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

[Hannibal Scorch]

I’ve “acquired” a few England flags and a Union Jack so far. Who doesn’t love a freebie

[SuperBacon]

4 hours ago, LaGoosh said:

He won't care and neither will his supporters. There's no "gotcha" moment when dealing with the far right. Pointing out their bullshit and hypocrisy doesn't do anything. Their hate is far too strong for any of that to work. 

 

4 hours ago, The King Of Swing said:

Like Farage, his supporters don't actually believe in free speech. So as stated, there is no gotcha. 

The media should still absolutely bring it up though.

 

2 hours ago, Carbomb said:

The problem with Farage supporters is, again, the Benjamin Franklin adage that you can't reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

You absolutely can, and should, point out all of his hypocritical stances at every opportunity.

This is a small pool of people and you cab always say "well that's Green Party PR puff" but it still shows that when his bullshit is pointed out, it can work.

 

[DavidB6937]

Those are exactly the people that Farage knows to target. Those who he only needs to win over on one point and distract them with something shiny and they won't care to look into anything else he's doing.

Obviously that's not to say there isn't a ton of genuinely shit people out there but there's just as many naive and easily swayed ones unfortunately.

[organizedkaos]

Slowly changing the conversation helps though.  People talk about echo chambers cos generally there are certain beliefs and tenets that get repeated and held to be true within a community. Me, one day telling a person that Nigel Farage doesn't have their interests at heart has to go up against a million small conversations where he's mentioned as salt of the earth man of the people.

However, say a few people repeat the zero hour contract thing over the next few weeks. It gets mentioned more, reflected on etc Potentially slowly that becomes recognised, repeated and slowly changes things.

I dunno. Maybe that's optimistic, or naive. However "these people cannot be changed, this is just how it is" continues to fuck us because its both a completely fatalist perspective and also because it continues to emphasise a divide through which little can be communicated 

[Chest Rockwell]

Fair play to you if you've got the energy for that. I'd need some serious green flags that the person is even listening and acting in good faith to bother trying.

[LaGoosh]

Yeah, talking to these people is the most infuriating and depressing thing imaginable. It's like talking to 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Just utterly steadfast and beholden to their insane hateful views to the point that there's a pride in their own total ignorance. If you want to try go ahead but I've no faith in talking to these people.

An aside, a few months back I saw an interview on Sky News with a group of Reform voters and one of them was saying "this country needs to go back to the way it was" and when the interviewer asked him in what way he looked confused, stumbled for words then eventually said "there used to be pubs and betting shops everywhere but now they're all gone!". Firstly, the interview was taking place literally in front of a pub. Secondly, betting shops are the one thing that don't seem to be vanishing from high streets - they're fucking everywhere!

[organizedkaos]

Rock and a hard place. May you be cursed to converse with hateful idiots or may you be cursed to endure the perspective of hateful idiots.  I'm not saying I'm out there chatting away all the time, just that I feel you've got to have the perspective change at that level is possible. Cos otherwise it's just anger and sadness that's left.

As pointed out It's all just sound bites and nonsense lines which means they are fundementally flimsy arguments. My favourite recent one has been "this country is becoming like North Korea". Ah yes North Korea which is famously known for it's open boarders and diverse multicultural communities.

 

[BomberPat]

14 hours ago, Carbomb said:

The problem with Farage supporters is, again, the Benjamin Franklin adage that you can't reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. Words and PR campaigns aren't going to fix this; experiential situations will. The only thing that will blunt the ire of the working class (and therefore the majority) of the far right and their supporters is a material improvement in their general quality of life, e.g. their money going further, their bills being lower, their health being seen to quickly, their public services being more efficient, their children getting decent education enough for them to earn a living, and a chance to buy their own home (or, at least freedom from the fear of homelessness). 

I think this is broadly true for a section of Farage's audience, but not the majority. I'm an old Marxist, and tend to think that class is everything, but these days age and education are much bigger indicators of voting intention - there's obviously intersection with class there, but there's also a lot of Reform voters who are retired or near retirement, who own their home, who are comfortably sitting on more money than I will ever see in my life, despite me being in a pretty solidly middle class career. A lot of Reform voters are solidly middle class, and it's no surprise that their rise has gone hand-in-hand with the near total collapse of the Conservative Party - most of their current supporters are disgruntled Tories, and the main reason I remain cautiously optimistic that Reform won't win a general election is that the media loves a status quo, and the Tories have the establishment credentials and long-term investment, and a lot of support will pivot back to the Tories come election season. I don't think that's necessarily a better outcome - I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with a Tory/Reform coalition, and part of me still wonders how much Reform is a long-term project to bring Farage into a high-level position in a Conservative government through the backdoor.

I just don't think it's particularly useful talking about winning over the far-right by improving the lot of the working class. Obviously improving the lot of the working class should be the goal of any government, and especially a Labour government, regardless, but as a strategy to oppose a party like Reform, it's making the mistake of characterising the working class as an angry mob who are only ever a grievance or two away from fascism.

If we look back to the riots of last year, and reactions to the flag craze at the moment, I think what does risk alienating the white working class is how many reactions to it were middle class, ostensibly liberal people making jokes about how everyone involved is a benefit-scrounging chav with two GCSEs. When I was around sixteen, I remember saying something about "Chavs", and a youth worker turned to me and said, "now Pat, I'm not hearing you of all people slag off working class kids, am I?", and I bear that in mind a lot. There were articles in the right-wing press bemoaning the lot of "middle class rioters" who were "drawn into" last year's riots; plenty of the people interviewed as representative of those rioters were seen as working class purely for being "bloke-coded" - they had the right haircut, a tracksuit, an accent, and a Fred Perry shirt - but a bit of background research showed that they were business owners, or came from generational wealth. It's all indicative of how bad we are at talking about class if anything!

 

I think the unfortunate problem with Reform and the far-right globally at the moment is that they have managed to move beyond class and financial insecurity, but how we talk about them hasn't. Something you hear a lot from the US is "the cruelty is the point", and that's increasingly the case here. A lot of the far-right don't bother hiding behind questions of finance or job security any more, they just talk about getting rid of foreigners. Plenty of them would happily take a cut to their own living standards if someone else has it worse. And how do you fight against a world-view like that? 

[Carbomb]

56 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I just don't think it's particularly useful talking about winning over the far-right by improving the lot of the working class. Obviously improving the lot of the working class should be the goal of any government, and especially a Labour government, regardless, but as a strategy to oppose a party like Reform, it's making the mistake of characterising the working class as an angry mob who are only ever a grievance or two away from fascism.

I apologise for having given that impression, because that wasn’t how I was trying to characterise the working class. They're not only a grievance or two away; they have a litany of grievances from decades of the political establishment and the upper classes steadily clawing away all the benefits they ever had from society, and not providing any meaningful replacements for them. Blair had all the power and time he needed to reverse the damage from eighteen years of Tory shit, and he chose to continue the Thatcherian narrative, pandering to the middle classes, handing over unprecedented and obscene power to the landlords and property developers, and only throwing comparative sops to the working class. The working class have been mobilised by the far right using a distortion of three eras' worth of inequity.

Also, it's not so much that they're embracing full-on fascism, but that they've been swayed to cheer on the actual fascists who are promising them a solution (even though it's a lie), based on the age-old and tried-and-tested playback of blaming the foreigner. 

I get that a lot of Tory and Reform voters are middle class, but I would argue that the numbers speak for themselves: they can't do anything without the exponentially larger working class to give them the votes they need.

[JNLister]

I repost this a lot, and it feels like a lifetime ago, but it's still one of my favourite TV political moments. The channels which commission the exit poll are allowed to tell the TV anchor the result just before 10pm so they can think how to summarize it and what questions to ask the studio guests.

CNN, not so much 

 

[FLips]

Turns out having a ring doorbell isn’t as much of a bane as I expected. I could see the Reform UK fella get ignored and walk away from the comfort of sitting taking a shit.

Not to stereotype but he looked as you’d expect.

Edited September 17, 2025 by FLips

[CTXRussomark]

"Your Party" seems to have imploded already - Zarah Sultana today sent out, via the official members mailing list, a link to a website allowing people to sign up as official party members. Raised over £20k in a matter of hours apparently (*EDIT* I'm now seeing it reported that it was 20k sign-ups, which would mean significantly more based on the different payment options - at the very least £100k+).  Only problem is Corbyn and others released a subsequent statement saying it was completely unauthorised and people should cancel any direct debits they've set up (which weren't even an option - it was card payments only).  Everyone immediately assumed some kind of hack or scam but then Sultana released a statement saying it was her after all, and she did it because the rest of the party were being sexist and keeping her (and others) out of the decision making process.  So someone has a chunk of peoples' money which may or may not make them members of a party that doesn't officially exist yet. 

An absolute shitshow. 

Edited September 18, 2025 by CTXRussomark
Correction

[DavidB6937]

Sounds like a quick way of raisin some money. Sadly not surprising in the currant climate.

[Chest Rockwell]

Fucking hell. State of politics in this country. Just had a look at the emails.. first one signed off "In Solidarity,
Your Party", second one signed off 

In solidarity,

Jeremy Corbyn MP

Ayoub Khan MP

Adnan Hussain MP

Iqbal Mohamed MP

Shockat Adam MP

 

Very explicitly leaving only Zarah off.

Edited September 18, 2025 by Chest Rockwell

[JLM]

So depressing. 20,000 members and quite possibly £1m raised in no time at all, only for all of the optimism to be sucked out of the room by this bollocks. Grim. 

Edited September 18, 2025 by JLM