Another Open Thread on the UK Election.

Holy cow. Tory disaster in the making?

I want to wait until the official results come in, but… WOW.

Fingers crossed.

I am mostly looking forward to “Have I got news for you” take on Teresa May’s excuses for stuffing it up so amazingly. And hoping she does. In many ways I think an actual loss of Conservative majority would be better than a narrow win, because it would leave her in her current position, unable to do much for fear of offending even one of her MPs… and with the example of Corbyn to show her what happens when the MPs oppose their leader.

From the far side of the planet, I’m just hoping the Corbyn side of Labour come out ok. And the SNP likewise. A firm kicking to the extremists on the reicht of the Conservative party wouldn’t make me unhappy, either.

Tories to win.

Wonder typing these questions into s search engine returns……

Will Cooper, Khan, Umunna, Reeves, Benn, Woodcock’s votes grant the Tories a majority?

What happens if the next step of an emboldened Corbyn Project is to grant complete power to the CLPs to nominate delegates?

What are Renzi, Macron!, Blair, Obama, the Clintons thinking?

What shape does the media of the future take given the biases of the Guardian, the BBC, C4 and the rest of them?

How many jobs would be created if all the punditry and the expert class resigned with May?

**
The Labour conservatives are hard at work, trying to take credit for this shift away from Momentum/Corbyn and attribute it to May.

@Philip, yes I saw that just after I posted. Still, it can’t be what May was gambling on. Happy I can get BBC here in Ecuador. Between James Comey and this election, it’s been some day!

Labour looks set to win Kensington & Chelsea. Yes, you read that correctly. This was unthinkable even at the height of the Blair landslides. It’s the revenge of the Remainers.

@JQ: Yes: it was a shock when I moved to Canada and results were called from every poll separately. In the UK (at least back when) the boxes are all taken to one central location and counted together. I blame geography.

@15,
Labour in Canterbury too?!

Exit polls project 18 “Other” – who are they? Some would perhaps be Sinn Fein – who else?

Frustrating! We get the results from each polling station as they complete the count. That’s compared to the same station last time to calculate the swing in real time.

Tabasco
The constituency of Kensington and Chelsea was abolished in 2010. You could mean ‘Labour looks set to win Kensington’ or ‘Labour looks set to win Chelsea & Fulham’ or ‘Labour looks set to win both Kensington and Chelsea & Fulham’.

Or your comment is somehow reaching us through a barrier between dimensions, I suppose …

@18: Replacements for May:

There are arguments against all plausible options. They could double down on the ridiculous (Bojo) or revert to the grey man’s grey man, Phillip Hammond.

Nooooooo! Farage is threatening a comeback!

Inspiring campaign and effort by Corbyn and his supporters.

Bernie would have won.

Markos Valaris
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/june2017/2017/06/election-2017-what-happens-if-theres-hung-parliament
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/june2017/2017/06/how-could-government-be-formed-hung-parliament

J-D, I saw a tweet to that effect and assumed it was authoritative. What a shame.

Anyways, what is likelihood of a Labour + Lib Dems + SNP coalition with a bare majority?

Will the warmongers and neo-Powellites back Corbyn for PM if it comes to that? Just counting party seats obscures the hatred many of the Labour ‘moderates’ have for the Corbyn project. While it is true that some of them are careerists, several others ran on staunch anti-Corbyn-but-Labour platforms and may find it difficult to beat a retreat. What would they do should the Tories offer a more charismatic/less sullied PM candidate than May/BoJo?

“What would they do should the Tories offer a more charismatic/less sullied PM candidate than May/BoJo?”

Outside of the Tolkien Bestiary, is there such a creature?

It looks like labour outpreformed exit poll in Wales. I have this mean desire to collect every Guardian opinionista column about the unelectability of Corbyn and make a blog of it. Sort of like Henry’s Krauthammer 6 months anniversary.
The case for saying that the british press and the pundits are absolutely out of touch with reality just grew stronger. Here’s a link to my favorite concern troll, Jason Cowley, and his New Statesman editorial about how, really, Jeremy has to go, too ultra don’t you know, doesn’t see that the smart thing is to bring in a more, shall we say, decent austerity. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/06/labour-reckoning

What I like about Corbyn is how much better he is than me. I imagine he could care less about the wankers who got it wrong. Myself, I am too petty.

This is a remarkably fine result for Corbyn and for his supporters. The rest probably feel like chewing glass. What comes next? Given that Corbyn can’t manage the PLP, I find it highly unlikely that he’ll accomplish much as PM, if the jobs falls to him. I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing. What is clear is that his message resonates with voters, he stands for something even if that something isn’t necessarily exactly what voters want. He’s an atypical politician at a time when many voters are clearly sick to death with more of the same. Those who predicted the demise of Labour under Corbyn have been proven wrong. Labour has been through some wrenching times, but clearly the struggles have been worth it, at least as far as I can tell.

Consider the counter-factual in the US. Would Sanders have won? That’s looking more and more likely. Imagine that Hillary had carried the day with a big margin in the popular vote and a narrower victory in the electoral college. Would the Democratic party be considering change? How difficult would it be to dislodge Clinton Inc. had Hillary won? We’d be reading serious suggestions regarding Chelsea’s future run. Expelling the sclerotic geriatrics running Democrats Inc. is proving a challenge even with a massive collapse of power at the state and local level over the previous eight years and the final humiliation of losing to the rodeo clown. Those arguing that Democrats can recover their footing by running on identity politics rather than fairness and economic equality for all (even the WWC) may with to take a glimpse at this piece in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/opinion/the-democratic-party-is-in-worse-shape-than-you-thought.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

“Priorities also studied Obama-to-Trump voters. Estimates of the number of such voters range from 6.7 to 9.2 million, far more than enough to provide Trump his Electoral College victory. The counties that switched from Obama to Trump were heavily concentrated in the Midwest and other Rust Belt states. To say that this constituency does not look favorably on the Democratic Party fails to capture the scope of their disenchantment. The accompanying chart illustrates this discontent. A solid majority, 77 percent, of Obama-to-Trump voters think Trump’s economic policies will either favor “all groups equally” (44) or the middle class (33). 21 percent said Trump would favor the wealthy.
In contrast, a plurality of these voters, 42 percent, said that Congressional Democrats would favor the wealthy, slightly ahead of Congressional Republicans at 40 percent.”

Corbyn and Sanders command respect from voters who prioritize integrity. Both have an inner moral core that comes from a lifetime of taking difficult, often unpopular stands. They’re reliable. The first time I was on strike the head of our union was a card-carrying communist who’d been jailed rather than submit to the bosses and the courts. He enjoyed enormous respect and loyalty from the folks who HRC and her minions would be keen to call deplorable and irredeemable. Labour got a great many votes from UKIP supporters, more it seems than went to Conservative. Best of all, Corbyn and Sanders prove to young folks ready to enter politics that idealists can win.

What a night!

J-D @44

The BBC’s prediction therefore is Conservative 316, Labour + SNP + SD 312

Since this is just a prediction, with 74 more results to declare, the likelihood of a Labour + SNP +SD majority might not be high, but it is surely more than nil.

Surely it’s a Con + DUP government vs. a Lab + SNP + etc. govt., no?

@45
And yet just a few weeks ago Macron won the French presidency campaigning from the center and looks like he will win big again in the parliamentary election.

Am I crazy to think that the spectacle of Trump in office has had some influence on the French and British elections? Particularly on turnout, which has been high in the UK.

In the spirit of Roger Gathmann’s comment at 43, specifically the last paragraph, I’d like to invite all the tories, lib-dems, and other naysayers to respectfully put on diapers, fill them with their shit, and tell us all that they’re goody-goods who deserve a lolly. Well done and godspeed.

Looks like CON+DUP then? Given that the NI Protestants/Unionists first solemnly signed the good friday agreement, establishing an open border, and then campaigned for Brexit, during a campaign based on closing borders, I have to wonder about the consequences for peace in Northern Ireland, with them becoming kingmakers in the UK.

So will the DUP insist on an EEA solution? Will the Tories or even Labour agree to that? (The EU has said they want a “creative and imaginative solution” to the NI issue, and ISTM that the DUP has a heavy responsibility to provide the creativity and imagination, having contributed to the Brexit problem)

Shorter kidneystones: “What if Spartacus had had a Piper Cub?”

Now: Conservatives 318 (out of 650), DUP 10, Labour 261, SNP 35, LibDem 12, Plaid Cymru 4, Green 1, Independent (a Northern Irish Unionist) 1, Sinn Fein (who won’t take their seats) 7.

That’s with Kensington, which will go to either Conservatives or Labour, still to declare after several recounts.

One of the Conservative MPs is the speaker, who votes only to break ties, and then (by convention) in favour of the status quo. If all the other Conservatives vote for a motion, the DUP abstains, and the other parties all vote against, the motion will pass by 317 to 314, plus Kensington on one side or the other.

What I’ve been reading this AM is that this result makes no agreement with the EU more likely, and that the DUP wants a hard line on Brexit. Any one with more knowledge able to comment on that? The logic that I saw was that, to the extent that the EU pursues a hard line, a weak government is not going to be in a position to make concessions.

Pleased with the strong Labor showing here. It is a bit concerning that they couldn’t pull a majority even in the face of a catastrophically poor Tory campaign. It also looks as if the SNP got hit quite hard – have they crested as well?

Is it hyperbolic to claim this as the most significant moment in global politics since the big left wave in Latin America? You really can sheep/goats the world of left politics on the basis of Corbyn love (not reluctant support) and that I imagine, is a very big deal. Crowds bigger than anywhere in the UK since World War II the telly said.

This is also the first time in my life that a girls’* platform has been vindicated in this way.

*I hope it is clear I mean this as a queer compliment, not a slur.

@Marc, Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, has said ‘no one wants a hard brexit’ and they don’t want a hard border with Republic of Ireland. Whatever stance May takes, especially on the single market, will piss of factions in the party who will want to press her when she is weak. There will be lots of deals being done to try and stop a leadership challenge against May, I’m really not sure what the outcome will be.

As a political phenomenon, Corbyn has a lot in common with Trump. Both are utterly unsuited to running a country, unpopular with senior figures in their own party, not very bright, but very good at getting their party’s supporters to come out and vote for them. Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, despite having very little support from the party’s MPs, because it changed its system for selecting the leader to a vote of the mass membership, not entirely unlike a US primary. It’s not surprising that he’s been similarly successful in a general election campaign.

I see the same sort of bafflement in my rightist friends’ faces at Corbyn’s relative success as I feel myself at the fact that 46% of the US electorate voted for Trump (and 38% still approve of him).

The size of the swing compared to 2015 is impressive, and the change in mood compared to just three weeks ago truly mind-boggling. In England, the swing is in part explained by the collapse of Ukip, but how do you interpret what’s going on in Scotland?

Pro Bono: “As a political phenomenon, Corbyn has a lot in common with Trump. Both are utterly unsuited to running a country…”

What is the basis for this judgment of Corbyn? It was patently obvious about Trump because he demonstrated it constantly with his words and actions. Is there a similar track record for Corbyn?

@ Philip – 67

Most Tories I know are furious with May for screwing up this election and leaving the door open to a Corbyn government which would simply, in their opinion, take everything they own before trying to put them all in prison (he did promise a “reckoning”).

Ordinarily someone who failed in this way would be expected to resign, but May’s particular punishment is to have to carry on. I would love to be a fly on the wall for the first cabinet meeting and the moment when the cabinet make it clear to May exactly where the power now lies.

73: Ok some voters would have liked it but others would have opposed it. The effect on balance would be speculation. What I’m taking issue with is the argument that “more radical” policies are a winning strategy for the left. There’s little evidence for this and I say that as somebody who would prefer more radical left policies. But they have been defeated at the polls over and over.

I’m delighted that Corbyn did so much better than predicted. Still given what an utter mess the Tories have made, it’s disappointing they still bested him.

= = = vidently a few people here believe that people without jobs are more concerned with identity politics than putting food on the table = = =

In the United States at least the evidence from Kansas, Kentucky, West Virginia, and now Missouri seems to indicate that, yes. People have been voting for policies and politicians that cost them their jobs as long as “thugs” and “welfare queens” are punished thereby. Pretty intense identity politics.

I have no idea if that applies in the U.K.

@Pro Bono, there’s good reason to believe the No Confidence vote was a consequence of Corbin’s traditional labour views rather than his abilities, so I wouldn’t necessarily count that as evidence of his unsuitedness. Do you think he’d get the same result now? As to the rest, you could say much the same about (say) Harry Truman, and he certainly didn’t play out as unsuited to high office. Trump, on the other hand, is a known fraudster. Comparing Corbyn to him strikes me as trolling.

I’m happy enough consdiering the circumstances, but the circumstances are dire no matter who is in power – there is no good solution to the Brexit problem and it will cost us all an arm and a leg.

I just wish Corbyn had used his considerable talent as a campaigner a year ago insted of hiding out in Islington North and we might not be in this mess now – but it was clear that his heart wasn’t in it at all and I’m actually pretty certain that he was quite pleased with Brexit – that makes it very hard for me to forgive him, as much as I admire what he has pulled of just now.

How ironic that so much effort went into portraying Corbyn as a terrorist sympathiser after he’s had a few cups of tea with Gerry Adams and now the Tories are being kept in power by the DUP, who have direct relations with Loyalist terrorists.

@Dipper 78 – “The Tories need to get a fair settlement for young people pretty soon”

The Tories’ idea of a fair settlement for young people is to try to prevent them from voting. They’ve changed the electoral law several times to do exactly that. Their plans to introduce ID checks on voters are designed to do the same – voter suppression as pioneered by the Reps in the US. Also changing the criteria for constituency boundaries based on the recent voting record rather than actual population after the initial voter suppression would give them an additional advantage.

I think I share the impression that Corbyn was let up on by the media.

Part of this is almost certainly the self-preservation instincts of vulnerable MPs of the PLP, for whom the election was a threatened extinction level event, and who turned down the gas on their own over-heated attempts to discredit him, feeding the tabloid’s never satiated demand for slanders. I find it hard to believe that Corbyn and his team had much control over this, though they may have been reasonably skillful about focusing on television, controlling venues and timing for events and so on. Despite all the talk today of Corbyn as a populist barnburner, during the actual campaign, it seemed like he was placed very cautiously with considerable risk aversion.

Before the campaign began, Corbyn was misquoted in the British media at a regular and scandalous rate, and the stories of his alleged incompetence as an organizer were repeated regularly with very little evidence. Suddenly, Corbyn the Hamas and IRA terrorist was forgotten and he was this nice man who wanted to hire more police and reduce waiting times at the NHS or improve service at British Rail. And, it was May with a dementia tax. Corbyn’s staff tried to protect him I am sure, but I wonder about attributing too much to the efforts to protect him, and too little to decisions from on high to stop torturing him for the duration.

It is amazing how fast things turned around for Labour, though it was third parties that mostly took the drubbing — not many Tories converted as far as I can tell. Britain is back to being a two-party system, with the Tories on notice that they can be rotated out of office. Keir Starmer as Shadow Brexit Secretary may be the swiftest move Corbyn made, since it is an advertisement of Labour Brexit competence on offer for TPTB that may soon feel they need it.

The point that I think Kidneystones is making is a bit different so I’ll address that specifically.

Kidneystones appears to be saying that a significant section of the white working class is sexist and/or racist, and Labour/the left can’t win without those people, so we should either condone sexism and racism or at least not talk about them. I don’t know if he is claiming that’s what Corbyn did, and I don’t know enough about British politics to say whether that’s true.

However for a long time it was a liability to run female candidates, and even now, some recent research (https://blaircenter.uark.edu/the-impact-of-modern-sexism/) suggests that it was still a factor in Hillary Clinton’s loss.

So I think Kidneystones’ take on this is an ‘I’m not sexist but’ (I won’t speculate on whether he is or not) – ‘I’m not sexist but if left candidates are women or overtly pro- women or pro-feminism, it will lose votes, and keep left wing parties out of power, so they should not be’.

That I think is possibly a charitable reading, but taking it as fair, my response would be that we can’t do that – the left has to show that we support equality for women, even if we potentially lose votes. We have to go on with the long process of educating people (and yep, some women are sexist too) and winning hearts and minds.

Having had a female PM here (who in the past, before I left the Labor party and joined the Greens, was also a friend), and having seen the awful way she was treated, I of course feel these things very deeply. But still I think anyone on the left should say we cannot sacrifice our belief in the equality of women and men to political expediency.

I’m not sure how true these things are true for race – Barack Obama showed that maybe it’s not such a factor for men. But conversely, as I think basil pointed out on the previous thread, the awful treatment of Dianne Abbott shows just how bad things can be for a person who is both female and black. We can’t condone this stuff by remaining silent about it.

Bruce wilder that is some delusional slurry you are spouting at 90. The daily mail didba 13 page hate screed on Corbyn just days before the election, and the sun were calling him an apologist for terrorists immediately after the borough market attacks. You really are uniquely well qualified at spouting nonsense on topics you know nothing about, aren’t you?

engels@84 “‘Speaking as a foreigner… Corbyn lost the popular vote, against May… This is the high water mark most likely. The rulers in Britain will look to the monstrous Macron’

Thanks for vindicating my decision not to read this thread.”

Good to know that for once I have not posted in vain. I am faintly curious as to what was too much. Corbyn did lose the popular vote against the woman personally responsible for letting Islamic terrorists train, fight and flit about freely to Libya, Syria and Manchester. And Macron is monstrous. It’s only my guess that this will be Labor’s high water mark (“most likely” is not a dogmatic assertion of fact.)

Ah, I just realized…since I write English of a sort, I must be a Briton, not a foreigner pace Dipper. After all, if Irish can be Britons…Perhaps I should just think of those islands as “uk,” pronounced of course the way it’s spelled. The Con/DUP understanding can focus on how they’re all ukians together? By the way, djr, I’m all in favor of Con/DUP misunderstanding. But with the new law on calling elections I’m not sure the Conservatives can be forced to call new elections even if they are in a minority. I never did quite follow that discussion.

Val: hear, hear.

What kidneystones is saying is that ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ are considerably more complex issues than pseudo-social scientists assert. How minorities respond to the hostility of majorities varies according to culture. Yes, that word. The UK, for example, is home to a form of xenophobia born perhaps from history and geography that allows people to demonize those living twenty miles up the road.

Suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst were about power, not posturing. Indeed, her evolution as a ‘radical’ was one by which she moved away from the endless talk of the left (and of patronizing left-wing males) to action (illegal) and compromise with Conservatives. Yes, those demons. She died a Conservative and a defender of the Empire with all its racist excesses.

In Japan our current debate revolves around changes to Article 9, the article of the MacArthur constitution of 1945-6 which prevents war. Japan is a deeply sexist and racist country that is nonetheless among the most egalitarian in the world with less income inequality than almost any other.

Public education is generally excellent with national standards and a national curriculum. Private tutors are normal and provide excellent part-time employment for university students keen to supplement their incomes. Competition for elite public universities (cheaper than private) is severe.

Minorities in Japan are subject to discrimination, as minorities are everywhere from what I can tell. The response of Korean-Japanese, a group with a long history of legitimate grievance get even by protecting and boosting Korean culture, which is in many ways even more xenophobic and racist than that of Japan.

Work is closely tied to identity and a positive self-image. Love and a good job is pretty much what everyone needs, although many want much more. What constitutes a good job? That varies by culture. In Japan all work has honor. That bothers some folks but not me. Our daughter elected to go to a technical high school rather than follow her mother into an elite university. Our son attends a good private school and also receives regular instruction after school at a cram school. Success comes from family stability and support in most cases. I see no reason not to try similar solutions elsewhere.

My female and male students understand their debt to the Douglas MacArthur that crazed Christian crank, who ushered in the modern Japanese Constitution. Would a more liberal general listened to a 22 year-old woman? https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/the-american-woman-who-wrote-equal-rights-into-japans-constitution/266856/

Mary Wollstonecraft got it largely right: men cannot civilize themselves in a society where differences exist under the law. Policing ideas, attitudes, and prejudices is much different matter. I leave that to the mullahs of various persuasions. Our daughter has good job in a safe society that confers honor on all members of society for their contributions with full healthcare protections and no mention of the word God anywhere. Western feminists (mostly white) appear to believe they have a monopoly on the use of the term feminism. Japanese women normally prefer Thatcher to Greer. Bad them.

I suppose I should add that, of course, the various movements for social justice (without scare quotes) have numerous extremely meaningful and worthwhile causes and achievements – with respect to feminism, the right to abortion and the recognition of marital rape spring immediately to mind. Of course such things shouldn’t be abandoned, and of course there is no *disjunction* between such issues and economic populism; what can be debated is what portion of the time, the effort and the resources should be allotted to each of these. The pseudo-disjunction is created to a great extent by the mainstream left itself, which has tended to shift its focus *primarily* to the identity-related issues, while largely scrapping its former economic populism and filling the resulting void either with far less urgent problems or with entirely fake controversies and absurd positions that are calculated to maximise inter-identity strife, allowing it to rely on an ethnic and quasi-ethnic/tribal vote, while actually serving the plutocracy.

I’m proposing that we step away from these essentialist approaches and try to think of race, gender, sexual orientation, as critical lenses available for illuminating the obscured working of systems that produce injustice. They are useful for guidance in making amends, and in undoing the mechanisms that produce these taxonomies in the first place. I cannot see how a left analysis offers solidarity to murderous monsters like Obama/HRC/Indira Gandhi while holding responsible a West Virginian AM slowly dying in a toxic colliery.

For me, white, straight, male are just a set of adjectives and social assignations defining an apex predator, a destroyer of worlds. If this descriptor is to be useful for more than rude jousting or silly banter, it cannot privilege the overseer at the expense of the overseen. Thus Obama, HRC, Gillard, Jacob Zuma, and Modi are straight white men. You might refuse to see it, but that’s the role they play, the script and the genealogy that produces their performance. The groups bearing the appellation WWC are not. If whiteness is a system of privileges, WWC is defined explicitly by the denied access to those privileges.

Corbyn refuses to celebrate or participate in the rituals, hierarchies and macho displays of colonialist, genocidal white supremacy. They refuse the logic that justifies racism and racial hierarchies, nationalism, war, immiseration, police violence, the destruction of the planet, the sequestration of wealth and social advantage for the privileged few, etc. This is what the whole debate about Corbyn’s pacifism, patriotism, hesitation to order extrajudicial murder, resistance to neocolonial war-making, and capacity to nuke is about. It is the backstory in discussions about their associations with the crown, with former colonials, and with Dianne Abbott. It is what people are discussing when they point out Corbyn’s sartorial and dietary choices, their allotment and their jam-making. People may shout terrorist sympathiser, but you understand why consorting with the House of Saud or the DUP does not attract similar condemnation.

—
I was reading Paul Gilroy talking about a time when ‘blackness’, far from being a phenotypical descriptor, was used to declare a political orientation and positionality against the logics of colonial domination, and their long term consequences. If race/gender discussions are to do useful work for social justice, they must be framed and deployed against violence, not in defense of privilege and individual advancement into the overseer or master class. Any other use and we continue to reproduce the very divisions and hierarchies that these categories were first created for.

Again, I’ll point out this week’s shocking revelations that WJC/HRC benefited from unpaid forced labour at the Governor’s Mansion in Arkansas. It was performed by the descendants of people who once did the same work under an institution we called slavery. By their telling, they were strict, but generous and friendly, in their participation in the old Southern institution. I’m sure we’ll have time to discuss Jefferson’s legacy, but this finding makes for very uncomfortable reading. Corbyn is a reminder that we, most of us, make choices.

—-
SJW is always a slur. If you imagine someone’s posturing, why not just say so.

For the benefit of the embarrassingly ignorant, Abbott is one of Corbyn’s allies and his pick for Home Secretary (also my ex-MP and all-round great person and politician…)

@gastro george. Can you provide evidence for DUP-terrorist links please? And evidence of senior Tory politicians either condoning loyalist terrorism or any photos of Tory politicians appearing in public with supporters of loyalist terrorism?

This is a ridiculous attempt to create some kind of parity with Corbyn’s clear historic association with terrorists and support for an armed struggle against the UK. It is clearly nonsense and frankly does not bode well for the kind of open discussions we can expect from a Corbynite party and state.

It’s great Labour did better than expected, but let’s not get carried away here. They only managed to get a third of the vote. It is only the vagaries of FPTP – a voting system prone to give pretty arbitrary results – that got them so close in seats this time.

@bruce wilder “Suddenly, Corbyn the Hamas and IRA terrorist was forgotten”

The first 13 pages of the Daily Mail on election day covered this in some detail.

From me too thank you Val for calling out stj for his blatantly sexist remark. re 92 To me it’s the biggest failure of that fraction of the US left to have denied Hillary Clinton at least the solidarity she was due as a woman who was being relentlessly attacked on sexist grounds. It was clearly different with Obama who policy-wise was never to the left of Clinton but still the left supported him and it would have been unthinkable otherwise, to deny a black candidate solidarity in the face of widespread racism, but this is exactly what still happens to female candidates in the face of widespread mysogyny.

@Val, I am entirely in agreement with 92. Well said!

fwiw women now make up almost 1/3 of MPs. I can’t remember who, because I have watched/heard so much coverage, but one journalist directly addressed the question of whether being female was a disadvantage for a candidate in this election and said that the figures don’t bear it out. The SNP, Scottish Conservatives, Scottish Labour, Plaid, the Greens, the DUP, Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, The Conservative and Unionist Party, all have female leaders; Lib Dems and Labour and UKIP all have male leaders (and so do a bunch of other parties…). The only characters other than May who the Tories put in the public eye were Amber Rudd (who almost certainly limited damage some) and Ruth Davidson (thanks to whom they have 13 Scottish MPs, and the ability to form a government — I hope she uses that fact to extract every concession she can — did anyone see her face when asked if she had an ambition to be leader of the national Party?). Jeremy Corbyn seemed to be sharing leadership with the quite remarkable Emily Thornberry for most of the campaign (I wonder whether the commentators have underestimated Thornberry’s effectiveness – but I think the Labour leadership hasn’t).

No question there was a lot of sexism and misogyny, not only from the usual suspects but from people you might have expected better off, especially toward May and Dianne Abbott. But I’m curious whether in this case it affected to the outcomes much.

bruce wilder — the broadcast media are bound by very strict neutrality guidelines during the election, hence the very different behaviour. They were required to give Corbyn direct coverage and, as you’d expect people quite like him when they see him perform.

I’ll boldly state that I suspect what saved May from complete defeat was her decision to not participate in the debate and let Amber Rudd do it instead. It made her look weak and cowardly, but that’s better than looking imperious and out of touch, which is what she’d have done.

–Comparing Corbyn to Trump strikes me as trolling.
–I had better say that I despise Trump and everything he stands for. I’d happily buy Corbyn a drink.

I’d say that the two do have something in common: Disregard the political norms and longtime custom and see what happens. After all, you won. You’re the leader. The members don’t like it? They can suck on it.

Theresa May seems to be taking these lessons to heart. Hang on to power, no matter what. You won the election. They lost. Cling to that. Just as Corbyn would.

I say the foregoing with some reluctance, since Trump is a vile man and I trust that Corbyn is not. …..

117: It seems that female politicians tend to fare better in the parliamentary system. Or maybe the US is simply an outlier (in many respects) but France would be another data point.

Sexism didn’t really play a role in this election, the rightwing press will jump on anyone they hate using anything they can find, but they are pretty much equal opportunity haters. And they loved Thatcher, as well as May (until Friday morning). As Harry pointed out there are many prominent female politicians in the UK, it’s certainly not a liability to be a woman and I am unwilling to cut them any slack because of their gender.

The amazing dumbfuckery about Corbyn’s non-existent victory

UK election: shock as blue-blooded Kensington turns red
Young voters reshape UK’s political landscape
A general election result that could change everything for Brexit
Brilliant @nytimes map showing Lab-Con swing in each constituency. This huge southern surge for Labour is fascinating and unexpected.
These are the times senior Labour figures and MPs said @JeremyCorbyn​ was a bad leader
Senior Tory MP: “We all f***ing hate her. But there is nothing we can do. She has totally f***ed us”.

derrida derider wrote: It’s great Labour did better than expected, but let’s not get carried away here. They only managed to get a third of the vote. It is only the vagaries of FPTP … that got them so close in seats this time.

This is false: Labour got 40.0% of the vote, and the Tories 42.3%. Labour got 40.3% of seats, about as close to their vote percentage as any system could be expected to deliver, and the Tories got 48.8% of seats, considerably higher than their percentage of votes. So “the vagaries of FPTP” benefitted the Tories (this time!)

A swing of just 2% from Con to Labour would see the party make 40 gains at next general election. Current total 262. Need 320 for majority.

Now back to arguing about Clintonite campaign memes…

@Dipper – “Can you provide evidence for DUP-terrorist links please? And evidence of senior Tory politicians either condoning loyalist terrorism or any photos of Tory politicians appearing in public with supporters of loyalist terrorism?”

If you’ve no idea about the connections of the DUP to loyalist terrorism, then you’ve not really been paying much attention to Ireland, specifically Northern Ireland. But that would not be uncommon because the English in general are staggeringly uninformed.

So we’ll start with deputy leader Nigel Dodds, who’s a member or former member of the UVF.

Here’s the leader, Arlene Foster, meeting the head of the UDA: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2017/dup-chief-arlene-foster-met-uda-boss-days-after-loyalist-murder-in-bangor-35776873.html

Here’s former leader, Peter Robinson, in paramilitary uniform: https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/adam-ramsay/so-who-are-dup

Wikipedia will do for Ulster Resistance, and it’s connection to senior DUP members: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Resistance

How about a nice mural: https://skwalker1964.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/uda-dup.jpg?w=470

All of this is well known in Ireland, and there’s no excuse for any English politician not to know. By sitting down with the DUP, the current Tory party leadership are exactly “appearing in public with supporters of loyalist terrorism”.

The DUP also voted against the GFA. Now while I’m in no way a friend of former DUP leader Ian Paisley, I do recognise that he was also part of power sharing as a result of the GFA and. as such, has made a contribution towards peace in NI – in many ways the loyalist equivalent of Gerry Adams. But that is not to deny his history, there is no excuse for loyalist terrorists because they were “our” terrorists.

“Basically there is no ‘deal’ that will suit everyone in the UK, let alone Europe as well.”

Yes, this seems as good a time as any to repost this link:

https://www.vox.com/2016/7/5/12098156/brexit-eu-britain-venn-diagram

Even if you don’t like Vox, it’s hard to argue with the diagram.

Thanks for the kind words everyone. It is interesting that British politics has so many female leaders and it’s good that female representation in parliament has increased to about 30%. Just noting it’s not a cause for complacency though – it’s about the same here and has been for quite some time, seems to be a bit stuck.

Going back to my original concern, i would like people on CT to stop using the terms ‘SJWs’ and ‘identity politics’ altogether because I think they are mainly being used as empty terms of abuse and as a cover up for racism and sexism. But if people think they are important and valid terms, maybe they could at least define what they mean by them. And they need to do so without eliding the history and continuing existence of racism and patriarchy/sexism.

I don’t think it can be done, so I think it’s a waste if time, but I don’t want to be labelled as an enemy of free speech!

harry b

I don’t understand how the fact that there are more than twice as many male MPs as female MPs can be considered evidence that there is no disadvantage to female candidates.

Or for a brief definition I’d endorse this.

https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=Identity+politics+from%3A%40leninology

But I’d much rather talk about the British election and the possibility of UK getting a real Left-wing govt in the near future (in the unlikely event anyone here is interested in that)

Harry

I don’t know whether being female disadvantages a candidate in terms of votes cast. I haven’t seen direct evidence that it does and I haven’t seen direct evidence that it doesn’t. I have seen somebody refer to the fact that women are now nearly one-third of MPs as if the observation were relevant to this issue. If you didn’t know whether being female disadvantaged a candidate, and you were looking for evidence that bore on the question one way or the other, and you found that male MPs outnumbered female MPs by more than two to one, would you think that was evidence that bore on the question? and, if you did, in which direction would you think that evidence pointed?

Fantastic article by Caroline Lucas! https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/10/progressive-alliances-future-of-british-politics

I guess most of you have read it, but if not I hope you will. Inspiring.

Btw here’s Val’s fave Graun columnist. Polly Toynbee, on Corbyn 12 months ago:
Dismal, lifeless, spineless – Jeremy Corbyn let us down again
Would you like that crow fried or roasted?

What black academics think of their noble liberal allies::http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2017-06-09-US-Black-Minds-Matter/id-c442a2e8bbc64f44a1c3d5ed5c33534a

“A leading journal of political philosophy took up the Black Lives Matter movement in its June issue without a single contribution from a black academic…”

Every now and then white liberals let the mask slip to confirm what people of color have known for a long time. Black voices don’t matter in white world: period, whether the area is feminism, education, political science, or plain politics. Here’s another name familiar to practically nobody:Leslie Wimes.

Leslie Wimes….president of the Democratic African-American Women Caucus. Here’s one of my favorite pre-election Leslie Wimes clips: featuring a young, liberal bubble-head questioning Wimes’ ability to gauge (you know) black voter turnout.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/clinton-struggling-with-fl-minority-voters-798347843751

The caption from MSNBC is perfect “Clinton struggling to connect with minority voters?”
Question mark?!!! It’s a must watch. Wimes:”…I warned in September…Now, it’s too late…Over. (Nov 1st, 2016) Now, we know that Wimes had it right and because I watched Wimes and I watched Van Jones and I listened to both. And because I watched folks here ignore the links to Wimes and Jones that I provided it was pretty easy to believe Wimes (a nobody to pretty much everyone here as far as I can tell – not cause she’s black and a woman fur sure!!!!!) that Trump was going to edge it thanks to low turnout from former Obama voters.

So, why bring this up now? Because of the lead link. Liberal academics couldn’t care less about African-American academics on the subject BLM. Black academics, especially women are as faceless and nameless now as Wimes was in 2016. And because nobody seems particularly upset to learn that 75 percent of African-American high school males in America’s largest state can’t read or write in 2016. What’s the consequence? Who cares? It seems.

“Two percent of faculty members at the nation’s top institutions are black, according to Ivory A. Toldson, editor of the Journal of Negro Education.

The problem isn’t conservatives and racists. We know what these folks are about. The lies liberals tell themselves about caring about people of color are going to come back to bite them on the ass, as they did in 2016.

Black lives and black minds matter in real terms to some of us. Just not many of us.

F. Foundling

That said, in the current polarised online discourse, ‘SJW’ is used all too often by pop rightists to criticise everyone who doesn’t share their conservative/reactionary views on cultural issues, so I do have mixed feeilings about using the term.

If you had written, in your earlier comment, that you agreed with basil about the positive and important role played by some of the movements he listed, but were more dubious about some of the others, would that have made the point you were trying to make, without setting off alarms in some people’s minds by using the term ‘SJW’?

kidneystones – who is your actual enemy here? I’m sure it would make life easier for everyone if you could just specify who your actual target is. You were right about Trump, we’ve all given you that, but it doesn’t mean you can just patronise everybody.

One final fact on the California literacy levels. To date this report has yet to make a voice at the NYT. I find links to the root.com (a black matters site), but so far the lily-white liberal newsrooms who doubtlessly are staffed with (some) people who can read have elected to ignore the report.

Everything one needs to understand about modern liberalism is evident these episodes. Black voters fail to support a white ‘liberal’ Democrat who ignored calls from black leaders to engage the community in person early and often. Trump is elected. The media fixates on a narrative that conveniently makes Russian interference the cause of the loss rather than de facto liberal racism. Black scholars are forgotten when white scholars decide to examine BLM (more de facto liberal racism?). 75 percent of African-American high schools males in America’s largest liberal state fail to meet minimal literacy levels and practically nobody in the liberal press can be bothered to even print the story, much less put it on the front page.

So, if these four examples do not strongly suggest a clear pattern of liberal racism, what do you think the NYT would writing right now if 75 percent of white high school males in New York state were tested and found to be illiterate. In what counter-factual reality would a prominent academic journal elect to focus on the women’s movement in 2017 and somehow ‘forgot’ to consult any female scholars?

Nuff said, no?

Engels, if you really want to talk about UK politics, you need to talk about Brexit in a substantial way that goes beyond soundbites and explain how it is supposed to work. That’s what Labour campaigned on (when pressed, they would have preferred to not talk about it at all): soft Brexit – so since your the new Labour spokesperson here, please explain what this actually entails and how exactly it is going to work.

It was clear that Corbyn was trying to build a compromise between the Bexit and Remain factions of his party – the surprise is, it seems to have worked. (At least, worked well enough to leave the conservatives without a majority, even if it wasn’t an outright win for Labour).

Cambridge, for example, was a key labour/lib dem marginal that was strongly pro-remain (university town, lots of people whose jobs depend on the EU, etc.) If the LibDem strategy of being strongly pro-remain (even at this rather late stage in the brexit process) had worked at all, you’ld have expected them to win Cambridge from Labour, at the expense of Labour gains in more pro-brexit constituencies. But Labour won even in pro-remain marginals.

It’s interesting to see that papers such as the Guardian that have been publishing attack pieces against Corbyn for months are now coming round to support him.

Daragh, I think you need to keep eating the crow. The local election results don’t tell us anything about the party’s performance nationally because of low turnout and lack of broadcast media interest. In contrast, at the national level: a) the labour campaign excluded national print media in favor of local print media when they went to local events; b) they had a social media strategy that worked (I bet Theresa May hates selfie sticks and thinks snapchat is a kind of turtle); c) in national campaigns broadcast media come into play and it’s possible for someone hated by print media to address the public directly through broadcast media; d) on election night the bbc reported the welsh Labour Party were crediting Corbyn himself as an asset to their campaign. The reality is that although he comes across as bumbling and a bit incompetent in peace time he is a very good campaigner (he won two leadership elections and he obviously enjoys campaigning) and his manifesto was something that leftists everywhere can get behind, and (as I said on a previous thread) corbyns labour is very traditional, so there’s no reason he should lose heartland seats. As far as I can tell labour didn’t lose any heartland seats, instead regaining a few they lost under milliband and ncreasing their majority in others (I read somewhere that abbots majority is bigger than mays total vote count).

The reality is that labour is back, in its full flight, and blairism and all that other bullshit is dead. I’m happy to see Corbyn put a stake in that vampire. And now maybe some of the other party members will remember that it’s okay to be ambitious but you must never ever ever bring the party down for your personal whims, the working class win when they stand together, not when they fight each other for scraps.

Also corbyns achievement in getting young people out to vote must be terrifying the infanticidal maniacs in the Tory back rooms. I like to imagine that they laughed at him for doing an interview with nme – “what’s he doing wasting precious campaign time on young people?” Well they aren’t laughing now!

Now the media have to take Corbyn seriously he will start to rise above the print medias prejudices and get his voice heard, and like sanders i suspect the more people see him the more they will like him. And he won’t have any more new labour treachery to undermine him. Plus he won’t be responsible for brexit when it goes wrong. This is a very good position for labour!

The Labor Party did not win a majority of the popular vote. The Conservative Party won the plurality. Politically all that happened was the liquidation of UKIP and a decline for SNP. Since this single-issue party won its issue, it cannot be clear UKIP’s demise is really important. And, since the referendum endorsed imperialism rather than Scottish independence, was there really anywhere else for SNP to go? It can’t deliver.

Most of all, Labor Party is no more able to deliver on its promises than SYRIZA could. Corbyn will not be an effective reform leader in opposition, because too many senior politicians, especially in the parliament, do not support a left program. That’s why this election is probably going to be the high water mark for apolitical leftism.

In Cambridge (where I live), university tuition fees are a big factor.

In 2010, the LibDems campaigned on abolishing tuition fees, and their guy was duly elected. They then joined a coalition with the Conservatives which trebled the fees. The MP personally voted against the increase, but voters were unimpressed, and in 2015 Labour won narrowly. This time, Labour promised to abolish tuition fees, and won easily.

(University tuition fees in England were abolished by a Conservative government in 1962, and reintroduced by a Labour government in 1998.)

Daragh @ 160

“After all, prior to Thursday Corbyn had led Labour in three major national votes (the 2016 and 2017 locals, plus Brexit). Whether Labour performed poorly in the referendum is debatable, but the local results were atrocious. Ditto Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent”

Yes, but you, like the pundits, were looking very narrowly at a particular problem area for Labour, and one that still is, after the election. In Copeland and areas in the Midlands like Stoke, Walsall and Mansfield Brexit was still a major issue, and in these cases cost Labour seats. Given that all the leading Labour politicians that opposed Corbyn were ‘Remain’ supporters, it is difficult to see how any alternative Labour leadership would have prevented this.

Where people forgot to look was in other areas where the increased turnout, particularly of the young, benefitted Labour a lot. Given that council elections see very low turnouts, the local results effectively obscured a lot of what was to happen when Labour was really able to campaign properly.

The whole problem of Labour after 1997 was that they were generally less able to persuade people to come out and vote for them. Their success in 2005, for example, was largely due to a general feeling of malaise in politics and a split in the opposition vote, rather than any real enthusiasm for Blair’s government. Many people wrote off the hundreds of thousands of members that have joined Labour since 2015 as nerds, do-gooders or ‘clicktivists’, but now it is clear that Corbyn and mild social democracy do have some resonance with wider sections of voters.

@166
‘maybe I was just a stopped clock that’s right…twice a day’.

When I was 12 -(in words ‘twelve’) – years old and very much believed that the world and the majority of the people are ‘evil’ – I predicted that one day an ‘evil idiot’ would ‘rule’ America – and as I now was ‘right’ and even far earlier and faar more ‘right’ than you and the commenter who goes bay the name of ‘kidneystone’ – I from now on will be always faaar more ‘right than anybody who didn’t predict anything at least one century ago.

Okay – Everybody?

@ Daragh, before the election, you thought Corbyn was the leader of a personality cult and unable to lead Labour to a decent electoral performance. After the election, you think Corbyn is the leader of a personality cult and unable to lead Labour to a decent electoral performance. Where exactly does the crow come in?

Also re Corbyn – I admit I never liked the look of him that much. He seemed a bit self righteous and he wasn’t able to control his party (though that may not have been his fault, in fairness I’ll admit that now). This campaign has shown that he can campaign well on things he believes in, and apparently he ran a very positive campaign, which is great.

(When I say “apparently”, I mean that’s what I’ve read since, I didn’t actually see any of it, again because 16000 kms away etc)

However it also seems to highlight again that Corbyn didn’t campaign well on Remain. I suspect people like engels will claim that’s because he was against the European neoliberals etc, but to me it means he betrayed the broader vision – which was always there – of a peaceful Europe. He could have stood for the values of peace and solidarity, and he didn’t.

Faustusnotes @163

“Daragh, I think you need to keep eating the crow. The local election results don’t tell us anything about the party’s performance nationally because of low turnout and lack of broadcast media interest.”

I think if you look back to prior elections, performance during the local elections provided a pretty good proxy for subsequent general election performance. More to the point, the May 2017 results were the latest in a series of poor results, broken by June 2017. And this is one of my main problems with Corbynism generally – all of the failures were ascribed to Blairite wreckers and assorted saboteurs. Now that we’ve had a moderately successful election – in which Corbyn was absent from the campaigning literature and disavowed by many MPs by all accounts – the glory is all to JC. Again – Corbyn deserves real credit in mobilising voter groups that the political establishment had broadly written off. But I’m also curious as to how much of Labour’s vote was ‘despite Corbyn’, how much of that would stick with Labour in the result of a) a competent Tory campaign b) an election where ‘Prime Minister Corbyn’ is a plausible result. I suspect we may find out pretty soon, sadly enough.

Layman @173

“@ Daragh, before the election, you thought Corbyn was the leader of a personality cult and unable to lead Labour to a decent electoral performance. After the election, you think Corbyn is the leader of a personality cult and unable to lead Labour to a decent electoral performance. Where exactly does the crow come in?”

The Corbyn wing of Labour is currently demanding full credit for a performance that equals Gordon Brown in 2010 and calling it a victory. To be clear, I thought he’d do much worse, and will eat crow over that. But he still lost. By contrast, Emmanuel Macron, who was received by many commentators here as a neoliberal disaster who would do nothing but serve as the mid-wife of fascism, is on the cusp of an overwhelming victory in the French National Assembly elections. Maybe Macron’s clear and overwhelming victory should provide a model for future progressive politics, rather than the guy who came close, but ultimately failed, to win an election when facing one of the most disastrous Tory campaigns in recorded history.

Oh, and FWIW and in the interests of intellectual consistency – I’m as horrified by May putting Arlene Foster in the cockpit of government as I am with Corbyn’s past dalliances with SF/PIRA.

Val

Making the target of criticism clearly identifiable makes it easier for the critic to be proved wrong; conversely, making the target completely unidentifiable makes it almost impossible for the critic to be proved wrong. So identifying kidneystones’s targets might make life easier for other people, but it would not make life easier for kidneystones, and that’s why you should not expect kidneystones to do so.

The 2016 election subthread is tiring but let me point out it’s the Hillary-haters who started it (33 etc.)

176: “really the null hypothesis for why the Democrats lost is “Hillary Clinton.””

I think you need to check your study design ;.) I submit the null hypothesis should be that the election outcome was determined by economic and political fundamentals. After all, the Republicans were at a natural advantage after 8 years of a Democratic presidency, and it has rarely happened in US history that a party won a third White House term. Allan Lichtman based his prediction – the only one that turned out correct – precisely on such fundamentals, completely disregarding the specifics of the candidates and the campaigns. Clinton performed way better than should have been expected given these fundamentals, but still she gets all the blame. Most observers, myself included, expected Clinton to win because we just couldn’t believe that Republicans would unite around such a terrible candidate. We were wrong – they did, and they are still fairly united around what most agree is a dangerous, abysmally incompetent president.

Re the Edsall article: anon is correct that the decline in Black turnout was to be expected. 2016 turnout still matches or exceeds all pre-Obama values. But the heart of his article is the claim that 7 to 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump. I think this is implausible. Obama bested Romney by 5 million votes, Clinton bested Trump by “only” 3 million so Trump improved the Republican margin by 2 million votes (while almost 8 million more votes were cast). Since we know that a significant number of Obama voters stayed home or voted third party, it is clear that if there was indeed massive vote-switching, it would have had to go both ways. I find that implausible but it’s not impossible. What I find interesting though is that nobody ever talks about millions of Romney voters switching to Clinton – while the opposite gets huge attention. That makes me suspicious of the whole theory.

“Last year’s triumph for Brexit has often been paired with the rise of Donald Trump as evidence of a populist surge. But most of those joining in with the ecstasies of English nationalist self-assertion were imposters. Brexit is an elite project dressed up in rough attire. When its Oxbridge-educated champions coined the appealing slogan “Take back control,” they cleverly neglected to add that they really meant control by and for the elite.”

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/06/10/britain-the-end-of-a-fantasy/

Eat your book Daragh.

@ continental 183

I’m sick of this kind of garbage from on-lookers. I don’t comment on his country, why does he feel he has the right to make snarky comments about mine?

F. Foundling

… I don’t think anyone uses it to refer to movements unrelated to ‘identity politics’, which were the majority of those that basil mentioned …

You seem very confident of that. I don’t know what your confidence is based on. I was able to find one example of somebody using the term ‘SJWs’ to refer to the Stop the War Coalition without much difficulty:
http://www.westmonster.com/radical-lefties-vow-to-shut-down-london-if-trump-visits/

@ continental 183 I’m sick of this kind of garbage from on-lookers.

I’m a British citizen and I endorse #183.

@187
I would think that a citizen of an imperialist nation, that routinely involves itself in the affairs of other nations and is happy to kill civilians in ginned up wars, should probably show less feigned outrage when confronted with mild international criticism.

@Val
SJW is a contested term. Defend it and wear it proudly or the alt-right will own it and everything else (see also: milk). Social justice is economic justice. Economic justice is social justice. Everything else is just nonsense.

and whilst we are on the subject, the notion that the post-Good Friday Agreement DUP and the pre-Good Friday Agreement IRA are somehow equivalent should send shivers down the spine of all democrats. If blowing people up in pubs is just as legitimate a political activity as voting then we are on a dark road. How long before Prime Minister Corbyn, who can notably never bring himself to condemn a specific terrorist attack except in tones that indicate we are all equally guilty, is sitting down with ISIS to discuss a political settlement, and suggesting that perhaps women might think about covering themselves up bit more to avoid offending decent muslims, and perhaps it would be better if the likes of Ariana Grande didn’t give concerts in our country?

@187

Dipper, later this year Liza McKenzie’s book about the lives of the worse-off left-behind struggling to survive in London will be published. It will contain material about how they were keen to vote Leave as a boot up the arse to an establishment that had either forgotten them or considered shows like “Benefits Street” as telling everything there is to know. They understood perfectly well it wouldn’t make their lives better, but they felt desperate.

After hearing McKenzie talk about these people, I am very happy to acknowledge that not all Leavers are smug Thames Valley dwellers who think they’re hard up because they waste most of £150,000 per year on status symbols. Unfortunately, the Leadsomites are the ones who are loudest in defining what the referendum was about. I have never seen a ConservativeHome article discussing the voters that McKenzie met, though there are plenty casting them as parasites who need to lose whatever support they currently get.

Let us know how your preferred model of Brexit – if you even have one – is going to do something for these people. Since Leave only scraped over the line at 52% it can’t afford to be ungrateful.

Dipper: “As a British citizen you are entitled to your opinion about the country, but the writer is not.”

This is an important point, one I say is too important to leave short. You cannot know another country as well as its own citizens, so you’re not entitled to any opinion about that country. Similarly, you cannot know any city you don’t currently live in as well as do its own residents, so you can have no meaningful opinion about any city you don’t live in. Furthermore, you can’t know every other barrio, borough, or neighborhood of your city as well as do its residents, so no opinions about them, please. You cannot know your neighbor as well as he/she knows himself, so, you know, you ought to just shut up about everything.

@casmilus

It is about immigration.

Straightforwardly free movement of people has created a situation where workers are in plentiful supply. Hence the price has fallen. The massive additional costs of importing millions of workers has not been transferred to employers and been dumped on the state which has failed to keep up. So, wages down, availability of housing down, housing cost up, and pressure on public services up.

I would do two things; I would limit non-skilled immigration to about zero. Make non-skilled workers a scarce resource. this will drive wages up, and encourage increases in productivity and improvement in skills. I would also build a new city because we need one. somewhere in southern England but not in touching distance of London, so based round either Oxford or Cambridge. A kind of reward for voting to remain in the EU. The increase in housing should take the pressure off housing costs elsewhere.

One immediate thing is given the number of nurses coming into the UK has crashed due to the introduction of the English Language test, I’d start investing in a number of them to become nurses and other trained medical staff.

Novakant—sorry missed your earlier query—if you watch Corbyn’s interview on Marr (on iPlayer) he spends a bit of time explaining how a Labour’s Brexit would differ from the Tories.

casmilus @ 196

Dipper is so concerned about the welfare of the ‘white working-class’ that he vents his anger at Labour for having the temerity to want to spend money improving the services they depend on and trying to provide them with a higher minimum wage and more housing.

He also believes that a ‘hard brexit’ is desirable but mild social democracy is not only utopian, but disastrous. Don’t expect any coherence from his arguments.

I’m aware that several people responded to my challenge about defining what you mean by “identity politics” or “SJWs”, but the conversation has moved on and it seems a bit off-topic to reply at length. However I will try to give a brief response and maybe we can all keep the discussion in mind if the issue comes up again.

Seems to me there are several functions of the term “identity politics”(as illustrated in the links above partic from engels).

One is labelling diverse social movements, such as feminism or Black Lives Matter, under one term. I guess it’s probably done for convenience but I don’t think it’s very useful in these kinds of discussions – eg Black Lives Matter aren’t proclaiming their “identity”, they are protesting about police violence and discrimination against African Americans or other people of colour.

Another meaning, mentioned in engels’ first link, is that what were originally protest movements (say back in the 60s or 70s) went from asserting people’s rights, as individuals in a liberal human rights paradigm, to equal or fair treatment, to asserting their positive identity as blacks or women etc, as in “black is beautiful’. I think this is important but I don’t think “identity politics” is a good term – it’s more like diversity, or standpoint theory, where having people with differing life experiences contributing to debates is recognised as something of value.

In this sense of course the contribution of educated white men is equally allowable with anyone else’s. The problem is a) they still tend to dominate public conversations, and b) they often still tend to talk as if they represent everyone (the ‘rational man’ or ‘everyman’ perspective).

The other usage/s are of course where the term is used in a pejorative sense, as it quite often is here. I think that is definitely something that people should try to avoid, as it at the least verges on racism and sexism.

“SJWs” seems to be just a term coined by the far right or ‘alt right’, and I can’t see any real justification for it.

Dipper’s tirades aren’t really worth a response, but let’s point out that the quote in 183 isn’t about the “working class” at all. It attacks “Oxbridge-educated champions” of nationalism.

And Fintan O’Toole is of course Irish. Of course no English person ever commented on Irish politics, let alone meddled in it, or voiced any kind of judgment about Irish people.

Nuff said, Dipper’s comments are blatant trolling.

CT’s policy of once-a-day comment approval means I get a whole bucket-load of joy in one go. So here goes:

Faustusnotes has met some wwc and they were racist, so they are all racist. It really shouldn’t be necessary for me to expand on the clear shortcomings and frankly danger of this position but I do further down

Ben Philliskirk @ 205 kind of makes my point. Labour are giving the working class the crumbs off their table. Under Corbyn, working class people aren’t free to create their own stories, determine their own outcomes, they will get what the expensively educated elite deem is appropriate for them.

Fintan O’Toole’s NY times column. Yes of course he is free to say whatever he thinks. Just wish he had said something less cliched. The UK stopped doing Irish jokes decades ago, about time he stopped the reverse. The reality on the ground is always richer and deeper than headline grabbing generalisations and character. The antidote to insultingly dim characterisations is not more of the same but works like this.

http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=607920;keyword=loud%20and%20proud

As for Brexit I would like the electors of the UK to be able to vote in a government that makes laws and conducts policy for them. The conversations about which flavour of Brexit we get are all a bit moot unless the EU shift from their position of a choice between EU membership with no vote and more fees, or complete exit and isolation. Just to bang on about this, the EU is mandating to us that we have to build and provide at our own cost the infrastructure of a medium sized European Nation in a generation in order to house the people fleeing their own economic ineptitude. I think this goes way beyond what any kind of formal relationship between two peaceful countries should look like and goes into the kind of settlement that normally occurs after a state has been defeated in war. I have the numbers, I’ve worked through them, so please don’t just say “that’s rubbish” but come back with your own.

And finally, Corbyn. A weak and vain man with a Stalinist organisation behind him. He isn’t trying to make us like Sweden or Germany, he is trying to make us like Cuba or Venezuela. Just look at his organisation; it only allows in friends and family. No open recruitment there. And only the best most expensive education for the children of the Vanguard. They are a controlling dynasty in the making. A Corbyn government, for the few not the many.

We know exactly how these regimes operate. It isn’t wealth they dislike, it is wealth that hasn’t paid its bribes to the rulers. The rule of law soon gets ripped up and replaced with intimidation and persecution. Just look how people like Prof Tim Hunt and Germaine Greer have been treated by groups of Momentum style activists. If this is what they are like out of power, just imagine what will happen if they get into power. Even the slogan “for the many not the few” states that individuals who have broken no laws will be the target of government attacks.

We can see it above all over. The identification of people you disagree with as being wrongdoers with bad attitudes; bad people, whose opinions make them less worthy, who have removed their right to the protection of the law through their own attitudes and thoughts. Then its just a small step to persecution, removal from jobs, show trials. It starts with Philip Green, then moves onto the likes of Lord Alan Sugar for his wealth and anti-Corbyn tweets, then perhaps J K Rowling for not praising her Momentum overlords enough.

So watch what you say, good people of CT, or you will be on a list.

The problem is a) they still tend to dominate public conversations, and b) they often still tend to talk as if they represent everyone (the ‘rational man’ or ‘everyman’ perspective).

Yes and educated white women do this too. You are Dipper are kinda the poster people for this sort of mindset imho.

@ Continental. So you think the quote in183 isn’t about the working class. But it is, because it says it as all about someone else. The working class must be denied a voice, a view. Written out of existence

Can I just point out, CT’ers, that we’ve had a shock result, and I haven’t heard one Tory in public or in private say that the stupid people did not realise what they voted for, that it was the Russians and their dark big data arts, or that voters were conned by lies in the Guardian. Just acceptance of the vote at straight value.

So remember that, folks, when Seamus Milne starts telling you how you voted. The Tories respect your vote when you vote against them. Labour (and the EU) will decide when your vote counts, and when it doesn’t.

Val@207:

You miss one common usage of “identity politics”, though in a sweeping sense your first definition comes close. It’s a style of political rhetoric which enshrines demographic group membership as the most important fact about any citizen, and prioritizes dealing with issues according to these identifiers rather than any other grouping schema. Specifically, it tends to devalue class as a politically meaningful idea – a rich, college-educated Congresswoman or the son of a rich black CEO is viewed as an oppressed minority because of demographic identifiers. Intersectionalism was intended to offset this to some degree, but proponents of more problematic identity politics have shown a marked willingness to view intersectionalism as being about overlapping even more demographic identifiers while continuing to ignore class identity.

When leftists talk derisively about mainstream American Democratic Party (or other liberals) commitment to identity politics, this is often the sense of the term they use. In my experience. It frequently manifests as well-heeled white academics, politicians, and professionals “speaking up for” marginalized groups, but so long as they “recognize” (in a rhetorical sense which changes very little and often merits the label of virtue signalling) their privilege (often while simultaneously recognizing demographic identity that “offsets” it) they can and do continue to dominate their conversations, to their decided advantage.

“SJWs” seems to be just a term coined by the far right or ‘alt right’, and I can’t see any real justification for it.

Over the last 5 years or so, I saw this term spring up in marginal conversations, spread, and finally become mainstream. It’s entirely a creation of online rightwing forums, and it does essentially mean “someone to my left who I despise for wrongthink”. There’s a very overwrought cliche that the term evokes and I assume is what the left-of-center users are referring to with the term, but it’s not a useful one as it conflates the problematic aspects of their behavior with their political alignment, and generally perpetuates and normalizes a particularly nasty (but from a rightwing perspective, very useful) political caricature.

No Dipper, it’s only a racist presumption if you do it on the base of race. No one in the Remain camp has been telling white people anything on the basis of race. They have just been pointing out that what is best for Britain is to stay in the EU. You might be familiar with the difference between “British” and “white”, it’s something that kippers like you go on about all the time. But of course you kippers think that telling people they can’t say “nigger” is the real racism, so it doesn’t surprise me that you don’t understand what racism actually is.

Orangewatch @ 211
But you are referring to the use of the term in a pejorative sense, to denigrate people, which is what I suggested people should not do. The usage you are referring to is handily vague, so it can be used to cover up sexism and give it a cloak of respectability.

I don’t know if you know anything about Australian politics, but if you had seen the crap Julia Gillard was subjected to, from the left as well as the right, you might have more idea of how this works. I know only too well – I was actually someone who had worked with Julia Gillard, but when I tried to tell some of these guys who bagged her that what they were saying about her was wrong, I was told “you’re only saying that because she is a woman’ (in other words, ‘identity politics’, in your terms).

So when they defended their preferred male candidate, Kevin Rudd, they were supposedly being objective, but when I defended Julia Gillard on the grounds that I actually knew the things they were saying were incorrect, I was indulging in ‘identity politics’! Perhaps you can see why I don’t have much time for this stuff.

Orange Watch

In your analysis of the concept of ‘identity politics’ you use the terms ‘demographic group membership’ and ‘demographic identifiers’ in a way that suggest you don’t consider the descriptions ‘rich’ and ‘college educated’ to be identifiers of demographic groups. Why not? it seems to me that they are. Are you using a definition of ‘demographic group’ and ‘demographic identifier’ that restricts them to referring only to gender and race and, if so, why?

It seems to me that the people who are most likely to decry the politicisation of issues of gender and race, and therefore most likely to use the description ‘identity politics’ as a pejorative, are also the people who are most likely to decry the politicisation of socioeconomic differences, although they will find different pejorative terms for that, like ‘class warfare’ and ‘the politics of envy’. The political defenders of wealth, power, and privilege (who won’t, naturally, describe themselves as such) are likely to be resistant to any identification of politically significant group divisions, because that’s the first step to the recognition of all kinds of social inequality, which is in turn the first step to the resolve to do something to reduce it. The people who attack (from the outside) the Democrats (or, outside the US, labour parties, or socialist parties) for abandoning their traditional bases in favour of the new-fangled trendy causes of ‘identity politics’ (or whatever other slurs they prefer) will attack them with equal vigour whenever they do assert themselves on behalf of those traditional bases against the wealthy, powerful, and privileged; those criticisms are opportunistic, not sincere.

#214 is a good comment

engels @ 227
Are you now reduced to praising your own comments? Well at least you’ve got one admirer.

Er #219

engels 06.14.17 at 11:20 am: “Yes and educated white women do this too.”

Wrong, women of whatever skin color and education do NOT dominate any important public conversations. That is an empirical fact and has been studied extensively.

Dipper continues his blatant trolling and CTers continue to feed him. What else is new.

Btw is it a rule that comments are approved once a day? That’s not a bad concept but I wasn’t aware of it. Is there a specific time of day for this?

P.S. Imagine thinking that an Irish person has no right to comment on Brexit. The days of the 26 counties having an essentially colonial economy dependent on the export of agricultural raw materials to Britain may be gone, but there’s no question that Brexit will profoundly affect the Irish economy and political situation.

Layman: it seems certain there were some people who believed that the UK could both prohibit free movement and continue to enjoy free trade with the EU; and it seems certain there are such people today. If they were not encouraged to believe this by someone, how do you imagine they arrived at this extraordinary idea?

novakant: freedom of movement and single market access are inextricably linked

There’s a label for the political dogma that there is no alternative, but Val says we shouldn’t use labels, so I guess I won’t use it. Ordinarily, I would think politics is how we collectively choose whether to link, say, “freedom of movement” and “tariffs” but what do I know?

The EU in the early 1990s embarked on an evolution premised on the desirability of enshrining the four freedoms of free movement of capital, people, goods and services within the EU. To achieve this neoliberal ideal, they set about politically disabling national governments in these domains. (Britain stands out as one of countries whose government was least disabled, because of various concessions and exceptions; this may be an interesting detail for the way the politics evolved. Britain was also among the least integrated into the politics of Brussels institutions, not participating much in the party groupings and so on, sending a lot UKIP members to the European Parliament, etc.)

The various aspects of the plan for implementing the four freedoms had varying degrees of popular support in Europe’s nation-states, not necessarily proportioned in any consistent way to reasonable anticipation of economic consequences. Time has passed, consequences have been realized even if the policy cause-and-effect is disputed among experts and not necessarily widely understood in the politically-aware populace of various states. (File these observations under, politics is chaotic.)

I personally do not have a committed view on the inherent desirability of Brexit. I am far away and disinterested. I do think it is inevitable that some re-configuration of the EU’s policy and political governance architecture take place. It is too big, too undemocratic, and has left the national governments too little scope. Of course, the four freedoms doctrine is on the chopping block; it doesn’t work — at least it doesn’t work for everyone and creates serious problems for a lot of people.

The neoliberal social democratic left has pretty much collapsed across western Europe since roughly 2010 and some kind of realignment is taking place now, which is necessary if it is not to be the case that there is no left left, going forward. (The LibDem gambit of opposing Brexit did not seem to help them, for what little that’s worth as a data point.)

We will see, I suppose, how Brexit plays out, qua opportunity to reform the European project. I expect it to become part of a general escalation of pressure on the EU for a general reform. It seems quite possible from this vantage point, that Brexit will be swallowed up by the coming paroxysms of France, Italy, or Spain.

What I do not quite understand is what anyone gets out of clinging to the doctrine of there is no alternative, expressed as an insistence that failure to govern migration is linked by logical entailment to failure to govern capital (aka “free trade”), and this is a good thing (from a leftish point 0f view).

Wrong, women of whatever skin color and education do NOT dominate any important public conversations.

Also, not the claim I was making, but if you think there’s ‘extensive empirical evidence’ that elite white women tend to be marginalised in American national politics/policy-making by eg black, working class or uneducated men it would be nice if you could point us in its general direction

Orange Watch 06.15.17 at 2:23 pm: I’m not interested in getting deeper into that debate but I have to point out that it’s absolutely wrong to claim that education divides the rulers from the ruled. There is a loose correlation of course between power and education but there are plenty of highly educated people who aren’t ruling anybody, have no political or economic power whatsoever, and often have low incomes and suffer economic precarity. Just as it is silly to claim that all white men belong to the ruling class, so it is silly to identify educated people with the establishment or the ruling class.

This education equals class thesis was btw one of the most important but little debated ingredients of Murray/Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve. Ellen Willis wrote one of the best takedowns of this BS – and its near universal acceptance by the punditry – I have read and I wish the essay were somewhere on the web (where is the internet when we need it) so we wouldn’t have to redebate this nonsense all the time. The article was reprinted in The Bell Curve Debate, which you may find in a good library.

Orangewatch@ 236

If your read my comment again, you may notice that I said ‘I worked with Julia Gillard’. In other words, I was talking about someone I knew, the people I was talking to were making quite wild claims about someone they had never met.

You made a generalisation about “identity politics” as a “style of political rhetoric”, which “enshrines membership of a demographic class” as the most important fact about people, and “tends to devalue class”.

“Political rhetoric” can’t do those things. You are presumably talking about certain people who have said or done certain things. So give examples.

Where are your examples of people who have been elected simply because of “membership of a demographic class”? I think you may find something rather surprising!

Dipper

And finally, Corbyn. A weak and vain man with a Stalinist organisation behind him. He isn’t trying to make us like Sweden or Germany, he is trying to make us like Cuba or Venezuela. Just look at his organisation; it only allows in friends and family. No open recruitment there. And only the best most expensive education for the children of the Vanguard. They are a controlling dynasty in the making. A Corbyn government, for the few not the many.

When I read that, the thought crossed my mind that Jeremy Corbyn might be the sort of person who deliberately refrains from having children; so I checked; and when I did so, I discovered that he and his second wife had three children, and that one of reasons their marriage broke up was that he was opposed to having their oldest child attend a grammar school, because he is opposed to selective education. That’s a fact that does not fit with the story you’re telling. By itself it’s a fact of limited significance, but I can’t help wondering to what extent your opinions generally are underpinned by this kind of unconcern for facts.

… The identification of people you disagree with as being wrongdoers with bad attitudes; bad people, whose opinions make them less worthy …

That kind of behaviour upsets me. I struggle not to be like that. People who model a different kind of behaviour are worth knowing about. You aren’t one of them.

J-D

‘there’s a difference between inherent/immutable identities and other ones, although the inherent/immutable ones aren’t inherent/immutable; but they’re still not the same, because they’re different’.

Very kind of you to do your very best to substitute an incoherent, confused garble that willfully ignores who advocates what in the place of what I wrote, and engaging with that in its stead. Duly noted. I’m not convinced it’s worth trying to unpack that given the sterling good faith that produced it.

If the wealthy, the powerful, and the privileged convince the poor, the disempowered, and the unprivileged that ‘I’m just like you but done good, and your children can be like me too’, or attempt to do so, then which are the grouping criteria you suppose they’re still valorising?

Cultural ones held by popular wisdom to be immutable rather than economic ones that are held to be exceedingly fluid. I.e., not the ones you appear to be suggesting they are, though since you don’t show your work in favor of seeming cryptic and clever I can’t say for certain.

Orange Watch

So if I tell you my personal experience it’s
a) not specific enough, and at the same time
b) useless anyway because it’s only an anecdote

But if I point you towards statistical evidence that if anyone is actually over-represented in politics on the basis of “membership of a demographic class”, it’s actually white men, you are not interested.

So life experience isn’t going to convince you, and statistical evidence isn’t going to convince you. And then you point me towards Kiwanda quoting someone who said:

“As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc. ”

I think what you and engels (and the person Kiwanda quoted) are talking about is some hypothetical people who are on the far right of politics, believe in hierarchy and are happy with gross economic inequality, but also believe in equal representation of women and people of colour all the way up the hierarchy.

Ok, possibly such people do exist – I don’t know, I don’t mix in far right wing circles. My observation suggests that most right wingers don’t really care that much about gender and racial equality.

But if you and engels are trying to say that believing in fair treatment for women or people of colour overlaps 100% with believing in hierarchies and supporting gross economic inequality, then you are pretty obviously talking nonsense, I’d say.

So if you are not talking nonsense, what are you saying?

engels 06.15.17 at 7:19 pm: If you ask me to provide evidence for a claim I haven’t made, here’s me polite answer: go [*] yourself read what was actually said.

[*]: withheld in the interest of polite conversation

Follow-up: As everybody hopefully noticed, the 13 GOP Senators tasked with taking health care away from millions of low-income Americans in general and defunding women’s health services in particular are not just all men, they are all rich white men. That the pundits commented on the sexist exclusion but not on the class exclusion is perhaps telling. People don’t even expect low-income people to have a say in politics. But please don’t blame “identity” politics for class warfare. Blame the class warriers for class warfare and acknolwledge that they are not exclusively but mostly white men, elected not exclusively but mostly by white men.

Like too many, this discussion would benefit so much from dialling down the scorn. And a bonfire of straw men.

The internet calls SJW anyone who dares to take a position against specific incidences of racism or sexism (etc.), especially those who themselves are female and/or non-white. To affirm it needs any more sinister behavior than this to run a good chance to be affixed with the moniker is a lie.

To characterize the so-called SJW as considering that “demographic group membership as the most important fact about any citizen” is a gross mischaracterization.

No doubt some of those so-called SJW would benefit in their political thinking by studying some aspects of class-based analysis. And no doubt one or the other of them could care less about helping the white male racists, even in cases when some of their grievances aren’t baseless. Yet to merely affirm the anti-identitarians’ superiority in economic matters doesn’t make it so. Myself, I’m a universalist at heart, but not willing to bend reality to my ideological preferences. Racism exists. Hegemony, colonialism etc. etc. all are a thing. History leaves traces. I’ve learnt more about then intricacies of economic inequality of those who could offer a look through the lens of, say, the history of housing and educational segregation (in the US), the history of state management of migrant worker families (in France or Germany), or an account of gendered labor participation over time than from those who want me to pretend that group affiliation is irrelevant and I should just talk about class and economic oppression. (Oh, and then there’s who gets shot and who gets jailed, which the anti-identitarians don’t seem to be interested in either.)

@ J-D

Yes Corbyn has children. One of them, Sebastian, is John McDonnell’s chief of staff. Laura Murray, daughter of the chief of staff of UNITE is on the staff. That’s what I mean by nepotism – a close group of people who give jobs to each other’s children.

Corbyn is against selective education, but Diane Abbott sent her son to public school, and Dame Shami Chakrabarti sends her son to the same expensive public school that Nigel Farage went to. So they are against it for you or I, but not for themselves. One of the worrying features of the Corbynite clique is this constant transgressing in private of the rules they lay down for others in public.

Dipper “Corbyn calls for the state to seize private property.”

The state seizes private property all the time, it is called compulsory purchase in the UK and “eminent domain” in the US. Without it, the railways would not have been built.

Dipper,
Pardon the question, but what’s your name reference? Liverpool or India? I can’t tell. Incongruous either way.

Thank you @lurker. I’ve tried to stake out that position myself.

Hopefully everyone remembers Obama calling protesters against police violence ‘thugs’, lecturing racialised communities about missing fathers, and telling Africa to take responsibility for its impoverishment and under-development. Even setting aside their necking with Branson or the gruesome terrific Tuesdays, this makes clear that a new understanding of language to describe the master class is necessary.

gastro george: “I’d fisk some more of your posts but really it’s a waste of breath.”

Well I, for one, appreciate it. Fisk away, with my thanks!

You said

Wrong, women of whatever skin color and education do NOT dominate any important public conversations. That is an empirical fact and has been studied extensively.

I asked for evidence white women don’t dominate public conversations about feminism.

Your reply: telling me to go fuck myself, then changing your thesis (and asserting that feminism isn’t consequential). And the only empirics we have is a CNN story about the Tepublicans. Good job there’a no word for liberalish Americans who try to win arguments on the internet by being aggressive…

But if you and engels are trying to say that believing in fair treatment for women or people of colour overlaps 100% with believing in hierarchies and supporting gross economic inequality, then you are pretty obviously talking nonsense, I’d say.

Yes and if you really think that the US government has been infiltrated by giant seven-legged martian fish I must politely inform you that you are mistaken. Good day!

Lurker, actually existing identity politics is about white people oppressing blacks people in the name of constructed racial categories. “SJWs” and all the rest of the supposedly awful identity politics of the modern left is a reaction against that. when people target you for your race, you fight back on racial terms. And then the dudebros of the socialist movement tell you you’re being silly, and the reason even rich black people get harassed by the police is all reallly about class.

Go tell Deontay wilder or the BLM supporting NFL players or the rich soccer players who get monkey taunts that it’s all really about class. I’m sure that they’ll believe you!

basil.

In bird-watching parlance, to dip is to go and see a rare bird and fail to see it. Also a Dipper is a bird that spends most of its active time under water occasionally surfacing to breathe. Both explanations seem somehow appropriate.

@ engels.

Whilst it is early days there seems enough evidence to suggest that in some way the regulations were not sufficiently tight to prevent the disaster we have seen, and also evidence that the regulations were a matter of dispute on which the government were at best slow to act.

Ultimately the safety of citizens, and hence the regulations and inspections which enforce that safety, sit with government. It is pretty hard to see how they can walk away from this and the lack of response from government has been dreadful. Personally I find Jeremy Corbyn’s opportunistic behaviour round the fire pretty sick-making, as if merely voting him in as Prime Minister will ensure safety for us all, but championing Theresa May as a viable PM is becoming an increasingly difficult task.

engels,
Do you know of this project? – https://architectsforsocialhousing.wordpress.com/

Dipper,
Thank you.

@ Dipper “eventually it will be you who is having your property taken and your voting rights removed, all for very good reasons, just temporarily, and in the interests of the common good.”

EU citizens in the UK will shortly lose their voting rights in local elections, thanks to changes supported by Dipper “in the interests of the common good”. Really hard to take this, “First they came for the absentee oligarchs …” stuff seriously.

@ Chris Bertram

The question of who votes in the UK elections will be a matter for the UK parliament. You can always get the Labour Party to propose a bill or amendment to include the rights of EU citizens, and for that matter non-EU citizens, to vote in local elections. It might get quite a lot of support from all sorts of people.

I raised the issue of sequestration of property partly because my other social media threads lit up at that point. You may not take this stuff seriously, but there are a lot of people out there who are checking their passports, working out what their red line is, and wondering where they can go.

@269, faustusnotes
Actually existing identity politics is about (mostly white) centrists using race and other identities to attack the left and oppose concrete improvements to the lifes of the bottom 80% of the population. Not leftist, at all. E.g. the argument that even if we had single payer, there’d still be racism, so why bother, implying that getting single payer and action against racism are somehow in conflict. It’s all about opposing the left, never about doing anything for the people who get weaponized.

“but there are a lot of people out there who are checking their passports, working out what their red line is, and wondering where they can go.”

Hang on, I thought you just “took back control” and now you want to go already? Unfortunately one consequence of taking back control is that your options about where to go will reduce. Are you writing these comments for a bet?

‘So, firstly John McDonnell calls for insurrection to overthrow the government’

A march is hardly an insurrection.

Majority of Brits disagree with ‘Voice of England’ Dipper:
https://mobile.twitter.com/YouGov/status/875746994379255808

@ Faustusnotes

Oppositions have to walk a fine line at times like this between proper holding to account of the government and exploiting the disaster. There isn’t a lot of evidence that one party or another party is particularly better at avoiding disasters, so making promises about how much better you will do is a real hostage to fortune. Corbyn, as usual, is charging way across this line. He is making promises that will come back to haunt him should he ever get into power.

Corbyn’s response to this and the London Bridge attack is more police, more firemen, despite the fact that in neither case is there evidence that more numbers would have changed anything. Let us not forget more nurses, more teachers, more council workers, whilst at the same time suspending freedom of movement (with which I agree), and this at a time when we have practically full employment. So where are these workers coming from?

This is all to be funded from tax rises which at best will simply take money out of worker’s pockets, and at worst be significantly tax negative as businesses move somewhere else. So once the fall out from that economic disaster has hit, do you think things will be safer? Or less safe? Will he really have looked after the workers’ interests at that point?

If you don’t think Corbyn’s economic policies will be disastrous, just remember that before all the above, Corbyn’s first act will be to write the Dipper family a cheque for just over £100,000, equal to about 3 x the median national wage, for nothing. And the same for millions like me.

Orange Watch

‘there’s a difference between inherent/immutable identities and other ones, although the inherent/immutable ones aren’t inherent/immutable; but they’re still not the same, because they’re different’.

Very kind of you to do your very best to substitute an incoherent, confused garble that willfully ignores who advocates what in the place of what I wrote, and engaging with that in its stead. Duly noted. I’m not convinced it’s worth trying to unpack that given the sterling good faith that produced it.

If you have decided that I am not in good faith, an assurance of mine that I am is not likely to have much effect. I admit that I was being ironical (which I don’t think is synonymous with bad faith), and I accept that sarcasm is a predictable response to irony.

What I wrote was an attempt to illustrate the meaning that was suggested to me by the words you chose to use. If you intended to convey to me a different meaning, you have not succeeded in doing so. Maybe there’s a different choice of words that would do the trick.

If the wealthy, the powerful, and the privileged convince the poor, the disempowered, and the unprivileged that ‘I’m just like you but done good, and your children can be like me too’, or attempt to do so, then which are the grouping criteria you suppose they’re still valorising?

Cultural ones held by popular wisdom to be immutable rather than economic ones that are held to be exceedingly fluid. I.e., not the ones you appear to be suggesting they are, though since you don’t show your work in favor of seeming cryptic and clever I can’t say for certain.

I was not making a cryptic suggestion about which grouping criteria the wealthy/powerful/privileged are valorising, because I was making no suggestion that they were valorising any grouping criteria. As far as I understood, you were suggesting that there were grouping criteria they valorise, but it’s still not clear to me which ones.

Dipper wrote —

Yes Corbyn has children. One of them, Sebastian, is John McDonnell’s chief of staff. Laura Murray, daughter of the chief of staff of UNITE is on the staff. That’s what I mean by nepotism – a close group of people who give jobs to each other’s children.

That’s one thing if it occurs against a background in which it’s rare for politicians to give jobs on their staff to people they know (or their children), and another thing if it occurs against a background in which it’s common for politicians to do that. So which is it?

— and also wrote —

… John McDonnell calls for insurrection to overthrow the government …

John McDonnell apparently thinks that if a million people protest in the street it will bring down the government. It won’t. If John McDonnell genuinely believes that, he’s a fantasist, and it’s worrying for the Labour Party if that kind of fantasist has an important position in the party. It’s not an indicator of what’s actually likely to happen.

— and also wrote —

Folks, the persecution starts with people who are pretty unarguably worth persecuting and with very few people willing to defend them.

The use of the present tense (‘starts’) makes it unclear whether this is intended to be a reference to a persecution which has already started or to a persecution which Dipper is forecasting will start, or is likely to start, or may start in the future. Which is it?

— and also wrote

I raised the issue of sequestration of property partly because my other social media threads lit up at that point. You may not take this stuff seriously, but there are a lot of people out there who are checking their passports, working out what their red line is, and wondering where they can go.

The fact that people are taking some prospect seriously does not demonstrate that there is any significant likelihood of its coming to pass. Sometimes people’s fears are sensible and sometimes they are silly.

basil

Yes, there is a practice of weaponising identities in order to advance a conservative politics that stymies liberation and material progress for the oppressed many.

I have no personal experience of that, so I would appreciate it if you could direct my attention to some specific examples so that I can get a clearer idea of what you mean.

Bruce Wilder:

Regarding the four freedoms I wasn’t making a normative, i.e. that the EU will certainly not give up on them during Brexit negotiations as that would mean giving up on one of th core principles of the EU. This goes without saying as has been made clear to delusional or simply mendacious Brexiters repeatedly, cf. e.g Merkel’s recent comments.

You say you are far away and disinterested: I urge you to acknowledge that there are millions of people whose lives will be directly and immediately affected by Brexit, and not in a good way – not to speak of the whole UK which will very likely turn into a second rate economy.

Also, Maastricht was signed 25 years ago, an overwhelming majority of young people voted against Brexit and have a positive view of the EU – they are the future, the 60+ Brexit voters will all be gone soon and notions of national greatness with them.

Finally I keep hearing that national governments are more democratic and responsive to their citizen’s needs, but I have yet to see any evidence for that: e.g. the UK is neither very democratic at all, nor have successive Labour or Tory governments championed citizen’s rights – these had to be upheld in many cases by EU intstitutions against the will of despotic governments. In fact, UK govenrments have proven themselves to be simply not very competent at governing, just look at the destruction of the state and infrastructure since Thatcher, not to mention the current clownshow.

God help us once we leave the EU.

@ J-D. “Sometimes people’s fears are sensible and sometimes they are silly.”

Well that’s the point of the red line. To identify the point where it stops being a silly fear and become a sensible one, but still be one from which you can escape, not one you cannot.

lurker

Actually existing identity politics is about (mostly white) centrists using race and other identities to attack the left and oppose concrete improvements to the lifes of the bottom 80% of the population. Not leftist, at all. E.g. the argument that even if we had single payer, there’d still be racism, so why bother, implying that getting single payer and action against racism are somehow in conflict. It’s all about opposing the left, never about doing anything for the people who get weaponized.

I have no personal experience of that, so I would appreciate it if you could direct my attention to some specific examples so that I can get a clearer idea of what you mean.

For example, I’m contrasting two hypothetical scenarios in my mind. In one of them, African-American organisations are perceiving labour unions as natural allies, with different specific priorities but with generally compatible agendas, and are encouraging collaborative activities. In the contrasting scenario, African-American organisations are perceiving the agendas and activities of labour unions as incompatible with their own priorities, and discouraging involvement with them. Which of these is a fairer picture of what’s happening?

@302

I believe you are technically correct. Hillary Clinton did, however, state that breaking up the big banks would not end racism. And she and her allies oppose single payer.

Given the Wells Fargo foreclosure scandal, the link between big banks and racism is as clear as the link between America’s scandalous “health care” system and racism.

@J-D

Of course it was an argument against breaking up the big banks. Why else would she have said it?

As for the opinions of African-Americans on banks and healthcare, you are bringing a pure strawman into the debate. lurker in his post referred to “(mostly white) centrists”, not African-Americans.

Public service by Dr. Google:

““Not everything is about an economic theory, right?” Clinton said, kicking off a long, interactive riff with the crowd at a union hall this afternoon.
“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow—*and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will* —would that end racism?” “No!” the audience yelled back.

She said this – live – in the context of the primary campaign. She’s accusing Sanders of neglecting all other political issues in favor of economic populist rhetoric. And many people seemed to agree with her. They were clearly not saying, we want a president who does nothing about the big banks as long as there’s racism. They were saying, we want a president who does more than talk about breaking up the banks.

So no, no substance there. You are getting the argument backward.

Over 170 years after Engels, Britain is still a country that murders its poor
https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/20/engels-britain-murders-poor-grenfell-tower

Dipper
It is not clear to me whether you are suggesting that austerity has caused a decline in the rate of deaths from fire; correlation is not enough to establish causation. I am not suggesting that austerity caused (or partly caused) the deaths in the Grenfell Tower; but it is a possibility, and a possibility fully compatible with the statistical pattern you have noted.

Another lamentable attempt at using identity politics to distract from economic injustice:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/opinion/london-tower-grenfell-fire.html

Indeed, Britain’s racial politics are the key to understanding the Grenfell Tower fire. It’s difficult to imagine this disaster — caused by a huge dereliction of duty and refusal to listen to residents’ concerns — befalling a community of white Britons.

Dipper, you can’t draw a conclusion about fires a decline from 2009 if you start the trend at 2009 – that’s transparently stupid. Also there’s a big uptick at the end. Do try harder!

@281

“Not leftist, at all. E.g. the argument that even if we had single payer, there’d still be racism, so why bother”

This is a strawman argument. idpol argues that in many cases, historically “universal” programs were designed in such a way as to benefit whites exclusively. I strongly urge you to read The Case for Reparations (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/) to see how a variety of policies, ostensibly meant to help the poor secure financial stability in the form of property, were selectively targeted to help only a single racial category (guess which one!). No serious proponent of idpol argues against single payer or economic justice, they argue against the blindness of previous (and apparently current) generations of socialists who’d like to ignore the racial and gender dimension that permeates every single social interaction. As for idpol people being white liberals exclusively, I’d like to introduce you to BLM. I’m sure you’ve heard of them at least once or twice.

@313

Sorry, I think I meant my previous comment and general ire to be directed @281 (edit button, where art thou?)

@ J-D

We seem to live on different planets. Aditya Chakraborty’s article clearly claims that Austerity killed the victims of Grenfell Tower. If Austerity was a cause of fires we would expect to see a rise in deaths due to fire over the period of Austerity, and in fact we see a fall, not a rise. If that evidence does not convince you that Chakrobarty’s claim is without basis, then perhaps you could state what evidence would convince you.

The Guardian in particular just seems to be completely collapsing as a newspaper. It has spent a year or so having a total nervous breakdown after the EU referendum, and now it sniffs an opportunity to restore its place as calling the shots politically it is just saying anything about anybody to make its claim without regard to evidence, history, or logic. A disgrace to journalism.

… and then I go onto Continental’s NYTimes link … and it is from a Guardian writer.

Firstly, for those wondering what a flat in Grenfell Tower looked like, here’s one: https://www.openrent.co.uk/property-to-rent/london/2-bed-flat-grenfell-tower-w11/168071

It doesn’t look like poverty to me, particularly not at just under £2K per month when a similar flat round my way inhabited by young professionals is £1K per month . This in no way excuses the failures round the fire, but to start going on about poverty and race seems a bit much based on this evidence.

And then this from the article: ” Poverty rates are lowest among the white population — at about 20 percent — while 50 percent of people of African descent live in poverty.” So the fact that there are many white people who are not living in poverty somehow makes those white people who are living in poverty less important. This blatantly discriminatory comment is so clearly inappropriate that I find myself unusually in agreement with Continental.

@ gastro george – 322 – oh come on this is desperate stuff. You reasonably put a list of facts that may have been involved and point out what the investigation may find, but Aditya Chakraborty doesn’t do any ifs or buts, he is straight in with a diagnosis based on nothing. I can get better analysis in my local on a Friday night.

All this grandstanding from leftish commentators is nauseating. Of course the fire should never have happened, and ultimately all this ends up on the desk of the Prime Minister who has overall responsibility for safety and inspection standards, but none of these commentators have done any research, they aren’t doing any analysis, they are not bringing you anything new, they are just using a tragedy to parade their adolescent prejudices as if they now have some special added value.

Katsue

Uh, that very quote is the one where she said that the big banks shouldn’t be broken up …

That statement is false. She did not say ‘the big banks shouldn’t be broken up’.

Serious journalist: Talks to people from Grenfell, determines their income and status.

Dipper: Look, a pretty picture. This *proves* they’re not poor.

@gastro george.

“Dipper: Look, a pretty picture. This *proves* they’re not poor.”

Well of course many of them are are poor. They have come here as migrants or refugees from their former countries in many cases with nothing apart from what they stand up in. Are you suggesting that anyone who can make it here gets the national median wage automatically on arrival? Living in the borough of Kensington they get more spent on their children’s education than just about anywhere else in the country, a flat the market rent for which is £2K per month, and free healthcare. That seems like a good deal. Given that lots of other properties now seem to have the same cladding it doesn’t seem to be the case that they were singled out for sub-standard housing either, as it seems this tragic fire could have occurred in any of a large number of similar blocks.