The reason Labour lost is because they have a Sir as a leader who failed to prosecute Saville and allegedly failed to prosecute the Rochdale grooming gangs and couldn’t wait to take the knee for a career black criminal in USA who was resisting arrest and was killed, unfortunately by a police officer even tho’ hundreds of blacks kill other blacks in America and nothing is said about that of course. He is a London lawyer and has no connection with the British working/middle classes he’s supposed to represent. He wants to re-join the EU even tho’ the people voted out. He has to go.
So it is Jimmy Saville that has brought down the Labour Party? I don’t think so. The average potential Labour voter neither knows or cares about that. They just want a patriotic working class party who will restore standards in schools, sort out the NHS mess, and generally have a social conscience. And lower tax on the lower paid.
Proportionally they pay the most tax. VAT, compulsory council tax, TV tax, fuel etc on say 20k net to spend takes you into precariat territory, on 40k it affects your life quality and on 100k or 500k its just an irritant.
Yes. Although I pay a chunk of direct tax (on 21kpa) the effect of the cost of teeth, glasses, and prescriptions (no longer free on this income), as well as those you mention, are quite deadening.
Social democracy or the Welfare state, i.e. Labour in the case of the UK, was a proposal to mitigate some of the problems of liberalism-capitalism through payoffs to select dissidents while maintaining the essential features of capitalism unchanged. This doesn’t seem to work any more, if it ever did. The desire for freedom and equality among the proles will have to take another route. Meanwhile expect the politics of tribalism to continue and increase.
Though the route that the Conservative government decided to take to deal with covid favoured the public sector-who are assumed to be more likely to vote Labour over the private sector who favour Conservative. The public sector could then urge caution while sabotaging the government policy.So to some extent who you vote for doesn’t matter if they are not in charge.
So for example we have a home secretary who can only say how appalled she is-but does nothing about it-so ‘souind and fury signifying nothing’ wheras the voters thought they might get a return to Thatcher, and will soon be disappointed if Tories carry on like Labour-Lite
You make a good point about the burden of non-progressive taxes lower down the pay scale, but you’d be surprised to learn how painful is the income tax burden for someone on 100k; proportionately way higher than the comfortable middle classes (40-60k) and definitely more than an “irritation”.
They pay tax but they get most of it back via in-work benefits. However that does not mean that they don’t care about standards in schools and the NHS.
The idea that Labour is capable of restoring standards in any area of life, or of sorting out the NHS or anything else, is patently absurd. The same applies to the Tories.
Ex-Labour voters in the North care vary much about Rochdale, and Rotherham, and the part that the Labour party and a certain former DPP played in trying to cover them up.
Yes, that rings true. Labour is associated – rightly or wrongly – with a tendency to tolerate, for the sake of keeping the peace, that which the majority find unspeakably foul.
The Tories are often accused of Islamaphobia. I have a hunch that every time that accusation is made it causes a vote to leave Labour and migrate to the Tories.
Labour are associated – again, rightly or wrongly – with a tendency to want to shut people’s mouths, and keep them shut, when it comes to any discussion of the incompatibility of values that have caused such division in this country, and which are probably endemic to a much larger undercurrent than is acknowledged.
Dominic Sandbrook places this problem as starting in1968, with Labour’s response the the ‘ROB’ speech by Powell, each step since then has been further and further away from the working class and their concerns.
I think the average Brit whose daughter was raped by a bunch of pedophile Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims do care but get no help from the authorities and are told to shut up by Labour MPs for the sake of community cohesion.
Their only push back is at the ballot box.
When I mentioned KS to my mother earlier this week, and also on previous occasions, her immediate response was first Saville and then Rochdale.
Also the lower paid do not pay any taxes in any material sense
It seems that KS is not the only one out of touch.
Eh?? Labour is to blame for Sir Jimmy?? Did not the Blessed Margaret entertain the old molester several times at Chequers and get him his secular knighthood, in the teeth of opposition from the Civil Service? Sir Jimmy was a rare showbusiness Thatcher fan. And it was Pope St John Paul who gave him his Papal Knighthood, so there are more than enough paedo enablers to go round.
Probably not enough to go to court on, though rumours had been around for years. But Savile’s own 1970s autobiography boasted that he had slept with 2,500 women….which might have convinced any reputable politician, especially an allegedly “Conservative” prime minister, to keep her distance.
Savile Probably had Matthew harding Killed 1996 Helicopter crash ,He was A friend of Jill Dando &was going to go live with A BBC Paedophile list,Same for Jill dando in April 1999, A Serbian assassin, ,i dont think so..?
There we go again. Blame those long dead and long long dead, for the actions they took. Saville was feted throughout the country for his good works. England did more than any country to stop the slave trade. So blame all our ills on them then.
And did you push for honours for CFC or their boys club who apparently are a “separate entity ” or just brush it under the carpet as “enablers” do the world over but especially in the Church of Rome.
Case in point – will be interesting to observe the Batley & Spen by-election, where the utterly dismal MP (Tracy Brabin – now the newly elected W Yorks Mayor) is savagely unpopular with constituents for her total lack of support for the teacher on the receiving end of the ‘blasphemous’ lessons protest.
Albireo Double
3 years ago
I agree with much of the analysis, but the preferences of this “Cameron-former-speechwriter” are very clear, and his distaste for the new zeitgeist pulsates like a distress flare throughout, as he clutches to a few planks of wood in the stormy sea, hoping that the twisted bits of sinking wreckage will somehow metamorphose into a shiny new ship called “HMS Centre Left”, and carry him back to his safe life.
Ian. All of this is happening because the people (the vast majority of the people – let’s not label them as particular party voters or by class) have had enough.
They (we) have spent 3 decades being patronised, insulted, condescended to, and talked down to, by a cross-party political grouping, (styled as “elite” only by itself), but clearly identifiable as metropolitan, liberal, wealthy, and finally now, no-longer-complacent. (you).
It is you lot, not “Labour” or “The Left” against whom the current revolt is happening, and will continue to rage. You should expect at least another 30 years of this. As long as it takes for you all to stop describing us as racist, populist, gullible, “right wing”, xenophobic, or any other “phobic” – and then some.
Yes, Labour is almost certainly a deserving early casualty, hopefully dead for good – with its original purpose (honourably) fulfilled, but now completely surplus to requirements. – the “dinosaur” that you mention.
We need an opposition. But it will need to be something completely new. and probably (to your horror) from the political right of Boris and Co. with their easy-going social liberalism.
We also need a new realisation from our self-regarding, self-absorbed, complacent, stuck-in-a-rut journalists. They (you) need to join us in the 2020’s, and completely re-boot your entire worldview and thought process. It’s going to be hard for you all. But we don’t care, because you all richly deserve the ongoing hard boot up the backside that you are receiving.
Journos and Politicos, We bid you welcome to your (self-imposed) future. Say hello to the rest of your life. We hope that you will enjoy it.
That is sort of what happened in the US to produce Trump. There were revolts on the Left and the Right, but only the one on the Right was effective. There will be other, more competent and focused Trumps along, and I am doubtful whether you will all be as pleased as you seem to be now.
Trump Was NOT left or Right,he annoyed The Globalists,Greens, career politicians, built A wall, helped black,hispanic, Blue collar workers..No wonder you keep losing,Also mainstream Media hated lied about him..Trump is primarily A 3 times,maybe soon 4, divorced business man
Well said. Nothing shows better how out-of-touch IB is than this line: “as the United States veers towards social democracy under its latest president.” The Democrats are going for full-on Marxism, which is where “social democracy” will always end up if unchecked at the ballot box. (And they know how to “win” elections now, without winning voters.)
Andy Yorks
3 years ago
Maybe Labour’s problem is two fold. First, as Shirley Williams once observed, today the ‘haves outweigh the havenots’. And secondly Labour has been taken over by middle class professionals.
There is that lovely line in Brideshead Revisited where Bridie is describing his future wife, Mrs Musprate, describing her ‘as a woman of high moral principle, fortified by all the prejudice of the middle classes’. In a way that describes Starmer. He bends the knee to Marxists but wouldn’t respect the Referendum result, no matter how he wanted to dress it up. He thinks people in Hartlepool and all points North are stupid, xenophobic bigots etc, etc, etc and then he wonders why we wont vote for him and his ilk. A bit of selfawareness would go a long way.
But unless Labour acts fast and reconnects with ordinary people and THEIR concerns it will find its vote will collapse just like it did in Scotland and just like PASOK’s did in Greece. So beware Starmer.
Well said. However, I think one should not point the finger too much at Starmer personally as he is in an impossible position. As Ian Birrell rightly says, parties of the traditional centre-left all across Europe are struggling – and failing – to keep their historical support.
George Glashan
3 years ago
let the Labour Party die, the battles it was created to fight are long gone. The future is about democracy versus technocracy, immigration, unstable employment, declining populations. It has nothing to say on these, at least nothing the voting public wants to hear. Let it die so that something appropriate for our times can take its place. Like Fraser Bailey says, its now a bloated cash cow for parasitic middle managers to leech from.
I agree Labour is finished but the natural successors of blind political hate, color prejudice and envy are the greenies. Once we see what they are like (Think the Black Hundreds or Bolshiviks) we’ll be begging for cuddly old Labour with its racism and grooming gangs.
If you think those who will take advantage of racism and envy and other destructive forms of tribalism are all in one party, group, region, or class, I think you’re going to be unpleasantly surprised.
Eating a big slice of humble pie would be job 1, following by a sustained programme of not making it obvious you despise great portions of your own voters while expecting them to place their crosses next to your candidate when next at the ballot box.
When it comes to cottoning onto the very simple idea of insulting your voters not being the best electoral strategy – honestly – pigeons learn faster.
Even if Labour does have a good think and comes back with a coherent vision and a decent programme, it is going to take a very long time for people to trust again.
I think that makes sense. Though I think most of the insults attributed to Labour are perceived rather than actual.
But insulting your voters sometimes works. After all who could win the Red Wall after saying: If he is blue collar, he is likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment? Families on lower incomes the women have absolutely no choice but to work, often with adverse consequences for family life and society as a whole – in that unloved and undisciplined children are more likely to become hoodies, NEETS, and mug you on the street corner?
Children of working mothers are ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children who in theory will be paying for our pensions?
Mr Johnson.
As we’ve learned from the past few weeks, trying to use anything that Johnson has (or may have) said to discredit him works about as well as a chocolate fireguard. Voters price in his flippancy and don’t hold it against him – especially since he is delivering on other policies which are important to them like Brexit and the vaccine rollout. He is the Mr. Teflon of UK politics.
“Price in”…. thats a great phrase/metaphor.
It makes me think of the Democrats constantly trying to raise the issue of Trump’s personality failings, as if his voters had not already noticed, and discounted them.
Thanks! Alas, I can’t claim credit for it, as I picked the phrase up from somewhere else. But I like it, as choosing who to vote for really is like going to market and weighing all the options to try and get yourself the best deal. Perhaps this is a perspective Labour should try and take to heart instead of taking their voters/buyers for granted.
As an active member of the London Labour Party through the 1980s and 1990s, I’m afraid the only part of “not making it obvious you despise great portions of your own voters” they ever managed was “not making it obvious”. The Blair Babes and the hereditory Labour bigwigs (Mandelson, Toynbee) despised most of the other members of the party, never mind the voters.
Andy Paul
3 years ago
The Labour Party is now the party of the social liberals who regard the attachment to nation as xenophobic, who want to erase its culture and traditions and despise all those such as the voters of Hartlepool who stand against them and their year zero approach. The Labour Party is a victim of its own loathing of people and nation.
George Bruce
3 years ago
a horribly tough stance on immigration, sparking justified outrage by stripping even Syrian refugees of residency rights and telling them to go back to Damascus.
Do not worry, Ian, it is one thing to tell an illegal immigrant or an asylum-seeker to go home, it is quite another to get them to go!
As has been said, it is not over until the illegal immigrant or asylum-seeker wins.
I am sure some of those told to go home will be around to make appearances in the less politically correct news sources in future for their unorthodox contributions to Denmark.
If Denmark ceases to be tough on immigration it will no longer be Denmark. It’s as simple as that. The population is only about 5 million, and it already has a few hundred thousand who have been living off welfare for years, with no intention of integrating.
Exactly,
And its already seen such hostility, In Sweden welfare cosseted migrant kids go round in gangs and pick single younger Swedes to rob, and even urinate on and film at promote on social media.
When the left applaud the welfare model of Scandinavia, they forget to mention the homogeneity of the population. Denmark has woken up, watching Sweden commit slow suicide.
Indeed. And if you wish to see what that suicide will look like take a glance at Pew Research’s analysis of Islam in Europe and its projections to 2050. Sobering stuff.
This writer of this essay speaks of the Danish Social Democrats’ success ‘in spite of’ their ‘horribly tough stance on immigration’.
That is exactly the stance desired by a large majority in most European countries and certainly in the United Kingdom.
As long as (a) the Labour Party, (b) most media commentators and (c) the Conservative Party perceive matters in the way this author does, the Labour Party is dead and shortly will be buried, then it will be followed by the Tories, who talk tough on immigation and crime but don’t deliver, who govern in the interests of big money (not true free enterprise); and at last the media folk may begin to have a glimmering of just how out of touch THEY TOO are with the public they address.
Labour is not only a 50-years-out-of-date dinosaur but is going nowhere but backwards in its beyond-the-pale vehement hatred towards the mass of ordinary people, having completely adopted the Left backlash of ‘identity politics’, that began about a century ago with deeming ‘the workers’ supposedly ‘repressed’ by ‘capitalism’. This utter bunkum was a dumb plot to try to explain away why Marxist prediction was hopelessly awry — the workers in ‘advanced capitalist’ countries didn’t revolt yet feudal Ruskies did. This has developed into man-hating extreme feminism, and (through the Left in the USA co-opting the civil rights and Stonewall movements), white-hating and heterosexual-hating. ‘The worker’ has been ludicrously retrospectively stereotyped as having three dimensions of oppressiveness (sexism, racism and homophobia), to make them a replacement for ‘the boiss’ as the new hate target of the Left, which has also completely changed its notion of the state from ‘the boss’ friend’ to ‘agent of social change’. It’s the biggest political fraud in history. Labour is going to die, along with the also ‘identity politics’ totalitarian Lib Dems and the hardly less ‘woke’ Conservatives. A massive political realignment is occurring and this has to be reflected in political parties sooner or later, rather than political parties being a drag on political realignment.
I agree in general with your view but I cannot see political realignment as the answer. It will bring more of the same. We need a state that has limited power over us that it should not matter who we vote for. Before that will happen we need to learn how to think and considering how many think we can control the climate with carbon dioxide we going in the wrong direction. Imbecility rules.
It’s imbecility indeed. The nonsense notion of man-made climate change is the apotheosis of ‘identity politics’ hatred towards the masses. The degree of state power is of course a key political question and part of the realignment. A Main Reform platform is massive simplification of tax & regulations and abolishing quangos.
I agree with you that we need a smaller state , but obviously all those people employed by it aren’t going to say ‘you’re so right-give me my P45’ are they?
See my numerous posts,I mostly Agree ..Although Taking An East German term ”We need to change the electorate?” to get results we want..
Anthony Lewis
3 years ago
Delicious watching Naga squirm on BBC News this morning – taking the knee clearly loses you votes – go woke go broke. It’s astounding how the media are not asking the right questions – the focus of the cognitive educated urban elite on woke issues does not have any traction with normal voters – how many times do the voters have to provide shock results like this for the commentariat to ‘get it’
The voters have to ‘disappear’ the legacy parties. Then the commentariat will ‘get it’; for THEY TOO are so out of touch with ordinary citizens’ concerns that nothing less than that biggest electric cattle-prod shock will induce connection with the thinking of the human majority.
Labour’s problem is it hates the working class but needs them to get them voted into power.
What Blair did was cunning. He presided over the post Thatcher years and took over where Kinnock had left off preparing the ground for his 3rd way champaign socialism and increasing immigration where the owners of the means of production could get weak, non unionised cheap compliant immigrant labour and who were prepared to live 6 or 7 to a room and keep the landlord petty burgoise happy so they could charge higher rents. Remember he got rid of Clause 4.
The interview with Lord Green exposed it all and where no one was asked about a radical change of the UK demographic make up in British society.
Labour’s loyal working class support was being overlooked and under represented in favour of a bunch of illegal immigrants with demands that their religion and culture get preference over the indigenous working class. Too much, hence the push back at the ballot box. Starmer is another Blair, even a lawyer who did nothing for the working class and their kids when they were groomed by Muslim grooming gangs and even looked the other way over the Savile case when he was Director of Public Prosecution Service.
Last edited 3 years ago by Clem Alford
Nick Taylor
3 years ago
I live in the northern towns and I have many friends who fit the category of working class and traditional Labour voters but who now vote Tory. Whenever I have challenged them in the last few weeks about them still voting Tory – they mention one name Corbyn – like Banquo’s ghost his name resides top of their memories. They have no interest in public ownership, when questioned about sleaze will cite the debacle at Liverpool city council and say they are just as bad as each other (in fact note why Hartlepool is a vacancy), are more interested in immigration and ascribe the covid recovery to a man who they use the first name of Boris – they trust him for some weird reason and see him as one of us – remarkable I know but Johnson does binary and simplicity well and the law specialist (they call him Starmer not Sir Keir not Keir Starmer but Starmer) on the other side does not. So, yes I am sorry to say Labour is dead as it is too divided, too complex, cannot take feedback and act on it. It is clueless and goodness help us all – there is one person they do respect from the Labour side and they use his name with respect – Andy Burnham. Good guy, one of us etc.
Remind your friends that Burnham presided over MidStaffs as Health Minister.
And he also wants to dismantle PREVENT.
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
As everyone got to have a vote and there was a need to represent the working man, the Labour Party came along to do just that. Then came unions and the NHS (a fabulous creation designed to allow everyone equal right to good health) as well as an increase in the standard of living of working people.
Now, the NHS is a failure because people have abused their own bodies, creating an impossible health situation. Unions only really exist for government employees. Genuinely poor people have almost ceased to exist although there will be many who have caused their own poverty by not being able to handle the incoming benefits (buying a new smartphone before food for the children, for example).
So, who should Labour represent? The answer is that the drive to equality has led to many highly educated people who still cling onto the belief that they are working class. They believe they can help poor people by applying outdated theories, like Socialism or Communism, by making everybody so equal that no-one takes responsibility – except themselves because only their view is clear and correct. Sound familiar?.
Behind all of this, the true aim and method of creating total equality is decarbonisation. When there is no carbon, travel will be difficult, commuting from the city chaos to nice houses in the country will be awkward. Why is decarbonisation so clever when Greece and Turkey are fighting over natural gas rights which will make them rich for 100 years?
The NHS illustrates why socialism will always fail. It replaces personal responsibility and freedom with government support and control. The Labour Party might be seen as failing to deliver on socialist policies but after Blair the Conservatives adopted New Labour policies and the voters have put their faith in them and now Boris to make socialism work. Socialism never worked anywhere.
What are you talking about,the NHS is fine.what Britain needs is an industrial policy to catch up with the rest of the world.
As for socialism and labour,renationalising our water and rail utilities makes 100% sense.
Our much vaunted private sector banking system failed in 2008.
Surely that’s pretty indicative that neoliberal financial capitalism doesn’t work.
Yours is a pretty superficial analysis. Yes, banks were clearly to blame but they were regulated by the FSA, who were aware of the issues but, fatally, took no action. Had they done so when the problems surrounding AIG first appeared, the damage to UK banking could have been substantially mitigated.
Er – that’s doubly superficial, surely? The banks were very very bad but it’s not their fault, the teacher should have told them off sooner…..in reality, the banks were completely focused on their own profits at the expense of even their own best customers, knew exactly what they were doing (although, hilariously, not how they were doing it), and then got away with it pretty well scot free. There was no lasting ‘damage to UK banking’ – ask G Osborne, or check out the 2018/9 bonus rounds. The damage was to their customers.
Saul D
3 years ago
A current learning example would be the Madrid elections, also this week. On the leftwing side, PSOE (ruling Spanish Labour party) was pipped by Mas Madrid (a local and practically focused leftwing party), with Podemos (now drifting into theoretical politics) itself running way back.
Three leftwing parties. But the one that came out strongest was the one that has a reputation of being more practical on the ground – more worried and more responsive to local issues.
The part of modern leftwing parties that seems to be missing is the old sense of mutualism – doing things for each other, pride in local community and achievements. Togetherness for mutual benefit. Divisiveness, labelling, segregating, placing theory over practice is killing leftwing movements.
So if there was an idea, it would be stop demanding and starting doing. For example, don’t just demand more childcare, but actually create a volunteer-led playgroup. Don’t waste effort trying to rename a park to make it more politically correct, use that effort to update the children’s play area. From the doing comes respect and trust, and from trust will come votes.
Last edited 3 years ago by Saul D
Nick Faulks
3 years ago
How am I supposed to take a supposedly dispassionate analysis seriously when elected governments whose policies the writer does not favour are described as “horrible” and “dreadful”?
There is far too much of this on Unherd.
Noticeable too that anybody the MSM doesn’t like is labelled “far right”. Pretty much anybody who doesn’t fully subscribe to the PRO-EU, SJW, unlimited immigration agenda is basically classified as a brownshirt.
I supported U because Freddie Sayers had done some excellent interviews on Covid, not seen elsewhere. He is a very good interviewer. Unfortunately the tenor of the site as a whole is most definitely British Establishment: Royalty, COE, the good the English have done the world, etc. I do not find in the writers the ability to question, be skeptical and try to understand the other side… Giles was blathering on yesterday about Moses, not in terms of a myth, but as though he were a bloke you might meet at the pub… blinkers! Good journalism is good skepticism, even about one’s own ideas.
I was quite invested in this article until I came across the ‘dreadful Trump’ comment, and after that couldn’t bring myself to read any more of what the writer was selling.
Yeah! I also felt a jolt of conscience when the writer masquerading as a new radical journalist lazily repeats the elitist denigration of a genuinely radical President……….
David Owsley
3 years ago
In Spain they actually have parties that could correctly be called ‘right wing’. In the UK this isn’t the case: the current Conservative Party is further left than Callaghan before Saint Margaret so no need for a wimpy woke centre left coloured red.
Don’t be fooled by MSM propaganda.The only party that could rightly be called “right” in Spain is a small party, relatively recent, whose numbers remained much the same in the Madrid elections. The equivalent of the Conservatives (Tories) in Spain (PP) are also a centre/liberal party. I suspect that this is the crux of the problem for the left in general. Conservative parties have moved into what was once their turf and in response they have moved further out on a limb, leaving their electorate behind. Moral posturing and lazy ideology will no longer cut it. The people of the region of Madrid have overwhelmingly voted for a hard-working, effective, efficient, daring Presidenta. Her own party (PP) didn’t fully appreciate what they had in her until quite recently! She is not an ideologue. I see a small – tiny – light at the end of a very long dark tunnel, worldwide, starting in Madrid.
sprog99
3 years ago
The most oppressive government since Oliver Cromwell, worldwide attacks on free speech, a crazed billionaire threatening to block out the sun and the answer to Labour’s relevance problem is to Go Green?
Sigh eye roll,
Danish immigration policies aren’t outrageous but entirely appropriate when you look at the complete breakdown of society in Sweden and their high crime rate.
Ian birrell is Pathetic.
Agreed. Add to that the fact that the native population in Denmark is only 5.8 million. They could quickly be overwhelmed by what seems to be a never-ending stream of migrants from e.g. the Middle East.
Julian Rigg
3 years ago
Is Labour dead? YES. Labour has no idea how this came to be or how to fix it. Or it refuses to acknowledge the fact. Focusing on London centric minority issues will not get you elected.
But despite a year long campaign against him in the Tory press Sadiq Khan is projected to comfortably win in London which will maintain life in the Labour party.
Khan or ”The hood” is damaged goods,Only loonies rate him, after yet another London bridge Terrorist attack,his response Was ”Its part &parcel of living in a capital city” The invisible man will surely get his comeuppance .Saying dopey flannel after Knife crime soar 65% London Is Safer than at anytime for 20 years,sheer bilge…
They are ”Sleeping’having fallen off their perch?…polly toynbee..polly?..
Johannes Kreisler
3 years ago
the far-right Marine Le Pen
??? What tosh. Marine Le Pen and the RN is the textbook centrist party, strongly socialistic on economy matters. Birrell must be mistaking her with her father, whom Marin explicitly distanced herself / her party a long time ago. Lazy journalism.
She has Moved to Right of centre, Unfortunately she gets beaten by establishment parties,this time ”Fishing” Frexit could swing it in remarkable times ..Macron is the Moron,despite Mainstream Worship…
AC Harper
3 years ago
The Conservatives, and the Tories before them, switch major polices every now and again to remain relevant. Boris and Brexit is the most recent example.
Labour switch client groups every now and again to remain relevant, but fail.
Labour is now a Zombie party, stumbling around but gradually decaying. It will take more than a new leader and a fresh motto to revivify the Party. Perhaps it would be kinder to end the Party and start again. Democracy needs a good opposition.
Unfortunately, the party system ensures that democracy does not work. It gives power to the politicians over us. Democracy needs independent politicians who work for those who elected them.
I have stood as Independent in last 3 General elections &4 Local elections,The Voters didn’t elect me,although (i thrashed the Labour candidate in 2019 local election) The Electorate like Safety! As HL.Menckhen stated in Roosevelts America ”The Prime purpose of ALL political parties,is to create imaginary,hobgoblins ,which ONLY they can lead us to safety”! ..prescient….
Janusz Przeniczny
3 years ago
Communism/Socialism killed 100 million people, and still killing people in Venezuela Cuba N Korea, and China. And yet nobody says sorry or is even asked why they are following a system that has blood on its hands and has devastated and blighted so many economies.
I mean, are 1- East European all stupid fools to have dumped “Socialist Paradise” or 2 Do they know something that Western Socialist and Communists will not admit to, and dumped it as soon as possible? Hmmmm tricky one eh.
Oh, and have you noticed that these Socialist Warriors are all over here, living off Capitalists. No Bread queues for them.
If I was in charge, I would have all Communists and Socialist explain themselves why they follow this Cult/Creed/Dogma that’s harmed people all over the world, before they are allowed to work with Kids Government or Media.
Extreme? Really? I think a few older East Europeans will tell you what its like to stand in a 24 hr bread queue whilst TV Radio Newspaper all told you that it was paradise, and your kids were indoctrinated to hate the West. You rebelled and the Midnight knock on the door happened.
This is spot on. I visited DDR and Poland a number of times in the mid-80s. The pollution, shortages, drunkenness, poor clothing, grey faces and drabness shocked me. I was able to describe these when I returned to the West.
But far worse were the lies, corruption, mistrust, cynicism, a constant feeling of oppression and being watched. This I found much harder to explain. The only people in the West who got what I said were Vietnamese boat people I met in Sydney.
Lance Milburn
3 years ago
Where does this Idea come room that Jeremy Corbyn nearly won the 2017 election? The truth is May nearly lost. If Corbynite policies were indeed so incredibly popular, why didn’t they win? After another two years of Corbyn and the true colours of his version of Labour began to show, they were soundly trounced in 2019. I have heard many left wing commentators today extolling a further leftward turn after much of the populace of this country seem to prefer a more right wing point of view.
Jon Redman
3 years ago
More gems from the Guardian’s comments: What kind of moron walks to the ballot box thinking they want to vote Tory after the past 12 months? Brexiteers, they’re not very intelligent. the continued popularity of this government is astonishing and is in my opinion, a stain on the nation that reflects badly on the electorate. I don’t think ‘moron” is that wide of the mark.
They are beyond help. Gleefully voting to be downtrodden by people that clearly despise you is not rational behaviour. Better to abandon them to their racist Brexit fantasies and focus attention on seats where the people aren’t quite so dense. People keep commenting that the problem is the left calling the electorate morons. No one would be calling them morons if they didn’t make moronic choices. The reason they vote Tory/Brexit is because they are small minded, xenophobic bigots and the tories have twigged on to this. They made their moronic choices before being labelled morons. Isn’t the time to stop calling people stupid the time just after they’ve stopped doing stupid stuff? If someone votes Tory because someone calls them stupid then they are stupid. English morons. More deadly than a virus 2029 and 2034 nailed on for the Tories like Jesus at Easter, I’d say.
Do you think the people in Hartlepool who voted Brexit and then Tory read the Guardian comments, though? I don’t even think the ex-Labour voters who didn’t vote at Hartlepool read the Guardian comments.
I agree those comments are appalling and self defeating.
Sounds like hate speech to me. Has Plod been informed?
Colin Haller
3 years ago
Piketty describes the wider arc (Labour in the UK; Democrats in the US; social democratic parties on the continent) of this electoral shift in his “Capital and Ideology.” The basic narrative is that these parties have all abandoned their former core electorate among the working classes for educated urban elites that represent their “donor class.” As currently constituted they are unelectable — a conclusion drawn by observers as various as Mark Blyth and William Mitchell.
The author writes, “Their parties should have been boosted by the flaws of neo-liberalism that were exposed first in the financial crisis of 2008 and now in the pandemic.” He’s missing their fatal flaw — Blairite Labour and Clinton Democrats are themselves hardcore neoliberal projects. They can no more disassociate themselves from the flaws of neoliberalism than Milton’s Satan can escape Hell: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”
Having left working class votes lying on the ground they can hardly be surprised to discover that their political opponents have gone to the trouble to pick them up …
Exactly. I am broadly sympathetic to Piketty’s analysis and it is incredible that in an age of rampant greed and banksterism etc the left is in retreat almost everywhere. The problem is, as you say, that those in charge of the so-called left are neoliberals themselves. The last thing they want is to see wealth redistributed, or for the value of their property portfolio to fall.*
*Scratch a leftie and you’ll always find someone with two or three properties.
It is truly amazing how the far left leaning members of my family will go to avoid paying tax (just like certain TV presenters) or how eager they are to explore property development opportunities.
My preference would be for Labour to turn deep green in hope of emulating events in Germany.
But the Greens are deep red, here as well as in Germany.
Victor Newman
3 years ago
This article is like a Rohrshach test, it tells you more about the writer than the topic itself; like when it said: “While Boris Johnson has seized the flag of English nationalism.” No, he has stood for the Union whilst the other parties have stood for atavistic, parasitic micropolitics. Labour has become a fashion-statement for socially-distanced people who think they are posh. What we are witnessing is the collapse of closed “hygiene” politics and its replacement with open democracy.
‘ dreadful Trump …..disastrous handling of the pandemic …’ Inaccurate. The US produced a vaccine in 5 months under Trump – but the mendacious and corrupt Democrats pretend that this success is down to them. And Trump was correct about the uselessness of masks.
Thanks for correcting the historical record on President Trump……
Graeme Laws
3 years ago
This dead party still tracks around 30% support in the national polls. It has been written off before. The membership of the Conservative party could be gathered together in two London football grounds. Both parties are in serious trouble.
Neither party appears to believe in responsibilities to match rights, the importance of law and order, the societal value of family, free speech, or the need for sound money. I would venture to suggest that these and one or two other issues loom large in the minds of a majority of the electorate.
When a party has been in power for a long time, it gets tired, especially if its parliamentary talent pool is shallow. The swing voters then get fed up with it and vote for the other lot.
We need something different, something that at the very least has the testicular resolution to face down the critical race theorists, biology deniers and sundry social media lynch mobs. If it comes from anywhere, it will come from the right. But don’t hold your breath.
Your venomous sort of socialist hates Boris for very simple reasons which go back centuries. Sure, he’s a toff but he’s not the snobbish sort and he understands noblesse oblige. Add to that, he’s a bluff cove and a bit of a lad and therefore just what the English love in a leader.
I latched onto this thinking when my management course invited some TUC talking head to come and tell us what’s what. And you could tell that what he really hated with passion was good employers. Without lots of ‘class struggle’ he had no raison d’etre.
what value do unions add to the quality of the product/service that is involved or to the end user? Unions are largely self-serving enterprises and that’s okay so far as it goes. But they should be honest about it. The notion that unions are morally righteous “because reasons” does not wash.
Sure, Alex — “what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Here’s a US list for you (I’m sure someone could give you the UK equivalents):
1. Weekends
2. All Breaks at Work (Lunch)
3. Paid vacations
4. FMLA
5. Sick Leave
6. Social Security
7. Minimum Wage
8. Civil Rights Act/ Title VII (Prohibits Discrimination)
9. 8- Hour work day
10. Overtime Pay
11. Child labor laws
12. Occupational Safety & health Act (OSHA)
13. 40-hour work Week
14. Worker’s compensation (Worker’s Comp)
15. Unemployment Insurance
16. Pensions
17. Workplace Safety standards and Regulations
18. Employer Health Care Insurance
19. Collective Bargaining Rights for Employees
20. Wrongful Termination Laws
21. Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
22. Whistleblower Protection Laws
23. Employee Polygraph Protect Act
24. Veteran’s Employment and Training Services (VETS)
25. Compensation increases and Evaluations (Raises)
26. Sexual Harassment Laws
27. Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)
28. Holiday Pay
29. Employer Dental, Life, and Vision insurance
30. Privacy Rights
31. Pregnancy and Parental Leave
32. Military Leave
33. The Right to Strike
34. Public Education for Children
35. Equal Pay Acts of 1963 & 2011
36. Laws Ending Sweatshops in the United States
Oh, please. Few of these are accurate and even if they were, you are defending the continued presence of an institution that has long since seen its expiration date. Today, it is no more than a money laundering operation for one political party.
Public education is in virtually every state’s constitution and has nothing to do with organized labor. Same with sexual harassment laws which mostly focus on the non-union white collar world. The ADA was a Bush I creation. Social Security was an FDR idea that was originally a women’s and orphan’s fund since age of eligibility was higher than life expectancy, and the minimum wage was a move to keep blacks out of the labor force.
Repeating what others tell you is not always the best approach.
thus far, you have both ignored the question in the post: what value do unions add to the quality of the product/service that is involved or to the end user? Unions work for unions and certain politicians. But much of this laundry list is things that have nothing to do with organized labor.
What is the evidence of better products or services? Teachers unions do nothing to improve the quality of education. The heavily unionized domestic auto industry has seen its market share gradually eroded by foreign carmakers who tend to have non-union shops.
In the private sector unions have a role to play in ensuring that management make the right decisions.
If the workforce do not have a voice then that is one less impediment to poor decision making
I agree in part. The main achievement of liberal societies has been the diffusion of power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely… as somebody famous said.
The key requirement for a decent society is that the primary competing power bases have some parity. Unions were a useful counterweight to the unfettered capitalism of the early 20th century, with a political arm in the Labour Party. At the time it was necessary, but by the 70’s was out of control.
Some counterweight to big corporate power is now very necessary again and probably won’t be found in political parties.
The woke agenda is nonsense but appears to have become a power base in its own right, some counterweight to that is also necessary particularly as the other big power bases – the judiciary and media seem to have fallen under its spell.
As the established order disintegrates my fear is which power bases will emerge.
You’re mixing up Trade Unionism for the good of the workers, and Trade Unionism as a Left Wing enforcer and paymaster. The first is a fair comment, the second is a threat to Democracy.
Why? When Thatcher took on the Miners Union there were two objectives.
1 Coal was expensive (and very polluting) so gas was the “new” clean fuel of the future. “Dash for Gas” was a Labour/Miners Union slogan, and used as an anti-gas slogan.
2 The other (more important issue) was the Scargill (egged on by others and unions) was to use the Miners Union to overthrow a Democratically Elected Government. A coup in any other country.
Unions are blurring (for a long time) the lines of what they are supposed to be and become quasi leftwing paymasters with muscle. Whilst playing games, you’ve taken your eye off the game ball.
The frightening thing is that the Left is so backward in thinking. They are 19 Century mantra chanting, rich people hating Luddites in the 21 st Century.
Artificial Intelligence has arrived. Robotics is serious, not just for working-class hands-on people, ( my son works for a company that has designed a bricklaying machine that is miles faster and better than and bricklaying gang x 3 . That has serious employment issues. It doesn’t require scaffolding either.)
Machines are doing Radiology jobs, open-heart operations (no shaking hands) etc etc etc. And what, your Union is following tired slogans and waving Red Flags led a Woke Kneeler? That’s your future?
Is the cunning plan to smash all robots?
Do get real.
Thatcher replaced British Coal with coal from Eastern Europe – so much for her commitment to Britain and to eliminating pollution.
Thatcher took on the miners as part of her campaign to eliminate collective worker power (or any power source that disagreeed with her eg GLC). She did it in a particularly cruel way by destroying the industries and communities that working people and their families worked and lived in. Not just with the miners – with the destruction of almost all the industries (other than health and education) that had strong Union memberships.
Many on the left, while still supporting Trades Unions, recognise that work is changing and hence the interest in things like universal basic income and shorter working hours.
Wilson wanted to close significantly more pits than Thatcher.
If those pits were still in existence Labour would be demanding they were closed immediately due to Climate Change, lack of diversity in the workforce (not enough gay, trans, non cis), Miners coming to the surface black with coal dust – obviously racist.
Margaret Thatcher wanted a smaller, more efficient coal industry producing more coal and energy. Sir Iain MacGregor, British Coal’s Chairman shared that goal. If ether of them wanted the industry’s demise they were both the sort of people who would have made that clear.
People like Len McCluskey living in £600,000+ flat in london’s housing shortage,wasn’t A vote winner…each PM wife,Mistress, has Overspent taxpayers money on furnishings,people weren’t too concerned over that..
Dominic S
3 years ago
Labour is dead. They don’t realise it yet.
The Liberal (Democrats) have taken decades to fully die out, now labour will do the same. A bit like those annoying weeds you spend years killing off in your garden.
Interesting to note that this might also spell the end for the conservatives – given that their modern existence is predicated on opposing Labour.
Hope so, My preference for Independents,SDP Left;;; Reform= Right of centre to take over ..but i fear Technocratic Vulture capitalists will destroy the next Generation & democracy,maybe you think ive Watched too much daft Varda?
Last edited 2 years ago by Robin Lambert
Barry Wetherilt
3 years ago
‘My preference would be for Labour to turn deep green’ yep that’ll fire up the wokeing class, forget the working class though.
Last edited 3 years ago by Barry Wetherilt
George Wells
3 years ago
If the Tories put the personal allowance for earned income only up to £20K or £25K (let’s tax flash cars & other fripperies to make up the difference) they might finish the ‘Labour’ party off once and for all.
Let’s treat hard working, but low earning, people better.
(I don’t care which party implements my personal hobby horse, as long as is happens !)
Prashant Kotak
3 years ago
I would like to make a prediction. I make no claims for my predictions, than that they are, most of them, completely bonkers, so there we have it. Anyway…
There is one more chimera of an escape hatch that Labour will head for next, over the next two to four years, before they stand alone atop a tower of rubble, and are forced to look in the mirror.
Why will they do this? Lots of reasons. Because they can. Because, although they have caught a glimpse of annihilation, they cannot (yet) bring themselves to look in the mirror. Because.
What will they do? Well, the cry will now go up across all of Labourland: PR! Yes, PROPORTIONAL Representation, don’t you know! It’s gotta be proportional, it’s only fair!. Because well, it wasn’t fair before, but it just is, now! If it ain’t Proportional, we don’t wanna know! This will now be the mantra of every two bit prog journo for the foreseeable. Meanwhile, the small parties, LibDems included, will look on in incredulity, that Christmas can in fact come every day of the year. And they will all support it of course – VERY enthusiastically indeed. I mean, if as a species, you were permanently on the verge of extinction, and someone offered you the perma-sanctuary of a couple of acres at Woburn, with the food thrown in, wouldn’t you take it?
Anyway, the assumption will be, we just tot up all the votes across all the left-leaning parties, and Lo! – we have a coalition majority. In which WE will be the big player, who gets to lord it over all the little ‘uns. And they will build a bunch of stories like that, which they will tell themselves, about why PR is RIGHT! …Urm, Left I mean! Well you know what I mean!! I mean, I know Clegg pushed this stuff, but that was Clegg PR! This will be Laybaa PR, which is superior and the *right* kind of PR! And anyway, what is your point about Clegg?
And then, after all that, will they win? Well No, That’s not how it works. They will, in fact, get pasted. Again. With yet more of their estate gone. Or fragmenting. But there will be a (somewhat cracked) mirror handy, for them to look into.
Well yes, Pepsi Max in a plastic cup vs Coke Classic in a fancy glass bottle. But, you know, sugared water.
Mary Elizabeth
3 years ago
Or maybe, people are simply fed up. Fed up with BLM and its Marxist ideology; with ‘cancel culture; with being lectured to by their moral superiors; with being called anything or everything ending in ‘phobic’ or ‘ist’. Maybe people are just tired…
Ann Ceely
3 years ago
Boris’ ‘cronyism’ is simply that when something needs doing, he phones around. Whether oxygen-masks or vaccines, I’m all for it!
His government IS Conservative – of British culture and population …
Johnson certainly does his best to make sure our money is conserved within the circle of his mates and girlfriends.
Jon Redman
3 years ago
There are some absolutely cracking comments over at the Guardian this morning. Pure comedy gold.
“why do those on death row vote for their executioners – it baffles me.” “leavers will forever be demanding ‘respect’ for the stupid decision they made in 2016” “Gutter press induced “Stockholm syndrom” (sic)” “People fall for slogans because they like short sentences.” “Labour should just give up and divert their efforts elsewhere because gullible voters will be gulled by posh accents and three word slogans which play to base instincts.” “Labour needs to get the racist vote back on board to win.” “people in Hartlepool blame Labour for the devastation caused by Austerity. If this is so, what chance do they have against such political illiteracy.”
“the gullibility, and the downright stupidity of many voters are ably played on by the Tory gutter Press”
“if you vote for a party you know are deliberately lying (Tories) then that is stupid.” “Voting conservative because other labour voters called you stupid does not mean you are not stupid.” “Dismantling the UK (and thus terminating UK history, which many voters are still irrationally attached to) would be a beginning.” “I would rather change the electorate.” “Johnson is a crook of very low moral character. That so many people in Hartlepool could vote for a party led by him is incomprehensible “
“the English, or at least a very large section of them , are right wing. They couldn’t care less about Johnson or his party’s, in plain sight, moral depravity, sleaze or corruption” “the English go everywhere with an obnoxious, look at us vibe combined with that noxious joyless anglo british nationalism, came a bit unstuck though when they were sorted out in Marseilles by the people who really did defeat Hitler.”
“When you vote for a well known, incompetent liar and all he stands for – I’m sorry but that puts you in the same bucket.”
“Stop pandering to racist, jingoistic Brexit supporters, all those people who go around saying “Boris” is doing his best so why can’t he have fancy wallpaper… f*** them, ignore them. “ “typical of English voters. Corrupt, lazy, jingoistic, arrogant, bullying and incompetent.”
Yeah, it was great. I often go on there for an incredulous laugh in the morning. I don’t put anything in their begging bowl though.
Al Beeb was pretty amusing as well, shades of the GE, poor old Hugh looked shattered.
“Lest we forget these poor northern souls who dare to think for themselves”
Harry Bo
3 years ago
One shadow cabinet member, fresh from the campaign trail, was perspicacious about the party’s plight when we discussed the election results. “This was the day that should be imprinted on all our eyeballs showing we have lost the white working class,”
The fact that this particular shadow minister felt the need to add the ‘white’ rather than just saying working class is interesting.
…Parties that make no secret of hating their own Country and despising most of the people that live in it rarely prosper. Their problem is that they are so pre-occupied with London (where most of them live, and all of them aspire to)…that they have come to believe it is a British City. In fact, a very large number of the people there are not from Britain and are here only to make use of it to pursue their ambitions…and those who are from places like Hartlepool have come because they hated Hartlepool (which might not have thought much of them)
London is at it’s most British on Remembrance Sunday…which Labour would probably like to ban, prior to repurposing the Cenotaph as a public urinal…RSF
Last edited 3 years ago by R S Foster
Pierre Brute
3 years ago
Why did the author feel obliged to say the ‘dreadful’ Donald Trump?
Last edited 3 years ago by Pierre Brute
Eowyn Fellows
3 years ago
The question that must be asked is why the U.S. is bucking this UK-Europe trend. 2020 election fraud?
The US isn’t bucking that trend — you need to look past the Presidential election to the composition of Congress (the Democrats LOST seats), the Senate and especially the State Houses.
Not bad for an uncontroversial by election but most with a bit of risk and media attention have a bigger turnout. I wonder if it turns out less than half the Brexit vote from last time switched to the Conservatives and the rest stayed at home, as did many ex Labour voters. Remember in 2010 the BNP got 2000 votes (5%)
I thought that was noticeable, too. And even more striking when you consider the national figure for 2019 of 67%. Even the EU ref turnout in Hartlepool was significantly lower than the National average.
I suppose it could be an indication of just how ‘left behind’ the place feels if so many people don’t see the point in voting.
It is true that had either major party chosen to field a candidate with more in common with local people, more might have voted.
jonathan carter-meggs
3 years ago
Every article discusses voter cohorts in terms of urban progressives with modern “good” views/opinions that are outvoted by rural outdated voters with “bad” traditional views/opinions. And there lies the problem and the reason why Labour is less than useless. They have to realise that to win they must reflect the majority NOT the righteous minority. The electorate knows what is right and there is no future in trying to educate them out of the wisdom of crowds.
Agreed. In any case, it is arrogant for politicians to think that they know better than the electorate.
Kremlington Swan
3 years ago
Political commentators of all stripes are keen on analysis. They pick over the carcass of every election, trying to find the key indicators for what went wrong (and sometimes, when bewildered, as of late, what went right).
The man or woman whose interest is less acute, and whose attention span is of necessity more limited (because life), works more with broad brush strokes. The messages they take over the course of months and years leading to an election are simplified either because they simplify them or because artful politicians do the simplifying for them.
An artful politician knows where to place emphasis, and knows how to get a core message across.
Boris Johnson is not an artful politician, he is a political genius who would have Machiavelli swooning with admiration.
You don’t need to provide evidence for this, because Hartlepool is, or should be, the final proof. For those who are interested it is probably time to stop trying to find a lamppost to hang him from, put all preconceptions aside, and see if it is possible to understand just how these highly improbable victories have been his.
Kier Starmer ought to be looking at this as well. He should now know for certain he can’t beat Johnson. Johnson may beat himself, eventually, and the fall may so bad it allows Starmer to walk over the prone figure of his nemesis and into Number Ten.
I wouldn’t bet on it if I were him. What I would be doing is recognising my inherent political weaknesses and, with a little bit of luck, finding the strength to concede that they make me unfit for the job at hand. Because that verdict has just been passed by the people of Hartlepool.
People don’t want him because they see him as someone who is a clumsy opportunist who lacks a backbone.
Bending the knee was clumsy opportunism. Nobody believed he meant it, everyone believed he did it because he thought it would earn him brownie points. In taking the knee he demonstrated beyond doubt that he was unfit to lead the country. He showed he so lacked proper judgement he was unable to see that the advice to do this thing was advice of the very worst kind. He should have been able to see it, he should have been able to say ‘no’ to it.
The only way forward for him today was to have come out to announce the sacking of every single woke, identity politics obsessed member of his shadow cabinet and every single adviser advancing that cause. He should have come out and said that the time of Labour being host to every grievance-obsessed minority interest was over.
There are other things he should have said, but there is no point listing any of them because he is incapable of saying them.
Until the Labour Party is led by someone with the strength to say ‘enough of this sh9t’, Labour will continue its decline. Because people don’t what what they currently have to sell, and they cannot be convinced to want it.
Last edited 3 years ago by Kremlington Swan
Andrew Thompson
3 years ago
Starmer falling to his knee was quite prophetic for the Labour party itself.
It’s always interesting reading between the lines on UnHerd. There are an increasing number of “neoliberals” and “neoconservatives” represented on it…must be some money they can smell. The elephant in the room is the “populism” that Trump ran on – economic localism / nationalism, controlled immigration, foreign policy pragmatism. Amazing that people like Birrell get away being commentators without “seeing” this…shape UnHerd gives oxygen to such people.
If a dripping wet left wing Tory like Birrell was still putting words in the PM’s mouth (syrians, trump, etc) the ukip would still be winning votes from the conservatives
Quentin Vole
3 years ago
It turns out that telling 52% of the electorate that they’re racist morons for disagreeing with your policies doesn’t win many votes. Whodathunkit?
Seb Dakin
3 years ago
‘We have lost the white working class’. Hardly surprising when the metropolitan wokies who now run the party quite obviously hate them.
Tony Taylor
3 years ago
When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class. But as I look about me now, all I see are the dregs of the middle class. When will you middle class perverts stop using the Labor Party as a cultural spittoon?
~~ Kim Beazley Snr to an ALP State Conference, circa 1970.
Looking on from the Antipodes, it feels like Beazley’s comment has landed with even greater vigour in the UK; so much so that Conservative toffs can now be thought of as “one of us” whereas Labour progressives are now thought to “hate us”.
Adam Kennedy
3 years ago
Once their leaders could rely on a powerful alliance of middle-class progressives backed by the massed ranks of working-class voters to win elections.
In the past, these two groups kind of muddled along together because they knew they needed each other to gain power. Since Brexit, the outright hatred they have for each other has been truly exposed. Turning a deep green will not heal those divisions (in fact likely the opposite) and I have no idea what will.
Ann Ceely
3 years ago
“Progressive” ideologies are the problem. Humans have thrown out their religious attitudes to be replaced by ‘modern lifestyles’ which don’t satisfy the soul.
Why are the parties of social democracy performing so poorly in many Western democracies at a time when the free-spending policies of their creed, boosted by the pandemic, are in the ascendancy? Maybe people have figured out that ‘free spending’ cannot go on indefinitely. Maybe they’re figured out that the free spending is coming out of their pockets, not those of elected officials. Maybe they’ve noticed that some of this spending — like in the US where people can make more money NOT working than working — is counterproductive.
Yeah right,people are in fact realising that government has a far larger fiscal capacity than previously thought.
Tom Krehbiel
3 years ago
The Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari wrote a short essay in The Atlantic Monthly a couple of years ago, remarking that workers faced the possibility of being rendered economically useless by modern technology. I think that’s the key. As Harari put it, they would find it far more difficult to fight such irrelevance than they did the relatively easy matter of exploitation. I suspect that those voters who feel abandoned by center-left parties aren’t really deserted by them. The parties simply don’t know what to do about the problem (other than UBI), and so concentrate on issues for which they have some solution(s).
Niels Georg Bach
3 years ago
If you compare Labour with Europe. It’s difficult, because ‘first by the post’ distract the picture. Compared with Denmark. Labour would be split into 3 parties : The existing Socialdemocrats ( meaby a little more to the left ? ) 2) People socialist party a soft left party , and 3) Not the danish left wing party Enhedslisten, but into another party which would look like the german ‘Linke’ a ultra left party, where violent demonstrations is ok.
The danish Socialdemocrats has survived mainly because it has accepted and lead a strong policy against immigration : No more immigrants than we can handle.
The general line is a strong welfare state, with a sound economic policy, which is what the majority of the danish electorate prefer. We are protestants, don’t use money you don’t have.
If you compare with the old communist countries, the danish state redistributes more money than they did.Most UK citizens would hate out tax regime. The highest in Europe.
Last edited 3 years ago by Niels Georg Bach
Frederick B
3 years ago
This moment will pass. I remember when Labour were dead and buried after the Michael Foot disaster in’83. Then a succession of capable leaders – Kinnock, Smith, Blair – brought the Tories to disaster in ‘97 and it was their turn to be dead and buried. So here we are again.
Whatever happens to Labour, that third of the electorate which always thinks to the Left will need representation of some sort.
I”m not sure about that. Brexit might have created a schism between the two wings of the party that cannot be reconciled. Moreover, and not much remarked over the last day or so, is the extent to which Labour is losing quite a lot of the woke-progessive-urban vote to the Green party.
Athena Jones
3 years ago
Liberals have become conservatives and Labor has become radical on many agendas. People are more likely to be conservative than radical and particularly where agendas are fluffy like climate change and transgenderism, to name just two of too many.
In addition, during times of trauma and the days of Covid have been traumatic, not because of the virus which is no threat to the vast majority but because of the reactions to it, which are a threat to everybody, people will lean toward conservatism because it has an old, familiar and more reliable lineage.
So Labor has lost its heart and its heartland through too much ‘do-goodery’ and through circumstance.
michael stanwick
3 years ago
The label “centre-left” I find rather confusing, given Starmer et al’s performative genuflection to a radical left wing political ideological movement. That one act signalled to me that a cultural critical theory mindset may have parasitised Starmer’s political ideology (whatever that is).
Dawne Swift
3 years ago
The Labour party has “lost the white working class” because they have treated us with contempt. The values and aims of the Labour party have changed markedly over the past 4 decades and they no longer reflect those of the majority of voters. Brexit will cast a long shadow for years to come. No Brexit supporter will ever trust the Labour party again, and that’s over 50% of the electorate. It’s in the end-game for the party.
Zach Thornton
3 years ago
Spot on analysis.
Tom Graham
3 years ago
No dead, but brain-dead.
Jorge Toer
3 years ago
Bojo have a good personal image,,the beer at hand in the pub,freedom with woman,,not responsabily in general,,is a clown to copying&brexit and covi19.
Every one want to be like him.
And they don’t think he is going to preach at them ( though Carrie wants him to).
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
I shall enjoy today because Derby County will probably be relegated tomorrow. Looking at it objectively, it’s a good thing for football when a (relatively) big spending club like Derby fails so spectacularly, just as it’s a good thing when Labour fail spectacularly.
As A Fox (Leics) supporter id like Derby to escape the drop to third tier…
John Stone
3 years ago
Labour may already be dead but democracy is teetering on the brink – in Hartlepool only 42% of the electorate voted so Conservatives got about a quarter of the popular vote and Labour an eighth: I doubt whether there is any enthusiasm for any of these people, but Labour and Sir Keir have out-performed the Tories by their moral absence and vacuousness. Last year I was writing to my (London Labour) about the social and economic consequence of lockdown and there was nothing I got back from her which suggested she gave a hoot. Hovering over this is the Great Reset: “You won’t own anything and you’ll be happy”. Government by the global oligarchy for the global oligarchy. How is this going to rescue northern voters?
Labour has a very curious &difficult problem,Lenin&Trotsky dreamers,
our days no comunist country believe in that ,,simple illusions progresives .
Marxism is a good dream, not applicable to humans,,maybe extraterrestrials, but here ,no way,
a good beer ,money ,girl’s, lies.
Here is an interesting take on the demise of Labour. It did not meet its obligation as “Royal Opposition
“His job title: Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. It is his job to oppose, which he has promised to do constructively and credibly. But he cannot deliver on this with the Coronavirus Act in force, leaving a small cabal of men able to impose unfettered restrictions, unchecked by Parliament and with the fourth estate forced by OFCOM to parrot the government’s narrative.
There is one person responsible for this: Sir Keir. Even the Liberal Democrats voted against the six-month extension to these tyrannical powers in March, and there is plentiful backbench opposition in Tory ranks to extinguish the Tory majority in the house. But with Labour waving the legislation through, power continues to be concentrated in the hands of Boris and his cronies.
Perhaps the public has sensed this, and wants more than warm words from Starmer. They want a credible opposition, not one that wafts more power into the hands of the Tories.
This publication has repeatedly called for Parliament to be fully recalled (any MP that is at risk should now have been offered a vaccine). Let’s get the mother of democracies working again. There is no excuse for us to be ruled by diktat any more. “Trust takes time” – yes, and probably the most important thing that the Labour leadership can do over the next few months to build trust is make it crystal clear that they will vote to suspend the Coronavirus Act 2020 when it comes up for renewal in September.
The time has come, Sir Keir, to arise and oppose. You’ve got work to do.” https://reaction.life/oppose-sir-keir/ (As Robin Monotti Graziadei, [07.05.21 09:15] posted on Telegram)
David Cockayne
3 years ago
At the time of the 2001 election, I was a Labour Party member in a northern working class city; there were still a fair few actual working class people in the Party, then.
John Prescott came to adress a Party meeting a week after having wacked a guy who threw an egg at him. When he entered, the room of 150 people or so absolutelty errupted. Never winessed the like before or since.
Many of us had considerable reservations aboout New Labour generally as well as his policies as Environment Secretary. Yet, he had become, forgive me, our Achilles – in contrast to Agamemnon Blair, and Odysseus Cambell. Had he gone to the king’s tent and slaughtered them all, metaphorically speaking of course, we would have followed him.
After the election, some bland, Blairite minister addressed us and gave a rah-rah victory speech. When she finished, the room was silent.
Yet, now I read in a 2017 Radio Times feature by some beardy hipster type, that Prescott’s action was “an infamous incident”, which has been “a recurring thorn in his side”.
There you go. That’s what’s wrong, right there. And there’s the solution, too.
Last edited 3 years ago by David Cockayne
Richard Turpin
3 years ago
I think the majority of the white working class voters have no real comprehension of the identity politics and culture wars the woke labour activists have embraced in Metropolitan London and beyond. They represent lifestyles and vocabulary that appear to embrace everything and anything they are not.
The shameful cover up of the abuse in Rochdale and Rotherham and the reluctance to discuss it through fear of ‘upsetting communities” was disgusting and many Northern communities knew\know for a fact what was/is going on, and consequently, are distrustful of the majority labour councillors that were more concerned about their jobs and the denial of the rape culture, than hi-lighting the criminality and suffering that was taking place.
I hope this government turns up the heat on wokery and the hard left teaching unions who have hijacked the curriculum and starts legislating for common sense and reason and in doing so, give the ‘silent majority’ a platform to take the country back. I believe in many ways this is a hopeful indicator that the tide is turning against the racist and bigoted perpetrators of post modernist ideology and its perpetuated misery and divison.
Reform are Right of Centre, Truth is Conservatives Dont Conserve
Labour doesn’t have Blue collar workers interests at heart
Lib-dems are illiberal
Greens are damaging the environment ,Forests Not allowed to Have Natural Fire breaks…A Pox on all their houses!
William Harvey
3 years ago
I wouldnt take too much notice of the prejudiced opinions of someone who was Cameron’s ex speech writer.
To me its clear that the average UK voter is totally alienated by Labour ( and some CINO) politicians aping the woke nonsense that has been imported from US/US universities.
The self loathing creed of a small minority of sinecured academics, has (thanks to social media and MSM) grown out of all proportion to its relevance to ordinary folk.
This “new religion” despises the white working and lower middle class especially. But they are not the only targets of the woke red guards.
When the average voter get the opportunity they therefore vote against these metropolitan woke elites, who care nothing for them, their culture or country.
Thats UK Labours problem.. they need to wake up and stop being so “woke”.
Wont happen Look at Greens have taken 70 Council seats mostly from Labour & Bristol Mayoralty, tipping Statues is popular by illiberal Woke jokes..So Labour will Continue to embrace Lunatic Xtinction rebellion environmentalists…&Electoral suicide…Boris is also A ”Green” Nut oblivious to Conservatives beyond M25…
Sean MacSweeney
3 years ago
We should give our thanks to Ed Milliband and his decision to allow everyone to join Labour at £3 a head (lol) if he hadn’t Commie Corbyn wouldn’t have been elected “leader” and set about destroying the party with his Anti-Jewish hatred, I’m looking forward to this party becoming more and more irrelevant till it exists no more, it’s hatred for everything British will be its death knell, and good riddance
Jorge Espinha
2 years ago
Instead of listening to the spin doctor that wrote this article, what about defending the poor? Regardless of skin color or gender? Going back to the old left priorities.
Isn’t that the problem all over Europe? I advise you to read PREY, a book written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, there you can find the answer for the problems of the centre left.
Tom Adams
3 years ago
test
Howard Medwell
3 years ago
Labour’s fate was sealed when Tony Blair, Lord Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and Co. decided that they would not challenge the Thatcherite “heritage” – the main plank of which was the focus on home ownership rater than social housing. Back in the 1990’s it looked as though everybody would become an owner-occupier; nowadays, as we can see, owner-occupiers are a diminishing minority of increasingly elderly voters who, understandably tend to plump for stability under the Conservatives. An increasing number of younger people are the victims of exploitative private landlordism; in any other country, these would represent a left-wing threat; here, they simply don’t vote. Blairite Labour is caught in the cross-current, unable to appeal to the conservative, prosperous oldies, terrified of saying anything that might mobilize the discontented youngsters.
Steve Gwynne
3 years ago
The economic reality is that the economy is predominantly an energy system, not a financial one, which as a result of the rising energy cost of energy (or reducing energy return on investment) means less surplus energy for economic growth and material prosperity. https://t.co/7IXczogyg3
Due to the rising energy cost of energy, much of the western world has already hit Peak Prosperity and so the emphasis of the current Conservative government is to invest in technological, economic, social and ecological productivity gains and through a national communitarian framework, level up spatial inequalities, strive towards net zero and ensure the continuity of import dependencies through trading agreements.
In this respect, the changing framework of Conservatism is towards a sustainable, resilient and sufficient future for Britain which the Left has no framework for due to its emphasis on global communitarianism
In this respect, Left of Centre parties are only retaining relevance if they pitch towards national communitarianism and the goal of national sustainability, resilience and sufficiency.
The German Greens on the other hand are beginning to shape a rudimentary framework towards global communitarianism with a progressive emphasis on national sustainability, resilience and sufficiency. So far their poll lead seems to indicate that their strategy is winning favour which includes embracing elements of the industrial Right and playing catch up with the nation’s green agenda.
Arguably the Conservative Party here has already embraced much of mainstream green thinking and we are not as ethnically segregated as Germany. Thus along with a soft social democratic platform the Conservatives presently occupy the entirety of the centre ground.
This doesn’t leave Labour with much to do other than engage in purity spirals or similarly embrace the centre ground of socio-ecological politics with a stronger framework for global cooperation with perhaps a nationalising drift to ensure infrastructural coherency.
Energy Prices will rise further, if Bonkers boris ”Green” Davos nonsense goes ahead,with windmills which destroy wildlife,Green fields,&Solar Panels ( Made of Plastic,a fossil fuel) Zero Carbon nonsense will also push up Industry Costs &domestic
jgraemec
3 years ago
SNP are mostly centre left and would describe themselves as such and doing pretty well at the polls…
SNP originally formed by Fascists sympathisers in 1934, Archbishop Ramsay & his Successors Are Stalinist ,not cosy motif ”Centre left”..SDP ARE centre left &will eventually succeed Labour
Jorge Toer
3 years ago
I agree, France,Germany, Portugal, Spain’s left, suffering painful & powerful defeats,,but here in British soil are different reasons.
People’s lives have been changed,
self employ is one’s, thousands of voters have others view,,today’s face the unknowns with more money ,product from the own small business,,,drogs distribution from is kids,,and full jobs for partner and kids in MCDONALD’S.
The old poor British becoming capitalist people’s.
Needs a men who lie,trick, and clowns them,,,no more Jeremy Corbyn promises of social justice .
robert scheetz
3 years ago
Birrell’s thesis is naïve. Bourgeois Democracy, the base structure, is an historical disaster. We are 100 seconds to midnight, poised on the brink of Armageddon, ecocide, pandemia, and starvation, all laid to bourgeois culture, its science fetish and insatiable commercial greed, tunnel vision and comprehensive corruption. For the enlightened fraction of the bell curve (this readership), bourgeois partisan political ideology is supremely passé.
And you? …you’re going to go and vote for your candidate?
john dann
3 years ago
Jeremy Corbyn created a resurgent interest in The Labour Party, bringing in hundreds of thousand members, energizing the base and speaking to real people about their problems. He was destroyed by the powerful, the people in control, The Israeli Lobby and Mass Media which pummelled him to death on a daily basis. If Labour is dead, that is when it died. Now mask up and vote for the buffoon.
Crank.
He was defeated in an election because of his terrorist support, his anti-Semitism, his hatred for this country and his cowardly refusal to set out a stance on Brexit.
He was destroyed by voters voting for the other side. Why? Because they don’t like anti semitism, they’re not too keen on the IRA, and the woman he wanted to be Chancellor had publicly demonstrated that she couldn’t do multiplication or percentages.
The reason Labour lost is because they have a Sir as a leader who failed to prosecute Saville and allegedly failed to prosecute the Rochdale grooming gangs and couldn’t wait to take the knee for a career black criminal in USA who was resisting arrest and was killed, unfortunately by a police officer even tho’ hundreds of blacks kill other blacks in America and nothing is said about that of course. He is a London lawyer and has no connection with the British working/middle classes he’s supposed to represent. He wants to re-join the EU even tho’ the people voted out. He has to go.
So it is Jimmy Saville that has brought down the Labour Party? I don’t think so. The average potential Labour voter neither knows or cares about that. They just want a patriotic working class party who will restore standards in schools, sort out the NHS mess, and generally have a social conscience. And lower tax on the lower paid.
Do the lower paid pay any tax?
Yes
Proportionally they pay the most tax. VAT, compulsory council tax, TV tax, fuel etc on say 20k net to spend takes you into precariat territory, on 40k it affects your life quality and on 100k or 500k its just an irritant.
Yes. Although I pay a chunk of direct tax (on 21kpa) the effect of the cost of teeth, glasses, and prescriptions (no longer free on this income), as well as those you mention, are quite deadening.
Social democracy or the Welfare state, i.e. Labour in the case of the UK, was a proposal to mitigate some of the problems of liberalism-capitalism through payoffs to select dissidents while maintaining the essential features of capitalism unchanged. This doesn’t seem to work any more, if it ever did. The desire for freedom and equality among the proles will have to take another route. Meanwhile expect the politics of tribalism to continue and increase.
Though the route that the Conservative government decided to take to deal with covid favoured the public sector-who are assumed to be more likely to vote Labour over the private sector who favour Conservative. The public sector could then urge caution while sabotaging the government policy.So to some extent who you vote for doesn’t matter if they are not in charge.
So for example we have a home secretary who can only say how appalled she is-but does nothing about it-so ‘souind and fury signifying nothing’ wheras the voters thought they might get a return to Thatcher, and will soon be disappointed if Tories carry on like Labour-Lite
I assure you that on £100k plus as sole earner it is far from just an irritant
You make a good point about the burden of non-progressive taxes lower down the pay scale, but you’d be surprised to learn how painful is the income tax burden for someone on 100k; proportionately way higher than the comfortable middle classes (40-60k) and definitely more than an “irritation”.
Yes
They pay tax but they get most of it back via in-work benefits. However that does not mean that they don’t care about standards in schools and the NHS.
The idea that Labour is capable of restoring standards in any area of life, or of sorting out the NHS or anything else, is patently absurd. The same applies to the Tories.
Ex-Labour voters in the North care vary much about Rochdale, and Rotherham, and the part that the Labour party and a certain former DPP played in trying to cover them up.
Yes, that rings true. Labour is associated – rightly or wrongly – with a tendency to tolerate, for the sake of keeping the peace, that which the majority find unspeakably foul.
The Tories are often accused of Islamaphobia. I have a hunch that every time that accusation is made it causes a vote to leave Labour and migrate to the Tories.
Labour are associated – again, rightly or wrongly – with a tendency to want to shut people’s mouths, and keep them shut, when it comes to any discussion of the incompatibility of values that have caused such division in this country, and which are probably endemic to a much larger undercurrent than is acknowledged.
Dominic Sandbrook places this problem as starting in1968, with Labour’s response the the ‘ROB’ speech by Powell, each step since then has been further and further away from the working class and their concerns.
I think the average Brit whose daughter was raped by a bunch of pedophile Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims do care but get no help from the authorities and are told to shut up by Labour MPs for the sake of community cohesion.
Their only push back is at the ballot box.
When I mentioned KS to my mother earlier this week, and also on previous occasions, her immediate response was first Saville and then Rochdale.
Also the lower paid do not pay any taxes in any material sense
It seems that KS is not the only one out of touch.
Eh?? Labour is to blame for Sir Jimmy?? Did not the Blessed Margaret entertain the old molester several times at Chequers and get him his secular knighthood, in the teeth of opposition from the Civil Service? Sir Jimmy was a rare showbusiness Thatcher fan. And it was Pope St John Paul who gave him his Papal Knighthood, so there are more than enough paedo enablers to go round.
And did she know he was a paedophile rapist at the time?
Probably not enough to go to court on, though rumours had been around for years. But Savile’s own 1970s autobiography boasted that he had slept with 2,500 women….which might have convinced any reputable politician, especially an allegedly “Conservative” prime minister, to keep her distance.
It’s also should have warned off the Pope assuming he knew.
Why would it?????
Don’t we all wish that? 2,500 eh!
Savile Probably had Matthew harding Killed 1996 Helicopter crash ,He was A friend of Jill Dando &was going to go live with A BBC Paedophile list,Same for Jill dando in April 1999, A Serbian assassin, ,i dont think so..?
She turned a blind eye to so many perversions and corruptions during her time that the answer is, probably yes.
There we go again. Blame those long dead and long long dead, for the actions they took. Saville was feted throughout the country for his good works. England did more than any country to stop the slave trade. So blame all our ills on them then.
Maggie pushed for savile’s knighthood!
And did you push for honours for CFC or their boys club who apparently are a “separate entity ” or just brush it under the carpet as “enablers” do the world over but especially in the Church of Rome.
Absolutely. What are Labour thinking?
He has banned any discussion in his own CLP meetings that he doesn’t approve of.
Case in point – will be interesting to observe the Batley & Spen by-election, where the utterly dismal MP (Tracy Brabin – now the newly elected W Yorks Mayor) is savagely unpopular with constituents for her total lack of support for the teacher on the receiving end of the ‘blasphemous’ lessons protest.
I agree with much of the analysis, but the preferences of this “Cameron-former-speechwriter” are very clear, and his distaste for the new zeitgeist pulsates like a distress flare throughout, as he clutches to a few planks of wood in the stormy sea, hoping that the twisted bits of sinking wreckage will somehow metamorphose into a shiny new ship called “HMS Centre Left”, and carry him back to his safe life.
Ian. All of this is happening because the people (the vast majority of the people – let’s not label them as particular party voters or by class) have had enough.
They (we) have spent 3 decades being patronised, insulted, condescended to, and talked down to, by a cross-party political grouping, (styled as “elite” only by itself), but clearly identifiable as metropolitan, liberal, wealthy, and finally now, no-longer-complacent. (you).
It is you lot, not “Labour” or “The Left” against whom the current revolt is happening, and will continue to rage. You should expect at least another 30 years of this. As long as it takes for you all to stop describing us as racist, populist, gullible, “right wing”, xenophobic, or any other “phobic” – and then some.
Yes, Labour is almost certainly a deserving early casualty, hopefully dead for good – with its original purpose (honourably) fulfilled, but now completely surplus to requirements. – the “dinosaur” that you mention.
We need an opposition. But it will need to be something completely new. and probably (to your horror) from the political right of Boris and Co. with their easy-going social liberalism.
We also need a new realisation from our self-regarding, self-absorbed, complacent, stuck-in-a-rut journalists. They (you) need to join us in the 2020’s, and completely re-boot your entire worldview and thought process. It’s going to be hard for you all. But we don’t care, because you all richly deserve the ongoing hard boot up the backside that you are receiving.
Journos and Politicos, We bid you welcome to your (self-imposed) future. Say hello to the rest of your life. We hope that you will enjoy it.
PERFECT! MOST TONIC!
As for your predictions, “Amen, amen, to that fair prayer say I” (Shakespeare).
Wow……..thumbs up to that!
That is sort of what happened in the US to produce Trump. There were revolts on the Left and the Right, but only the one on the Right was effective. There will be other, more competent and focused Trumps along, and I am doubtful whether you will all be as pleased as you seem to be now.
Trump Was NOT left or Right,he annoyed The Globalists,Greens, career politicians, built A wall, helped black,hispanic, Blue collar workers..No wonder you keep losing,Also mainstream Media hated lied about him..Trump is primarily A 3 times,maybe soon 4, divorced business man
Excellent post
Bravo Sir.
Well said. Nothing shows better how out-of-touch IB is than this line: “as the United States veers towards social democracy under its latest president.” The Democrats are going for full-on Marxism, which is where “social democracy” will always end up if unchecked at the ballot box. (And they know how to “win” elections now, without winning voters.)
Maybe Labour’s problem is two fold. First, as Shirley Williams once observed, today the ‘haves outweigh the havenots’. And secondly Labour has been taken over by middle class professionals.
There is that lovely line in Brideshead Revisited where Bridie is describing his future wife, Mrs Musprate, describing her ‘as a woman of high moral principle, fortified by all the prejudice of the middle classes’. In a way that describes Starmer. He bends the knee to Marxists but wouldn’t respect the Referendum result, no matter how he wanted to dress it up. He thinks people in Hartlepool and all points North are stupid, xenophobic bigots etc, etc, etc and then he wonders why we wont vote for him and his ilk. A bit of selfawareness would go a long way.
But unless Labour acts fast and reconnects with ordinary people and THEIR concerns it will find its vote will collapse just like it did in Scotland and just like PASOK’s did in Greece. So beware Starmer.
Well said. However, I think one should not point the finger too much at Starmer personally as he is in an impossible position. As Ian Birrell rightly says, parties of the traditional centre-left all across Europe are struggling – and failing – to keep their historical support.
let the Labour Party die, the battles it was created to fight are long gone. The future is about democracy versus technocracy, immigration, unstable employment, declining populations. It has nothing to say on these, at least nothing the voting public wants to hear. Let it die so that something appropriate for our times can take its place. Like Fraser Bailey says, its now a bloated cash cow for parasitic middle managers to leech from.
I agree Labour is finished but the natural successors of blind political hate, color prejudice and envy are the greenies. Once we see what they are like (Think the Black Hundreds or Bolshiviks) we’ll be begging for cuddly old Labour with its racism and grooming gangs.
exactly…bolsheviks with smiley face emoticons…
If you think those who will take advantage of racism and envy and other destructive forms of tribalism are all in one party, group, region, or class, I think you’re going to be unpleasantly surprised.
Our Labour County Councillors bragged they took briefings from extinction rebellion, Now today they Are Ex County Councillors!
Agreed. It (Labour) is an ex-parrot!
Eating a big slice of humble pie would be job 1, following by a sustained programme of not making it obvious you despise great portions of your own voters while expecting them to place their crosses next to your candidate when next at the ballot box.
When it comes to cottoning onto the very simple idea of insulting your voters not being the best electoral strategy – honestly – pigeons learn faster.
Even if Labour does have a good think and comes back with a coherent vision and a decent programme, it is going to take a very long time for people to trust again.
I think that makes sense. Though I think most of the insults attributed to Labour are perceived rather than actual.
But insulting your voters sometimes works. After all who could win the Red Wall after saying:
If he is blue collar, he is likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment?
Families on lower incomes the women have absolutely no choice but to work, often with adverse consequences for family life and society as a whole – in that unloved and undisciplined children are more likely to become hoodies, NEETS, and mug you on the street corner?
Children of working mothers are ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children who in theory will be paying for our pensions?
Mr Johnson.
As we’ve learned from the past few weeks, trying to use anything that Johnson has (or may have) said to discredit him works about as well as a chocolate fireguard. Voters price in his flippancy and don’t hold it against him – especially since he is delivering on other policies which are important to them like Brexit and the vaccine rollout. He is the Mr. Teflon of UK politics.
“Price in”…. thats a great phrase/metaphor.
It makes me think of the Democrats constantly trying to raise the issue of Trump’s personality failings, as if his voters had not already noticed, and discounted them.
Thanks! Alas, I can’t claim credit for it, as I picked the phrase up from somewhere else. But I like it, as choosing who to vote for really is like going to market and weighing all the options to try and get yourself the best deal. Perhaps this is a perspective Labour should try and take to heart instead of taking their voters/buyers for granted.
So that is your impression of a description ex-labor voter?
In MANY instances,he’s not actually wrong.
This bunch will never be trusted again..if they re-package it will be rightly seen as a con.
As an active member of the London Labour Party through the 1980s and 1990s, I’m afraid the only part of “not making it obvious you despise great portions of your own voters” they ever managed was “not making it obvious”. The Blair Babes and the hereditory Labour bigwigs (Mandelson, Toynbee) despised most of the other members of the party, never mind the voters.
The Labour Party is now the party of the social liberals who regard the attachment to nation as xenophobic, who want to erase its culture and traditions and despise all those such as the voters of Hartlepool who stand against them and their year zero approach. The Labour Party is a victim of its own loathing of people and nation.
Do not worry, Ian, it is one thing to tell an illegal immigrant or an asylum-seeker to go home, it is quite another to get them to go!
As has been said, it is not over until the illegal immigrant or asylum-seeker wins.
I am sure some of those told to go home will be around to make appearances in the less politically correct news sources in future for their unorthodox contributions to Denmark.
If Denmark ceases to be tough on immigration it will no longer be Denmark. It’s as simple as that. The population is only about 5 million, and it already has a few hundred thousand who have been living off welfare for years, with no intention of integrating.
Exactly,
And its already seen such hostility, In Sweden welfare cosseted migrant kids go round in gangs and pick single younger Swedes to rob, and even urinate on and film at promote on social media.
When the left applaud the welfare model of Scandinavia, they forget to mention the homogeneity of the population. Denmark has woken up, watching Sweden commit slow suicide.
Indeed. And if you wish to see what that suicide will look like take a glance at Pew Research’s analysis of Islam in Europe and its projections to 2050. Sobering stuff.
All thanks to Denmarks version of Labour.
This writer of this essay speaks of the Danish Social Democrats’ success ‘in spite of’ their ‘horribly tough stance on immigration’.
That is exactly the stance desired by a large majority in most European countries and certainly in the United Kingdom.
As long as (a) the Labour Party, (b) most media commentators and (c) the Conservative Party perceive matters in the way this author does, the Labour Party is dead and shortly will be buried, then it will be followed by the Tories, who talk tough on immigation and crime but don’t deliver, who govern in the interests of big money (not true free enterprise); and at last the media folk may begin to have a glimmering of just how out of touch THEY TOO are with the public they address.
Well said
Labour is not only a 50-years-out-of-date dinosaur but is going nowhere but backwards in its beyond-the-pale vehement hatred towards the mass of ordinary people, having completely adopted the Left backlash of ‘identity politics’, that began about a century ago with deeming ‘the workers’ supposedly ‘repressed’ by ‘capitalism’. This utter bunkum was a dumb plot to try to explain away why Marxist prediction was hopelessly awry — the workers in ‘advanced capitalist’ countries didn’t revolt yet feudal Ruskies did. This has developed into man-hating extreme feminism, and (through the Left in the USA co-opting the civil rights and Stonewall movements), white-hating and heterosexual-hating. ‘The worker’ has been ludicrously retrospectively stereotyped as having three dimensions of oppressiveness (sexism, racism and homophobia), to make them a replacement for ‘the boiss’ as the new hate target of the Left, which has also completely changed its notion of the state from ‘the boss’ friend’ to ‘agent of social change’. It’s the biggest political fraud in history. Labour is going to die, along with the also ‘identity politics’ totalitarian Lib Dems and the hardly less ‘woke’ Conservatives. A massive political realignment is occurring and this has to be reflected in political parties sooner or later, rather than political parties being a drag on political realignment.
IIRC Marx thought Russia would never have a Communist revolution because it didn’t have a middle class.
Shows who the real hate target always was.
I agree in general with your view but I cannot see political realignment as the answer. It will bring more of the same. We need a state that has limited power over us that it should not matter who we vote for. Before that will happen we need to learn how to think and considering how many think we can control the climate with carbon dioxide we going in the wrong direction. Imbecility rules.
It’s imbecility indeed. The nonsense notion of man-made climate change is the apotheosis of ‘identity politics’ hatred towards the masses. The degree of state power is of course a key political question and part of the realignment. A Main Reform platform is massive simplification of tax & regulations and abolishing quangos.
I agree with you that we need a smaller state , but obviously all those people employed by it aren’t going to say ‘you’re so right-give me my P45’ are they?
See my numerous posts,I mostly Agree ..Although Taking An East German term ”We need to change the electorate?” to get results we want..
Delicious watching Naga squirm on BBC News this morning – taking the knee clearly loses you votes – go woke go broke. It’s astounding how the media are not asking the right questions – the focus of the cognitive educated urban elite on woke issues does not have any traction with normal voters – how many times do the voters have to provide shock results like this for the commentariat to ‘get it’
The voters have to ‘disappear’ the legacy parties. Then the commentariat will ‘get it’; for THEY TOO are so out of touch with ordinary citizens’ concerns that nothing less than that biggest electric cattle-prod shock will induce connection with the thinking of the human majority.
Both legacy media and legacy parties need to die. I gave up on them both long ago.
How do you remain so well informed?
Labour’s problem is it hates the working class but needs them to get them voted into power.
What Blair did was cunning. He presided over the post Thatcher years and took over where Kinnock had left off preparing the ground for his 3rd way champaign socialism and increasing immigration where the owners of the means of production could get weak, non unionised cheap compliant immigrant labour and who were prepared to live 6 or 7 to a room and keep the landlord petty burgoise happy so they could charge higher rents. Remember he got rid of Clause 4.
The interview with Lord Green exposed it all and where no one was asked about a radical change of the UK demographic make up in British society.
Labour’s loyal working class support was being overlooked and under represented in favour of a bunch of illegal immigrants with demands that their religion and culture get preference over the indigenous working class. Too much, hence the push back at the ballot box. Starmer is another Blair, even a lawyer who did nothing for the working class and their kids when they were groomed by Muslim grooming gangs and even looked the other way over the Savile case when he was Director of Public Prosecution Service.
I live in the northern towns and I have many friends who fit the category of working class and traditional Labour voters but who now vote Tory. Whenever I have challenged them in the last few weeks about them still voting Tory – they mention one name Corbyn – like Banquo’s ghost his name resides top of their memories. They have no interest in public ownership, when questioned about sleaze will cite the debacle at Liverpool city council and say they are just as bad as each other (in fact note why Hartlepool is a vacancy), are more interested in immigration and ascribe the covid recovery to a man who they use the first name of Boris – they trust him for some weird reason and see him as one of us – remarkable I know but Johnson does binary and simplicity well and the law specialist (they call him Starmer not Sir Keir not Keir Starmer but Starmer) on the other side does not. So, yes I am sorry to say Labour is dead as it is too divided, too complex, cannot take feedback and act on it. It is clueless and goodness help us all – there is one person they do respect from the Labour side and they use his name with respect – Andy Burnham. Good guy, one of us etc.
Labour’s biggest problem is that many of its MPs and most of its supporters are deeply unpleasant people.
Yes,Also most other Parties,especially Green fascists like ”Extinction rebellion”
Remind your friends that Burnham presided over MidStaffs as Health Minister.
And he also wants to dismantle PREVENT.
As everyone got to have a vote and there was a need to represent the working man, the Labour Party came along to do just that. Then came unions and the NHS (a fabulous creation designed to allow everyone equal right to good health) as well as an increase in the standard of living of working people.
Now, the NHS is a failure because people have abused their own bodies, creating an impossible health situation. Unions only really exist for government employees. Genuinely poor people have almost ceased to exist although there will be many who have caused their own poverty by not being able to handle the incoming benefits (buying a new smartphone before food for the children, for example).
So, who should Labour represent? The answer is that the drive to equality has led to many highly educated people who still cling onto the belief that they are working class. They believe they can help poor people by applying outdated theories, like Socialism or Communism, by making everybody so equal that no-one takes responsibility – except themselves because only their view is clear and correct. Sound familiar?.
Behind all of this, the true aim and method of creating total equality is decarbonisation. When there is no carbon, travel will be difficult, commuting from the city chaos to nice houses in the country will be awkward. Why is decarbonisation so clever when Greece and Turkey are fighting over natural gas rights which will make them rich for 100 years?
The NHS illustrates why socialism will always fail. It replaces personal responsibility and freedom with government support and control. The Labour Party might be seen as failing to deliver on socialist policies but after Blair the Conservatives adopted New Labour policies and the voters have put their faith in them and now Boris to make socialism work. Socialism never worked anywhere.
What are you talking about,the NHS is fine.what Britain needs is an industrial policy to catch up with the rest of the world.
As for socialism and labour,renationalising our water and rail utilities makes 100% sense.
Our much vaunted private sector banking system failed in 2008.
Surely that’s pretty indicative that neoliberal financial capitalism doesn’t work.
Yours is a pretty superficial analysis. Yes, banks were clearly to blame but they were regulated by the FSA, who were aware of the issues but, fatally, took no action. Had they done so when the problems surrounding AIG first appeared, the damage to UK banking could have been substantially mitigated.
Er – that’s doubly superficial, surely? The banks were very very bad but it’s not their fault, the teacher should have told them off sooner…..in reality, the banks were completely focused on their own profits at the expense of even their own best customers, knew exactly what they were doing (although, hilariously, not how they were doing it), and then got away with it pretty well scot free. There was no lasting ‘damage to UK banking’ – ask G Osborne, or check out the 2018/9 bonus rounds. The damage was to their customers.
A current learning example would be the Madrid elections, also this week. On the leftwing side, PSOE (ruling Spanish Labour party) was pipped by Mas Madrid (a local and practically focused leftwing party), with Podemos (now drifting into theoretical politics) itself running way back.
Three leftwing parties. But the one that came out strongest was the one that has a reputation of being more practical on the ground – more worried and more responsive to local issues.
The part of modern leftwing parties that seems to be missing is the old sense of mutualism – doing things for each other, pride in local community and achievements. Togetherness for mutual benefit. Divisiveness, labelling, segregating, placing theory over practice is killing leftwing movements.
So if there was an idea, it would be stop demanding and starting doing. For example, don’t just demand more childcare, but actually create a volunteer-led playgroup. Don’t waste effort trying to rename a park to make it more politically correct, use that effort to update the children’s play area. From the doing comes respect and trust, and from trust will come votes.
How am I supposed to take a supposedly dispassionate analysis seriously when elected governments whose policies the writer does not favour are described as “horrible” and “dreadful”?
There is far too much of this on Unherd.
Yes, the article was very disputing in that respect.
Noticeable too that anybody the MSM doesn’t like is labelled “far right”. Pretty much anybody who doesn’t fully subscribe to the PRO-EU, SJW, unlimited immigration agenda is basically classified as a brownshirt.
True, but Unherd isn’t supposed to be MSM.
I supported U because Freddie Sayers had done some excellent interviews on Covid, not seen elsewhere. He is a very good interviewer. Unfortunately the tenor of the site as a whole is most definitely British Establishment: Royalty, COE, the good the English have done the world, etc. I do not find in the writers the ability to question, be skeptical and try to understand the other side… Giles was blathering on yesterday about Moses, not in terms of a myth, but as though he were a bloke you might meet at the pub… blinkers! Good journalism is good skepticism, even about one’s own ideas.
I was quite invested in this article until I came across the ‘dreadful Trump’ comment, and after that couldn’t bring myself to read any more of what the writer was selling.
Yeah! I also felt a jolt of conscience when the writer masquerading as a new radical journalist lazily repeats the elitist denigration of a genuinely radical President……….
In Spain they actually have parties that could correctly be called ‘right wing’. In the UK this isn’t the case: the current Conservative Party is further left than Callaghan before Saint Margaret so no need for a wimpy woke centre left coloured red.
Don’t be fooled by MSM propaganda.The only party that could rightly be called “right” in Spain is a small party, relatively recent, whose numbers remained much the same in the Madrid elections. The equivalent of the Conservatives (Tories) in Spain (PP) are also a centre/liberal party. I suspect that this is the crux of the problem for the left in general. Conservative parties have moved into what was once their turf and in response they have moved further out on a limb, leaving their electorate behind. Moral posturing and lazy ideology will no longer cut it. The people of the region of Madrid have overwhelmingly voted for a hard-working, effective, efficient, daring Presidenta. Her own party (PP) didn’t fully appreciate what they had in her until quite recently! She is not an ideologue. I see a small – tiny – light at the end of a very long dark tunnel, worldwide, starting in Madrid.
The most oppressive government since Oliver Cromwell, worldwide attacks on free speech, a crazed billionaire threatening to block out the sun and the answer to Labour’s relevance problem is to Go Green?
Yes, that was rather bizarre.
Sigh eye roll,
Danish immigration policies aren’t outrageous but entirely appropriate when you look at the complete breakdown of society in Sweden and their high crime rate.
Ian birrell is Pathetic.
Agreed. Add to that the fact that the native population in Denmark is only 5.8 million. They could quickly be overwhelmed by what seems to be a never-ending stream of migrants from e.g. the Middle East.
Is Labour dead? YES. Labour has no idea how this came to be or how to fix it. Or it refuses to acknowledge the fact. Focusing on London centric minority issues will not get you elected.
But despite a year long campaign against him in the Tory press Sadiq Khan is projected to comfortably win in London which will maintain life in the Labour party.
Of course Khan will win. The secret is in the name.
Khan or ”The hood” is damaged goods,Only loonies rate him, after yet another London bridge Terrorist attack,his response Was ”Its part &parcel of living in a capital city” The invisible man will surely get his comeuppance .Saying dopey flannel after Knife crime soar 65% London Is Safer than at anytime for 20 years,sheer bilge…
They are ”Sleeping’having fallen off their perch?…polly toynbee..polly?..
???
What tosh. Marine Le Pen and the RN is the textbook centrist party, strongly socialistic on economy matters. Birrell must be mistaking her with her father, whom Marin explicitly distanced herself / her party a long time ago.
Lazy journalism.
She has Moved to Right of centre, Unfortunately she gets beaten by establishment parties,this time ”Fishing” Frexit could swing it in remarkable times ..Macron is the Moron,despite Mainstream Worship…
The Conservatives, and the Tories before them, switch major polices every now and again to remain relevant. Boris and Brexit is the most recent example.
Labour switch client groups every now and again to remain relevant, but fail.
Labour is now a Zombie party, stumbling around but gradually decaying. It will take more than a new leader and a fresh motto to revivify the Party. Perhaps it would be kinder to end the Party and start again. Democracy needs a good opposition.
Unfortunately, the party system ensures that democracy does not work. It gives power to the politicians over us. Democracy needs independent politicians who work for those who elected them.
I have stood as Independent in last 3 General elections &4 Local elections,The Voters didn’t elect me,although (i thrashed the Labour candidate in 2019 local election) The Electorate like Safety! As HL.Menckhen stated in Roosevelts America ”The Prime purpose of ALL political parties,is to create imaginary,hobgoblins ,which ONLY they can lead us to safety”! ..prescient….
Communism/Socialism killed 100 million people, and still killing people in Venezuela Cuba N Korea, and China. And yet nobody says sorry or is even asked why they are following a system that has blood on its hands and has devastated and blighted so many economies.
I mean, are 1- East European all stupid fools to have dumped “Socialist Paradise” or 2 Do they know something that Western Socialist and Communists will not admit to, and dumped it as soon as possible? Hmmmm tricky one eh.
Oh, and have you noticed that these Socialist Warriors are all over here, living off Capitalists. No Bread queues for them.
If I was in charge, I would have all Communists and Socialist explain themselves why they follow this Cult/Creed/Dogma that’s harmed people all over the world, before they are allowed to work with Kids Government or Media.
Extreme? Really? I think a few older East Europeans will tell you what its like to stand in a 24 hr bread queue whilst TV Radio Newspaper all told you that it was paradise, and your kids were indoctrinated to hate the West. You rebelled and the Midnight knock on the door happened.
This is spot on. I visited DDR and Poland a number of times in the mid-80s. The pollution, shortages, drunkenness, poor clothing, grey faces and drabness shocked me. I was able to describe these when I returned to the West.
But far worse were the lies, corruption, mistrust, cynicism, a constant feeling of oppression and being watched. This I found much harder to explain. The only people in the West who got what I said were Vietnamese boat people I met in Sydney.
Where does this Idea come room that Jeremy Corbyn nearly won the 2017 election? The truth is May nearly lost. If Corbynite policies were indeed so incredibly popular, why didn’t they win? After another two years of Corbyn and the true colours of his version of Labour began to show, they were soundly trounced in 2019. I have heard many left wing commentators today extolling a further leftward turn after much of the populace of this country seem to prefer a more right wing point of view.
More gems from the Guardian’s comments:
What kind of moron walks to the ballot box thinking they want to vote Tory after the past 12 months?
Brexiteers, they’re not very intelligent.
the continued popularity of this government is astonishing and is in my opinion, a stain on the nation that reflects badly on the electorate. I don’t think ‘moron” is that wide of the mark.
They are beyond help. Gleefully voting to be downtrodden by people that clearly despise you is not rational behaviour. Better to abandon them to their racist Brexit fantasies and focus attention on seats where the people aren’t quite so dense.
People keep commenting that the problem is the left calling the electorate morons. No one would be calling them morons if they didn’t make moronic choices. The reason they vote Tory/Brexit is because they are small minded, xenophobic bigots and the tories have twigged on to this. They made their moronic choices before being labelled morons.
Isn’t the time to stop calling people stupid the time just after they’ve stopped doing stupid stuff?
If someone votes Tory because someone calls them stupid then they are stupid.
English morons. More deadly than a virus
2029 and 2034 nailed on for the Tories like Jesus at Easter, I’d say.
Are those BTL comments, or quotes from the latest Polly Toynbee column?
Do you think the people in Hartlepool who voted Brexit and then Tory read the Guardian comments, though? I don’t even think the ex-Labour voters who didn’t vote at Hartlepool read the Guardian comments.
I agree those comments are appalling and self defeating.
They may not read the Grauniad comments, but somehow they are getting the message that Labour hates them.
They are not self defeating they are illuminating
Sounds like hate speech to me. Has Plod been informed?
Piketty describes the wider arc (Labour in the UK; Democrats in the US; social democratic parties on the continent) of this electoral shift in his “Capital and Ideology.” The basic narrative is that these parties have all abandoned their former core electorate among the working classes for educated urban elites that represent their “donor class.” As currently constituted they are unelectable — a conclusion drawn by observers as various as Mark Blyth and William Mitchell.
The author writes, “Their parties should have been boosted by the flaws of neo-liberalism that were exposed first in the financial crisis of 2008 and now in the pandemic.” He’s missing their fatal flaw — Blairite Labour and Clinton Democrats are themselves hardcore neoliberal projects. They can no more disassociate themselves from the flaws of neoliberalism than Milton’s Satan can escape Hell: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”
Having left working class votes lying on the ground they can hardly be surprised to discover that their political opponents have gone to the trouble to pick them up …
Exactly. I am broadly sympathetic to Piketty’s analysis and it is incredible that in an age of rampant greed and banksterism etc the left is in retreat almost everywhere. The problem is, as you say, that those in charge of the so-called left are neoliberals themselves. The last thing they want is to see wealth redistributed, or for the value of their property portfolio to fall.*
*Scratch a leftie and you’ll always find someone with two or three properties.
It is truly amazing how the far left leaning members of my family will go to avoid paying tax (just like certain TV presenters) or how eager they are to explore property development opportunities.
dltd
But the Greens are deep red, here as well as in Germany.
This article is like a Rohrshach test, it tells you more about the writer than the topic itself; like when it said: “While Boris Johnson has seized the flag of English nationalism.” No, he has stood for the Union whilst the other parties have stood for atavistic, parasitic micropolitics. Labour has become a fashion-statement for socially-distanced people who think they are posh. What we are witnessing is the collapse of closed “hygiene” politics and its replacement with open democracy.
Good post, and interestingly phrased.
‘ dreadful Trump …..disastrous handling of the pandemic …’ Inaccurate. The US produced a vaccine in 5 months under Trump – but the mendacious and corrupt Democrats pretend that this success is down to them. And Trump was correct about the uselessness of masks.
Thanks for correcting the historical record on President Trump……
This dead party still tracks around 30% support in the national polls. It has been written off before. The membership of the Conservative party could be gathered together in two London football grounds. Both parties are in serious trouble.
Neither party appears to believe in responsibilities to match rights, the importance of law and order, the societal value of family, free speech, or the need for sound money. I would venture to suggest that these and one or two other issues loom large in the minds of a majority of the electorate.
When a party has been in power for a long time, it gets tired, especially if its parliamentary talent pool is shallow. The swing voters then get fed up with it and vote for the other lot.
We need something different, something that at the very least has the testicular resolution to face down the critical race theorists, biology deniers and sundry social media lynch mobs. If it comes from anywhere, it will come from the right. But don’t hold your breath.
Excellent post.
Your venomous sort of socialist hates Boris for very simple reasons which go back centuries. Sure, he’s a toff but he’s not the snobbish sort and he understands noblesse oblige. Add to that, he’s a bluff cove and a bit of a lad and therefore just what the English love in a leader.
I latched onto this thinking when my management course invited some TUC talking head to come and tell us what’s what. And you could tell that what he really hated with passion was good employers. Without lots of ‘class struggle’ he had no raison d’etre.
dltd
what value do unions add to the quality of the product/service that is involved or to the end user? Unions are largely self-serving enterprises and that’s okay so far as it goes. But they should be honest about it. The notion that unions are morally righteous “because reasons” does not wash.
Sure, Alex — “what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Here’s a US list for you (I’m sure someone could give you the UK equivalents):
1. Weekends
2. All Breaks at Work (Lunch)
3. Paid vacations
4. FMLA
5. Sick Leave
6. Social Security
7. Minimum Wage
8. Civil Rights Act/ Title VII (Prohibits Discrimination)
9. 8- Hour work day
10. Overtime Pay
11. Child labor laws
12. Occupational Safety & health Act (OSHA)
13. 40-hour work Week
14. Worker’s compensation (Worker’s Comp)
15. Unemployment Insurance
16. Pensions
17. Workplace Safety standards and Regulations
18. Employer Health Care Insurance
19. Collective Bargaining Rights for Employees
20. Wrongful Termination Laws
21. Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
22. Whistleblower Protection Laws
23. Employee Polygraph Protect Act
24. Veteran’s Employment and Training Services (VETS)
25. Compensation increases and Evaluations (Raises)
26. Sexual Harassment Laws
27. Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)
28. Holiday Pay
29. Employer Dental, Life, and Vision insurance
30. Privacy Rights
31. Pregnancy and Parental Leave
32. Military Leave
33. The Right to Strike
34. Public Education for Children
35. Equal Pay Acts of 1963 & 2011
36. Laws Ending Sweatshops in the United States
Oh, please. Few of these are accurate and even if they were, you are defending the continued presence of an institution that has long since seen its expiration date. Today, it is no more than a money laundering operation for one political party.
Public education is in virtually every state’s constitution and has nothing to do with organized labor. Same with sexual harassment laws which mostly focus on the non-union white collar world. The ADA was a Bush I creation. Social Security was an FDR idea that was originally a women’s and orphan’s fund since age of eligibility was higher than life expectancy, and the minimum wage was a move to keep blacks out of the labor force.
Repeating what others tell you is not always the best approach.
You are welcome to all the concrete, material benefits you can keep, Alex. Good luck to you if you think you can keep them all without any help.
Union membership has been declining for decades. Your perception of organized labor’s popularity might be mistaken.
Zero hour contracts Came about because Gordon Brown embraced EU Part time directive in 2000
Yeah, but what else have the unions ever done for us?
thus far, you have both ignored the question in the post: what value do unions add to the quality of the product/service that is involved or to the end user?
Unions work for unions and certain politicians. But much of this laundry list is things that have nothing to do with organized labor.
QED!
dltd
What is the evidence of better products or services? Teachers unions do nothing to improve the quality of education. The heavily unionized domestic auto industry has seen its market share gradually eroded by foreign carmakers who tend to have non-union shops.
dltd
So what if unions are self serving,so are businesses.
In the private sector unions have a role to play in ensuring that management make the right decisions.
If the workforce do not have a voice then that is one less impediment to poor decision making
I agree in part. The main achievement of liberal societies has been the diffusion of power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely… as somebody famous said.
The key requirement for a decent society is that the primary competing power bases have some parity. Unions were a useful counterweight to the unfettered capitalism of the early 20th century, with a political arm in the Labour Party. At the time it was necessary, but by the 70’s was out of control.
Some counterweight to big corporate power is now very necessary again and probably won’t be found in political parties.
The woke agenda is nonsense but appears to have become a power base in its own right, some counterweight to that is also necessary particularly as the other big power bases – the judiciary and media seem to have fallen under its spell.
As the established order disintegrates my fear is which power bases will emerge.
You’re mixing up Trade Unionism for the good of the workers, and Trade Unionism as a Left Wing enforcer and paymaster. The first is a fair comment, the second is a threat to Democracy.
Why? When Thatcher took on the Miners Union there were two objectives.
1 Coal was expensive (and very polluting) so gas was the “new” clean fuel of the future. “Dash for Gas” was a Labour/Miners Union slogan, and used as an anti-gas slogan.
2 The other (more important issue) was the Scargill (egged on by others and unions) was to use the Miners Union to overthrow a Democratically Elected Government. A coup in any other country.
Unions are blurring (for a long time) the lines of what they are supposed to be and become quasi leftwing paymasters with muscle. Whilst playing games, you’ve taken your eye off the game ball.
The frightening thing is that the Left is so backward in thinking. They are 19 Century mantra chanting, rich people hating Luddites in the 21 st Century.
Artificial Intelligence has arrived. Robotics is serious, not just for working-class hands-on people, ( my son works for a company that has designed a bricklaying machine that is miles faster and better than and bricklaying gang x 3 . That has serious employment issues. It doesn’t require scaffolding either.)
Machines are doing Radiology jobs, open-heart operations (no shaking hands) etc etc etc. And what, your Union is following tired slogans and waving Red Flags led a Woke Kneeler? That’s your future?
Is the cunning plan to smash all robots?
Do get real.
dltd
Thatcher replaced British Coal with coal from Eastern Europe – so much for her commitment to Britain and to eliminating pollution.
Thatcher took on the miners as part of her campaign to eliminate collective worker power (or any power source that disagreeed with her eg GLC). She did it in a particularly cruel way by destroying the industries and communities that working people and their families worked and lived in. Not just with the miners – with the destruction of almost all the industries (other than health and education) that had strong Union memberships.
Many on the left, while still supporting Trades Unions, recognise that work is changing and hence the interest in things like universal basic income and shorter working hours.
GLC was a talking shop same as EU regional assembly, london GLA
Wilson wanted to close significantly more pits than Thatcher.
If those pits were still in existence Labour would be demanding they were closed immediately due to Climate Change, lack of diversity in the workforce (not enough gay, trans, non cis), Miners coming to the surface black with coal dust – obviously racist.
Margaret Thatcher wanted a smaller, more efficient coal industry producing more coal and energy. Sir Iain MacGregor, British Coal’s Chairman shared that goal. If ether of them wanted the industry’s demise they were both the sort of people who would have made that clear.
Scargill prediction Coal Would be imported,From Poland Came true, He was Anti-EU so not all bad
Unions are needed as much as ever given the abuses we know about Sports Direct workers, of gig economy workers and Leicester sweatshops.
I would note also the ahistorical forgetting of the central role of the Trade Union movement in expanding the franchise.
People like Len McCluskey living in £600,000+ flat in london’s housing shortage,wasn’t A vote winner…each PM wife,Mistress, has Overspent taxpayers money on furnishings,people weren’t too concerned over that..
Labour is dead. They don’t realise it yet.
The Liberal (Democrats) have taken decades to fully die out, now labour will do the same. A bit like those annoying weeds you spend years killing off in your garden.
Interesting to note that this might also spell the end for the conservatives – given that their modern existence is predicated on opposing Labour.
I don’t disagree with your argument, but what will there be in place of the two main parties?
Hope so, My preference for Independents,SDP Left;;; Reform= Right of centre to take over ..but i fear Technocratic Vulture capitalists will destroy the next Generation & democracy,maybe you think ive Watched too much daft Varda?
‘My preference would be for Labour to turn deep green’ yep that’ll fire up the wokeing class, forget the working class though.
If the Tories put the personal allowance for earned income only up to £20K or £25K (let’s tax flash cars & other fripperies to make up the difference) they might finish the ‘Labour’ party off once and for all.
Let’s treat hard working, but low earning, people better.
(I don’t care which party implements my personal hobby horse, as long as is happens !)
I would like to make a prediction. I make no claims for my predictions, than that they are, most of them, completely bonkers, so there we have it. Anyway…
There is one more chimera of an escape hatch that Labour will head for next, over the next two to four years, before they stand alone atop a tower of rubble, and are forced to look in the mirror.
Why will they do this? Lots of reasons. Because they can. Because, although they have caught a glimpse of annihilation, they cannot (yet) bring themselves to look in the mirror. Because.
What will they do? Well, the cry will now go up across all of Labourland: PR! Yes, PROPORTIONAL Representation, don’t you know! It’s gotta be proportional, it’s only fair!. Because well, it wasn’t fair before, but it just is, now! If it ain’t Proportional, we don’t wanna know! This will now be the mantra of every two bit prog journo for the foreseeable. Meanwhile, the small parties, LibDems included, will look on in incredulity, that Christmas can in fact come every day of the year. And they will all support it of course – VERY enthusiastically indeed. I mean, if as a species, you were permanently on the verge of extinction, and someone offered you the perma-sanctuary of a couple of acres at Woburn, with the food thrown in, wouldn’t you take it?
Anyway, the assumption will be, we just tot up all the votes across all the left-leaning parties, and Lo! – we have a coalition majority. In which WE will be the big player, who gets to lord it over all the little ‘uns. And they will build a bunch of stories like that, which they will tell themselves, about why PR is RIGHT! …Urm, Left I mean! Well you know what I mean!! I mean, I know Clegg pushed this stuff, but that was Clegg PR! This will be Laybaa PR, which is superior and the *right* kind of PR! And anyway, what is your point about Clegg?
And then, after all that, will they win? Well No, That’s not how it works. They will, in fact, get pasted. Again. With yet more of their estate gone. Or fragmenting. But there will be a (somewhat cracked) mirror handy, for them to look into.
Clegg’s idea in that referendum (2011) was for AV, not PR.
Well yes, Pepsi Max in a plastic cup vs Coke Classic in a fancy glass bottle. But, you know, sugared water.
Or maybe, people are simply fed up. Fed up with BLM and its Marxist ideology; with ‘cancel culture; with being lectured to by their moral superiors; with being called anything or everything ending in ‘phobic’ or ‘ist’. Maybe people are just tired…
Boris’ ‘cronyism’ is simply that when something needs doing, he phones around. Whether oxygen-masks or vaccines, I’m all for it!
His government IS Conservative – of British culture and population …
I wish he would do something about immigration and pedophile grooming gangs.
Johnson certainly does his best to make sure our money is conserved within the circle of his mates and girlfriends.
There are some absolutely cracking comments over at the Guardian this morning. Pure comedy gold.
“why do those on death row vote for their executioners – it baffles me.”
“leavers will forever be demanding ‘respect’ for the stupid decision they made in 2016”
“Gutter press induced “Stockholm syndrom” (sic)”
“People fall for slogans because they like short sentences.”
“Labour should just give up and divert their efforts elsewhere because gullible voters will be gulled by posh accents and three word slogans which play to base instincts.”
“Labour needs to get the racist vote back on board to win.”
“people in Hartlepool blame Labour for the devastation caused by Austerity. If this is so, what chance do they have against such political illiteracy.”
“the gullibility, and the downright stupidity of many voters are ably played on by the Tory gutter Press”
“if you vote for a party you know are deliberately lying (Tories) then that is stupid.”
“Voting conservative because other labour voters called you stupid does not mean you are not stupid.”
“Dismantling the UK (and thus terminating UK history, which many voters are still irrationally attached to) would be a beginning.”
“I would rather change the electorate.”
“Johnson is a crook of very low moral character. That so many people in Hartlepool could vote for a party led by him is incomprehensible “
“the English, or at least a very large section of them , are right wing. They couldn’t care less about Johnson or his party’s, in plain sight, moral depravity, sleaze or corruption”
“the English go everywhere with an obnoxious, look at us vibe combined with that noxious joyless anglo british nationalism, came a bit unstuck though when they were sorted out in Marseilles by the people who really did defeat Hitler.”
“When you vote for a well known, incompetent liar and all he stands for – I’m sorry but that puts you in the same bucket.”
“Stop pandering to racist, jingoistic Brexit supporters, all those people who go around saying “Boris” is doing his best so why can’t he have fancy wallpaper… f*** them, ignore them. “
“typical of English voters. Corrupt, lazy, jingoistic, arrogant, bullying and incompetent.”
Yeah, it was great. I often go on there for an incredulous laugh in the morning. I don’t put anything in their begging bowl though.
Al Beeb was pretty amusing as well, shades of the GE, poor old Hugh looked shattered.
I don’t like Boris Johnson’s character but I hate the Guardian.
“Lest we forget these poor northern souls who dare to think for themselves”
One shadow cabinet member, fresh from the campaign trail, was perspicacious about the party’s plight when we discussed the election results. “This was the day that should be imprinted on all our eyeballs showing we have lost the white working class,”
The fact that this particular shadow minister felt the need to add the ‘white’ rather than just saying working class is interesting.
Indeed.
Coughs.
Yes, perhaps as in “white van man”, the one that Emily Thornberry poured such withering scorn on. That will not be forgotten, or forgiven.
Yesterday, Boris beat back the French. HMS Tamar and HMS Severn versus swarms of French fishing boats. Decisive British victory.
Yesterday, Kier Starmer lost a political stronghold.
Compare and contrast.
Jersey is a crown dependency with many tax dodgers as residents. Will Bojo be sending them a bill or will the UK taxpayer have to pick up the tab??
Yes maybe,why does Labour Party have Offshore accounts cosy up to Bernie ecclestone,Phoney Flat sales managers ?…
Good job the French didn’t have the Jauréguiberry!
Think about it, Everything Went Downhill After Men Stopped Wearing Hats
I was bemoaning the fact that men no longer wore hats while watching Talking Pictures the other day. It stopped more recently than you might think
It was a bad idea that it did.
Yes, that is when the rot set in.
…Parties that make no secret of hating their own Country and despising most of the people that live in it rarely prosper. Their problem is that they are so pre-occupied with London (where most of them live, and all of them aspire to)…that they have come to believe it is a British City. In fact, a very large number of the people there are not from Britain and are here only to make use of it to pursue their ambitions…and those who are from places like Hartlepool have come because they hated Hartlepool (which might not have thought much of them)
London is at it’s most British on Remembrance Sunday…which Labour would probably like to ban, prior to repurposing the Cenotaph as a public urinal…RSF
Why did the author feel obliged to say the ‘dreadful’ Donald Trump?
The question that must be asked is why the U.S. is bucking this UK-Europe trend. 2020 election fraud?
It’s a bit more complicated than that but yes, essentially, it was a form of fraud on a massive scale.
The US isn’t bucking that trend — you need to look past the Presidential election to the composition of Congress (the Democrats LOST seats), the Senate and especially the State Houses.
We’ll see in November 2022 Mid terms how Senile Corrupt fraud,Biden does….
The lesson for Labour may be that they need to learn to cheat as well as the Democrats.
Turnout was 42%. Down from 57.9%. So a majority is uninspired by any of the candidates. Fertile area for an inspirational leader/party.
No, 42% is not bad for a by-election.
Not bad for an uncontroversial by election but most with a bit of risk and media attention have a bigger turnout. I wonder if it turns out less than half the Brexit vote from last time switched to the Conservatives and the rest stayed at home, as did many ex Labour voters. Remember in 2010 the BNP got 2000 votes (5%)
I thought that was noticeable, too. And even more striking when you consider the national figure for 2019 of 67%. Even the EU ref turnout in Hartlepool was significantly lower than the National average.
I suppose it could be an indication of just how ‘left behind’ the place feels if so many people don’t see the point in voting.
It is true that had either major party chosen to field a candidate with more in common with local people, more might have voted.
Every article discusses voter cohorts in terms of urban progressives with modern “good” views/opinions that are outvoted by rural outdated voters with “bad” traditional views/opinions. And there lies the problem and the reason why Labour is less than useless. They have to realise that to win they must reflect the majority NOT the righteous minority. The electorate knows what is right and there is no future in trying to educate them out of the wisdom of crowds.
Agreed. In any case, it is arrogant for politicians to think that they know better than the electorate.
Political commentators of all stripes are keen on analysis. They pick over the carcass of every election, trying to find the key indicators for what went wrong (and sometimes, when bewildered, as of late, what went right).
The man or woman whose interest is less acute, and whose attention span is of necessity more limited (because life), works more with broad brush strokes. The messages they take over the course of months and years leading to an election are simplified either because they simplify them or because artful politicians do the simplifying for them.
An artful politician knows where to place emphasis, and knows how to get a core message across.
Boris Johnson is not an artful politician, he is a political genius who would have Machiavelli swooning with admiration.
You don’t need to provide evidence for this, because Hartlepool is, or should be, the final proof. For those who are interested it is probably time to stop trying to find a lamppost to hang him from, put all preconceptions aside, and see if it is possible to understand just how these highly improbable victories have been his.
Kier Starmer ought to be looking at this as well. He should now know for certain he can’t beat Johnson. Johnson may beat himself, eventually, and the fall may so bad it allows Starmer to walk over the prone figure of his nemesis and into Number Ten.
I wouldn’t bet on it if I were him. What I would be doing is recognising my inherent political weaknesses and, with a little bit of luck, finding the strength to concede that they make me unfit for the job at hand. Because that verdict has just been passed by the people of Hartlepool.
People don’t want him because they see him as someone who is a clumsy opportunist who lacks a backbone.
Bending the knee was clumsy opportunism. Nobody believed he meant it, everyone believed he did it because he thought it would earn him brownie points. In taking the knee he demonstrated beyond doubt that he was unfit to lead the country. He showed he so lacked proper judgement he was unable to see that the advice to do this thing was advice of the very worst kind. He should have been able to see it, he should have been able to say ‘no’ to it.
The only way forward for him today was to have come out to announce the sacking of every single woke, identity politics obsessed member of his shadow cabinet and every single adviser advancing that cause. He should have come out and said that the time of Labour being host to every grievance-obsessed minority interest was over.
There are other things he should have said, but there is no point listing any of them because he is incapable of saying them.
Until the Labour Party is led by someone with the strength to say ‘enough of this sh9t’, Labour will continue its decline. Because people don’t what what they currently have to sell, and they cannot be convinced to want it.
Starmer falling to his knee was quite prophetic for the Labour party itself.
He lost my respect at that moment.
It’s always interesting reading between the lines on UnHerd. There are an increasing number of “neoliberals” and “neoconservatives” represented on it…must be some money they can smell. The elephant in the room is the “populism” that Trump ran on – economic localism / nationalism, controlled immigration, foreign policy pragmatism. Amazing that people like Birrell get away being commentators without “seeing” this…shape UnHerd gives oxygen to such people.
Should immigration be uncontrolled, then?
If a dripping wet left wing Tory like Birrell was still putting words in the PM’s mouth (syrians, trump, etc) the ukip would still be winning votes from the conservatives
It turns out that telling 52% of the electorate that they’re racist morons for disagreeing with your policies doesn’t win many votes. Whodathunkit?
‘We have lost the white working class’. Hardly surprising when the metropolitan wokies who now run the party quite obviously hate them.
Looking on from the Antipodes, it feels like Beazley’s comment has landed with even greater vigour in the UK; so much so that Conservative toffs can now be thought of as “one of us” whereas Labour progressives are now thought to “hate us”.
In the past, these two groups kind of muddled along together because they knew they needed each other to gain power. Since Brexit, the outright hatred they have for each other has been truly exposed. Turning a deep green will not heal those divisions (in fact likely the opposite) and I have no idea what will.
“Progressive” ideologies are the problem. Humans have thrown out their religious attitudes to be replaced by ‘modern lifestyles’ which don’t satisfy the soul.
The ‘soul’ does not exist.
Why are the parties of social democracy performing so poorly in many Western democracies at a time when the free-spending policies of their creed, boosted by the pandemic, are in the ascendancy?
Maybe people have figured out that ‘free spending’ cannot go on indefinitely. Maybe they’re figured out that the free spending is coming out of their pockets, not those of elected officials. Maybe they’ve noticed that some of this spending — like in the US where people can make more money NOT working than working — is counterproductive.
Yeah right,people are in fact realising that government has a far larger fiscal capacity than previously thought.
The Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari wrote a short essay in The Atlantic Monthly a couple of years ago, remarking that workers faced the possibility of being rendered economically useless by modern technology. I think that’s the key. As Harari put it, they would find it far more difficult to fight such irrelevance than they did the relatively easy matter of exploitation. I suspect that those voters who feel abandoned by center-left parties aren’t really deserted by them. The parties simply don’t know what to do about the problem (other than UBI), and so concentrate on issues for which they have some solution(s).
If you compare Labour with Europe. It’s difficult, because ‘first by the post’ distract the picture. Compared with Denmark. Labour would be split into 3 parties : The existing Socialdemocrats ( meaby a little more to the left ? ) 2) People socialist party a soft left party , and 3) Not the danish left wing party Enhedslisten, but into another party which would look like the german ‘Linke’ a ultra left party, where violent demonstrations is ok.
The danish Socialdemocrats has survived mainly because it has accepted and lead a strong policy against immigration : No more immigrants than we can handle.
The general line is a strong welfare state, with a sound economic policy, which is what the majority of the danish electorate prefer. We are protestants, don’t use money you don’t have.
If you compare with the old communist countries, the danish state redistributes more money than they did.Most UK citizens would hate out tax regime. The highest in Europe.
This moment will pass. I remember when Labour were dead and buried after the Michael Foot disaster in’83. Then a succession of capable leaders – Kinnock, Smith, Blair – brought the Tories to disaster in ‘97 and it was their turn to be dead and buried. So here we are again.
Whatever happens to Labour, that third of the electorate which always thinks to the Left will need representation of some sort.
I”m not sure about that. Brexit might have created a schism between the two wings of the party that cannot be reconciled. Moreover, and not much remarked over the last day or so, is the extent to which Labour is losing quite a lot of the woke-progessive-urban vote to the Green party.
Liberals have become conservatives and Labor has become radical on many agendas. People are more likely to be conservative than radical and particularly where agendas are fluffy like climate change and transgenderism, to name just two of too many.
In addition, during times of trauma and the days of Covid have been traumatic, not because of the virus which is no threat to the vast majority but because of the reactions to it, which are a threat to everybody, people will lean toward conservatism because it has an old, familiar and more reliable lineage.
So Labor has lost its heart and its heartland through too much ‘do-goodery’ and through circumstance.
The label “centre-left” I find rather confusing, given Starmer et al’s performative genuflection to a radical left wing political ideological movement. That one act signalled to me that a cultural critical theory mindset may have parasitised Starmer’s political ideology (whatever that is).
The Labour party has “lost the white working class” because they have treated us with contempt. The values and aims of the Labour party have changed markedly over the past 4 decades and they no longer reflect those of the majority of voters. Brexit will cast a long shadow for years to come. No Brexit supporter will ever trust the Labour party again, and that’s over 50% of the electorate. It’s in the end-game for the party.
Spot on analysis.
No dead, but brain-dead.
Bojo have a good personal image,,the beer at hand in the pub,freedom with woman,,not responsabily in general,,is a clown to copying&brexit and covi19.
Every one want to be like him.
And they don’t think he is going to preach at them ( though Carrie wants him to).
I shall enjoy today because Derby County will probably be relegated tomorrow. Looking at it objectively, it’s a good thing for football when a (relatively) big spending club like Derby fails so spectacularly, just as it’s a good thing when Labour fail spectacularly.
As A Fox (Leics) supporter id like Derby to escape the drop to third tier…
Labour may already be dead but democracy is teetering on the brink – in Hartlepool only 42% of the electorate voted so Conservatives got about a quarter of the popular vote and Labour an eighth: I doubt whether there is any enthusiasm for any of these people, but Labour and Sir Keir have out-performed the Tories by their moral absence and vacuousness. Last year I was writing to my (London Labour) about the social and economic consequence of lockdown and there was nothing I got back from her which suggested she gave a hoot. Hovering over this is the Great Reset: “You won’t own anything and you’ll be happy”. Government by the global oligarchy for the global oligarchy. How is this going to rescue northern voters?
A 42% turnout is not bad for a by-election.
yep my Local Ward by election was 41.4% turnout, Ive experienced 21% in South london council by election & 25% so Not to bad …
Simple. It won’t.
Labour has a very curious &difficult problem,Lenin&Trotsky dreamers,
our days no comunist country believe in that ,,simple illusions progresives .
Marxism is a good dream, not applicable to humans,,maybe extraterrestrials, but here ,no way,
a good beer ,money ,girl’s, lies.
Your last line could be a politcal slogan!
The Labour party is Not dead,its ”Sleeping”…
Here is an interesting take on the demise of Labour. It did not meet its obligation as “Royal Opposition
“His job title: Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. It is his job to oppose, which he has promised to do constructively and credibly. But he cannot deliver on this with the Coronavirus Act in force, leaving a small cabal of men able to impose unfettered restrictions, unchecked by Parliament and with the fourth estate forced by OFCOM to parrot the government’s narrative.
There is one person responsible for this: Sir Keir. Even the Liberal Democrats voted against the six-month extension to these tyrannical powers in March, and there is plentiful backbench opposition in Tory ranks to extinguish the Tory majority in the house. But with Labour waving the legislation through, power continues to be concentrated in the hands of Boris and his cronies.
Perhaps the public has sensed this, and wants more than warm words from Starmer. They want a credible opposition, not one that wafts more power into the hands of the Tories.
This publication has repeatedly called for Parliament to be fully recalled (any MP that is at risk should now have been offered a vaccine). Let’s get the mother of democracies working again. There is no excuse for us to be ruled by diktat any more. “Trust takes time” – yes, and probably the most important thing that the Labour leadership can do over the next few months to build trust is make it crystal clear that they will vote to suspend the Coronavirus Act 2020 when it comes up for renewal in September.
The time has come, Sir Keir, to arise and oppose. You’ve got work to do.”
https://reaction.life/oppose-sir-keir/
(As Robin Monotti Graziadei, [07.05.21 09:15] posted on Telegram)
At the time of the 2001 election, I was a Labour Party member in a northern working class city; there were still a fair few actual working class people in the Party, then.
John Prescott came to adress a Party meeting a week after having wacked a guy who threw an egg at him. When he entered, the room of 150 people or so absolutelty errupted. Never winessed the like before or since.
Many of us had considerable reservations aboout New Labour generally as well as his policies as Environment Secretary. Yet, he had become, forgive me, our Achilles – in contrast to Agamemnon Blair, and Odysseus Cambell. Had he gone to the king’s tent and slaughtered them all, metaphorically speaking of course, we would have followed him.
After the election, some bland, Blairite minister addressed us and gave a rah-rah victory speech. When she finished, the room was silent.
Yet, now I read in a 2017 Radio Times feature by some beardy hipster type, that Prescott’s action was “an infamous incident”, which has been “a recurring thorn in his side”.
There you go. That’s what’s wrong, right there. And there’s the solution, too.
I think the majority of the white working class voters have no real comprehension of the identity politics and culture wars the woke labour activists have embraced in Metropolitan London and beyond. They represent lifestyles and vocabulary that appear to embrace everything and anything they are not.
The shameful cover up of the abuse in Rochdale and Rotherham and the reluctance to discuss it through fear of ‘upsetting communities” was disgusting and many Northern communities knew\know for a fact what was/is going on, and consequently, are distrustful of the majority labour councillors that were more concerned about their jobs and the denial of the rape culture, than hi-lighting the criminality and suffering that was taking place.
I hope this government turns up the heat on wokery and the hard left teaching unions who have hijacked the curriculum and starts legislating for common sense and reason and in doing so, give the ‘silent majority’ a platform to take the country back. I believe in many ways this is a hopeful indicator that the tide is turning against the racist and bigoted perpetrators of post modernist ideology and its perpetuated misery and divison.
Reform are Right of Centre, Truth is Conservatives Dont Conserve
Labour doesn’t have Blue collar workers interests at heart
Lib-dems are illiberal
Greens are damaging the environment ,Forests Not allowed to Have Natural Fire breaks…A Pox on all their houses!
I wouldnt take too much notice of the prejudiced opinions of someone who was Cameron’s ex speech writer.
To me its clear that the average UK voter is totally alienated by Labour ( and some CINO) politicians aping the woke nonsense that has been imported from US/US universities.
The self loathing creed of a small minority of sinecured academics, has (thanks to social media and MSM) grown out of all proportion to its relevance to ordinary folk.
This “new religion” despises the white working and lower middle class especially. But they are not the only targets of the woke red guards.
When the average voter get the opportunity they therefore vote against these metropolitan woke elites, who care nothing for them, their culture or country.
Thats UK Labours problem.. they need to wake up and stop being so “woke”.
Wont happen Look at Greens have taken 70 Council seats mostly from Labour & Bristol Mayoralty, tipping Statues is popular by illiberal Woke jokes..So Labour will Continue to embrace Lunatic Xtinction rebellion environmentalists…&Electoral suicide…Boris is also A ”Green” Nut oblivious to Conservatives beyond M25…
We should give our thanks to Ed Milliband and his decision to allow everyone to join Labour at £3 a head (lol) if he hadn’t Commie Corbyn wouldn’t have been elected “leader” and set about destroying the party with his Anti-Jewish hatred, I’m looking forward to this party becoming more and more irrelevant till it exists no more, it’s hatred for everything British will be its death knell, and good riddance
Instead of listening to the spin doctor that wrote this article, what about defending the poor? Regardless of skin color or gender? Going back to the old left priorities.
Isn’t that the problem all over Europe? I advise you to read PREY, a book written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, there you can find the answer for the problems of the centre left.
test
Labour’s fate was sealed when Tony Blair, Lord Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and Co. decided that they would not challenge the Thatcherite “heritage” – the main plank of which was the focus on home ownership rater than social housing. Back in the 1990’s it looked as though everybody would become an owner-occupier; nowadays, as we can see, owner-occupiers are a diminishing minority of increasingly elderly voters who, understandably tend to plump for stability under the Conservatives. An increasing number of younger people are the victims of exploitative private landlordism; in any other country, these would represent a left-wing threat; here, they simply don’t vote. Blairite Labour is caught in the cross-current, unable to appeal to the conservative, prosperous oldies, terrified of saying anything that might mobilize the discontented youngsters.
The economic reality is that the economy is predominantly an energy system, not a financial one, which as a result of the rising energy cost of energy (or reducing energy return on investment) means less surplus energy for economic growth and material prosperity.
https://t.co/7IXczogyg3
Due to the rising energy cost of energy, much of the western world has already hit Peak Prosperity and so the emphasis of the current Conservative government is to invest in technological, economic, social and ecological productivity gains and through a national communitarian framework, level up spatial inequalities, strive towards net zero and ensure the continuity of import dependencies through trading agreements.
In this respect, the changing framework of Conservatism is towards a sustainable, resilient and sufficient future for Britain which the Left has no framework for due to its emphasis on global communitarianism
In this respect, Left of Centre parties are only retaining relevance if they pitch towards national communitarianism and the goal of national sustainability, resilience and sufficiency.
The German Greens on the other hand are beginning to shape a rudimentary framework towards global communitarianism with a progressive emphasis on national sustainability, resilience and sufficiency. So far their poll lead seems to indicate that their strategy is winning favour which includes embracing elements of the industrial Right and playing catch up with the nation’s green agenda.
Arguably the Conservative Party here has already embraced much of mainstream green thinking and we are not as ethnically segregated as Germany. Thus along with a soft social democratic platform the Conservatives presently occupy the entirety of the centre ground.
This doesn’t leave Labour with much to do other than engage in purity spirals or similarly embrace the centre ground of socio-ecological politics with a stronger framework for global cooperation with perhaps a nationalising drift to ensure infrastructural coherency.
Energy Prices will rise further, if Bonkers boris ”Green” Davos nonsense goes ahead,with windmills which destroy wildlife,Green fields,&Solar Panels ( Made of Plastic,a fossil fuel) Zero Carbon nonsense will also push up Industry Costs &domestic
SNP are mostly centre left and would describe themselves as such and doing pretty well at the polls…
SNP originally formed by Fascists sympathisers in 1934, Archbishop Ramsay & his Successors Are Stalinist ,not cosy motif ”Centre left”..SDP ARE centre left &will eventually succeed Labour
I agree, France,Germany, Portugal, Spain’s left, suffering painful & powerful defeats,,but here in British soil are different reasons.
People’s lives have been changed,
self employ is one’s, thousands of voters have others view,,today’s face the unknowns with more money ,product from the own small business,,,drogs distribution from is kids,,and full jobs for partner and kids in MCDONALD’S.
The old poor British becoming capitalist people’s.
Needs a men who lie,trick, and clowns them,,,no more Jeremy Corbyn promises of social justice .
Birrell’s thesis is naïve. Bourgeois Democracy, the base structure, is an historical disaster. We are 100 seconds to midnight, poised on the brink of Armageddon, ecocide, pandemia, and starvation, all laid to bourgeois culture, its science fetish and insatiable commercial greed, tunnel vision and comprehensive corruption. For the enlightened fraction of the bell curve (this readership), bourgeois partisan political ideology is supremely passé.
And you? …you’re going to go and vote for your candidate?
Jeremy Corbyn created a resurgent interest in The Labour Party, bringing in hundreds of thousand members, energizing the base and speaking to real people about their problems. He was destroyed by the powerful, the people in control, The Israeli Lobby and Mass Media which pummelled him to death on a daily basis. If Labour is dead, that is when it died. Now mask up and vote for the buffoon.
Crank.
He was defeated in an election because of his terrorist support, his anti-Semitism, his hatred for this country and his cowardly refusal to set out a stance on Brexit.
True.
He was destroyed by voters voting for the other side. Why? Because they don’t like anti semitism, they’re not too keen on the IRA, and the woman he wanted to be Chancellor had publicly demonstrated that she couldn’t do multiplication or percentages.
True.
Carry on with your conspiracy theory and anti-Semitic dream!
Keep raging against the machine, sizzlechest.