butchersapron
Bring back hanging
You'll have no dissension from me.
Inside, against and beyond the Labour Party: Thoughts for the Left post-GE
- Thread starter chilango
- Start date
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Each one the same
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Shipping up to Boston. From brum. Docks.
Proper Tidy
Arsed
It's the beaky minders
Proper Tidy
Arsed
Also would guarantee the two either side are workers who work in IT
imposs1904
Thread Killa'
Last edited:
Proper Tidy
Arsed
I have a coat that I cantona the collar on sometines. It's not leather and it's not an overcoat though, it's a navy long cotton thing. My other half says I'm a wanker when I wear the collar up tbf
the one with all the zips?
rekil
to menny cranks
There's only the three and the two for the inside pockets but that's the one.
Shechemite
Be the sun and all will see you
Clive Lewis for WPB Parliamentary Leader (only MP)
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
NOTHING AT ALL. IT'S WHAT THE REAL WORKERS WEAR COMRADE.
There's some stats here. 16% of people are in low paid jobs and 26% in high paid jobs. Obviously this only tells half the story, not including out of work claimants, pensioners, students and all kinds of other groups. And a lot of people in medium paid jobs may be struggling because of such unequal housing costs. I suspect the population is as split economically as it is politically, around half are struggling and a quarter very much so whilst half are sort of doing okay and a quarter doing very well. The electoral left is fragile if it focusses only on the bottom half, not least because plenty of them may go renegade and vote to the right in protest, as they just have and the more the left appeases the middle class the more that will happen. So the electoral left is fucked I suspect and thats why the only time Labour have won an election in the last four decades is when they had a Tory in charge.
So fuck the demographics it has to be grassroots struggle. It has to be based in communities and workplaces working with the issues people face day to day as well as pushing for a more radical pro working class voice in existing institutions whether that's the TUC or XR. And it has to be militant, it has to scare capital and be prepared to force, not ask or vote for, concessions. I don't have much hope for revolution these days but a movement like that could be revolutionary, and even if not we are more likely to win things outside of parliament than we are pissing about with Labour Party politics that history must now show us are doomed to failure.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Very long piece by Salvage journal here ‘It’s in the Air, It’s in Your Bones’: Notes on an Aftermath - Salvage
Concluding with the work that needs to be done as:
"We, the Left, in the Labour Party and beyond it, will need to be and be seen to be – as the Labour Party has not been – on the forefront of local campaigns and to be part of the social fabric. To listen. To take no vote and no opinion for granted. To ‘build’ ‘electorally’, do unglamorous, necessary work. Fight the effects of this government, not least with breakfast programmes and food banks. Join the campaign to save the local hospital. Recruit 12 people. Keep at it. Build networks. Keep going. For years. Save a youth centre. Become community councillors. Build more. Make sure the bins get collected. Take minutes. Support striking cleaners. Open a new youth centre. Join committees. Recruit.
Repeat in 150 towns, for ten years."
Concluding with the work that needs to be done as:
"We, the Left, in the Labour Party and beyond it, will need to be and be seen to be – as the Labour Party has not been – on the forefront of local campaigns and to be part of the social fabric. To listen. To take no vote and no opinion for granted. To ‘build’ ‘electorally’, do unglamorous, necessary work. Fight the effects of this government, not least with breakfast programmes and food banks. Join the campaign to save the local hospital. Recruit 12 people. Keep at it. Build networks. Keep going. For years. Save a youth centre. Become community councillors. Build more. Make sure the bins get collected. Take minutes. Support striking cleaners. Open a new youth centre. Join committees. Recruit.
Repeat in 150 towns, for ten years."
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I wonder when the first mention of the IWCA was on here?
I'm seeing people who would have scorned anything to do with Labour or electoral politics at one time now excitedly discussing who should be the next leader. Electoral politics is seductive. But also UVW Union have reported lots of new members since the election. I think the best we can hope for from Corbynistas is that a chunk of them break off into more meaningful radical activity whilst the rest devote the next couple of years squabbling within the party about which directon to take until they lose another election and Labour inevitably lurches rightward again (if it takes that long).
HoratioCuthbert
Deep seated inconsequence
I dunno I like a bunnetPfwc. Look at the hats.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Bet they'll be able to organise a book fair though?
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
I'm not knocking this approach as its better than doing f-all however its is all fine and dandy untill you look at the political composition of most Labour Councils and the fact that these 'Left in the Labour Party' activists will at some point come up against them. I also think that we are talking about a relatively small amount of Labour activists ,for example during the election in Barking and Rainham their blog says they had a core team composed of four people and the same seven to 15 people turning up to canvass daily. Then of course there is the issue are these campaigns community led, led by the Left, prompted/enabled by the left and to be frank in some areas what if the community is hostile/suspicious about campaigns that involve members of the same political party that is imposing the cuts.
brixtonscot
Well-Known Member
Some comments from post-election discussion on Facebook....
PBJ :
BAME voters yet again largely voted Labour, and here is the conundrum..Tottenham, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol, Manchester, Sheffield , Coventry have pockets of poverty ...hell not just pockets fucking massive sacks of areas of poverty that are statistically on a par with an ex-pit town in Wales, a former steel or shipbuilding town....and yet these areas remained Labour.
The collapse of Labour reflects a disenchantment, an anger, a hopelessness that is both real, largely white and older and can skew racist. We should not beat about the bush on this. Largely city and large town areas that were and are mixed whether poor or not so poor didn't flock to the Tories.
We have a tremendous rift in ex-industrial northern and Welsh towns between a Labour party that for years assumed the vote, was in power locally overseeing the decline, where anger is or can be racialised. A Welsh pit village is not poorer than an estate in North Tottenham. Poverty alone is not enough to explain this, disempowerment when white in predominantly white and poor communities has the "benefit" of the illusory and false benefit of kicking down.
Get Brexit Done..is our Make America Great Again, it's a dog whistle to an age long xenophobia in a time of real despair. It is not however an illusion that cuts much ice to young poor multi ethnic parts of Britain. It is a very specific and white reaction
HL :
I think many BME communities have built new cultures and identifies in the UK. Whereas many white working class towns have been defined by a breakdown of identity and community after 20 years of de-industrialisation .
Even if you don't have much I think many migrant communities and families feel a big sense of pride in what they have achieved, because they often sacrificed a lot to come here and build new lives.
In small towns in the north and midlands, people had poverty for generations but they also had job security and a community identify that was inseparable from the pit/shipyard/docks/factory. Pride, solidarity and community are huge practical and psychological insulators to poverty and unfortunately a lot of that went. That's been replaced with a sense of loss, humiliation and anger.
Of course there's the racism that brings things into sharp focus. The Islamophobia muslims experience from the media and the harassment black young people get from the police. It develops your consciousness.
How do we rebuild class consciousness in small town northern England when that consciousness was based on actual industrial infrastructure? How do things seem a bit different in Scotland than they do here? I think the toxic British nationalism of the 70s and 80s was replaced in the 90s when football fans swapped the union flag for the St George's cross and that's how English nationalism became defined, by the racism and empire that had inspired versions of British nationalism before it. Whereas Scottish nationalism was intertwined with a largely social democratic movement for independence.
In the absence of red flags, union halls and Labour clubs the cultural void was filled with the common sense of nationalism and England's version was exclusive rather than the more civic Scottish form.
DM
Could the LP vote in big cities also be due to more middle class and student support ?
I reckon english football fans switched from union jack to george cross ( at least partly ) in response to growing support for independence in Scotland.
The Left in England have mostly avoided acknowledging any sense of a collective sense of working class cultural and political identities , specifically located in England.
Leaving that wide open for the Right to exploit
PBJ
Class as a concept is being race-washed, lets more accurately say, whitewashed.
Grimsby is working class.......Tottenham isnt ? Lewisham isnt ? nobody is rushing to listen more closely to the voices of Tower Hamlets, there will be no special infrastructure deals for housing estates in Walthamstow. This is insidious, but it will only grow.
Brexit was won by the tories crafting an unholy alliance of leafy tory villages and towns, rich places outside of big cities, white places by and large and the so-called left behind ex-industrial towns of Wales and the North - by and large that was not the large and multiracial cities.
What Johnson and Cummings are trying to do now is weld that alliance into permanence - straight from the Trump playbook - ex steelworkers in Pennsylvania cheered and attended in their thousands for Trump, ex industrial area after ex industrial area, Trump wasnt elected by Wall Street, and Johnson wasnt elected by the City of London. They are trying to forge a new normal - at the heart of this is whiteness.
The left cannot and must not fall into this trap, in effect it denies what class is and that is it is multiracial, multi identity and lives in cities and towns across the UK.
PBJ :
BAME voters yet again largely voted Labour, and here is the conundrum..Tottenham, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol, Manchester, Sheffield , Coventry have pockets of poverty ...hell not just pockets fucking massive sacks of areas of poverty that are statistically on a par with an ex-pit town in Wales, a former steel or shipbuilding town....and yet these areas remained Labour.
The collapse of Labour reflects a disenchantment, an anger, a hopelessness that is both real, largely white and older and can skew racist. We should not beat about the bush on this. Largely city and large town areas that were and are mixed whether poor or not so poor didn't flock to the Tories.
We have a tremendous rift in ex-industrial northern and Welsh towns between a Labour party that for years assumed the vote, was in power locally overseeing the decline, where anger is or can be racialised. A Welsh pit village is not poorer than an estate in North Tottenham. Poverty alone is not enough to explain this, disempowerment when white in predominantly white and poor communities has the "benefit" of the illusory and false benefit of kicking down.
Get Brexit Done..is our Make America Great Again, it's a dog whistle to an age long xenophobia in a time of real despair. It is not however an illusion that cuts much ice to young poor multi ethnic parts of Britain. It is a very specific and white reaction
HL :
I think many BME communities have built new cultures and identifies in the UK. Whereas many white working class towns have been defined by a breakdown of identity and community after 20 years of de-industrialisation .
Even if you don't have much I think many migrant communities and families feel a big sense of pride in what they have achieved, because they often sacrificed a lot to come here and build new lives.
In small towns in the north and midlands, people had poverty for generations but they also had job security and a community identify that was inseparable from the pit/shipyard/docks/factory. Pride, solidarity and community are huge practical and psychological insulators to poverty and unfortunately a lot of that went. That's been replaced with a sense of loss, humiliation and anger.
Of course there's the racism that brings things into sharp focus. The Islamophobia muslims experience from the media and the harassment black young people get from the police. It develops your consciousness.
How do we rebuild class consciousness in small town northern England when that consciousness was based on actual industrial infrastructure? How do things seem a bit different in Scotland than they do here? I think the toxic British nationalism of the 70s and 80s was replaced in the 90s when football fans swapped the union flag for the St George's cross and that's how English nationalism became defined, by the racism and empire that had inspired versions of British nationalism before it. Whereas Scottish nationalism was intertwined with a largely social democratic movement for independence.
In the absence of red flags, union halls and Labour clubs the cultural void was filled with the common sense of nationalism and England's version was exclusive rather than the more civic Scottish form.
DM
Could the LP vote in big cities also be due to more middle class and student support ?
I reckon english football fans switched from union jack to george cross ( at least partly ) in response to growing support for independence in Scotland.
The Left in England have mostly avoided acknowledging any sense of a collective sense of working class cultural and political identities , specifically located in England.
Leaving that wide open for the Right to exploit
PBJ
Class as a concept is being race-washed, lets more accurately say, whitewashed.
Grimsby is working class.......Tottenham isnt ? Lewisham isnt ? nobody is rushing to listen more closely to the voices of Tower Hamlets, there will be no special infrastructure deals for housing estates in Walthamstow. This is insidious, but it will only grow.
Brexit was won by the tories crafting an unholy alliance of leafy tory villages and towns, rich places outside of big cities, white places by and large and the so-called left behind ex-industrial towns of Wales and the North - by and large that was not the large and multiracial cities.
What Johnson and Cummings are trying to do now is weld that alliance into permanence - straight from the Trump playbook - ex steelworkers in Pennsylvania cheered and attended in their thousands for Trump, ex industrial area after ex industrial area, Trump wasnt elected by Wall Street, and Johnson wasnt elected by the City of London. They are trying to forge a new normal - at the heart of this is whiteness.
The left cannot and must not fall into this trap, in effect it denies what class is and that is it is multiracial, multi identity and lives in cities and towns across the UK.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
Bet they won't.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Sorry are these people we should recognise or are you just using them as an example?
And what point are you trying to make?
brixtonscot
Well-Known Member
Just used initials as example , rather than full names
I thought the comments contributed to general post-election discussion
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Well no offence but without knowing the backgrounds of these people, their politics etc it's kind of just the same as looking at a load of guardian Comment is Free posts.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
do you agree with the comments you’ve posted from a Facebook page? If so, why do you?
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brixtonscot
Well-Known Member
I think there are some points worth considering , but overall I'm genuinely not sure.
I was interested in hearing other opinions , if anybody's inclined to comment.
For what it's worth DM comment is from me
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Yeah, although his thread is 'inside, against, and beyond' I'm mostly interested and likely to be in the later two categories. I guess it's just in the context of the current situation where plenty of people have thrown their hats into the Labour Party camp, although like smokedout I suspect most will leave again quickly now the excitement has worn off.
Proper Tidy
Arsed
I don't think citing ingrained racism as the cause of breakdown in labour vote in working class towns when working class urban areas held is helpful or remotely true. Where there is racism (and other expressions of hostility to cultural changes etc) it's a consequence. It's also bollocks to engage in one upmanship about whether a or b are more working class, or to conflate that with levels of poverty.
It's a different experience of class and poverty, the 'welsh pit towns' cited in that facebook post (ignoring that the valleys were labour holds btw, the former industrial areas of wales that fell had coal mining but never as the all encompassing industry, but ok by the by) have had generations of decline, breakdown in communities, and loss of purpose and local identity, sense of being ignored, blamed, mocked, and all of this under labour MPs, labour councils, in the 'welsh pit towns' labour govt since 1997 (first westminster then cardiff bay post devolution), generational hopelessness with nobody to blame but these labour administrations and politicians.
It's a different experience of class and poverty, the 'welsh pit towns' cited in that facebook post (ignoring that the valleys were labour holds btw, the former industrial areas of wales that fell had coal mining but never as the all encompassing industry, but ok by the by) have had generations of decline, breakdown in communities, and loss of purpose and local identity, sense of being ignored, blamed, mocked, and all of this under labour MPs, labour councils, in the 'welsh pit towns' labour govt since 1997 (first westminster then cardiff bay post devolution), generational hopelessness with nobody to blame but these labour administrations and politicians.
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