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

(I appreciate the responding at face value on this!)

As Koogs says: it's bad that this person who has written and published books about herself can't spell 'wept'.

Worse still is the possibility it may be an affectation

Possibly - but a hard affectation to invent?

re discussion above:

Anvil: you are bashing at a door that has been open for at least 80 years. Everyone on 'the Left' has always talked about their patriotism or talked fondly and favourably about Britain.

There is a long tradition of people on the Left doing this, mirrored by an equally long tradition of people asking why nobody on the Left is doing it. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance.

I knew this was true in present-day terms but it was enlightening to find it outlined in historical terms by Anthony Barnett, I believe. I read this essay in ... 1993 !

c.15 years later a Labour PM, who had once edited a Gramscian publication, was publicly urging all Britons to plant a Union Flag in their front garden.

The idea persists that 'the Left is not comfortable with patriotism' and 'it would be smart politics for the Left to talk about patriotism'. The single person I would most associate with inanely repeating this for 30 years, against all evidence of what was actually being done and said, is Freedland.

The main reason the idea persists is that public discourse in our society is distorted and does not reflect reality. This in turn serves particular interests.

My values are British values: work must be rewarded, public services need protecting, and vested interests must never hold our country back.

— Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) November 13, 2014

Ed Miliband, 2011:

Let’s be clear about one thing. The problem isn’t the people of Britain. I saw it when I met our troops in Afghanistan.

Brave men and women. Called to serve our country. At this moment, as we meet in the comfort of this hall, hundreds, thousands of our troops are risking their lives. In harm’s way, so far from home. We should think of them today and every day. Let’s all thank them and acknowledge the heroism they show on behalf of our country.

And as always in our history, we see the true British character in moments of crisis. We saw it during the riots. It was a terrible moment for Britain.

People looting shops, burning cars. It even happened right by my old school. But for every person that looted, there were hundreds, thousands who said this will not stand and came out to help with the clean up. I saw it in Manchester, people of all generations, who came out the next morning to get the city back on its feet. Those young people with the brooms. Those young people who join us at Conference today. And let us celebrate what they did.

Let us celebrate too those brave police officers who worked day and night to bring order to our streets. They put themselves in harm’s way and we should thank them for it. Citizens and public servants alike.

Theirs are the true values of Britain.

They are the true face of Britain.

Progressive Patriotism seems to be thriving. I heard the other day something like in the last decade 65 countries have constructed large scale walls/borders where previously it was only a conceptual border. They should have got a giant John Bull to drunkenly pass out and shit its pants and lie there comatose for the entire game at West Ham vs Watford last night, you see anyone can do opening ceremonies.

ffs Ed was such a fool, he didn't get any thanks nor respect for playing with nationalism, they just took the piss out of him for being Jewish.

Years after Ed Miliband's relentless talk of British values, a New Statesman article says:

Corbyn is a decent man, part of a maverick English Labour tradition that includes Michael Foot, Tony Benn and perhaps Ed Miliband, but all four of them are metropolitan intellectuals who could never or never will understand why so many ordinary people are passionate about their country.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/01/why-are-so-many-left-embarrassed-patriotism

It's basically lazy, ignorant garbage talk and it deserves Calzino treatment.

Called to serve our country.

factually incorrect

looting, rioting = not British
cleaning up, drinking tea out of racist mugs = British

Thanks Pinefox, I'm now reconsidering my position. After reading Miliband's insipid garbage I am now of the belief that politicians should use as few words as possible, and preferably none at all other than yes and no

you can't do faux nationalism it is transparent even to the dumbest of racists, you are either a racist prick like boris or you aren't. If you try fake it you just look desperate and weak and the angry middle class white racist with regional accent knows you are going call them a moronic bigot behind their back. nobody is fooled by tortuously conceived notions of neo/progressive/jazz-fusion patriotism or whatever, it failed badly for Ed and made him look like a weak idiot and he ought to be more embarrassed about than even the Russell Brand cringefest in his kitchen(s).

If we grant that, I'm wondering why I feel that it will work out better for Starmer than it did for Miliband.

I think my hunch is that Starmer believes lots of the bad stuff, where Miliband sometimes strained to or pretended to.

Unfortunately I think Starmer is a worse human being than Miliband. Maybe that's why I think he will succeed.

well Miliband appears to have a soul, albeit a slightly lost one

Starmer will still get vilified, probably with some Friends of the IRA type confection to do with his lawyer work, or failing that they'll just shop him to look like Roy Cropper, he won't get an easy ride just because he's a conservative cop-loving establishment prick.

but I think Ed is a much more fundamentally decent person than Starmzy and also of course than his arsewipe brother!

you can't do faux nationalism it is transparent even to the dumbest of racists, you are either a racist prick like boris or you aren't.

It's not really what I'm suggesting, I'm not suggesting anything more than what Bernard does

Miliband's fakery is apparent largely because of class, how do you do, fellow proles and patriots?

Whoever came up with that 'absolute boy' shite or whatever it was re Corbyn should be ashamed of themselves.

i was reading somewhere how the tragedy of Ed is part encapsulated by how he turned down a spot in Corbyn cabinet where he would have actually been respected and popular and took a place in a Starmzy cabinet where he is loathed by the right, destined to get briefed against and stabbed in the back at some point. In footballer terms the lad just makes too many poor decisions!

They're not sending their best

"Whoever came up with that 'absolute boy' shite or whatever it was re Corbyn should be ashamed of themselves."

It's better than this.

I'm saying is there merit in saying "I like my country and the people who live in it, and thats why I want the children that live in it to have enough food, be housed and be cared for"?

*looks at rampant levels of poverty and inequality in the 6th largest country*

I like it.

*richest

Also Miliband failed because its not about words, thats totally missing the point, he's just digging himself further in with that insipid nonsense

*looks at rampant levels of poverty and inequality in the 6th largest country*

I dislike it, we should do something about it

But you are just saying you like the country, make your mind up.

Or maybe don't and realise the question is a trap.

xp the "we" is the key thing here

I like this town, we should put some public transport in it otherwise it will be difficult to get around without a car

all four of them are metropolitan intellectuals who could never or never will understand why so many ordinary people are passionate about their country.

Which begs the question, which country?

"Miliband's fakery is apparent largely because of class, how do you do, fellow proles and patriots?"

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

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.