - that's a lot more than 80 Tory majority. 

Most of that had to have come from the labour benches? 

Edited December 20, 2019 by quote the raven

[Guest]

 

[JNLister]

9 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

That Liverpool one can't be right, surely, the Scousers didn't vote to leave.

Liverpool as a whole voted to remain. Liverpool Walton, the constituency with Anfield in, is estimated to have voted leave. Not sure how certain that estimate is as it depends on the area how much constituency "leave or remain" is based on actual figures or demographic assumptions.

 

(Background: The referendum was counted by local authority and only a few released results by ward, which you can combine to figure out a parliamentary constituency. Most of the "this constituency voted Leave" is taken from an academic who estimated it by taking the results that were released and combined them with various surveys of how different ages/genders/class/etc voted and known demographics about each constituency.

 

A year or so later the BBC did a Freedom of Information request to every local authority and was able to get actual tallies for 189 constituencies. They found that many of the original estimates were bang on, the vast majority were within three percent, and there were only four constituencies where he had the "winning side" wrong.)

Edited December 21, 2019 by JNLister

[Pinc]

2 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

That Liverpool one can't be right, surely, the Scousers didn't vote to leave.

The city as a whole didn’t. But the Walton constituency where both football grounds are voted 52% to Leave. So these figures could be correct if they’re calculated at constituency level.

Edited December 20, 2019 by Pinc

[Devon Malcolm]

Ahh right, I see. I was going to say as well that I saw a different survey that said City and Everton fans voted for Leave, but obviously the same geographical criteria.

[Keith Houchen]

I’d imagine Man Utd and Liverpool fans voted differently as City and Everton fans tend to live in the same city as their teams and not in the south. 

[JNLister]

Answer to the "has it always been this way" question on different age groups voting differently:

 

 

(I assume the odd-looking 2010 is down to a lot of young people voting Lib Dem.)

Edited December 22, 2019 by JNLister

[David]

That chart is interesting, but surely the notion that most people become more "conservative" in their views as they age is nothing new? I certainly know that while I'm not a full-on 'Tory by any stretch, I'm certainly not as "left wing" politically as I was as a younger man. Back then I earned a lot less, and had a lot less responsibility. 

It's the classic viewpoint that it's easy to want those who earn more to pay more tax when you don't earn enough to fall into that bracket. Most people will hesitate to champion such policies when it actually means money coming out of their pockets, especially if they have a mortgage to pay, car payments to make, children to support and so on. I think most people, rightly or wrongly, tend to shift to the right the older they get, with the shift being determined by them having more to lose, and by having more people they have to support.

[Carbomb]

I currently earn more than I've ever earned. I'm also as left-wing as, if not more than, I've ever been.

Edited December 23, 2019 by Carbomb

[Devon Malcolm]

5 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

I currently earn more than I've ever earned. I'm also as left-wing as, if not more than, I've ever been.

Five years ago I didn't care at all. Now I'm just to the right of Lenin.

[Keith Houchen]

Yeah I think I’m in the minority of growing more left wing as I get older and I joined the Socialist Party about 15 years ago!

[The King Of Swing]

Yeah I've definitely drifted much further to the left as I got older.

Think I really started moving politically around the time of the Afghanistan invasion and I started to realise that most people around me were/are utter arseholes.

[PunkStep]

51 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

I currently earn more than I've ever earned. I'm also as left-wing as, if not more than, I've ever been.

Same here. I've never been close to being a Tory or right wing but I'm moving more and more to the left, especially over the past 4-5 years. 

[PJ Power]

I've long thought that political views simply are not based along a single axis but at least two (as in the Political Compass or Nolan Chart) or even more, and in that sense I've perhaps drifted very slightly rightwards over the years (but would still be regarded as an leftist anti-business leftard lunatic by most in today's Conservative party) to being somewhere slightly to the left of Labour under John Smith's and Tony Blair's early years in the 1990s but still with a big enough gap compared to the left of the party both back then and today. Socially however my bubble along its axis would be kind of steady in the centre whilst having being pulled in different directions from time to time, as I see myself in this sense as a communitarian, which is often seen as a dirty word these days because (a) it sounds too similar to communism, and (b) because it is often derided as anti-liberal, anti-freedom, authoritarian etc. when it isn't. It is simply the recognition that people's live are moulded by the community that they live in or a part of (unless they live in almost complete isolation) and that essentially such communities lay the foundations of indivudal liberties and development, and in doing so being more important and mattering more than the other way round. This doesn't have to mean that individual rights don't exist or are stripped away with, indeed without some basis of such rights, communitarianism couldn't exist. So on that basis, I'd consider myself roughly "centre" on the social axis, and I don't see myself moving away from there any time soon. If I was living in Britain I would have despaired on whom to vote for as both the Conservatives and Labour were repelling, and that while the Lib Dems would probably be the best fit of the three main parties, they badly regressed under Swinson. If I was in Scotland, then SNP it would have been.

Just a final €0.02 from me, while all the warning signs were there that most voters see Corbyn and a cold cup of puke as one and the same, I reckon the point they Jumped The Shark, so to speak, of being a realistic contender to hold government was when they came out with the promise for free broadband to every part of the country. It was a real WTF moment - there had been no signs of Labour adopting such a policy before it was announced, there had been no public campaign to have such a thing except for a maybe a website and twitter account ran out of someone's attic, no other country in the world does anything like this or has even considered it (no, its not the same as a minimum speed obligation which is set to be introduced in the UK next year), and yet when it was announced it was done so using a megaphone and being promoted as a "game changer" when it just reeked of desperation to announce something like this out of the blue, not to mention that it couldn't have come across as more of a middle class entitlement - for those on the breadline trying to feed themselves & their children and keeping warm over the winter, free broadband isn't much cop whereas a free allowance of electricity or something to heat the home with would be far more beneficial (if still essentially an impossible pledge to make). The free broadband policy sounded like it came from the suggestion list of a socialist society student union group at a Russell Group university that was crossed out from it later on once they actually started thinking about it.

[Carbomb]

2 hours ago, PJ Power said:

I've long thought that political views simply are not based along a single axis but at least two (as in the Political Compass or Nolan Chart) or even more, and in that sense I've perhaps drifted very slightly rightwards over the years (but would still be regarded as an leftist anti-business leftard lunatic by most in today's Conservative party) to being somewhere slightly to the left of Labour under John Smith's and Tony Blair's early years in the 1990s but still with a big enough gap compared to the left of the party both back then and today. Socially however my bubble along its axis would be kind of steady in the centre whilst having being pulled in different directions from time to time, as I see myself in this sense as a communitarian, which is often seen as a dirty word these days because (a) it sounds too similar to communism, and (b) because it is often derided as anti-liberal, anti-freedom, authoritarian etc. when it isn't. It is simply the recognition that people's live are moulded by the community that they live in or a part of (unless they live in almost complete isolation) and that essentially such communities lay the foundations of indivudal liberties and development, and in doing so being more important and mattering more than the other way round. This doesn't have to mean that individual rights don't exist or are stripped away with, indeed without some basis of such rights, communitarianism couldn't exist. So on that basis, I'd consider myself roughly "centre" on the social axis, and I don't see myself moving away from there any time soon. If I was living in Britain I would have despaired on whom to vote for as both the Conservatives and Labour were repelling, and that while the Lib Dems would probably be the best fit of the three main parties, they badly regressed under Swinson. If I was in Scotland, then SNP it would have been.

Thing is communitarianism, as you describe it, is actually part-and-parcel of socialism. It's one of the biggest (and most deliberate) misconceptions about socialism that it's basically "the government will give you everything". Government provision isn't the only principle of socialism, and, for many, it's not even the main principle - it's just a natural consequence of taking the logic of collectivism to a certain point, which basically takes the view that, if the government truly represents the people, it's the ultimate representation of the people as a collective.

Also, not every socialist (at least, not every socialist I know) puts the same focus on the same issues within that framework - for me personally, the most effective implementation of socialist policies is at a grassroots, rather than governmental, level, as I take the view that democracy does not begin nor end at the ballot box. The most effective way to persuade people of the benefits of any kind of politics is to demonstrate them in an application of said politics, rather than just stating them. Show, don't tell, basically. I'm particularly invested in the promotion of the co-operative as a preferable business model, i.e. that workers should have as much say in the direction of a company as those who hold the capital, because whilst the "owners" pay for the equipment and whatnot, it's the workers who generate the value that becomes the company's profits and therefore income. Without them, there is no company.

Overall, my personal politics as a socialist is informed by several fundamental notions of fairness and justice, one of which is that, whatever you want to accomplish, it has to be matched by the economics of it, or it just won't happen. Consequently, I firmly believe that you absolutely cannot expect to achieve social or political democracy without economic democracy.

Quote

Just a final €0.02 from me, while all the warning signs were there that most voters see Corbyn and a cold cup of puke as one and the same, I reckon the point they Jumped The Shark, so to speak, of being a realistic contender to hold government was when they came out with the promise for free broadband to every part of the country. It was a real WTF moment - there had been no signs of Labour adopting such a policy before it was announced, there had been no public campaign to have such a thing except for a maybe a website and twitter account ran out of someone's attic, no other country in the world does anything like this or has even considered it (no, its not the same as a minimum speed obligation which is set to be introduced in the UK next year), and yet when it was announced it was done so using a megaphone and being promoted as a "game changer" when it just reeked of desperation to announce something like this out of the blue, not to mention that it couldn't have come across as more of a middle class entitlement - for those on the breadline trying to feed themselves & their children and keeping warm over the winter, free broadband isn't much cop whereas a free allowance of electricity or something to heat the home with would be far more beneficial (if still essentially an impossible pledge to make). The free broadband policy sounded like it came from the suggestion list of a socialist society student union group at a Russell Group university that was crossed out from it later on once they actually started thinking about it.

Yes, and no. It was a bad idea on their part in terms of strategy, because, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, they hadn't done enough to dispel the false narrative in enough people's minds that Labour are always profligate spenders, and that the Tories always have to clear up the mess they leave with their "sound" financial management (that anyone still buys that lie is depressing enough).

It wasn't a bad idea in terms of policy, because, whether we believe it or not, broadband is now an essential part of life - people need to be online to do so many things these days, and that includes the working class. Banking, applying for jobs, sorting out utilities and bills, applying for benefits, even shopping for people who have to work several jobs and don't have time to hit the shops - all of these require internet access. As a general cost, I'm willing to bet a lot of working-class people would welcome economic relief on this score.

All in all, though, that's something Labour should've kept up their sleeve for if/when they got into government. The 2017 manifesto was more than good enough, they didn't need to add to it. The broadband announcement reeked of them thinking they should combat BJ's "Dead Cat Strategy" with one of their own; it just came across as a PR stunt.

Edited December 23, 2019 by Carbomb