love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

given that the main problem for the left is getting voters out rather than persuading floating voters i'm not sure dull competence is an election winner, it only really appeals to a fairly small class of ppl

it's true that if there's a big housing market crash or comparable shitshow then enough property-owning oldsters might be tempted by a dull and competent opposition, but that's a coalition that would have few members from or reasons to represent the interests of the post 08 crash generations or your trad working class labour constituencies

I think dull managerialism will just inspire apathy and low turnouts, lots of what'sthefuckingpoint? and tories will keep a huge majority with even less votes than '19.

i agree and there's lots of evidence for it. this is why the rent issue is such a key one, bc it's unclear if there's any way you can win an election representing renter's interests, and, if you argue for dull competence, you won't even get an opposition party

I'm sympathetic to all that but it requires an awful lot of faith in the Conservative Party being receptive to what happens in the (awful phrase) marketplace of ideas, as opposed to what their supporters and donors are pressuring them to do, or the ideas that are flowing from the right in that marketplace. The government is not renationalising the railways because the Labour opposition of the last five years redefined the art of the politically possible - renationalising the railways was in Labour's 1997 manifesto, it has been a massively popular policy for decades. The government is (effectively) renationalising the railways because a once-in-a-century pandemic has caused the revenues of privatise operators to collapse.

I'm not sure whether any generalisations we might make about the electorate over the past decade or so are going to apply moving forward, because everything has changed. The nature of opposition that is required might have changed - once of the reasons I'm ambivalent towards Starmer's approach is that it might be auditioning for a job that will no longer exist in its current form.

I wanted Corbyn to succeed both in the leadership elections and subsequent GE's. Still, the question remains as to whether or not a Corbyn-style opposition actually benefited any of the people they were supposed to represent when the end result was an 80-seat Tory majority that no longer has to give a shit about what disadvantaged voters might think, not that they ever did except when it was expedient. Righteous anger and forward-thinking ideas don't work if crucial groups of people don't believe that you are capable of doing the job better.

Everything Starmer does has to be viewed through that prism and ultimately will succeed or fail on that. He has to break the Conservative voting coalition by convincing enough people that he would be doing the job better. Convincing credulous broadsheet columnists is barely even step one. It may still be that the government does so badly at containing the outbreak and driving any economic recovery that they are hurled from office regardless of what Starmer does, there's very little point even thinking that far ahead.

(many xposts)

the govt announced renationalisation of northern rail way before covid.

my main point is to argue that we can't talk about the electorate as a single mind, including the idea that they are all under the sway of one contemporary narrative. to make any sense of the electorate you'd need to divide them into at least 15+ blocs of voters with political loyalties of various strengths formed at different times that will change for different reasons. the current crisis will impact them all differently but it will often entrench these differences and will not wipe the slate clean.

then we're back onto this mctiernan argument that power is everything. the key point here is: what do you do when you're a big minority that can't win power but is opposed to both of the established power blocs. corbyn's rise was to a large extent the rise of, depending on how you want to slice it, 'left liberals'/university educated ppl/the post-crash generation. there was an alliance w/ elements of the 'old left' that had been peripheral or dormant (always worth remember how many millions of ppl are basically unrepresented and deemed 'not crucial' at any given time), but as corbyn said "i've got youth on my side". the political generation gap is much, much starker than it has been for decades. there's a huge bloc of voters who thanks to the marvels of the two party system went from being disenfranchised to wielding disproportionate influence.

dull competence is about taking certain blocs of voters for granted, offering them only a 'least bad option' rationale, and hoping they are scattered in a way which means their lack of votes won't be too harmful. the electoral strategy is almost wholly focused on appealing to the sensibilities of a section of centre and centre-right voters. dull competence is short-term electoralism, it's a big part of the erosion of political consciousness in 'former heartlands', the weakening, marginalisation and corruption of the union movement, and the move away from ideology and Politics towards managerialism. the silence of centre-left voices here isn't just bc ppl are fragile or afraid of looking lame, it's reflective of a wider lack of vision in the centre of politics.

You cannot appeal strongly to all 15+ blocs of voters at the same time, because they want contradictory things. And not to relitigate the last election, but it's unquestionable that 65+ voters were one of the things behind the drubbing, and also one of the main groups now literally fearing for their lives from this government's incompetence at execution. Competence doesn't seem a bad play for that bloc. (A lot of them are also landlords, damn their eyes)

"dull competence is about taking certain blocs of voters for granted, offering them only a 'least bad option' rationale"

I thought this was why the Labour vote was declining in every election post '97 and this decline didn't go into reverse until Corbyn became leader, until that cursed brexit election of course, which as much as a dramatic failure it was it still didn't vindicate going back to the old failed ways of New Labour imo. Some really good posts there Ogmor.

xp indeed, forming and holding together a coalition is v difficult and corbyn was aware of this and mostly did a v good job at what has been an extremely neglected aspect of leftist electoral politics and I think it has made an impression on soft and centre-left elements of the labour party, even if they haven't fully taken it on board. over 65s are more than one bloc, but a big swing in that demographic was from ukip/bxp to tory.

it's worth saying again I guess because every couple of weeks everyone forgets but the tory vote overall didn't change that much between 17 and 19, while lots of 17 labour voters either stayed at home or voted for someone else bc of brexit (at least a million votes either way)

Furlough scheme extended to November...

xp which is to say, there was no dull and competent solution to keeping the 17 coalition together than corbyn failed to pursue. a starmer-ish more remainy line might have kept enough FBPE types from voting lib dem or snp to win a few more fairly well-off suburban seats and might have lost a few more brexity #towns. if they'd gone for a more old school labour -friendly soft brexit line you'd get the inverse.

Sunak says the government believes in the dignity of work.

lying cunt

They need dignity to exist so they can take it away.

there was no dull and competent solution to keeping the 17 coalition together than corbyn failed to pursue

Yees but the 17 coalition wasn't enough, which is also one of those everyone forgets things too. Starmz can't appeal to the same blocs that Corbyn could, no. The question is whether he can cobble together enough support from the people Corbyn antagonised while keeping enough of those who turned out in 19. Jury has to be still out on that, especially with a massive realignment of the blocs themselves underway. Covid is now #1 on "your top concerns" polling and Brexit isn't even in the top 10.

24 isn't going to be like 17 or 19 again.

Fucking Sunak fanboys are back out. Entire scheme is barely costing a fraction of a scratch of the arse of the Banks bailout and already people who in theory can do sums are talking about its sustainability

Sunak decision to extend furlough till end of October is expensive but eminently sensible. It’s a lifeline business large and small to prevent Depression level unemployment. Sunak is proving Mr Steady in this crisis #COVIDー19

— Lionel Barber (@lionelbarber) May 12, 2020

yeah, but at that point it stops being a problem for the left and starts being a problem for the centre, and the left is back to 'what do you do when you're a big minority that can't win power but is opposed to both of the established power blocs'

every election is different, but just because you don't want to fight the last war it doesn't mean you discount all experience from it

Righteous anger and forward-thinking ideas don't work if crucial groups of people don't believe that you are capable of doing the job better.

there are v long term structural processes at work in society that are affected by but ultimately much more important than events (hence why the same crisis plays out so differently in different places!)

Like the issue of all these voters baying for the blood of foreigners, BAME people and whatever boogieman offered up to them by the press is why the Tories won in December, and that’s not ground Labour could or should try to compete on. Grey managerialism isn’t the answer, and there is a very unaddressed danger that disillusioned and alienated young people looking for an outlet get swept up by the far right.

that's happening on a small hopefully insignificant level, except now it's an internet-based alt right, conspiracy shit etc

happening already i mean, obv it could get worse and the rona looks like a great petri dish

I think my autistic son has been radicalised by YouTube. Yesterday he was repeatedly playing a Boris press conference today it's a choir singing the Welsh national anthem!

uh-oh, it's important to dob him in to the cops asap so they can tactfully and sensitively deradicalize him

Oh no

Prime minister material. pic.twitter.com/kjmYrLiJcF

— Sir Kier Blobby (@kier_sir) May 12, 2020

Following

going back to the issue of where the tories get their ideas from, I think johnson is in some ways an extension of cameron's reformist/disruptive streak, which is p receptive to ideas from all over the place (in the name of the big society!). it's more modern than may's more cautious/perhaps socially conservative one-nationish shtick (not that she was really in a position to articulate much) and w/ his majority he initially looked to be more focused on internal enemies, but now he's busy firefighting I can foresee even more radical change being brought in, you know how disaster capitalism works

That twitter is a dubdobdee alt.

The nationalisation of the railways would have been on the agenda anyway, the base hated the privatisation because it's one of the few ways in which everything turning to shit actually affected them (and which having lots of money wouldn't ameliorate)

Dull competence isn't going to save anyone but no one here is arguing for dull competence. At some point Starmer is going to have to give people something to vote FOR rather than just a safe pair of hands and that's where my reservations lie. That's going to require vision for a country that will need rebuilding but it also requires enough people in the right parts of the country to believe that Labour are capable of delivering upon that vision. Competence (or at least a widespread enough belief in it) is a baseline requirement, not the be all and end all.

The Corbyn strategy was effectively a gigantic bet on new young voters, previous non-voters, and people who were so repelled by May and Johnson that they would vote for pretty much anyone else. There is no sense whatsoever in taking any of those voter groups for granted but only the youth vote is going to get any bigger, you do need to split off other voting groups. The SNP is the only other party whose voter coalition looks especially solid, so there's both winnable ground and a massive barrier there.

Look I know you didn’t want to see what the rest of us saw happen with the media in the run-up to the election, but it happened. None of this happened organically, there’s a reason great swathes of people are and were repeating the same attack lines fed to them by the vicious press. 7

Of course it happened, everyone knew it was going to happen from the start, but the fact is it worked, just like it worked against Ed Miliband. The question is whether there's any way through that doesn't involve either blundering into the same fire or folding completely. And it's not one I have an answer to.

This would be much easier to talk about if there were more than one person alive with experience of winning an election as Labour leader, and if that person wasn't a cunt.

The Tories did plenty well serving up the blood of foreigners and BAME people on Facebook with no press required. Hell, they have blanked huge BBC programmes. Whether Labour were just too inept to respond, or were being undermined from within is still an open question.

Either way, the appalling state of our press is something that can't be ignored in either direction. Genuinely don't know what the answer is: if you become "electable" to the press I probably don't want to elect you; if you're fully antagonistic to them they'll kill you like they eventually did Corbyn. Even if you're in the middle ground they'll find a bacon sandwich in the end.

Also a lot of what Johnson was planning pre-covid and was reflected in the (now completely swamped) Sunak budget was stuff that Cummings wanted to do anyway, this is best understood as part of an emerging (or re-emerging) tendency on the right rather than a reaction to pressure from the left.

Dull competence is exactly what the SNP have been doing for the last 12 years btw.

yep, and it works for reasons largely outside of their control (uk constitutional malaise & rift between scotland and tory england). I think there are more votes to be won from non-voters than from ppl who voted tory, even if you throw in ppl who voted nationalist and lib dem and green I think it's marginal, partly bc a lot of those ppl are fundamentally opposed to labour and require compromise to win over that loses you other votes. political apathy helps the right way more than the left, and in practice perceptions of competence are loaded to favour the centre/status quo/hegemony/anyone 6'2'' that looks smart in a suit, it's rarely going to be a criteria that works for the left (& often not minorities)

Has there been a collective penny-dropping moment from vocal anti-lockdown types when they realise what another four months of furlough is likely to mean for the transition out of lockdown? That coupled with Hancock's "sorry, you aren't getting on a plane this summer" announcement? Feels like the entire year has been basically written off now but the govt don't want to openly admit that yet.

"Nobody who is on the furlough scheme wants to be on this scheme,"

workings shite mate

A negative Boris is even more pointless than a serious Boris, so leave the tough stuff to Sunak and Hancock

The thing I am having trouble accepting myself is that there's nothing special about the end of year – next year is just as much written off as this. Absent an incredibly solid TTI infra (which we don't appear to be even getting close to), a really robust treatement or vaccine turning up, what would change that?

and so at this point, I could give a shit about perceptions of competence – I want actual competence-at-implementing-TTI to take the reins, sooner rather than later please.

Plenty of appetite to pull the plug on furlough. Any reduction will mean many job losses.

Stage 1 of the government deciding who "deserves" furlough pay and who doesn't. Expect mass redundancies in the creative industries and smaller businesses, and total protection of big business and financial sector jobs. https://t.co/qfgldwCoCm

— Uncle P (@PasqualeLDN) May 12, 2020

it’s hard to see any way that next winter/spring are any better than this one given we’ve already got global reach for the virus, plenty of countries will have lifted their social restrictions, and a bunch of us will have been softened up by bouts of cold and flu. nice time to be leaving the EU hey? oh by the way has the remainder of the EU settlement scheme been sorted out yet? no? all the document verification centres have been closed you say? and no postal applications either? and EU citizens without settled status are already being denied UC? hmmm!!

It'll be interesting to see what's coming down the line on home-based learning if you have another four months of people staying in and getting paid for jobs that likely won't exist by the time business are theoretically able to re-open.

it’s good money after bad. why pay people not to work when you could be paying them to train up - as contact tracers, first and foremost!

Difficult to see how they could discontinue furlough given it's effectively turning off life support for hundreds of thousands of small businesses, the owners of which make up a hefty chunk of the Tory vote. It's also going to make economic restructuring much harder whenever the other side of this turns out to be.

The only way I can see out of this in even the short-ish term is the discovery and widespread distribution of effective antivirals and lord knows how far away we are from that.

not everyone wants to be a tracer

first i’ve heard of it

Someone I vaguely know runs a business (with their partner) related to the live events sector, which of course has died on its arse. Their turnover is in the six-figure bracket with a bunch of expenses, so I don't think they're earning vast amounts. Furlough or no, they're getting precisely FUCK ALL government help, and will probably go bust/lose their house etc. Sunak et al are well aware that most small business owners are set up as limited companies and taking a minimal wage with the rest as dividends - which of course aren't covered. So a lot of small-to-medium size businesses are set to go under, Tory voters or no.
Since there probably won't be an election until 2024 they figure it doesn't matter I guess, and the void in semi-essential services to get things up and running again can be *waves hands* sorted out. Dunno, maybe business owners can all be retrained as grave diggers or something?

This is it, quite a few people falling through the cracks already. Also Tories will have little idea on how to do anything like re-structure the economy, hence why I can see the plug being pulled to some extent, earlier than it should be.

But also I can't see Sunak fucking it up at some point.

*not