Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Ben Smith,
I'm surprised to see Germany and France so high. People on holidays, working in the meantime? Students? Au pair workers? I confess to being quite shocked at some friends who employ au pair girls, all of whom have been from Germany. There's something not quite Kiwi about that.
-
Speaker: Britain: the crisis isn't…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Effectively, the UK is now over-populated, unable to provide enough work for everyone, ethnically and politically polarised and as broke as it was in the crisis ridden early 1970s.
I'd say all of that is true, on the proviso that you accept neoliberalism and its model of how they run their country. It's only overpopulated on the assumption that there is only so much work to go around, and that work is the only way that wealth should be redistributed, and that debt/equity ratios and balances of trade are the measure of how broke you are. In that case, yes, all your conclusions are correct.
-
Speaker: Britain: the crisis isn't…, in reply to martinb,
To get elected you’ve got to win your wing and take them with you toward the centre.
There are many strategies that might work. That one has been popular, but it might have also had its day as the "wing" concerned is divided into many different directions. Perhaps the wing a personal technically belongs to is not as big a driver of political choice as it was.
Depends on what is meant by a wing, though. If it is actually based on where the population's main points of political difference align (and thus moves with the population, rather than fixes around a political theory), then winning the wing is by definition the only way to take a majority.
TBH, I think that this is actually the best way to define the wings. What actually is it that most divides the populace? What questions explain their political choice most? It might be the values of a traditional Labour voter, or it might (these days) not be. I doubt that it is. This does not mean Labour has to change necessarily. It just means they don't sit in the middle of their wing the way they probably think they do. It also means that the question of which direction to move to be closer to more voters is not always axiomatically "the center". It could be that moving around within the Left in orthogonal directions actually works better, hoovering up big clusters of voters.
-
Speaker: Britain: the crisis isn't…, in reply to Sam Bradford,
you don’t win elections by immediately kneecapping your leader
You might if you thought they were leading you to disaster. But I'm not defending the party dysfunction. It's totally divided. I think that's because what it represents is, too. Its fragmentation is an image of the society under it. It's astonishing that nearly 50% of the people who voted voted to Remain, but neither of the two parties that have almost all the power stands for them. It's the most important decision their country has faced in 70 years, and their political system is unable to present its population with a choice. Seriously, this election ratifies Brexit, that is exactly what it stands for, exactly what May says it stands for. Who on earth are all the Remain people meant to vote for?
-
Speaker: Britain: the crisis isn't…, in reply to Sam Bradford,
At that point they’re not even pretending to represent the party anymore. The party IS the members.
It is, but winning members is a sideshow to winning voters in the whole point of the democratic process, selecting the leadership of the country. You could equally say that the members aren't even pretending to represent a significant constituency. They don't have to, they're not the ones who end up being held accountable for losing elections.
-
Speaker: Britain: the crisis isn't…, in reply to Moz,
The evidence so far suggests that not only do they have no real ideas, their opponents in the party don't either. My feeling is that the entire reason Corbyn was elected was that no-one had a better idea. Which tells you an awful lot about the calibre of his opponents in the Labour leadership elections.
I think the problem is that the electorate is not so interested in the Left-Right dichotomy as espoused by the current Labour Party leadership, and making the party all about that plays only into the hands of the Right. Perhaps what's going on had to happen, if only to show that times have changed and a Left/Right that is defined around what theorists think about it, rather than around what the population thinks about it, is becoming less relevant to political choice of the population.
-
Speaker: The Brexlection, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
without giving any examples
You need one? Donald Trump. or Vladimir Putin, admittedly accompanied by ballot rigging.
There have occasionally been good presidents too, you know, and no shortage of party appointed fuxors. I can't say I'm totally convinced the system of directly electing presidents is broken. It is a check/balance on the power of the legislature.
-
Speaker: The Brexlection, in reply to Neil,
a peculiar form of kabuki that has real world consequences.
Yup. I don't really have a dog in the Brexit fight and can't claim a strong opinion on it based on personal consequence for me, but it looks like a massive fail. The British are going to piss away something of great value in the fallacious belief that Europe was the cause of their problems. In ten years, when the dust settles, all of their problems will still be there. They aren't going to rebuild their lost industrial prowess, it's going to stagflate as it has done for 50 years because the fundamental drivers of that stagflation will be second stage to the long and tedious job of redefining their relationship with the whole world, in a humiliating round of finding themselves well down the line in most negotiations.
-
Speaker: The Brexlection, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Emmanuel Macron’s election simply postpones the inevitability of the ascendance of the populist right in France, because he offers no solutions beyond feeble tinkering with the status quo, yet across Europe the elites have hailed his election as a signal for business as usual. We shall see, I guess.
Yes, I'm still holding out hope that the rise of the populist right might actually be stemmed, contained, thwarted, slowed, mitigated, etc. Egging it on really doesn't strike me as the kind of thing anyone with an actual stake in the outcome could do. You could do it from abroad, or from the security of a pension and an impending deathbed, but when you're actually there, it's scary as fuck, especially if you don't happen to belong to the master race/class/sex. Anyone who isn't some kind of neofascist wannabe does cast a ray of hope to those who aren't treating it as a spectator sport that would be incomplete without a serious villain.
-
Speaker: The Brexlection, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Well, at least it is an alternative from more of the same crushing austerity and concentration of wealth in the hands of the 0.1% – which is all “new” Labour, the Conservatives, the French socialists/Gaullists and Hillary Clinton deign to offer the voters.
OK, I think I missed a beat. You're not defending National Socialism, right? You're defending Brexit or the Daily Mail, or UKIP, or Corbyn, or something? I have a clearer picture of who you hate than what you actually want.
Are we seeing the revitalization of the UK Labour Party or its demolition? I don't know. It looks like a demolition. Maybe you're right and the purge will take it back to its roots and a groundswell of workers will raise it to its former position as the driver of progressive change in Britain. Or maybe you're wrong and its time has passed as that, and this course is its death throes. That's what it looks like.
Certainly you're right that Britain's political class has failed it. No one is disputing that neoliberalism has the upper hand there, any more than they do anywhere else in the world. Even right wing people acknowledge it now. This analysis is true, and not new. What I see a shortage of is solutions. Your belief that Corbyn will save them is being tested.
My pick is that it will be found wanting. For all the same reasons that it faded out in the first place. It's time to try something new. Could it NOT be bigotry and its guardian angel, Fascism, for a change? Could not social liberalism be at least the one fucking good thing we got out of the 20th century, and something different be tried?