…and “sovereignty” could de described as a kind on nationalism, with a bit off imperialism thrown in for good measure (the way pro EU Nicola Sturgeon has been referred to).
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I don’t have any proof, or even a logical argument, but I do get the impression that everyone who’s likely to vote for Corbyn as a prime minister has just voted for him as leader of the Labour party.
Still, I’m sure at least half the country have been thoroughly enjoying watching the Labour party turn itself into a laughing stock, just when the UK needed a decent opposition party.
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Thank you @toyg @caze and all for willingness to engage in an open minded discussion. This is the kind of future I want. Online, in the pub, on the bus, in front of the school gate, people having differing views and exchanging them. To me atm things are feeling like they might slide towards a slippery slope. The question is how slippery–but I am a pessimist, not much else to expect from a Hungarian.
In terms of following things Brexit from a European Immigrant’s perspective I find the historian Tanja Bültmann among the most informed social media commentators
this is the kind of nationalism I am thinking of
and this is the kind of reality I fear
And @toyg my kid was also asked to supply immigration status and dates at her new secondary school, just started year 7. In 16 years of kids in English schools this has never happened before.
I asked why. Answer was swift: because rules. I enrolled her in a different school. Asking kids in Hackney what their immigration status is, is just not on.
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I’m not a member of the Labour Party (yet, I still haven’t decided), and I voted. So why didn’t the other people who aren’t members and want a leader who isn’t Jeremy Corbyn do that too?
I know you won’t have voted Labour either way, but anyone else who wanted Owen Smith, could have voted and didn’t has no one to blame but themselves.
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I have grandchildren at school in London and the discussions that arise at the school gates when we visit are interesting to say the least. Not Hackney but Haringey. I dislike London as a place - despite living in and around it for thirty years - because of the dirt, crowding and visible inequality - but the parents of school age children are lovely and they actually make me feel a bit more optimistic because they are a genuine melting pot - people from all over the Earth getting on together and not making a stupid fuss about headscarves or skin colour. I recognise that it’s part of, let’s be honest, a more advanced civilisation than a lot of the country experiences (goes for NY too) and all such things are fragile. We tend not to get told this at school but history goes back as well as forward.
I guess the only reason I have for optimism is that I’ve been expecting the slippery slope since 1979 and despite everything we’ve kind of bounced back. The basic protection of civil rights in the UK is that our extremists are lazy. People like Farage spout in the saloon bar rather than march at the head of legions. Boris Johnson is a wonderful exemplar; if he tried to run a dictatorship he would out-Mussolini in looking for photo ops. Thatcher, it turns out, got drunk on whisky most nights. Powell kept falling out with whichever right wing group he was supporting at the moment. At the moment I don’t see any charismatic figure on the Right who might do a British Trump. May is a technocrat, like Heath, but British laziness is likely to see off technocrats.
I hope that our immigrants stay here and defend their patches if necessary, because someone has to make things work.
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It’s the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street next Tuesday. I wish I could go to some of the events commemorating it but I doubt I could get there and cope with crowds.
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There was more than one battle against the fascists in London, and Churchill had a list of British people who might have to be interned in a war against Germany, many aristocratic.
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I know, but I thought I would mention the anniversary in case anyone else was interested.
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At least afterwards, Hitler sided with the people who suppressed the Republic and massacred the socialists.
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To translate it to - or, I suppose, from - english, he’s saying “A top-level, better than everyone comedian? That stupid(gormless) guy who only has one bad joke? The one that’s employed at Russia’s Propaganda outlet, RT? I find the idea that he’s better than anyone quite unbelievable. I, and many others in the same profession sincerely disagree with Mr Robbo’s assessment of Tom Walker’s skill and ability.”
That aside, I’m not that harsh on the guy. One (Mostly Ex)comedian to another, his style isn’t my thing, and I find his choice of employer stunningly questionable at best, but I can see why some people like it, and I’m happy he’s found a consistent gig and an appreciative audience.
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Yeah, there’s no doubt Corbyn has managed to attract a lot of engaged new members to the party, which was vital because Smith won 63% of the members who were around at the time of the last general election. They did make an effort to sign-up new members, but it obviously wasn’t good enough. That reflects a broader problem of apathy towards the political system I think (which is also reflected in the fact that Smith had the most support among 18-24 year olds, traditionally the most apathetic group around), though there would be a lot less apathy in a general election because it doesn’t cost anything to take part.
One issue with this though is exactly how engaged the new members really are, will they stick around? Will they take up canvassing and manning phone banks? The people who are currently doing all that stuff tend to be supporters of the majority of MPs in the party, not of Momentum. This will probably depend at least to some degree on what kind of platform and MP candidates are around for the next election.
It’s also worth noting that Labour have significantly more members than any other party, they always have, and that hasn’t been any kind of guarantee of electoral success.
I saw that, but I wonder if it captures how many people were members pre-Blair. How many left and rejoined? How many of those have been members for > 20 years?
Lets not get bogged down in a semantic argument here, the original point was that anti-immigrant sentiment has been steadily rising for a while now, significantly so in the last couple of years. It’s mostly been growing because people are easily fooled into believing immigrants are stealing their jobs (they’re not), or driving down wages (they’re not), immigrants only flood into a country when there’s a shortage of jobs for them to fill. About the only noticeable negative impact they have tends to be in putting a strain on local services (like school places, hospital beds, housing waiting lists, rental accommodation). Overall they have a significant net positive impact on the economy, putting far more into it than they take out in benefits, etc.
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I don’t see any reason to believe there’s a significant Blairite impact here, Smith is nearly as far from a Blairite as Corbyn is, that’s why he was chosen over Eagle in the first place.
I agree that Blair was not economically to the right of the Tories, but he does have a lot to answer for. He provided temporary relief from want through redistribution but did nothing to address systemic and structural inequality, such that any gains made (or mitigation of losses) are proving relatively easy to roll back. He alienated working class voters from the party and turned it into a party of the middle classes - which was a strategic error since the middle classes are quite a lot more likely to slink off to the Tories once they’ve made it, and once they do go the Labour vote collapses. He also embraced globalisation, which tends to benefit middle class voters (more disposable income to take advantage of cheaper consumer goods) at the expense of working class voters (food prices remain static and thus rise relative to falling prices, and globalisation tends to drive rents and house prices up driven by the increasing affluence of high earners), compounding the problem of favouring middle class interests over working class needs. This has served (probably inadvertently) to drive a wedge between the working class and lower-middle class voters, who have historically been the driving force behind Labour victory. The task now falls to Corbyn and Labour to persuade people that protectionist (I cant find the post that refers to this but they’re bang on) attitudes to immigration aren’t going to work, and they can’t do that by the New Labour means of shushing working class voices on the matter while actually being pretty shitty to refugees - I think that they have to engage meaningfully with peoples’ fears, without dismissing them simply because they’re expressed in a way that’s informed by decades of tabloid poison.
I also think getting involved in an illegal war essentially to prove that Labour could work with a Republican president was probably pretty damaging.
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What about his shitty behaviour towards disabled people?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/347747.stm
That lead to ATOS, the Work Capability Assessment and the chronically and terminally ill being wrongly assessed as being capable of work.
If I’ve thrown Blair under the bus it’s only because he tried to throw me under it first.
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… as the wind will carry him, and then as close as a Blairite as the wind blows back. He was found out massively during the campaign as someone who will say anything to get ahead. By the way, he was not “chosen” over Eagle - they had a short competition for support from MPs and he won it, mostly because Eagle looked extremely weak (have you seen the video where the audience tells her that Boris is the new Foreign Secretary? That sums her up, really). It tells you a lot about the capabilities of the current crop of Labour MPs to select political leaders.
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Yes, and that’s been repeated over and over from all sides (me included, as a migrant with a clear stake in all this); it didn’t work, people did not want to listen. So the next step must be to find something that will appeal to workers’ protectionist instincts, without killing the golden goose of healthy migration flows. What that is, I don’t know. Staring at these forms, I guess someone wants to play with statistics; I fear numbers will be massaged into supporting an argument for deporting migrants from affluent marginal areas to poor Labour constituencies that still look “ethnically cohesive”. That would be a recipe for social unrest, but from the Tories I don’t expect anything better.
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Sunderland’s vote didn’t surprise me at all; the place is racist as fuck. The fact that Leave scraped through a victory overall did, but there’s reasons I don’t live in my hometown, and that’s one of them.
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Well, the reintroduction of funding to support regions that are adversely affected by immigration (and there are some adverse effects, though usually temporary and certainly unevenly distributed in society) would be a good start. The UK used to have such a scheme, and the EU has a fund for this purpose too, although the UK government has not been very forward in claiming for this from the EU purse. I guess that it was too politically useful a problem to solve so easily.
Funding to provide infrastructure, jobs and training would not go all the way towards solving apprehension regarding immigration, but it would be a start; and a better one than doing fuck all for working class people and then pointing the finger at immigrants.
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