Why Labour Lost in Britain

In that Ashcroft poll, there is no “working class” vote for Labour. Even DE, Labour fails to match the Tories and C2, that is just sad.

Brexit was treated by the Guardian and others on the centre-Left and Left as a class issue. They fed contempt for the Brexit voter in ways that made it impossible to maintain Labour as a Party representing the working class. Blair had already undermined the foundations of the Parliamentary Labour Party as credible representatives of working class interests by making them into another cadre of upwardly mobile careerists, shaving policy in a Tory-lite direction. Brexit as an issue framing the EU as the progressive future and Brexit as racism slotted right into the PLP’s orientation.

What Corbyn never had that I could see was a vision of an economic engine for Britain. The EU has been an economic engine for only a part of Britain and not the better part I might add. Part of Britain has boomed and drawn in immigrants who find Britain an attractive place in ways that Germany and France are not. There was neoliberal handwringing from the EU over the very large parts of Britain left behind, sunk since Thatcher by the obsolescence of coal and iron but also by the forces of finance doing in the possibility of making things. Britain is a debtor; debtor countries suffer under neoliberalism, which is nothing if not a creditors’ regime. If you must make things, neoliberals insist you must wring prosperity out of risk-taking, privatization and flexibility, which is a nice way of saying usury, stealing and lower wages.

The EU does do grants. But, by neoliberal design, the EU prevents government from doing anything effective for people in the bottom half of the income distribution except feeble redistribution. Conspicuously, nothing can be done about immigration from within the EU. Local manufacturing cannot be protected from EU competition and must struggle against the effects of London’s success in financial services (including criminal money laundering).

We swim in a political sea where the water is propaganda narratives, and in the prevailing narrative for what passes for the Left, the EU embodies all the existing promise of a better life, which would be ironic in a more enlightened age. And, in that narrative, those unhappy with the results and with the political disarming of their communities are resentful racists voting against their own economic interests, their nationalism a symptom of an archaic moral disease.

There is no alternative, if you cannot imagine one. Isn’t that what Mandos said?

Exactly Ian, thank you.

The question then is how does the Left ever manage to side-step this media, and broader institutional, bias. Blairites, aided by the media, will nw fight to re-control the party. If they succeed, then that is the end of a socialist alternative for another generation and we’ll be in the democratic facade of Reps vs Dems, or Cons vs New Lab.

Everybody wants to keep their pay rates ‘hopeful’. Telling them that it’s their moral duty to make their pay rates ‘hopeless’, so that foreign workers different from themselves can live better lives while their employers can live much better lives, doesn’t seem like a very good selling point. It doesn’t seem very “labour”.

Trump used undocumented and nonunion labor pretty frequently.

Every aspect of neoliberalism either was explicitly developed so as to foreclose alternatives, or functions that way, consistently, owing to the systemic logic of its structures. Whether the free movement of capital, deindustrialization, regulatory arbitrage (whether between nations or utilizing supranational tribunals) , or (yes), mass migration, neoliberalism operates by means of blocking avenues of redress and socio-economically atomizing the people who might potentially unify to effectuate any reform. When neoliberals bang on about there being No Alternative, the significance is not merely rhetorical, and not a simple reference to the established order resisting change in the name of its prerogatives. Rather, every single neoliberal deform is intended – objectively intended, as in: this is how neoliberal policy functions in the political economy, regardless of what any individual neoliberal thinks about it between his ears – to prevent the re-erection of previously-existing social democratic bulwarks, or the erection of new ones.

Free movement of capital represents the perpetual threat of the capital strike: raise taxes too high, implement monetary policy in the interests of the people, nationalize or even regulate an industry in the public interest – in sum, do any of the things that are necessary for broad prosperity and flourishing – and capital can “stay on the sidelines” or leave the country.

The related offshoring regime is an effective veto on real union power. It is to unions what capital mobility is to the nation writ large.

And so on and so forth.

And the important thing, from my perspective, is that neoliberalism is not a monolithic thing, though it often functions as though it were; there is no Neoliberal Central, rather, neoliberalism is a series of overlapping and intermingled networks of financial and political power. It is not an emergent phenomenon of these networks; it *is* these networks. It is a thing like a hydra. And that’s why, in my opinion, attempting to confront the thing all at once, as if on an open plain of battle, with massed armies, for the Final Battle, will prove so futile. Instead, it is necessary to isolate each of the networks, as if in a free-fire cauldron, and concentrate fire on them. Proposing maximal openness, but of a different, or slightly different type, as a means of fighting neoliberalism is proposing coordinated resistance everywhere, all at once – the mother of all collective action problems.

At a level fairly close to the surface, the ideology of neoliberal reformists is, “To him who already has everything, more will be given; and from him from whom everything has already been taken, more will be required – but if we keep doing this long enough, it will be awesome.” I’m not sure it’s realist so much as magical realist, and that’s the problem.

Ian said “Labour’s voters were genuinely split.”

Yes, because like most of today’s “left,” Labour has no coherent ideology. It’s no longer based on class, instead it is a hodgepodge of special interests and identify politics.

Do you like Corbyn’s economic policies? Well, they can’t be implemented within the constraints of the EU. To support Corbyn’s economic policies while also wanting to remain in the EU is incoherent.

Does this have any relevance to the U.S., or is it unique to England? Well, I observe similar dynamics in France and Greece, where only the far right is willing to take a firm stand against the EU and against open borders, and in the U.S. where only Trump was willing to take a firm stand against so-called “free trade.” In many countries, the so-called “left” offers no coherent path forward. The left means well but doesn’t seem to know what to do. They don’t know what to do because they don’t have a coherent ideology. The “left” can’t put together a winning coalition because it is no longer based on class or ideology.

Add climate change and stir.

Before folks get distracted by the troll, a couple of thoughts.

If you look at which seats changed hands, and in which direction, it is pretty clear that Brexit was the main driver. The globalist / remain cabal had their best chance with May’s deal, but they thought they could have it all and reverse the vote. Corbyn made a mistake in my opinion, in allowing himself to shift position on Brexit, but it wouldn’t have made much difference.

Corbyn was the same Corbyn this election as last, with the same policies, the only change on his side was moving to more of a remain position, but the big changes were on the Tory side, a new leader, and a new focus on Brexit. I can’t stand the Tories, or Boris, but one has to acknowledge how successful and effective they have been in consolidating their vote, eliminating dissenting voices, crafting and conveying a clear message and sticking to that message. Of course, campaigning and governing are two different things, so success to date is no guarantee of how things will go in power.

The only way for the other parties to fight the consolidated leave vote would have been a remain coalition, but again the globalists were unwilling to compromise or get behind Corbyn, trying and failing to bolster the LD vote instead.

Echoing what some of the others have said here, sadly I see a real potential of a similar electoral wipeout if Bernie or even Warren gets the nomination. To whit:

1) the Democratic leadership establishment will work at least covertly, if not overtly, to defeat them in the general election, just like Blair had said he would rather the Tories win than someone like Corbyn:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/26/obama-privately-considered-leading-stop-bernie-campaign-combat-sanders-2020-surge

2) Peon says the “Brexit” issue for rural voters/working class whites is immigration. I differ a bit, in that while immigration may be an emotionally-driven hot button issue it’s really ‘free trade’ that’s effectively the issue (for starters, there’s an inverse correlation between anti-immigration fervor and where immigrants actually live; anti-immigrant fervor appears highest where there are few immigrants and lowest where there are plenty)

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/us-immigrant-population-state-and-county

By this map, you’d see the states that have the most immigrants aren’t the Midwest or my Appalachia, where the anti-immigrant sentiment is higher. So it’s not like the out-of-work or laid-off there are seeing Hispanics and Asians and other groups going to the jobs that they once had. No, what has happened is those jobs were at plants now shuttered, as the jobs were shipped overseas to low-wage/low-environmental and safety restriction countries. By contrast, walk into a Starbucks or so in Boston, where there is far less anti-immigrant sentiment, and it seems that say a quarter or a third of the customers are recent immigrants.

No, anti-immigration sentiment in the US is, truth be told, the result of combination of pre-exisiting racial, ethnographic, and/or religious biases which have been heightened by economic distress produced by 40 years of neoliberal policies. They are also usually coupled with the belief that a capitalist economy were Mr Job Creator deals out all the jobs is the best or only way to run things, that this is all a zero-sum game, that any additional worker in the country is not creating more wealth but is driving down their pay. Humans are good at connecting dots to form patterns, however real or unreal, and these people draw a causal line from “there are more brown people in the US now” to “any job I can get, if I am lucky enough to do so, sucks” just like their Christian Right counterparts note “we don’t have Protestant Christianity as our quasi-official religion anymore” to a perceived lack of morality or to America’s decline. Of course, there are no such causal links to any of this, this is all the result of bad economic policies, but it’s a simple answer and people generally prefer simple answers to complicated ones.

And the simple fact is, no Democratic candidate can espouse the same degree of full-throated anti-immigration sentiment as Trump without losing more voters than they can win back any more than they can appeal to antiabortion or anti-gay rights sentiments without doing the same. While polls show that 55 % or more of the US electorate is “never Trump” they all oppose him for a variety or conflicting reasons, and it’s hard for any conceivable Democrat to appeal to all. Bernie or Warren might be the best bet but still they don’t appeal to significant fractions of the Democratic base, and maybe not enough to weather the media assault they’ll probably face (see #1 above). So large numbers of anti-Trumpers will stay home no matter who the party nominates.

And with the Pelosi Dems working *with Trump* to pass the new NAFTA followed by a probably Trump “win” (i.e., a surrender) to China on a trade, this probably isn’t going to help. The Peters will believe that any trade deal, no matter how bad, is a “win” just because Trump says is is, so Trump won’t lose much support, but the labor unions do watch such things and will note yet another Democratic betrayal.

(Two caveats before I’m misunderstood:

1) I’m not saying Trump’s voter base is ‘just racism’; racism, cultural, gender, and religious prejudices may always be with us, but there conditions which can either exacerbate these or dampen these. The US of the 1950s and 1960s was still deeply racist, but the FDR economy which floated all boats mitigated this racism enough to allow African-Americans and other groups to make advances that were not possible earlier.

2) Biden or the media darling ‘safe Democrats’ would likely be an even worse disaster, they appeal and excite no one and would still suffer most of the other drawbacks. Bernie or Elizabeth or someone similarly ‘left’ would still be the best choice, just maybe not good enough).

peon, I understand your point about how this parallels the rural midwest. Although I live in the Northeast, I do not live in one of the “boom” areas, and in many ways, the economy resembles the midwest.

On a side note, Bernie Sanders has never advocated for “open borders”, and he has actually been a little further right than many liberals on immigration (including me) – he has expressly described immigration in language that is tied to “taking American jobs”.

But moving beyond that, here is what I think is the challenge: convincing those rural midwestern voters to stop seeing immigrants as “competition” and to start seeing them as “lifeblood to a dying community”.

Capitalism depends on economic expansion, and many of those rural midwestern areas are contracting or are stagnant. Think, for a minute, what would thrill the people living in them ? Having good, hardworking, white Americans settling in their communities. They know that this would provide vitality, it would provide economic expansion. More customers, more potential homebuyers, more local taxpayers.

Guess what though: it’s not going to happen because the economics and demographics don’t work. Anyone who wants to open a store on Main Street USA is going to want to make $75k/year from that gig, but Main Street can’t support a $75k/year salary, and it never could. It can support a $35k/year salary though, but no one wants to live on that anymore.

Except immigrants. They are happy to make $35k/year because that is at worst a doubling of their income from their home countries. They are happy to work 60 hours because that’s 50% less than what they would need to work in their home country.

And immigrants don’t look down on East Bumfuck with houses that are only worth $40k and no night life, Starbucks, or Trader Joe’s because they just want a better life – not a perfect one.

And when you have 1.8 children per family on average, you’re not replacing your parents, so without importing people, your town IS going to die.

So – keeping in mind that the only difference between what people in the Midwest want, and what they can have, is skin color/ethnicity, I think the win-win scenario here is for people to get over their racism.

Who cares if we either graduate 50,000 white kids from college and send them into the workforce of we graduate 50,000 kids from Mexico and send them into the workforce? The end result to the economy is the same – 5o,000 college graduates into the workforce. And if you see those 50,000 kids as “competition”, then shouldn’t we start shutting down the colleges so they don’t churn out so much competition?

The USA has been more successful than other countries specifically because of immigration. We were able to grow our economy faster than other countries because our growth surpassed the natural replacement rate of a native population. We were able to have nice things because we had people happily willing to do work for less money and for longer hours. And to boot, we were able to peel off the most ambitious people from other countries – those who had enough inner drive to get up off their asses and do something really hard to make their lives better.

There was once a time when Italians were seen as ‘the other’, another time when Germans were, another time when the Irish were. Instead of fighting so hard against immigrants, how about working that hard to help welcome and assimilate them? That is win-win.

Whistling past the graveyard, isn’t it? The notion of a working class is antiquated. With the relentless advance of automation and AI, there is no more working class. It’s been transformed into the useless eater class. Considering climate change, we really shouldn’t advocate for a reconstitution of a working class because that would predicate more growth and growth is the cause of climate change. We need a new, constructive purpose for people who were formerly working class that doesn’t require them to further growth. In otherwords, we need an entirely new economic system based not on growth but contraction to a steady state. Anything short of this is trying to fit squares into circles or circles into squares.

>If I can get Bernie as the president, at least I know I will get Medicare for All, and no more Forever Wars, and other good stuff, so I can overlook his immigration policies with that I vehemently disagree. On the other hand, the entire Democratic establishment is pro-immigration and PRO-ILLEGALS. Atop of that, I disagree and dislike all their other policies and positions. Which means that: if someone like Biden or Bootyjuggs becomes the DNC nominee, I ain’t gonna bother — if anything, I will go over to the other side to vote for Trump.

i.e., Biden and Bootyjuggs are as corrupted as Trump if not more so, and I get nothing I want out of them. With Trump, at least I will get immigration enforcement — and less illegals and refugees. Trump has fulfilled most of his promises on immigration enforcement; “Build the Wall” is really just a metaphor for “getting tough on illegals and refugees,” and he has certainly gotten tough on them.

Like it or not, Trump has actually fulfilled most of his campaign promises: he is cracking down on illegals and refugees, he cancelled the TPP that is really just a corporate power grab, he has gotten tough on trade with China, he is pulling out from Afghanistan, etc. AND the economy is actually doing good, and real wages are growing for the first time in decades, (I have just been headhunted for the first time in over a decade.)

It is gonna be a tough fight for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, whoever he/she will be. The DNC is gonna make it easier for Trump by nominating Creepy Joe or the Gay Obama.

Labour does have an ideology. An incorrect one, but it does have an ideology. But the press is salivating over “tax cuts!!” So Tories it is.

Then climate change will come.

I agree with Melenchon, Corbyn never should have apologized. By doing so, he gave the accusations play. He gave the illegitimate accusations the appearance of legitimacy, otherwise why apologize?

I find it hard to believe the charges of anti-semitism had that much of an effect to swing the election to this degree. I’m guessing Brexit is pretty much responsible for 99% of the results.

Think about it. Is someone who would have voted Labour/Corbyn really going to be persuaded to vote otherwise because of these accusations of anti-semitism? I highly doubt it and if it’s an independent voter, especially of the working class, no way these charges of anti-semitism make any difference in their vote.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-netanyahu-s-party-to-blame-for-corbyn-defeat-says-french-far-left-leader-1.8283093

Oops, “be” should read “beat” as in something always beats nothing.

I never really liked The Guardian, it always felt like their job is gatekeeping for the Anglo-Left, also some weird Francophobia, and some Neocon opinion pieces.

Bruce: it’s more that, even if you can imagine the alternative, the opportunity to enact it may no longer exist.

> Immigration is the biggest driver of population growth in the US. So limiting or eliminating most immigration would place us on a glide path to sustainability.

I am seeing this argument so many times that I’m starting to think it is being planted by Russian trolls – the idea that the USA must somehow shrink in population, and that this will fix everything. The idea that we must eliminate ourselves is being touted as some kind of “green” solution.

Maybe we should all just prepare some national kool-aid to help the planet out – after all, having 375 million less inhabitants is surely great for the planet, isn’t it?

Maybe, we should call the Blairites “toxic” — it was the Blairites after all who introduced poison into politics and policy. (policy: Iraq, the British version of financial deregulation)

The groundless charge of “antisemitism” is poison, too, imho.

When anyone expresses their political differences over policy preferences as a visceral aversion to a person (which is not quite the same as aversion to a political persona, like Trump, though maybe related), I am always suspicious that the real cause of disagreement is not being articulated for a reason — like maybe the motives for the policy position cannot be revealed without losing the argument.

Many people need to get their gut reactions better aligned with an accurate moral compass.

Was Labour stabbed in the back by the Blairites?

NoPolitician, you are apparently also no mathematician, ecologist, or economist. Do you have an argument? We live in a country and on a planet, both with finite resources. We can either make reasonable choices or let nature make unreasoned ones for us.

Dismissal of every reason for left-wing voters to dislike Corbyn as the result of propaganda is tantamount to living in a denialist bubble. You may not agree with their reasons, but a lot of people hated Corbyn (and the faction he represents) way before Blair was a thing. I have no reason to believe that many of them are not old-school pre-neoliberal social democrats, and they have seen since forever the tendency now called Momentum as a front for totalitarian, destructive politics. The whole deselection business confirmed their suspicions.

More importantly, they view that political movement as essentially incompetent to govern, no matter how good its policies look on paper. I can’t entirely dismiss this, both based on the waffling over Brexit from Labour and also from the passionately-held assumptions from some Corbyn sympathizers here on this very blog. There is no anti-austerian Brexit, there is no Brexit that delivers a mass nationalization program that results in generalized prosperity, real existing Brexit is fundamentally incompatible with these things and would be under a Corbyn government. Inability to understand why is to me prima facie incompetence.

Of course, there was also a lot of dumb propaganda spread through the BBC and the Guardian and the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. If you can’t process that there are traditional left-wing voters who did not like Corbyn as such, for reasons outside of propaganda, then no learning is possible. There’s no shortage of bad faith on anti-semitism also, but there are enough “grassroots” reports, not from Corbyn personally but from some of the forces that felt empowered by him. I’m sure many of us have met That Guy whose outrage about Palestinians makes him less than careful about generalizations about Jews-as-such. I mean, I’ve met my share of That Guy, and I’m definitely not Jewish.

Insight into the propaganda campaign against Corbyn: ”The Integrity Initiative, an arm of British intelligence masquerading as an NGO. The Integrity Initiative is a means of undermining the sovereignty of the British people by manipulating them with lies. It engaged in numerous efforts to libel Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and prevent him from ever being elected prime minister.”
https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-propaganda-and-defeat-jeremy-corbyn