Rayvin

Thought so Don't worry about it, I understand

Three years ago I made this post on the guardian after Trump won: Well indeed - but given this billionaire has just managed to persuade large tranches of the lower classes to vote for him, we have to look at why the left's message is not resonating with them. And honestly, I'm struggling to think that the left actually does have a message for these people. It has one for minorities, and for middle class women, but for working class white men and women? Hardly. The left has failed to build a consensus and coalition based on economic stature, instead choosing to do so based on social and political factors. In doing so, it has left a great many people behind. The right has just manipulated the discourse to make it look like economic progress is something they can offer. The fact that they can't and won't is by the by for those who voted, as the left wasn't offering it either. I think they've sent a message more than anything else - and while that message is coloured with racist language quite frequently (and deplorably), I suspect that these people could quite readily live in ethnically diverse communities (as they often do) were their anger being directed at the people ultimately responsible. Failure to harness and direct that anger, is the left's problem. We need to build a coalition with these people again. Or we're fucked. So I agree that we won't govern without them. But those people aren't coming back either way. I don't see how Labour can get them back while holding onto the millions of ideological young people who aren't going to have mortgages and stability which might have otherwise persuaded them to vote pragmatically.

Find me the word 'centre' in my post. Unless, you're saying that everything I've written there is indeed what the centrists do when they fear someone on the left. In which case I applaud you for coming forward with such a bold view, but I don't think it'll be popular on here.

Yes, I got that from what you said. What other ulterior motives could one have? It can't be socialism, since most socialists will make those views visible quite readily. I'm accepting compromise - I'll compromise to the point of Starmer, as long as he's backing socialist policies - on the basis that he fits a number of the irrelevant check boxes that don't matter to me because I'm stupid, but which do matter to the super intelligent. Like being ok with nuking people, loving the queen, and accepting that sometimes, baseless opinions are as valuable as facts.

Can you please explain what the centre, at this point, has to do with Lisa Nandy? I'm stupid and/or a Tory remember, I need things spelled out.

What in that post had anything to do with centrism. There's no popular support for the centre in this country anymore, but plenty of centrist politicians. As you well know?

Ok so, people who voted for Corbyn are stupid or secretly Tories. We've come full circle.

I think she'll be shot with shit from the get go, the LDs will opine that they could work with Labour if not for Nandy, they'll find something in her past that equates her with Stalin ideologically, and will brand her reckless and a danger to the country's finances. And then we'll lose again and rinse and repeat.

I said that if we lose this, we were done for 15 years come what may. I stand by that. We can go over to the centre if you want but we're going to achieve fuck all on that front too. If we're going to lose anyway, I'd prefer to lose without compromise. Die on my feet, as it were. So yes, I am that stupid apparently - although Starmer as spoken positively enough about socialism that I think Corbyn won the battle for the heart and soul of the party anyway, so I'm comfortable voting for him.

Telling about what?

I think they're gone mate. I think that's the problem now actually - those voters aren't coming back. And if they do, we will have had to go so far to the right as to lose the young and idealistic left. Don't really think there's any way forward but to stick to our guns on socialism and wait for them to die/come around off the back of years of the Tories.

This is really not being recognised by people who despise Corbyn. That article I posted, which no one will read, makes the following case (as to why people -specifically some of his MPs- might despise him): Most sitting Labour MPs had begun as Labour youth activists themselves, just as most centrist political journalists had begun their careers as leftists, even revolutionaries, of one sort or another. But they had also risen through the ranks of Blair’s machine at a time when advancement was largely based on willingness to sacrifice one’s youthful ideals. They had become the very people they would have once despised as sell-outs. Insofar as they dreamed of anything, now, it was of finding some British equivalent of Barack Obama, a leader who looked and acted so much like a visionary, who had so perfected the gestures and intonations, that it never occurred to anyone to ask what that vision actually was (since the vision was, precisely, not to have a vision). Suddenly, they found themselves saddled with a scruffy teetotaling vegan who said exactly what he really thought, and inspired a new generation of activists to dream of changing the world. If those activists were not naive, if this man was not unelectable, the centrists’ entire lives had been a lie. They hadn’t really accepted reality at all. They really were just sellouts. One could even go further: the most passionate opposition to Corbynism came from men and women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. They represented the last generation in which any significant number of young radicals even had the option of selling out, in the sense of becoming secure property-owning bastions of the status quo. Not only had that door closed behind them; they were the ones largely responsible for having closed it. They were, for instance, products of what was once the finest free higher education system in the world—having attended schools like Oxford and Cambridge plush with generous state-provided stipends—who had decided their own children and grandchildren would be better off attending university while moonlighting as baristas or sex workers, then starting their professional lives weighted by tens of thousands of pounds in student debt. If the Corbynistas were right, and none of this had really been necessary, were these politicians not guilty of historic crimes? It’s hard to understand the bizarre obsession with the idea that left Labour youth groups like Momentum—about the most mild-mannered batch of revolutionaries one could imagine—would somehow end up marching them all off to the gulag, without the possibility that in the back of their minds, many secretly suspected that show trials might not be entirely inappropriate.

It's not one of the points I was arguing with you about, but you asked. I mean once you factor in Blair never had to deal with Brexit, and 10 years of Tory austerity which Labour has been perceived to have done absolutely nothing to mitigate. Lets have Blair back now then, and see if he can still win over those same people, since apparently that's all it takes. Also, we aren't - or at least I wasn't - arguing about Corbyn's election performance, which was strong in 2017 and dismal in 2019. I was just talking about the EU. I mean you're laying the blame at Corbyn's door even though Cameron was pro-EU and was the sitting prime minister. Could he not have appealed to the Blairite centrists (who almost all will have voted Remain anyway) or the right wing working classes? Corbyn presumably had the left sown up. I think Meenzer's point perhaps comes closest to a solid counter on this - maybe another leader would have secured a higher turnout - but I think that could only have been achieved if that leader had actually put him or herself front and centre of the Remain campaign as a whole. Which would have been a strange move for an opposition leader, given that it would have meant they were fronting a government backed stance on the government's behalf. With or without Corbyn, on the EU situation, we were fucked. The damage had been done by the centre right, aided and abetted by the centre left.

I suggest reading that article I linked to a couple of pages back. Might be painful but it might also help you process all of this a bit. And I know you can't prove the alternative future. What boggles my mind is why you keep talking with all these absolute truths when, as you just make clear, you can't prove shit.

You could. You could look at the 65% as an actual number, push it to 100% and then you'd be able to identify how many dropped out. But then you'd have to make assumptions on which way the dropouts voted. You could perhaps apply the same percentage breakdown and suggest that 65% of dropouts would back Remain. I don't think it would materially change anything, and i also think you would have a tough time making a convincing argument that voter turnout for a referendum is Corbyn's responsibility any more than it was anyone else's.

Implication being what? That Labour could have easily hit around 80% had the positions of individual MPs had been clearer? I disagree. As an aside, how fucking useless do you guys think the LDs were back then if Corbyn's Labour should have gotten a higher Remain percentage..!

No, there is no mechanism I know of for accounting for them. We could assume that the split works both ways and is therefore negligible or you can make a case one way or the other. I guess you could look at the estimates for the number of Labour voters that voted Remain in absolute terms and work it out from there but it'll still make my overall point so I'm not going to do the work personally.

I recall him giving the EU 7/10 and saying he was a eurosceptic, but also making a comprehensive case for why we should remain part of it, yes. Corbyn wasn't the leader of the Remain campaign. It wasn't an election indeed, so where the fuck was the Remain leader? Why would Labour blow all of its political capital with the northern leave constituencies over this? At the end of this argument, I have provided numbers which, IMO, make it look like Corbyn had an impossible job winning over enough Labour voters to make a difference (who to the right of Corbyn was going to listen to him after the hitjobs going on in the press against him at the time btw?). You've got fuck all as a counter other than your gut feel. So let's just leave it.

Ok I just worked it out again, to get us to absolute deadlock in the referendum, on their own, Labour needed to hit 72% Remain. To reverse the majority entirely, they needed 79%. It was never going to happen. The EU is a broadly centrist project and even the LDs couldn't get past 70%.

Because we've been here before I've had the think and previously concluded that this notion that Corbyn could have made any difference is just wrong. And that's based on the fact that for enough Labour voters to vote remain in order to cancel out the leave vote, they would have needed to jump from 65% voting remain, all the way past the LDs on 68%, and approaching the Greens on 80%. No Labour leader was going to hit 75% Remain or whatever the final number is. I worked it out once and posted in here. No one engaged with it so I assumed I was right

We've been here before. How many Labour voters voted remain? How many Lib Dems? How many Greens?

Aye, if only the Labour party before Corbyn had listened to the warnings about austerity, maybe we wouldn't be here. Although Brexit would have happened anyway of course since the desire to issue an anti-establishment kick in the bollocks would have existed still been there.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/13/the-center-blows-itself-up-care-and-spite-in-the-brexit-election/ This article is superb and well worth a read even though it's long. Even covers Rentons feelings about the current direction of the Labour Party. Key point though is that the faction that took the heaviest hammering in this election was the centre. Not the left.

What does the party that represents you look like then? I bet it's not a million miles off where most of the candidates are standing politically.

Yeah tbf, if you really care about any of this you need to sign up and vote for someone other than RLB. Gloom is right, no point bitching on in here if you don't. If you don't, you'll be to blame for the next 10 years of Tory rule /Renton. I don't think her victory is a formality, it looked to me like she wins the first round and Starmer wins the second. I'll vote Starmer in the end probably but could also go for Nandy.