1/ I think we need a centre-left populism. I think it should be aimed at the tax-dodging rich and the Tory elite. Rich bastards screwing hard-working honest taxpayers. Link that with Tory corruption and I think you've got something.
2/ An attack on the alliance of the Tory elite and the tax-dodging rich can pull in support from the Left and from the middle class and from decent tax-paying businesses. It's an attack on a very small venal, corrupt and cheating elite that is screwing the rest of us.
3/ I see deindustrialisation as having destroyed 20th century class politics. It's created a fragmented and disorientated populace open to manipulation by a very small coherent and well-financed elite.
4/ But the very existence of such a small and manipulative controlling elite also opens the door to it being targeted as a parasitic entity manipulating and feeding off the body politic. And that's a very populist way of looking at politics. And that's what I advocate.
5/ This tactic of targeting the Tory kleptocratic elite is very different from the normal centre and left party strategy of putting forward rafts of policies. I think that kind of strategy is defunct for the moment, and that we need to take a leaf from the populist book.
6/ I think the idea that advancing the right set of policies will attract working class Tory voters is why mistaken. The kind of politics at play now is emotive, tribal and sloganistic. We must redefine the tribe of the 'people' to exclude the Tory kleptocratic elite.
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1/ Working class support for the Tories isn't just due to disorientated people in a fragmented society clinging onto tribal nationalism.
It's also because economic stagnation makes economics and politics seem like a zero sum struggle for resources between social groups.
2/ Economic and social change has disrupted the white working class more than any other large social group. They feel that as natives they deserve preferential treatment, and feel that the liberal-left focus on minorities betrays them.
3/ So identification with the bogus security and solidarity of tribal nationalism is augmented by a bitter white nativist resentment against a progressive politics that they believe puts them at the back of the queue.
English nationalism is built around the denial of the pain, loss and humiliation of loosing the empire, and around delusions of regaining that past glory. Only through acceptance of the humiliation of imperial collapse can England move to a positive & realistic national identity.
The world's largest ever empire collapsed in just 20 years. It was a huge loss of status for those who care about such things, and the humiliating reality was covered up by the myth of a gracious withdrawal.
1/ Social change, especially deindustrialisation has shattered the working and middle classes as political forces. Now we are left with a fragmented mass, part of which is hoodwinked by the nationalist drivel of the manipulative kleptocratic Tory elite. The rest is us.
2/ The part of the electorate which has not been hoodwinked by Tory Brexit nationalism does not constitute a coherent economic or social grouping. And it seems unlikely that it will let itself be drawn into some kind of bogus flag-waving unity.
3/ With such a disparate electoral base the opposition to Tory English nationalism has to be based not an a fake and unworkable idea of unity, but on the acceptance of difference and on the politics of cooperation and compromise.
1/ YouGov poll- Working Class Voters
- Conservatives 48%
- Labour 29
A short thread discussing reasons for this.
1) Deindustrialisation has disrupted working class communities far more than it has impacted the middle class.
2/ Deindustrialisation has largely destroyed the economic structures that underpinned working class communities and their social and political organisations. The sense of being part of a powerful social, trade union and Labour movement has largely gone.
3/ In quite a few working class areas a large influx of migrants has transformed areas already afflicted by deindustrialisation. Communities where people grew up have vanished. The familiar has become unfamiliar and strange.
Keir Starmer’s most senior adviser, Claire Ainsley, is a white, middle class genocide denier and ex member of the SWP, who thinks Labour should engage with working class voters through abstracts like “faith, flag and family”. jodatu.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/why…
Former RCP Trotskyite Munira Mirza is in Number 10 and set up the race report commission, while Corbyn had Stalinist Milne as his right hand man. Maybe our politics could be improved by expelling these creepy spawn of the authoritarian left from their positions of influence.
The authoritarian left may hate fascists, but what they really hate is exactly the same liberal metropolitan elite that the hard right detest, and that's because they see bourgeois democracy as standing between them and power.
Sometimes I think the Tory Brexiters have a calculated plan to turn the UK into a tax haven, but at other times they look like a bunch of petulant and deluded idiots who think the UK is a superpower and the rules don't apply to them.
I can't resist some cod psychology. Some Brexiters strike me as people who are venting displaced and long-suppressed adolescent rage against authoritarian parents - the EU standing in the place of the parents, who as children they dared not challenge.