Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/25/jezzer-at-glasto.html
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This is what he’s always been best at. The scripted stuff not so much but a reality doesn’t exist where you can imagine chairman may doing this.
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Mr. Corbyn is a fine fellow, but demographics are not destiny. The idea that voters are automata programmed by their age, race, religion, work, education, and so on has failed before and will fail again, attractive as it is to the touts of political horseraces.
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Isn’t that what he’s just proved to the Tories and looks to be about to prove again, once their horrible shitshow comes off the rails for the third and final time since the Brexit vote?
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The Brits are ahead of the US, again.
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Corbyn’s Energy in a Field in Pilton
The burning flats, the awful DUP
Dacre and Murdoch striving to be master
And Leadsom threatening the BBC
The paths of Tory lead but to disaster
Can spinning Raab or furthest right Patel
Fill Randian platitudes with exciting breath?
Revive the Party? Can they really? Hell,
Most of their members are too close to death.
And that is why it’s me here on this stage
Telling the young it’s time for them to rise
Engagement beats senescent noisy rage
The tortoise yet may steal Theresa’s prize.
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If someone had told me a year ago that Corbyn would:
- See off every attempt to replace him as party leader
- Overcome a 20-point deficit in the polls to push Westminster into a hung parliament
- Be polling ahead of May as “best prime minister”
- And that he’s be addressing a crowd of enthusiastic supporters at the Glastonbury festival
I’d have dismissed it as ridiculously over-optimistic. What a difference some time makes.
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One of the reasons Clinton lost in the US was because of her (and her allies’) fixation on Identity politics at the expense of class and economic issues. An incredible 53% of White women voted for the boorish buffoon running against her. Corbyn does not seem to be making a similar mistake in spite of your encouragement.
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Huh. I read your comment as saying that he is making a similar mistake (in this case, by appealing to what’s commonly called “the youth vote”).
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Um, no. Trump was the one who overwhelmingly (and successfully) played the identity politics card.
As the analysis linked below puts it, “Trump’s win should rightly be understood as the triumph of white identity politics. And the data supports this conclusion.”
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Isn’t Corbyn more like Sanders than Clinton?
The hyperfocus on identity politics to cover up the deliberate ignoring of the working classes needs is Third Way rather than the social democracy (and Jeremy Corbyn isn’t as left wing as most of the UK press claim). Not that this means that identity politics should be ignored, unless your goal is to create a new underclass.
I just want a government that helps the disabled rather than telling us “fuck you, I’ve got mine”. Maybe Corbyn can deliver on that for the first time in my nearly 40 years of life. I know the Tories and the third way labour supporters won’t.
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It would seem you don’t understand British politics.
Labour was losing because Blair and Brown did not enthuse the younger voters, and the media encouraged them to believe they could make no difference to things.
Corbyn got a grassroots movement going to re-engage the under-45 bracket. It succeeded. If he can get them back to historic high levels, he will achieve a minority government supported by SNP, PC and the Lib Dems. If, as Heseltine suggests, there is a demographic shift away from the Conservatives, every year that passes increases his chance of a majority. He just needs to do two things: provide visible opposition and keep the youngest half of the country voting.
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You are making my point for me. By 2016, the Democratic Party had focused on Identity politics for decades in order to avoid class and economic issues and thus serve the interests of its upper-class leadership. But the major Identity in the US is what I would call the White Man (although many women seem to adhere to it). So the result of stirring up Identity was to hand millions and millions of votes to the other party. Not because of issues of equity, like the Civil Rights movement, but as a mode of exploiting minorities.
Additionally, there is probably no weaker Identity than ‘young people’. For one thing, they all get old. But more importantly, they are not at all demographic automata. In the US, the young people of the 1960s were supposed to carry their radicalism forward into national politics and conquer all. Instead, we got the Me Generation followed by Ronald Reagan, Bush I, the Clintonian triangulation, Bush II, Bush ii Lite, and now the ultimate right-wing buffoon of Trump as the crown of the Boomers’ political career. What a record!
I sure hope for better from Corbyn and company.
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Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!
Have you looked at the last Labour party manifesto?
http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/manifesto2017
I think that class and economic issues are prominent in it.
http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/manifesto2017/economy
http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/manifesto2017/fair-deal-at-work
http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/manifesto2017/leading-richer-lives
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Sure. What I’m criticizing is the theory that Corbyn and Labour will be victorious simply because they appeal to a demographic category, a.k.a. ‘Identity’. It’s the Right that knows how to play the tribalism game, it’s their thing. As witness the unfortunate U.S.
In the UK we have just seen Teresa May win an election based on an openly racist and sectarian agenda. Okay, before anyone leaps to her defence, she did not explicitly do this. She promised a reduction of immigration rates to the UK. We have seen NHS nurse recruitments (many from overseas) drop to 6% (not by 6%, but to 6%). There was a strawberry farmer who voted Tory and is facing ruin because the migrant labourers who harvest his crop are not coming. Why is this? Well, I suspect mostly because the Daily Mail, The Daily Express, the Evening Standard, and other papers belonging to overseas owners have interpreted “less immigrants” as “sending the darkies back to the jungle” and “sending Muslims back to Muslim-land”; and to Britain’s shame, there enough Alf Garnetts out there who would vote for this. Does Teresa May actively cooperate in this? She has plausible deniability, but would be silly if she does not. Some deal has been done with her ‘gentleman’ Trump, but we have no details. The bits we know about her policies are not encouraging.
What do we have against Jeremy Corbin? The reports of his plans to remove the Royal family, scrap Trident, disband the army, and hand over the Falklands and Gibraltar have all had no foundation. So one lone writer here re-hashes his objections to Israel’s policy with Palestine (which I am not happy about, and neither are some people in Israel itself) as clear evidence of Corbin’s generic hatred of Jews.
We are a bit new to this sort of thing in the UK, but come of the public is beginning to see how the tricks are done. It’s not magic any longer when you know.
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We clearly reached the point of ‘anything is better than the Tories’ years ago so it is about time someone like Corbyn began to threaten the status quo, but for me, he will forever be damned for standing back (or at best being half-hearted) during the Brexit Leave/Remain campaign.
Only a Mail-reading moron would deny that Brexit, having been voted for, is leading us to greater unemployment, a failing health service, diminished living standards, global political irrelevance and economic disaster. Given that the vote was 48% to 52%, an appeal to younger voters who were overwhelmingly pro-Europe could have swung the Remain campaign and saved us from the cliff edge. Where were his speeches to young people then?
Sure, speeches are great but when one is called to govern then we see that one can’t wish things to happen just because they sounded great as speech slogans. Not in any way defending Tories and their bumbling handling of Brexit (from Cameron to May) here but I can’t help noticing that Corbyn is in that same wishful thinking cloud that will eventually come crashing down should he be elected.
For the record, I’m a 100% remain position in the Brexit trainwreck and do hope it somehow gets reversed.
