Fun and games with ballot papers

[Richard Barrett]

There are many Labour folks who will be more than pleased with this result, Skinner & Co for example
they will get the Brexit they have longed for

Nonsense. The "hard Brexit" favoured by the Tories around Johnson is something which nobody in Labour ever wanted (and which nobody voted for either). Are you seriously trying to say that Dennis Skinner et al will be happy at the coming NHS selloff etc.? Your thinking seems quite confused.

[Globaltruth]

Nonsense. The "hard Brexit" favoured by the Tories around Johnson is something which nobody in Labour ever wanted (and which nobody voted for either). Are you seriously trying to say that Dennis Skinner et al will be happy at the coming NHS selloff etc.? Your thinking seems quite confused.

good that the opinion of an elderly retired MP in the East Midlands carries so much weight with both of you. The Tories won in Bolsover.

[vinteuil]

.

... this patronising guff that the next leader "has to be a woman", - "has to be northern" - "has to have been a Leaver".

More important is the ideas. What is the Labour party for? How can it convincingly win to govern well for all the country?

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[MrGongGong]

Either the Labour party was right to embrace environmental concerns or it wasn't. You're obviously not saying it wasn't. So what are you saying? That it should have done so earlier? Many people and indeed pretty much all Corbyn supporters would agree with you there.

It should have done so many many years earlier

Nonsense. The "hard Brexit" favoured by the Tories around Johnson is something which nobody in Labour ever wanted (and which nobody voted for either). Are you seriously trying to say that Dennis Skinner et al will be happy at the coming NHS selloff etc.? Your thinking seems quite confused.

No,I don't think they are happy
BUT the reality of leaving the EU will take away resources and support from those who have the least regardless of who is in power.

What I now see on social media (some of which you share) is lots of folk on the left pointing out the injustice of the FPTP system where we had an election last week with the majority of folks who voted voting for either remain or second vote parties but the result being the opposite. It's a bit late IMV we had a Labour government which did nothing to change this and it didn't seem to feature in the last manifesto (though I might be wrong about that ?).

[Serial_Apologist]

Nonsense. The "hard Brexit" favoured by the Tories around Johnson is something which nobody in Labour ever wanted (and which nobody voted for either). Are you seriously trying to say that Dennis Skinner et al will be happy at the coming NHS selloff etc.? Your thinking seems quite confused.

One thing I do agree with MrGG on is that Labour might benefit from some of the greens' ideas about financing an environentally sustainable system. I'd have to do a bit morr reading up on this - Schumacher's "Small Is Beautiful" is about the limit of my reading on the subject - but one of the endemic problems anyone on the left is going to have to face up to in the public's mind is practicability. Any challenge to the capitalist order of things is going to have to deal with paying for the necessary bulding materials for the housing shortage, to begin with, and the capitalist class worldwide will gang up to demand the highest prices and interest rates for delayed payments. Currency speculation was probably the one thing Stalin was right to execute people for - I jest, of course, but at the same time, if the change is going to really mean investment in production of use values as opposed to for the profitability of competing companies and the benefit of shareholders, the question of how to create a watertight currency rough-and-ready enough in its initial stages to be operable in the circumstances cannot be dodged. Labour under Corbyn and McDonnell was not thinking nearly as far as this, of course; but the one thing they were never really challenged on was their assertion that borrowing at current low rates of interest made the policies timely.

[Richard Barrett]

good that the opinion of an elderly retired MP in the East Midlands carries so much weight with both of you. The Tories won in Bolsover.

Nowhere did either MrGG or I claim that his opinion carries any particular weight. Where do you get that from?

[MrGongGong]

This might interest you Dave





(I tried to make a more nuanced election results map. It runs from blue (100% Conservative) via grey to red (100% non-Conservative, ie Lab + LD + SNP + etc).

The UK is more complex than the bright, bombastic, winner-takes-all maps show. Much of it is literally shades of grey. Obviously this still isn’t nuanced enough: ‘non-Conservative’ is a rather broad category, and I left off Northern Ireland which was just a bright red block given the lack of Tories there!

I was inspired to do this after making a similar map of the EU referendum. Maps of brightly-coloured regions were part of the toxic polarisation of that issue, with whole regions which were only 52:48 one way or the other labelled ‘leave’ or ‘remain’. Reality is again greyer.

With this election, while headlines focus on a massive landslide (which in reality is just over 10% of seats changing hands), the country is a mush of grey. All those complex, fascinating, sometimes-crazy opinions, swirling round, reduced to soundbites and narratives.

The election map didn’t entirely confirm my preconceptions: I was expecting it to be slightly greyer like the referendum one, and was surprised at the intensity of some blues and reds. (The localised bright reds are of course why the Tories needed the fewest votes per seat won.)

But, for deflated liberals, remainers, lovers of the social safety net and those of us simply baffled that anyone could vote for a racist, homophobic, womanising, lying, policy-vacuum fridge-hiding coward, look at how grey that map is and take some small comfort. Unfortunately our electoral and parliamentary system means that that’s enough to ride roughshod over the majority of voters’ wishes, our constitution and more. But at least the views of the UK are a bit more complex than ‘WOO! GET IT DONE BORIS!!’

This will take time, and it will be exhausting, but you’re not alone.

We’ve got this.

Long live shades of grey in politics.)

From Andrew Steele

[zola]

That's an interesting viewpoint. May I take it that a socialist automatically thinks of a social democrat as 'Tory-lite'?

Pretty much. It was Thatcher who, when asked what she considered her greatest achievement, replied Tony Blair.

[Serial_Apologist]

Pretty much. It was Thatcher who, when asked what she considered her greatest achievement, replied Tony Blair.

I thought it was the death of socialism, though I could be wrong? Anyway, it's as near to being tautological as needs be.

[Joseph K]

That's an interesting viewpoint. May I take it that a socialist automatically thinks of a social democrat as 'Tory-lite'?

These terms are bandied about quite a bit and often mean quite different things at different times and places. Compare the conception/perception of 'communism' in the 19th century with that in most the 20th century - originally it wasn't an authoritarian thing at all (although there were anarchists like Bakunin who accurately predicted the rise of a red bureaucracy).

I'd say 'socialist' and 'social-democrat' are overlapping terms. Corbyn is quite a straight-forward Scandinavian Social-Democrat.

Also what is regarded as the political centre has changed over time. Corporation tax was higher for most of Thatcher's time as PM than it was suggested it ought to be moved up to in the recent Labour manifesto, for instance!

This is how far to the right we have moved, so that the 'centre' is actually an extreme position to take.

[muzzer]

I agree that to be in the centre now seems “extreme”, but if this election has proved anything it’s that Britain is conservative with a small c. Overall. Neither old school liberals nor old school socialists are likely to win power. History will look far more kindly on Blair than the last decade has. I fear we are doomed to a future of feudalism. When the chips were down, the right did what it needed to do to stay in power, but the left got tangled up in ideology. The idea that Jeremy Corbyn was ever going to be PM is utter nonsense. Shame it will take Labour a decade to shape up.

[Joseph K]

History will look far more kindly on Blair than the last decade has.

Really? Why? (Just curious). As far as I'm concerned many aspects of his legacy are terrible e.g. Iraq, and he simply didn't do enough to embed the social-democratic aspects of his time as PM. I mean changes to welfare to reduce child poverty were good, but all too easily swept aside. Also tuition fees, privatisation... I think he needs to take his share of the blame for where we find ourselves now...

[Serial_Apologist]

These terms are bandied about quite a bit and often mean quite different things at different times and places. Compare the conception/perception of 'communism' in the 19th century with that in most the 20th century - originally it wasn't an authoritarian thing at all (although there were anarchists like Bakunin who accurately predicted the rise of a red bureaucracy).

Also the term "communism" as applied to the E Bloc, then China and Cuba in the Cold War era, would have been an oxymoron to Lenin, who put its establishment far into the future, after socialism had done away with the money economy. Arguably it's still valid to speak of "primitive communism" as a stage in early human social evolution between hunter-gatherer and feudalism.

I'd say 'socialist' and 'social-democrat' are overlapping terms. Corbyn is quite a straight-forward Scandinavian Social-Democrat.

I would say socialism is any a system of common ownership, whether partial within a capitalist system (eg a co-operative), whereras social democracy refers to the type of system known as mixed economy. One of the original ideas of public ownership was to "prove" companies could operate more efficiently than those in private hands and out-compete them; however the top-down Fabian mini-Stalinist way of running them was to their discredit and undoubtedly was part of their undoing; some of the unions facing mass redundancies in the 1970s and 80s collaborated with the Institute of Workers Control and came up with workers' plans for alternative socially useful environmentally safe products which were claimed to be profitably saleable on the market, and were turned down by the TUC, with the support of the Communist Party by the way, as outside the remit of trade unionism, ie to improve wages and conditions only - and rejected by the Wilson and Callaghan governments, with Tony Benn the only Cabinet member in support . People should remember all this when they talk about wanting "real" labour governments, but it is not of course on the history syllabus. Most of the UK's publicly owned industries and services were taken over as essential infrastructural back-ups to the private sector, having been nationalised in the first place because they were either badly run in private hands or near-bankrupt, and their financial operating criteria were indistinguishable to their workers from private firms, which made them easy ideological targets for the tories and their press - taxpayers' money funding inefficient businesses etc.

Also what is regarded as the political centre has changed over time. Corporation tax was higher for most of Thatcher's time as PM than it was suggested it ought to be moved up to in the recent Labour manifesto, for instance!

This is how far to the right we have moved, so that the 'centre' is actually an extreme position to take.

Quite.

[Serial_Apologist]

Really? Why? (Just curious). As far as I'm concerned many aspects of his legacy are terrible e.g. Iraq, and he simply didn't do enough to embed the social-democratic aspects of his time as PM. I mean changes to welfare to reduce child poverty were good, but all too easily swept aside. Also tuition fees, privatisation... I think he needs to take his share of the blame for where we find ourselves now...

Actually we have to go back further than Blair for the origins of the rot - see my post above.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

History will look far more kindly on Blair than the last decade has.

Given who's going to get to write it now, that's probably true.