UK - Politika i društvo

'Crushed by Brexit': how Labour lost the election

In the first of a new series, leading figures in party’s campaign tell of tactical spats, mixed messages and frayed tempers

by Heather Stewart Political editor
Tue 21 Jan 2020 16.25 GMTLast modified on Tue 21 Jan 2020 20.50 GMT


As Jeremy Corbyn’s top aide, Seumas Milne, drove to Finsbury Park on election night to watch the exit poll with his boss in an anonymous office lent by a charity to skirt the media scrum, he took a call from the Scottish National party’s Westminster leader, Ian Blackford.

The genial Scottish MP wanted to prepare the ground for the two parties to enter into immediate talks, if the result was a hung parliament – but Milne told him there was no chance of that.

After a bruising six-week campaign, he and Corbyn’s lieutenants were resigned to humiliation at the hands of Boris Johnson.

Labour’s defeat was a long time in the making. Two years of parliamentary warfare over Brexit had left deep scars on the personal relationships that once formed the glue for Corbyn’s radical political project.

Speaking to many of the leading figures in Labour’s election campaign, a picture emerges of tactical spats, mixed messages and frayed tempers – not least Corbyn’s own.

Many of the senior players were the same as in 2017 – the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, chaired the daily 7.30am calls to set the agenda for the day ahead; the policy chief, Andrew Fisher, oversaw the manifesto; the former Corbyn aide Karie Murphy led the operational side of the campaign, and Milne was in charge of strategy and communications. Jennie Formby, handpicked by Corbyn to be Labour’s general secretary, oversaw management and budgets.

Yet this group had been on different sides in the painful dispute about Labour’s Brexit stance – McDonnell and Fisher were instrumental in helping to persuade Corbyn that backing a second referendum was the only way of safeguarding the leftwing political movement they had built. By contrast, Milne and Murphy – as well as the Unite union’s chief of staff, Andrew Murray, and the Corbynite PR Steve Howell, both of whom sat on the election strategy group – believed that fateful decision would cost Labour dear in leave-supporting seats.

And this difference of analysis continued to reverberate throughout the campaign. There was a strongly held perception in Labour’s HQ at the outset that Labour still had more work to do to pacify remain voters, after its switch to backing a second referendum.

As for leave voters, many of whom were heavily concentrated in a swath of Labour-held seats being targeted by the Tories, the plan was to change the subject – focusing as much as possible on other issues, including public services and the NHS.

“It felt like the People’s Vote campaign in there,” said one senior member of the campaign team, who recalled being warned, in respect of Labour leave voters: “We don’t want to prod the beast!”

Howell, who had overseen Labour’s digital campaigning in 2017 and was brought in this time to look at targeting and polling, was alarmed by the prevalence of the view that Labour could win by focusing on remainers.

“A mythology developed – Paul Mason was one of the early advocates of it – that we could win an election on remain votes. And that even in leave areas, the vast majority of our voters were remain. But, while it’s true that the proportions are something like 70% to 30% nationally, in strong leave areas, as many as 40% to 50%-plus of Labour voters are leavers,” he said.

He and other sceptics about Labour’s shift towards a referendum always felt it was fruitless to try to skirt the issue. “In the end, you can’t just fight a battle and ignore your opponent. You can’t just say: ‘We’re fighting at sea’, if your opponent is mounting a land invasion,” said one party strategist.

Even Labour’s attack line on the NHS – focusing on the risk that it would be handed to Donald Trump as part of a trade deal – had an anti-Brexit undertone to it. And focusing on austerity, which still featured heavily in Corbyn’s stump speeches, was perhaps a less potent weapon against a Tory party that had ditched Philip Hammond’s rigid fiscal discipline.

“That was one of the things that we were a bit caught on the hop about: Boris suddenly started throwing austerity overboard. He had deprived us of our core message,” said the adviser.

Labour’s approach to targeting was almost a mirror image of 2017’s. Then, Corbyn and his lieutenants blamed the excessive caution of party officials for blunting their attacking edge.

This time, they began with an ambitious list of 96 targets – 66 of which were attacking seats, and 30 defensive.

That was partly because the job of any opposition is to get into government, and it would have appeared defeatist to target fewer seats than Labour needed for a majority.

But the campaign team also hoped some of the magic that propelled them to such a close result in 2017 would spark the campaign into life again: the rousing rallies, Corbyn’s comfortable-in-his-own-skin authenticity, Tory missteps. “We were all too hypnotised by our achievement in 2017, and we thought that however bad the situation was, once the campaign got going we would catch up,” said one party source.

Some events – including an upbeat launch at Battersea Arts Centre, and the unveiling of the manifesto at Birmingham City University, where Corbyn held the document triumphantly aloft against a dark pink backdrop – almost recaptured the buzz of two years earlier. But veterans of that election remarked that the crowds in 2019 were generally smaller this time, and failed to build as the weeks went on.

Labour’s manifesto itself was a casualty of the fractious working relationships that dogged the campaign. Milne was widely viewed internally as the most important single decision-maker in the 2017 campaign. But this time, a day before the crucial clause V meeting at which the manifesto was to be signed off, he had not seen the final printed version.

Key policies had been thrashed out in discussions, including among the strategy group – but Fisher’s policy team kept a firm hold on the finished document, and his relationship with Milne had been badly frayed by the Brexit battle.

“No one really knew what was coming until it emerged, from a process only really accessible to Andrew Fisher and John McDonnell,” said one Labour source. “And so major policies were coming out – free broadband, Waspi women – which really nobody knew was coming.” But Labour’s policy wonks insist they were just doing what they could to fill the hole where they felt an electoral strategy should have been. Unlike in 2017, policy and strategy were working in silos.

The general election was Fisher’s final job for Corbyn, after he resigned in September, with an email leaked to the Sunday Times in which he gave a blistering critique of Labour’s incompetence, including what he called “a blizzard of lies and excuses” about the party’s failure to come up with a strapline for its conference until the last minute.

The same indecision dogged Labour’s election slogan. “It’s Time for Real Change” was meant as a riposte to Johnson’s phoney claim to be offering a fresh start for Britain, but was the outcome of a fraught debate, including external consultants and focus grouping, and as such was little loved by anyone.

As the campaign went on, and anxiety increased at the risks Labour faced in defensive seats, “Labour Is On Your Side” took over – though one insider laments with hindsight that voters in leave seats who felt the party had betrayed them over Brexit appear to have been moved to respond with “fuck off”.

The “grid”, overseen by the combative Murphy, and discussed at a 10am daily meeting, was packed with policy announcements: but there was scant sense of a theme or direction for each week or phase of the campaign.

“They had all these policies drafted and waiting, and that would lead the grid – a different policy announcement every day,” said one member of the campaign team. “I think it was pretty obvious that there was a lot of throwing a lot of stuff at a lot of walls and hoping it would stick.”

As the campaign went on, and reports flooded into the Victoria HQ from anxious candidates in defensive seats, those who had always believed Brexit was Labour’s overriding challenge felt increasingly vindicated – and alarmed.

On Sunday 24 November, about halfway through, the strategy group met to review how things were going – and agreed it was necessary to make more of a pitch to leavers – and to resource defensive seats more generously.

As a result, Howell recommended adding another 16 seats to the target list, and it was decided to ask Labour’s regional directors for more recommendations – a process that resulted in a further 21 seats being put on the list, taking the total to more than 130, though not all of those were fully resourced.

The group also decided to focus more on Labour’s bread-and-butter offer to working-class voters in leave-supporting communities – including giveaways such as free prescriptions and social care – and to extend the party chairman Ian Lavery’s campaigning Brexit bus tour.

But in the event, much of the following week was overshadowed by Labour’s record on tackling antisemitism. On Tuesday, as the party prepared to launch its race and faith manifesto, the Times splashed with a letter from the chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, claiming Corbyn’s handling of allegations of anti-Jewish racism meant he was “unfit for high office”.

At the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham that morning, Corbyn was more than half an hour late for the race and faith event, and the MP Dawn Butler filled the time by reciting the lyrics to the Labi Siffre classic (Something Inside) So Strong, to a bemused audience of hacks, who bombarded Labour aides with questions and requests. Until the last moment, it was unclear whether she and Corbyn would take questions from journalists.

Later that day, the Labour leader recorded a pre-planned interview with Andrew Neil. Corbyn was at his most petulant, as the broadcaster challenged him to apologise over antisemitism, grumpily interjecting “will you let me finish?” – a clip of which found its way on to that week’s Have I Got News for You.

Colleagues say that throughout the campaign Corbyn was keener to be personally involved in day-to-day decisions than in 2017 – and grumpier, sometimes even angry if he felt his views had been disregarded.

Labour tried to use a moment of political theatre to seize back the agenda the next day, by staging a press conference where Corbyn dramatically held aloft a 400-plus page leaked dossier suggesting the government was ready to put the NHS up for sale. “These uncensored documents leave Boris Johnson’s denials in absolute tatters!” he cried.

But the impact was nothing like the furore in 2017 when Labour’s manifesto was leaked – or when Theresa May insisted “nothing has changed”, after executing a swift U-turn on her social care policy. “It worked for a day, and we had a 36-hour row about whether Donald Trump was going to buy the NHS, but that was it,” said one insider.

And as the strategy group tried to hone Labour’s message, focusing on a bread-and-butter offer to leavers, some began to fear Corbyn’s straight-from-the-heart, unscripted authenticity was not the best medium for delivering it. “It’s just Jeremy, isn’t it?” said one exasperated member of the campaign team. “You judge him on a different marking scheme, almost. Did this person in this stump speech hit the five key messages to get on the evening news? No. Was he ever going to? No. I went to rallies where there was a billboard and he didn’t say what was on the fucking billboard. He just talked about whatever he wanted.”

As polling day loomed, some aides would have liked Corbyn to make more aggressive attacks on Johnson, whose loose relationship with the truth was openly laughed at by the Question Time audience when the pair met in a head-to-head debate. But “no personal attacks” was one of the rules written for Corbyn’s 2015 leadership campaign by Fisher, and he stuck to it doggedly.

The Labour leader told the Guardian at the outset of the campaign, “they go low, we go high” – though one despairing party aide described it as “they go low, we go wandering across the country”.

After six gruelling weeks of criss-crossing the country, including a dawn rally in Glasgow on the final day of campaigning, Corbyn watched the grim exit poll with his wife, Laura, his fiercely loyal sons – who released a statement shortly afterwards lambasting the media for treating him badly – and a few officials, including Milne.

They had been on a long journey together, from the political wilderness to the brink of government, but they believed their electoral chances had been crushed, in what one rueful Labour source called, “the Brexit vice”.

“This campaign was lost before it began,” the source added. “Even if nothing had gone wrong in terms of targeting, messaging, Jeremy’s schedule, TV interviews, anything – I still think we would not have won.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/21/crushed-by-brexit-how-labour-lost-the-election

Why the left keeps losing

Boris Johnson won a remarkable victory by routing Labour in its old heartlands. But his dilemma is how to cement his alliance with the working class while the cultural establishment remains wedded to progressive values.  

BY JOHN GRAY

Though its origins go back many years, Boris Johnson’s decisive victory in the general election was made possible by the unwillingness of most of the political class to learn the lessons of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Labour has suffered a cataclysmic defeat. The Liberal Democrats have been reduced to a disoriented rump, while the Independent Group for Change has evaporated along with the phantom of a new centre party. The DUP has been marginalised and the Brexit Party effectively liquidated. The unified Conservative Party that has been created in a matter of months, following generations of division over Europe, is an astonishing feat. The power Johnson commands in the Commons has no precedent for decades, and there is no serious opposition.

Yet outside government, British institutions are vehicles for a progressive mindset that is hostile to much of what he aims to achieve. This places a question mark over whether he will be able to secure the conjunction of political power with cultural legitimacy that Antonio Gramsci, one of the most penetrating 20th-century political thinkers, called hegemony.

At present the logic of events works in Johnson’s favour. Brexit will alter Britain irrevocably. Any project that presupposes close alignment with the EU – such as Scottish independence – belongs in the past. So, for different reasons, does the attempt to impose political choices by legal fiat, which has become entrenched in sections of the judiciary. Large alterations in the machinery of the state and its relations with the market are under way. Britain is moving rapidly towards a new economic regime.

For the two wings of British progressivism – liberal centrism and Corbynite leftism – the election has been a profound shock. It is almost as if there was something in the contemporary scene they have failed to comprehend. They regard themselves as the embodiment of advancing modernity. Yet the pattern they imagined in history shows no signs of emerging. Any tendency to gradual improvement has given way to kaleidoscopic flux. Rather than tending towards some rational harmony, values are plural and contending. Political monotheism – the faith that only one political system can be right for all of humankind – has given way to inescapable pluralism. Progress has ceased to be the providential arc of history and instead become a prize snatched for a moment from the caprice of the gods.

In a droll turn, 21st-century modernity has turned out to be rather like Johnson’s beloved ancient classical world – although the flux we inhabit should temper any confident predictions of Conservative hegemony. Johnson’s invulnerable position in government masks the dominance of progressive ideas throughout much of British life. Even Labour, seemingly damaged beyond recovery, cannot be written off.

***

Progressive thinkers have reacted to the election result in different ways. Rationalists among them blame the first-past-the post electoral system. If only Britain had European-style proportional representation, the disaster they have experienced could have been avoided. It is obviously true that the result would not have been the same. Whether PR would have produced a progressive majority is another matter. If the 2015 election had been held under the D’Hont system used in elections to the European Parliament, Nigel Farage’s Ukip would have secured 83 seats in the Commons (it won nearly four million votes). In reality, voting patterns would be different under any kind of PR, but the far right would still play a larger part in the British political system than it does now. Progressives talk of building the kind of majority they want, as if it somehow already latently exists. More likely, parties of the far right would set the political agenda, as they do throughout much of the continent. If you want a European-style voting system, you get a European style of politics.

Other progressives prefer a demonological interpretation. Doodling their fever-dreams in green ink, they portray the election as having been hijacked by sinister global forces. Officially, they believe values and beliefs other than their own are errors that can be corrected by reason and education. In practice many among them have invoked an idea of omnipresent evil to explain humankind’s stubborn resistance to their efforts to improve it. Communist regimes pointed to saboteurs and foreign spies to account for the systemic failings of central planning. More recently, liberals have invoked Russian meddling and a global far-right network masterminded by Steve Bannon to explain their political defeats. Delusions of conspiracy are part of the mass psychology of progressivism, and will intensify in the coming months and years.

Taking another tack, avowed liberals carry on attempting to thwart the results of democratic choices – not only the referendum, but now a general election. Such attempts tend to be self-defeating, as American liberals will discover if impeachment solidifies Donald Trump’s base and opens his way to a second term as president. The anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller appears set to continue the alt-politics of legal warfare, but the attempt to install rule by lawyers can only have one result. The authority of the executive will be reasserted, and the British judiciary returned to a more modest role like the one it had before Tony Blair conjured up a Supreme Court one wet afternoon.

In these pages in October I suggested that British politics had reached a Hobbesian moment. Voters demanded a government, not anarchy presided over by a gibbering rabble. The clean-out in the Commons followed from this imperative. The single most important lesson of the previous three and more years is the abject incompetence of Britain’s centrist political class. Their comical despair today comes from their inability to grasp the part they played in the debacle that has engulfed them.

That the centre was engaged in a process of self-immolation had been clear for some time. Blair and Peter Mandelson began the embourgeoisement of Labour that allowed Johnson to capture the party’s working-class heartlands in 2019. New Labour’s unthinking embrace of globalisation and open borders produced the working-class revolt against economic liberalism and mobilised support for Brexit. Blair may have won three elections on a centrist prospectus, but there was never any chance of Labour winning another on this basis when – as an unintended consequence of Blairite policies – the centre ground had shifted radically.

A hint of what was to come could be seen in the debacle of the People’s Vote (PV) campaign. Reported as the outcome of organisational conflicts and clashing personalities, its implosion in the run-up to the election revealed the basic contradiction in the Remain movement. Alastair Campbell, an éminence grise of the campaign, has written that it failed because it could not explain to people why, when the country had voted for something, it should not happen. In fact, everyone knew the sole reason for a second referendum was to nullify the first. That is why a section of the PV campaign opted for Revoke. Searching for a unique selling point, the Liberal Democrats did the same. Preferring the risk of a Jeremy Corbyn government to Brexit, Remainer grandees and centrist journals and commentators backed Jo Swinson’s extremism. In turn, she triggered an election that made Brexit inevitable. There is a certain rationality in politics, it seems, after all.

***

Flouting norms that are central to liberal democracy, Remain was another populist movement, if more short-lived than most. Some of its remnants – such as the Liberal Democrat Ed Davey, who is demanding an enquiry into the 2016 referendum – are in a state of denial. Others, including the Labour leadership contender Jess Phillips, appear to want to regroup under the banner of Rejoin. But with Johnson in control of the Brexit process they will have as much impact as the haggard figures that tramp the streets in sandwich boards announcing the end of the world. The Remain camp has had its final say.

While the liberal centre has disappeared as a significant force in politics, the future of the Corbynite ascendancy has yet to be decided. If, as some are already speculating, Keir Starmer proves most able to unite the party and its affiliated organisations, Corbynism could become not much more than a divisive faction. Wisely, Starmer has accepted the finality of Brexit. In the interests of continuity, he has talked up his humble origins and will make much of his work with trade unions. But he remains ineffably the candidate of the woke bourgeoisie in the party’s mass membership and metropolitan redoubts, and in practice could well complete the detachment of Labour from its working-class roots that Corbynism has accelerated. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Corbynite continuity candidate despite her protestations otherwise, is campaigning on the basis that Labour voters who rejected Corbyn’s message were mistaken, so it is they – not her party – that must change.

In different ways, each of these candidates represents a style of politics that millions of working-class voters repudiate. Whoever leads the party, Labour could repeat in the North the collapse it has undergone in Scotland.

Regardless, the Corbynites are not going away any time soon. Neither Starmer nor any other candidate could mount a campaign of the kind Neil Kinnock waged in the 1980s – a time when the far left was not so embedded in the party’s power structures. The appointment of Ed Miliband to chair an inquiry on the election suggests that much of Labour may still be in a state of collective solipsism. Another defeat – possibly larger because of likely constituency boundary changes and the evanescence of Farage – may be needed before it can adjust.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude the party is necessarily in terminal decline.

Seeing off Corbyn and completing the first phase of Brexit has left Johnson’s position unsettled. Without these dead-weights, Labour may be able to revive the domestic agenda that failed to cut through during most of the election campaign. Labour’s economic programme was not, as some are claiming, a roaring success among voters. Large numbers saw its spending pledges as impractical, if not fraudulent. But as the narrow Conservative lead at points in the campaign showed, it spoke to concerns about a dysfunctional economy that much of the electorate shares. Helped by the binary pattern to which British politics has reverted, Labour could yet rebound strongly.

If Johnson falters it will not be because of Scotland. A pervasive meme among progressive commentators is that Brexit will break up the Union. In fact it is only if the UK were somehow to remain in the EU, or make a soft exit, that Scotland could plausibly leave the UK. Seceding once Britain has left means reapplying to join the EU.

Wearied by years of negotiation over Brexit and fearful of reinforcing separatism in Catalonia, Brussels would not make the process easy. Strong tests of fiscal rectitude would be applied, which would mean many years of austerity. The question of which currency an independent Scotland would use would be more intractable. It could not be the euro until Scotland rejoined the EU. Would it be the British pound, or a new Scottish currency that would instantly attract speculative attacks?

The trade regime under which the new Scottish state would operate would pose severe problems. Given its heavy dependency on the rest of the UK, could the Scottish economy survive a hard border? Perhaps the increased economic risks of independence do not matter much in an age of identity politics. But it is hardly imaginable that they would not be a central feature of another independence referendum campaign.

Long-term pressure on the UK comes from Northern Ireland, where demography works in favour of Irish unification, not Scotland. While there will be nothing like a fully federal system, devolution will doubtless go further. Unending discussion of the break-up of the UK is a talking cure for depressed progressives, not realistic analysis.

***

Corbynism was Marxian in the sense that Oswald Mosley was Keynesian. But it is by using a Marxian idea of hegemony that Labour’s future, and that of Johnson’s Conservatives, can best be plotted. Corbynite Labour is a morbid symptom of the decay of centrism. The problem Johnson faces is that while he exercises unassailable power in government, British institutions as a whole remain vehicles of progressivist ideology.

Understanding the present must start with the end of the Thatcherite era. She was toppled in November 1990, but versions of the neoliberal ideas that may have intermittently informed some of her policies went on to dominate politics for nearly 30 years. Recognising the need for spending and investment in public services, Blair gave Thatcherism a new lease of life. It was David Cameron and George Osborne, with their witless cult of austerity, who brought the Thatcher era to a close. Johnson’s cabinet contains neo-Thatcherites like Esther McVey, while Sajid Javid, the Chancellor, is reportedly a devoted reader of Ayn Rand. But the era of neoliberal hegemony is plainly over. Electoral imperatives are leading Conservatives to abandon any fundamentalist faith in free markets. As Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s former joint chief of staff, perceived, and the political scientist Matthew Goodwin has confirmed in his studies of political realignment in Britain and other countries, the right is moving leftwards in economics. At the same it is moderating its individualist view of society. There is not much call for Rand or Hayek in Blyth Valley.

Representing Johnson’s government as neoliberalism in populist clothing misses the regime shift that is taking place. Horror at the spectre of “Singapore-on-Thames” is a sign of ignorance and confusion. Singapore is far from being an untrammelled market economy. Land is the property of the state, and around 80 per cent of the island’s housing supplied by a government corporation. A highly effective civil service is engaged with companies and active throughout society. Singapore is a success story of managed capitalism, not the free market.

A Singaporean model cannot be transplanted here. Britain is a large, multinational, unevenly developed country, not a city state (though London now resembles one). But Johnson will need something like Singapore-style government if he is to keep his working-class voters on board. Dominic Cummings’s proposals for renovating the state machine reflect this fact.

How hard Brexit will be remains to be seen. Immediately after the election great minds in the City were convinced that Johnson’s large majority would mean him pivoting to a softer exit. That seems highly unlikely. Britain can remain engaged and even friendly with Europe in many areas without being locked into the sclerotic institutions of the EU. Excitable talk about another cliff edge is also inaccurate.

Johnson’s withdrawal deal removes the most disruptive risks of Brexit, and neither the UK nor the EU wants to reach the end of this year without some kind of understanding on trade. A bare-bones agreement is possible and even likely, whatever Brussels may say publicly. All the signs are that Johnson aims to keep the option of the UK diverging from EU rules. Progressives will seethe at the prospect, since it could mean further deregulation. But diverging from the EU also enables government to act in ways that are currently prohibited, such as providing state aid for industry. The EU has long been a neoliberal construction, whereas a hardish Brexit allows a more interventionist mode of capitalism.

***

Whether Johnson can retain his commanding position depends in the short term primarily on how well he maintains his pact with his new voters. If working-class jobs are hit hard by tariffs in the event of a hard Brexit, Labour has a chance to revive rapidly. The votes that have been lent to Johnson were part of a transaction in which greater economic security was a vital component. Working-class Labour supporters who turned to Johnson after a decade of Conservative austerity did so, in part, because they perceived him as a different kind of Conservative. A spate of closed factories and bankrupt farmers could discredit this perception.

The focal point of power has moved north. Resources will have to move with it, including facilities for scientific and technological innovation. Johnson will have to engineer a fundamental shift in the direction of government, and do so without depriving his traditional voters of what they have come to see as their due. But hegemony has to do with culture as well as government, and it is here that he faces his most formidable challenge.

If only people aged between 18 and 24 had voted in the general election, Corbyn would have won an enormous majority. No doubt this is partly because of Corbyn’s promise to abolish student tuition fees and the difficulties young people face in the housing and jobs markets. But their support for Corbyn is also a by-product of beliefs and values they have absorbed at school and university. According to the progressive ideology that has been instilled in them, the West is uniquely malignant, the ultimate source of injustice and oppression throughout the world, and Western power and values essentially illegitimate.

Humanities and social sciences teaching has been largely shaped by progressive thinking for generations, though other perspectives were previously tolerated. The metamorphosis of universities into centres of censorship and indoctrination is a more recent development, and with the expansion of higher education it has become politically significant. By over-enlarging the university system, Blair created the constituency that enabled the Corbynites to displace New Labour. No longer mainly a cult of intellectuals, as in Orwell’s time, progressivism has become the unthinking faith of millions of graduates.

When Labour voters switched to Johnson, they were surely moved by moral revulsion as well as their material interests. As polls have attested, they rejected Labour because it had become a party that derided everything they loved. Many referenced Corbyn’s support for regimes and movements that are violently hostile to the West. Some cited anti-Semitism as one of the evils their parents or grandparents had gone to war to defeat. For working class voters, Labour had set itself against patriotism and moral decency. For Corbynites, in the form in which they are held by what is still a majority of British people, these values can only be expressions of false consciousness. Labour’s dilemma is whether it continues to promote progressive orthodoxy or tries to reconnect with its traditional voters.

A possible way forward has been presented in Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour faction. If it is to avoid devastating defeat, the party needs to abandon its anti-Western stance and its hostility to the nation state and treat Brexit as an opportunity rather than a disaster to be mitigated. (It also needs to root out anti-Semitism in its ranks rather than apologise for it.) Spelt out some years ago, Blue Labour’s analysis is extremely prescient, and some leadership candidates are talking vaguely in these terms. But the likelihood of the party changing course on these issues is not high. A Blue Labour takeover along the lines of that mounted by Blair cannot occur when the mass membership recruited by Corbyn is made up overwhelmingly of progressives. Even if a takeover was feasible it is doubtful whether voters would support a programme of moral conservatism, which Blue Labour also proposes. The resistance to progressivism in social matters is focused chiefly on law and order and immigration. There is no detectable enthusiasm for the restoration of traditional family structures or sexual mores. Working-class voters want security and respect, not a wholly different form of life.

***

Liberal or Corbynite, the core of the progressivist cult is the belief that the values that have guided human civilisation to date, especially in the West, need to be junked. A new kind of society is required, which progressives will devise. They are equipped for this task with scraps of faux-Marxism and hyper-liberalism, from which they have assembled a world-view. They believed a majority of people would submit to their vision and follow them. Instead they have been ignored, while their world-view has melted down into a heap of trash. They retain their position in British institutions, but their self-image as the leaders of society has been badly shaken. It is only to be expected that many should be fixated on conspiracy theories, or otherwise unhinged. The feature of the contemporary scene progressives fail to understand, in the end, is themselves.

Johnson’s dilemma is how to cement his alliance with the working class while the cultural establishment remains wedded to progressivist values. It may be that hegemony is no longer possible for his or any political project. Society may remain fragmented indefinitely, and in some areas unalterably polarised.

Yet with other parties in disarray, there is a clear chance of him occupying a new centre ground. His conservatism is a green-tinged version of a tradition articulated in Lord Randolph Churchill’s concept of Tory Democracy, and before that by Benjamin Disraeli. His ambitious plans for infrastructure and new centres of science and technology allow him to channel the modern faith in a better future. Faced with the possibility of a decade or more of Conservative rule, Britain’s cultural establishment may change its complexion. As well as an identity, progressive views have been a means of advancement in the academy, the arts and broadcast media. With the funding position of cultural institutions under review, the usefulness of progressivism as a career strategy may be about to decline.

Boris Johnson has come to power at a moment of high uncertainty. Progressive theories that claimed to divine the future have proved as trustworthy as Roman auguries. Gramsci’s belief that the working class makes history has turned out to be right, at least in Britain, but not in the way he and his disciples imagined. Somewhere in the heavens, the gods are laughing.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/01/why-left-keeps-losing

Working-class Labour supporters who turned to Johnson after a decade of Conservative austerity did so, in part, because they perceived him as a different kind of Conservative. A spate of closed factories and bankrupt farmers could discredit this perception.

William Murderface wrote:Ma ovo je bre ćirjakovisanje 1/1. Čovek koji je podržavao šampione neoliba, sad objašnjava kako je problem u (((progresivistima))) na univerzitetima. More, mrš!

KinderLad wrote:Dobro, New Statesman je vec neko vreme "Blue(ish) Labour". 

Recimo ovo

Working-class Labour supporters who turned to Johnson after a decade of Conservative austerity did so, in part, because they perceived him as a different kind of Conservative. A spate of closed factories and bankrupt farmers could discredit this perception.

Ja sam prilicno ubedjen da su se okrenuli njemu skoro iskljucivo iz Brexit razloga. Plus iz neprijateljstva prema tom kulturalnom, metropolitan progresivizmu (al tu treba biti oprezan, UK nije isto sto i US).

zvezda je zivot wrote:

KinderLad wrote:Dobro, New Statesman je vec neko vreme "Blue(ish) Labour". 

Recimo ovo



Ja sam prilicno ubedjen da su se okrenuli njemu skoro iskljucivo iz Brexit razloga. Plus iz neprijateljstva prema tom kulturalnom, metropolitan progresivizmu (al tu treba biti oprezan, UK nije isto sto i US).

nije da pratim nesto pazljivo, tako da moguce gresim, ali kolko ja vidim analize kazu da: 1) to je kontinuirani proces koji traje od blera (i koji je nepovratan u partiji pola mejsona i kiarostamija) ali je ubrzan 2) time sto je korbin ispao neprincipijelni politicar a bodzo cuvar narodske volje, mada je 3) vecina nije otisla dzonsonu nego u apstinenciju.

dr. Labrador Špegelj wrote:Nije neistina da je dobar deo tzv. tradicionalnih Labour glasača, posebno na severu, go ksenofobni rasistički seljačina.

KinderLad wrote:Dobro, New Statesman je vec neko vreme "Blue(ish) Labour". 

Recimo ovo

Working-class Labour supporters who turned to Johnson after a decade of Conservative austerity did so, in part, because they perceived him as a different kind of Conservative. A spate of closed factories and bankrupt farmers could discredit this perception.

Ja sam prilicno ubedjen da su se okrenuli njemu skoro iskljucivo iz Brexit razloga. Plus iz neprijateljstva prema tom kulturalnom, metropolitan progresivizmu (al tu treba biti oprezan, UK nije isto sto i US). 

Drugo, zemlja je de facto podeljena. Isti je procenat za taj novi konzervativizam i progresivizam (kad se saberu svi glasovi za jedne i druge). Problem je kako osvojiti centre ground a ne izgubiti levicu (ili obrnuto). Ono sto bi autor hteo je da Labour usvoji "nacionalniju" struju, ali tu postoji 1 catch - samo po sebi to nije problem, nego je problem sto to koliko je neko "nacionalan" se meri po skali koju odredjuju Torijevci ili desnica genealno. Moze se biti "nacionalan" na vise nacina. Jer ako sad krenu da se takmice sa Torijevcima u kripto-rasizmu (cega je Brexit apsolutno bio vehicle) to se nece dobro zavrsiti. Komunisti kad negde dodju na vlast oni su definitivno "nacionalni", u smislu drzavni (jer to je u Engleskoj ili UK jedno te isto) - ali na potpuno drugi nacin nego desnica. 

Hard Brexit ce imati svoje ekonomske posledice. Ne katastrofalne kao sto neki najavljuju, ali ce ih biti dovoljno u narednih 5 godina. Torijevci ce to gledati da pokriju onako kako svaka desnica to pokriva - krivi su stranci i prog/liberalni izdajnici. Sta je odgovor Labour na to - "krivi su stranci i liberali, ali ne malo manje"?

William Murderface wrote:

KinderLad wrote:Dobro, New Statesman je vec neko vreme "Blue(ish) Labour". 

Recimo ovo



Ja sam prilicno ubedjen da su se okrenuli njemu skoro iskljucivo iz Brexit razloga. Plus iz neprijateljstva prema tom kulturalnom, metropolitan progresivizmu (al tu treba biti oprezan, UK nije isto sto i US). 

Drugo, zemlja je de facto podeljena. Isti je procenat za taj novi konzervativizam i progresivizam (kad se saberu svi glasovi za jedne i druge). Problem je kako osvojiti centre ground a ne izgubiti levicu (ili obrnuto). Ono sto bi autor hteo je da Labour usvoji "nacionalniju" struju, ali tu postoji 1 catch - samo po sebi to nije problem, nego je problem sto to koliko je neko "nacionalan" se meri po skali koju odredjuju Torijevci ili desnica genealno. Moze se biti "nacionalan" na vise nacina. Jer ako sad krenu da se takmice sa Torijevcima u kripto-rasizmu (cega je Brexit apsolutno bio vehicle) to se nece dobro zavrsiti. Komunisti kad negde dodju na vlast oni su definitivno "nacionalni", u smislu drzavni (jer to je u Engleskoj ili UK jedno te isto) - ali na potpuno drugi nacin nego desnica. 

Hard Brexit ce imati svoje ekonomske posledice. Ne katastrofalne kao sto neki najavljuju, ali ce ih biti dovoljno u narednih 5 godina. Torijevci ce to gledati da pokriju onako kako svaka desnica to pokriva - krivi su stranci i prog/liberalni izdajnici. Sta je odgovor Labour na to - "krivi su stranci i liberali, ali ne malo manje"?

Pazi, petlja ovog teksta je u onom delu o Škotskoj i Severnoj Irskoj. Na ovim izborima je najpatriotskije, u smislu suvereniteta UK, nastupao - Korbin. Džonson je taj koji je, zajedno sa dobrim delom brexitera, prezrivo odšmrknuo na pretnju Škotskog otcepljenja i potencijalnog ujedinjenja Severne Irske. Uostalom, čitali smo one ankete - zapuca im za Škostku za NI, jedino im ne zapuca za Korbinov nedolazak na vlast, samo im je to bitnije od Brexita. I zato grej mora da se upinje da dokaže kako od raspada UK nema ništa - problem je samo što mu je argument izuzetno neuverljiv. Čuli smo ga hiljadu puta - nije racionalno za Škotsku da napusti UK. Pa da kao što nije bilo racionalno za UK da napusti EU, pa se to desilo. Povučeš ovu petlju i razniže se ceo tekst.

Let us know if you find a Brexit coin this week!
Around 3 million will enter banks, Post Offices & shops from Friday 31.
They bear the words ‘Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations’.https://t.co/pvRnXik659 pic.twitter.com/SshJ2H2CAm

— HM Treasury (@hmtreasury) January 26, 2020

Britain allows Huawei limited role in 5G networks

Scottish Parliament has voted in favour of holding another independence referendum. But this does not mean it will happen. Still needs agreement from Westminster. They've also voted to keep the EU flag flying outside Holyrood after Brexit. This will happen.

— sarah smith (@BBCsarahsmith) January 29, 2020

As #Brexit day approaches, in their jubilation Brexiteers are suddenly talking again about exporting Brexit and dismantling the whole EU.

This should be taken serious. If it starts to inform the Tory approch to Europe, EU-UK partnership will become even more difficult. pic.twitter.com/9iYDUWok0Z

— Nicolai von Ondarza (@NvOndarza) January 30, 2020