I mean, apart from posting Rod Liddle - a genuinely vile piece of shit scumbag - there's also the fact that we have some data on why people didn't vote for Labour in these elections. And it's got nothing to do with "woke".Slick wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 9:36 am I thought this was quite good.
Conservative victory (in Hartlepool) marked the death of the Labour Party both as an effective conduit of opposition and an institution representing the working class. It’s over. It can no longer be either, for structural and demographic reasons that its members do not seem to understand.
I was in paroxysms of laughter listening to a succession of Labour gobmerchants attempt to explain away this debacle. Mandelson, Abbott, Russell-Moyle — all were wrapped up in their bizarre delusions, sniping at the different wings of the party, spraying the blame around, utterly missing the point. The only one who made much sense was John McDonell, who insisted, rightly, that Jeremy Corbyn’s economic policies in 2019 were popular north of the Severn-Trent divide. Nationalise everything, invest, tax the rich and abolish the grouse moors. Good left-wing populism.
I disagree with little of that. It was the other stuff that put off the voters back then — the culture stuff. The fashionable obsession with race and interminable gender complexities; the hatred of the UK and the contempt for those who love their country and believe in a sense of place and belonging; the secularism; the lack of respect for the traditional family.
The problem is that in attempting to make Labour electable once more, Keir Starmer ditched Corbyn’s economic policies, which did have an attraction up here, and kept the stuff everyone hated. Starmer took the knee, for example: that will have lost him several million votes. For a lot of former Labour voters Starmer and Corbyn are, as an old Blue Labour chum put it to me, two cheeks of the same liberal arse. The working class and lower middle, easily the majority of the country, are not liberal.
One Labour supporter, inadvertently, put it rather well. Upon hearing the result from Hartlepool, Jane Gray, a “Starmer superfan”, tweeted: “Yep as expected the working class love a bit of nationalism and racism. Well done Hartlepool, you turkeys. I’ve never been and I never will.” That’s it, summed up. An absolute loathing of the people the party was set up to support but supports no longer, because it regards them as uneducated, racist morons.
This is the intractable problem for Starmer, who seems a decent man, and the party. Look at the council election results over the weekend. Labour did well-ish in affluent cities, especially university cities. If Starmer were to embrace the mores and aspirations of the people his party once represented, all those gains — the only ones the party has experienced recently — would vanish. So would his party membership, which is no longer made up of horny-handed trade unionists but the well-orf, the comfortable, the impeccably right-on.
In fairness, there is a place for a party that espouses these values: utterly woke but not impinging too much upon the salaries of the middle class. It might pull in 18-25 per cent of the vote, maybe even a little more in alliance with the Greens and Lib Dems. But the Labour Party we knew is gone. Gone for good. Those votes are not coming back. When the north feels dissatisfied with the Tories, it will look to the independents for succour, not Labour
"Woke" at 2%.
Actual, genuine issues: Right at the top. People don't really know what Starmer stands for, they don't think Labour are providing a clear agenda, they don't trust Labour on the economy (this one is funny, of course), 8% divided neatly between being too radical and not radical enough, etc...
There's plenty of discussion to be had about where Labour is actually going wrong, how much of it is their fault vs the messaging coming from the Tory media, how much of it is a holdover from the Corbyn days, and so on.
But if anyone starts wanking on about statues, BLM, and wokery, they're just a cunt who's trying to perpetuate the culture war for their own ends.