The General Politics Thread v2.0 (AKA the "Labour are Cunts" thread)

[Loki]

10 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

This is a massive factor. It's also easier to mobilise people to vote against something, rather than for. This is largely what happened in 2019. Johnson wasn't widely popular at any point (I don't think he ever had positive approval ratings) but people definitely didn't want Labour so voted to prevent that.

To bring it back to your original point, not only did Corbyn not unleash the youth vote as hoped, he got lapsed voters back into the polling booths to vote against him.

 

[Devon Malcolm]

34 minutes ago, Nick James said:

I am a voter, just to make that clear and this is purely from my own perspective, but I could also see an arguement for people not wanting to vote.

This is the best option for anybody not seeing a candidate they agree or engage with, especially in this country, and it's what I'll be doing.

[Dead Mike]

8 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

 

Also, I know we aren’t politically alike, but you campaign and put your boots on the ground for your party, and that has to be respected. You’re one of the good ones. 

Cheers m8. 

We're probably politically a lot closer than cones across on here. One of the problems with political discussion like this is that it's never set out if we're talking about what 'we' personally want for the country or what's actually available. I'm very aware that there's little appetite for the policies I want therefore I choose the closest option with the most likelihood of success. I know I might get 10% (at a stretch) of what I want from the Tories but I may get half of what I want from Labour. You get nowt from not being in power! 

 

 

[Keith Houchen]

44 minutes ago, Nick James said:

 

I am a voter, just to make that clear and this is purely from my own perspective, but I could also see an arguement for people not wanting to vote

 

The public transport analogy works for me. I know where I want to go, I know there probably won’t be a bus or tram stop directly outside where I want to go, so I’ll get the option that goes the closest to where I want to go. Obviously I’ll need to read manifestos at the time, but currently the public transport options on offer means I’ll have to stay at home. 
 

A big factor for me is thinking about the most worse off, hard done by and forgotten people I know, usually the poor in money and health, and the disabled, and see which party they’d be better off under. But currently the buses don’t have disabled access and the fares are too expensive. 

[David]

3 hours ago, deathrey said:

Two brown people in charge in the UK. Some peoples heads will be exploding. 

And the newest one has just been outed as a Celtic fan. The shenanigans ahead will be amazing.

[The King Of Swing]

I've honestly never been as politically cut off as I am now and actively avoid talking politics outside of this place.

Just can't deal with it mentally, anymore. 

[Keith Houchen]

1 hour ago, David said:

And the newest one has just been outed as a Celtic fan. The shenanigans ahead will be amazing.

Bad day for the staunch. That flat roof pub will be hell tonight, more so than usual. 

[Carbomb]

19 minutes ago, The King Of Swing said:

I've honestly never been as politically cut off as I am now and actively avoid talking politics outside of this place.

Just can't deal with it mentally, anymore. 

I'm not too dissimilar. It's a fucking nightmare and has been for thirteen years.

In some ways, I'm lucky, in that anything I can that would be considered politically "big" is meaningless, as my constituency has been solidly Labour since the end of WWII, and has never really been in any danger of falling to anyone else (consequently, it's where the Tories send their headcases as candidates, to get them out of the way conveniently).

Thing is, I always remember what my dad taught me, which is that politics does not begin and end at the ballot box, and there's plenty I can be getting on with without needing to engage with cunts. I'm already doing stuff that's to do with my local community, and looking to increase that activity. 

What we can contribute as individuals politically is, realistically, a drop at most, but that drop is so important, because so many choose not to contribute. For me, that drop is to try to contribute to grassroots politics, to put a block in place to build from the ground up, and hope for something new and better to grow from it, instead of always focusing our attention and hopes on what's going on at the top.

It's all about the base, no superstructure.

[Loki]

Be interesting to see what happens in Corbyn's constituency.  He's a very popular local MP so I can see him getting in as an Independent candidate.  The Tory vote there is minuscule - it's one of those constituencies where CCHQ send young candidates to blood them and see if they're worth putting into a marginal seat. So even with a split Labour vote the Conservatives won't stand a chance.

The thing will be a clusterfuck though - anyone who works for Corbyn in his candidacy will also get kicked out of the Labour Party.  And if Momentum decide to support him they might be proscribed, so there's an awful lot at stake.

[BomberPat]

16 hours ago, Loki said:

Could Blair have won a 4th GE?  Quite possibly he’d have squeaked it, he was still personally popular.

That's bollocks, though. Blair's popularity in the polls when he left office was on a par with Gordon Brown in 2010, and in some instances worse. The Iraq War, financial crisis, cash-for-honours, and the expenses scandal had all fucked him to the point that he had to step down. He might have won another election by a whisker, even accounting for the Tories being 10+ points ahead in the polls when he left, but if he did, it would have been far more likely on the grounds of "better the devil we know", and I don't think that's a political route often traveled in this country - we're not the French, we don't do "better the crook than the fascist". 

16 hours ago, Carbomb said:

He still took the working class vote for granted and pandered to the middle class.

This is the bit that goes infuriatingly unspoken. We're constantly told that Labour under Corbyn had abandoned the working class and were pandering to middle-class liberal elites, and that a return to the politics of Blair and New Labour would be preferable, as if we can just set the clock back to 1997 and forget that Blair, Brown and Miliband's particular flavours of neoliberalism have had their time and ultimately lost at the ballot box. But Blair's entire success was born of winning over middle-class voters, something that we're now apparently meant to see as a bad thing. Labour had been taking the working classes for granted since long before Corbyn was in charge, and I daresay that the policies of Corbyn would do far more to benefit the working class than the politics of Starmer, Miliband or Brown. 

That's particularly if we don't skirt around one of the unspoken realities of "working class" politics in this country, as was evidenced by the amount of landlords with the "right" accent being used as exemplars of the working class in anti-Corbyn media profiles - when most people use it, it's a cultural identity, not an economic one, and it has the invisible word "white" in front of it. When people talk of Labour abandoning the working class, they don't mean Muslim cleaners, Syrian Uber drivers, or any number of people in extremely precarious employment, they mean blokes with a Four Yorkshiremen sketch accent, even if they've got a property portfolio to make your eyes water.

15 hours ago, Loki said:

To bring it back to your original point, not only did Corbyn not unleash the youth vote as hoped, he got lapsed voters back into the polling booths to vote against him.

 

2017 saw the highest 18-24 turnout since 1992. Around 60% of that demographic voted Labour. There was definitely a youth vote, and it's foolish to pretend otherwise. It was split in 2019, for a lot of reasons, but it was still there - the problem is that the Tories were doing just as well among older demographics as Labour were among the young, and in an aging population that's an uphill battle.

 

I don't particularly like Corbyn being the centrepiece of this debate, because I think he was a deeply flawed leader, and it's unlikely he'd have ever been PM - though, equally, he shouldn't be subject to the treatment that he's receiving from the Labour Party at present.

My problem is that the Labour Party under Keir Starmer aren't a party that I would be comfortable voting for, in part because they're attempting to repeat the most morally bankrupt of the policies of New Labour - right-wing rhetoric on crime and immigration, scapegoating trans people, "Thatcher was right", pandering to the Murdoch press - with little, if any, of the social good that actually did come from Blair's premiership.

They are so singularly fixated on going scorched earth on all things Corbyn (and I genuinely believe that most of the general public don't care about Corbyn at all any more) that they have no moral stance or backbone to speak of any more. What is the point of a Labour Party that won't allow its MPs to stand on a picket line in support of striking workers, amid the most widespread course of industrial action in decades, let alone a Labour Party that won't commit to nationalising some of those same industries currently beset by strike action, despite the fact that it was in their last manifesto (allowing them to play the political game of imagined futures - "if you'd voted for us, this wouldn't have happened"), and was one of Starmer's leadership pledges? Similarly, Labour were pilloried for offering subsidised broadband in the 2019 election, yet a year later we're all working from home, home-schooling, and stuck indoors for months, and the leadership didn't have the guts to say, "look, we offered you this. We can offer you it again", because the fear of being tarred with the Corbyn brush is greater than the need to actually help working people. It's a fucking joke.

I no longer have any confidence that Labour will even win the next general election, or if they do, by anything more than a whisker - a far cry from the celebratory nonsense about how the Tories will be reduced to a handful of seats. A halfway competent Tory party will wipe the floor with this version of Labour. And all I ask is that Starmer and those close to him be held to the same standards that Corbyn was constantly being held to - that his electoral failures are seen as a damning indictment of his entire political project, not just an opportunity to bus in another robot in a red rosette. But we all know that won't happen.

[Carbomb]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

That's particularly if we don't skirt around one of the unspoken realities of "working class" politics in this country, as was evidenced by the amount of landlords with the "right" accent being used as exemplars of the working class in anti-Corbyn media profiles - when most people use it, it's a cultural identity, not an economic one, and it has the invisible word "white" in front of it. When people talk of Labour abandoning the working class, they don't mean Muslim cleaners, Syrian Uber drivers, or any number of people in extremely precarious employment, they mean blokes with a Four Yorkshiremen sketch accent, even if they've got a property portfolio to make your eyes water.

Akala talked about this on Question Time.

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

I don't particularly like Corbyn being the centrepiece of this debate, because I think he was a deeply flawed leader, and it's unlikely he'd have ever been PM - though, equally, he shouldn't be subject to the treatment that he's receiving from the Labour Party at present.

Agreed. Going back to the earlier discussions of electoral choice and the analogy of public transport, I voted for Corbyn because he brought a party of government the closest to my politics in over four bloody decades. I had no illusions that he would have been a particularly great PM in himself, but I do believe that he's the kind of guy who knows his limitations, and would have made full use of a cabinet and a government body. I also have a problem with his typical old left-wing mentality of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", associating with all sorts of objectionables just because they oppose the US and the West, even though a socialist would abhor them as well.

Have said it before on here quite a lot, but I still maintain that he achieved the most important thing in front-bench politics he was ever going to, which is to boot the door back open on socialist politics, long after we thought it had been shut. He got people talking about it, which means they'll eventually start thinking about it </sirhumphrey>, and in turn there will come new generations of socialists who will be much better and smarter than him, and who will be able to take on the deeply entrenched right wing thread that runs through the makeup of this country.

[BomberPat]

in many ways, one of his biggest weaknesses is simply having been on the Left for as long as he has, because of that "enemy of my enemy is my friend" aspect - for every time you can point to him being on the right side of history with protests against Apartheid or unjust wars, there's an example of him sharing a platform with a shady wrong'un. 

After the first local elections under Starmer, many of the people who would have called for Jeremy Corbyn's head if the same outcomes had happened on his watch started suggesting that okay, maybe Keir Starmer isn't the perfect candidate, but that he might be something of a bridge back to electability and respectability, that he's a step towards the future of the Labour Party. I honestly believe that it's a massive misstep, and that Corbyn was the bridge - he offered something genuinely ambitious and transformative (and, as you say, reintroduced the notion of socialism into the mainstream), but he wasn't the man to deliver it, in part because of the baggage that his long career in leftist politics has saddled him with.

The next step should have been a similar politics with a more palatable face, and I think a lot of my growing disdain for Starmer is because that's what he sold himself in his leadership pledges, and he repeatedly fails to live up to that. I find it especially egregious coming out of the pandemic when, for all its misery and uncertainty, there was at least a wave of optimism that it might ultimately be an opportunity to transform the way we live, work, and structure society, and it's been a genuinely depressing experience to see that conversation go nowhere, and a big part of that is on Labour having no message, no vision, and no sense of transformative politics. It's all well and good to say "vote for us to get rid of the Tories", but I'd like some sense that getting rid of the Tories is a meaningful act for anything more than the schadenfreude of seeing a "Portillo Moment", and will see any lasting improvement on our lives and society, rather than just a couple of years' respite until the next lot of pricks take over.

[Devon Malcolm]

45 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

I also have a problem with his typical old left-wing mentality of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", associating with all sorts of objectionables

 

21 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

in many ways, one of his biggest weaknesses is simply having been on the Left for as long as he has, because of that "enemy of my enemy is my friend" aspect - for every time you can point to him being on the right side of history with protests against Apartheid or unjust wars, there's an example of him sharing a platform with a shady wrong'un. 

Who are you both referring to?

[Keith Houchen]

51 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Akala talked about this on Question Time

Was going to post that clip!!  Love how windsock Chuck attached himself to it. I believe, shocking I know, the guy asking the question worked for the tories. 

[Carbomb]

9 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

 

Who are you both referring to?

Yusuf Al-Qaradawi is the first that comes to mind. 

I'm not saying that it justifies the shit-storm he got from the right-wing and its media; I'm saying it left him very open to attack, and needlessly so. I still voted for him, because I don't believe it makes him an antisemite, but I do believe it makes him stupid, both in terms of principle and in terms of tactical politics.