Rolling Brexit Links/UK politics in the neo-Weimar era

how indeed

& we always come back to this when this week saw a benefit cap that will lead to not just individuals but families becoming homeless which will surely lead to deaths fairly soon.

it's quite depressing/frustrating to read discussions about waiting until 2020 to weed out the dead wood of the PLP etc. so that we'll be in a better position by 2025 when we're in quite a desperate situation with regard to people's lives and i don't hold the view that we can afford to wait for Corbyn's massive failure. I'm perfectly willing to accept something close to a Blairite at this point.

Good for you dude, Lib Dems are that way ---->

I like Farron a fair bit, in fact.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/11/brexit-could-be-reversed-government-lawyers-may-argue

A standard Blairite would be very unlikely to win either at this juncture (adopting either the policies that Blair etc actually followed, or the ones the current Labour right claim they would follow now). It would be virtually impossible for them to come up with policies on Europe, welfare, the economy and immigration that would be acceptable to enough of the country.

Sorry, unnecessary. I don't believe a hypothetical Blairite government would row back any of this.

no need to apologise. i'm just don't have any answers and am fairly desperate for some hope of any kind.

Even if they were to adopt the Tories' immigration policy wholesale they would still haemorrhage support in West Midlands marginals, or in London, without winning enough votes from disgruntled Tories or UKIPers to compensate. They aren't going to be winning any seats in Scotland for a long time.

The only thing that can save them is a really totemic, transformative and popular policy that the Tories too stupid or ideological to steal. Or for half the electorate to die in a meteor strike.

> The only thing that can save them is a really totemic, transformative and popular policy that the Tories too stupid or ideological to steal.

a little of column a and a little of column b: assuming we'll be some way down the brexit road by the time an election comes around, is there any way of making that additional £350 per week for the nhs bollocks work at all? that was the one stomachable offer of the whole brexit farrago, even if it was a total fantasy that it would ever happen. they could slash e.g. subsidies to wealthy farmers to part fund it.

i'm sure that any actual budget savings from Brexit - hard to imagine they will really exist, but let's play along - will have been handed out as tax cuts before any non-Tory government has a chance of getting near them

As it stands the Lib Dems are the only English party prepared to resist a road that will almost certainly lead to ever more punitive and destructive anti-immigration laws.

Obviously this isn't to suggest they've suddenly become socialists or that their Cameron rubber stamp isn't to blame for this whole shitshow, but it is something.

Most Labour MPs and probably a majority of party members voted Remain, but they won't oppose leaving the EU for fear of upsetting anti-migrant voters in the constituencies Labour might lose. The alternative would be to give 48% of the population (at least) something to really vote for. Meanwhile they've pledged to hold the government to account for some vague "Brexit that works for Britain" while refusing to vote against Article 50 and taking the only thing that might have actually done so off the table. It's an utterly fucked and incoherent state of affairs.

I mean the chances of me voting Lib Dem over Labour are basically nonexistent, but still.

i still think trying to overturn the result of the referendum is electorally impossible. trying to force some kind of vote, Parliamentary or otherwise, on the single market/free movement feels more sensible, even if still racked with difficulties and dangers.

Yeah you can't just overturn the referendum result without an unlikely general election victory fought on that explicit platform. But there are other ways that would be in line with the principles of both wings of the party, and would surely win more votes than the current mess. It would also provide a platform that might actually give them a chance (however remote) of actually enacting some anti-austerity policies with the right leadership.

As it stands all that they can do is impotently oppose some horrific and damaging policies while making it all the more likely that they'll actually continue to happen.

how likely are MPs to get a vote on the negotiating terms, even if the Supreme Court upholds the original decision on Parliament having to trigger A50? seems pretty unlikely to me?

I don't think anyone really knows. As it stands the government seem to have free reign even if Article 50 does go to a vote. Lib Dems + SNP + a handful of Labour and Tory rebels isn't enough to force any changes.

Cameron could have fixed the whole thing by stipulating that all four parts of the UK had to vote Leave, which probably would have caused its own constitutional crisis but surely not as big a mess as what we have now. Bit late for that now.

any number of ways Brexit could've been avoided by the way the referendum was set, but perhaps not many ways it could've been set that would've protected Cameron from his bucolic colleagues and the ravages of UKIP

can't remember if i've said it on here or elsewhere but the best referendum question would've been "Should we continue to belong to the Single Market and allow free movement of people?" It would've functioned as a referendum on EU membership since a No vote would've meant withdrawal, and we'd have a handy figure for how many fucking racists there are in the country without the figleaf of sovereignty to hide behind

Yeah I mean the referendum would have happened whatever eventually I think, the forces would have just kept building. He was probably banking on a Labour party in a rather more coherent state though.

I'm just exasperated or sickened by virtually everything in politics at the moment which is colouring my posts.

Like, look at an ILX politics thread from 2006 and just imagine trying to explain our global and national political situation to a poster from ten years ago. People would think you were fucking insane.

I was listening to that hideous man-boy/Redwood clone Rees-Mogg talking up Trump/US trade deals on r4 yesterday and thinking the next decade is going to be so much fucking fun. I'm sure even 15 years ago this fucker would have been derided as an old school tory anachronism, but now they nearly give the BoE gig to the cunt.

Like, look at an ILX politics thread from 2006 and just imagine trying to explain our global and national political situation to a poster from ten years ago. People would think you were fucking insane.

Say no to ID cards! Hahahahaha.

Was thinking about the UK politics end of season finale thread earlier today
The Official Newscorp/UK end of season finale/Rebekah Brooks did 9/11 thread

Gotta say, the scriptwriters really upped their game.

I know both Corbyn and Starmer have come out saying they wouldn't vote down A50 but iirc in an interview Keir gave the position seemed to be a bit more ambiguous. Reckon it won't be a free pass but yeah Labour are figuring things out etc.

there are at least two problems :

jeremy corbyn isn't good enough ;

there isn't anyone else .

can either be solved ?

how ?

― conrad, Friday, 11 November 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

To me this isn't about any single person. You could still have a Trudeau-like telegenic blah with better communication. Then if you have that person coming out saying they wouldn't use nuclear weapons or that there is 'no upper limit on immigration' you would witness this guy getting squeezed on all sides.

The problems are many: the Labout Party is almost certainly beyond use, the almost dead Liberals/centre that are still vocal enough to divert the left's energies (because the centre is now fucked and this is a question of left and right), the lack of a movement or a culture on the ground, and the many who don't vote at all. Not that I would ever blame them. Its all too fucked up and a lot of my POV is...not so much forget 2020, its more around creating the kinds of change will take time. A left that can fight at all.

the two problems and two questions were in response to Matt DC - whose words and opinions I appreciate sometimes reflect things I think or feel sometimes make me reflect upon the way I think or feel and of course sometimes do neither - saying that jeremy corbyn isn't good enough and then that the problem is that there isn't anyone else. they're both problems. jeremy corbyn isn't setting the world on fire dynamically reframing narratives seizing imaginations converting the masses. he isn't good enough - that's the first problem. he isn't likely to radically alter his approach his persona his appeal. but he is necessary. there isn't anyone else - that's the second problem. it seems as though the only way at this point that there can ever be anyone else is with someone like jeremy corbyn despite not being good enough hanging around long enough. so jeremy corbyn isn't good enough - this likely cannot be solved. there isn't anyone else - this can possibly be solved. it needs to be solved. someone else is needed. lots of someones else are needed.

Yes I saw you were responding to Matt and I was actually going to reply to his focus on the "There isn't anyone else" thing.

I agree that many are needed.

FWIW I agree with that - the problem isn't Corbyn himself (although...) it's the political vacuum that propelled him to a position for which he was manifestly unqualified. Why was no one else there?

The same phenomenon has of course propelled Trump to the White House but that's going with the grain of a rabid media rather than against it.

It can't be solved without fundamentally changing the whole system. No vaguely left wing politician who doesn't include electoral reform in their manifesto is going to achieve anything in the long run.

This doesn't change the fact that the biggest threat to Corbynism is Corbyn himself.

^ you keep saying everything I want to say better than I could put it

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/12/donald-trump-election-global-wake-up-call-jeremy-corbyn

this seems better than his original statement imo, draws parallels between Trump and the tories/UKIP, goes into the idea that people feel they don't have control over their own destiny

FWIW I agree with that - the problem isn't Corbyn himself (although...) it's the political vacuum that propelled him to a position for which he was manifestly unqualified. Why was no one else there?

i don't really believe in Tory infallibility but there is a key difference, in that centrist Labour has moved so far to the right over the last 25 years as to be no longer credibly part of the left. and the centrists' policies, in power or out, are so disconnected from the needs of the poor and marginalized in the UK that supporting them feels wholly pointless, if not self-sabotaging.

perhaps there's a minority of people in the country who will be permanently impoverished by our political/economic system, and perhaps those people are kidding themselves that they can form an effective alternative candidacy capable of winning power. perhaps the underlying truth is that the Haves and the Kinda Haves are going to just keep ignoring or demonizing the Have Nots until the ocean swallows us up. if that's true then a lot of us at the bottom will continue to kid ourselves that given the right tactics a properly left Labour have a shot, because it eases the pain a little bit.

One thing is pretty certain : the tories would never have done something similar to themselves. The right will always choose the necessary course of action (to retain power)

The Tories elected Iain Duncan Smith at a similarly low and directionless point in their political cycle, I wouldn't be so sure about that. They are also pursuing a version of Brexit that their leader and many of their senior figures know full well will be economically suicidal. Whether it's electorally suicidal is a different question, and maybe one they might be more tempted to ask themselves if they felt more threatened by the opposition. I suspect their failure to ask that question is going to come back and hurt them, because the economic mismanagement could be so bad that if Labour does come back (probably under Corbyn's successor) then it's going to happen very quickly because the tide of anger will be so great.

Corbyn won because a) the decision not to oppose the welfare cap crossed a moral line that most of the Labour Party was not prepared to cross, and b) the party took a long look at Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham and realised that they didn't necessarily stand a greater chance with any of them, and if they were going to fail on their own terms then they might as well go with a failure that didn't leave them in paroxysms of self-loathing.

Say whatever you like about Blair and Brown but their whole project was about combining neoliberalism with increases in welfare and public spending. The conditions for that no longer exist. Still, take that second bit away and there's nothing, and no one on the Labour Right has been promising anything like that.

... just some clueless Tristram Hunt guff about "offending the British people's sense of fair play by appearing to oppose the welfare cap".

another scary referendum question would be "Is it better that legitimate claimants suffer if it ensures people cannot cheat the benefits system?"

wonder just how many malicious, self-centred vultures would vote yes on that one

i'd like hard-ish answers to this stuff, surely somebody is running the research?

I think if there's an ideological school that might come to seriously threaten Momentum while remaining "electable" it's unlikely to come from the Blairite side, and more from some kind of mutation of Blue Labour. A combination of social authoritarianism, industrial strategy and redistributive economic policies could work in Brexit Britain. Whether that 'electability' tell us anything good about the country is another question.

There's also the question of whether, if he were a member of the Tories, Farage or a similar figure would stand a chance of becoming PM. Possibly not, for the same reason with don't have PM Boris Johnson right now. Then again, Trump was able to rinse through, with embarrassing ease, the kinds of Republican electoral processes that were surely designed to prevent someone like him becoming President.

maybe the most political capital could be made by a party credibly offering to create a lot of good jobs - via manufacturing, i suppose, but maybe there are other alternatives. that could be done by politicians from a range of backgrounds, from the centre right to all points left. Trump has certainly made this part of his offer, without the "credibly" bit, obv.

hard to imagine any other way to lastingly improve incomes and equality in the UK that doesn't involve a major restructure of the economic infrastructure

How do you do that without being shouted down by the press and portrayed as a crazy communist/financially irresponsible? Corbyn is also frustratingly vague on how he'd create jobs - the National Investment Bank idea suggests one path that I genuinely think might work, "people's quantitative easing" is another, but neither are exactly something that is going to resonate with an electorate. It also might take years to come into fruition.

Then again the Tories can get away with doing things that even a right-wing Labour government couldn't, and May could be leading the country in the direction of more economic interventionism. I think the neoliberal consensus is over but voters are still rather attached to the benefits of neoliberalism, even if they no longer feel it in their wallets.

Then again the Tories can get away with doing things that even a right-wing Labour government couldn't

Ain't that the truth. Sadly, Paul Dacre is undead so we will never be rid of him.

you can do any sort of borrowing you want as long as you frame it so that the "serious people" i.e. deficit ideologues go along with it. they all went along with the keynesian response to the financial crisis. i honestly don't think most people give a shit about the deficit unless mercilessly prodded about it by the press and conservative think tanks. as you say matt the austerity consensus has basically fallen apart now - there is room for a massive investment programme if it's sold the right way.

you come up with a programme of things that need investing in the UK and sell it hard? of course the usual voices of capital are going to go after you, but i thought we'd already accepted that one way or another the electorate is crying out for "not the status quo". Brexit could even supply a useful context for arguing the necessity of investing in growth.

so basically what Tracer said :)

this - or the next - govt could say alright, we need half a million homes built each year for the next five years, and the govt will do the lion's share of the borrowing, with HAs and local govt doing the building and contracting. this will of course require other infrastructure and services as well. it will require massive borrowing, which we are comfortable with, as loans have never been cheaper. and we are creating assets that will mainly rise in value.

i mean just as an example. this would be a massively popular policy!

Unless it tanked the prices of people's homes.

people's homes have already tanked/ are tanking unless you live in London.

and they will continue to tank unless the economy improves in a meaningful way.

That's the exact opposite of what seems to be happening at the moment.

"The dire shortage of available housing across the UK is continuing to push prices upwards, regardless of the uncertainty linked to the ongoing discussions surrounding Brexit," RICS chief economist Simon Rubinsohn said.

Price expectations for the coming three months edged up and were positive in all areas bar London, where prices have fallen for the past eight months, mostly in central areas.

The Tories are going to have to be remarkably brave to flood the market with new stock when most of their voters are homeowners who see their wealth as inextricably linked to the value of their property.

iirc those "Central London" figs are median prices, and misleading as they are capturing zillionaire properties in Zone 1 whose prices have halved (like from 3M to 1.5M etc)

and again, an investment in say Paisley residential property 10 years ago will have seen you taking a bath for the most part.

that said yes of course there's a problem with property, which is what a massive homebuilding scheme would address. and yes it would require courage to propose and vote through. anything substantial would! (and yes the tories are not the ones to do it)

There are parts of the country where house prices are below their 2007 levels still, though they tend to not be Tory strongholds.

The housing crisis has never just been about reluctance to invest in infrastructure - under Tories or Labour - and seems fairly intractable at this stage. There isn't much alternative to Corbyn proposing a huge programme of house building if it's going to be 'fixed' but idk how popular it will be.

yes the particulars may be troublesome - this is why i'm an internet typist and not a career politician. ultimately i'm saying people seem like they're ready for big ideas even if they cost money. voters are looking for somebody who can "cut through" and fix shit.

i don't really believe in Tory infallibility but there is a key difference, in that centrist Labour has moved so far to the right over the last 25 years as to be no longer credibly part of the left. and the centrists' policies, in power or out, are so disconnected from the needs of the poor and marginalized in the UK that supporting them feels wholly pointless, if not self-sabotaging.

Two Tory MPs have resigned, the elected Tory PM was booted out after a year. Labour - and the energy that has come about via the set-up of Momentum - could revitalise the party, ultimately bringing about a vision that is positive and beyond the 'please don't vote for the other lot'. You saw the results of that in the US elections.

Look at this: http://news.sky.com/story/city-bosses-dismay-over-treasury-minister-talks-10653125

Sources who were present at the meeting say Mr Kirby told them that he was unable to offer detailed assurances about the Treasury's work.

He is understood to have made a convoluted joke about Ed Balls' appearance on the light entertainment programme Strictly Come Dancing, before answering two questions and then leaving after little more than ten minutes to attend another engagement.