The Chairman Mao resembling, Monarchy hating, threat to Britain, Labour Party thread

[El Zen]

4 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

Didn’t Labour have their most successful period in modern times when they ‘changed the values they were built on’?

I guess. The long term good of the party, and indeed the country, is another question entirely though, knowing what’s happened since. 

[HanoiVillan]

Another thing to stress here is that change cuts both ways; if the electorate are changing, you need to deal with that with something other than 90s re-enactment society.

[OutByEaster?]

10 minutes ago, bickster said:

Sorry Scot, you keep saying this, apart from a small number of years under Corbyn the Labour Party in modern times has been a Centre Left party for over half a century. This notion that the party has undergone some kind of corporate take-over really isn't true

I think describing Starmer as a centre left politician is a bit of a reach - he's pitching to the centre right, the people left alienated by the Conservative's steep right turn into madness.

 

[Jareth]

19 minutes ago, bickster said:

This notion that the party has undergone some kind of corporate take-over really isn't true

Meanwhile, internally, staff are told to 

“adopt a product-mindset using agile ceremonies, be empowered to make decisions and encouraged to focus on rapid prototyping, deployment and iteration”.

[bickster]

16 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

I think describing Starmer as a centre left politician is a bit of a reach - he's pitching to the centre right, the people left alienated by the Conservative's steep right turn into madness.

 

I keep seeing pictures of Starmer being posted where hes talking to a Palestinian Group or another group on the left (the McDonalds stike was another). I keep seeing people saying they don't know what he stands for because he hasn't done or said anything (both perfectly valid criticisms) but apparently he's not on the left of anything and is pitching his non-existent views to centre right people

It's utter madness, he still hasn't had a Party Conference yet

And as time goes on, I'm even less likely to vote Labour than I usually am but that isn't all Starmer's fault (some of it is)

I just rail against the absolute double-speak coming from his opponents because it comes across as criticism for criticisms sake absolutely anything to criticise him even if it contradicts the last criticism

[OutByEaster?]

I think Starmer is being judged as centre right because as party Leader, his whole and sole focus has been on removing anyone within the Labour Party that has the slightest association with anything vaguely left leaning - he's the leader of the opposition leading opposition to the opposition. His political position is hating half of the Labour Party - that's all he has been for 15 months - a man who hates the majority of the Labour Party - and very publicly - he's been vaguely supportive of the government more often than he's been conciliatory with his own party.

There's absolutely nothing in any of what he's done that suggests he's doing anything but courting the right wing press and disenfranchised Tory voters and hoping that the Labour label will keep enough people with the party to support him.

Labour are a left leaning party and he took over them with a set of stated principles, he's since actively worked against most of those principles and removed many of the people he said he'd work with - if Corbyn pulled the party to the left on a series of popular policies delivered shambolically, he's lurching it to the right on an empty suit and a professional PR team - all of which he could perhaps justify if it resonated with voters in any respect - it doesn't - he's a dead duck waiting for an election to confirm his lifelessness.

Anyway, happy birthday to him.

 

 

 

[blandy]

23 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Another thing to stress here is that change cuts both ways; if the electorate are changing, you need to deal with that with something other than 90s re-enactment society.

How do you think the electorate has changed (I agree it has)?

I think it has stopped being largely split by "party" issues, in the old sense, and is now split on various "issue" lines - climate change, finance, immigration, the EU, and various minority issues like Trans rights, Palestine, Israel, the USA and stuff like that (I mean minority issues in the sense that most people DGAF, but those that do appear extremely keen on them).

Or to put it another way, more of the country is economically left-ish, but socially conservative.

If that's right (it's just my impression) then Labour needs to keep hold of it's economical leftishness and be more appealing to more socially centrist people. Which is perhaps what Starmer is doing?

[bickster]

58 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Meanwhile, internally, staff are told to 

“adopt a product-mindset using agile ceremonies, be empowered to make decisions and encouraged to focus on rapid prototyping, deployment and iteration”.

The staff went on a course, ok it was a course in psychobabble but that's really all that is. If you'd told me the Womens group at the local Uni Student Union had come out with a line like that I wouldn't be shocked. I'm not sure its a sign of anything other than some dickhead thought a daft course was a good idea

[OutByEaster?]

4 minutes ago, bickster said:

The staff went on a course, ok it was a course in psychobabble but that's really all that is. If you'd told me the Womens group at the local Uni Student Union had come out with a line like that I wouldn't be shocked. I'm not sure its a sign of anything other than some dickhead thought a daft course was a good idea

Even I'll agree with you on that one.

 

[HanoiVillan]

34 minutes ago, blandy said:

How do you think the electorate has changed (I agree it has)?

That's a great question, but absolutely huge! Some disorganised thoughts:

• The share of the population born overseas has increased dramatically (5.3 million in 2004 to 9.3 million in 2018);
• The non-white share of the population will have increased since 2011, though we await the census data to see by how much;
• The population is older, with people living longer, fewer kids being born, and a greater proportion of those kids belonging to immigrant or non-white backgrounds;
• The relative value of occupational pensions has declined, leaving older people more reliant on both the state and on sweating assets;
• Partly as a consequence, asset prices have increased hugely, most obviously house prices, creating a cleavage between disproportionately younger, poorer renters and disproportionately older, wealthier landlords;
• The nature of work and a career has seen significant shifts, with average tenures in a job falling dramatically, a rise in shift work, piece work and multiple jobs, less unionisation and declining real wages;
• The profound economic shifts in society have created or exacerbated generational divides among the electorate, which is now highly polarised by age having been largely unpolarised by age 20 years ago;
• Society has continued to atomise, with first fewer people reporting church attendance, then a rise in variety of religions / less unionisation / fewer social groups, and instead more people conducting a larger proportion of their social lives virtually;
• Similarly voters get information from a wider variety of sources, and media has become much less concentrated;
• As you note, there has been some churn in issue attention, perhaps most obviously the increasing salience to voters of climate change;
• Perhaps important for us all to remember that the voters themselves are not the same people too; a voter who was 18 in 1997 is 42 today; a voter who was 65 is either 89, or most likely no longer with us. Most importantly, the specific people identified as crucial to Labour's win - middle class, middle income, middle aged, middle England - have aged out of the workforce and are enjoying an asset-rich retirement.

Huge changes really. We have to remember that 1997 is as far from today as 1997 was from 1973. Some current voters weren't alive for 1997; by the next election, there will be the first voters who weren't alive last time Labour won a majority in 2005.

[darrenm]

58 minutes ago, blandy said:

If that's right (it's just my impression) then Labour needs to keep hold of it's economical leftishness and be more appealing to more socially centrist people. Which is perhaps what Starmer is doing

As I said earlier, that's what conventional political wisdom says. And it's what Starmer's doing. While diving in the polls.

I guess conventional political wisdom is no longer applicable. Because if it was, the increase from 26% to 46% for Labour in 2017 when offering socialism wouldn't have happened.

[HanoiVillan]

7 minutes ago, darrenm said:

As I said earlier, that's what conventional political wisdom says. And it's what Starmer's doing. While diving in the polls.

I guess conventional political wisdom is no longer applicable. Because if it was, the increase from 26% to 46% for Labour in 2017 when offering socialism wouldn't have happened.

'Diving in the polls' is perhaps over-selling it!

On 3rd September 2020, the polls were CON 42-LAB 38. On 2nd September 2021, today, they are CON 40-LAB 33. It's a bigger decline for Labour, for sure, and it's not exactly a good position, but I don't know that you can hang too many huge claims on it.

[darrenm]

5 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

'Diving in the polls' is perhaps over-selling it!

On 3rd September 2020, the polls were CON 42-LAB 38. On 2nd September 2021, today, they are CON 40-LAB 33. It's a bigger decline for Labour, for sure, and it's not exactly a good position, but I don't know that you can hang too many huge claims on it.

Yeah it was diving but he managed to arrest the slide and now they're fairly stable at around 32%

[LondonLax]

It seems a common issues that the right wing parties are now better at capturing the mood of working class folk than their traditional representatives from the left. They also have the capitalist class under their wing.

There is a global isolationist mindset, a backlash to ‘globalisation’ perhaps but maybe also a feeling that the global society is ‘too big’ and ‘too dangerous’ and we’d be better off retreating back to our own local areas and issues.

The voters who remain up for grabs are typically the university educated urban middle class. They don’t make up a majority and even then their vote is split between Greens, Labour and independents of a similar mindset.

A bit of a tricky path to negotiate. It seems like traditional left wing parties are going to have a tough time for a while yet. Possibly until they either jump on the protectionist (xenophobic?) bandwagon or the global mindset changes back to meet them. 

[tinker]

Any movement  in the polls has everything  to with the shambles going on in government, nothing to do with Starmer's PR driven Labour Party.

To gain the majority he has to engage with their problems and give solutions. Lack of quality employment , health care funding, travel, pensions and most of all... clean cheap energy generation (which holds the answers to many of the other issues we have). 

Immigration is being blamed for so many issues that are largely completely unrelated to it (poverty and underfunding of public services) Instead we bloat the profits of individuals and fight wars we can't win so our great friends,  the Americans,  can win elections and walk with a swagger. Rant over .

 

 

 

[darrenm]

When is this pillock of a leader going to resign so we can get someone in who's not a blatant liar and have some kind of opposition against the worst government in my lifetime?

 

 

[OutByEaster?]

He's the best thing that ever happened to the Green party.

And he's not doing a bad job for the blue one either.

 

[bickster]

19 minutes ago, darrenm said:

When is this pillock of a leader going to resign so we can get someone in who's not a blatant liar and have some kind of opposition against the worst government in my lifetime?

 

 

Probably around the same time that people stop using polls conducted for the Scum on Sunday as actual evidence of anything

PS. 33% is a 1% increase on the votes the last leader of the Labour Party actually achieved at the last election and 41% is a 3% drop on the votes the Tory Party achieved at the last election

I'm still not Starmer's biggest fan, I think some of the criticism he faces is valid but using a poll conducted for the devil which actually suggests Starmer has improved Labour's position marginally from that he was given by the last leadership, before he's even had a party conference, smacks somewhat of desperation.

[HanoiVillan]

15 minutes ago, bickster said:

Probably around the same time that people stop using polls conducted for the Scum on Sunday as actual evidence of anything

PS. 33% is a 1% increase on the votes the last leader of the Labour Party actually achieved at the last election and 41% is a 3% drop on the votes the Tory Party achieved at the last election

I'm still not Starmer's biggest fan, I think some of the criticism he faces is valid but using a poll conducted for the devil which actually suggests Starmer has improved Labour's position marginally from that he was given by the last leadership, before he's even had a party conference, smacks somewhat of desperation.

There's a fairly obvious difference in the media treatment of the two leaders though.

(On the broader point I agree with both of you, in that I think he's useless but also that it doesn't really matter what his poll numbers are now)

[El Zen]

So, for an outsider, who would it take to unite and save Labour as a political party and electoral force? Andy Burnham, should he decide to return to national politics? Is there anyone else who is realistically up for the task? Is the task even possible at this point? 

For someone actively and emotionally involved in the (lower case l) labour movement, the current state of Europe’s traditional Labour parties is quite sad (even if my own party is, arguably, profitting from it.)