Brexit and not very united kingdom politics II

[loomer]

This is just one of multiple articles I could source breaking down the deep racist, misogynist, and homophobic subtext of "cuck".

Great job posting the literal first result on google. It's not a racial slur, dude. It has a racial subtext but that does not make it a racial slur - a slur about someone's race. Nor is it a misogynist slur - a slur about being a woman.

Ask yourself, who's the primary target of the cuck insult? It's, shockingly, white men. Do you think they're being abused on the basis of their race and gender by its use?

[The Romulan Republic]

This is just one of multiple articles I could source breaking down the deep racist, misogynist, and homophobic subtext of "cuck".

Great job posting the literal first result on google.

What?

Should I have dug through a dozen more posts to prove my Google skills when the first one will suffice? Do you actually have a refutation of the source, other than some vague insinuation that I'm lazy or incompetent because I didn't cite a more obscure source, as though this has any bearing whatsoever on the validity of my point?

You're really scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with something to attack me with.

It's not a racial slur, dude. It has a racial subtext but that does not make it a racial slur - a slur about someone's race. Nor is it a misogynist slur - a slur about being a woman.

Ask yourself, who's the primary target of the cuck insult? It's, shockingly, white men. Do you think they're being abused on the basis of their race and gender by its use?

They are being denigrated as not "real" men, not proper white men, and as traitors to their race and gender. The term also targets women indirectly by implying that "real men" control "their" women, targets black indirectly by invoking the idea of black inferiority and "black men coming to take our women" which was used as the pretext for innumerable lynchings, and targets gays indirectly by suggesting that "effeminate" men/not traditionally masculine men are not real men.

Why do you feel such a strong need to defend the term? Is it because you've used it yourself, and don't want to admit that you were using racist, misogynist, and homophobic rhetoric in doing so? Or are you just engaging in the typical Pavlovian response this board seems to have to anything I post?

[loomer]

This is just one of multiple articles I could source breaking down the deep racist, misogynist, and homophobic subtext of "cuck".

Great job posting the literal first result on google.

What?

Should I have dug through a dozen more posts to prove my Google skills when the first one will suffice? Do you actually have a refutation of the source, other than some vague insinuation that I'm lazy or incompetent because I didn't cite a more obscure source, as though this has any bearing whatsoever on the validity of my point?

You're really scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with something to attack me with.

It's more that you just low-effort copy-pasted an article that... Doesn't do what you want it to do. That also happens to be the literal first result on google. You can see why I'm laughing at you, right? Because your google-fu seems to be completely useless? First you couldn't find what CUKTIG meant and assumed it had something to do with cuckolding, and then you decided to grab the literal first result to back an argument that it, well, doesn't actually back.

It's not a racial slur, dude. It has a racial subtext but that does not make it a racial slur - a slur about someone's race. Nor is it a misogynist slur - a slur about being a woman.

Ask yourself, who's the primary target of the cuck insult? It's, shockingly, white men. Do you think they're being abused on the basis of their race and gender by its use?

They are being denigrated as not "real" men, not proper white men, and as traitors to their race and gender. The term also targets women indirectly by implying that "real men" control "their" women, targets black indirectly by invoking the idea of black inferiority and "black men coming to take our women" which was used as the pretext for innumerable lynchings, and targets gays indirectly by suggesting that "effeminate" men/not traditionally masculine men are not real men.

None of this constitutes a racial slur, nor a misogynistic or even homophobic one. Are you not aware that a word or insult can have racial/misogynistic/homophobic underpinnings without necessarily constituting a racial/misogynistic/homophobic slur, especially when it isn't targetted at and used at members of that race?

Let's take a moment to consider what a slur is. In the current context, a slur is a derogatory, insulting term used to describe a group of people as a group of people. Racial slurs refer to members of a race. Misogynistic slurs refer to women. Homophobic slurs refer to gays. 'Cuck' refers to a group that is smeared by association, but not those groups. It is neither a racial slur, nor a misogynistic slur, nor even a homophobic slur (well, in and of itself - the way it's used contextually can certainly make it a homophobic slur, but on its own it merely denigrates a man for not controlling his women and her fucking other men.) It invokes its racial and misogynistic underpinnings for effect but is not itself a slur against those identifiable groups.

Why do you feel such a strong need to defend the term? Is it because you've used it yourself, and don't want to admit that you were using racist, misogynist, and homophobic rhetoric in doing so? Or are you just engaging in the typical Pavlovian response this board seems to have to anything I post?

You say dumb shit. We make fun of it. Welcome to SD.Net, where we get our fill of mocking stupid ideas. Let's unpack this particular paragraph and the stupid ideas it contains, shall we?

1. 'Defending the term'
2. 'You must have used it'
3. 'If you haven't, you must just be conditioned to dunk on me'

I'll cop to 3, as it goes. Dunking on you is hilariously easy and fun, because you continually say dumb shit and use words improperly without seeming to understand what they actually mean. For instance, 'racial slur' and 'decolonization'. As for 1, there's no defence of the term being advanced, just that it is not a racial slur, which... it isn't. As for 2, no, not really, outside of a few erotic encounters many years ago with some local fetishists where I had the very strange experience of being the 'bull'. Make of that what you will. That's 3 dumb ideas for the price of 1, which is just really great value for money.

The smart move would have been to leave it at 3 (which is, of course, correct - if still dumb) or perhaps to ask if my point - that a term can utilize racist rhetoric without necessarily belonging to the category of a racial slur - is a meaningful distinction. Instead, in typical TRR fashion, you decided to just really go all in and flop your nuts out on the table for a nice hammering.

[The Romulan Republic]

Since by your own admission your motive is trolling and vendetta (including dragging in an old, unrelated argument on decolonization from another, long-dead thread), I see little point in continuing the conversation. You're just stirring up shit for the sake of stirring up shit, and I see no reason to gratify you further.

[loomer]

Since by your own admission your motive is trolling and vendetta (including dragging in an old, unrelated argument on decolonization from another, long-dead thread), I see little point in continuing the conversation. You're just stirring up shit for the sake of stirring up shit, and I see no reason to gratify you further.

Actually, my motive is to point out that the term is not a racial slur, and my reference to decolonization is not 'dragging in an old, unrelated argument' for the sake of vendetta, but just to point out that you routinely have no idea what words mean. Suck it up, TRR - you said something dumb, got smacked, and then laughed at. But I'll be nice and accept your concession, even if it's born out of your fundamental inability to understand what others have said. You see, I didn't admit a motive of trolling - I just dissected one of your points and acknowledged that yes, I've been conditioned by your hilarious responses to find it amusing to smack you when you say dumb shit. That doesn't go to motive in the slightest, but as typical for you, any understanding of what people are actually talking about is something you seem incapable of even glimpsing, let alone attaining.

[Starglider]

I agree. There has been a recent shift in trend between those that sought a greater sense of local identity vs those who are more willing to embrace internationalist identity.

'Internationalist identity' will only result in isolation, disappointment and unhapiness for the majority of the population, who aren't nestled into a SJW intersectional socialist bubble in a student union or tech startup, and don't have a network of acquintances scattered across Europe and the funds to visit one every weekend. For most people, engaging with actual neighbours, and celebrating shared traditions, produces the best psychological outcomes. Chavez-style populist socialism acknowledges this with a major focus on local action groups, exploiting the resulting sense of camaraderie by tying it to the political cause (of course these groups are vehicles for indoctrination, control and identification of troublemakers; the standard populist playbook).

[mr friendly guy]

Cuck derived from cuckold is a term the alt Right love using the same way SJWs love using misogynist. I assume the usage of it is to mock men who are also feminists (or at least the Alt Right's ideas of what feminists men should behave like, ie not the alpha male, of which the behaviour doesn't even exist in nature and only exists in captive animals). From what I can see their use of it is not confined to men of a certain ethnic group.

[madd0ct0r]

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST MOVE THE FUCKING CUCK DISCUSSION TO A FRESH THREAD OR BETTER YET STOP SEMANTIC BAITING EACH OTHER.

On topic. I actually agree with Starglider. An awful lot of modern life is isolating and destabilizing, and people need that sense of community.
And for most people, that is local and relationships accrued over decades.

Its not for everyone. But just as id like people to cope with my "SJW intersectional socialist bubble in a student union or tech startup, and a network of acquintances across Europe Asia"
I need to respect that that does not work for some. And its not like i dont put effort into meeting neighbours and community volunteering locally to feed that need.

[ray245]

I agree. There has been a recent shift in trend between those that sought a greater sense of local identity vs those who are more willing to embrace internationalist identity.

'Internationalist identity' will only result in isolation, disappointment and unhapiness for the majority of the population, who aren't nestled into a SJW intersectional socialist bubble in a student union or tech startup, and don't have a network of acquintances scattered across Europe and the funds to visit one every weekend. For most people, engaging with actual neighbours, and celebrating shared traditions, produces the best psychological outcomes. Chavez-style populist socialism acknowledges this with a major focus on local action groups, exploiting the resulting sense of camaraderie by tying it to the political cause (of course these groups are vehicles for indoctrination, control and identification of troublemakers; the standard populist playbook).

I think it is possible to bridge the gap between the two groups, if there's some effort being done so. The issue is the communities are utterly segregated in the UK, and the chronic lack of investment in the Northern towns have created a sense of those communities being left behind.

As long as the British democracy uses the first past the post system, any party that didn't invest specifically in the North can end up losing the election.

[ray245]

Its not for everyone. But just as id like people to cope with my "SJW intersectional socialist bubble in a student union or tech startup, and a network of acquintances across Europe Asia"
I need to respect that that does not work for some. And its not like i dont put effort into meeting neighbours and community volunteering locally to feed that need.

I think part of modern life is that we can become incredibly selective of the social network we developed. For people with a chance to have a much bigger social network, the more selective you become. On the other hand, people who lived in more rural, or more improvised regions have less opportunities to choose their social networks.

But sadly, the opportunities to develop those networks is extremely cut-off to many people, and resentment over the lack of ability to gain those network can result in results like the GE 2019.

[Elfdart]

I've already seen the british press has switched from corbyn is antisemitic to the labour leadership is antisemitic.

You'll see how much baggage the next leader will find himself saddled with. If he is jewish they will simply forget about antisemitism and become antisemites and nobody will bat an eye. Like they did with "Red" Ed Millband.

Or they'll copy American right-wingers and centrists and attack the new candidate as a "self-hating" Jew, just as neo-Nazis are trying to do to Bernie right now.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

A further development.

Boris Johnson sends pound tumbling with Brexit statement

Sterling erases gains since general election as prime minister pledges law to enforce the end to a transitional period in December 2020

Ben Chapman

The pound has erased almost all of its gains since the general election exit poll correctly forecasted a resounding victory for the Conservatives, after markets received a “reality check” on Monday about Boris Johnson’s Brexit plans.

The prime minister sent the UK currency tumbling after pledging to enshrine in law his ambition to conclude the Brexit transition period by the end of next year.

That raises the prospect of a new no-deal cliff-edge which commentators have warned will severely weaken the country's negotiating position and give little time to agree on the future trading relationship with EU member states.

Many firms will be forced to again consider making expensive contingency plans for a possible crash-out on World Trade Organisation terms on New Year’s Day 2021.

Sterling dropped at its fastest pace against the dollar since July to $1.32 on Tuesday morning, just half a cent higher than its level moments before the exit poll. The pound had surged as high as $1.35 when it became clear Mr Johnson's party was on course for a comfortable majority in the House of Commons.

Some shares that had made strong gains after the election result have also begun falling back.

“The party was good while it lasted,” said Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell.

“The impact of this news is that many stocks are giving up some of their earlier post-general election gains, including various banks and housebuilders.

“While this has dampened sentiment towards UK equities it is perhaps a reality check with investors doing well to appreciate that Johnson is going to go to any lengths to get Brexit sorted out without further delay. The message is that UK equities are not guaranteed to stay in the fast lane despite recent gains.”

Elsa Lignos, global head of currency strategy at Royal Bank of Canada, warned that Mr Johnson’s proposed new law would “erode all the positives” of a large Tory majority and bring back uncertainty for the pound.

“If passed, it would mean further pound downside that should be apparent by January,” Ms Lignos wrote in a research note.

Speculation had mounted that Mr Johnson may pursue a softer Brexit now that he has a solid mandate and less need to rely on the support of hard-Brexit supporters on the right of his party.

I would like to receive morning headlines Monday - Friday plus breaking news alerts by email

But those hopes appeared quashed as Mr Johnson put the prospect of a no-deal Brexit firmly back on the table.

The prime minister introduced a legal provision on Monday night to bar him from extending negotiations on a trade deal with Brussels beyond the end of next year.

The move was branded “reckless” by Liberal Democrat interim leader Sir Ed Davey, who warned it risked sending the UK “straight off the no-deal cliff”, threatening jobs, the environment and the NHS.

The ban, to be included in the Withdrawal Agreement Bill tabled in parliament on Friday, will prevent the prime minister from buying extra time if trade talks are not completed within what most experts regard as an extremely tight timescale.

Last week a leaked recording revealed that Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, believed the timetable was “unrealistic”. He told MEPs: “We will not get everything done in 11 months.”

From all this, it looks like Bojo is going for a Hard Brexit after all. I'm actually not that much surprised. It was widely hoped that he might go for BRINO now that he doesn't need his pro-Brexit supporters any more, but that would force him to spend five years building a new voter base; a risky prospect on reflection. Not only would he risk some of his current voter base, but there's even the risk that the Tory hardliners could try and force him out as party leader; if they can persuade/bribe/intimidate enough MPs into backing them.

That said, considering the likely consequences of a Hard Brexit, he's taking one hell of a risk either way. The poisoned chalice is smoking worse than Morticia Addams' tea.

[His Divine Shadow]

I read some interesting news about Bojo, apparently he's started talking about investing 100 billion pounds into the country, the midlands and north to be precise. That's pretty crazy considering how the conservatives were the party of austerity. But if you get a right wing government and it starts to implement versions of Corbyns economic policies anyway, then that's a pretty decent silver lining. Important thing is that austerity is stopped.

Though Bojo and promises, color me skeptical until it happens, and that it won't just be another way to get money into his rich buddies pockets and no actual improvements for the people.

[madd0ct0r]

He risks nothing, personally. He has his wealth, position, tacit agreement to wreck whatever by those with least to lose and the media mogul backing.

There is no damage or pain brexit can cause to his supporters compared to the last decade under his party. Forgive that, they'll forgive anything for the chance to feel in control of their countries destination. A lot of the opportunity cost of brexit has already occured or been locked in. And if brexit coccurs with actual investment in the starved north, the multiplier effect might well swamp the remiaining(hah) damage.

The ft reported back when change uk happened that the political space open was not lib dem 2 but the opposite - social right wing but economic left wing. Bojo has seized that ground.
Lets see if it holds up.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Speaking of Change UK, in the wake of its failure to win any seats in either of the recent elections it effectively ceased to exist, its dissolution was merely a formality:

The Independent Group for Change - a political party formed of Labour and Tory defectors - has announced it is to disband after failing to hold any seats in the general election.

The group posted a statement to Twitter, saying it was "right to shine a spotlight on Britain's broken politics" but, having "taken stock" it admitted now was right time to "begin the process of winding up" the party.

Its leader, ex-Tory MP Anna Soubry, wrote a letter to its members, telling them political change was still needed, but "now that we no longer have voices within Parliament, a longer term realignment will have to take place in a different way".

"Honesty and realism are at the core of our values, and we therefore must recognise that the political uncertainty of recent months has now given way to a settled pattern in Parliament for the next five years.

"So this is the right time for us to take stock."

Sorry, this content isn't available on your device.

It was a difficult time in British politics for the new political party, which originally had seven former Labour MPs as members.

They were soon joined by four more MPs, three joining from the Tories, and they registered themselves as an official political party named Change UK.

The registration was made in time for the party to compete in the European Elections, but it faced a drubbing in the poll and won zero seats.

After a poor showing in the EU election, six of its MPs left to either join the Lib Dems or to stand as independents.

Then things got even worse for the party as its name was challenged by petition website Change UK - the group was forced to change its name to what it is currently called.

Three Independent Group for Change MPs stood in the 2019 General Election, but none of them retained their seats.

The Brexit Party should do likewise since they fielded a couple of hundred candidates who all failed.

[His Divine Shadow]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... tony-blair

For the Labour left’s many enemies, there are few events more useful than a leftwing defeat. Not just for its immediate consequences, which have been graphic over the past week as Jeremy Corbyn’s messy but transformative four-year leadership has been reduced by his critics to a single bad election campaign. But also for the longer term ways in which such a defeat can be deployed: to attack leftwing politicians in general, close off leftwing policy options, and ultimately deny the Labour left’s right to exist. The left rarely gets to run the party and so is all the more castigated when it fails to capitalise on the opportunity.

On election night, the former New Labour minister Alan Johnson began this familiar ritual – describing the pro-Corbyn group Momentum, which has 40,000 members, as “this little cult”. “I want them out of the party,” he said on ITV. “Go back to your student politics.”

It was a powerful intervention, widely noted by the rest of the media. Johnson, like quite a few other leading New Labour figures, had once been on the radical left himself. Before becoming an MP “I did consider myself to be a Marxist”, he confessed to the New Statesman in 2004. Yet in the view of New Labour’s still vocal grandees, their descendants in today’s party, and most political journalists, such attachments are just youthful indiscretions. Grownup Labour politics is centrist. And whenever the party breaks that rule, disaster follows.

Until last week the main evidence for this conviction was the general election of 1983, cited again by Tony Blair on Wednesday in a speech attacking Corbyn’s leadership. In that campaign Labour, led by Michael Foot, offered voters a leftwing manifesto, and was crushed by the Conservatives – who went on to govern for 14 more years. Labour eventually returned to power, it has long been argued, only because it abandoned its radical policies and marginalised those in the party who had come up with them. After last week’s disaster, say Corbyn’s critics, Labour should do the same.

Yet there are big differences as well as similarities between the party’s defeats in 1983 and 2019. These differences tell us important things about the state of the party now, and about its prospects. But unless the Labour left persuades others that this election was not simply 1983 revisited, it risks again being ostracised for decades, to the detriment of the party as a whole.

For a start, 1983 was much worse in many ways than 2019. Back then, the Conservatives won a majority of 144, compared with 80 last week. In 1983 Labour got 27.6% of the vote – its worst share for 65 years. Last week it got 32.2% – mediocre, but more than at the 2010 general election, when Alan Johnson was home secretary, or in 2015 under Ed Miliband. This year Corbyn may well have been “a disaster on the doorstep”, as Johnson put it; but such assessments conveniently omit to mention that New Labour, in its latter years, was an even harder sell.

And unlike Foot, Corbyn won the support of a cohort of voters that will only become more important. According to the Conservative pollster Michael Ashcroft, last week Labour received almost three times as many votes from the under-35s as the Tories. In 1983, the Tories led Labour comfortably in this group. Then, Margaret Thatcher’s party often seemed more modern than Labour, offering a vision of an individualistic, competitive country, which many young people liked. There was an intellectual ferment on the right, which for years had been producing fresh policy ideas.

Few people would say these things about the Tories now. In 2019, their almost content-free manifesto, and massive reliance on older voters, were highly effective as election tactics. Yet, like the airy promises to increase state spending in today’s Queen’s speech, they are also signs of a party with questionable long-term prospects. By contrast, Labour’s youthful support, and policies addressing what are by common consent the biggest contemporary issues – the climate emergency, the inadequacies of the modern economy and Britain’s proliferating social crises – suggest a party with the potential to do much better at future elections.

And even some of the similarities between 1983 and 2019 are less terrifying for the left than many think. In both contests, Labour struggled against an unexpected surge of nationalism that swept up many of its traditional voters: the triumphalist aftermath of the 1982 Falklands war; and the 2016 vote for Brexit. Such episodes aren’t that common, despite the best efforts of the tabloids, and their electoral effects don’t usually last. In 1983 the Tories drew level with Labour among working-class voters, but by the next election Labour was well ahead once more. With Brexit likely to fade as an issue, and given the failures of past Tory governments to do much for the working class, it’s not hard to see a similar process happening again.

In a democracy as prone to changing its mind as Britain, political settlements and orthodoxies never last for ever. Even the view that Labour’s 1983 manifesto was completely misjudged looks less convincing now. Foot’s proposals for tighter controls on banking and a less militaristic foreign policy may have been “suicide”, as the left-bashing Labour MP Gerald Kaufman famously described it, when put before the jingoistic, increasingly materialistic electorate of the early 1980s. Yet, given the way the Iraq war and financial crisis destroyed New Labour’s credibility in government, perhaps his manifesto wasn’t so naive after all.

In the 80s, one of Labour’s biggest electoral problems was that it often performed poorly in London. In 1983 it won only 26 London seats, less than half the Tories’ total. Yet Corbyn’s election to parliament that year as a scrawny young radical was an early sign that Labour would come to dominate the capital. Despite the fact that London has become ever more central to British life since, Labour’s strength in the city – its total of 49 MPs there was unchanged by last week’s election – is now presented by the party’s critics as a weakness.

Labour’s regeneration after 1983 made little use of its London MPs, and instead revolved around clever young centrists with northern constituencies – such as Blair, who won Sedgefield for the first time in 1983. This approach eventually worked, with much help during the 90s from John Major’s hapless Tory government; but it didn’t create a lasting ascendancy. New Labour’s vote dropped successively in 2001, 2005 and 2010. And last Thursday Sedgefield, like many of New Labour’s former northern strongholds, elected a Tory MP.

After last week Labour could look for a different path to recovery, acknowledging that the left of the party, for all its failures this time, understands the modern world and the emerging electorate in ways that centrists, at least so far, do not. Yet if the party is too busy blaming the left for everything, this route to power will not be found.

IMO Corbyn shoulda purged the party when he had the chance. He should have been the stalinist they said he was and purged all the new labourites as soon as possible. Allowing them to remain in the party and keep flinging shit on Labour like the fifth columnist they were didn't help any.

[madd0ct0r]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... tony-blair

For the Labour left’s many enemies, there are few events more useful than a leftwing defeat. Not just for its immediate consequences, which have been graphic over the past week as Jeremy Corbyn’s messy but transformative four-year leadership has been reduced by his critics to a single bad election campaign. But also for the longer term ways in which such a defeat can be deployed: to attack leftwing politicians in general, close off leftwing policy options, and ultimately deny the Labour left’s right to exist. The left rarely gets to run the party and so is all the more castigated when it fails to capitalise on the opportunity.

On election night, the former New Labour minister Alan Johnson began this familiar ritual – describing the pro-Corbyn group Momentum, which has 40,000 members, as “this little cult”. “I want them out of the party,” he said on ITV. “Go back to your student politics.”

It was a powerful intervention, widely noted by the rest of the media. Johnson, like quite a few other leading New Labour figures, had once been on the radical left himself. Before becoming an MP “I did consider myself to be a Marxist”, he confessed to the New Statesman in 2004. Yet in the view of New Labour’s still vocal grandees, their descendants in today’s party, and most political journalists, such attachments are just youthful indiscretions. Grownup Labour politics is centrist. And whenever the party breaks that rule, disaster follows.

Until last week the main evidence for this conviction was the general election of 1983, cited again by Tony Blair on Wednesday in a speech attacking Corbyn’s leadership. In that campaign Labour, led by Michael Foot, offered voters a leftwing manifesto, and was crushed by the Conservatives – who went on to govern for 14 more years. Labour eventually returned to power, it has long been argued, only because it abandoned its radical policies and marginalised those in the party who had come up with them. After last week’s disaster, say Corbyn’s critics, Labour should do the same.

Yet there are big differences as well as similarities between the party’s defeats in 1983 and 2019. These differences tell us important things about the state of the party now, and about its prospects. But unless the Labour left persuades others that this election was not simply 1983 revisited, it risks again being ostracised for decades, to the detriment of the party as a whole.

For a start, 1983 was much worse in many ways than 2019. Back then, the Conservatives won a majority of 144, compared with 80 last week. In 1983 Labour got 27.6% of the vote – its worst share for 65 years. Last week it got 32.2% – mediocre, but more than at the 2010 general election, when Alan Johnson was home secretary, or in 2015 under Ed Miliband. This year Corbyn may well have been “a disaster on the doorstep”, as Johnson put it; but such assessments conveniently omit to mention that New Labour, in its latter years, was an even harder sell.

And unlike Foot, Corbyn won the support of a cohort of voters that will only become more important. According to the Conservative pollster Michael Ashcroft, last week Labour received almost three times as many votes from the under-35s as the Tories. In 1983, the Tories led Labour comfortably in this group. Then, Margaret Thatcher’s party often seemed more modern than Labour, offering a vision of an individualistic, competitive country, which many young people liked. There was an intellectual ferment on the right, which for years had been producing fresh policy ideas.

Few people would say these things about the Tories now. In 2019, their almost content-free manifesto, and massive reliance on older voters, were highly effective as election tactics. Yet, like the airy promises to increase state spending in today’s Queen’s speech, they are also signs of a party with questionable long-term prospects. By contrast, Labour’s youthful support, and policies addressing what are by common consent the biggest contemporary issues – the climate emergency, the inadequacies of the modern economy and Britain’s proliferating social crises – suggest a party with the potential to do much better at future elections.

And even some of the similarities between 1983 and 2019 are less terrifying for the left than many think. In both contests, Labour struggled against an unexpected surge of nationalism that swept up many of its traditional voters: the triumphalist aftermath of the 1982 Falklands war; and the 2016 vote for Brexit. Such episodes aren’t that common, despite the best efforts of the tabloids, and their electoral effects don’t usually last. In 1983 the Tories drew level with Labour among working-class voters, but by the next election Labour was well ahead once more. With Brexit likely to fade as an issue, and given the failures of past Tory governments to do much for the working class, it’s not hard to see a similar process happening again.

In a democracy as prone to changing its mind as Britain, political settlements and orthodoxies never last for ever. Even the view that Labour’s 1983 manifesto was completely misjudged looks less convincing now. Foot’s proposals for tighter controls on banking and a less militaristic foreign policy may have been “suicide”, as the left-bashing Labour MP Gerald Kaufman famously described it, when put before the jingoistic, increasingly materialistic electorate of the early 1980s. Yet, given the way the Iraq war and financial crisis destroyed New Labour’s credibility in government, perhaps his manifesto wasn’t so naive after all.

In the 80s, one of Labour’s biggest electoral problems was that it often performed poorly in London. In 1983 it won only 26 London seats, less than half the Tories’ total. Yet Corbyn’s election to parliament that year as a scrawny young radical was an early sign that Labour would come to dominate the capital. Despite the fact that London has become ever more central to British life since, Labour’s strength in the city – its total of 49 MPs there was unchanged by last week’s election – is now presented by the party’s critics as a weakness.

Labour’s regeneration after 1983 made little use of its London MPs, and instead revolved around clever young centrists with northern constituencies – such as Blair, who won Sedgefield for the first time in 1983. This approach eventually worked, with much help during the 90s from John Major’s hapless Tory government; but it didn’t create a lasting ascendancy. New Labour’s vote dropped successively in 2001, 2005 and 2010. And last Thursday Sedgefield, like many of New Labour’s former northern strongholds, elected a Tory MP.

After last week Labour could look for a different path to recovery, acknowledging that the left of the party, for all its failures this time, understands the modern world and the emerging electorate in ways that centrists, at least so far, do not. Yet if the party is too busy blaming the left for everything, this route to power will not be found.

IMO Corbyn shoulda purged the party when he had the chance. He should have been the stalinist they said he was and purged all the new labourites as soon as possible. Allowing them to remain in the party and keep flinging shit on Labour like the fifth columnist they were didn't help any.

I think the battle for control of the heart of lab party is a distraction from the actual important control of the country. I support the greens to keep that end of the window open. I did not think labours tactics for this election were bad, but if you keep loosing at cards, you need to learn to play better, not purge the eights at the start of the game.

Labour needs to up its game. This means electorate, not masturbating into a cup.

[His Divine Shadow]

Upping their game means getting rid of people trying to pull you down, thats not masturbating into a cup. Labour tried doing the broad church thing that was the first thing Corbyn tried and it totally back fired and did real damage. And it's not like doing that means neglecting other avenues either. There is a long road to the next election and there have been lots of good suggestions I've read to increase engagement on a local level, to actually help people and communities all the time and not wait 5 years for the next election. But that doesn't mean centrist saboteurs should be allowed to remain to keep damaging labours image. At the very least they can do it from the outside.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

I found an article in the Guardian today, which I think is relevant.

Labour failed to engage older voters – and after 100 hours canvassing, I know why

Luke Pagarani

In a generation used to transactional politics, Corbyn’s values failed. But the party can rebuild trust with local socialism

Sat 21 Dec 2019 10.00 GMT

Knocking on doors for Labour for more than 100 hours in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes showed me the stark difference in voters’ attitudes by age. Among a section of older, white voters in both more and less affluent areas, I saw a visceral hatred of Jeremy Corbyn, and sometimes Diane Abbott. How did the demonisation of Corbyn and the Labour party under his leadership – as documented by media analysis conducted at the LSE and Loughborough University – impact so strongly with them in 2019 but not in 2017?

Although on the face of it that demonisation has been raw and relentless, it actually only circled around a key charge, rarely making it explicit, so it has taken four years for low-engagement voters to absorb it fully.

The key charge against Corbyn is that he fundamentally believes British lives are of equal value to the lives of others. His opponents wouldn’t put it so bluntly, but this is what it has always been about. Hence the series of confected outrages – from not bowing deeply enough at the Cenotaph to ruling out pushing the nuclear button – that built a treasonous charge sheet as absurd as it was banal.

It seemed impossible to defend Corbyn against this unspoken indictment. Smears such as Corbyn “siding with Putin” over the Salisbury poisoning, when caution about trusting the judgment of British intelligence agencies was cast as support for the Russian version of events, or “supporting” the IRA, gained more traction as time went on.

Even Corbyn’s commendable record of campaigning against the geopolitical grain, such as for dispossessed Tamils, Chagossians and Palestinians, came to be seen as evidence that he didn’t know which side he was supposed to be on. A symbolic moment of the campaign was the first leaders’ debate, when Corbyn highlighted the impact that the climate crisis would have on the poorest people in the world and a section of the audience responded with groans and someone shouted, “Here we go again!”

When people talk about having paid into the system all their lives, as I heard repeatedly at the doorstep, they’re not just talking about national insurance payments and the benefits they’re entitled to. They’re talking about loyalty to a state they expected to be their exclusive patron – and they saw a Labour leader who seemed to invite the whole world to his allotment, offering homemade jam to all, no matter which flags their ancestors spilt their blood for.

With such voters, retired or coming towards the end of their careers, Corbyn’s collectivist language of what we could build together left them sceptical and uncomprehending. It seemed more zero sum to them, where one person’s gain must be another’s loss. A small hoard has been salvaged from the UK’s long post-imperial decline, and only those whose fealty is proven can claim their share.
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This isn’t about a chauvinistic sense of racial or national superiority. I encountered no Brexit optimism, no sense of “Believe in Britain” boosterism. On the contrary, people were fixated on the inevitability of scarcity, and the need to guard against naive hope.

The feeling that Corbyn’s loyalties were too wide for a national leader is a materialist concern, because people worried he would be profligate and squander the security inherited from times when Britain was more powerful. That’s why the leadership was not trusted to deliver the popular policies in the manifesto. Sensible investments such as state-provided broadband came to be seen as giveaways. Taxing the rich was unpersuasive, as many people just thought it impossible. These voters wanted the patronage of the powerful, not to challenge their power.

The good news is that people are not crying out for more racism or war. Immigration itself didn’t come up once in all my conversations, and indeed polls show declining hostility to it. Corbyn’s opposition to military adventurism is popular, although his pacifist principles are not.

Pandering to so-called legitimate concerns will fail, as it always does for Labour, but so will labelling large chunks of the electorate racist. Despite ethical injunctions to “call out” prejudice, there are no electoral prizes to be won from naming racism as such, except in the most egregious cases. We need to reduce the salience of nativist and nationalist identity. Let’s start by abstaining from the self-indulgence of “gammon” jokes and other temptations to sharpen cultural and intergenerational divides.

I also canvassed many young, working-class people who were not engaged with politics. Many had never heard about class politics at all, and expressed confusion and boredom regarding Brexit. The idea of voting for a party to tax the rich to pay for redistribution and public services was completely novel, and generally immediately attractive. It was amazing to see how quickly and instinctively they grasped a leftwing agenda while saying they had never thought about it before.

There is a huge opportunity for the left to make inroads with younger non-graduates in towns, but imaginative strategies are needed to reach them, since sending enthusiastic activists out from the cities for a few weeks before an election is too little too late, especially when younger voters are rarely at home to answer the door.

Labour still runs local governments across the country. This needs to be seen as an opportunity for popular participation – engagement in civic and political life on a local scale – to combat the feeling of powerlessness that saps the ability of people to imagine a radically different future. With five years in the wilderness at the national level, Labour may have to explore the potential of municipal socialism, as pioneered in Preston and seen in Barcelona.

• Luke Pagarani is a trustee of the Human Capability Foundation charity

I find this an interesting set of insights, and I'd like to expand on it.

It comes back to the analogy of the biscuits. You've got a rich man, a poor man, and a foreigner sitting at a table, and a plate of biscuits. The rich man takes all but one biscuit, and tells the poor man that the foreigner wants his biscuit. The poor man then turns on the foreigner, not because he particularly dislikes the foreigner or feels superior to him, but because it's his only hope of a biscuit. In his mind, to turn on the rich man means either the rich man taking all the biscuits away, or else the biscuits getting knocked on the floor in the struggle. Either way, no biscuits for anyone. It's basically Learned Helplessness.

Factor into this a rather contractual form of patriotism. To these voters, they've served the state in one way or another all their lives, and they want their reward; and they don't want their reward reduced by sharing out to those who haven't contributed. This isn't my country right or wrong patriotism, it's I want my share and I want it now patriotism. Once again, it isn't so much racism that underlies this, but merely a sense of limited resources being shared out in a way that disadvantages them. Factor in a sense of helplessness towards the rich and powerful, and you have the current situation.

But of course, what to do? The author's suggestion about trying to coax people out of helplessness with local cooperation schemes might just work in itself. But somehow I doubt it'll be enough on its own.

[ray245]

That's what happens when internationalist socialism died with the end of the cold war.

[Elheru Aran]

That's what happens when internationalist socialism died with the end of the cold war.

Well some might argue it died before then, as to the best of my knowledge the US was energetically stamping out emergent socialist governments whenever they popped up in the Western Hemisphere and the Soviets never really expanded much past the Bloc other than Afghanistan... but I'm not aware enough to discuss that in depth and outside of its relevance to Britpol I'm not sure it's relevant here.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Conveniently, another article has appeared that illustrates these points from other directions.

The idea that the British working class is socially conservative is a nonsense

Kenan Malik

The atomisation of society is the real reason Labour lost support from its traditional base

Sun 22 Dec 2019 06.30 GMT

‘It is easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on identity & culture.” So tweeted politics professor and TV pundit Matthew Goodwin on the morning of the Tory election victory as the moral of the night before. The Tories, so the story goes, won over huge swaths of Labour voters by a willingness to back greater state intervention and increased public spending. Labour lost them by a refusal to shift on questions of crime or diversity.

Long before the Tory demolition of Labour’s “red wall”, it had become accepted almost as a given that the working class was intrinsically socially conservative. The abandonment by working-class voters of social democratic parties throughout Europe, and their embrace of populism, was seen by many as a rejection of the liberal values that define the left.

The working class, runs the argument, is rooted in communities and cherishes values of family, nation and tradition. It has little time for liberal individualism or for the language of diversity and rights. That belongs to the “metropolitan liberals” and to a different political tradition. Indeed, many argue that if Britain’s electoral system were not rooted in a first-past-the-post system, the Labour party would have already broken into two, one part representing the socially conservative but economically leftwing working class, the other liberal metropolitans. Labour now faces a choice: either accept that its traditional working-class voters are gone forever or abandon liberal social policies.

The trouble with this argument is that the key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation. The annual British Social Attitudes survey, which began recording public attitudes in 1983, has tracked “the onward march of social liberalism”. On a host of issues, from gender roles to gay marriage, from premarital sex to interracial relationships, Britain has liberalised to a degree that would have left the average Briton of the 1980s aghast. It’s not just metropolitan liberals but society as a whole, including the working class, which has embraced this change.

So much has Britain liberalised that those who still cling to values that would have been consensual just 30 years are now seen as not properly British. When Muslim parents in Birmingham protested against primary schools teaching children about gay lifestyles, they were not welcomed as embodying solid working-class values, but criticised for not being properly integrated into British life.

In today’s discussions about working-class attitudes, “social conservatism” has been redefined to mean not opposition to gay marriage or premarital sex, but support for a far narrower cluster of views: harsher punishments for criminals, a more patriotic attitude and, in particular, a clampdown on immigration. Even here, the reality is more complex. It’s true that there are deep class divides on immigration, with differences between the views of unskilled workers and those of professionals being the widest in Europe. Yet, nearly a third of unskilled workers are “pro-immigrant” and almost half think that Britain should allow in “many” or “some” migrants from poorer European countries. That’s a sizable contrarian minority within a supposedly uniformly hostile working class.

Equally telling are the reasons for hostility to immigration. Sociologists Vera Messing and Bence Ságvári, using data from 20 European nations, have shown that the scale of immigration has little impact on anti-immigrant attitudes. In societies in which trust is low and social solidarity weak, hostility towards migrants is high, even when immigrants are few in number. Where trust in public institutions is high and social stability strong, people are more open to immigration. The BSA similarly found that attitudes to immigration were intertwined with issues of trust.

Working-class wariness of immigration is not an expression of an innate social conservatism but of the loss of trust, the breaking of social bonds and a sense of voicelessness. Working-class lives have been made more precarious not just through material deprivation, but through the erosion of the more intangible aspects of their lives – their place in society, the sense of community, the desire for dignity. Immigration has become symbolic of this loss. We should not, however, confuse anger at social atomisation and political voicelessness with social conservatism.

Historically, hostility to liberal individualism has taken conservative and radical forms. Conservatives saw history, tradition and the nation as the means by which the individual became part of a greater whole. For radical critics of liberalism, an individual realised himself or herself not through tradition but through struggles to transform society, from battles for decent working conditions to campaigns for equal rights. These struggles created organisations, such as trade unions and civil rights movements, which drew individuals into new modes of collective life and forged new forms of belonging.

These broad ways of thinking of “community” have long coexisted in tension. But in recent years, as trade unions have weakened and social movements crumbled, it has seemed for many that the only form of collective politics left is that rooted in conservative, Burkean notions of national or ethnic identity.

At the same time, many sections of the left have also given up on traditional modes of social change, retreating instead into the vapidity of identity politics and diversity talk. In so doing, they have often abandoned not just class politics, but their attachment to traditional liberal values as well, transforming the meaning of equality and rejecting free speech.

The problem is not that metropolitan liberals have become too liberal or the working class more conservative. It is that social and economic changes have unstitched the relationship between the social and the liberal that defines the left; the relationship between a defence of community, of policies that put social need before private profit and a defence of rights, whether of gay people or migrants, and of opposition to unequal treatment. It’s a relationship expressed throughout the history of working-class struggles, from 19th-century opposition to slavery, to the defence of Jewish communities against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 1930s, to the support for the Grunwick strikers in the 1970s.

Today, the unpicking of that relationship is visible in everything from accommodation to antisemitism and anti-migrant rhetoric, on the one hand, to the easy dismissal of working-class voters as ignorant and racist, on the other. The challenge for the left is not to embrace social conservatism but to reforge the link between the social and the liberal.

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... a-nonsense

This adds a little more to the points I made earlier. These older working-class voters feel not merely powerless, but alone and vulnerable; making them more likely to respond with xenophobia to anyone obviously different. It also makes them all the more likely to bow down to the elite in the hope of a biscuit and a pat on the head; they think it's all they can hope for.

It also ties in to something broader that I found in an article by Rana Dasgupta (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/a ... a-dasgupta). To cut a long post short, Dasgupta argues that the nation-state system is decaying, in part because national governments just don't have the kind of control over money that they used to. But a lot of people - especially older working class voters like those above - see the nation state as their rightful patron and protector. This is what makes them vote for the likes of Bojo, Trump, Erdogan, etc. Such populists cannot keep their promises even if they wanted to, so they stomp, snort, threaten, and bully in order to maintain the illusion of state power, the illusion these people so desperately want to be true.

Coming to ray245's point about internationalism; I'm agree up to a point. As you yourself pointed out a while back, these voters have been persuaded that internationalism is a threat. For myself, I'm not convinced that matters such as culture or race are all that important. The culture war strikes me as secondary; a kind of war paint that gets put on once the battle lines are staked out. What turned these people against internationalism, I'm inclined to believe, is the idea that it was going to steal their nest egg and leave them poorer; that naifs like Corbyn were going to blow the family fortune on good causes where nothing ever seems to improve, and they'd be left with nothing.

[His Divine Shadow]

An article about centrism and corbyn and the left and overton windows and whatnot. Too long to copy in here:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/1 ... -election/

[madd0ct0r]

Boris: Back Big Ben Brexit Bongs

I refuse to add context.

[Lost Soal]

Context only makes it dumber