What is the point of Labour ?

[GordonS]

58 minutes ago, jamamafegan said:

[quote post="14438244" timestamp="1620369362" name="Dunning1874" userid="10614"
Pasokification is actually happening.


Had never heard of that until now. Why is it happening? It’s a sorry state of affairs.

Lots of possible reasons, but for me it mostly boils down to one thing.

At the end of The Big Short, a film about the 2008 financial crisis, one of the characters grasps the consequences - bailing out the banks and years fo austerity. He says "I have a feeling, in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people."

The right caused the credit crunch and centre left governments did nothing to prevent the bubble that caused it, they have choked off public spending while the rich got massively richer, and then through the media they control they have persuaded the public to blame the wrong people.

[NotThePars]

Heading into Labour HQ this morning with the rest of the boys 

 

[SANTAN]

7 minutes ago, renton said:

Why would that change his point?

Exercising democracy isn't the same driving force as promoting Nationalism.

Take aside the flag waving then Brexit getting completed had a lot of support from people that weren't necessarily keen on Brexit in the first place. This of course can't be said about Indy. 

To actually answer your question, his point of the Tories copying SNP homework is impossible considering the difference in situations. 

Edited May 7, 2021 by Stormzy

[Hillonearth]

30 minutes ago, jamamafegan said:

It’s no surprise Hartlepool was lost and it shows that we need to GTF out of the UK ASAP. The political landscape in south of the border is totally fucked. It’s hard to imagine anything than a Conservative government for at least the next decade, and even then who is going to step up and offer credible opposition? Labour are finished. They need to start all over again. How long will that recovery take? Will they ever recover? We face a prospect of being tied to a Conservative government for the rest of our days if we cannot secure independence.

My thoughts exactly...first and foremost I want us to have the chance to set our own course as a country, but almost as important is the fact that we're currently chained to a neighbour that's inexorably leaning ever further to the right and through force of numbers is dragging us with it.

As things stand, England's a lost cause. Hartlepool last night:

[Michael W]

6 minutes ago, Stormzy said:

Except Brexit actually won in the referendum where as Indy did not. 

The point is that the divisions caused have not gone away. 

Whilst Brexiteer devotion to the Conservatives may indeed dissipate over time now that it's happened, I can't see how it disappears in the short term. 

[SANTAN]

1 minute ago, Michael W said:

The point is that the divisions caused have not gone away. 

Whilst Brexiteer devotion to the Conservatives may indeed dissipate over time now that it's happened, I can't see how it disappears in the short term. 

That point remains, I was just pointing out a flaw in the analogy. The Tories didn't copy SNP homework in that respect but the general point is correct. 

[Dunning1874]

27 minutes ago, O'Kelly Isley III said:

This has less to do with the Labour Party, shambolic and supine as they are, and more to do with the English electorate, and almost all of it, plunging further down a right-wing dead end characterised by ignorance, xenophobia and beggar-thy-neighbour attitudes.  I had family in Hartlepool and frequented it when they weighed the vote for Labour's Ted Leadbitter.  But that was when people had jobs, trade union representation and above all a sense of political engagement and intelligence.  Sadly, swathes of England have now regressed to the 1930's - Mortimer could have read Mussolini on that Hartlepool ballot paper.

While the rightward shift in British and especially English politics is clearly a thing, I think this blaming of the electorate lets Labour off the hook far too much. This isn't something Labour are powerless to do anything about.

Looking at Hartlepool election figures:

2015 - Labour 14076, UKIP 11052, Tory 8256

2017 - Labour 21969, Tory 14319, UKIP 4801

2019 - Labour 15464, Tory 11869, Brexit 10603

2021 - Tory 15529, Labour 8589

The right wing vote has been there for years, it's not a new development unleashed by the Brexit referendum. While it's the highest vote the Tories have had it's not a wild outlier compared to previous results. The defining factor here is the collapse of the Labour vote with people abandoning them to stay at home, not to move rightwards themselves.

If 15000 people in Hartlepool were still willing to vote Labour in 2019 despite Corbyn and despite their stance on Brexit in a constituency which had voted leave by about 70%, then it's simply not the case that the general rightward trend of English politics makes it impossible for Labour to win in seats like this.

7000 people in this one constituency who had voted Labour in 2019 didn't in 2021. That can only be a huge indictment on Starmer's leadership and the direction of the Labour Party; people see absolutely no reason to vote for them just now. This isn't due to the rightward shift of the English electorate, it's due to Labour being a directionless mess led by a wet wipe.

[GordonS]

2 minutes ago, Dunning1874 said:

This isn't due to the rightward shift of the English electorate, it's due to Labour being a directionless mess led by a wet wipe.

Why can't it be both?

[Benjamin_Nevis]

I don't really understand the glee about this.

Because watching Labour pathetically flail about about trying to be diet-Tory and having it blow up in their faces is VERY amusing. The last Labour government laid the foundations for many of the Tories' most cynical aspects of welfare reform. I've seen absolutely nothing from them that suggests any attempt at meaningful change. Hell mend them.

[renton]

7 minutes ago, Stormzy said:

Exercising democracy isn't the same driving force as promoting Nationalism.

Take aside the flag waving then Brexit getting completed had a lot of support from people that weren't necessarily keen on Brexit in the first place. This of course can't be said about Indy. 

To actually answer your question, his point of the Tories copying SNP homework is impossible considering the difference in situations. 

Brexit was of course an exercise in "nationalism" as anything else.

But the central point is that referendums, particularly close run affairs can create polarisation in politics. Regardless of winning or losing the actual referendum, they produce faultlines that realign politics. 

[John Lambies Doos]

I think people who live in English shiteholes are finally realising that they have been voting for Labour all their live and they still live in shiteholes. Same thing happened in Scotland 10 yrs ago but people had an alternative. The Torys are the only alternative in England so votes are going there. Labour could genuinely be dying in England (already dead in Scotland) which will mean a 1 party UK state for forever.

[Monkey Tennis]

59 minutes ago, Highlandmagyar Tier 3 said:

Indeed. As Scottish voters seemingly shiting themselves over independence we are saddled with England for a long time. Depressing. 

It's all round depressing.

Hopefully, we find the escape hatch.  

Even leaving that aside though, it would be grim.  I don't want a far right government in France.  I didn't want one in America and I wouldn't want one in England or the rest of the UK, even if we'd got a divorce.

[Dunning1874]

Just now, GordonS said:

Why can't it be both?

Because, as the numbers show, there were always 15K or more right wing votes in Hartlepool. That hasn't changed, what's changed is Labour's vote collapsing without switching to the Tories en masse and that evidently can't be because the electorate doesn't think Labour are right wing enough, when they got more votes when they were further left than they are now.

I'm not disputing that the rightward drift of the English electorate exists or that Corbyn was for the most part a blithering incompetent, but in this case both of those things clearly aren't the defining factor.

[D Angelo Barksdale]

5 minutes ago, Stormzy said:

Centrists did not lose the last election. Corbyn did 100%. The sabotage existed but he was the main proponent of sabotaging Labour from the inside. 

Delicious irony how the same radical lefties of the party seem to be trying their hardest to bring down Keir whilst also lamenting the sabotage from inside the party during the Corbyn era. 

Absolutely miles off here pal. Of course Corbyn has to shoulder the blame for the election defeat, but there were sitting Labour MP's in the media on a weekly basis telling voters that Labour were the most racist organisation ever, and that they should vote for the Tories. These MP's were then rewarded with peerages and cushy jobs with gambling firms, weapons manufacturers and pay day loan companies. But Corbyn was the one doing all the serious sabotaging ?

Your second point makes zero sense. The party have already purged the left. There are no 'radical lefties' left in the party. They were told they were scum and not wanted, but it's also their fault for not voting for Starmer and trying to bring him down in some 'delicious irony' ?

[Monkey Tennis]

5 minutes ago, Day of the Lords said:

1 hour ago, Monkey Tennis said:

I don't really understand the glee about this.

Because watching Labour pathetically flail about about trying to be diet-Tory and having it blow up in their faces is VERY amusing. The last Labour government laid the foundations for many of the Tories' most cynical aspects of welfare reform. I've seen absolutely nothing from them that suggests any attempt at meaningful change. Hell mend them.

What about the poor sods condemned now to be governed for the foreseeable by an utterly hideous alternative?

[Michael W]

2 minutes ago, Stormzy said:

That point remains, I was just pointing out a flaw in the analogy. The Tories didn't copy SNP homework in that respect but the general point is correct. 

I think they have - identity. As much as many people (and let's be honest here, they are mainly middle class #FBPE types) would like to think it wasn't so, it is a very powerful feeling, especially in nationality terms. If it wasn't, it would be nowhere near as easy to weaponise by politicians. 

People have never been entrenched as much as they are now in their own viewpoint. The SNP is the party of Scottish independence and people who want that identify with it and therefore give the SNP almost unconditional backing. The Tories have latched onto this with Brexit, are the party of Brexit and they are starting to reap the rewards of this from places that backed Brexit but historically had never backed the Conservative party. They would be foolish in electoral terms not to use this to their advantage. The strategy is of course foolish for different reasons, which I doubt politicians that earn themselves a fixed contract every five years really care about. 

The constitution is ultimately the red line in the sand. 

 

[Gaz]

12 minutes ago, Dunning1874 said:

This isn't due to the rightward shift of the English electorate, it's due to Labour being a directionless mess led by a wet wipe.

It's both.

[G51]

Every Tory seat won is another swing voter waking up in Scotland and realising that the only way to deliver progressive policies is to break up the union.

There is nothing else that can be done about it. Labours moved to the left, moved to the soft left, moved to the centre, and it's now going to try and move to the right.

Nothing has worked. Nothing will work. England just simply loves voting Tory. Adores it. Cannot get enough of it. No matter what they do, they will be returned to the seat of power because there are powerful classes that demand it.

The modern day has known only Tory governments and Blair governments, and there was almost no difference between the two. Effectively forty years of Tory rule. England is a one-party state, and whether unionists realise it or not, that is their biggest problem for the next referendum.

 

[TheScarf]

My word, Labour losing to Lib Dem ffs, that's when you know the game is truly up.

[D Angelo Barksdale]