Wow, your complaint could almost be mistaken to be about the situation in the United States as a whole. Is it the case in most (all?) democracies that Conservative parties garner the most “loyal” (consistently voting in lockstep) supporters and all other movements end up diluting their power due to inherent lack of unifying vision? Yes, they can form coalitions around various topics but when it comes to building a reliable voting bloc do non-Conservative parties (far-right and center and left) find that it is easier for supporters to be dissatisfied / discontent with the politicians and/or platform? I wonder if that is a “rule” in political science or if I’m extrapolating too much.
Yep. The biggest loss for the party in roughly 84 years. Off the back of an election that should have been theirs to lose.
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Correct me if I’m wrong. But you’re talking about 1924, and the following year there was a general strike, yeah?
No, I was thinking of 1935, where Labor lost by 232 seats(Despite an overall gain, which shows how dire things were for labor at the time.) Seemed unfair to compare it to the 1931 election, that one was a drubbing so bad that it nearly killed the party, they lost 200+ seats(Not lost by, lost as in didn’t have them anymore) and were left in the double digits.
(And no, I didn’t remember this off the top of my head, I had to fact check a claim made about it for work, so it’s pretty fresh in my mind)
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I know it’s fun for us American’s to tie everything to our situations, but UK’s situation is VASTLY different and I would hesitate to draw much from their election. Beyond maybe that Labour F’ed their message up and the Remain forces in general couldn’t decide on a message.
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Its not 1:1, but the weariness over Brexit + 2nd referendum stance for Labor seeming to draw it out further could also apply to 24/7 trump impeachment stuff in the US at the cost of table stake issues and direct messaging by Dems/Candidates about big policy proposals/plans. How much real coverage does any of that get on CNN et. all vs just a bunch of talking heads red in the face with each other over it (This applies to every large cable new network).
While Labour had it’s problems, I don’t think any of those things played a role in their loses.
I’m confident it is every much to do with media coverage and nothing but that.
Had it’s problems? My dude, they had constant scandals due to their leader(Who is, despite what twitter might suggest, one of the most monumentally unpopular party leaders in British history, and who hasn’t polled a net positive in two years or more despite opposing one of the least popular conservative governments in the last twenty - turns out, twitter isn’t the nation), they avoided taking responsibility for anything like they were fucking deathly allergic to it, they wavered on Brexit - pretty much THE biggest and most important issue of the last decade, which could decide the fate of the nation for decades to come, and the strongest predictor of if a voter was going to abandon Labor - until they were finally forced into a position, which they took with the kind of limp, unenthusiastic commitment of a forced apology, they did their level best to take the gold for in-party knife-fighting over sticking the boot into the weakened conservatives, and that’s just the 10k foot view.
On top of that, I’m not sure I can accept that the working and middle class vote is just some metaphorical clay to be molded trivially, but then pretend that this doesn’t also mean that Corbyn and the party under his leadership just utterly, utterly failed to make so much as a thumbprint. At least, since I don’t think it’s your intent to call him a charisma black hole with the PR ability of a small sponge.
While I’ll agree that it played a role - being a member of the media, and previously a member of the British media, seems a little pointless to deny it’s influence - it was just one thing among multiple factors, and a relatively smaller one at that.
Don’t play the “Corbyn cannot fail, only be failed” game, it’s counterproductive - Labor can’t win again, until they get a handle on why they lost, and the fact of the matter is, Corbyn and the way he ran the party is key part of that.
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So, here’s a thing I don’t understand, and I’m hoping someone can Britsplain to me.
I took a look at the Conservative party’s manifesto here:
I’ve seen a number of people talking about how the Tories want to defund NHS, but here they’re literally talking about more funding.
Obviously American politics have given me a fucked-up perspective because this is something that would only get pushed by the progressive wing of American politics.
So, what gives? Other than Brexit and what appears to be a xenophobic immigration system, what is the damage the Conservative party is aiming to do?
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Ike’s already well handled the NHS bit - and accurately, too, the entire thing about the NHS getting more money is entirely lies in every sense, it’s just a privatization scheme.
Really, the trick with the rest is rather similar - they talk a big game about these ambitious plans, but it’s all smoke and mirrors, based around a lot of privatization, killing benefits programs, and just flat-out sweet sounding lies about much more sinister plans. They’re basically just putting a bit of paint and spackle on their usual banal evil - for example, they’ll “Make a strong commitment to worker’s rights”, which sounds good, right up until you remember precisely what they consider those rights to be, and how few they consider to be valid rights.
They have all these things on the slate they’re claiming they want to do, but their funding plans only give a total of 2.9 billion for it, nowhere near enough to fund even a tenth of their promises - because many of them, they just lie out their ass that they’ll pay for themselves, or other savings will pay for them. The Tories under Johnson isn’t even the Tories under May, which were already bad enough - they’re simply utterly unrepentant and unremorseful liars.
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One of the things I’ve heard just from the… like the amalgam of everything I see and read on the internet is the Labour was internally split on Brexit itself. So if you look at it as a single issue voter you’ve got 2 options, the brexit party and the party that’s split on brexit, half for and half against.
Is that so? If so then over and above Corbyn, Labor needs to put their house in order. Get their reps aligned with their voters.
This is what makes me wonder about my earlier point above. Conservatives in the US lie as easy as breathing. So, is there something about Conservative voters that cause them to keep voting Conservative regardless of reality, because all that matters is the rhetoric and promises yet for other voters their viewpoint/ideology results in so much to critique and consider before deciding if to vote at all and who to vote for? Or am I trying too hard to overfit? I’m also considering the somewhat longer term view here, going back 30-40 years to the modern era of Conservative politics.
I’m imagining a graph that shows Conservative-identifying voters as a minority of the voting public but voting at a consistent turn-out rate over time. Compared to centrist and/or liberal voters as a much higher proportion of eligible voters but turning out or voting liberal in a much more swingy trend (big turnout, big voting support in years where conditions are strongly anti-conservative but big drop-off in other years).
Well, the extremely simplified version is - May and Johnson are a relatively novel and recent kind of turd in the punchbowl of UK politics. Sure, they’re hardly the first shitty conservatives to show up, but even the nastiest conservatives in the past had rules, a sense of ethics(twisted as they may have been, they were present), a sense of propriety. They might have had absolutely abhorrent beliefs, but they actually believed them. They worked within a structure and framework that British conservative voters largely understood and accepted.
Johnson and May(albeit to a slightly lesser extent, but not by fucking much) have literally none of those. They’ve no rules, ethics, propriety. They have no beliefs that matter, only the ones that are in service of their current goal at that moment, if a different belief is of more benefit to them, they instantly switch and always believed that. And their only adherence to that structure and framework, is to exploit it to do as they please, and keep that conservative vote. There’s a lot off conservatives out there who genuinely can’t really deal with this, because it’s Just Not Done, it’s not how things work, so they rationalize it away - because if there’s one thing British conservatives have always been good at, it’s rationalizing away any evidence that counters their belief in The Way Things Work.
Of course, bear in mind this is grossly simplified, and doesn’t touch on easily a dozen other major things that influence it(for example, lotta hardcore conservatives and other assorted euroskeptics out there that like the idea of brexit more than they dislike Johnson, May, or the conservative party, the conservatives have spent a lot of time and effort basically cannibalizing the base of most other anti-EU parties), but it is a big part of the reason they get away with it.
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Labour is split on Brexit. So were the Conservatives. But Johnson booted out the MPs who were against Brexit. So now it’s pretty much behind it and Johnson (from the outside view).
I support Scotland going independent, but Satan give me strength. How many elections and referendum will there be.
" In many ways, I feel that elements of the cultural studies movement and postmodernism, in emphasizing human agency vis a vis the media, have obscured the extent to which the media influences people. In my view, door knocking hits home the enduring strength of the propaganda model: make no mistake, the corporate media in this election acted as an arm of the Conservative party and are largely responsible for their victory."