- May 6, 2020
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That's all a good point and I agree with it, but I don't know if Corbyn specifically could credibly do something like that, given his history and his past statements.
UK Labour wanted to lose
- Thread starter Trunkage
- Start date
There's only so much mileage in the actions and stances somebody took decades ago, though. Corbyn reiterating opposition to nuclear weaponry etc in interviews ensured constantly renewed coverage.
Had he just shifted, by political necessity-- as he did on NATO membership, for instance-- then it's a neutered line of attack.
There's some kind of universal law that people involved in left of centre politics in the UK have to be totally ineffectual or involved in deliberate self sabotage. It's the uniting factor that brings together everyone from the communists to the Blairites. I'm sure by this time next year Labour's left wing will have regrouped and formulated a plan to fuck everything up for the current soft left leadership, whereupon a new left wing leader will be elected and then immediately be undermined by the soft left again. While that's happening the voters will nod approvingly at the Green Party's policies (except for the small quantity of weird, unworkable ones we're duty bound to insert) and then vote Labour anyway, and the the minor left wing parties will continue to sit under the table eating paste, or whatever it is they get up to.
With all due respect, I don't want Blairism to become the ideological current. Third Way politics didn't work, and Corbyn's union activism, particularly with the RMT, did achieve traction, just not the kind that gets publicised as much as the smearing. Same with Sanders. I think if there's popular support within the party, if there is no backstabbing based on self-fulfilling electoral policies, then if anti-jingoism is a part of the policy based on a principled approach to politics, then one shouldn't start wavering in that consistency because of one bad election. Labour losing under Miliband was when the party was being milquetoast in trying to appeal as broadly as possible, Labour losing in the second election under Corbyn was simultaneously due to the indecision about Brexit (which, I'll agree, was a point where principles about clearing up a botched referendum intervening really were not appropiate for the goals set out by the leadership at that point in time) and the sustained media campaign both from evidently within the party and outside of it. The second is not something that can be addressed easily. The first does merit pragmatism, but not where the calculation is 'we need to become more jingoistic so that the conservative wing of the labour party likes us'. These ideas were not the ones that carried Labour's recent popularity, nor should they be. It's important to remember that the Corbynite policies were still very much popular.
I think it's also a fair assessment that the north-east was lost due to systematic alienation - not making use of local council power, focusing too much on electoralism on national policies and seriously underestimating the extent of alienation on hand. Dennis Skinner being booted out of his constituency is evidence of this. I agree with the general principle of pragmatism I guess, but I disagree with the direction Starmer is taking it. It's never 'just a few Union Jacks', not in a post-Blair world.
Corbyn couldn't. As someone I read put it (damning with faint praise) and I paraphrase, "if Corbyn doesn't have authenticity, what does he have?" But no-one else needs to be burdened by the awkwardness of his backhistory.
Blairism is dead, so much is clear. Momentum was something that can't be undone, and even if centre-inclined pragmatists have been restored to control of the Labour Party, Momentum have indelibly shifted the tone to the left; the most Blairite centreists quit the party and promptly disappeared in ignominy. Labour was in a sense successful even despite losing the election: Johnson at least nominally committed to massive infrastructure and social spending, as a clear indication the Tories knew Corbyn's Labour was scoring some major victories in the policy argument. Of course, he'll try not to do actually do it because his cabinet's full of ultra-capitalists, but if the language has shifted leftwards, policy is likely to eventially follow: the Tories deliver or risk failure.
Brexit was an utter failure for Labour. I think they could have survived Corbyn alone, or Brexit alone, but not both. Labour's response to Brexit was in many ways as weak as the Tories, except without the visibility of being in government to see it played out so vividly in the press. But they had a perceived weak leader who seemed to be fudging the biggest issue of the day.
As for the Labour Party infrastructure, shit. A friend of mine used to be heavily involved with Welsh Labour. Years ago, the party in Wales realised how thin the loyalty of lots of voters was and took measures to deal with it. In Scotland, they remained flabby and complacent, and were duly wiped out the minute they faced a major challenge. In lots of parts of England, the local parties are complacent and toxic, and they've taken the support of too many voters for granted.
If there is one thing that amazes me about Blair and Blarists, they seem to amazingly blind to how they've eroded and disillusioned many people's support for their own party, and don't seem to realise its 2020, not 2000, and that 2000 stuff just won't fly any more.
I've seen people complain as such. I know for a fact though that Scottish Labour were shit for quite a while, and even though some might point to IndyRef as the turning point, the fact of the matter was that the nationalism, however soft, was a big reason as to why Labour lost seats in Scotland - the SNP managed to counter it effectively with public rhetoric, but also because the prevalence of Labour members to flirt with Unionism and the Orange Order (in some instances for the latter) made it very clear that the party was in dire need of cleaning itself up if it wanted to be a progressive party. Sure, they were facing suicide if they were to not be Unionists - they would have most certainly been cut off from English Labour as a whole, but it just showed how that tension mixed in with the party's structure and the 'centrists' within it leads to constant failure. I think that's part of why I find the nationalism followed by Starmer problematic, even if it is supposed to be pragmatic, and that I lament it as an ideological return to Blairism, even if the party is still reeling leftwards from the past few years.
The politburo also wishes to inform me that I've been spending dangerous amounts of time flirting with revisionism. In the mean time I'd recommend all those wallowing over Labour here to remind themselves that the spirit of anti-Fabianite aktion lives on in Robert Tressell, and that the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a fine novel for practicing the dialectic which will be necessary to intimidate the Labour Party with if we ever decide to instrumentalise its shell for the sake of storming no. 10 to the tune of Sleaford Mods.
Here's the thing. In the UK, I don't believe you can win the election without the support (or at least consent) of print media, and print media consists of a very small group of companies and individuals who despite seeming to cater to a range of political positions ultimately possess the same shared interests. Even in the Blair era, labour's electoral success was likely as much due to Alistair Campbell's media influence than anything Tony Blair himself actually did.
Since then, print media as a whole has shifted consistently towards the right and become increasingly preoccupied with a small range of "national debates" (or moral panics) which create rolling stories. There is no reasonable basis why immigration or EU membership should be political issues, they became political issues because of their utility as rolling headlines. Because of this, I don't think some hypothetical moderate Corbyn could have won an election without immigrant bashing simply because immigrant bashing has become the dominant issue for a huge swathe of the British public.
We are already at the point of being peons tugging our forelocks at our billionaire overlords. Our billionaire overlords just happen to own the newspapers which tell us that antisemitism is a huge problem in labour (after all, a fake charity said so) while ignoring blatant racism in the Tory party, and who now think that a single minister breaking quarantine to fuck is a bigger story than the UK having the highest coronavirus death toll in Europe. They are not going to play fair. They are not going to give a fair shot if you concede to them by putting a union jack on stuff because they don't care about union jacks or military spending. They ultimately only care about preserving the interests of people like them, which right now are better served by the Tory party.
We are not going to see political change in the UK until there is a significant change in media consumption. Corbyn's leadership, at least initially, hinted that that might be a possibility, which was exciting after so many years of "practical" election winning strategy not actually winning elections. I am not optimistic any return to practicality will achieve more success than the previous attempts.
Remember, all you have to do to lose an election is eat a bacon sandwich wrong.
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In hindsight, I'm not sure if MAD was a bad idea. If the Cold War had gone hot, I'd no doubt be on the other end of that assessment, but I've read/watched plenty of material that states that MAD prevented the Cold War from going hot.
But that aside, whatever his policies, Reagan was mentally competent. Policies one disagrees with isn't the definition of insanity. Trump blunders around, Reagan got things done. Whether those things were good or not is another matter.