Brits - Who are you voting for in the European Elections?

Can't abide this pox-on-all-of-them-I'm-not-voting bullshit.

Yeah, but it's tough to expect people to vote for something they radically disagree with just to keep out something they even more radically disagree with. I had to vote in the knowledge that in some small way I was registering support for a bunch of clowns who imo should be out of politics. Doesn't exactly feel like Yay Democracy either.

If we're looking to the Lords, they'll only have to wait a few months before parachuting Alan Sugar into the top job.

The bold thing to do would be something like this, Brown steps down, caretaker PM takes over and sets an election for 6 months time. Labour puts every constituency up for re-selection and the invite all comers to public meetings to set the policy agenda, select candidates and choose a new leader, possibly from outside the commons.

Call it a political Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Mandy could probably be tolerable as PM if the only thing he were to do was to call an election. If they don't ditch Brown this week, and cling on for October, that'd be possible. Not a great platform for fighting an election, mind

I feel with the Tories it was a social network, I don't think they actively sought members from the lower orders except for novelty value.

This sort of ties in with the decline of the skilled working class thing - the skilled working class are increasingly self-employed and I can see why it would then be in their interests to vote Tory. But in the areas where the BNP gained most of the manual jobs, where they exist, are less secure and worse paid than they were 20-30 years ago, and guess who it is who gets the blame?

Unless a government is seen and believed to be actively tackling that problem I don't really see how to arrest the decline in both Labour support and wider participation.

xpost

Bold but kind of unworkable in terms of bottom-up/top-down policy setting? If the PLP's failure is at least in part a result of its detachment from the broader party and the general Labour support base beyond that then how much influence can you allow the PLP? And then who's gonna marshall the troops?

If they don't try something like this then labour are going to be out for at least 2 cycles, who ever is next is likely going to be their Michael Howard or Menzies Campbell unless they try something bold to reconnect with their supporters.

(I see GB as a Hague or Duncan Smith, Blair was his own John Major)

who ever is next is likely going to be their Michael Howard or Menzies Campbell

The party higher-ups probably see Alan Johnson as this, no doubt.

Blair was his own John Major

harsh on major.

Johnson is defending a 9000 majority in Hull, the results there last night make him look very vulnerable:

http://www.hullcc.gov.uk/portal/page?_pageid=221,604100&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

I don't really see how to arrest the decline in both Labour support and wider participation

Some truths that need to start getting self-evident:

1. What's left of the working class and the trade union movement can't support alone the weight of a party popular enough to hold workable power. If it ever could.
2. Labour has always been a collab between working class and middle class members/voters, because of 1.
3. If the Labour Party has any point at all it's to increase economic equality and to attempt to make the machinery of Capitalism work for the good of all citizens, by whatever means seem most effective.
4. YOU HAVE TO SELL THAT TO ENOUGH PEOPLE HONESTLY - Not sneak piddling redistributions of wealth through by stealth
5. A decent system of PR wd be an improvement on First Past the Post but only if the Party itself can stop centralizing power and restore proper democracy to the regions

xpost I heard we had a very low turn-out tho Ed, 20 percent or something hilarious.

is the labour party the party to do all that. NV, or are we seeing the likes of the BNP/UKIP attempting to corner that vote?

Australia has compulsory voting but it also has xenophobic nutters like Pauline Hanson who at times has got a larger percentage of the vote than the BNP in England, so that argument doesn't necessarily work.

I would disagree with that. Hanson only ever got into government because she was a Liberal Party candidate who got ditched by the party after the ballot papers had been printed. They only managed to get 9% of the vote in the best Federal election in 1998 and one Senate seat, far less than what the Democrats and Greens (centrist and leftist, respectively). Of course, the fact that the Liberal Party went further right was partly the reason why the never ended up anywhere but at least they didn't reach the point of "Asians Go Home". Well, unless you were seeking asylum and not spending big amounts of cash.

I tend to find Australian politics a race to the centre on EVERYTHING, which is why the Liberals got kicked out last election. They had steered too right and Labor went into for the centrist vote for the first time in twenty years. So you end up with a political landscape which is totally bland, exceptionally centrist and lacking any reform or progressiveness (most of the time). But it keeps out the nutters.

Labour needs to be a party of working people, the party of people who work for money as opposed to those who have wealth. A Northern Rock Branch manager has more interests in common with a dustman than a merchant banker or Alan sugar (or David Cameron for that matter).

45.2% according to wikipedia. xpost

are we seeing the likes of the BNP/UKIP attempting to corner that vote?

The BNP couldn't do it because the majority of people won't vote for a racist party under any circumstances. UKIP really are a protest group and need to realise that if people felt that strongly against the EU they'd be running the country by now. I still think the Labour Party is the best hope for a broad-based left of centre party that represents a majority of the population. That's a bit depressing btw.

xp

Whilst I agree with a broad-brush definition of working people it's also a case of where people perceive their interests to lie. Plus yr definition really ought to include everybody bar a tiny proportion of people with inherited wealth/land, and the Friends of Unfettered Capitalism is definitely a bigger group than that.

So you end up with a political landscape which is totally bland, exceptionally centrist and lacking any reform or progressiveness (most of the time). But it keeps out the nutters.

not necessarily a good thing. a few nutters don't hurt, as long as there's some sort of variance across the political spectrum represented. the sprawling mess across the centre that is new labour is one of the major factors in voter apathy.

Sorry Ed I guess you were distinguishing wage earners from entrepreneurs but I still don't know I mean somebody like Sugar did actually work for his money and technically a lot of wealthy professionals are drawing a "wage".

hey only managed to get 9% of the vote

This is more than the BNP have got at this election.

Hey!

as in, (as demonstrated by ILX) most people that identify as working class or thereabouts will never vote tory, but labour seem to be doing their best to make themselves unsupportable, leaving you the option of voting nutter or staying home, and increasing the nutter vote.

'fuck voting for the current shower' covers a lot of what would be labour's core vote at the moment.

back in the day, there was a lot of e.g.

"Suppose you won the pools, wouldn't you want to leave that to your kids in your will? Or would you want Socialists to take it ALL as part of DEATH DUTY TAXES????!"

Feel bad about not voting Scargill now as it may've encouraged him to do the next Celebrity BB.

I'm probably one of the few, if not the only, Labour members on ILX, and I was out leafleting at 6.30 Thursday morning, but I agree with pretty much all of this (although with the caveat on 1, that if you passed pro-union legislation, more people would join unions).

1. What's left of the working class and the trade union movement can't support alone the weight of a party popular enough to hold workable power. If it ever could.
2. Labour has always been a collab between working class and middle class members/voters, because of 1.
3. If the Labour Party has any point at all it's to increase economic equality and to attempt to make the machinery of Capitalism work for the good of all citizens, by whatever means seem most effective.
4. YOU HAVE TO SELL THAT TO ENOUGH PEOPLE HONESTLY - Not sneak piddling redistributions of wealth through by stealth
5. A decent system of PR wd be an improvement on First Past the Post but only if the Party itself can stop centralizing power and restore proper democracy to the regions

Overall, though, given the context (in which you would expect disaster), I'd say these results weren't *too* bad for Labour - down 7 percentage points overall, Tories only up 1.

Just as a relief, it's good that in London, Labour came second, UKIP fifth and the BNP sixth.

Labour needs to be a party of working people, the party of people who work for money as opposed to those who have wealth. A Northern Rock Branch manager has more interests in common with a dustman than a merchant banker or Alan sugar (or David Cameron for that matter).

Proper definition of working class.

The rest of it is advertising bullshit, imo.

I think you miss the point (and possibly SirAlan was a bad example, caught in the zeitgeist here), what we have now is not a division between waged and salaried workers anymore. the division between ricj and poor has never been greater and what I am trying to get at is the division between those who have economic security and those who don't, an plenty of the middle class (now a useless category IMHO) fit into the latter category.

And the redistribution that Labour has carried out has been from the working comfortably off to the working poor, leaving the rich (or those that in part live off money, as well as their wages) and the non-working and childless poor well alone.

I promise to strenuously avoid trying to nail down the shifting sands of What Class Is as long as everybody else does likewise. (Gots to add 1 tiny little caveat tho which is that it is an attempt to describe something that is real and visible in the world).

Beyond that, yes the Labour Party ought to be able to appeal to a broad spectrum of working people but perceptions of what the causes of and the solutions to peoples problems are always going to be problematic. Crudely speaking Labour under Brown/Blair specifically targetted voters in one income bracket at the expense of those below them. I'm not suggesting a reverse but I'm saying those in the middle are generally more likely to be flexible in their political principles depending on whether the economy is strong or weak.

First priority for Labour ought to be to regain the trust of the people who feel they've been abandoned.

whether those people vote or not?

Yeah, tbh. I think trying to persuade people to vote is probably more important than bidding for a dwindling core of those who already do.

trying to persuade the sections yr talking about is more likely to drive a large % of that dwindling core further away from you, i think.

Widespread suspicion of politicians in general traditionally favours parties of the Right, for one thing, so it's more than just a noble gesture to try and restore some belief in politics as process.

I tend to find Australian politics a race to the centre on EVERYTHING, which is why the Liberals got kicked out last election.

I'm no expert on Australian politics but I did grow up there and my impression is that fringe parties get much better representation there than in the UK, not worse. Admittedly that's more to do with the voting system than compulsory voting per se. I do remember a total xenophobic right-wing nutcase being premier of Queensland for most of my childhood.

I think Belgium also has compulsory voting, and is home to one of Europe's most successful nationalist parties, Vlaams Velang, which Wikipedia tells me won 17 out 150 seats in the last federal election.

Unless darragh you're saying that the BNP's race politics is what won them the number of votes they got this weekend? Cos I don't believe that's true. Core vote of traditional racists plus large cloud of people who haven't thought their shit thru or didn't vote for the BNP because they were the hatred option.

I am trying to get at a post class identity for labour.

Belgium also failed to form a govt for ages and almost ceased to exist as a nation through apathy so maybe not the best example.

Crudely speaking Labour under Brown/Blair specifically targetted voters in one income bracket at the expense of those below them.

I don't think this is true at all. They targeted everyone. They tried to pretend the opposing interests of groups didn't exist.

And in narrow terms of who benefited, it is the working less well-off with children (through active policies) and the very rich (through not doing anything about it). Those that have suffered are the middle class at above average earnings (through not raising the higher-income tax threshold in line with earnings - fiscal drag).

I am trying to get at a post class identity for labour

"We're not cunts, and we're still electable?" That'd do for me.

(I mean, it neatly separates them from the Tories, in the first instance, and the LDs in the second.)

In countries with compulsory voting do you literally have to vote for a party or is there a "none of the above" option on the ballot? Presumably it is a crime to spoil your ballot paper deliberately?

Anyway, the UK results seem pretty much what was expected, but across Europe, I'm really surprised the centre right has done so well.

I was expecting anti-incumbent votes everywhere, but that apart from that effect, the left to benefit. The global economic apocalypse having slightly shaken faith in markets etc. I know that we're talking about all these different political contexts and so it's hard to generalise, but genuinely perplexed about this.

Fuck, I knew Stoke results would be depressing but this is even worse that I expected. 20% of the vote went to the BNP, leaving them only 13 votes behind the Tories and around 1k behind Labour.

Tuomas (if you're still reading): what do you make of Perussuomalaiset's gains in Finland? My Finnish friends seem to put them in the same category as the BNP.

Jamie they did also raise taxes on the poorest people in the country in order to offer a tax cut for everyone else. That's pretty big and was a catastrophic cock-up on Brown's part.

I think centre-right parties in France and Germany in particular have done well by positioning themselves as the alternative to the Anglo-American model that brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse. Also France actually weathered the storm better than most countries. Spain's Socialists didn't do too badly seeing as its unemployment rate is at something like 20%. Genuinely have no idea what happened in Italy.

I'm really surprised the centre right has done so well.

I've been pondering that a bit. General fears of immigration? Some kind of belief that Government interference in the financial crisis after it happened is the cause of economic problems? Anti-American knee-jerkery? Completely unrelated but parallel issues in different member states?

Yeah more what Matt said. France's socialists in disarray, Spain did okay, Berlusconi is Italy's Boris Johnson and seems to score off "being a character" up to and possibly beyond the point where he actually kills somebody in public or something.

xpost

Catastrophic cock-up, yes. No doubt.

But they introduced the 10p tax rate in the first place, and tax credits etc etc. Overall over the 12 years, the tax/benefit equation has been to the benefit of those on lower incomes (especially with children), at the expense of people who are now just over the higher-rate threshold.

I think centre-right parties in France and Germany in particular have done well by positioning themselves as the alternative to the Anglo-American model that brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse.

Yeah, I think there must be something about that - but why then vote for the party that is trying to drag your country a little way towards that model (both Merkel and Sarkozy have invoked Thatcher, I think).

Tax Credits have been far from an unblemished success. The administration has been shit, the paperwork is terrible, nobody I know who's entitled to them has anything good to say about the system, which makes people suspicious about why it was made so tortuous.