Posts by Tom Semmens
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Corbyn was ambivalent on Europe for good, socialist reasons and has always been ambivalent on Europe. Unlike the new labour liberal middle classes who have benefited financially from the neoliberal European project he could see it’s considerable flaws, and has been a consistent critic of them.
Corbyn was mainly hammered on his Brexit position by the snowflake liberal elite media pundits for daring not to to fall about having an extended hissy fit at losing the referendum, for daring to suspect that heaps of the traditional Labour base were not a bunch of white trash little England racists and for daring to being personally ambivalent about an EU that has turned into a vehicle for German imposed neoliberalism and bullying economic austerity on people like the poor old Greeks.
The lib-dems went with a straight reject the referendum and remain position, and got slaughtered for their troubles.
As it turns out, Corbyn was right and the snowflake tantrum throwers of the Guardian were (as usual) wrong. His position of actually thinking about the problem and then deciding to accept the outcome of a democratic referendum and then work hard for the softest of Brexits was enough to bring back huge numbers of ex-Labour UKIP voters and satisfy most reasonable Brits, who realise you can’t simply ignore a referendum result you don’t like. Polls indicate that most British people now accept Brexit is going to happen, and it is up to the pollies to make it work – and Corbyn has the most common sense program for that.
I know it is hard for a lot of people to accept the reality that a certain style of politics they follow has had it, but get used to it – Corbyn’s success signals not just the end of Blairism. It also signals the final smashing of the identity politics of the reactionary PC liberal middle classes and that reactionary classes pretensions to owning the left, and a victory for those of us who have always argued the centrality of class and that socialism and the radical hope of socialism to improve the economic circumstances of the many rather than the few is what the left actually means, and what it is actually about. People have short memories. Corbyn’s victory as leader was greeted by the Labour neolib “centrists” with the most appalling weaponised indentity politics smears – he was an anti-semite, he was a racist, he was a misogynist. All were trotted out and paraded before an approving audience of the cackling, venomous chattering classes on the liberal “left”. That is how the liberal middle class “left” has asserted it’s control and buttressed it’s position as enablers of neoliberalism – it has used weaponised identity politics to cow, bully, browbeat and and control it’s opponents for over twenty years. Well, that spell has been broken.
Russell Brown said that the exuberance of the left at Corbyn’s success was a bit difficult to understand, but it wasn’t just a two finger salute to the toffs in the Conservative party, it was a right royal fuck off to insufferable middle class liberal wankers and their suffocating, weaponised identity politics as well.
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FPP has some considerable advantages, as long as you have a largely two party system. For example, it actually allows for more radical reform once you have a mandate. Let’s face it, MMP was voted for in New Zealand as an additional constitutional check on a series of rogue parliaments, not as a tool for legislative reform. And there is much to be said in favour of the bracing democracy of being directly responsible to an electorate. When was the last time under MMP a senior minister lost their seat and was outside WINZ on Monday morning? MMP means you can never get rid of the buggers if they have the grace and favour of the tiny group of political insiders who draw up the party list. FPP also emphasises the need to have well developed electorate organisations, which in turn improves public involvement vis-a-vis our tiny elite cadre parties.
MMP is a great system for getting an accurate representation of the voters in parliament. Once they are there, it has become a great system for the careerists and managerialists to keep the neoliberal radical centre well and truly locked in place.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to simon g,
For the UK to have an early election, 2/3 of Parliament has to vote for it.
Or the government loses a vote of confidence. There were seven by-elections in the UK in 2016 alone, it is highly unlikely May with her two seat majority would go the distance based on the intervention of the grim reaper alone.
Although May appears to be deluded enough think she can carry on as if the election never happened, she has lost the moral authority to implement her legislative program, such as it is. For example, she seems absolutely intent on an authoritarian crackdown on the internet, a "more of the same" type policy the electorate has clearly rejected.
May staggering along alone, wounded and discredited, propped up by the DUP, in the face of a re-invigorated opposition and falling ever further behind in the polls is a recipe for electoral catastrophe. The 1922 committee simply won't stand for it.
May will be dumped, the DUP deal engineered to collapse, a vote of confidence will be lost and the Tories will run to limit their losses.
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UK Labour now streaking ahead in the polls. My pick is May to be gone by August and a new election in October.I think Jeremy Corbyn may be the PM of the UK by Xmas. I want to be the fly on the wall when he meets Trump…
Labour has added 150,000 new members since the election, it has now got 800,000 members in total. UK Labour is by far the largest, most vital and successful social democratic party left in Western Europe. It has, in a few days, added as many members as it had in total under the Blairites. When one looks at the electoral fate of their European social democratic bretheren in places like Germany, France and the Netherlands who cleaved to the radical centre of TINA neoliberalism, it seems to me Corbyn hasn’t just brought the Overton window way, way back to the left – he has saved the social democratic political project in the UK, and saved the British Labour party from dwindling into irrelevance.
Translated to NZ, those sort of membership figures I mentioned above would give you 60-70,000 members in Labour. All our political parties put together would struggle to hit 20,000. I feel so jealous of my UK friends, living in a country that doesn’t suffer from the intellectually stultifying and cloying fug of “anti-politics” smugness that New Zealand exists under. Students wear red Jezza tee shirts and people in pubs talk politics. When interviewed, bouncers know some manifesto promises. Oh, to live a real democracy with real, mass membership parties. -
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I hope the NZ MSM stop interviewing that new Labour twat Josie Pagani as a voice of the left.
Her and her ilk are so yesterday that even the rats are turning up their noses at the stink.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to BenWilson,
From what I can tell, the Tory vote % has also increased, 5.6% at the moment.
May and her posh strategists committed the great toff mistake – they assumed the proles were an unvariegated mass of easily led inferiors. They thought the UKIP support in the precariat/working class was inherently right wing and monolithic, May moved immediately to seize the UKIP vote and gloated endlessly about how the Conservatives were now the party of the working class – and the middle class MSM engaged in all sorts of wish fufillment to help the Conservatives to keep thinking that way. The entrails of every minor election was poured over for evidence that Labour’s support amongst the lower sorts was gone.
Well, it didn’t work out that way. The Brexit/UKIP vote was a massive protest against the radical centre and the neoliberal lockstep of the Tories and “new Labour” not a signal of the emergence of working class English fascism. When Labour offered a real choice, the UKIP vote proved much more nuanced than those southern toffs in Tory HQ ever imagined. The Tory vote went “up” because they hosed up SOME of the UKIP vote – but enough working class and precariat voters understood the Tories were just false friends to keep Labour seats safe, while Labour’s policies appealed far more to the lower middle class than the Tories and they hosed up heaps of those.
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short of actually winning, this is the near perfect result for Labour. Maybot is last month bot, and the Tories will seek guidance and succour from.....
BORIS JOHNSON!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
So Labour can watch the Conservatives twist in the wind under that moron, wrestling with Brexit and the NHS, until the inevitable election in 12-18 months that they are very well poised to win.
BTW, 71% of the youth vote went to Labour, which was almost exactly reversed in favour of the Tories in the over-65 vote. Britain is one seriously age-polarised society.
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So, will the missing million vote if you give them something to vote for?
The UK result says yes.
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A Tory spanking in Wales...