- Or maybe shes talking sense. Archived Message
Posted by Ken Waldron
on December 15, 2019, 6:44 am, in reply to "Maybe folk like Ash Sarkar are part of the problem"
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-The Blairist days where a Labour elite could milk the discarded manufacturing and mining areas of the Thatcher era: "The Heartlands" for votes is gone. Labour did nothing for them when in power. The Blairites let them decline further and nothing has changed since then. Corbyn gets the flack but the Labour vote has been in long term decline in nearly all of them. "What I think it needs to do is to send out its troops into all the towns and cities where, logically, it would have expected to win seats and, instead lost them to talk to actual people of all ages and classes who actually live in these actual places..." Yea. Good idea. They will tell you it was about Corbyn and you will hear every bit of propaganda the media has ever pushed on the guy. Sure they didnt like him because he's a cosmopolitan southerner, but all the shit sunk in. Forget the second referendum, I particularly liked the one in Bishop Auckland that: "MPs had a big problem presenting Corbyn to the sizable local community of army veterans..." Well, well, considering that the propaganda machine had five military commanders prominently warning that Jeremy Corbyn was “dangerous” for national security..." are we surprised? The army had been actually been using his image as target practice for f sake... We now have a presidential campaign and not an election. Corbyn was a threat and got thoroughly machine gunned by the media, but was the real issue Corbyn in the North? Blairs old constituency went... of course that was not just screwed by the Tories but under him. The working mans club where he carpetbagged working class credo shut down long ago and and has been a carpet shop for years. Bolsover? cant blame that on an a second vote: its sitting MP was aggressively pro Brexit but you look to the results and see Denis Skinners majority has been shrinking for decades. Under both Blair and the Tories the whole class demographic has changed. The problem with Labour is that it mythologised the old one. The idea that the acceptable-to-the-elite Jess Phillips mimicking a Tory (she wont have to try hard) will return these red "Brigadoons" of the horny handed sons of toil to Labour with a bit of dog whistling about immigration on a red coffee cup is bollocks because the idea behind them is nonsense. They weren't entities punishing Corbyn but areas where people had given up after decades of neglect; he was merely the official metropolitan scapegoat: you won't get them back on the same basis. That's why what Sarkar has to say is important. Labour can't build a party any more on a past generation of mineworkers and steelmen in shrinking working class ghettoes. If they vote Tory because they think Labour ####ed them over (and it did) there's little you can do about it to get them back: You've actually got to look at who the present "working class" actually are and act on that, oh and be careful about not ####ing them over too. |