love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

this town is shite we should just sack it off its not worth the bother

Repeating *get Brexit done* in a posh accent every hour every day for a month worked for the current PM.

The public hates the line manager not the owner

Wtf does that eve mean?

posh is cute and fine and very well educated and should probably be in charge.

middle class is embarrassing, let's not think about it if at all possible.

working class are an unknown mass to be used to argue for whatever you want, you never actually meet them IRL, thank god!

Corbyn was offering civic patriotism when seemingly most 45+ English voters wanted nationalist or ethnic patriotism. As long as that's what voters want Labour are never going to be be able to make fulfil that appeal. or should they try. The only hope is that upcoming voters possibly want the former.

*Nor

Importantly Jess said she weeped not at the opening ceremony but at the documentary about the making of the opening ceremony.

(Which was, iirc, quite emotional, all the people, all the time, the team work.)

An ilxor was involved, helped carry the Windrush, but there was so much going on that you only caught the merest glimpse of it on TV.

Seeming like you might actually like the voters and their dependants is surely a good thing unless you don't believe in electoral politics

This is the part that deserves more attention. One big reason - perhaps for many people a defining reason - why they don't vote for a party is "they hate people like me". It's why the majority of black people in this country will never vote Tory under any circumstances, for example. And it's extremely easy to weaponised that against you.

Labour fought two elections on the "many not the few" line - itself a recycled Blair era soundbite. What actually happened was that, egged on by some of its louder and less intelligent social media voices, a lot of people on the left gleefully threw themselves into an Us vs Them mentality. Fair enough, that's politics, and in Labour's case that was based on the idea of people realising they were part of an ever growing Us. What actually happened was that it made too many people feel part of the Them and the kneejerk response to that was "well fuck off then". (Obviously the Twitter left is not the whole left or even especially representative, most people don't even notice it, but it can be made into the most visible, especially if your aim is to go "see how much they hate you").

It's the same thing that drove the Emily Thornberry England flag thing. I'm viscerally uncomfortable with patriotism and nationalism of any kind but I'm also aware that's a minority view in both senses of the word, and easily spun as "they hate you" by malicious actors. The world of electoral politics is a terrible place for this conversation to play out because there is always someone with a vested interest in making sure that millions of people misunderstand.

Er yeah, I can’t agree with that at all. Most people in the UK aren’t on or give a shit about Twitter.

Yes I acknowledged that in my post but something of that still managed to seep through into the wider national consciousness, too many people started to believe that Labour and Labour supporters fundamentally held them and their priorities in contempt.

Yeah, it was called years of the press and prominent people saying so loudly and often?

Yeah the papers they do read reported the horrors unfolding among the woke Twitter snowflakes who want to stop you saying anything in much the same terms people talk about 4chan

Going too hard the other way is also a pretty big fuck off signal to descendents of any colonised people as well, that should go without saying.

xpost - the press is one of the vested interests I was talking about, in fact the biggest and the loudest.

There was also a very concerted effort to blur the lines between Labour and Remainers which should be laughable to anyone who was paying attention to what FPBErs were really saying, but it happened and it worked. Didn't help that the FPBE crew really did believe that everyone who disagreed with them was either stupid, bigoted or a pathological sociopath.

There's nothing your opponent wants more than for your supporters to play up to people's worst opinion of you.

of course the FBPE and the actual Twitter left didn't help with the blurred lines and fractures that were already set in between the Labour Party and the "traditional working class" *cough*

The question then becomes about how you effect any kind of substantive change in this ultra spun perma bad faith atmosphere and I don't have an answer to that.

o freunde, nicht deez remoaners

xp the bad news for people who don't want to do is we need a whole new left infrastructure which is most likely well beyond the scope/reach/ethos of the Labour Party as the key stakeholder

"people who don't want to die" whoops

Isn't "many not the few" more like recycled occupy, we are the 99 or what have you?

It fell apart because you couldn't apply this to Brexit in 2019. The country was 1) divided down the middle but 2) it fucked Labour in the way it was distributed at constituency level.

So now we have Starmer liking the country. Can't wait to see how that goes.

Also this is much bigger than the Labour Party, it's part of a sustained and a structured international anti-woke backlash and for now *they are winning*. Maybe new approaches are required or maybe time and events will change that idk.

it's an actual class war, and middle class liberals are showing their true colours, and the Labour Party is on the wrong side as per

There's also a wider issue of downward social mobility over more than a decade now and how that's playing out wildly differently across different voter groups right now. There should be fertile ground for opposition parties especially given the pandemic, if they can find a way to create a narrative around it and more importantly make it stick.

The poor must outflank the rich.

the downward social mobility feels part of the global picture, a hyperwealthy elite manipulating national governments in their own favour to entrench and increase their wealth at the expense of people who would have had more life opportunities under more egalitarian post-WWII governance. almost as if the money is being stashed against the impending end of the world but sadly i don't have the imagination to believe they've got a secret spaceship project on the go

it's an actual class war, and middle class liberals are showing their true colours, and the Labour Party is on the wrong side as per

Corbyn was offering civic patriotism when seemingly most 45+ English voters wanted nationalist or ethnic patriotism. As long as that's what voters want Labour are never going to be be able to make fulfil that appeal. or should they try. The only hope is that upcoming voters possibly want the former.

Never forget the difference in 2017 was just half a million votes.

Maybe the route is a simpler vote splitting one by the next election. Something like "they've had 15 years, no more excuses, you're still worse off under the Tories". It's very likely to be true and it would resonate. Focus on the thing that unites these groups, hammer it relentlessly, and worry about the rest later.

That line is a must.

that's a decent approach, a lot might depend on how 2025 looks compared to 2021 tho

hammer that line but worry about the rest now because the rest is why it hasn’t already worked

still trying to wrap my head around this preposterous yet plausible idea that the Tories bagged around 2 million first-time voters at the last GE

But do you love your country?

our :)

i love Country will that do?

Sir QC loves it, no doubt.

There are only two kinds of country.

My reading of 2017 and 2019 was that people got the message that they were less well off but that kicking migrants was the way forward to prosperity, hence the re-election of the party of Queen, country, austerity, Brexit and Windrush.

Obv Brexit will happen now so if people don't feel well off they could vote for even more hatred of people that aren't white, ofc. Whatever, just love this fucking country.

this is britain. many brits literally desire repression by these people, in a semi-sexual way, over and above any class interests they should have from a leftist pov. no patriotism can fix this

Boris Johnson said he 'loved' fox hunting in a 'semi-sexual' way https://t.co/zlGJnwhzXZ

— The Independent (@Independent) July 18, 2020

That's it, he's done for!

They thought they were worse off, some of them blamed migrants, some of them believed Brexit and Johnson would make them better off, and they had no faith in Labour to make them better off. We know all the reasons for that last part.

My reading of 2017 and 2019 was that people got the message that they were less well off but that kicking migrants was the way forward to prosperity, hence the re-election of the party of Queen, country, austerity, Brexit and Windrush.

Good points in here! Whats your reading for why the message was less succesful prior to 2017

BoJolyon.

There was no offer of anything from Lab in the Ed M years.

Just the place we are going back to, funnily enough, but it may not matter as much, depends on the state of the country we all love so much in 2024.

Thinking also it will be 13 years since the last lab government so that might be long enough for a change of colour for a lot of people. And maybe the climate crisis will not have hit us by then in a significant way.

Can agree with that for sure, what about June 2017 though

What about it?

I misread your post just realized, you were including the 2017 and 2019 voters together, for me there was more of a difference in the two groups

The fact that Lab gained seats is good evidence that Lab had an offer, but it's all hard to disentangle from Brexit, whose result Labour were keen to honour.

That's... quite the claim

Hi Andrew