General Election 2015 - chat, predictions, results and post election discussion

[damnNAFTA]

Read an interesting take on the reaction of Blairites in Labour and the future of the party. Some parts that stood out to me:

Within hours of the result, John Reid, Blair’s most effective henchman, was publicly savaging Miliband, asserting that Labour lost because it was “on the wrong side” of the most important arguments, from the economy to immigration.

On May 9, another Blairite cabinet minister, Alan Johnson, called on the Labour Party to learn the lessons of Blair’s three consecutive election victories.

Several more of Blair’s cabinet ministers, including David Blunkett and Charles Clarke, have called for Labour to recapture the centre ground.

Their prescription is curious after a general election in which the three parties which rejected the centre ground — the SNP, UKIP and the Greens — made the biggest gains in the popular vote.

Meanwhile the party which made the greatest claim to the centre ground — the Liberal Democrats — was virtually annihilated.

...

Matthew Goodwin, the political scientist, has shown that UKIP polled higher in the North East and Yorkshire (16.7 percent of the popular vote, and 18 percent in Ed Miliband’s Doncaster) than any other region of Britain. In London, more affluent and more socially diverse, UKIP polled only 8.2 percent. These figures suggest that Labour is losing the working class vote in its provincial heartlands.

It is important to remember that Labour came into existence more than a century ago precisely in order to protect working men against immigrant (mainly Irish) competition which drove down wages and stole jobs.

In power, New Labour favored unlimited immigration, a policy which was strongly supported by employers. Meanwhile Tony Blair established a policy of defining himself in opposition to traditional unionized working-class voters by repeating attacking them. He treated the Labour party like Basil Fawlty on Gourmet Night — abusing the long-stay residents in the hope of attracting a better clientele.

...

Labour’s crying need is to offer people — especially the traditional voters it has lost — a sense that it actually stands for something. This may be an impossible task. The Labour Party, which has achieved so much for Britain over the last century, may be about to disappear from England and Wales, as it already done in Scotland. In any case, David Cameron is the real heir to Blair.

Link to the whole thing: http://www.politico.eu/article/labour-recovery-uk-election-blair/

 

[tbtommyb]

i found this interesting: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/05/labour-lost-the-working-class-vote-a-long-time-ago/

In 1966, 69 per cent of manual workers gave their X to Labour at election time. This number waned through the 1970s and 1980s until, by 1987, only 45 per cent of manual workers voted Labour. The greatest desertion was among skilled manual workers. Between 1945 and the end of the 1950s, around 60 per cent of these workers supported Labour; by the time of the mid-1980s only 34 per cent did.

...

The Blairites are often accused of ruining Labour, abandoning its traditional voters and ideals. This turns history upside down. New Labour is better understood as a response to something that had already happened: the slow but sure abandonment of Labour by working-class voters, which left Labour a shell, ripe for a takeover by a middle-class professional set. It was working-class voters who sealed Labour’s fate, not Labour that sealed theirs.

however i'd need someone who knew the history better to tell me whether it's bollocks or not.

 

[DotCommunist]

It is important to remember that Labour came into existence more than a century ago precisely in order to protect working men against immigrant (mainly Irish) competition which drove down wages and stole jobs.

alarm bells a-ringing here

 

[passenger]

Labour where the ukip of there day ?

 

[belboid]

alarm bells a-ringing here

good thing it's somewhat wide of the truth

 

[chilango]

Hmmmm.

 

[Pickman's model]

Hmmmm.

sounds bollocks to me.

 

[free spirit]

People joining to be able to vote.

I'd bet that includes those union members registering as affiliated supporters as well, with the unions pushing their members to affiliate.

 

[treelover]

This happened last time, lots of enthusiasm from young people, then zilch.

 

[belboid]

This happened last time, lots of enthusiasm from young people, then zilch.

Yup, they join wanting to fight back against the Tories, then realise that that just isn't what the labour party does. And they can't really influence anything - unless they want to be a candidate in a no hope council seat, because no one else wants to. Is that all there is? Yup.

 

[chilango]

...but, but there's those Labour Left people working for change from within! They could join those guys, no? Their time is surely now?

 

[killer b]

Yup, they join wanting to fight back against the Tories, then realise that that just isn't what the labour party does. And they can't really influence anything - unless they want to be a candidate in a no hope council seat, because no one else wants to. Is that all there is? Yup.

hey, they're struggling to find people who want to stand in council seats where they'll win, too.

 

[co-op]

hey, they're struggling to find people who want to stand in council seats where they'll win, too.

Oh christ yes, it's easy to find someone who'll stand as a paper candidate in a no-hope ward. Finding someone who actually wants to be a councillor, that is nigh impossible, it's why so many of them are such weirdoes, they are literally the only people who would step forward. This is true of just about all parties, not just Labour. The careerists who are using it as a stepping stone are one in a hundred in most places.

 

[killer b]

Yep, metropolitan centres only for the careerists. Everywhere else it's inbreds & panty sniffers.

 

[DotCommunist]

good thing it's somewhat wide of the truth

I meant about the veracity of the whole article you plank

 

[mk12]

i found this interesting: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/05/labour-lost-the-working-class-vote-a-long-time-ago/



however i'd need someone who knew the history better to tell me whether it's bollocks or not.

It is interesting. Does it mean the rest of w/c voters went Tory (I know they did in the 80s), or was the vote spread out more widely?

 

[pinkychukkles]

Don't forget about the 2001 monolith, sorry, Ed's Stone... it's been located:

Ed Miliband is licking his wounds in Ibiza but his much maligned “Ed Stone” has suffered a less glamorous exit from the spotlight and is languishing in a south London garage, the Guardian has learned.

http://gu.com/p/48pcn/stw

Some amusing BTL comments:

 

[belboid]

hey, they're struggling to find people who want to stand in council seats where they'll win, too.

"Yes, you too can apologise for and justify cuts while you piss into the wind!"

 

[CNT36]

...but, but there's those Labour Left people working for change from within! They could join those guys, no? Their time is surely now?

Person.

 

[belboid]

Inside the Milibunker

 

[treelover]

Oh my, apparently posted up in Manchester.

 

[Greebo]

<snip>

Some day, let it be soon.

 

[Patteran]

Oh my, apparently posted up in Manchester.

(Definitely Manchester, if it matters - Manchester Rd in Chorlton)

 

[brogdale]

thread coming to a close?

 

[treelover]

Just read that Steve Rotherham got 82% in Walton, is he superman?, Walton has some quite posh bits, baffled by that level of support.

 

[brogdale]

Guardian account of Ipsos Mori's GE analysis.

Can be summed up..

The general election result can be summarised in a nutshell: the Conservatives did well with voters that turn out. Labour did well with voters who don’t vote.

 

[Belushi]

I see Ed Balls has announced he's retiring from politics, which is a little odd as I thought that decision had been taken by the voters a fortnight ago.

 

[brogdale]

I see Ed Balls has announced he's retiring from politics, which is a little odd as I thought that decision had been taken by the voters a fortnight ago.

 

[butchersapron]

IWCA view:

Who will fill the vacuum?

(I think the piece needs to define euro-nationalist a bit clearer, i don't think it fits for UKIP at all)

The roots of Labour’s crisis are quite simple. The New Labour project was underpinned by the belief that Labour could ditch Clause 4, embrace neo-liberalism and orientate entirely to the middle class, safe in the knowledge that its working class core vote could be taken for granted because, in Peter Mandelson’s words, they had ‘nowhere to go’.

What this demonstrates is that the BNP’s success, and indeed that of UKIP, has very little to do with the innate charm of these parties and is more symptomatic of working class disillusionment with the political centre, Labour specifically. From 1997 onwards, directly coincident with the emergence of New Labour, electoral turn-out has fallen well below its post-war trend of around 75%, with 65% now seemingly established as the new norm (link). As the progenitors of the IWCA wrote in 1995: ‘In straightforward language, it is the politics of the Labour Party that has created the BNP… Labour and the Left are increasingly alien to working class people’ (link). The Oxford academics Geoffrey Evans and Jon Mellon wrote just before the 2015 election that ‘Labour’s move to the ‘liberal consensus’ on the EU and immigration alienated many of their core voters a long time before UKIP were an effective political presence. These disaffected core voters left Labour in 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2010 and went to other parties—or simply stopped voting. UKIP has since attracted these disaffected former Labour voters, particularly from the Conservatives… the damage to Labour’s core support had already been done by new Labour’s focus on a pro-middle class, pro-EU and, as it eventually turned out, pro-immigration agenda, before the arrival of UKIP as a plausible electoral choice in the years following the 2010 election’ (link). [It will be interesting to see how much of UKIP's increased support has come directly from Labour this time.]

So what can be done? There is no reason why Euro-nationalism should be the only political tendency appearing on working class landings, listening and responding to working class concerns. This could and should be the default job of the pro-working class left, and the IWCA experiment has shown that the mainstream parties are as vulnerable to an attack from a progressive working class party as they are to the radical right.

On a macro scale, why should it be left to UKIP to frame the debate around hot-button topics like the EU and immigration in a reactionary fashion, when progressive pro-working class arguments can be made? The EU is a capitalist project; immigration policy is used to provide a weak, defenceless reserve army of labour for UK plc and keep wages down (the Migration Observatory at Oxford University recently reported ‘UK research suggests that immigration has a small impact on average wages of existing workers but more significant effects along the wage distribution: low-wage workers lose while medium and high-paid workers gain.’ [link]). This is obvious: why would the EU be anything other than a capitalist project? Why would immigration policy be designed in any other way but to service the needs of capital? In Europe, as elsewhere, the free movement of labour is at the behest of the free movement of capital – that is the way it works. And is best explained in that way. To do otherwise out of sentiment or sensitivity is to sow a dangerous confusion.

In point of fact, if pro-working class forces can be drawn together down the line, UKIP can be looked at as doing our job for us by breaking off working class support from the mainstream parties. To again quote Evans and Mellon on UKIP’s support: ‘There are two quite distinct social groups that have shown a disproportionately high level of support for radical right-wing parties: the working class and the somewhat quaintly labelled ‘petty bourgeoisie’ (the self-employed—small employers such as shop owners)… working-class and petty-bourgeoisie radical right-wing party voters are divided on economic issues, but share the types of non-economic preferences addressed by radical right wing parties’ [italics added] (link). That UKIP is able to win working class support when it doesn’t even share the economic priorities of those self-same working class supporters is an indictment of the left as it stands, but it also indicates the opportunity that is there for an effective, pro-working class alternative to Labour. But if the battle for working class hearts and minds is to be won, Euro-nationalism will need to be challenged head on by just as compelling and grand a narrative. That is the challenge still.

 

[Quartz]

I see Ed Balls has announced he's retiring from politics, which is a little odd as I thought that decision had been taken by the voters a fortnight ago.

I wonder if, like Portillo, he's lined up a nice little earner at the BBC?