Thread: 1/10 Who is to blame for the loss of safe Labour seats in the North? Tony Blair & New Labour. Through all the social and economic devastation of the 80s & 90s those seats kept faith with Labour, hoping that the eventual election of a Labour govt
2/10 would rectify matters. What we got instead was more of the same Thatcherite policies with the North left to rot while Blair, Campbell & Co courted their new friends in the South. Labour become associated exclusively with minority causes & identity politics.
3/10 It's not that those things aren't important, it's that Labour allowed itself to be painted as sympathetic to every cause on the planet but that of the white working class. If you think that sounds like a racist assessment, congratulations, you're part of the problem,
4/10 part of the reason why an entitled toff born with a silver spoon in his mouth and who's never done a day's work in his life, who labels working class men as lazy, dunken chavs, has been allowed to paint himself as the champion of ordinary working class men & women.
5/10 He's occupied space that should never have been vacant in the first place if Labour had been doing its job. Now we have a hard-right Govt recruiting far-right supporters & supported by 95% of the media. Yes, including the @BBC. Their pitiful attempt to claim innocence
6/10 post-election has been one of the least edifying exhibitions of hypocrisy I've ever seen in my decades of following UK politics. The likes of Huw Edwards & Gary Linekar chime in like the last claims of innocence from the condemned cell.
7/10 Oh, and if you're waiting for things to revert to normal at the next election after Johnson hammers the North, think again. The cultural ties of industry, Trade Union, & social club have disappeared. We have a media that treats truth & lies as equals & a Govt
8/10 which has no qualms about exploiting that. As bad as things got in the 80s Labour held its heartlands and so had a springboard to return to Govt. This time the idea that simply electing some moderate Blairite or a
9/10 bluff talking working class woman will save the day is fantasy land. Think generational. The popularity of Labour amongst the climate-aware young is the one positive of the defeat. The next Labour PM, if there's to be one at all, will probably come from their ranks,
10/10 not from the reheated corpse of Old Labour, New Labour, or Fantasy Politics Labour.
Studs Terkel:
Studs Terkel:
