Kind of depressing when you see stuff like this and realise that the left really could sweep the board at elections, but a large section insist on their loud pronoun politics, on calling the deportation of foreign-born violent offenders "racist", on "defund the police", open borders, reparations, the Union Jack as a "butcher's apron", UK as "Terf island" etc etc etc. It's like for fucks sake can't we just have decent levels of public investment/well-funded services/some council housing/a modicum of redistribution/public ownership of the utilities/some basic left-ish social democracy pleeeeeeeeeeease.

@johnpmerrick @meadwaj Mentioning the fact that 900k annual net arrivals might be a bit too high = racism 👍

@johnpmerrick @meadwaj Well good luck waiting for the proles to become convinced by full militant Marxist libertarian socialism/communism, I suppose! 😂

Hardened borders is a simple question of political economy and service delivery. 900k net arrivals each year poses a serious public policy challenge and creates crazy pressure on housing, services and labour markets. It’s not a tactic to win over “jingo” or “boorish” proles. Left social democracy should be in favour of a controlled labour supply.

@johnpmerrick @meadwaj Nobody is saying the left was just politically conscious workers at any point. It was politically conscious workers and bourgeois intellectuals. Today it’s the bloated service-sector middle class plus the remnants of public sector trade unionism.

The labour movement was properly embedded into workplaces and communities. The connection hasn’t changed, it has disappeared. I don’t think the evangelising of Frank Owen in a book discounts the fact that there was once a solid working class activist/“organic intellectual” core that was far more representative of British society at large, reflecting its values far more pertinently.

The left had the priggish, detached, urban intellectuals that Orwell moaned about almost hundred years ago, no doubt. But it also had the solid foundation of the Labour movement and its institutions that provided an actual real connection to the working class that has now been lost. It’s not total bollocks at all. Look at the backgrounds of Labour MPs, members, councillors over the years. It’s been thoroughly subjected to progressive embourgeoisement.

If it doesn’t happen, the left continue to lose. It really is that simple. “Hegemony” isn’t achieved by creating a narrow puritanical subculture that aggressively persecutes totally normal opinions and that embodies values and principles that the vast majority of the population think are fucking stupid/dangerous/insane.

@AndyMcCrimmon @meadwaj You don’t think migration and law & order are important to most people? 🫠 One not being relevant to the other is precisely my point: “left wing” economic values and VERY OFTEN NOT paired with “left wing” social positions among the general population.

@drgerke1 @meadwaj I want to completely change the sociology of the left, yes.

@AndyMcCrimmon @meadwaj So people who believe X thing and people who do not believe X thing are not mutually exclusive? Riiiight….

I’m not interested in semantic debates. Ok let’s put it like this: If you selected 1000 British people at random, would you find more shouty blue haired students who thought borders were racist and biological sex wasn’t real, or more people who did not believe those things but thought “the economy is skewed to benefit the rich over ordinary people and this should change.”?

@meadwaj Oh yes I know let’s deconstruct commonly used words that everyone knows the meaning of. That’ll be fun.

Tbh I’m not just advocating this because it’s a good tactic to win over voters (which all the evidence obviously demonstrates that it obviously is). I ACTUALLY BELIEVE that open borders is fucking disastrous, that the police should be well-funded, that foreign violent offenders should be deported, that self-ID gender implications are fucking crackpot insane, and I quite like Britain and British culture - I miss it when I’m gone. I don’t think Churchill = Hitler cos smthg smthg Bengal, or that working class people should pay income tax for “reparations” for crimes committed centuries ago when their ancestors were living 10-to-a-room in slums and working 70 hour weeks for slop. I also want something approaching a socialist/social democratic economy. But if that’s not on offer, I’d still take the “Blue” stuff without the “Labour”, thanks very much. Values matter. Culture matters. Social policy matters.

They shouldn’t be cosplaying anything. They should be normal people with the kind of normal views set out above. But Labour left and Labour right are all extracted from the same class of freaks instead. Common sense positions on social policy stuff DOES NOT EQUAL “populist right”.

@michaeljswalker @meadwaj Precisely.

For the record I am talking about Labour in the UK context. Without PR, anything else is for the birds. I detest the greens and think they would be a disaster for British workers. The WPB is a joke party aimed almost exclusively at constituencies with heavy south Asian presence so that Galloway (a ridiculous, clownish figure) can exploit Biraderi-type bloc votes.

Ofc they do not LITERALLY exist as a person lol. It’s a concept of averages used to represent the obviously true fact that FUCKING SHITLOADS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE think the economy is a rich man’s racket and that migration is too high. We should tax the bosses more to help working people AND males in women’s sport is fucking stupid and batshit mental. Tax the rich and deport foreign sex offenders. It’s really not hard. You can’t just refuse to believe evidence because it doesn’t suit your political preference. It’s not about just selecting the correct policies from a menu. It’s about an entire ethos and vibe and myriad cultural signifiers and semiotics. Nobody reads the manifestos. You have to *embody* the right values.

I literally could not disagree more. It creates the space for Faragism to thrive because the old institutions of the left have become so divorced from their traditional base. I’m not just taking about Corbynites, I’m talking about Starmer too - a North London liberal Remainer progressive to his core, oozing it from every pore, only moving in the Blue Labour-ish direction (somewhat unconvincingly) under the strategic influence of others.

@residentadviser Yeah it’s liberal PMCs and woke loons y Corbyn types - both are totally divorced from the mean.