What is the point of Labour ?

[Guest Bob Mahelp]

20 minutes ago, G51 said:

Social values are a very minor factor. People vote for what is good for their wallets. The North of England is full of retiree homeowners, and voting Tory is a good financial deal for them. A high percentage of blue collar workers in the North are still homeowners because the house prices are so cheap.

The precariat these days are the people spending £2000 a month on renting a studio apartment in Hammersmith, with no prospect of ever having financial stability. Labour has to focus on winning more city seats first.

I don't disagree with that, but I think you're incorrect in saying that social values are a minor factor. I believe that the right wing jingoism of the Tories now resonates with what were previously 'working class' areas....people have voted in the last couple of elections not according to economics, but according to identity. Brexit has the been the major factor, not financial status. 

I'm not sure that Labour has an answer to this. 

[GiGi]

6 minutes ago, Alert Mongoose said:

I think most of England thinks of themselves as British first. The problem lies in the fact that most of them think British=English.  I actually agree on that distinction and hope more Scottish people would think the same way then we can finally unshackle ourselves.

Most of the world thinks this way. When they think of Britishness they think of posh English accents, red double deckers, hackney cabs, tea and biscuits etc. 

They don't think of marching bands in Belfast, the Highland games or whatever the Welsh get up to.

Edited May 7, 2021 by GiGi

[Alert Mongoose]

2 minutes ago, Pato said:

Not according to census data:

I think of English as London...

[G51]

 

 

 

[Monkey Tennis]

16 minutes ago, Alert Mongoose said:

I think of English as London...

Where's that tiny purple island in the middle of England?

It's not Corby is it? 

[Monkey Tennis]

2 hours ago, G51 said:

 

 

 

That's undeniably true.

It's not the same thing as saying those governments were completely indistinguishable from the Tory ones that preceded and succeeded them though.

Edited May 7, 2021 by Monkey Tennis

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

6 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

Has anyone on the left actually tried to engage with this vast swathe of lost voters to find out exactly why they are voting Tory?

It seems to me that everyone on the left is in such a rush to brand them all as racists that nobody has bothered finding out the real reason for those lost votes.

Oh and BTW, you can't be calling people racists for 5 years and then expecting them to vote Labour. I think it's a combination of that, Brexit, Corbyn/Starmer and apparently a genuine belief (incredibly) that Boris is a straight talking guy who is listening to them which has killed the party down south.

There's a lesson here for Indyref2 if people have a genuine desire to win that referendum when it comes.

Tbf I think this is an issue, but there's also a lot on the left, including Corbyn, whose attitude was not to brand people racists, accept the brexit vote and acknowledge/try to offer solutions to the economic issues facing the previously labour, now brexit areas. Not putting his foot down and instead compromising with the remainer section of the PLP was another nail in the coffin in 2019. 

[ayrmad]

1 minute ago, oaksoft said:

No idea if you're taking the piss or not but actually this isn't the worst idea.

A bit of both. 

[ayrmad]

13 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

Has anyone on the left actually tried to engage with this vast swathe of lost voters to find out exactly why they are voting Tory?

It seems to me that everyone on the left is in such a rush to brand them all as racists that nobody has bothered finding out the real reason for those lost votes.

Oh and BTW, you can't be calling people racists for 5 years and then expecting them to vote Labour. I think it's a combination of that, Brexit, Corbyn/Starmer and apparently a genuine belief (incredibly) that Boris is a straight talking guy who is listening to them which has killed the party down south.

There's a lesson here for Indyref2 if people have a genuine desire to win that referendum when it comes.

That's why the Donald was so successful 1st time round. 

[Detournement]

You look at the Hartlepool turnout and it's not a huge swing to the Tories. They got 21% of the electorate. In 2017 Labour got 30% of the electorate and Tories and UKIP combinecd  got 27%.

The story of this by election is masses of people who voted for Corbyn not bothering to vote at all.

 

[NotThePars]

16 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

Has anyone on the left actually tried to engage with this vast swathe of lost voters to find out exactly why they are voting Tory?

Yeah, quite a bit actually.

[G51]

26 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

That's undeniably true.

It's not the same thing as saying those governments were completely indistinguishable from the Tory ones that preceded and succeeded it though.

Look, I get that there is an obvious reason for SNP voters to pretend that centrist parties are actually progressive, but the truth is they aren’t.

New Labour actually committed war crimes, lads.

[Detournement]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/26/boris-johnson-tories-economy-rising-house-prices-wages

This is the best thing I've read recently about the new Tory electorate.

This is also revealing. It's pretty obvious the vast majority of Tory voters aren't in the workforce. 

Edited May 7, 2021 by Detournement

[ayrmad]

12 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

And what answers are they getting?

Ones that are ignored, obviously. 

[Detournement]

1 minute ago, oaksoft said:

This sounds awfully like denial to me.

It's reality.

My post was a response to seeing media coverage saying voters are going from Labour to the Tories which obviously isn't true. The Tories simply retained more of their voters. 

There is no point trying to win over nihilist pensioners or embittered Gammons like yourself for Labour. This only path forward is to rebuild the base by targeting non voters. 

[NotThePars]

5 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

And what answers are they getting?

Well they range from the sensible "Labour have taken this area for granted for decades now" or "we've voted Labour since time immemorial and the area is still shit and being left behind" to the irrational "Corbyn loved the RA and was going to sell Trident to Hezbollah and make Gerry Adams the Deputy PM" to the outright bigotry of "Labour are only for gypsies and Muslims rather than people who look like me". It's a kaleidoscope of stated (and other structural, social and economic) factors that goes back decades at this point but there's quite a lot of people on the left who have been writing about it. Could find people who are engaging with it on some level if you're interested in learning more.

 

[dorlomin]

40 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

And again, ultimately the blame for this does lie with Corbyn and McDonnell. They bent over backwards to accommodate these people and let them stay in the tent pissing on everything. We can blame the wreckers only so much when the leadership doesn't do anything to fling them out. 

Electoral politics from someone with a Marxist dictator as their avatar is like asking a convicted rapist for relationship advice. 

That said NotThePars does not have any political ideology or beliefs. He simply comes online to say whatever he thinks will be edgy and popular. Its like someone that will never mature beyond being 16 years old. 

Moving on:

Corbyn started as the least popular new opposition leader in the records

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2015/10/05/corbyn-britain-least-popular-new-opposition-leade

Then went on to shatter records for his unpopularity as an opposition leader. 

https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/jeremy-corbyn-has-lowest-leadership-satisfaction-rating-any-opposition-leader-1977

16% of the country was satisfied with his leadership. -60% approval rating. 

The hard left are liars and fantasists. Their views on things are foggy, impossible to pin down and shift when you trey to engage with them. They seem to live in a world where somehow most people support them but are too dumb to realise they do? As I said its vague and changes around depending on what they are trying to say. They will throw bullshit about the press or something. Its excuses. 

Hard left politics has virtually no support in the UK. If you look back through the general elections, council elections and when we had them regional elections no far left group gained traction beyond RESPECT and Galloways couple of Westminster wins and pushing the greens into "hard left" their occasional council seat plus Brighton Pavilion. They are liars and will try to portray Corbyn as some kind of moderate or something, this will be popular with people here. But Corbyn was dumb, I mean really stupid (his school results are part of the evidence for this). He was mired in all manner of fruitcake politics (launching Gerry Adams autobiography) and surrounded himself with hardline Marxists  in his backroom team at Labour (Seamus Milne and Andrew Murray). It was objectively the nuttiest leadership  of a major political party in the post war period. 

You cannot reason people out of positions they did not reason themselves into. You cannot present a set of evidence to discuss rationally with people who have surrendered rational thought as a way of coming to decisions.  

Arguing with the hard left:

 

 

Now ignoring the clowns and buffoons like NotThePars and Mixuwhatsisnamenow

The Tories have increased their vote every single general election since 2001. 

Polling on areas like trust on the economy, Labour has done between badly and terribly since the financial crash of 2008. 

There is a general trend in Europe of social democratic politics losing ground. 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/rise-and-fall-of-social-democracy-19182017/4E96179FAF3D1C450072565C6B5DD103

Looking into social trends shows that working class, lower education attainment and people from smaller towns have increasingly moved away from Labour. Labour has strengthened its support in groups such as degree educated, younger and large urban centres. 

Several leading political scientists have been making the case for years that there is a huge split in the "coalition" of voters who the centre left, the lower income workers and the socially liberal urbanites. This trend is also very visible in the US. 

Labour has a near impossible job of appearing competent on the economy, appealing to a social more conservative, generally patriotic lower income small town base vs is other base of increasingly radicalised increasingly self absorbed urban liberals. Within a first past the post system it is probable these two bodies cannot be reconciled without both sides understanding they have to compromise and work together. Just look at how often the low income, small town English are traduced as "gammons", "racists" etc too see how unlikely it is that this process is underway. 

We probably have at least another general election defeat (I think two) before the Labour party membership will begin to start acting with a bit of humility and trying to work out what the electorate want and need to hear to vote for them, rather than being caught up in fantasies about  who and what the electorate are.

This has been said many times on here by me. 

Medium term Europe is likely headed for a couple of decades of low growth and likely constant debt and currency crisis without some major structural reform. This is going to be the backdrop of the next ten years at least. We also face an ageing demographic with fewer younger people and younger people not willing to vote for various reasons. All headwinds for the centre left. That is without the millstone of the loonies and clowns from Momentum having any influence. 

As with all opinions your mileage may vary. But the social trends and clear and widely represented in academic analysis of UK electoral politics. There is little too actually argue over with this, especially not against people stupid enough to have thought Corbyn would have been and was anything other than both a buffoon and an electoral liability. 

Have a good day.  

[Ira Gaines]

tl;dr

[G51]

@dorlominthese are forum posts not dissertations

[vikingTON]

6 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

Well they range from the sensible "Labour have taken this area for granted for decades now" or "we've voted Labour since time immemorial and the area is still shit and being left behind" to the irrational "Corbyn loved the RA and was going to sell Trident to Hezbollah and make Gerry Adams the Deputy PM" to the outright bigotry of "Labour are only for gypsies and Muslims rather than people who look like me". It's a kaleidoscope of stated (and other structural, social and economic) factors that goes back decades at this point but there's quite a lot of people on the left who have been writing about it. Could find people who are engaging with it on some level if you're interested in learning more.

I haven't seen too many mainstream British left/Labour sympathetic commentators embracing a multi-factoral analysis though. It's usually their pet peeve (90%) plus oh aye other factors as well.