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

Dame Louise said some sections of society did not accept British values such as tolerance.

could really do with some quotation marks around "British values" and/or "tolerance" here

missing "fair play", we love that

Friend of mine pointed out that what this does is take basic moral principles that almost everyone has in common (in theory at least if not in fact, including here) and label them 'British'

they've been doing it for the past few years

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/97976/prevent-strategy-review.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/11/prevent-strategy-uk-counter-radicalisation-widened-despite-criticism-concerns

the "British values" tag has got nothing to do with preventing radicalization and functions as a racist dog whistle basically

no specific mention of it in that bbc article, but gay rights seems to get claimed as a "British value" in a lot of this stuff, which seems a stretch. (I mean, it's a wonderful thing that Britain in 2016 is better on this issue than most of the rest of the world but the idea that support for gay rights is some inherent part of "British values" requires a short memory at the very least)

If you called it 'liberal values' test, the right would freak out.

yeah, they can't use "human rights" either for same reason. "British values" is a really sick attempt at eliding hundreds of years of British/English state abuses of human rights tho

"British values" involve respect for the rule of law btw so prior to 1967 they included the criminalization of homosexuality

i have been thoroughly trained on how to spot junior terrorists and how to dob them in to MI5 so you can all sleep soundly

xp 1980 if you happened to live in Scotland, 1982 in Northern Ireland

But if we can make these people pledge that women deserve equal pay and treatment, religion has no place in legislation, race and sexual orientation are no indicators of someone's worth etc I'd quite like to make people sign it. As it is, it's just another attempt to solidify 'Britishness' as white male conservatism.

had "xmas" with my mum and stepdad this weekend as we're with my in-laws for the day itself this year. all was fine till i got cornered and received the annual political lecture this morning (just glad my partner managed to evade it tbh) which was like a greatest hits of daily mail covers from a man who believes brexit and trump and this 'populist' movement are putting power back into the hands of the people. tried not to engage because every time i have the last 26 years has been a mistake but snapped slightly when he said he was doing it for our kid, and it was a waste of time. we can talk about the damage of our "liberal bubble" all you like, but i don't see how you penetrate the world of people so ensnared by obvious fictions they're too invested in. i'm feeling deflated and dismayed right now, it feels a lot like boxing day usually does.

feeling this post

I feel like the ghost of Xmas near-future - if you have Brexit relatives it will fucking suck this year

yeah at this point i've had enough of even trying to deal with social reactionaries. happily cutting them out of my lives.

Wasn't this his deal from the get-go, and they're just hopeful that the zeitgeist has come closer to embracing it?

Barnstorming populism is probably the least bad option available to Corbyn at this stage but I'm just not sure he'll be able to personally pull it off. He's just really bad on TV for one thing.

Faintly astonished that anyone could look at the way Corbyn approached his first year in charge and conclude that he was basically a populist all along though.

Who is not bad on TV?

At some point in history Vote Labour posters changed from having this very overt 'Labour will help YOU!' aimed at specific groups to a much vaguer please everyone benefit-of-the-country message. I think they could do worse than try the former approach, especially in the age of non-directional Keep Calm nostalgia.

"very overt 'Labour will help YOU!' aimed at specific groups" is kind of what Stephen Kinnock was suggesting the other week (and Blue Labour types generally have been suggesting for a while), but only with the specific group in this case being "white working class ppl"

I kinda meant in ways other than "we'll be more racist if that's what you really want". Basically it'll be interesting to see what actual policies they hitch this new populist bandwagon to.

I guess that the 'vague please everyone benefit-of-the-country' was an attempt to counter the fact that pre-Blair, loony-left council era Labour were seen as being too in thrall to "interest groups" (as in ethnic minorities, feminists, gay lib ppl, guardianista do-gooders with supposedly esoteric concerns), and that trade unionism had declined to the point that it was seen as another interest group rather than representing a broad enough swathe of the electorate to enable Labour to win elections by appealing to it? like at one point a 'Labour will help YOU!' message aimed at unionised industrial workers covered enough people that it could simultaneously a "benefit-of-the-country" message rather than an appeal to an "interest group"?

thinking about it, isn't "very overt 'Labour will help YOU!' aimed at specific groups" specifically what David Axelrod criticised Ed Miliband era Labour for when he was brought on board to help with the election campaign? (I think he characterised it as "vote Labour and get a free microwave" or something) like, Labour had this checklist of particular interest groups to appeal to with transnational promises of what they would do for them, whereas the Conservatives had this narrative about how they were taking tough decisions in the national interest, and the latter proved more compelling to a lot of people, even some of the people who were getting screwed over as a result of those "tough decisions"

once they reached "Labour basically agrees with the Tories about how the economy should be run and for whose benefit" there probably weren't a lot of specific messages left in the tank that anybody was excited for

RW media going proper gonzo at the strikes, isn't it? Though maybe the "RW" is redundant.

I think that there is merit to the Blue Labour argument that says Labour has a serious problem wrt white, employed working or lower middle class voters whose position is "Labour only cares about immigrants, minorities, benefit scroungers, snobby guardianista liberals, militant trade unionists etc, it doesn't care about ppl like me" as that group is big enough that Labour needs its support to win elections. but obviously the answer isn't for Labour to go "ok then, screw anyone who isn't part of this white, employed working or lower middle class group", which seems to be the only answer Blue Lab has to the problem.

sort of agree that Corbyn is absolutely not the person to win over those voters, even if all the alternatives in the last two leadership elections were far worse

The idea of 'the people we need to appeal to' seems to have changed since c.1995 and Blair.

Then, it was, say: 'afflent, aspirational, optimistic people who need to be convinced that Labour won't take their money away and will make society better' (to some extent, it did).

Now, it seems to be: 'poorer, angry, distrustful people who have been convinced that leaving the EU is the most important issue'.

Both groups must have coexisted extensively, and still do, but it does seem as though the 'political narrative' has gone from the need to placate the one, to the need to placate the other.

Something about the extent of this shift feels a bit phoney to me. I feel sure that there are still tons of the first group of people.

It is really curious to realize how far the idea of 'immigration' just wasn't an electoral issue immediately prior to Blair's first victory, compared to what it is now.

That is one of the biggest changes in the political landscape in 20 years.

I'm not sure how far this is down to actual increased immigration (cf Blair supposedly presiding over lots of East Europeans coming to UK), how far just to media discourse, scapegoating, disproportionate focus on the issue, etc.

Back then (c.20 years ago) there was talk of 'crime', 'the NHS', 'education' ... those were the main issues. There were Eurosceptics but there was no serious talk of the UK leaving European union. There was the possibility of Scottish devolution, maybe, but only if enough Scots would vote for it. There was Northern Ireland to focus the mind a little.

'Immigration' in its current discursive form wasn't really a factor.

Then, it was, say: 'afflent, aspirational, optimistic people who need to be convinced that Labour won't take their money away and will make society better' (to some extent, it did).

Now, it seems to be: 'poorer, angry, distrustful people who have been convinced that leaving the EU is the most important issue'.

in the current moment it seems to be 'poorer, angry, distrustful people who need to be convinced that Labour won't take their money away and give it to immigrants, benefit scroungers etc' (i.e. even poorer ppl for the most part). The idea that immigrants and/or BAME ppl get preferential treatment over working class white ppl is so widespread, wish this could be acknowledged when they're having these arguments over whether saying that racism was a factor in the brexit vote makes you a liberal elitist who has contempt for ordinary ppl or whatever.

like, it seems to me that there are a huge number of ppl who are not hate filled bnp thug types and don't think of themselves as racist, but absolutely buy into this "non-white ppl are privileged over white ppl" idea. Kinnock brought this up in his terrible identity politics speech, with the "may ppl feel that" caveat, but if a politician brings this up without explicitly saying it's not true then they're basically endorsing the idea, surely?

"The huge mistake we’ve made, we have played the game of identity politics and identified groups, whether it is by ethnicity or sexuality or whatever you might want to call it, rather than say, ‘we stand up for everyone in this country and that includes you, the white working class’....It doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is or what your background is. What matters is that you’re poor and you’re disadvantaged and we’ve got to be there to help and engage with every single one of you - not just those who seem to have been taken priority over others.”

he really should never be allowed to forget this, despite his efforts to weasel out of it and say that he was misunderstood

pinefox, the shift came in 2004 when Poland joined the EU then other eastern countries joined. French, German, Italian people didn't want to live in the UK in sufficient numbers to change the cultural make-up of the country. Eastern Europeans did.

RW media going proper gonzo at the strikes, isn't it? Though maybe the "RW" is redundant.

― There shouldn't be a thread for Dennis Perrin tweets (stevie), Monday, 19 December 2016 14:36 (two hours ago) Permalink

Funny you should say that but I almost posted earlier on about the BBC's ongoing campaign to destroy what's left of the unions in this country. People Cunts are seriously talking about a 'conspiracy to bring down the government', if only.

my stepdad was on this tip yday, along with raving about populism and trump's secretary of state appointment and admitting "I'm to the right of Genghis Khan"

last week 5 Live had a panel discussion/phone-in about "should people be allowed to strike"

String 'em up. The BBC, Sky etc are going hammer and tongs on whether public service workers should people be allowed to strike.

Like a fucking postie going on strike is going to kill someone.

But but but Christmas cards might turn up late ;_;

many xposts I thought this report from September highlighted the issue as best as any could. Particularly quotes like "The thing is," he says, nodding up the street towards the African men who are still fiddling with their phones, "in their houses they get given microwaves and ovens and sofas and everything. I mean I had to take a loan to get that stuff." He shakes his head. "They get supermarket vouchers too - we don't get that. But lots more people round here have to go to food banks now."

It encapsulates everything people like Kinnock have alluded to (without providing adequate solutions to). Envy from 'born-heres' of people who seem to have been given things instead of working for them, regardless of whether they're even able to work for them, getting them sooner despite 'deserving' them less.

Jed: yes, that was a significant development with continuing consequences - perhaps especially for attitudes to the EU - but I'm not sure that it's _the_ shift. That shift I was getting at seems longer and deeper.

The kind of sub-humans that would begrudge someone having food and the means to cook it are expressing valid opinions according to the beeb on trash like brexit st.

Weetabix workers have also voted to strike in the new year.

The Breakfast of Discontent.

The kind of sub-humans that would begrudge someone having food and the means to cook it are expressing valid opinions according to the beeb on trash like brexit st.

How do you convince them they're wrong? This task is seemingly beyond anyone.

Let's not get carried away, I'm sure there's not that many people who would 'begrudge someone having food and the means to cook it'.

xp idk, but the Kinnock idea that can you recognise the 'legitimacy' of their opinion and then design a system suitably onerous enough that ppl will accept that it's "fair", rather than just increasing the resentment is a dead end

Strikes me that this lurch to the far right is at least partly propelled by a nostalgia for social democracy, coupled with a fatalism about it ever coming back. When I say 'social democracy' I don't believe that many of these people would even relate to the term, and a lot of them might be explicitly hostile to socialism, and most of the language that Corbyn uses. But the poor availability of both social housing and the kind of manual work that a less laissez-faire state might have been able to provide has almost certainly fuelled this.

The toxic picture of everyone *except* Wayne the landscape gardener and people who look and sound like him living a life of luxury off the state is one that Cameron and Osbourne explicitly encouraged in order to secure public support for austerity. Forces they were unable to control and that ended up destroying their careers. A significant number of the Labour MPs who complain that the leadership doesn't understand working class communities also carry on supporting austerity and don't seem to see the contradiction at all.

This should present an opportunity for left-wing populism that will only work if it's coupled with policies that are so attractive that they trump immigration concerns - this is where Kinnock and friends have nothing at all. But the electorate also has to actually believe that you are capable of delivering it, and this is where it falls down for Corbyn.

How you sell this vision to the kind of chattering classes idiots who think that things were basically peachy from 1997 up until the Iraq War, and whose votes you also need, is another problem entirely.

Some people, like me, think things were never uniformly 'peachy' but that some things were better, in some ways, at that time, and the direction of travel was better, in some ways, than now.

You're quite a long way from the sort of people I'm talking about, I mean the Centre Will Rise Again crew, who think that Labour's travails prove that 97-03 (or even 97-07) was the best of all possible worlds. The direction of intended travel might have been better under Blair, but they were also creating the conditions that led directly to this state of affairs - and you can't separate one from the other.

It's almost like they're not living in the real world or in touch with ordinary people. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯