You’re fired!

I wonder if this is the tragedy or the farce part of the history. The only comparable meltdown in an established democracy I can think of right now, is Italy in the early 1990s.

And we all know how that ended. Maybe you should just have Sir Sugar appointed PM and get it over and done with.

Alan (ths) Johnson now!

‘reality-show compere’

What’s the problem? This could start a trend. Jeremy Kyle for Home Secretary, Davina MacColl for Meeja Relations…indeed there’s a new programme that has just started filled with bright talented people, any one of whom could end up being in the Labour Government!

Does anyone actually think that appointing A(the minister)J leader now would win the next election for Labour, make a significant policy shift or hold the party together after an election defeat?

“On a separate issue, who knew that that the Chancellor of the Exchequer gets to decide who’s Chancellor of the Exchequer?”

This is hardly a break with New Labour tradition is it?

Bunbury,
I think the answer to all your questions is no. The aim is to minimize the damage. I think AJ’s appeal is that people think he has a sort of common touch that will enable him to do that. No idea whether they are right, but I don’t see another candidate who would be able to hold the party together in the aftermath of defeat anyway, so its not a big risk.

Boom, boom, out go the lights on Geoff Hoon, by the way.

Chris,
As a self-confessed, life-long labour voter, do you feel a bit:
a) responsible
b) gullible
c) just plain stupid
or
d) all of the above?

Also, Chris, have you stopped beating your wife?

It turns out that Sugar is the Enterprise Champion.

The thing is, there’s not really a Labour Party left to put itself together again. After the 1983 debacle there was a prolonged and painful debate in the party as to how it needed to change in order to aspire to government again. I didn’t and wouldn’t agree with the people who won, but they did win and they won because they made their case and most people agreed with them. But the trouble was that one perhaps unanticipated consequence of their winning was that the process couldn’t be repeated in the future, when <i<they fouled up: partly because most of the people who’d been enthusiastic for the changed party lost their enthusiasm and left (as did nearly all their opponents) but partly because one of the conclusions the party came to is that there should be no more fighting in public.

They had good reasons for deciding that, but unfortunately now they need to fight in public, either now or when they get slaughtered at the next election, and who’s going to do that? It’s not necessarily a case of what particular policies they should have, how far to the left or right they should be, but clearly they need a prolonged and genuine debate about what the party is for and how it should work. And I don’t think they will. There may be faction fights in and around Westminster, there’ll be plenty of briefing and briefing against, but I’ll take a lot of convincing that the party isn’t so entirely timorous that it has any capability of holding so much as a public meeting.

Of course that’s not the only thing: the other is that pretty much the entire national media were behind the changes of the Eighties and Nineties, whereas there’ll be hardly a politics correspondent or a leader writer who won’t jump all over anybody calling for the party to be more democratic.

I’m American, and only an intermittent follower of British politics, but why would Alan Johnson (or anyone else, for that matter) want to take over now? Why take over a party on the brink of electoral defeat, for which you will very likely be blamed even if it isn’t your fault?

Why not just let Brown ride it out, hope things improve by next year, and then, if the almost inevitable loss happens anyway, pick a new leader. The Tories don’t seem to have any real ideas or vision about what to do, so far as I can gather, and as Bert notes they’re split over Europe, so it doesn’t seem all that likely their government would be particularly lasting. Johnson’s in a much better position to have a successful tenure as leader of the Labour Party if he takes power after the embarrassing defeat, doesn’t he?

And, perhaps things will have sufficiently improved by next year that Brown will be able to win. Major did it, after all.

Isn’t it time that someone pointed out that Surallan isn’t actually a particularly successful businessman?

Careful with this nickname, it looks Spanish to me. Or maybe an Indonesian celebrity.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, UK Higher Education has just been sold down the river into the hands of the Antichrist himself… Thank feck they’ll be out of office soon…

I’m genuinely interested in the idea of voter responsiblility. Do those who voted Labour feel responsible for the present situation or not? The plan to make Brown PM was well known. His record was well known. His personality was well known. A lot of people have got what they voted for and it’s a little unfair of them to be on the guy’s back now when all that’s happened has been pretty much predictable.

By the by, I wouldn’t vote Tory any more than I’d vote Labour, but looking at the mess Brown has made I don’t think you can seriously claim that the Tories are ‘a joke’ in comparison. (@17)

I’m genuinely interested in the idea of voter responsiblility.

well, you might get more discussion of this idea you’re genuinely interested in if you try asking the question in a more neutral and less studiedly assholish way then, maybe?

further to bert (24); I think we have evidence that he doesn’t much want it, because right now its his for the taking if he does want it. The next few days will tell.

Bunbury – really, you think Howard would have made more of a mess of the job than Brown? I can’t really see how that’s possible but perhaps you have more imagination than me.

dsquared – as a regular reader, I haven’t noticed anyone behave in a more studiedly assholish way on a regular basis than your good self and so I thank you for the recognition.

The serious point is this: the original post talked of the ‘desperation and vacuouseness of the Brown adminstration’ but the poster admits voting to bring in that administartion. I guess that many of you voted the same way – does anyone feel just a little bit responsible for the mess this administration has made of running the country? generally, do people think voters should feel some responsibility for the governments they elect or not?

Harry,
Despite my comments at #21, if you’re after rightwing ideology among the Cameroons then Europe is probably the best place to look. Yet even that smells phoney. The commitment to withdraw from the EPP was a leadership election move to head off an attempt by David Davies to outflank on the right. The pledge on Lisbon was designed to exploit a broken Labour manifesto commitment.
I remember John Major used regularly to send people out to reassure the tea rooms that he remained eurosceptic at heart. He found out rather too late that an irreducible core of his party was made up of unappeasable nuts. Cameron looks set to relearn the lesson, painfully.

Re the LibDems, does anyone else get the sense that Nick Clegg is sort of thick? I get the uncomfortable feeling I used to get from Neil Kinnock – that he starts a sentence with no clue as to how it will finish, and is only just clinging on until the sentence comes to an end of its own accord.

MDH, I’m not thinking what you’re thinking.

If you said what you thought this mess was and what part Brown played in it you might get a more meaningful answer. That is what you want isn’t it?

not a UK citizen, but the failure of left-leaning Brits to support Brown, probably the world leader most committed to fighting global poverty and strengthening global institutions to prevent genocide, has been a disappointment and a surprise. Brown’s playing a tough hand, no doubt, but I think he’s doing a pretty good job, and to some extent this is Murdoch-led hysteria. Vacuous seems a more apt word for the critics of Brown, rather than the man himself, who if anything is too substantive & policy-oriented. I’d like to be reassured that Cameron’s up to the job, but from what I’ve seen he strikes me as George Bush with a bad haircut.

Brown has shown a lot of steel in standing up and doing his job under adverse circumtances, and from my POV it’s pretty damned inspiring.

roublen, there are a million dead iraqis because of Brown. I don’t know that he gets much credit for “strengthening global institutions to prevent genocide”. Also, his presiding over the country which produced the credit crunch, and his unwillingness to tackle tax havens, doesn’t really play well for the whole “committed to fighting global poverty” thing. I don’t think you could say that he’s doing a good job on the week that 6 of his cabinet quit, and he lost every council in England.

If he’s playing a tough hand, it’s only the hand he dealt himself with 10 years in power: two vicious wars of choice (in one of which another kid soldier died this week), a country in economic collapse, a resurgent far right playing on the slogans he failed to live up to, a police force that kills people for fun while he’s playing Big Boy with his betters, and a bunch of corrupt and inept fools for a cabinet.

And I don’t think you can credit the choice of “stick it out till the voters screw you” over “get screwed now” as showing “a lot of steel”.

Bye bye Gordon and bye bye labour. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, and thanks a bunch for letting the BNP and UKIP in before you left.

sg: Also, his presiding over the country which produced the credit crunch,

Gordon Brown is the PotUS now? Someone should tell Bush and Obama they were/are living in the wrong house.

Re: Johnson:

Ok, why would Johnson want to be Prime Minister of the UK when he’s bound to lose in a year’s time?

Erm, well perhaps being Prime Minister of the UK remains, while a bit tarnished, one of the most imporant positions you can hold in world politics? And add to that the history.

I think it’d be a bit odd if you wanted to be a cabinet minister, but didn’t want to be the PM.

@40
Roublen, this is a guy who had Thatcher around for tea and biscuits in his first three months. Admired her, apparently. After spending the first half of his premiership cuddling up to business, why would any on the left take his claims of being a good old socialist/Keynesian all along once the crisis kicked off as any less of a desperate bid for popularity than the “Britishness” meme he toyed with and the aforementioned Thatcher incident?

If Brown is “committed” and “substantive”, then that’s certainly not how he (not just the press) has presented himself. Empty, confused, lacking a political compass, lost for what his ideology is supposed to be – or in a word, vacuous, seems to fit him best.

“that’s certainly not how he (not just the press) has presented himself”

I dunno, read the transcript of his speech to Congress. Perhaps he’s a real Jekyll & Hyde act, but if not he strikes me as your basic garden-variety insufferably earnest good-government leftie. And a rather admirable one, IMO.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/brown_jointsession_030409.html

“. . .In the Rwandan museum of genocide, there is a memorial to the countless children who were among those murdered in the massacres in Rwanda.

And there is one portrait of a child, David. The words beneath him are brief, yet they weigh on me heavily. It says, “Name, David. Age, 10. Favorite sport, football. Enjoyed making people laugh. Dreamed to become a doctor. Cause of death, tortured to death. Last words, ‘The United Nations will come for us.'”

But we never did. That child believed the best of us, but he was wrong, as to our eternal discredit. We tend to think of a day of judgment as a moment to come, but our faith tells us, as the writer said, that judgment is more than that. It’s a summary court in perpetual session

And when I visit those bare, rundown, yet teeming classrooms across Africa, they’re full of children like our children, desperate to learn. But because we’ve been unable as a world to keep our promises to help , more and more children, I tell you, are being lured to expensively funded madrassas, teaching innocent children to hate us.

So for our security and our children’s security and these children’s future, you know, the greatest gift of our generation, the greatest gift we could give to the world, the gift of America and Britain could be that every child in every country should have the chance 70 million children today do not have, the chance to go to school, to spell their names, to count their age, and perhaps learn of a great generation who are striving to make their freedom real. . .”

Those words seem to me something you’d expect to come from Samantha Power, or a human rights activist. To have them coming from the current UK prime minister seems like a big deal, an important first step.

For those who want to get a sense of the new Conservative MPs in the next Parliament (and there are likely to be at least 120 of them), here’s a Times piece that I thought was useful:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6195107.ece

As far as I can tell, the Conservatives havent outlined any clear policies, so we really dont know what they’re going to do. Which spending cuts will they prioritize? We know that they say the NHS (and education?) is inviolable, but i’ve always wondered why someone doesnt ask them WHY they dont want to cut any spending on the NHS. It seems that they’ve realized the vast majority of the public doesnt want spending cuts in the NHS, but i’m not convinced they’ve got principled reasons for their changed view. The only policy i know they’re going to pursue is trying to overturn the human rights act, which will make the UK the first democratic country to decide to leave an international human rights institution (i think). Conservative ministers are on record as saying that the replacement ‘British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities’ will be 99% the same as the human rights act, so we can all speculate on why they’re so keen on this piece of legislation.
But does anyone know their current views on taxation, foundation hospitals, education (grammar schools, academies?, tuition limits in higher education, private funding in higher ed), etc? Yes, we’ve got statements and voting records on these issues, but i really struggle to understand what exaclty the conservatives are going to do in almost every policy area, and where their priorities actually lie. And i’m particularly concerned about this given the very large spending cuts they’ll have to make in their first budget.

It’s also worth pointing out that nothing is getting done in government right now, making Sugar’s appoitment seem even more desperate. Proposed legislation such as the Equality Bill and Bill of Rights may not get passed, and though i’m not wholly convinced by either, we can be sure the the Conservative equivalents (if any) will be much worse. Peopple are concerned about how all this speculation on rebellion and leadership is damaging labour in terms of voting behaviour, but it’s also resulting in very ineffective governance, and so i doubt we can expect any progressive legislation however long Brown manages to hold on. What will Brown’s legacy (as PM) then be? No, dont answer that question please.

it’s still a party without a philosophy and wanting it that way.

EJH, that’s really not true, but given the lack of publicity the Lib Dems get, ever, I’m not surprised that you would think so. The philosophical shenanigans of “New” Labour got squillions of column inches during the early 90’s, so everyone knew about them. The struggles in the LibDems over the “Orange Book” faction (of which Nick Clegg is one) got nearly nothing,

The struggles in the LibDems over the “Orange Book” faction (of which Nick Clegg is one) got nearly nothing

Well, they got a little bit, but to be fair they weren’t remotely as fundamental as the New Labour v Old Labour battle. They were about policy (and specifically what sort of policy should be adopted to attract what sort of voter) far more than about some sort of defining philosophy. They don’t define themselves – they make a virtue out of that, which is their privilege, but it’s not terribly unreasonable if as a result people find them lacking in substance.

Well, there we are: ask a fatuous question …
I suggest you open a bottle.

To come back to Bunbury’s question @ 7: the Labour Party needs to *elect* a leader, just as Brown should have held a leadership election (and perhaps a general election). Only the victor has a chance of holding the party together. There are several ways a leadership election would have helped Brown (if he’d won of course). He’d have a mandate; he’d know who was against him; he’d have had to have campaigned and would have had feedback from members (if he’d listened); and he’d have had to declare some policies. Democracy is such a good idea that we should export less of it, and try it at home too.

I voted Labour in 1997 partly in the belief that Brown would succeed sooner rather than later (partly because it was the only thing to do). By the time he became PM, I’d given up on him. The post of Labour Party Leader is not the gift of the incumbent to give away; it belongs to the members. Brown didn’t seem to believe that. What’s the point of all the talk of ending hereditary peerages and stuff if you just run the People’s Party like a feudal tyrant?

Back to the ‘Apprentice’ theme. Brown yesterday: “If I didn’t think I was the right person, leading the right team to meet these difficult challenges I wouldn’t be standing here,” Mr Brown said. You know, there’s a reality TV show where we get to laugh at arseholes whose self-belief far outstrips their talents, and they generally talk like that.

Talking of obvious headlines, I have been surprised during the expenses ‘expose’ not to see ‘A Plague on Both Your Houses.’

Maybe I missed it.

I have been surprised during the expenses ‘expose’ not to see ‘A Plague on Both Your Houses.’

They’re saving that one for when swine flu shuts down Parliament.

Also, what photographic negatives does bloody Mandelson have in a drawer?

None: but he has opinions which suit political commentators and he has more friends among that group than in the party, having worked out a generation ago which set of people were the more important. As did David Cameron.

the Labour Party needs to elect a leader, just as Brown should have held a leadership election

So it should and so should he: but where was the Labour Party when Brown was taking over? Was it actually saying so? If you don’t stand up for democracy, you don’t get it.

Moreover – and I know I’m banging on about the commentariat, but it’s important – who among Westminster correspondents was saying anything other than that a real, genuine election would be “damaging” or “divisive”?

Just on an interesting side note to all this Broon stuff… last week the Tories left the centre right block in the European parliament and joined some bunch of mad fringe rightist AGW-deniers. If (against all Dsquareds predictions) the BNP and/or UKIP win a seat in these elections, they will be in parliament and I wonder if they will join the mad loony right bloc?

If so this means that, despite Cameron’s supposed hatred of the loony right, he’ll be in alliance with them. Or he’ll have to fight the rest of his bloc to deny the BNP admission to the asylum with all their loony mates. Is this possible, or is there a madder fringe they can join? I would love to see the results of that little bit of confusion…

sg: there’s a wonderfully pithy take on that from Janice Turner in the Times today. The whole article is good (well-written, astute, and I agree with it, FWIW):

Great to see also that while Mr Obama left Egypt to make common cause with Angela Merkel over the economic crisis and nuclear disputes with Iran, that aspiring international statesman David Cameron has decreed that Tories in the EU will work not with her, but with a far-right posse of Gypsy-haters and homophobes, a sort of Borat Alliance.

While we’re on the topic of actually good Times columns, I think Minette Marrin is also worth a look. It’s not clear that the Labour strategists have understood the impact of weeks of headlines about one depressing child abuse case or botched probation after another. They can try to pass the blame to councils or agencies but the public ain’t buying.

“Despite a lifetime of voting Labour…..”.

This is something I find really puzzling. Parties go through periods of good performance and periods of bad – just like companies, students, armies, etc- and yet there are people who will cheerfully admit to a lifetime of voting for the same party.

Since the Second World War, Labour has brought economic disaster on the nation three separate times, and yet the electorate has exhibited the same behaviour pattern throughout this period. When a disaster strikes, but only then, floating voters will vote against Labour, but as soon as the disaster is safely in the past, they will vote Labour once more, and we are set up for the next crash.

Meanwhile, Labour’s core vote is so tribal that they would continue to vote Labour no matter what happened.

Voting without memory, or as a means of expressing an identity, seems like a very bad idea to me.

I have to say, while I didn’t expect any words of praise for Brown, I am a little surprised by the lack of any thought to what happens next, and the attitude of “good riddance” extending to the Labour Party as an institution.

This surprised and saddened me. It surprises me, because as a progressive who is also a Democratic Party partisan, my attitude to the dominance of the more conservative wing of the Democratic Party from 2000-2004 wasn’t to say “to hell with the Party” but to try to win it back from people who had steered it astray – and luckily that was the attitude of, for example, the Dean for America supporters who heeded his call to take over the Democratic Party from the local level on up. Without that effort, I really don’t think there would have been a major Democratic victory in 2006 (there still would have been some, but it would have been weaker without forces pushing the party to oppose and speak out against key elements of the Bush agenda), or the Obama campaign’s victory in the primaries.

So what saddens me is that people here seem to be willing to see the party of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson die an ugly and undignified death without even trying to rescue it. Last time I checked, the Labour Party still has local constituency parties, union affiliates, various clubs and organizations, as well as the Party Conference, the National Exec. Committee, and the NPF. Why not at least try to take the party back, either before or after the election?

StevenAtwell, look at the electoral landscape after the European elections – 2 Nazis elected, and the second biggest vote-winner a bunch of far-right anti-immigration lunatics. There aren’t exactly a lot of Britons interested in progressive or left wing politics who are left in Britain to reform the party…

There aren’t exactly a lot of Britons interested in progressive or left wing politics who are left in Britain to reform the party…

I don’t think the first of these propositions is quite true, or at least it doesn’t follow from the premise provided. But very few of these people are very interested in trying to expend their energies reforming the Labour Party.

None: but he has opinions which suit political commentators and he has more friends among that group than in the party,

but this isn’t true is it? literally nothing is more obvious conventional wisdom among that group than that Mandelson is evil, strange (if you’re Simon Heffer or Richard Littlejohn insert ***dogwhistle: Jewish and ghay!*** here), etc, and this has been true ever since 1997. I presume he might have been popular with the press for three weeks in 1994-1995, but then so were Menswear…

EJH, Chris, and SG:

To be honest, the “we tried and failed” argument does not impress me at all. Look at the American progressive movement post-1972: we failed twice to get an alternative to Carter, we got party loyalists (albiet a rather liberal one in Mondale) instead of the Rainbow Coalition, and got rolled by the New Democrats from 1992-2004 (Kerry wasn’t a New Democrat particularly, but they joined ranks with him to shut out Howard Dean. Then look at the last 4 years. Sometimes the political climate isn’t right, and sometimes you just have damn bad luck, and that might well mean an entire generation has to toil without seeing the result, but commitment to a cause should mean a willingness to endure time ” in the wilderness” in the service of that cause.

Progressive politics is the ultimate long game – it took Labour from 1899 (founding of the LRC) to 1924 to get into government, that government was a disaster as was the succeeding one; it wasn’t until 1945 that Labour was able to rule on its own, and then it spent 13 years in opposition; then they were in office for 11 years in the 60s and 70s; then 18 years in the wilderness, then 12 years of New Labour. If activists had given up in the 1930s because they’d tried and failed to win the party free from MacDonald and Snowdon, or in the 1950s because they’d failed to win the party free from Gaitskell, the Labour Party never would have held power at all.

If progressive activists really care about what’s going on, then the fact that they tried and failed 20-30 years ago isn’t an excuse. New Labour has lost both public support and intellectual confidence – now is the best time to try to fight for the party. Just like it was in 2004 when the New Democrat’s triangulation had failed in 2000, 2002, and 2004.

As for the most recent elections, all I’ll say is that I think activists need to own turnout. I didn’t see any huge push by the British left to try to out-mobilize UKIP or the BNP, but if “very few of these people are very interested in trying to expend their energies reforming the Labour Party,” I’m not surprised they’re not getting their act together to win European Parliamentary elections.

If progressive activists really care about what’s going on, then the fact that they tried and failed 20-30 years ago isn’t an excuse

Says who? Who the hell are you to tell people who spend half their lives fighting a cause that they should spend the other half doing the same?

If activists had given up in the 1930s because they’d tried and failed to win the party free from MacDonald and Snowdon, or in the 1950s because they’d failed to win the party free from Gaitskell, the Labour Party never would have held power at all.

This is a bit strange and tends to suggest that you’re not really very familair with your material. For instance, MacDonald and Snowden (Snowdon is a mountain) were both expelled from the Labour Party. The struggles against Gaitkskell were mostly after the Fifties. And so on.

Dsquared:
Autobackslapping is hardly what I’m going for here. As you point out, Obama isn’t Kucinich – but he does open up political space, make it more possible to talk and think (and act) progressively, hence the fact that Keynesianism and universal health care are now back within the Democratic Party mainstream. If Labour could rally around someone somewhat to the the Left of New Labour, it would allow the left wing of the party to start talking and thinking and pushing in a leftwards direction.

Like I said, this is the long game – Democratic politics in the Age of Obama is more to the left than politics in the age of Dean vs. Kerry, and even more Left than the age of Clinton. After Obama, it will now be possible to run outspoken progressives in national Democratic Party primaries while defusing the DLC counter-attack that “they’ll be called socialists! no one will ever elect a liberal!” So the next Democratic nominee will be to the left of Obama, and so on.

EJH:
I don’t claim to be anyone special or politically all-knowing. I’m someone who’s spent the majority of their political career to date in constant defeat – I backed Bradley against Gore because he was the only other hat in the ring, I tried often in vain to get progressives to vote for Gore after the primaries, I backed a liberal academic in the MA Democratic primary for governor in 2001-2 and saw our campaign just barely got beat by a party hack thanks to division on the Left (and thus, Mitt Romney was allowed into national politics), I worked for Howard Dean in 2003-4 and saw our campaign burn to the ground over the most idiotic thing imaginable, and then saw Kerry fumble the ball as I knew he would. I also backed Edwards in the primaries – although that’s a loss that retrospectively was somewhat fortunate. I was one of only 8,500 Democrats to vote for Dean in the New York City primary because I was determined to choose who I thought was the best candidate, and one of only 193,000 Democrats to vote for Edwards in the California primary, again for the same reason. I’m saying I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to lose repeatedly, but giving up doesn’t do your cause any good.

And I suppose if you want to argue that older generations fought the good fight and should be allowed some peace, I’d ask – where are the younger generations of activists? Why shouldn’t they be fighting to take back the party instead of watching it die?

Yes, I knew MacDonald and Snowden were kicked out – but they were able to keep hold of the government for five years, and they badly split Labour in the next election. My point was that Labour activists didn’t give up even though they lost 225 seats in one go. Likewise, there was plenty of fighting between Bevanites and Gaitskillites starting from his election as party leader in 55 and his leadership in the 59 election, but I take your point. However, my point was that despite Gaitskill’s continued tenure, people opposed to him kept fighting, despite losing attempts to unseat him.

did you not even read dsquared’s comment (#82), sg? The BNP’s result was actually several thousand votes down on 2004, they only picked up seats because overall turnout was consierably weaker too. There’s not much to worry about considering that the far-right nationalist group in the EP has fewer seats than the Greens, and it’s highly unlikely that their vote will be replicated in a general election. New Labour were re-elected because of the incompetence of the opposition, at least in the last election – even then they only got 35% of the vote, which would have prevented them becoming the government if we actually had a fair voting system.

I should give a link shouldn’t I.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ab7a478c-5463-11de-a58d-00144feabdc0.html

Bert – you seem to equate wanting to leave the EU with xenophobia. Whilst that may be a factor for some, there are plenty of other possible reasons for such a desire. Are you suggesting that the people of any country which does not cede a portion of its sovereignty to an international bloc necessarily hate foreigners?

Alex: I disagree. i think as citizens you hold everyone accountable – including yourself. After all, the citizenry is sovereign, and has to make decisions responsibly, otherwise representative democracy doesn’t work; there’s a reason why 18th and 19th century republicans talked about the need to instill “republican virtue,” they thought that being a citizen of a democracy wasn’t just a passive status, it was a way of life and thinking that you had to learn how to do.

In any case, I do think that social movements and political activists of the Left do have to bear some responsibility as well for not getting out there, counter-organizing these communities, and confronting fascist organizers (although to be fair, there have been some quite noble attempts to do this). My comments in this thread more speak to the extent of commitment of resources and manpower to this task, especially in light of the ability of the Left to mobilize as seen during the runup to the Iraq qar.

Thanks bert – I don’t actually remember the fall but nice of you to be encouraging. Would have been nicer still if you had come somewhere close to responding to my point but anyway…

I have no idea what motivates the Tory party but it’s a remarkable prejudice to have that anyone who has a different view from yours over Britain’s relationship with the EU must hate foreign people.

I don’t actually remember …
Scroll up.
I have no idea …
Couldn’t be clearer.

Invent a straw man somewhere else.

Steven, if you read this piece in the Guardian it would not appear to be the case that people haven’t counter-organised. The 10% of the vote that the BNP got up there occurred despite a considerable effort to prevent it. This doesn’t bode well for your arguments against those like Alex, ejh etc. who think the Labour Party is dead; but it also doesn’t bode well for the arguments that English civil society isn’t steeped in racism. If it took 3.5 million letters, a week of press adverts and the biggest political email in history to keep the BNP vote at just 10%, well, things aren’t looking so brave out there.

Chris, I haven’t said anything in this thread about loathing the UK, I have simply given my opinion about how racist it is – an opinion it seems pretty strange to argue against when nearly 1 million people voted Nazi. Alex is probably right that it’s not a breakthrough moment for the far right, but 55% of voters voted for anti-European toryism or out-and-out xenophobia in this election, and UKIP are now here to stay. The BNP now hold more than 50 council seats, which may be a pittance but it’s a clear sign that they’re permanent, and they’ve been gaining ground since 2003. And now they have some real European money to back it up.

I agree with Alex that getting this vote out in public is a good thing, but what is the response? Sniffing huffily at these people or throwing eggs at them. It’s now time for Britain to have a serious conversation about race and immigration – something long overdue here – but the Labour party is too busy dog-whistling and the educated left is too busy being haughtily superior. And while you try to pretend that Britain doesn’t have a serious problem with race and racism, these people seem to be doing a pretty good job of harnessing just exactly that sentiment. It’s time for the British left to get real about the people they would like to represent.

The BBC have updated the story.
The first version said that Brown would be announcing concrete plans for a new Westminster voting system tomorrow. The update is full of enormous caveats.
So, as you were.
Back to the debate as to whether Britain as a whole is racist, or parts of Britain are responding to an artfully sold racist pitch. The answer will determine whether the BNP can break out beyond the limits of what right now is a reasonably well-defined geographical and social profile.
For my money, the economy will be the clincher. The wider and deeper the hardship, the more effective the extreme right tactic of identifying resentments and providing scapegoats.

All of these people … are not working inside the Labour Party, even though I’m guessing that an explicitly anti-fascist organization is at least close to social democratic in ideology.

a) Anti-fascism has nothing to do with social democracy. Tories and UKIP members can declare themselves to be anti-fascists & would be warmly welcomed. The broader the coalition, the better.

b) The Labour Party has nothing to do with social democracy and hasn’t done for some time.

c) Even if thousands of social democrats did join the Labour Party, they’d find that there are no mechanisms for members to change Labour Party policy. The levers have all been removed.

d) Your own inspirational story seems to be all about rallying around one leadership candidate or another – not so much “reclaim the party” as “vote Dean/Edwards/Kucinich/Kerry/Obama and hope for the best”. It sounds as if you’re starting from a lower point than we are in terms of party democracy as well as party policy.

Don’t mind ejh and dsquared….. they’re just sour because their dream of the British as a noble, mildly left-wing but occasionally quaintly racist people has suddenly run into the nightmare that is the reality of British civil life.

What?

a. Fair enough, but the overall point I was making is this – activists on the Left are working outside the Labour Party and are not seeking to make change through winning a majority government of the left/center-left. What does it say that the people attracted to anti-BNP political work don’t even consider the Party road?
c. Constituency parties don’t nominate candidates for parliament? The Conference doesn’t elect the Party leader? Please explain.
d. True, the point is still there though – activists in the American left/center-left by and large work through the Democratic Party, and seek to influence its internal politics and policy positions. That doesn’t seem to be the case in the U.K.

sorry ejh, I think I misread your comments for snark. As you were.