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The Political Thread

Started by The Legendary Shark, 09 April, 2010, 03:59:03 PM

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IndigoPrime

Quote from: GordonR on 13 March, 2017, 09:54:25 PMA question many voters will be asking themselves at the council elections this May, I suspect.
And 2020's GE, which may no longer involve Scotland. It's going to be a bloodbath.

Professor Bear

Funny how all this has worked out for the far right.
Globally, I mean.  Things were going slowly but steadily in the other direction, but then all this "disparate" outlier behavior comes along and creates a perfect storm not just for the re-emergence of fascism, but the active embracing of it by the West.

RE: Labour - Harriet Harmon, before Corbyn even entered the leadership race, stood before Parliament and told the British people that it was Labour's duty to back the Tories' welfare cuts and Austerity measures.
There's a reason Thatcher called New Labour her greatest achievement.

JOE SOAP

Quote from: Professor Bear on 13 March, 2017, 11:18:21 PM
Funny how all this has worked out for the far right.
Globally, I mean.  Things were going slowly but steadily in the other direction, but then all this "disparate" outlier behavior comes along and creates a perfect storm not just for the re-emergence of fascism, but the active embracing of it by the West.


The left were always edging more and more in the direction of the right; happy to co-opt the policies of the right that suited their interests until the the voter base got sick of it, abandoned them in return, and paradoxically –at least on the surface– ran to the other side.


Professor Bear

Compromise is a longstanding part of any political landscape, but that's not what we're seeing: what we're seeing is polorisation and extremism ultimately favoring only the right, with the left attacking itself from the bottom up.
And inevitably: "It is utterly unacceptable to condemn a generation of our young to unemployment by maintaining all the rights and privileges of those currently in work."

JOE SOAP

Aye, but it got to a point where no one knew what separated the parties from each other, and the left became a party of lesser substance by becoming the party of the big cities and the liberal middle-class. With the resurgence of far-right ideologues –who are far more organised than the left– the old polarisation no longer functioned in the familiar way it used to because the left has been hollowed-out. Reverting to an old ideological version of itself instead of being pragmatic will no longer cut-it in opposition. This, as you point out, is global, and the previous global alliances have been dissolved to favour the new, stronger alliances between neo-nationalists.


TordelBack

#12365
The core of all this for me is the shift in the organisation and control of grassroots dissatisfaction and anger from left to right.

Rather than lefties being able to articulate and leverage frustration with treatment by employers, backwards laws and self-serving governments, we've ended up (again) with protest directed at nebulous outsiders who 'strong' governments are exhorted to protect us from, with the desirable status quo being something in an in imagined past rather than an imagined future. To what extent this is a function of ongoing demographic shift and the quite shocking relative affluence of older generations versus the ever-extending childhood of younger generations, and to what extent this is something cleverly engineered by an international corporate elite I don't know: but probably a bit of both. 

This at a time when we desperately need to pull together and think only of the future.

Professor Bear

#12366
You Mexicans better make room, as us 'uns are moving back in.
May's Ministry is so blinkered and weak it's probably going to happen, and while the politics of the South are as big a horror show as up here, I'll probably vote for this.

Quote from: JOE SOAP on 14 March, 2017, 01:41:27 AMReverting to an old ideological version of itself instead of being pragmatic will no longer cut-it in opposition.

That's the kind of thing that I mean: the idea that being pragmatic is the opposite of holding left wing views.  I thought we were past that when Carry on At Your Convenience bombed at the box office.

IndigoPrime

The British left is insane right now. Momentum is aligned with hard-right Con/UKIP on key issues, in the naive belief that it will usher in a grand new era of socialism. How we get to that from economic devastation and a hard-right Tory government likely to get a majority of 50+ seats at the next GE, I don't know.

And then we see Corbyn asking people to protest with him for EEA national rights, shortly after his Lords fucked over the very same people, at which point he presumably thought better of it and didn't show up.

In England, what happens next? The Lib Dems are still polling very low (10 per cent or so), on the basis of people thinking them traitors for the coalition. They're the only properly national English party to now support Remain, but I can't see that being enough, and even if they matched Labour at a GE, they'd only get a handful of seats. Labour's seemingly halfway to becoming the UKIP of the left. At best, they're ineffectual capitulators. "We'll take the fight to the Conservatives in new and imaginative ways." Oh do fuck off. You had your chances to block, and Corbyn three-line-whipped everyone away from that. This also makes an electoral pact impossible, which is just great. Beyond that, there's the Green Party (one MP, fairly likely to retain her seat; possibly the chance of one other, in Bristol). And a new party simply won't work, on the basis it'd be knackered  by FPTP.

In short: bleurgh.

Professor Bear

As far as I can see, the LibDems are pretty happy bottom-feeding lapsed Labour supporters by pretending to be left-wing despite constantly reiterating that they'd power-share with the Tories again and Tim Farron's inability to deny that he's a homophobe.  The latter is a bonkers turn-up for the leader of a party widely credited with getting the Tories to implement marriage equality - the one palpable lasting success of their time in coalition that they can point to.

The Legendary Shark

Have political parties outlived their usefulness? Are they more problem creators than problem solvers? Is it time to rethink the role, indeed the whole need for, political parties?
[move]~~~^~~~~~~~[/move]




Smith

Not that we needed them in the first place.

NapalmKev

Quote from: The Legendary Shark on 14 March, 2017, 12:20:33 PM
Have political parties outlived their usefulness?

Possibly, but I'd rather others run the Nation than have to do it myself. My major concern with Politics/Politicians is that nobody's ever accountable for anything!

Illegal Wars are started with false evidence as the cause - nobody cares!

Paedophiles apparently infiltrated Government and TV stations years ago - nobody cares!

I could go on but I'll end up winding myself up!

Anyway, accountability, or lack of, is what concerns me. People can be in charge but they need to take proper responsibility.

Cheers
"Where once you fought to stop the trap from closing...Now you lay the bait!"

Professor Bear

"Apart from all of Western civilisation and everything we see and experience all day every day, what have coalitions of people of like intent ever done for us?"

IndigoPrime

Quote from: Professor Bear on 14 March, 2017, 11:01:53 AMAs far as I can see, the LibDems are pretty happy bottom-feeding lapsed Labour supporters by pretending to be left-wing despite constantly reiterating that they'd power-share with the Tories again and Tim Farron's inability to deny that he's a homophobe. The latter is a bonkers turn-up for the leader of a party widely credited with getting the Tories to implement marriage equality - the one palpable lasting success of their time in coalition that they can point to.
The problem with the left/right axis is that it isn't nuanced. In terms of economics, the LDs have never been left. In terms of social justice, they are liberal in nature rather than authoritarian. The second of those things puts them squarely at odds with Labour on a number of subjects, as, to some extent, does LDs not being as left as traditional Labour regarding the economy.

Regarding power-sharing with the Tories, why wouldn't they if it's the only viable coalition? This is what happens in countries with a mature approach to politics. But here we throw our toys out of the pram at any idea of collaboration and cooperation. Of course, had Labour actually made good on its promises regarding electoral reform before getting its 1997 landslide and kicking Ashdown's LDs in the balls, most of these issues wouldn't exist anyway. 2010 would have returned a viable Lab/Lib option.

Farron: I can't disagree there. He at least puts a lid on some of his worst viewpoints, but then it's hard to know how should lead that party now. Clegg had no option but to quit, given what happened in 2015, but he's still the grown-up in that party. (Miliband, however, shouldn't have resigned, to my mind. This is another bonkers thing about British politics now – that notion that the leaders must quit when they don't win. It's like football rather than measured forward-looking politics.)

In a more general sense about political parties, the problem isn't so much that they exist, but that our political framework for most layers of government is so skewed as to make only large parties viable nationally in England. In countries with PR, it's feasible for parties to split without destroying half or all of the original; it's feasible for new parties to show up and take a bunch of seats. People keep talking about a new centrist party for the UK – somewhere LDs, and moderate Labour and Cons could decamp to. But what would be the point? They'd never get anywhere.

Professor Bear

Sarah Olney is probably the best candidate for LibDem leader, as she has both the benefit of relative anonymity and a political career so short that it not only precludes any skeletons in the closet, but it also succeeds the Coalition, which people are not going to forgive no matter how much Farron and the few remaining LibDem faithful hope otherwise.  Not much experience as a politician, but these days that's more of a bonus with voters than a hindrance - not that she'd be going to be leading a party that's got any heavy lifting in its future, anyway.