I was talking once with the previous MP for our constituency - a Conservative in the wrong party - and he said that MPs tend to work on the rule that if they receive a genuine letter - i.e. not a cut and paste job from a pressure group - about something, that one letter can represent up to 1000 actual voters. Six real letters and the subject needs to be looked at seriously. The fact that the effort of writing a letter, addressing an envelope, putting on a stamp and posting it is so significant tells you how mentally idle and unengaged are 99% or more of the population when it comes to politics.
People were prepared to pay £25 to support Corbyn; it is reasonable to assume that an awful lot more will be prepared to support him for free. Saying that it’s “only half a million votes on an island with over 50 million people” isn’t meaningful.
Labour may well lose the next election. They lost the election after and despite the first disastrous years of Thatcherism, with people influenced by the Falklands War who had no idea how cluelessly it had come about and been waged. But that doesn’t mean your argument isn’t bunk.
I really hope you don’t mean what you seem to be saying, because if so it’s such an over the top exaggeration that even Lord Mandelson might feel uncomfortable about using it.
Miliband had already shifted Labour leftwards from Blair, and all that managed to do was further distance themselves from the voters. This wasn’t all down to policy of course, he might have done better if he had correctly installed his personality upgrade chip prior to the election.
I actually do mean it. I know this is very upsetting to English people, I have been screamed at for suggesting it, but to those with knowledge of German history–the Daily Mail headlines (as well as the Morning Stars unfortunately) are a real sense of deja vue.
I am not suggesting that history will repeat itself–The English are not as organised or thorough or determined or principled as the Germans. Much more the pragmatists.
But if you study contemporary accounts of Germans in the late 20s or early 30s you will discover that to the vast majority of common people the persecution of the Jews and other undesirables was incidental to the “looking after your own”. Hitler was very much a Socialist. He invested heavily not only in built infrastructure but in education and welfare provision for the masses–people had holidays, German Mothers were honoured and and and. They just didn’t want to share those provisions with undesirable others.
To clarify, I am writing this as a Hungarian Jew–whose family was eradicated by Hungarian fascists, who has a German passport, studied German history and am now living in England as an EU immigrant. The way I feel here in the middle of London (I practically live in the City), the way I am made to feel after 16 years of raising my kids here, has significantly changed. I feel less welcome and I think twice about whether or not to speak Hungarian or German on the bus. I have actually been shouted at for speaking Hungarian on a London bus.
So yes, I do mean what I am writing, while at the same time I also hope that the English (and for that matter the Americans in November) are far wiser than the Germans were.
The only concrete step for self-determination, the 2014 referendum, only went ahead because the Conservative government agreed to it. Any referendum without the support of UK Government would have had no legal standing.
wasn’t this mostly the influence of Röhm? from what I remember of my history classes Hitler used the examples you mentioned mostly from a populist PoV, not because he really believed in them
the initial NSDAP platform included socialistic elements (like a land reform) but those were dropped rather fast, and Röhm killed in an alleged coup as early as 1934.
yeah, the nazi party as it was founded was definitely heavily socialist, but Hitler wasn’t one of them, and he had most of them killed in the night of the long knives. nojaboja’s broader point is right though, nazism was definitely a development that grew out of socialism, it just also developed out of the german romantic tradition, the voelkisch ideology, so it was somewhat distinct from broader marxism internationally speaking, but that distinction was only solidified after Hitler consolidated his power.
I am not an expert on Hitler, and I certainly would’t want to second guess what he believed in but given that his formative years were spent in 1920s Vienna and Munich, both hotbeds of socialism (the real Räterepublik kind) Soviets and all, it wouldn’t be surprising if he had adopted socialist ideas.
It’s worth reading Brigitte Hamann’s Hitler’s Vienna, her incredible in depth study is probably as close as we will ever get to getting a sense of what formed Hitler’s thinking and socialism / communism was definitely among those things.
Not in my experience. In my experience the reason for the disillusionment of the Welsh and Scottish with Labour is “colonialism” and centrism. English Labour treating those outposts as fiefdoms hasn’t endeared them to the local Labour constituency.
Yep. But that’s what happens to imperial overlords. The plebs abandon ship as soon as they can.
But “was very much a Socialist” and “adopted socialist ideas” are different : P
The DAP was the precursor of the NSDAP and founded around the time of the German soviet republics - and as I said before the NSDAP platform used socialist demands. But I am not convinced that Hitler could be called a captial-S socialist, and this seems to be the consensus considering the citations in relevant WP articles.
eta: link fix @codinghorror, why does Discourse sometimes try to replace underscores in URLs with an <em>?
I am extremely sad to hear that, but I completely disagree about Hitler. His technique was to grab any bits of ideology, any political slogans that might gain him power, and to work with any group that might do that till they ceased to be useful - when he turned on them. The biggest arguments against any kind of consistent socialism in Hitler’s ideology were the support of Hindenburg and his followers in 1933; his funding by Thyssen; the abolition of trade unions; the anti-communist Concordat with the Pope. I could go on and at considerable length*, but the claim that Hitler was in some way socialist is a calumny that has been used repeatedly against socialism. A right wing takeover attempt of the UK is much more likely to come from UKIP, funded by people like Arron Banks. After my own experience in a restaurant on Sunday when I made the mistake of mentioning my concerns about the future of my children to a UKIP supporter, I know who worries me most. Getting a Hitler salute and “We won, you lost” isn’t very entertaining.
*Have you read Golo Mann’s book “The history of Germany since 1789”? I am assuming you are familiar with Schirer, since everybody I know seems to have read him.
You are right, apologies for my sloppy phasing. I meant to write that the NSDAP was very much a Socialist party and Hitler used Socialism to win over the populace.
What Hitler was or wasn’t is beside the point. The important bit is that Nationalism, in my view, is dangerous no matter whether it is paired with socialism or capitalism. But then again, I am an Internationalist through and through, as of course were Marx and the early communists.
what would you expect the labour party to do in the Syrian refugee crisis?
And its silly to slag off Corbyn and then cite Jo Cox’s murder. I think Corbyn has an alibi and I dont think the killer was a left wing labour supporter.
For what little its worth, Corbyn is an internationalist and was supportive or immigrants from all over the world. However I think he would like a set of policies to the left of the consensus among European democratic socialist parties, which generally are not in power in Europe.
Amongst the southern public, maybe. I can tell you that anywhere north of Birmingham, that Thatcher/Blair combo tops the list of most hated PMs ever.
It’s not just Iraq. It’s PFI, workfare, and the privatize-everything mantra. The NHS under Blair continued the trend towards privatization by stealth that the Tories spearheaded and continued after Blair. And this while Blair was effectively braked by the internal Brownite faction fostering unrest from the left. Brown then committed suicide when he failed to take the chance of a systemic financial failure for meaningful social reforms, instead burdening public finances to save the banks. After that, New Labour was (and is) completely out of ideas; had they survived in 2010, they would have likely followed a policy not very different from what Osborne and Cameron enacted. There is nothing left to capitalize on - Blair hemorrhaged votes left right and center, losing 2 million votes at every election since 1997, when Tories were so discredited that a horse could have won against them. “Red” Ed Miliband could barely get himself to commit to rail renationalisation (about 5 years too late and many pounds short) while effectively sanctioning savage welfare cuts. There is nothing left in blairism that can help us through the XXI century, a time that requires drastic action, not triangulating moderation - something even Cameron found out.
This is a relevant article re anti-semitism in the Labour party:
They’re basically sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending nothing is wrong, claiming that the accusations of anti-semitism are dishonest smears, and then they go on to spout various conspiracy theories and say the jews should be kicked out of the labour party!
I am beginning to wonder if your comments on the national + socialist thing are actually driving trollies. You do know, don’t you, that overall between Labour on one side and Conservatives/UKIP on the other, the voting pattern of the referendum was almost exactly reversed, i.e. Labour approx 2/3 remain, the others approx 2/3 Leave?
A significant proportion of pro-Leave voters seem, from opinion polls, to have voted with the belief that this would attack Cameron and Osborne; which it did, it got them out of power. The actual number of Labour voters who voted Leave for nationalistic reasons must be assumed to be rather small.
That might be, but Mussolini (which he admittedly studied) was undeniably a card-carrying socialist - until he found it more effective to build bridges with the owning classes. Regardless, socialism was on the rise everywhere back then, and extremely fashionable even among elites; it permeated the political discourse pretty much on all sides, as the only solution to the hereditary social pyramid that was, by then, widely discredited.
This is all academical anyway. Things are not great but 2016 UK is nothing like 1916 Germany. Shit can happen anywhere at very short notice (and boy, did the racists take Brexit as a license to come out of their stinky closet), but I don’t see masses of people fighting in the streets every day for weeks and months like it happens in pre-revolutionary periods, nor millions of unemployed war veterans with a grudge, nor a foreign army that current elites would love to surrender to. I personally don’t think the “diversification” of Britain can be reverted at this point, although the air has definitely become a bit more chilling; but it was much worse in the '80s, in my experience.
This all started because @nojaboja suggested that 2016 UK is like 1930s Germany, and by inference that Corbyn is like Hitler. In the 1930s my father and his friends were throwing half bricks at fascists trying to force their way into Jewish areas of London. I really think there’s some serious exaggeration going on here.
And the 70s and the 60s. I expect the 50s were worse but I didn’t notice, being too busy learning Imperial units in primary school.
My Cambridge college didn’t even go co-ed till after I left. But then the school my American nephews went to wasn’t even desegregated till 1974.
Since that resulted in a remain vote, it wasn’t much of a step towards self-determination, was it? Whereas the establishment of a Scottish parliament with significant legislative power seems to me to be an actual step towards self-determination both conceptually and in realised form.
