bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

I'm not sure if I'm not getting the joke, but I didn't mean A New England, which was four decades ago. I meant stuff like England, Half-English, or y'know, his book "The Progressive Patriot".

I mean, I think this angle from RLB is soft-headed, but I don't know if it's nefarious, and it's not new.

yeah that Bragg book has been ripped to pieces on these pages before, he's a total Paul Mason style dolt iirc.

I'm just shoehorning Gapesy onto my ballot as my 2nd pref

"And when it came to Brexit, too many of the people whose votes and trust he needed weren't prepared to" ..vote for his 2nd ref policy basically. That obv did more damage in the lost marginals than him not being good at doing the standard bullshit hardman act whenever the UK got entangled in messy events involving other countries.

As I said, England not Britain iirc

I think Bragg was voting/stanning for the LibDems back in his progressive days.

what is the political make-up of the half million or so membership? I know there was a lot of 2nd ref pressure coming from a section of them, but are they all really buying into a candidate who was part of the reason Corbynism happened? It's all very well him paying lip service to anti-austerity now, but history shows he goes with the wind and basically has a right wing core. Just basically Yvette Cooper again.

Cooper afaict has made no concessions to the left / being wrong. Starmer’s positioning so far has been substantially to the left of the anyone who ran last time, other than Corbyn. He may not believe it, idk, but he seems to recognise that you can’t just have a return to Rachel Reeves et al hammering the Tories from the right. The key thing will be how much power / decision-making would be decentralised to the membership under the various leaders, though.

He has to put on this charade though SV, his track record is not good and there won't be much scrutiny from the press who probably love him. Even Thornberry was criticising his conduct as DPP at the time, that is pretty damning for someone trying to convince members he is going to pursue anything more radical than a lukewarm centre-left agenda.

when I say they love him, they will much more than RLB obv

my brain is melting right now, but not my heartfelt belief that he is rotten to the core and would be a disaster for the party.

I can remember Owen Smith making similar noises about his socialism with about as much credibility.

Starmer has one distinct advantage over Owen Smith though, he's not a total dumbass.

The debates will be different this time because Corbyn made mincemeat of Cooper because she was stilled doggedly gunning for fiscal conservatism/austerity and doing it very fucking badly.her gotcha was so bad the crowd we're dying in embarrassment on her behalf. But this time a seasoned barrister who basically has the same underlying politics but a bullshit line in left-wing posturing is much more dangerous for RLB.

RLB is also a solicitor, she’s not some kid!

Thanks for that positive RLB content G, needed some!

That Starmer isn't as thick as Owen Smith could be one of the dangers. But on the other hand it could still unravel badly for him. People with zero political conviction often do flounder in the white heat of battle.

he always seemed like a very a legalistic, personality free type melt to me did Starmer. very clever and impressive to other barristers and barrister lovers, and to lots of that Remain crowd. But couldn't see him winning over people that a uber campaigner like Corbyn couldn't.

Was messaging to an old pal that lives in Berlin last night. He was telling me landlords are fuming over there because some rent control bill has been brought in that restricts them from raising rents for a five year period. Then we took piss out of some German trust fund brat who was complaining about the lack of opportunities for landlords to make money. If that happened in London there would be martial law/a military coup imposed in minutes. Fuck this country - couldn't even get the fitness for human habitation 2015/16 bill through parliament.

As I was reminded when I had a friend who lives there visit over the Xmas period, they have rent controls in New York ffs.

The RLB piece was pretty strong on democratising the party.

Looked at in a calmer manner and putting aside the unfortunate choice of words a jumped on by shit stirring graun hack (and the bad history). Nothing wrong with anything else she said!

Yes, the Guardian framing has certainly been part of the defence.

I think she could lose because front-runners often lose. It wouldn't be because of this pitch. Anything with patriotism in it is pretty much against any kind of left politics hence the reaction, but as long as she doesn't get bogged down in it there have to be other factors to drag her down.

there is only so many blows I can take in a calendar year. if that fucking melt wins the leadership election then it is the end of the road with me for getting involved with parliamentary democracy. Might as well just give up.

Clive Lewis retweeting this doesn’t bode particularly well:

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/31/only-way-labour-win-ditch-labourism-corbyn

idk how long it’s going to take for people to work out that the Lib Dems are not a progressive natural ally, if the coalition and their steadfast refusal to countenance supporting a minority Labour government more recently, didn’t do it.

the penny won't even drop when they change their name to the Conservatives for EU membership Party. But of course if "lefties" like Gordon Brown and Ed Mili didn't run with such commie-utopian manifestos, then the LibDems would consider coalition.

I'm not sure there was a route into power even with the LibDems, who performed so poorly across so much of the country it wouldn't have made much of a difference, particularly in seats that are going to matter next time round. And that's assuming the LibDems didn't leak votes back to the Tories in that eventuality.

Labour can't do this without widening *it's own* appeal and rebuilding the 2017 coalition is only the first step. Hard to see how a few token LibDems would help them in Burnley or Sedgefield and it might actually make things worse.

As I said, England not Britain iirc

Fair point.

"And when it came to Brexit, too many of the people whose votes and trust he needed weren't prepared to" ..vote for his 2nd ref policy basically. That obv did more damage in the lost marginals than him not being good at doing the standard bullshit hardman act whenever the UK got entangled in messy events involving other countries.

I think that's far from obvious, even for Labour Leave Corbyn was not significantly behind the Brexit policy in the list of things that they don't like.

And that's if you can separate them - I know I'm repeating myself from the Corbyn thread, but one of his strengths is that it's really obvious that he's a conviction politician, that when he's answering a question he's not mentally trying to recall a position paper someone showed him, he's speaking from views constructed solidly over principles he's held for a long time. Which is something we're probably going to miss with whoever's next. And it's also why one of the first serious attacks was that thing on the train because it could convince people that he was just another politician setting up stunts.

Anyway, where I was going with this is that I've never got that impression from him when he was talking about Brexit. And I don't mind that so much because it's the main issue where I agree with the membership against him, but it definitely matters to a lot of people. As loath as I am to admit it, it might've been best to just throw us under the bus and vote for May's deal.

xxp

I don't think Clive Lewis is much of a thinker, either that or he does a very good impression of being braindead at times - which might be part of his cunning plan to hide his dastardly intentions in plain sight or something!

I don't think Clive Lewis is much of a thinker

Something of an understatement.

tbf non-thinkers keep getting elected PM in this country.

when you are the LOTO you've got have an IQ of 368 and be able to whistle the national anthem whilst reciting the greatest Queen's Speeches '58-'74.

Oh i forgot Boris can quote The Iliad and make it sound like he's reading from a telephone directory, kudos!

Sudden frisson of realising Thatcher was probably the cleverest PM of my lifetime

both her and Wilson did a good job of hiding what boffins they were!

Wilson was my other guess, yeah

thatcher certainly the most effective

unfortch

The 2nd referendum policy did a lot of damage but he had *already* been voting against May's Brexit policy, frustrating and blocking it in Parliament consistently for a year. That would have had an effect as well.

Like if you look at the polling (yeah I know) then Corbyn/the leadership is listed as the #1 reason why people didn't vote Labour - pretending it wasn't a big deal is comforting but also not really helpful when it comes to working out a way forward. BUT if you look at the polling on why people didn't like Corbyn then his stance on Brexit was the #1 reason. Obviously that may have been as much from the Remain side as the Leave side but it's clear that Brexit absolutely fucked both Labour and Corbynism the longer it continued. That was made easier by the fact that he made it very easy for his opponents to paint him as not really in Britain's corner. These things all bleed into one another.

So yeah whoever comes in almost certainly won't be as naive in the way they frame these things (getting rid of Seumas Milne will probably help). You can't over-rely on your ability to change to conversation when your opponents are having the same old conversation more forcefully. But milquetoast blandness and excessive caution won't work either - look what happened with Ed Miliband. Hard to see why draping yourself in a flag (but nicely) will work either.

I saw this a while ago but I don't think I saw it here - it really is a kick in the head that if Cameron had held his nerve, we'd probably still be 5 months out from Corbyn's first election.

Yeah any relationship to patriotism needs to be purely reactive, a way of dismissing accusations levelled by the media. The flip of that is that internationalism is probably a dead end diversion too except for pushing green new deal policies. Realistically the emphasis on greening the economy can be sold differently to different sections of the electorate - trying to mitigate the climate emergency yes but also creating a raft of new skilled jobs especially in regions where those kinds of jobs currently don't exist.

The kinds of necessary diversion around topics like geopolitics and immigration make my skin crawl but I don't think there's a positive approach that can be sold to the boneheaded end of the patriot market, and then there's a whole raft of twee little Englandism in the melt community, keep calm and 2012 on. Those waters are just best avoided when poss imo.

I don't think that makes a lot of sense. Unpicking and reconfiguring national pride is too hard a job to undertake over an electoral cycle and downplaying that kind of talk is the most efficient strategy but ugh realpolitik is soul death, armed struggle now.

Wilson was an Oxford don at 21, Thatcher was still messing about with pipettes and bunsen burners at that age.

Yeah also these are the kinds of attitudes that need to be unpicked over decades, not in one election cycle. Teaching the British Empire properly in schools would be a good start. But you don't need to put that in a manifesto or even talk about it before you've won the election.

Also I think the route back to power for Labour lies in pledging to rebuild regions, not in a notional idea of Britishness that the Tories can always outflank them on.

NV otm (Matt too)

I don't know how effective the weaponising (as seen on that "He's brainwashing your kids" banner - or whatever it said) of the BE in schools policy was by the tories, probably very and within the heat of election campaigns are definitely the worst time to unveil such proposals.

A problem facing all UK political parties is that the UK likely won't exist in 10 years time.

So much for British values.

Absolutely. Can't we just end all this bickering by replacing prog patriotism with 'civic pride'. It has none of the baggage, describes much more accurately what e.g. RLB was talking abt in that Guardian piece, & even sounds a lot stronger & less mealy-mouthed as a slogan. https://t.co/lJniCjRuSi

— Alex Niven (@Alex_Niven) December 31, 2019

I get where this is coming from but, perhaps it’s living in Kent, ‘civic pride’ is used to justify a hell of a lot of awful things too. ASBOs, running homeless people out of town, ‘local housing / services for local people’ with a narrow view of who is white enough to qualify as ‘local’, etc, etc. It’s this stuff that leads to policies like expropriating the caravans of travelling communities, not overt nationalism. The task of detoxifying local community politics can’t be underestimated, though it’s essential.

Civic pride is the worst.

My very left-wing Turkish-born pal and her 10yo BAME daughter came over yesterday and both say that the way girl’s school teaches British Values (it’s a thing all junior schools now do) and just the fact of having such a module makes them both sick.

I'm glad ILX has come to the civic pride bad consensus and never feel bad about wanging empties over farmers fences, they are the enemy within!

emptying my wang over farmer’s fences to own the fash