I want to believe they'll be unelectable for a generation or more of they double down this way. But a nagging fear that Starmer and co inheriting an irreparable country might bring them back sooner is keeping me unsettled.
Morgan Sweeney and others aren't dumb and surely they think this too? I know they have limited room to manoeuvre, but it sort of needs Labour to be more radical if it wins.
Either way, Labour are faced with insoluble problems, just as the
Tories were.
It reminds me of a cartoon in which a CEO says to his gloomy fellow- directors at the boardroom table "Our auditors recommend a Day of Prayer."
Because Britain's problems go much deeper than politics and because the Left has done as much to Break Britain (e.g. by destroying marriage and family life) as the Right has.
I think a sensible Starmer government would introduce PR for local government this first term (to match Scotland and NI) and have it in its manifesto for the next election. We need consensus driven policy making in this country; not wild swings from left to right to left again
I used to think that but I don't any more. PR would give rise to a strong Faragist party in Parliament and a strong Corbynite one too. It is perfectly possible they would eclipse more centrist parties. Look at France. Look at Italy. Look at Belgium where I live and Vlaams Belang got 30% of the vote and 30% of the seats in the Flemish Parliament. (Fortunately given the language division in Belgium everything gets stalemated at Federal level so the extremists can't take over their. The flip side of that is that nothing gets done.)
If you want more centrist policies I would go for ending membership leadership votes for all parties with MPs and making them MP votes only, plus compulsory voting and votes for 16-17 year olds to dilute the power of the grey vote.
Or perhaps the voting twice system that the French use for the Commons, and the Lords as an elected Senste under PR (with longer terms and elected by the regions), but you’d probably need a written constitution then.🙄
I don't think it has swung to the left... ever.. in opposition maybe... but the "left" as an extreme is just a bogeyman.. a poster. See Owen Jones.
We need to admit the cold war never ended.
That Russian nationalism has infected our politics and is the primary geopolitical factor in Europe ... and America. A Trump win is game over for DDay nostalgia.
Never ever forget the role of the media in all this. Its dominant Neo-Liberal discourse, its anti Europe discourse and its anti Labour/Progressive discourse. The headlines of the Daily Mail show it all. Having given us Brexit, Johnson, Truss and Sunak and driven GB to the cliff edge...it just carries on demonising the politics, economics & social democratic policies of Labour that has given Western Europe its better well being, its better health care, reduced inequality, fairer schools, widespread child care, less expensive universities, cheaper public transport etc., We have reached the terrible point as reported last week that UK female cancer survival is 20 yrs behind Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Our UK inequality is one of worst in Europe bar Bulgaria ( Danny Dorling 2023)
What is worrying is when those negative Tory press discourses leak into BBC unrepresentative UK news narrative, dominated by an elitist band of so-called right wing political spin experts as it so often has since 2016.
The silly TV debates trivialise the political election fever. Its deliberate, forget 14 yrs of decay and decline and do as Fiona Bruce did keep asking Sir Keir, which was better Johnson or Corbyn? This is a country with a health care meltdown of long gone medics, long cancer waits and yes, twenty years behind Denmark.
People read the Mail or Telegraph because they despise The Guardian and everything it stands for. And the Left generally.
They are correct in doing so.
The Left is still pining for a Lost Golden Age of Tax and Spend. Beyond making radical noises, it offers no other cures. And in its fanatical internationalism and culture-Marxism, has made Britain and the West much worse.
The Ukraine tried to join NATO at the same time as Poland and other former Soviet occupied countries. It was prevented from doing so and a conference in 1994 laid down conditions that guaranteed their freedom from Russian interference. Putin was having none of this and started supporting the Russian speakers left behind in Ukraine when Ukraine separated from Russia. Any one supporting Putin in his invasion or his annexation of Crimea is a lier if they say that the West provoked Russia. The 1994 agreements were ignored by Putin when he believed he could get away with it.
I think for me the moment when I realised the Rubicon was crossed was during the Brexit campaign when Penny Mordaunt in an interview claimed the UK as an EU member had no veto over Turkish succession. A stone cold lie. I remember the interviewer, startled, picked her up on it. She gulped, stared into the camera, and repeated the lie. Stone cold. The interviewer was utterly at a loss. As you say, polticians have always stretched points, exaggerated, went out on limbs on flimsy evidence. But this was different. She knew she was lying. The interviewer knew she was lying. Everyone who saw it who knew anything knew she was lying. We knew that she knew that we knew she was lying. But she had realised no interviewer would call her a liar to her face. And because of that, in fact, all it took was to say it.
In terms of the defence of liberal democracy today the big division is not between left and right but between those, wherever they are on the political spectrum, who believe in rational arguments based on evidence and those who don't.
Actually I was just thinking about this a bit more, dredging stuff up from my memory I'd buried. If you go back this wasn't just Mordaunt, the Turkey lie was a massive part of the Vote Leave campaign with posters about Turkey imminently about to join the EU, Johnson who had previously campaigned for Turkish accession, writing to Cameron asking for a guarantee it would not happen, Farage joining in too and claiming staying in the EU would increase the risk to women of sexual assault..... So the lie was strategised, focus grouped, and deliberately run, and run in the most inflammatory way possible. Incendiary hardly begins to describe it. And then Jo Cox was killed just after. See this: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/unfounded-claim-turkey-swing-brexit-referendum/
Sometimes I think I've buried the horror of exactly how nasty and how low that campaign went. I mean, it would drive you mad to think people who were such utter sh*ts capable of that were actually running the country. It's like after we all had to pretend it didn't happen and they were decent people after, and it all just a bit out of hand.. But they really, really weren't decent people. And aren't. And people who can do that once can do it again. Especially if they got away with it. Which they did.
These "patriots"... that lie, that, when it comes down to it, "don't care" ... that hide in Churchill's shadow and hate him for apparently sacrificing the empire to defeat nazism... have much in common with the nihilism of the kgb infected MAGA.🤔
None dare call it... even when it's screaming it in your face... Farage, Johnson, Trump... Putin.
I very much fear that Fascism is the new Tory default position. Unless an incoming Labour government gives far greater powers to the currently toothless Electoral Commission as regards party funding and dodgy donations and unless much more clarity is demanded as to issues like Russian sabotage and the finances of right wing think tanks, we’ll all be hearing ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ or its modern equivalent. I don’t see this as implausible within the limited span of years still left to me.
You are living in a fantasy-world. Fascism died in 1945. The right-wing populists of today merely faintly echo them - Marine Le Pen isn't her dad, Meloni isn't Mussolini and Farage isn't Mosley.
Ordinary voters support populism only because of the impenetrable, brain-dead fanaticism of leftists and liberals in destroying the West with mega-immigration (in alliance with Business), then backing radical Islam.
The Left loves minorities, hates the majority of people. The Left no longer represents the working-class, but merely panders to the twisted minds and Capitalist cravings of the affluent graduate-caste, i.e. the Brahmins !
Oh Tony, there you go again. It's hard to take you seriously when you say things which are factually incorrect and then set up a series of straw dolls to knock over as if they're devastating points. They're not. Fascism did not die in 1945. I had the misfortune to have to do some work in the last openly Nazi regime in 1989: General Stroessner's Paraguay. Your take on Italy is hilarious. Go visit Predappio on October 31st and the scales will fall from your eyes. Or drop by the CasaPound HQ in Rome. Hint: you won't find much poetry discussed there...
Dammit, I just realised that you're being satirical. You fooled me again. Not enough unnecessary capitalisations to remind me. Keep up the good work.
I imagine there will be some bitter infighting after the election. How it will play will presumably depend quite a bit on what exactly the result looks like. If they lose more seats to the Lib Dems than to Farage, that may make some of them wonder if being more right wing is really the solution to their problems. I wonder how many proiminent Tories want to follow Farage into full-blown apologetics for Putin. They do after all revere Margaret Thatcher, who was very much not an apologist for Russian imperialism. It's interesting that the Mail has come out fairly strongly against Farage. I wonder if they wll keep it up. Maybe many Tories would like a Farage without the Putin apologetics, but it's hard to see how he could backtrack from his curent position. It looks like an interesting period coming up, and I don't think that necessarily means a bad period.
You are simply suffering from Brexit Derangement Syndrome, talking as though the Cameron-Osborne era was fragrant.
In fact, for many people outside your Bubble - notably those in small towns, those without degrees, the elderly suffering from culture shock - Britain in 2015 was a ghastly place. Once the tide went out in 2008, it was discovered that Britain was swimming naked.
Hence they voted Leave. Just as in France they supported the gilets jaune, a movement that began among the elderly in provincial France. If you don't get a Nigel, you get a Marine instead.
You have got things upside down, confusing Cause and Effect.
The truth is, Europe is crashing down the league tables because of globalisation, with physical poverty held in check only by food banks, homelessness exploding and government coffers empty. The complacent liberal consensus you support broke in 2008. Radicalisation is inevitable.
And the radicalisation spiral isn't happening only on the Right. In Britain the Left marches arm-in-arm with Hamas. In France, the Left is allied to the North African radicals and civil war is looming.
Policy Exchange is already engaged in. Big research project designed to transcend left and right. Charles Moore is enthusiastic about it. Probably worth investigating what Godson has afoot.
I want to believe they'll be unelectable for a generation or more of they double down this way. But a nagging fear that Starmer and co inheriting an irreparable country might bring them back sooner is keeping me unsettled.
Absolutely Adrian. Perfectly reasonable fear
Morgan Sweeney and others aren't dumb and surely they think this too? I know they have limited room to manoeuvre, but it sort of needs Labour to be more radical if it wins.
Either way, Labour are faced with insoluble problems, just as the
Tories were.
It reminds me of a cartoon in which a CEO says to his gloomy fellow- directors at the boardroom table "Our auditors recommend a Day of Prayer."
Because Britain's problems go much deeper than politics and because the Left has done as much to Break Britain (e.g. by destroying marriage and family life) as the Right has.
So with even the political problems insoluble...
I think a sensible Starmer government would introduce PR for local government this first term (to match Scotland and NI) and have it in its manifesto for the next election. We need consensus driven policy making in this country; not wild swings from left to right to left again
I used to think that but I don't any more. PR would give rise to a strong Faragist party in Parliament and a strong Corbynite one too. It is perfectly possible they would eclipse more centrist parties. Look at France. Look at Italy. Look at Belgium where I live and Vlaams Belang got 30% of the vote and 30% of the seats in the Flemish Parliament. (Fortunately given the language division in Belgium everything gets stalemated at Federal level so the extremists can't take over their. The flip side of that is that nothing gets done.)
If you want more centrist policies I would go for ending membership leadership votes for all parties with MPs and making them MP votes only, plus compulsory voting and votes for 16-17 year olds to dilute the power of the grey vote.
It's not perfect. But nothing is.
Or perhaps the voting twice system that the French use for the Commons, and the Lords as an elected Senste under PR (with longer terms and elected by the regions), but you’d probably need a written constitution then.🙄
In other words, you want an Establishment stitch-up so as to keep out the extremists.
But that solves nothing; mere makes things angrier.
I don't think it has swung to the left... ever.. in opposition maybe... but the "left" as an extreme is just a bogeyman.. a poster. See Owen Jones.
We need to admit the cold war never ended.
That Russian nationalism has infected our politics and is the primary geopolitical factor in Europe ... and America. A Trump win is game over for DDay nostalgia.
If Putin and Trump have affected European politics, that's only because Europe is kaput and will soon be in chaos.
Never ever forget the role of the media in all this. Its dominant Neo-Liberal discourse, its anti Europe discourse and its anti Labour/Progressive discourse. The headlines of the Daily Mail show it all. Having given us Brexit, Johnson, Truss and Sunak and driven GB to the cliff edge...it just carries on demonising the politics, economics & social democratic policies of Labour that has given Western Europe its better well being, its better health care, reduced inequality, fairer schools, widespread child care, less expensive universities, cheaper public transport etc., We have reached the terrible point as reported last week that UK female cancer survival is 20 yrs behind Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Our UK inequality is one of worst in Europe bar Bulgaria ( Danny Dorling 2023)
What is worrying is when those negative Tory press discourses leak into BBC unrepresentative UK news narrative, dominated by an elitist band of so-called right wing political spin experts as it so often has since 2016.
The silly TV debates trivialise the political election fever. Its deliberate, forget 14 yrs of decay and decline and do as Fiona Bruce did keep asking Sir Keir, which was better Johnson or Corbyn? This is a country with a health care meltdown of long gone medics, long cancer waits and yes, twenty years behind Denmark.
A Labour government will drive them insane
And the rest of us too. Which is only half Labour's fault.
People read the Mail or Telegraph because they despise The Guardian and everything it stands for. And the Left generally.
They are correct in doing so.
The Left is still pining for a Lost Golden Age of Tax and Spend. Beyond making radical noises, it offers no other cures. And in its fanatical internationalism and culture-Marxism, has made Britain and the West much worse.
The Ukraine tried to join NATO at the same time as Poland and other former Soviet occupied countries. It was prevented from doing so and a conference in 1994 laid down conditions that guaranteed their freedom from Russian interference. Putin was having none of this and started supporting the Russian speakers left behind in Ukraine when Ukraine separated from Russia. Any one supporting Putin in his invasion or his annexation of Crimea is a lier if they say that the West provoked Russia. The 1994 agreements were ignored by Putin when he believed he could get away with it.
He started that trick in the Baltics too, but did not carry it further, but then all 3 are Nato members
And Ukraine is far larger and more threatening to Russia. Why should Russia welcome encirclement by pro-Western powers ?
Would the US welcome Mexico joining the Russian sphere of influence ?
Tony, could you please have a look at the map? Encirclement…
Sounds like the Kaiset’s army b4 1914 btw
Next is that Nato forced Finland and Sweden into the encirclement party, right
I think for me the moment when I realised the Rubicon was crossed was during the Brexit campaign when Penny Mordaunt in an interview claimed the UK as an EU member had no veto over Turkish succession. A stone cold lie. I remember the interviewer, startled, picked her up on it. She gulped, stared into the camera, and repeated the lie. Stone cold. The interviewer was utterly at a loss. As you say, polticians have always stretched points, exaggerated, went out on limbs on flimsy evidence. But this was different. She knew she was lying. The interviewer knew she was lying. Everyone who saw it who knew anything knew she was lying. We knew that she knew that we knew she was lying. But she had realised no interviewer would call her a liar to her face. And because of that, in fact, all it took was to say it.
In terms of the defence of liberal democracy today the big division is not between left and right but between those, wherever they are on the political spectrum, who believe in rational arguments based on evidence and those who don't.
Actually I was just thinking about this a bit more, dredging stuff up from my memory I'd buried. If you go back this wasn't just Mordaunt, the Turkey lie was a massive part of the Vote Leave campaign with posters about Turkey imminently about to join the EU, Johnson who had previously campaigned for Turkish accession, writing to Cameron asking for a guarantee it would not happen, Farage joining in too and claiming staying in the EU would increase the risk to women of sexual assault..... So the lie was strategised, focus grouped, and deliberately run, and run in the most inflammatory way possible. Incendiary hardly begins to describe it. And then Jo Cox was killed just after. See this: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/unfounded-claim-turkey-swing-brexit-referendum/
Sometimes I think I've buried the horror of exactly how nasty and how low that campaign went. I mean, it would drive you mad to think people who were such utter sh*ts capable of that were actually running the country. It's like after we all had to pretend it didn't happen and they were decent people after, and it all just a bit out of hand.. But they really, really weren't decent people. And aren't. And people who can do that once can do it again. Especially if they got away with it. Which they did.
The Remain campaign went very low with Project Fear and taxpayer-funded leafleting of every home.
The "utter sh*its" aren't confined to the Tory Right.
For example, it is the Left who are betraying Britain to Islamism, which eclipses anything Farage has done.
And is equally irrational.
Witness the huffy fits, the spite and invective, of liberals once they lose the upper hand.
These "patriots"... that lie, that, when it comes down to it, "don't care" ... that hide in Churchill's shadow and hate him for apparently sacrificing the empire to defeat nazism... have much in common with the nihilism of the kgb infected MAGA.🤔
None dare call it... even when it's screaming it in your face... Farage, Johnson, Trump... Putin.
No worse than the bellicose nihilism of Biden or Sunak.
Johnson has backed Kyiv with manic enthusiasm, you will recall.
I very much fear that Fascism is the new Tory default position. Unless an incoming Labour government gives far greater powers to the currently toothless Electoral Commission as regards party funding and dodgy donations and unless much more clarity is demanded as to issues like Russian sabotage and the finances of right wing think tanks, we’ll all be hearing ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ or its modern equivalent. I don’t see this as implausible within the limited span of years still left to me.
You are living in a fantasy-world. Fascism died in 1945. The right-wing populists of today merely faintly echo them - Marine Le Pen isn't her dad, Meloni isn't Mussolini and Farage isn't Mosley.
Ordinary voters support populism only because of the impenetrable, brain-dead fanaticism of leftists and liberals in destroying the West with mega-immigration (in alliance with Business), then backing radical Islam.
The Left loves minorities, hates the majority of people. The Left no longer represents the working-class, but merely panders to the twisted minds and Capitalist cravings of the affluent graduate-caste, i.e. the Brahmins !
Oh Tony, there you go again. It's hard to take you seriously when you say things which are factually incorrect and then set up a series of straw dolls to knock over as if they're devastating points. They're not. Fascism did not die in 1945. I had the misfortune to have to do some work in the last openly Nazi regime in 1989: General Stroessner's Paraguay. Your take on Italy is hilarious. Go visit Predappio on October 31st and the scales will fall from your eyes. Or drop by the CasaPound HQ in Rome. Hint: you won't find much poetry discussed there...
Dammit, I just realised that you're being satirical. You fooled me again. Not enough unnecessary capitalisations to remind me. Keep up the good work.
I imagine there will be some bitter infighting after the election. How it will play will presumably depend quite a bit on what exactly the result looks like. If they lose more seats to the Lib Dems than to Farage, that may make some of them wonder if being more right wing is really the solution to their problems. I wonder how many proiminent Tories want to follow Farage into full-blown apologetics for Putin. They do after all revere Margaret Thatcher, who was very much not an apologist for Russian imperialism. It's interesting that the Mail has come out fairly strongly against Farage. I wonder if they wll keep it up. Maybe many Tories would like a Farage without the Putin apologetics, but it's hard to see how he could backtrack from his curent position. It looks like an interesting period coming up, and I don't think that necessarily means a bad period.
But Farage isn't a Tory !
And after the Election, there may not be a Tory Party !
You're trying to lean on thin air. As in the USA, the mainstream Right is dead.
Unless you tell me what you mean by "a Tory", I have no way of knowing wheher I agree with your claim or regard it as silly.
You are simply suffering from Brexit Derangement Syndrome, talking as though the Cameron-Osborne era was fragrant.
In fact, for many people outside your Bubble - notably those in small towns, those without degrees, the elderly suffering from culture shock - Britain in 2015 was a ghastly place. Once the tide went out in 2008, it was discovered that Britain was swimming naked.
Hence they voted Leave. Just as in France they supported the gilets jaune, a movement that began among the elderly in provincial France. If you don't get a Nigel, you get a Marine instead.
You have got things upside down, confusing Cause and Effect.
The truth is, Europe is crashing down the league tables because of globalisation, with physical poverty held in check only by food banks, homelessness exploding and government coffers empty. The complacent liberal consensus you support broke in 2008. Radicalisation is inevitable.
And the radicalisation spiral isn't happening only on the Right. In Britain the Left marches arm-in-arm with Hamas. In France, the Left is allied to the North African radicals and civil war is looming.
Policy Exchange is already engaged in. Big research project designed to transcend left and right. Charles Moore is enthusiastic about it. Probably worth investigating what Godson has afoot.