Woebot

Well-known member
oof!

well - although i certainly didn't vote for it - it has happened. consequently it seems like the sane thing is to try and come to terms with it.

funnily enough the voices in the aftermath i've found comfort from are people who i usually cannot stand - that's the duo at the guardian of john harris and owen jones who unlike ALL the insular metropolitan socialists (corbyns final remain rally beside the guardian's offices beside a waitrose in islington - lol) that make up labour today have realised that this is the working class speaking.

the comment leading harris' article "'If you've got money, you vote in ... if you haven't got money, you vote out'" - rings very powerfully over this. and frankly - although i think it's an insane, paranoid and even suicidal thing for the uk to have to done to itself, it has to be reckoned with.
 

vimothy

yurp
Worth excerpting some of it:

Most of all, Brexit is the consequence of the economic bargain struck in the early 1980s, whereby we waved goodbye to the security and certainties of the postwar settlement, and were given instead an economic model that has just about served the most populous parts of the country, while leaving too much of the rest to anxiously decline....

For six years now, often with my colleague John Domokos, I have been travelling around the UK... trying to divine the national mood, if such a thing exists. I look back, and find all sorts of auguries of what has just happened. As an early warning, there was the temporary arrival of the British National party in electoral politics from 2006 onwards..

A few years later, we met builders in South Shields who told us that their hourly rate had come down by £3 thanks to new arrivals from eastern Europe; the mother in Stourbridge who wanted a new school for “our kids”; the former docker in Liverpool who looked at rows of empty warehouses and exclaimed, “Where’s the work?”

In Peterborough in 2013, we found a town riven by cold resentments, where people claimed agencies would only hire non-UK nationals who would work insane shifts for risible rates; in the Ukip heartlands of Lincolnshire, we chronicled communities built around agricultural work and food processing that were cleanly divided in two, between optimistic new arrivals and resentful, miserable locals – where Nigel Farage could pitch up and do back-to-back public meetings to rapturous crowds....

In so many places, there has long been the same mixture of deep worry and often seething anger. Only rarely has it tipped into outright hate.. but it still seems to represent a new turn in the national condition.

More:

And all the time, the story that has now reached such a spectacular denouement has been bubbling a way. Last year, 3.8 million people voted for Ukip. The Labour party’s vote is in a state of seemingly unstoppable decline as its membership becomes ever-more metropolitan and middle class, problems the ascendancy of Jeremy Corbyn has seemingly made worse. Indeed, if the story of the last few months is of politicians who know far too little of their own supposed “core” voters, the Labour leader might be seen as that problem incarnate. The trade unions are nowhere to be seen, and the Thatcher-era ability of Conservatism to speak powerfully to working-class aspiration has been mislaid. In short, England and Wales were characterised by an ever-growing vacuum, until David Cameron – now surely revealed as the most disastrous holder of the office in our democratic history – made the decision that might turn out to have utterly changed the terms of our politics.

(...)

Of course, most of the media, which is largely now part of the same detached London entity that great English patriot William Cobbett called “the thing”, failed to see this coming. Their world is one of photo ops, the great non-event that is PMQs, and absurd debates between figures that the public no longer cares about. The alienation of the people charged with documenting the national mood from the people who actually define it is one of the ruptures that has led to this moment: certainly, wherever I go, the press and television are the focus of as much resentment as politics. While we are on the subject, it is also time we set aside the dismal science of opinion polling, which should surely now stick to product testing and the like. Understanding of the country at large has for too long been framed in percentages and leading questions: it is time people went into the country, and simply listened.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Very good article, though I don't agree with everything he says.

And specifically wrt Corbyn - snipe all you want, but the alternatives are much worse.

For me personally, the greatest priority now is seeing Corbyn continue at the head of the Labour Party. If he goes, and is replaced by someone whose opposition to austerity is mere rhetoric and whose involvement in politics is based purely upon their career advancement rather than principle (which has obviously been the idea all along, since....the second he was confirmed as the leader?), then there will be no meaningful choice at the next general election, and Britain* will again have got exactly what it has asked for. And then endlessly complains about.

*Sorry, England & Wales (& NI?)
 
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luka

Well-known member
If you've got money, you vote in ... if you haven't got money, you vote out'"

Is broadly true but in London and other multicultural cities the picture is very different
 

vimothy

yurp
I've not seen a detailed breakdown of London, but the general trend is clear enough:

median.png


At the Guardian page where those charts originate, they also discuss what they call the "east London exception":

Although remain was strong almost everywhere in the capital, leave had a majority in the east London working class neighbourhoods of Havering, Barking and Dagenham, plus Bexley and a number of neighbouring areas in the Thames estuary. These were traditional Labour strongholds that swung to UKIP in the general election.
 

comelately

Wild Horses
Hillingdon voted for Brexit too, as did Sutton. Yeah, slightly more of a tendency in East London suburbia but wouldn't get too carried away.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
So, Boris is now wearing the blank shock of a man who has just walked free of the wreckage of an airplane disaster. Doesn't seem to have got what he wanted after all....
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Yep - is there a chance he won't even stand for PM? He knows there's a big chance that he'll end up being hated by absolutely everyone, which might be unbearable for such an attention-seeker.

And Tea, I'd forgotten about that picture. Extraordinary. Farage's mask slips.
 
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Woebot

Well-known member
For me personally, the greatest priority now is seeing Corbyn continue at the head of the Labour Party.

jeremy corbyn is a bourgeois fantasist. socialism does not appeal to the working classes - frankly they are too sensible.
 

droid

Well-known member
Yeah, get rid of the only party leader who opposes austerity, that's the solution.

But yes, it seems the 'working classes' have chosen fascism over socialism.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Russia and China have turned capitalist, the working class has turned nativist and hipsters have turned libertarian. At this point the only socialists left are 3 blokes on this message board.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Labour needs a leader who opposes austerity but also acts like a leader. Who that could be, I don't know. The odds aren't looking good right now. Maybe Corbyn can still be that leader. Who knows.
 
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