Indeed. And UKIP had promised to spend more on the NHS and social care, to abolish the bedroom tax, to scrap tuition fees for STEM students (with strings attached), and to end VAT on tampons. Traditional Labour voters voting for a right-wing (but populist) party doesn’t mean that they thought Labour wasn’t right-wing enough.
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While editing “died” into “dyed” you seem to have inserted something from your clipboard:
a dyWe’re I the only human to ever read the Player’s Handbook appendix, I
too would commemorate it with custom plates ed-in-the-wool
Oops!
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@doctorow A typo? First sentence reads:
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So it was the biggest landslide in history of the few that were run under those rules? Even more meaningless hyperbole, then,
So…
Jeremy Corbyn, a dyed-in-the-wool left-wing veteran MP
with an injection of:
We’re I the only human to ever read the Player’s Handbook appendix, I too would commemorate it with custom plates
Cannot. Parse. Eeerrorrr.
Also
…is a good idea?
I’m not one for conspiracy theories but it looks like the establishment is all up in Cory’s writing, jumbling up his internets.
so to completely over-stretch the analogy to US presidential politics, Corbyn has some of the same partisan strengths as the 1976 Reagan: bring a strong message to the disenchanted base to get those crucial “rank and file” engaged again, even if Corbyn/Reagan isn’t immediately electable.
Niftily, even your 10 year estimate fits. Reagan would have also lost in 1980 if Desert One had succeed, but Republicans would have been well positioned for '84
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It still isn’tlington parse!
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Well I’m not actually there anymore. I’m Norwegian but I did my bachelor in a small English city ten years ago and I recently returned from a year doing a master’s in Glasgow. And I generally follow UK news and politics. As a Scandinavian who generally votes to the left I’m probably way more left than almost all Americans and many Brits. I want a government that makes sure everybody has a chance to get an education, good healthcare and a safety net when things go wrong and I don’t mind paying taxes to ensure people with less money than me get that too. Most British people I have talked politics with agree with that. When I was undergrad, most of my friends had no interest in politics. A few went to protest against the Iraq War but that made no difference. Politics is something that rich people who don’t care about them do and all the people on the ballot are arseholes out to line their own pockets. Nobody on the ballot had issues they cared about or made commitments to help them and their families improve their lots. So they didn’t vote. Things have been worse since. Politicians know that young and poor people don’t vote so they ignore them. They talk about the deficit as if it is something like somebody’s home budget, which makes no sense. To cut the deficit they cut spending on the people who need help the most, and allow people to starve to death because they are cut off from welfare payments, when the obvious thing to do to grow the economy is by ensuring most people have incomes and spend that income on homes and cars and clothes. Starving poor people doesn’t grow the economy, it just starves it further. This is why Scotland fled from Labour to the SNP. The SNP has shown through their actions in Holyrood that they care about regular people which is how they have been able to rally young voters and win every seat in Scotland bar one. These politics are very electable. Corbyn and his fellows will hopefully follow in their footsteps, minus the nationalism, and in the process they might rebuild the Labour Party as what is was always meant to be. A party for working people, built on solidarity and compassion. Those are ideals sure, but they’re not bad ones. Another thing I’m impressed with is that Corbyn is following through on him promise to not impose his will on the party. They have had debates on which policies to follow and they haven’t always gone his way. He seems to have accepted that. This is huge in the UK. I also don’t know if he’ll ever be PM, but hopefully he can re-engage the Labour Party’s natural working class electorate base and turn around some attitudes that have been far too quick to pander to the media and what is “electable” as dictated by the Daily Mail. After all, what’s the point of being in politics unless you have opinions and principles. The point isn’t to be elected after all, it’s to make your views clear and if people don’t agree with you to accept that and try to change their minds.
Sorry for the rant, I hope that all made sense.
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From my side of the pond, this seemed to be crucial. Not only did the SNP eat Labour’s lunch in traditional Labour seats, but the SNP seemed to stir up a surprising amount of “English Nationalism”. Since UKIP were fringe (and, in the minds of many, racist) the obvious beneficiary were Tories.
Put differently, plenty of English blokes didn’t mind the Tories sharing the spotlight with those wacky Lib-Dems, but acquiescing to Scots wielding actual power in a Labour- SNP coalition was another matter altogether.
Does that analysis make any sense to you?
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Also, before the general election my Facebook feed was full of English people wishing they could vote SNP. I realise my Facebook feed isn’t exactly a good scientific measure but it’s the feeling I got. Especially in the North a lot of traditional Labour voters seemed to want to vote SNP because the issues they were talking about were ones that they related to. I’m not sure what they ended up doing. Probably they either voted Green or stayed home. I can’t remember Milliband voicing a single definite opinion during the election campaign. He was just sort of there, going “Vote for us or the Tories will win”. As if Labour didn’t seem to agree on almost everything the Tories were doing. It’s not like they were fighting against their policies at least.
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That was the Lynton Crosby / Rupert Murdoch spin. Seems it worked.
And now Crosby is ‘helping’ in Canada.
Shame Dennis Skinner didn’t stand, to be honest.
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With typical shrewdness and ruthlessness, Crosby identified the surge of Scottish nationalism in recent years as a wedge that could be used against Labour, both in Scotland and in England.
Great. So now I’m agreeing with Guardian.
Erm… Trump is attractive to bullies and people who like to blame others for the problems of the world.
Actually, this:
I think the most analogous name on our side of the pond is “Bernie”
The opening paragraphs are gibberish. Proofread?
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To quote my own post
So what is the point you are attempting to make?
Milliband’s campaign was a joke. If he’d actually engaged with the electorate instead of frantically reacting to the tabloids every time they were mean about him, he might have done better (well, and had Ed Balls shot, maybe). Cameron refusing to appear on the debates didn’t help either like. Sturgeon would have pulled him to pieces over Tory policy.
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I suspect the reason may be nostalgia for when it seemed Labor had something to say. That and or they felt it had been far too long since a Labor leader sat down with Hamas for high tea.
That it was even more meaningless to say “biggest landslide in history”. Nothing more. I wasn’t disagreeing with you.
(a) Labour - it’s the party name.
(b) It worked (mostly) in Northern Ireland. As none other than Winston Churchill remarked, “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war”. A lesson some in the US State Department (and the Israeli equivalent) seem unable to learn.
