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reminder that we lost as i recall two seats that voted remain. every single other loss, i want to say 57 of the top of my head, were in majority leave areas. almost every single one of those seats had, in the previous and totally pointless euro elections, had a huge cohort of people who moved from labour to what was basically a joke party called the brexit party as a protest vote, then again, almost one to one, those brexit party supporters voted conservative in the general and smashed us. but yeah it was because they were concerned about the shadow foreign secretary or whatever.
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Sep 19, 2021 02:56
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look, the point of the matter is: we cannot change the past, but we can learn from it. once brexit became what it became, it was basically impossible for corbyn's coalition to maintain, and it was very difficult to keep it together to begin with. the point of arguing about how to frame 2017 is what lessons may be extracted from it. your proposed lesson (even if it's implicit) is that it's hopeless, people are brutes etc. etc. that lesson is the obvious and reasonable consequence of framing 2017 as a labour defeat. my points are: first, framing 2017 as a labour defeat is ahistorical because nobody thought of it that way at the time and there's no good case to be made that the specific result of 2017 (apart from not putting corbyn in the big chair with a solid majority) led to a later and otherwise avoidable strategic defeat. second, framing it that way is actively detrimental to further analysis, because it leads to an oversimplification/mystification of british politics. your view is, by this reasoning both wrong and counterproductive. the former means that i feel comfortable arguing against it; the latter means that i feel compelled to.
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Sep 19, 2021 03:02
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i don't disagree with most of that but "when brexit became what it became" i feel fails to represent what happened. it didn't void in from the aether, it was an extremely expensive and heavily media supported campaign to force labour into a suicidal position. i don't think everyone who did it was that cynical but the people who paid for it did, the leadership did and, frankly, it was kind of obvious from up here in the seats we need, rather than down in the ones we didn't.
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Sep 19, 2021 03:08
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I don't think whether people thought it was a success at the time really has any bearing on reality now that we can look back and see that the success of a narrower defeat than predicted was not built on as presumed and those conditions for even that don't currently exist anymore within labour. The material outcome of the two defeats has of course been pretty bad, despite what we thought in 2017
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Sep 19, 2021 03:27
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oh it's enormously instructive imo, and quite useful going forward. know anyone who people's marched or whatever is either a total idiot, a sucker or (and this is more relevant for anyone who say marched or wrote on it or whatever) someone who you will need to combat if you wish to achieve socialism. we already did once and lost. the liberal class told on themselves in the most embarrassing fashion, and if nothing else it made them stand out.
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Sep 19, 2021 03:29
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V. Illych L. posted:my points are: first, framing 2017 as a labour defeat is ahistorical because nobody thought of it that way at the time and there's no good case to be made that the specific result of 2017 (apart from not putting corbyn in the big chair with a solid majority) led to a later and otherwise avoidable strategic defeat. I remember, in the US, listening to the election returns through NPR or something like that in real time or close to it while I was out on a walk. The presenters were bewildered, nervous, and not able to really comprehend or discuss what they were seeing unfold before their eyes. This wasn't supposed to happen and the professional commentariat was without their usual patter. Sometimes, they would cut to a corbyn supporter, who were uniformly exultant and triumphant. I don't remember the response of other factions as things happened at the time, other than the famous "humiliation for loser clegg" headline and a journalist joking on live TV with their colleagues that corbyn was going to put all conservatives into concentration camps, with or without corbyn being PM. The "loser corbyn failed in PM bid" concept was something that only emerged later, after the dust settled and the commentariat had time to think, and was a way to process the 2017 result. In the moment, Corbyn won and the right lost. The magnitude of the defeat for the conventional political machine is evidenced by the incredible reactionary unity that manifested itself later. Corbyn may have fallen short of PM, but that was entirely too close for the liberals and for the right. bedpan has issued a correction as of 03:34 on Sep 19, 2021 |
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Sep 19, 2021 03:31
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yup. it really was stunning, the uniformity of the reaction. and like, i would be extremely contrary to CT's claim the press did nothing - the sun and the other redtops sold brexit betrayal and the guardian and i paper and whatever other dumb magazines sold the people's vote. both the right and the liberal faction found a way to pitch brexit so it was corbyn's fault.
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Sep 19, 2021 03:35
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they voted con because trans people exist i'm afraid.
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Sep 19, 2021 03:49
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corbyn should have said he was absolutely commited to brexit. the waffling was loving stupid
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Sep 19, 2021 03:50
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Quotey posted:corbyn should have said he was absolutely commited to brexit. the waffling was loving stupid yep, it was insanely obvious to everyone. he resisted it as hard as he could, he was more obstinate on the issue than any other i can think of in his term. everyone knew it was a landmine, particularly those setting it.
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Sep 19, 2021 03:52
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The real evidence that 2017 was a win was the documentary Labour: The Summer that Changed Everything having to change tracks because the central plot of it was that Corbyn was a big dumb loser, and then he wasn't. Though maybe that just sticks to me because our former PM treated Stephen Kinnock like an actual child when he failed to adjust his messaging in the face of failure.
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Sep 19, 2021 06:34
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Quotey posted:corbyn should have said he was absolutely commited to brexit. the waffling was loving stupid At the time the Labour membership was uniformly pro-remain and the issue was being used successfully by the labour right as wedge between him and his supporters. i.e. "I saw jeremy Corbyn in the closet voting brexit and the brexit looked at me" In hindsight with the results in hand it's easy to say they should have bitten the bullet, but I'm not sure how it would of played out. Maybe a successful leadership challenge by a Kier like figure?
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Sep 19, 2021 10:48
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Communist Thoughts posted:And Labour at the time weren't remain afaik (it seems like 30 years ago) so it makes sense the libdems didn't go for it. Labour wasn't remain, but they offered Remain the one thing they claimed to want and the answer was of course: NO and gently caress you.
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Sep 19, 2021 10:49
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Rosie duffield has got herself the front page of the times and kieth defending her over "threats" because she's a huge transphobe
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Sep 19, 2021 11:03
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bedpan posted:I remember, in the US, listening to the election returns through NPR or something like that in real time or close to it while I was out on a walk. The presenters were bewildered, nervous, and not able to really comprehend or discuss what they were seeing unfold before their eyes. This wasn't supposed to happen and the professional commentariat was without their usual patter. Sometimes, they would cut to a corbyn supporter, who were uniformly exultant and triumphant. I don't remember the response of other factions as things happened at the time, other than the famous "humiliation for loser clegg" headline and a journalist joking on live TV with their colleagues that corbyn was going to put all conservatives into concentration camps, with or without corbyn being PM. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isr0F3bLA-M
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Sep 19, 2021 11:22
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Double lol given that his wife was the leader of a left-wing party, campaigned in a general election actually wanting to win, and won.
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Sep 19, 2021 12:20
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brexit was a wedge driven directly into the most fragile part of the corbyn coalition; so was the absurd antisemitism stuff. i think that antisemitism could've been batted away by a somewhat different ideological approach to racism as seems to have quietly happened in the wake of 2019 especially; the extreme emphasis on personal Lived Experience seems to have receded, which really was an important part of why it was so hard to defend against. however, brexit was a real, material issue with immediate consequences, and even beyond the fever pitch culture war trappings it took on it was a genuine conflict between groups which needed to not be in conflict for corbynism to have any chance at all. it is not obvious that a pro-brexit corbyn would've managed any better than the one who capitulated to the People's Vote types, and once johnson got in and just caved on basically everything to the EU he had been able to define what brexit would actually look like; so then you've lost the distinction between brexit as such and This Tory Brexit and that makes everything more difficult i do think that as a basic moral principle it would've made sense to take the referendum result seriously, and the People's Vote types were extremely bad news all along, but it was not a no-brainer politically and the attempt to find a compromise between the factions was also not obviously stupid. it was just a really bad situation to be in and johnson was willing to give away the house just so could have a brexit deal to give shape to the issue. if i were to go back in time to advise the corbyn leadership, i would've told them to find as specific a vision of brexit as possible, to start their side-track negotiations with the EU much earlier and to present their vision as what was on the table, but it was a very, very difficult situation in any case
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Sep 19, 2021 12:23
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here is exhibit a in my argument that people's vote was the press's baby: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/19/peoples-vote--march-a-very-british-rebellion-in-the-rain this was for a political movement that at the time i and anyone with two braincells was screaming against for being utterly insane. quote:As the news of the success of the Letwin amendment filtered out to the hundreds of thousands who had once again marched to Parliament Square to demand a People’s Vote on the Brexit deal, there was the most reassuringly British of reactions: widespread applause in the rain. it's all like this, read that. it's all a comforting bed time story about the goodness and rightness of the cause, of how good and pure such revolution was. it was legitimately three years of this, of "can you be daring enough to support this incredibly brave and smart position??". hrm lets see who spoke at this event? quote:A rally at the end of the march was addressed by SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, Conservative peer Michael Heseltine, former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and MPs Jess Phillips, Justine Greening and David Lammy.[38][39] An 800 square metre crowd flag was unfolded on Parliament Square revealing a 2012 quote from Brexiteer David Davis saying “If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy”, organised by anti-Brexit campaign group Led by Donkeys.[40] huh wild it's a who's who of people who directly and enormously benefited from the death of corbynism and the most embarrassing people in the country. the only person who isn't there is starmer becuase 1) he was at a previous march and 2) he did a ton of the organizing where it hurt most, on the labour party conference floor.
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Sep 19, 2021 12:44
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also if you want to look at this effect on an individual level, owen jones got it 100% correct immediately after the referendum, there was a tweet where he predicted exactly what would happen in like 2016. three years of social pressure from the guardian lead to him accepting that oh we have to have a vote oh i see. tons of people told him how he was limiting their freedom or hurting britian or something and he melted, like tons and tons of people did. e: this isn't the one i was thinking of but it demonstrates the concept  (it was genuinely what he wanted, lol) CoolCab has issued a correction as of 12:59 on Sep 19, 2021 |
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Sep 19, 2021 12:56
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CoolCab posted:also if you want to look at this effect on an individual level, owen jones got it 100% correct immediately after the referendum, there was a tweet where he predicted exactly what would happen in like 2016. three years of social pressure from the guardian lead to him accepting that oh we have to have a vote oh i see. tons of people told him how he was limiting their freedom or hurting britian or something and he melted, like tons and tons of people did. lol even owen jones could see the utter stupidity of the people's vote
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Sep 19, 2021 13:18
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Doctor Jeep posted:lol even owen jones could see the utter stupidity of the people's vote oh yeah tons of people did. it was very, very obvious after the referendum and it took years of concentrated press effort and liberal entitlement to shift it. oh, bonus! https://twitter.com/plasmatron/status/1438594468609990664?s=20 he of course blames everyone else.
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Sep 19, 2021 13:20
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I regret to inform you that Mogwai was Always Bad
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Sep 19, 2021 13:41
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oh i saw the avatar and assumed he was a guardian writer, lmao
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Sep 19, 2021 13:42
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CoolCab posted:oh i saw the avatar and assumed he was a guardian writer, lmao maybe lmao, but he's best known as the guitarist for Mogwai
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Sep 19, 2021 13:47
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multijoe posted:Is it still schadenfreude if you're eating poo poo from it too? Yes, the purest kind of schadenfreude is when you know a) how completely hosed you are and b) how insanely funny it would be to an outside observer.
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Sep 19, 2021 14:00
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Captain Splendid posted:Double lol given that his wife was the leader of a left-wing party, campaigned in a general election actually wanting to win, and won. *Bonus points for the first one being the son of an actual Nazi
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Sep 19, 2021 14:11
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Relevant Tangent posted:Yes, the purest kind of schadenfreude is when you know a) how completely hosed you are and b) how insanely funny it would be to an outside observer. the purest kind of schadenfreude is when u post 
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Sep 19, 2021 14:20
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tbf Labour had its neoliberalism problems long before Kinnock (it was a MASSIVE mistake for Callaghan to accept that IMF loan since Britain has a printing press and it literally cannot run out of money, not to mention that the Gang of Four were all Labour MPs before they formed the SDP), but since Kinnock allowed Mandelson, Smith, Brown, and most importantly Blair to undermine and destroy the Labour left, they've never gone back on that anti-socialist narrative Labour delenda est
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Sep 19, 2021 14:21
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A Buttery Pastry posted:It should be noted that the party was taken over by Third Way liberals* before Labour was in the UK, who came to power four years earlier and have yet to let go. They've even openly stated that stopping socialism is their foremost priority, IIRC at the height of the financial crisis. The closest thing to being left-wing is them being forced to have a socialist party in their coalition, because the pro-genocide party doesn't want to legitimize their racism. yeah, and they were remotely competent at it, which is why her instincts are approximately infinitely better than his.
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Sep 19, 2021 14:21
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CoolCab posted:yeah, and they were remotely competent at it, which is why her instincts are approximately infinitely better than his.
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Sep 19, 2021 14:36
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Re 2019, Brexit didn’t come up much on doorsteps etc for me and neither did antisemitism. If either did come up you had no chance of getting through to them though, and the only Labour->Tory switchers from 2017 were single issue Brexit olds. The People’s Vote shite was of course impossible to push (wow betrayal AND cowardice, you’re spoiling us) and felt emblematic of a general woolly imprecision in the whole campaign. Because the entire media landscape was against us it was even more important to get consistent, targeted messages out locally and up here we didn’t even begin to do that. I got a lot of ‘love the IRA you lot eh’ and Corbyn-haters that couldn’t explain why they hated him, and above all towering waves of miserable apathy. In 2017 some mild socdems lost, by a fairly comfortable margin, the opportunity to be sabotaged into governmental uselessness. This terrified the liberal establishment so much they stopped playin, just ripped the flimsy masks right off and allowed the gnashing telluricidal mania to pour out of their mouths and wash over the island. Two years of that allied with a couple of decades of corrupt and useless Labour governance at all levels quite nicely tyvm. The Brexit wedge was real, and I don’t think there was a good way out of being split down ‘how much do we want to suck and gently caress this racist transnational bureaucracy’, even if we did amusingly end up with the worst possible approach. Even that strangely evanescent National Conversation though was just another manifestation of media culture wagging the thoughts dog, as others have said. I don’t have a clear point here. I’d just like to drown all guardian columnists in a var of piss
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Sep 19, 2021 14:48
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Shogi posted:If either did come up you had no chance of getting through to them though, and the only Labour->Tory switchers from 2017 were single issue Brexit olds. 100%. and you can totally, totally see this in the exit polling. i think i looked it up once and something utterly insane like two people out of every 10 who were older than 50 in leave seats went labour -> brexit in the euro and then brexit -> conservative in the general, or stayed there in seats Brexit still ran like bolstover. there were a huge number of them and i disagree that they were all old tbh.
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Sep 19, 2021 14:52
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they without a shadow of a doubt decided the election and you can pour over the exit polls to demonstrate exactly that. here it is two years later and weirdly we blame literally anything and everything else, funny.
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Sep 19, 2021 14:55
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yeah its clear after corbyn that left wing politics is an electoral dead end in the UK currently. Fortunately for everywhere not England it looks like the UK isn't going to be around that much longer
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Sep 19, 2021 14:57
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Corbyns intense love of the IRA is my favourite thing about him
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Sep 19, 2021 14:57
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i remember owen jones talking to some gammon woman who was gleefully telling him that the brexit party would step aside, give all the votes to the tories and smash the commies a keen political mind
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Sep 19, 2021 15:03
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V. Illych L. posted:brexit was a wedge driven directly into the most fragile part of the corbyn coalition; so was the absurd antisemitism stuff. i think that antisemitism could've been batted away by a somewhat different ideological approach to racism as seems to have quietly happened in the wake of 2019 especially; the extreme emphasis on personal Lived Experience seems to have receded, which really was an important part of why it was so hard to defend against. however, brexit was a real, material issue with immediate consequences, and even beyond the fever pitch culture war trappings it took on it was a genuine conflict between groups which needed to not be in conflict for corbynism to have any chance at all. it is not obvious that a pro-brexit corbyn would've managed any better than the one who capitulated to the People's Vote types, and once johnson got in and just caved on basically everything to the EU he had been able to define what brexit would actually look like; so then you've lost the distinction between brexit as such and This Tory Brexit and that makes everything more difficult Yeah, it's really not easily solvable and I don't think the loss in 2019 was preventable once the liberals and Tories decided they prefer burning down the country over Corbyn getting into Nr 10. For one, Brexit is not something that exists in the real world and nothing Corbyn could have done would be anti-Brexit, as defined by the Guardian and People's vote, or pro-Brexit, as defined by the Daily Mail. But more than that, the material question of the European Union is pretty poo poo for the left in general. In Greece the membership in the EU was both the only prospect for young people to gain decent employment and the main reason the economy was going down the drain. Syrizia never had a plan for dealing with that rift in their base. In the UK you had on overwhelming majority among the young who moved to the cities for staying in the EU. Those were also the majority of Corbyn's base, and since the whole Brexit thing was a scam cooked up by the right wing press it's kind of hard to tell them to gently caress off. But the other option is to tell your supporters in the rural seats that, after decades of neglect, that, surprise, they still don't matter compared to the cities. It sucked poo poo.
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Sep 19, 2021 15:10
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i stil have family insist that remain would have won had corbyn just campaigned harder and its his fault it lost
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Sep 19, 2021 15:31
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Jose posted:i stil have family insist that remain would have won had corbyn just campaigned harder and its his fault it lost the best part is that if you interrogate them they also believe that brexit was an elaborate press ruse on a bunch of ignorant rubes, which is very funny.
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Sep 19, 2021 15:34
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like you're not wrong mate and yeah i bet that would be really humiliating falling for something like that huh? anyway how has your STOP BREXIT sticker campaign been going?
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Sep 19, 2021 15:35
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