Ken vs. Boris: It's So On

HIS NAME IS MILLIBAND. LOL.

I guess it's a better name than Balls

Colonel Poo is a better name for a Prime Minister than Ed Balls.

Radio 4 talking heads have been clutching at Straw for the job

inconceivable brown will quit.

Colonel Poo would get this country back on its feet.

Yeah I'm under no illusion Brown will quit. He just should, really.

Radio 4 talking heads have been clutching at Straw for the job

This actually made me laugh. At least they weren't clutching at Balls.

so are Labour just gonna accept the inevitability of an election defeat in two years time, and let Brown take the fall for it, and start again in 2010 with some fresh young charismatic twattish upstart?

I know that's not the kind of question one wants to be asking at 2.35am but i still have at least an inch and a half of beer left so i might as well eh?

lol I'm heading back to the fridge now. I expect you're spot on though.

one possible bright side is that the next incumbent might lose the GE after next, regardless of which party it is, because of the economy.

That City and East result tells you a lot about NuLab - white working class fuck off to the BNP, ethnic working class fuck off to Respect, when for 60 years they'd been the bedrock of Labour's support.

Jeez, glad I don't live in London no more.

Dear London,

This is a joke, right?

Love,
A Concerned Friend

we know you're enjoying this.

Oh, I've only just now heard Conceding Ken speech. How was there a dry eye in the house?

This SUCKS.

I'm gutted. Just...completely gutted.

40,000 votes in the end.

I can hear the tube trains speeding along through Hounslow. It makes me feel a bit ill knowing that they're now powered by the forces of evil (<- dramatic but true).

Welcome to 1979.

This is waht happens when idiots like Tatchell campaign against Ken. You don't get Greens, you don't get Lib Dems, you get fucking Johnson. I expect he'll be make financing the History of gay life museum one of his priorities.

oh hey guys i had this really bad dream last night oh wait

I have never felt better abt my decision to move from London to Glasgow than on this awful morning - let the mass exodus begin!

so are Labour just gonna accept the inevitability of an election defeat in two years time, and let Brown take the fall for it, and start again in 2010 with some fresh young charismatic twattish upstart?

-- Upt0eleven, Saturday, 3 May 2008 01:34 (7 hours ago) Link

Basically, yeah. On current status the next election won't be a hung parliament or a tiny Tory majority, but rather a 1997 in reverse. A Tory majority of 150 seats is now not just obtainable, but also likely. Why ruin another leader, just let Brown sit this out, take the blame in 2010, and then hit restart with Straw/Johnson/someone who isn't a Milliband.

"This is waht happens when idiots like Tatchell campaign against Ken. You don't get Greens, you don't get Lib Dems, you get fucking Johnson. I expect he'll be make financing the History of gay life museum one of his priorities"

THIS :-(

I have never felt better abt my decision to move from London to Glasgow than on this awful morning - let the mass exodus begin!

Mass exodus starts with "failed asylum seekers"...

http://www.express.co.uk/img/covers/257x330front/2008-05-03

Mr Brown’s catastrophic premiership has brought Britain so low that even failed asylum seekers are now trying to flee the country, immigration officers revealed last night.

I don't really understand where they're going with this - are they saying this is a good thing or a bad thing?

I was really annoyed that they cut off the pretty Green lady's speech. She sauntered up with her red handbag, and they went back to the studio...on BBC and Sky! Damn them!

That City and East result tells you a lot about NuLab - white working class fuck off to the BNP... when for 60 years they'd been the bedrock of Labour's support.

It's a myth that this is confined to New Labour, it happened towards the end of previous Labour administrations as well, except for BNP read National Front. The parties of the extreme right did badly in the 80s because their supporters, or people who might be tempted to vote for them, swung behind Thatcher, not Labour.

I've removed the bit about Respect because, well, it just didn't exist before.

Also the notion that "the white working class" (not exactly an amorphous mass) has been an unassailable bedrock of Labour support for 40 years is highly questionable, especially across London and the South of England. One of the reasons Thatcher was so good at winning elections was because she separated working class voters from 'traditional' party loyalties (then only 40 odd years old). The flow of working class votes to Thatcher can't be ignored.

This is also why I am maybe not that surprised to see former Labour strongholds falling to the Tories. If Thatcherism was such a successful electoral machine because it separated voters from traditional loyalties (only to be destroyed once they realised the voters they created then had loyalty to no one), the success of the Blairite electoral machine lay in neutralising upfront party-political ideology.

The Tories lost repeated elections because they were too "tax, Europe, immigration", Cameron has wiped that from public Tory discourse. If Blair and Brown have helped create an ideologically neutral mainstream political landscpae, where we are sold politicians as effective managers, and Labour are no longer percieved to be effectively managing the country. This is why you get a flaky, indecisive electorate, opinion polls that fluctuate wildly over the course of the year, this is why Boris has won a mayoral election in the UK's most ethnically diverse city.

Over the course of a year, I mean.

Labour lost Scotland too, which wasn't something I thought I'd ever see happen.

Boris
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5b/Trashofthetitanstruck.png/200px-Trashofthetitanstruck.png

Ken
http://www.simphoni.net/forums/uploads/av-7904.jpg

That, especially "we are sold politicians as effective managers", sums up what I've been thinking for a long while now. Which leads us to the overwhelming question: is it ever gonna be possible to unsettle this monolithic "centrism" in the future and to create a (small s) socialist politics that can win elections? Unfortunately I find it a lot easier to envision a shift of the new consensus rightwards. In short, aren't we screwed?

i don't even slightly know the figures, but i assume that "ethnically diverse" applies way more strongly to the inner city than to the burbs -- and hence that there's at least an element of "white flight voters" (of all classes) in the outer borough voting (in a rather vague but pointed way) "against" the "multiculturalism" of the inner boroughs?

(i'm being a bit hesitant here bcz my assumptions are based totally on generalisation and guesswork -- and probably prejudice, i don't know much abt the outer boroughs, i drive thru em sometimes on the way to non-london bits of the uk -- rather than ANY empirical fact) (alsio i really DO think this election has been more than anything about the revolt of the private car user against the public bus user)

NV - I dunno, a serious and prolonged economic downturn might change that, as Tracer said a couple of days ago:

Matt that's a good point but as many people have been pointing out in various venues (vainly so far), the ideology that markets will regulate themselves, self-correct, and serve the public good to boot is coming under severe strain. It would be ironic if it were Blair who started the first new government under the post-Thatcher free-market consensus, and Cameron who started the first new government under the breakdown of that consensus.

-- Tracer Hand, Thursday, 1 May 2008 12:32 (2 days ago)

I am not sure if a serious and prolonged economic downturn is something I want to happen on the vague offchance the Labour Party might move to the left.

xpost to stet's simpsons analogy: i was thinking about exactly that earlier on: how voters have rejected the serious/politically diligent (ok, ken's not exactly ascetic, but he has that air about him) for the clowning buffoon at a time of, umm, great international instability. it's almost like a merry-hell approach: "we're fucked anyway, so we might as well have cap'n chumpy at the helm!"

either that or it's entirely down to the congestion charge.

i don't quite buy into the labour line that the mayoral election is a reaction against brown/the tax thing/labour in general, because a) ken/nu-lab was an uneasy afterthought at best; b) i get the impression the mayoral race has transcended party politics and is much more about individual personalities. that said: i'm observing this from a distance, and i could be completely wrong. (it has happened, once or twice, i'm told.)

That was in response to:

Also, if we accept that post-Thatcher global capitalism is now so dominant in Britain that no government can really go against it (big assumption but run with me), then Blair's was the first 'new' government in this environment. We don't actually know how much further to the right the Tories will run, given the opportunity.

-- Matt DC, Thursday, 1 May 2008 12:20 (2 days ago)

(xpost)

if the social problems are real, noodle (and they are), then the centrism will break up against itself as its inner conflicting interests begin to emerge -- or are brought into public discourse and articulated (<-- important and hard to achieve)

i don't think it's monolithic at all, except in the sense that it's large -- i think it's unusually variegated for a voting bloc

And I think one of the huge barriers to reinventing socialism has been the nigh-desperate willingness to settle for being in "power" that characterizes the last 11 years' government, to the point where preferring the Labour party over any other feels like not much more than a salve to conscience or a kind of moral particularism to convince ourselves that we are "nicer" or some other inanity than other voters.

xpost Yeah I kinda think that maybe some kind of burgeoning environmental disaster might realign the political system when it gets pressing enough, but I'd prefer something to happen a bit sooner than that thanks.

Sorry that xpost was to Matt not Mark. Yeah "monolithic" is probably an inaccurate word here, the Tory vote represents a coming-together of diverse interests like any other party.

GIANT METEOR HEADING FOR EARTH, QUICK LABOUR CHANCELLOR, RAISE THE TOP RATE OF INCOME TAX!

If all these morons are voting against the C-Charge (which I'll wager many of them don't pay regularly as who can afford to park in central london every day); why did the vote for Boris who has pledged not to abolish it? (well nothing so direct but he certainly plans o keep it)

Impact of the Cloverfield monster attack on global macroeconomic policy, 2015-2045 (Oxford University Press)

I was thinking more of scarcities of natural resources or repeated serious flooding, but I can see how Lembert Opik could suddenly step up to the plate in the event of meteor attack.

One Cheeky Girl either side of him, manning the giant laser that is our last line of defence.

See that's the kind of government we can all get behind.

two huge and gaping holes in libertarian and/or free-market ideology: transport systems (how they get designed built maintained and improved) and the management of immigration <-- can either of these issues can be tackled without a giant big dose of nanny-statism? (in particular: how paid for?)

(incidentally UK socialist nanny-statism was constructed largely on the back of brit imperialist nanny-statism: a co-opting of institutions started by one side and converted by the other)

("nanny-statism" used in its objective and non-pejorative sense here -- ie as something that can be used to good or awful ends)

True free-market Liberals would have fully open borders immigration and emigration, efficiency of the market and all that, but I can't see that flying. Freemarketeers always cripple themselves by compromising their theories because of their personal nightmares.