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Pistol_Pete posted:What I remember about the late 90's/ early 2000's is that Labour radiated confidence: even before '97, they were acting like they'd already won, while the Tories were visibly nervous and exhausted by comparison. They didn't awkwardly hover around focus groups, asking what policies they'd like to see: they swept people along on a wave of enthusiasm. labour actually focus group'd especially intensely 1992-1997 due to internal suspicions and intraparty accusations that 1992 could happen again (recall LAB was heavily favoured to win in polling and instead Major rode to a massive unprecedented landslide - exactly the opposite of what Kinnock had promised after 1987), having the Labour Communications Agency run groups every single week in the years leading up to 1997 the 'acting like we've already won' schtick - in particular fronting Blair as a leader brutally overriding intraparty objections, 'hippie punching' in contemporary parlance - emerged from focus group research that LAB was still tainted by a perception of weak leadership. In 1987 and 1992 the Daily Mail had pushed a message that Kinnock - despite being massively despised by the hard left by this point - was actually in the pocket of the hard left. Hence the elaborate staged confrontations with the left under Blair subsequently these were massive controversies within the party at the time, as the New Labourites used focus group outcomes to justify the ferocity of internal reform in those years (by the 1990s there were no serious defenders of Militant still relevant - but there were still plenty of soft-leftists who preferred a less confrontational 'one more heave' coexistence) - but these were not nonpartisan/commercial focus groups given neutral prompts as conventional today, but instead engineered groups personally led by Mandelson or his handpicked loyalists. e.g., the campaign to reform Clause IV in 1995 was heavily premised on Labour's focus-group-guided polling supposedly indicating a massive aversion to 'old Labour' but in fact Philip Gould himself would both moderate discussions and then write his conclusions on how the party had to change to appeal to Middle Englanders. Exuding confidence, maybe not. quote:Labour used polls when conducting its policy review after the 1987 defeat, to such an extent that critics on the left of the party claimed that Walworth Road was more interested in asking what the public wanted and devising policies to match these requirements than it was in sticking to Labour's eternal principles. It was argued that policies should not be trimmed to the passing whims of voters, and that it was more important to 'sell' the ideas and policies which members believed in... what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again &c
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Feb 1, 2021 10:05
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Niric posted:I pretty much entirely agree with you, and your effort posts about Labour's factional history are always appreciated, but I'd query your reading of this: I'd gloss Gould's adventurism as genially tolerated intellectual dishonesty in service of something a reasonable observer would have agreed to be, in the balance of evidence, probably true - but not unambiguously provable in the context of a vicious intraparty battle where every scrap of countervailing evidence would be seized upon as a debunking. It was not enough for the party marketing studies to merely agree with two decades of BSAS trends; it had to be really unanimous. And so it was, with some helpful prodding. Such focus group data, some of better quality than others, was critical during New Labour's ascent in rallying supporters to the confidence would victory would eventually arrive after the shock of 1992 it's important to remember that before Blair actually won, large swathes of the Left genuinely did not think that the Great Moving Right Show was working, even as electoral strategy. Labour being crushingly defeated in 1992 was merely the wages of failing to speak up for the class that had cried out for a champion in the poll tax riots &c - certainly not a sign of an electorate basically reconciled to Thatcherism with the most confrontational aspects filed off. Conversely, two defeats in (and the second one even more resounding than the first), voices on the Labour right were somewhat more circumspect about forecasting imminent victories or tying oneself to any inconveniently immobile masts, no matter what the long-term trends in polls appeared to suggest. In 1995 itself - in between Blair's initial salvo as leader to reform Clause IV in the 1994 Conference and his eventual success at the next - there was a brief nationalist-populist moment when the Tory press - the Telegraph and Mail included - rallied against privatization and broke news stories on scandalously high directorial pay at formerly nationalized industries. And Blair ("Until those companies are properly regulated in the public interest, they will continue to be seen, rightly, as the unacceptable face of privatization") promptly turned like a weathervane, because Gallup and MORI were suggesting some appetite for nationalization. It would only be once the public lost interest that the party returned to banging on the drum of reform.
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Feb 1, 2021 14:05
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goddamnedtwisto posted:"Axis" is the cooler name, it has to be said. I was sure the name had been used before by an alliance in a European war but apparently not, or at least not that ten seconds of Wiki-ing can find. if Italy had not declared for the UK, France, and Russia in WW1, WW1 would have featured the Triple Entente vs the Triple Alliance rather than the Allies vs the Central Powers conversely the German-Italian pact was very nearly instead the Pact of Steel (formally the Pact of Friendship and Alliance)... although the secret protocols of said Pact referred to 'der Achse' as a cohesive entity so who knows the phrase 'axis of power' does pop up fairly frequently beforehand and seems directly traceable to Michael Faraday, with the phrase percolating out of natural philosophy and into politics subsequently
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Feb 6, 2021 20:02
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The leak, for reference: http://www.healthpolicyinsight.com/?q=node/1699
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Feb 14, 2021 18:00
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the politics of healthcare systems between countries can be surprisingly resilient - the UK allows private healthcare, for instance, which Canadian politics regards as the death knell of free-at-the-point-of-use public healthcare consensus ('two-tiered healthcare'). Australia had a vicious fight over the introduction of nominal copayments as a principle (it failed), whilst it is a frozen and apparently settled issue in New Zealand. Ireland introduced a €1.50 copayment for prescriptions relatively recently. and then there's the odd distinction that each country accepts as "normal"/"okay" to charge for, or not charge for, between e.g. the 'typical' health service vs the dental or psychiatric services (as varies per country). clinically (heh) speaking, it's not surprising that it's perennial political catnip. It seems entirely detached from reality and wholly built on existing 'wisdoms', what's not to love?
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Feb 14, 2021 18:59
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it's been pointed out that any aging country that really wants to save on its healthcare bill should just pay people to smoke obviously, the public health policymaker's objective function here is not just "reduce sum of private+public healthcare expenditures"... at the margin, the expenditure reductions are more like: persuade people to go to the ER less and use daytime services instead, persuade people to spend less on EOL care, persuade people to accept other non-directly-healthcare related aspects (longer travel times, longer waiting times, poorer facilities in lower-cost locations and care personnel) etc. My haven't--looked-closely-at-this-topic-in-a-while eye feels like the various policy movements around the world fall into one of these three for cost control, anyway... these are demand-side pressures; the headwind is from 1) the aging society, and 2) increasingly pricey expertise and capital that can be brought to bear in extreme circumstances. Sadly the new bleeding edge of medical interventions are phenomenally costly compared to the leaps and bounds of the mid 20th century... we don't live in a period where best-effort oncological intervention consists of exploratory surgery, shaking one's head sadly, and then closing up the incision and packing the patient off for their remaining months. On the supply side many countries have long since shifted to a consumer-oriented healthcare delivery model and that battle is past. There's probably a nascent topic on how the 'rich West' has been staving off the surge in labour costs by importing a staggering amount of medical/nursing expertise from the developing world, however. Over the next couple decades or so, I'd guess. ronya fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Feb 14, 2021 |
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Feb 14, 2021 21:40
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It was never a circle that was possible to square. That should already have been obvious in 2016, however. It is true that Labour made a short-sighted miscalculation in 2016 in gambling that Remain would obviously win, which would suppress any dicey coalitional consequences anyway, and hence the tactical goal is mainly to avoid a ScotRef-style trap where the Tories drive an irreparable wedge between Labour and a sufficiently large chunk of its natural voting base by emphasizing the cultural contradictions within Labour's old and new voting cores. But this is if anything a remarkably small miscalculation next to then-Conservative leadership's own, of course, that Remain would obviously win &c. The contradiction only eventually destroyed Corbynism but it did immediately destroy Cameronism.
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Feb 17, 2021 09:24
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there's no shortage of actual-material-concerns politics, albeit it chases the median voter no less fiercely than immaterial-concerns politics - squeezed middle, childcare spending, social care spending. Middle class households worrying about kid and granny respectively. (if one callously calculates that a middle-class benefit matters more than reversing Tory austerity that one has just denounced as killing however many thousands of people, well, that calculation would have been quite at home in Labour not long ago etc. But I have made that point before) the problem here is not really the materiality but the dynamic of chasing the swing voter it's completely fair to have other, specific material concerns of course, but it seems appropriate for these to be the subject of e.g. specific interest-group activism rather than mass party politics, especially as long as FPTP holds sway (not that PR removes the dynamic inasmuch as merely making the horse-trading explicit)
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Feb 27, 2021 18:00
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it's almost all from South Asia something to keep in mind when reading fluff pieces about the Kerala model of development: all that remittance inflow comes from somewhere, often someplace not very pleasant
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Feb 27, 2021 22:19
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Iceland has a larger citizen population than Qatar - nine in ten people in Qatar are foreign workers. Same in the UAE, and about seven in ten in Kuwait and six in ten in Bahrain. These are, even as internationally open small countries go, actually really small countries floating atop a sea of transient foreign labour. The overwhelming share of the foreign worker population are from South Asia, male, and on short-contract visas - build a nest egg in dangerous, difficult conditions and then return home (previous terrible incidents of abuse have led the South Asian nations to place restrictions on female migration). The remittance flows are so massive that they distort the economic structures of the states the workers hail from, even. Oil is a hell of a thing.
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Feb 27, 2021 22:43
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