Politics and ideological / pragmatism balance

Cherie has really let herself go

@THM you should have used “their” there ^^^ my dear.

I think the state should provide for those that can’t but those that can should help, people should be helped to do what they can not be defined by what they can’t, business should survive by being good and taxes should work and encourage success. Loopholes should be closed.
Business and workers should work together and the public sector ditch the deadwood.

Too much common sense to work in most political systems…

I know, was waiting to be shot down for living outside the UK rather than talking sense…

There is a huge part of the voting populous that I just don’t think are catered for and that is the under 30’s, maybe this is should be the target of labour.

What would that need?
Well traditionally, the older you get the further right you head so that would mean they could stay left leaning.
I suspect they’d need to also be very, very tolerant, backing gay rights, backing drug decriminalisation, etc.
They’d need also to find a way of dropping the value of millions of homes so younger people can afford them.
Social care, particularly education and health need to be pushed and spent on, big infrastructure projects perhaps left alone.
You’d need ministers who are younger, feel more “normal” and able to engage with people without sounding or looking condescending. Oddly, you need someone not a million miles from Nick Clegg, well, 2011 Nick Clegg anyway.

But, but this will royally annoy a huge amount of older voters whose “pension pots will be raided” and whose house prices will be slashed. Are any modern politicians prepared to do that? I think not.

There is a huge part of the voting populous that I just don’t think are catered for and that is the under 30’s, maybe this is should be the target of labour.

The SNP just proved what can be achieved by actively involving younger people in the political process. They built on the referendum, and kept them engaged. They came out and voted for them. As labour will if learnt, if they’re capable of actually learning anything. Which it doesn’t look like they are.

They came out and voed for them

did they vote snp or not the other ones?
A great 71% meaning at least 35% of Scots voted snp.

Well, they could no worse than actually being coherent and honest. I think a large part of the swing towards Corbyn can be exemplified by the shambles that is Andy Burnham abstaining from voting on the Tory’s Welfare Bill, when he made opposing Tory cuts a central part of his recent election campaign.

Apparently, this doesn’t mean he does support the bill though…So I guess he’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that when the poor are being pissed on from a great height, he’ll be able to claim he didn’t vote for the cuts…

And they wonder why we won’t vote for them.

Have a bunch of policies that support the poor and vulnerable, have a coherent media message that gets that across, persuade the electorate. Y’know basic party political stuff.

Y’know basic party political stuff.

The labour party just isnt very good at doing politics. You know… communication and stuff. The present Tory party is.

Looking at the run up to the election I did wonder what their so called Electoral Guru from Merica was doing to earn his enormous salary. Not much would seem to be the answer. The Tory’s rougher hewn Aussie version seemed to be earning his though.

It would appear that the only person the Labor party has ever had who was any good at getting the message across was…

Yeah I think you could be onto something there. I know you like Burnham, and of all the candidates he seemed the most plausible. Have you seen his Facebook page after the vote (on welfare)

It’s ugly

You know… communication and stuff. The present Tory party is.

Unfortunately the torys have the press on their side presenting shall we say, a version of some truth. The messengers need to be “shot”.

Also, Blair was rather helped by the murdoch press, a decision made easy for murdoch by an uncooperative John Major who didn’t like murdoch.

Have a bunch of policies that support the poor and vulnerable, have a coherent media message that gets that across, persuade the electorate. Y’know basic party political stuff.

Well a message is nice I suppose, but what a future Government needs to do is impress upon its citizens that they have a responsibility to society as a whole, and not just to themselves as individuals. Do you remember all those quaint Government broadcast films? Of course some here would squeal “nanny state”.

Anyway I don’t see social responsibility happening any time soon particularly with the Governments we’ve had since 1979, preaching small government and free choice.

The natural conclusion of having free choice of course is if you have money, you can make a choice, a choice in health, education, law and so on. If you don’t have money, well…

In 1979 the defeated Labour Party underwent 18 years of inter-party left/right wrangling until their eventual re-election in 1997 under Tony Blair
During that time four former Labour cabinet ministers formed the SDP (remember them?)
Will history repeat itself?

Their other problem seems to be membership and the finance necessary to push their message. Their alignment will affect this too

There is a massive gap in the way that we’re thinking about what a “good society” looks like 20 years down the line. Corbyn & co don’t really know: their models for how work and money are organised, especially, are out of date and getting worse – most of the 20th Century methods of the left are reduced to tatters by global mobility of capital and (to a lesser extent) labour.

The right has some vague kind of vision, but it focusses on the interests of the biggest capitalists and monopolists, and tries to co-opt everyone else into behaving as good, productive work-persons and presenting government and the state as a supplicant to capital.

Looking at the future through that spyglass, most people are screwed: instability, personal indebtedness, personalised costs of insurance against all the risks of a life, but great rewards for the best people in a ferocious vaguely-meritocratic competition.

The left almost needs to sidestep the logic of late capitalism altogether: to understand better how technology can reduce the impact of the weakness of the modern state on people’s lives and risks, how the sharing of knowledge can be managed for everyone, to push into spaces where formal money does not go easily and enable economies that work on labour, barter and peer-to-peer credit. It needs to grasp that people are (generally, to an extent) decent to one another, but that empathy does not stretch to a national scale. They need to work hard at designing and enabling ways of pushing semi-formal and acutely democratic government down to the level of really quite small communities to manage their own business – including welfare provision.

The starting point has to be an understanding of how the world of 2030 might look. Paul Mason is probably a decent first call here.

Labour isn’t going to win in 2020, unless the Tories literally implode over the EU referendum. It isn’t actually a case of being “right or left” enough. It’s a case of understanding the world in a way that doesn’t mean you have to end up acting with the callousness that we dislike when we see it in the right, and using that understanding to inspire.

🙂

BD for PM!

wow, I went on a bit up there^^^. Sorry! 🙂

They need to work hard at designing and enabling ways of pushing semi-formal and acutely democratic government down to the level of really quite small communities to manage their own business – including welfare provision.

BD – You could argue that a lot of what your saying there was what motivated Blair initially. What he initially set out to do. And he won 3 elections. I think he underestimated how much oppsoition he’d receive from the vested interests throughout the whole system. And as a Labour PM, could only take on the public sector unions to a certain degree. And then he sort of gave up, then his desire to centralise and consolidate power took over, when he got a bit …erm… Jesussy and thought it’d be great to bomb everyone.

I doubt George Osbourne will be feeling quite as restrained by those considerations. Hence him telling governement departments to draw up plans for 40% cuts in budgets.

I’d say its what presently motivating George Osbourne too. His Northern Powerhouse thing isn’t just rhetoric. He means it. Pity theres no money to back it up, but the devolution is real. Here’s a great piece on how Osbourne and Howard Bernstein made it happen. Really interesting.

He’d clearly like to do it with other areas too, especially in the north. but (probably correctly) has evaluated the local polititians as not presently up to the job. THere are not many obvious Howard Bernstein’s out there. More’s the pity.

has evaluated the local polititians as not presently up to the job

We never take that as an excuse. Any “evaluation” will have missed all the Mhairi Blacks out there, guaranteed.

🙂

fin25 – Member

The problem for ideology is the increasing habit on the part of the voter to vote for what suits them best as an individual and not what fits their own personal ideology.

Spot on.

It’s the cult of the self.
Greed is promoted as the default position.

Picking any other option than the one which promises the greatest benefit for the individual is portrayed as perverse, saintly or comical.

There are even TV programs that show amazing acts of altruism, carefully scripted so that we can get it all out of our system in half an hour, then go back to thinking about ourselves.

Inevitable, given societal changes post industrial revolution/WW2?
And/or an inevitable consequence of ideology behind the post 1979 New Tory lurch right?

As to the Labour leadership, I have little interest in a Blairite Labour Party.

‘It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees’.
🙂

^^ All very true.

The Conservatives party have made this seem like both the common sense and virtuous choice and aligned it to a narrative that talks about the economy.

In contrast a non-Blair Labour Party is at a grassroots level the same party with the same ideology it had 60 years ago. I’m convinced that Conservatives from the same period would be horrified by what the Conservative party and viewpoint has become now compared to then. In simplified terms, I see it as: –
– Labour = big state, nationalised industries to provide maximal employment and better living standard and welfare state to protect vulnerable
– Conservative used to equal small state, entrepreneurial businesses to invest to provide maximised employment and better living standard with welfare state to protect vulnerable. Now it’s about giving money to shareholders and bugger everybody else not true a Conservatism.

NHS will be changed in ways that cannot be undone

Nothing is beyond change, you just need to be prepared to piss a lot of vested interests off. Being able to change the law before you do what you want is also helpful. (See apartheid era South Africa for examples).

Things need to change and adapt, looking back to the good old days of free everything and jobs for life churning out mediocre stuff that people didn’t want isn’t sustainable.
A very strange example but there was a fascinating documentary on the invention and deployment of the iso shipping containers. Literally something that in one move changed so much. Union influence is good and bad for Labour they need the cash but they also need to accept that this isn’t the 70s any more.

Vested interest are greater and more immovable than they have ever been IMHO.

Unions can be brilliant and were essential in developing civil society as we know it. Unionisation needs again IMHO to be in more German model – working in positive collaboration with more responsible business leaders.

Nothing is beyond change

Fair point. I should have said that ‘The NHS will be changed in ways that will not be undone’ instead. I don’t believe that if the NHS as it was laid out in the post-war period was proposed now it would be taken up.

On p1 Binner’s says that free thought and dissent was stamped out by the grinning idiot. Isn’t that the whole point behind labour? The greater “good” being given priority to individual desires.