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Labour Leader: Keir Starmer II

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droodzilla said:
Just to add... you really don't have to look far to find Thatcherism being described as a radical ideology...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/fe...er-Radical-visionary-who-rescued-Britain.html
https://www.ft.com/content/550046ba-a048-11e2-88b6-00144feabdc0
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...-became-the-global-norm-idUSBRE9370WM20130408
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/thatcher-breaks-consensus

And so on... There are also literally millions of words about this stuff in the academic political science literature.

The difficulty some people seem to have in accepting this perfectly illustrates seanm's point that radical ideas from the right are essentially normalised (no matter how bonkers they are), while radical ideas from the left are made out to be weird and an existential threat to "British values" (or whatever).
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Thatcher was just the willing figurehead of course, the theorists were Ridley and Joseph among others who plotted the course, taking up the monetarist theory of Friedman...
 
gavreid said:
not contemporaneously so much, but certainly retrospectively, it even has a wikipedia entry. It was used much earlier with regard to American groups on the right.
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I guess that ideas once seen as 'radical' (eg about climate change) might become mainstream, at which point opposition to such ideas becomes radical in turn. But ask 100 people to name a radical politician, and I'd be surprised if even one of them replied 'Thatcher'.
 
Tony L said:
Believe me I am. I’m very disappointed with him so far, but in fairness I am always disappointed with Labour! Given a party as small as the Greens can find a Caroline Lucas, the SNP a Nicola Sturgeon, and the Lib Dems totally fail to recognise the one they have (Layla Moran), I don’t understand why Labour is always such a vacuum. I honestly don’t know what the party is for anymore. It should be a powerful highly focused progressive opposition to the most destructive and hard right-wing government in my lifetime, but it is just crap. Bland, cowardly fence-sitting crap. It’s been crap since Blair waddled into Iraq with George Bush, they’ve just discovered a whole new range of banal focus-group-neutered crapness since then! Just shoot it in the head and let the Greens grow into the opposition!

PS FWIW I quite liked Ed Milliband!
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My position exactly. For all its faults, at least the 2017 manifesto stood for something unambiguous. The Labour Party has a rotten core that I feel very uncomfortable supporting. The Greens don't offer a realistic option for me. Lucas is brilliant, but in my experience at a local level they're run by worthy but useless people who can't even deliver information to someone asking to join them. Layla Moran was too quiet on education, very difficult to see where she stood on academies for example. Ed Davey's voting record suggests he is someone well on the wrong side of arguments about welfare, privatisation, health and education.

Mind you, is there anyone out there who is making arguments for welfare, health and education, and against more privatisation? Arguments with racist undertones about Immigration seem to have the most cut through at the moment. Quite depressing
 
droodzilla said:
Yup. Often used to describe Thatcher's demolition job on the post-war political consensus. And not just by left-wing commentators.

Like I said in my earlier post, Johnson's pursuit of Brexit is equally radical: it sacrifices economic prosperity and the interests of big business (Conservative Party donors) to the demands of nationalistic, socially conservative voters with the explicit aim of forging a new electoral coalition that breaks the old pattern (the concept of "the red wall"). The Conservatives have dreamt of harnessing the social conservativism of "traditional" (code for "white") working class voters for a long time, and Brexit might have given them the perfect tool for the job.

So yeah, that's plenty radical enough for me. And that's before you even get to the itensifying scapegoating of immigrants, minorities, and the endless bullshit culture wars that will need to be unleashed to distract people, as their economic conditions deteriorate.

I guess Starmer's calculation is that people will yearn for "normality" once the wrecking is over, and will flock to Labour in gratitude. I'm not entirely convinced, but it's certainly plausible. The real question, of course, is what would a Starmer government do with its power (how do you reverse the seemingly inexorable slide of the UK to the far-right?).
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My point is that Brexit is less radical and more a return to the core values of Conservatism by keeping Johhny Foreigner at arm's length. Nothing to get worked up about.
 
Woodface said:
It is often quite simple policies that make the biggest difference, e.g. the minimum wage which wouldn’t have happened under the Tories. The beauty of this is that it can be increased over time.

I think Sean makes a good point about how Labour can come across as quite patronising to the working class (to be fair he used the patronage). I felt this was the case with Corbyn, always came across as very affected but I have a very low tolerance of this, a bit like poverty tourism.

Obviously the above applies equally to the Tories but I don’t really care about them.
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I disagree about the minimum wage, it defined a minimum and therefore a race to the bottom, usurping collective bargaining, which was very much the intention. That's why wages (pensions and conditions) in the UK are so poor relative to much of Europe. Many argued that this would be the case at the time. Indeed, it would have been far more beneficial to have repealed the Tory anti-union legislation. The big employers were 'laughing all the way to the Leeds' as we used to say ;)

 
Tony L said:
Indeed. It is well documented Conservative Party tradition (Wikipedia).
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It is but it was a minority one - the Eurosceptics were a noisy nuisance to the Tories. It was really Goldsmith forming the referendum party in 97 that acted as the catyalyst of a more 'radical' Tory position - and the rest is history
 
droodzilla said:
The difficulty some people seem to have in accepting this perfectly illustrates seanm's point that radical ideas from the right are essentially normalised (no matter how mad,bad and dangerous they are), while radical ideas from the left are made out to be weird and an existential threat to "British values" (or whatever).
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The validity of this explanation is down to whether you believe "everyone is a bit more left wing if only they knew it and weren't so easily influenced" or that the UK population are simply more 'Right Wing'.
 
Seeker_UK said:
The validity of this explanation is down to whether you believe "everyone is a bit more left wing if only they knew it and weren't so easily influenced" or that the UK population are simply more 'Right Wing'.
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The annual British Social Attitudes Survey is always a good source - here's the 2019 full report. The section on poverty and inequality is important. It goes some way to explain the popularity of Labour's core policies. There's a detailed section too on the EU which is also interesting - the big take home is the growth of nationalism, especially people seeing themselves as English rather than British (Table 10 p187) and authoritarian attitudes towards immigration. There's been quite a growth in the naive view that Britain's importance on the world stage will increase post-Brexit. That, I think, is the Tories weak spot and where Starmer must be very vocal around the trade negotiations so that he is able offer an alternative as things unravel for the Tory fantasists - as I have said previously.

https://bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39363/bsa_36.pdf
 
Here's a very timely new book out next week - "The truth is we face a fork-in-the-road every day of our lives."

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...-capitalism-isnt-working-heres-an-alternative
 
droodzilla said:
Like I said in my earlier post, Johnson's pursuit of Brexit is equally radical: it sacrifices economic prosperity and the interests of big business (Conservative Party donors) to the demands of nationalistic, socially conservative voters with the explicit aim of forging a new electoral coalition that breaks the old pattern (the concept of "the red wall"). The Conservatives have dreamt of harnessing the social conservativism of "traditional" (code for "white") working class voters for a long time, and Brexit might have given them the perfect tool for the job..
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Was Michael Foot's pursuit of Brexit equally radical?
 
Joe Hutch said:
Was Michael Foot's pursuit of Brexit equally radical?
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To some extent, yes. But less so than it is today because the fate of the UK economy was not so entwined with the EU back then. A better example is Foot's position on nuclear weapons which went completely against the grain of UK post-war history, and its self-image as a mighty imperial power. It's clearly radical to suggest we might be better off, and saner, without them. I mean...

https://twitter.com/itvnews/status/1196914809167581186?lang=en

Like the interviewer says, a brilliant, short answer.
 
droodzilla said:
To some extent, yes. But less so than it is today because the fate of the UK economy was not so entwined with the EU back then. A better example is Foot's position on nuclear weapons which went completely against the grain of UK post-war history, and its self-image as a mighty imperial power. It's clearly radical to suggest we might be better off, and saner, without them.
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But for the blooming Falklands war, the 80s might have been entirely different ;)
 
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