UK election INCOMING

[Stavros]

Perhaps you should be Stavros. In the Brexit thread less than 3 months ago you predicted confidently that Boris Johnson's days were numbered.

You make a fair point, but there was a time when it was argued that Johnson was so unpopular in the Parliamentary Party that he would never make it to the ballot in a leadership election, and as is often the case, I allowed my wishes to determine my claims.
So I was wrong at the time, but I am wrong on many issues.

With regard to your earlier point, Johnson is an opportunist. He was enraged when David Cameron became leader of the party because at Eton Johnson regarded Cameron as an irritating twerp, and thus made his decision to back the Leave campaign out of spite and for political one-upmanship. He now owns the Brexit he has never really thought about, and in my view when the honeymoon is over in his party, he will discover that the Conservatives remain as divided on Brexit as they always have been. The fault-line for him is now defined by the manner in which the UK exits the EU, and the possibility that the EU will force Johnson into 'interim arrangements' on trade which for some of his backbenchers will be 'Brexit in Name Only' until the full details of the Uk-EU trade deal are signed, which could and probably will take years.
Johnson doesn't want Brexit to be a major issue in British politics once the UK has left the EU in a legal sense, but he cannot in fact avoid it becoming a constant prick to the flesh because it is so wrapped up in jobs and the economy. He may have a large majority, but Johnson is a maverick politician with a short-temper and like the wind-up monkey in the White House prone to impulsive decisions that may yet weaken his position in the party he now leads.

But I have been wrong before, and I admit, I loathe and detest him so always think the worst.

[Jericho]

I know you are flattened by the result, but are you seriously unwilling to engage in self-examination even after a disaster of this scale? If the majority of Labour members are going to circle the wagons and direct the blame everywhere else than the party then I'm afraid you are likely to be in the same position in 5 years time.

Flattened...doesn't even come close.
Even my home town, with it's queues outside the foodbank, crumbling hospital, and tent city, turned blue.

It might be naive (I've been called worse), but we have missed the opportunity of a lifetime. Corbyn would have been the Atlee of our generation! (That should get Stav reaching for his pills ).

But you're right, it's time for introspection and change. Corbyn's one true flaw was he thought you could change people's minds by reasoning with them, but how do you reason with something like this?

a story today of someone saying they voted Tories cause "Labour aren't funding the NHS" and "The Tories will end the bedroom tax".

I don't know where the party's going to go from here, but, if it needs a ruthless cunt like Blair to win an election, it's not a party I'd want to be a part of. I might poke Stavros about his age sometimes, but maybe it's me that's the anachronism.

Maybe the Scots have the right idea, I dunno. I'm not big on independence but, Plaid Cymru have some good social policies.

As for Johnson, if he believes one tenth of the shite he spouts, I'd be majorly surprised.

[filghy2]

Corbyn would have been the Atlee of our generation!

As for Johnson, if he believes one tenth of the shite he spouts, I'd be majorly surprised.

I think Corbyn is more like the Michael Foot of our generation, and the Labour party has just gone round in a circle over the past 36 years. I doubt that he's as virtuous as you claim, but even if he was that's not sufficient - a leader needs to be politically savvy as well.

Johnson clearly does not believe most of what he says. As I understand it, the withdrawal agreement he made with the EU is essentially on the same terms that he and the hard-liners declared to be unacceptable under Theresa May. Yet now he is being hailed as a genius for breaking the deadlock on Brexit! I think Stavros is right - the difficulties have just been kicked down the road to the end of next year.

[broncofan]

Just to analogize I recall after John Kerry was defeated by George Bush in 2004 I was crushed. Obnoxious bigmouth Andrew Sullivan got on Bill Maher and told us the election was a referendum on basically everything we believed in. His message was self-serving since he never wanted anything anyone on the left wants and it was transparent.

So there will be some of that from people who didn't support Corbyn and just want to say "I told you so." My criticism is that the right-wing does blind tribalism better than the left. Many of Corbyn's policies were overshadowed by the manner in which they were advocated for by new media. A small group of very committed socialists advocated hard for his policies, were unable to ever brook dissent, and could be verbally abusive to those who were not far enough left. This can only work if there are enough people in your hardcore camp.

With the rise of blogs and other independent outlets does come the risk that people exploit a movement for their own popularity. Politics isn't sport, it can be entertaining but that's not the main object, and what's good for ratings and likes on social media doesn't always play in the election.

As for Corbyn, I always thought he was neither as good as his supporters thought nor as bad as his detractors claimed. My take is that he's basically honest, tries to do right, but is not especially charismatic nor good at articulating policies. Would he be the person you'd nominate to explain a comprehensive program that could improve people's lives? If we're fair I think not. Is he the person who you would trust to say or do the right thing in a difficult situation because he's a clear-thinker and decisive actor? Again, I don't think so.

[filghy2]

My criticism is that the right-wing does blind tribalism better than the left. Many of Corbyn's policies were overshadowed by the manner in which they were advocated for by new media. A small group of very committed socialists advocated hard for his policies, were unable to ever brook dissent, and could be verbally abusive to those who were not far enough left. This can only work if there are enough people in your hardcore camp.

That may be true, but I doubt that willingness to brook dissent has been any greater on the right. That's most obvious in relation to the Trump Republican party, but I think it's also true of the Conservative party since Johnson became leader - the pro-EU people seem to have been either pushed out or intimidated into silence. The right has been more effective in stifling internal dissent, and I think the main reason is the existence of a right-wing media apparatus that is able to feed disinformation to supporters and intimidate anyone who steps out of line. There is nothing equivalent on the left because it doesn't have ultra-rich backers like Murdoch and the Mercers who are willing to fund propaganda machines.

[broncofan]

That may be true, but I doubt that willingness to brook dissent has been any greater on the right.

One of the eternal frustrations of politics is that your candidate's adequacy often isn't judged by how they compare to their opponent but to an abstract ideal. When people criticized Hillary, I kept thinking, I agree but how is she worse in any of these aspects than Trump?

The right-wing does have a more powerful media machine, but they also seem to lose fewer people when they run hit campaigns on dissenters. I'm not as versed in political theory as you and some others but I do think when someone goes far enough left, they cross a threshold where they're not open-minded or evidence-based but become tribal and support a revolutionary ends justify the means politics. You get enough of these clowns together and it scares at least some people who want healthcare, a fairer tax system, civil rights.

Just to address an elephant in the room here, I'm sure I can't convince anyone Peejaye is the Labour everyman, but is he an outlier or aberration? In my view, he's the exact kind of abusive hobbyist Labour has attracted to its fold. Among his views:
1. Sadiq Khan is a centre-right Tory
2. George Galloway would make a great PM
3. Russia was not a good suspect for the Skripal poisoning
4. Trump may be better than Hillary (which he said during the 2016 cycle)

The new media I've referred to catered to these sort of views, withheld useful information, and would lambast and demonize anyone with a modicum of reason or sense. It wasn't so much that people were worried about left-leaning newspapers having a corporate filter but that they weren't tribal; they were not designed purely to antagonize political opponents, including people who otherwise would vote Labour.

Was it worse than the right? Probably not, but people on the right have a stronger stomach maybe.

[Stavros]

Broncofan, think of it in terms of a critique of power, where the established elite is rarely challenged, but historically has been by either the left or the extreme right. In reality, the three most significant Labour leaders all maintained the privileges and power and wealth of the establishment, by which in the U.K. we mean the Monarchy, Military, Church, Parliament and the Judiciary.
Labour Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald abandoned Labour in 1931, forming a 'National Government' with the Tories and a Liberals. Attlee introduced radical social legislation but much of it had emerged from a Labour-Liberal-Tory consensus earlier in the 1940s, and none of the established elites were threatened. Blair, as close to Murdoch as Thatcher, achieved successes in his first term but by the end was viewed as an establishment slave, with the extraordinary friendship with the neo-con US Republican Party.
Radical in tone, how much of a threat was Corbyn when John McDonnell claimed Labour would initiate a 'transformative revolution'? The truth is without power it was all stuff from a pamphlet that had no chance of shaking up the old order.
The tragic irony is that two men viewed as radicals-Boris Johnson and his American friend in the Whit House- are merely outliers of the same old establishment. Made up of billionaires, and old Etonians, they are frisky with the royals, and in the American case too close to weird so-called Christians who think Jews like The Kushners must either convert or be condemned to an eternity in hell. If you want the Johnson connection, his novel 'Seventy Two Virgins' depicts hook-nosed Jews controlling the media and the banks. Eat your heart out, Corbyn!
As Boris Johnson spends his Christmas on a private island in the Caribbean paid for by his billionaire chums, he basks in the votes of people for whom he has nothing but contempt while plotting a Brexit to benefit his backers. As with the American who calls his fellow citizens Human Scum, it is the people who voted for them who will lose the most.
How many more times can the people choose to be fooled? But will the left, so called, ever find the right amount of appeal for obtain power, and for once make real changes to the established bastions of the modern State?

[broncofan]

How many more times can the people choose to be fooled? But will the left, so called, ever find the right amount of appeal for obtain power, and for once make real changes to the established bastions of the modern State?

This is a good post and I do understand what you're saying. Every society should resist entrenched power, including privileges that inhere in being wealthy or powerful or having a certain social standing. To the extent we don't have a society without any wealth or class distinctions, a fair society would increase economic and social mobility so that opportunities exist for everyone and nobody is left out in the cold or playing with a deck stacked against them.

The issue I have with the last question you pose in particular is that I'm not sure the left can obtain power and make the kind of significant changes you call "real changes". One could always say that to the extent they are thwarted it is because people don't know what's in their own best interest or that the powerful have rigged the system, but it could be that people want their changes to be consistent, to avoid shaking up the social order too much, and want a piecemeal package that improves their lives.

It's a bit sad that I post on a thread about British politics and look for parallels to my own country because my references get rather narrow otherwise, but I think it's sort of like the dilemma Obama faced in his first term. When he passed Obamacare, it is a healthcare system that in Britain would have seemed cruel given the commitments you've made to your citizens, but in the U.S. it was a big step. As a result of it, everyone who worked for an employer with 20 or more employees ended up with health insurance. A lot of other aspects of it ended up sucking, but it was the only thing he had the political capital to pass. I look at part of Labour's manifesto and I don't see anything scary, but I do think the people heading the movement lost sight of what they had support for and were self-indulgent. Some of his prominent supporters were saying things like "I am literally a Communist", or "I can't wait to expropriate your wealth", and yes it's easy to say this is someone being glib or that he didn't sign off on the message, but it became unclear at some point whether his movement had consensus and what people would be signing up for if they supported him.

[Stavros]

"The issue I have with the last question you pose in particular is that I'm not sure the left can obtain power and make the kind of significant changes you call "real changes". One could always say that to the extent they are thwarted it is because people don't know what's in their own best interest or that the powerful have rigged the system, but it could be that people want their changes to be consistent, to avoid shaking up the social order too much, and want a piecemeal package that improves their lives."

-John Harris has written an interesting article today that addresses Labour failures, to convince the voters who should be their natural constituency to support them, to articulate a vision that does not reside firmly in the 19th and 20th centuries, that has no credible leaders. It is a crisis for the Left that has seen them lose power in the UK, the Netherlands, France and Italy, while in Germany the SPD is not seen as a spent force, but a party without an identity, as most of its policies were stolen by Angela Merkel, in addition weakening her CDU and giving a voice to more extreme elements on the Nationalist side of German politics.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/27/labour-party-leadership-keir-starmer-rebecca-long-bailey

I think the question is as Lisa Nandy put it when she said Labour must either change, or die. But this, to me suggests that what Labour wants cannot really be organically linked to its past, because the party was not only based on working class communities that have been shredded by the post-industrial wave, it also has a major problem if 'ethnic minorities' are its supporters because many of them have conservative rather than liberal views on marriage, sexuality, abortion, and above all education. I despair of the current situation in the UK where there is an absence of any deep and meaningful debate on what the curriculum for the 21st century should contain so that children in school today can make a success of their lives when they leave it.

The US has the same range of problems, the Democrats having lost so much to a 'populist' wave that, as in the UK has obsessions with immigration and immigrants -pretty incredible in the US given its history, but no less racist than it has always been-but there are significant differences. A Federal system means politics is more diffused in the US than it is in the UK, but may not prevent divisions there, as with the Confederate States re-emerging to repudiate the authority of the US Congress.
A key difference is that religion plays no role in UK politics where it appears to in the US. As I have pointed out before, there was a deep Christian base to the Labour and Socialist movement in the UK, if not before the 17thc Revolution, then emerging more clearly after it. Indeed, some of these non-conformist sects were instrumental in the creation of the US, but where religion has declined to a great extent in the UK, it seems to have grown stronger in the US, but far from being a collectivist movement whose moral foundations is a critique of capitalism and a belief in 'fare shares' through wealth re-distribution, your Christians seem to be moral bigots, more determined to control women's bodies and outlaw same-sex relations, and generally appreciate rather than condemn the violence of the State.
Either way, the left is in crisis because it cannot yet make sense of the way capitalism has changed since the 1970s, and cannot articulate an alternative that is credible and which people want, with leaders they can trust. And, into this, comes Climate Change, a global problem that over-rides party loyalty, but in the US is considered a litmus test of intelligence or stupidity, with science the sacrificial victim of US Government.
You have to wonder how anyone can take seriously the hysterical rant of the President's 'Spiritual adviser' -asking God to make pregnant women miscarry!- and then wonder if in fact people do, because if so, America is in deeper trouble than I thought. But if the Democrats have a credibility problem, how did people like this ever get close to power, and is this their last gasp?

There is a longer version of White's rant here-

https://www.washingtonpost.com/relig...arry-metaphor/