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

Why are they talking about welfare right now anyway? In the middle of a pandemic? It seems completely tin-eared.

It does feel like both the article and the tweet itself have put a heavy spin on what he said, the full interview is here:

https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/jonathan-reynolds-interview

“One of the reasons that support for social security has diminished amongst parts of the country is the sense that people put into the system and they don’t get anything out of it. In a way, if you look at eligibility for Universal Credit, people are not wrong. You can make significant contributions to the system and find that actually, you’re not really eligible for any major support if you need it, even in a crisis like this one. I think you’ve got to recognise that that’s a big problem for working people in the UK.”

And also:

“At the minute, I see absolutely nothing from the Government that even responds to the fact that we’re heading towards five million children being in poverty,” he says. “And if you incorporate that into the [welfare] system, you have to have a more generous system.”

At the same time linking benefits paid out to contributions paid in is fundamentally regressive, the more you have paid in in tax the less likely you are to need a larger welfare payment out. But there's also a wider sense that people who are receiving benefits have never paid into the system via tax, which is complete nonsense but it does reflect another aspect of the way that the link between contributions and benefits has broken down in the public mind.

it's always those melts with the least at stake that believe in gradualism and have the audacity to tell people from the lower orders it'a a binary choice fule! No it isn't, not supporting a rotten party is a actually a vote, fule.

thanks SV i meant to make that point but i got distracted. moronic time to do moronic politics because they only have one way of doing politics.

not voting may not help, stet, but voting got us Blair and that's all it got us. when you vote for the least worst option you really do create a race for ever worse options.

And what creates the pressure for the better options? Because not-voting just guarantees you the worst option, who go on to accelerate the decline.

mass non-voting in a party puts pressure on that party to move towards the direction the non-voters are in

"children in poverty" is a perennial Nu Lab rhetorical move and i think it's to do with a mealy-mouthed justification for welfare benefits because they lack the conviction to make the strong case. it also got us a byzantine, intentionally alienating tax credit system and oh, lest we forget, the sheer poverty-ending magic of SureStart.

middle managers gonna middle manage, technocrats get the fuck away from my techno.

seriously stet i think the burden of proof is on your argument here, voting for Nu Lab in droves didn't force Blair leftwards, quite the opposite.

i don't think anybody's even talking about not voting as a tactic, just that there is nobody of worth to vote for

It’s very garbled and when I combine it with Starmer doing a show with Nick fucking Ferrari...

Starmzy Puts You On Notice

honestly that pig will make a great James O'Brien mark II

ok, sorry for splitting the tolerant Left, i'm gonna walk this bile off

Lord Mandellson's arch criminal boss boast of "they've got nowhere else to go" was actually followed by millions of people dropping off the electoral register, so was completely wrong, they went somehere!

The way forward is to learn from the right, influence the (at least theoretically) mainstream party by putting it under serious electoral pressure. Labour has to fear losing large numbers of votes to the left otherwise it will be almost entirely focused on winning votes from the right with all the policy positions that implies. Otherwise they'll calculate they can afford to lose a few socialists in metropolitan areas if it means bringing in larger numbers of votes from elsewhere.

Otherwise they'll calculate they can afford to lose a few socialists in metropolitan areas if it means bringing in larger numbers of votes from elsewhere.

Seems like it's time for voters in London to be taken for granted.

I’m not saying it did — but it did give us a lot of things we’d not have had if we’d just let the Tories in.

It’s interesting to compare the Tory route. The current admin is far more right-wing radical than Corbyn was left-wing. But they got control of the country by first taking power, then taking the party.

There is an argument that none of that would have happened without UKIP. So yes, minority party voices matter - and will matter more if Labour are the largest party because without Scotland they’re still not getting a majority. It’s not a binary choice. Except on the left rn, where there are no compelling alternatives afaict.

So if you are on the left and want to say “don’t vote Labour” it is hard to see anything other than you’re saying “I’m OK with the hardest right option possible keeping control”.

xp - I think I agree. But not voting doesn’t bring pressure from the left, it just weakens what remains. If there was a genuine alternative this would be a different conversation but there isn’t and I don’t see a route to creating one in the time available.

(Though if ever there was a time the upcoming economic depression is surely it)

One of Corbyn’s calculations was to return people who stopped voting back to Labour. His argument that Labour lost millions of voters tacking to the centre was correct, and loads of them were poor or BAME. One thing I thought the 2019 manifesto was missing was to give the demographic that never needs benefits (or never applies, they can be a group with below-average incomes) a few good reasons to vote for them.

Just to say, because I’m making myself cross with myself here: that’s not saying “vote for whatever is in the red rosette regardless of how hateful their rhetoric is” because also fuck that.

I’m mostly fucked off with the tweet’s implicit idea that, on its own, “don’t vote for them” is any kind of answer to the problem.

glad it pissed you off tbh!

welcome to the Six, stet :D

Think I've said this before but the UK system where you're voting for your local MP also makes it far more muddled to send out a message about the party either way.

Lack of credible minority left parties also very much a problem yes, you'd think this was the USA or something.

isn't the neo-neo-cons' underlying principle to turn us into a US client state

One of the most enraging things about centrist discourse during the Corbyn years, especially around the time of the 17 election, was an over-reliance on prebuilt narratives. "Labour only achieves power when it moves to the centre ground" was one of them, another was "all the Tories need to do is move back to the centre ground with Ruth Davidson as leader and they'll comfortably beat Corbyn". These narratives was so divorced from actual political reality that they were basically meaningless.

A lot of left Twitter in particular appears to repeating that mistake, I'm seeing lots of prebuilt narratives cobbled together from bits of the Blair and Miliband eras but we still don't know what this Labour frontbench are going to propose and these narratives don't really acknowledge the completely unprecedented political situation we're in. (Centrist Labour Twitter also has these prebuilt narratives, in which Starmer leads them seamlessly to victory apparently without considering what's going to happen with Scotland, for example).

They said yesterday that they’re going hard anti-Indy so RIP Edinburgh South I guess.

We might well reach a situation where all three main (suppress your laughter!) parties reach record levels of unpopularity at the same time. Despite efforts to turn the whole thing into a US-style dichotomy, there has probably never been a better time in our lifetimes for a new party to emerge

Just don't bloody call it Momentum. Stealth is the key. Call it something really traditional and patriotic-sounding, then when it's all guillotines and universal incomes you can say 'but we're for Britain!'

We might well reach a situation where all three main (suppress your laughter!) parties reach record levels of unpopularity at the same time

We already got there, last year. But very few people dislike them all equally so someone is going to win out.

glad it pissed you off tbh!

Change UK is finished imago xp

That has never worked in the history of politics. xp, responding to LJ

mass non-voting in a party puts pressure on that party to move towards the direction the non-voters are in

Particularly if you're in a non-marginal.

Nobody is going to be voting for another 4 years, now is not the time to be saying "my vote is guaranteed", now is the time to be saying "my vote is not guaranteed"

Yes but you can learn a lot more from people taking their votes in a specific direction than you can from people just not voting.

"A lot of left Twitter in particular appears to repeating that mistake, I'm seeing lots of prebuilt narratives cobbled together from bits of the Blair and Miliband eras but we still don't know what this Labour frontbench are going to propose"

Starmer is doing a racist weekly phone-in show, this has been announced at a week of anti-racist protests. While I don't know where they will go there is enough evidence that thid is not looking good and to equate left and centrist twitter like this isn't right at all.

If anything this is the time -- no elections of any sort for at least s year -- to show you aren't happy with the leadership.

can't believe that for the hundredth time i'm having to protest (too much, he doth!) that my strategic goals are essentially identical to alphie's

that said how do you lead a populace away from authoritarian neoliberalism let alone make it drink the sweet nectars of neosocialism

i even agree that this is a good time to show Labour that disenfranchising the most vulnerable half of their base is evil let alone tactically inept - but how do you even go about showing that? when are the next council elections and what is the protest vote?

Can we really not bring the “complaining about the party you nominally support” argument is voter suppression here, it’s bad enough in the US thread.

By the way, Starmer still hasn’t said a fucking word about schools reopening.

mass non-voting in a party puts pressure on that party to move towards the direction the non-voters are in

It's nice out here in the lukewarm sun.

Has Starmzy said anything about democratising the party since he became leader? Has he said anything about bringing the PLP closer to the wishes of the membership? Cos I don't think he has and I think that tells us a lot.

"can't believe that for the hundredth time i'm having to protest (too much, he doth!) that my strategic goals are essentially identical to alphie's"

I have never supported Change UK, the Greens or concern trolled anti-racist protests.

Labour is hardly reacting to the last loss of voters by heading further left though, so even if this were true the party answer apparently always is "the direction the non-voters went is towards the right, let's be more racist"

This seems disingenious to me - it obviously wasn't leftist voters who stayed home in protest last time. Basically you're saying the strategy worked for the centrists - all the more reason to adopt it.

Starmer is doing a racist weekly phone-in show, this has been announced at a week of anti-racist protests.

ftr I have zero faith in Starmer but this is the wrong thing to attack him on. Bernie goes on Fox News and that is good.

tbh, i'd rather he went on Ferrari's show than O'Brien's.

Bernie did a one-off Fox news town hall, and he did not soften what he had to say to them.

This is not what Starmer is doing xp

This seems disingenious to me - it obviously wasn't leftist voters who stayed home in protest last time. Basically you're saying the strategy worked for the centrists - all the more reason to adopt it.

concern trolled anti-racist protests.

― xyzzzz__, Friday, 5 June 2020 10:40 (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

fuck you, dipshit - we are in a deadly pandemic

lots of melts in the so-called red wall, lots of authoritarians, lots of property owners, v few ppl on the liberal left or even who will change their vote based on benefits

TBH I don't understand the Nick Ferrari thing at all - I get that if you're looking to split voters off from the right you need to be heard in the space where they're going to be listening, and talk radio is basically the cesspool of Britain, but London-based reactionaries are right at the bottom of the priority list given the party's electoral performance there.

Then again I hear talk radio most often in cars driven by immigrant cab drivers who sit and listen to endless frothing racists telling them there's too many of them in the country, punctuated with these genteel 75-year old lefties calling in. I have to admit the psychology of listening to talk radio is something I don't really understand.

Maybe it's a bid for a sweet slice of electoral Essex gammon IDK.

it's obv true that while a collapse in vote will normally lead to change, it doesn't necessarily lead to right kind of change