Liberal Conspiracy » A wake-up call for the left | creating a new … http://bit.ly/14UJQm

“There is intense amount of energy, activism, interest and action over climate change, feminism and green issues. ”

The problem for the Left is that these tend not to come high on a list of voter concerns. On issues that do, such as immigration, the Left finds itself out of step with public opinion. The question is, how do you address this?

Sunny,

just thinking here like the average bloke in the street. Don’t you think that there is a collective strategic apathy from the general populus about most things political and that politicians are not held in the highest esteem at all at the moment?

Although there are serious messages to convey, party memberships (in all the major parties) are at a low ebb, and there is little interest in active participation when we are still so far away from a general election. Ideologies are meaningless to average Joe, we need to inject a little more fun into our politics to help get the message across!

Sunny: good rant.

Couple of responses: firstly, the ‘left’ and ‘right’ discourse is increasingly unsatisfying to me, partly because it is no longer used to define who you agree with but is instead predominantly used to define who you don’t agree with. Let me be plainer: both terms are now seen as indults.

When people over here start talking about ‘the left’ there’s almost always a ‘Do you mean Labour or the left?’ argument (often started by me, to be fair): but more importantly, there is really no such thing as ‘the’ left. People defined (usually by opponents like LfaT or the Admiral) as lefties tend to get that way because they are socially progressive, but “the left” is not that simple. It’s possible to be a conservative economist and have progressive social views; which ‘side’ is that person on? Of course, what is much more statistically likely is having redistributative economic ideas and reactionary social ones, I’ve seen a lot of that in poor Labour voters in the East End who still think all homosexuals should be burned at the stake.

The second point is about what ideologies are for. They’re for making everyone in an entire movement think the same thing. There is an argument that this is so alien to the left that they can’t understand it at all. The left are the guys who do pluralism, not entrenched party lines. Surely.

Of course you’re right that in practice, what you have is a left that’s just as ideological, only divided with it; the young Greens have no concept of pragmatism and the old Greens have a bizarre adherence to Cold War battle lines. The socialists haven’t noticed that we’re post-industrial and the anarcho-syndicalists still think we can fix the problems without getting industry into orbit. Etc. Etc.

The Left, imo, needs less ideology and more ideas. The most transcendently successful popular movement of the modern era was Stop the War; the need to play their strenghs, and recognise that mobilising over issues works better in modern populist politics than entrenched positions and party lines do. But then, I would think that, because one of the main drivers behind my non-partisan political stance is that I loathe being told what to think. I was raised evangelical Christian and have had more than enough experience of dogma to last me a lifetime.

Good post . Preventing any movement being hijacked by SWP and hard left is vital. Deal with the basics .
1. Ensure inner city Britain is safe.
2. Ensure all comprehensives provide a good education and sports for all abilities. Fire useless teachers . Remove left wing dogma from the edducation theory. Look at the rest of the World , particularly the Far East and ensure all Brtish children have a good grasp of the basics- English , mathematics, science , geography, history and a foreign language. British children to be top in mathematics and science in the World.
3. Ensure all hospitals and GP deliver the basics- clean, good food, patients seen quickly . Deaths from cancer are too high in the UK, in part , because it takes so long to be treated.
4. Be honest , remove most targets and admit failure. All people to use their initiative to improve services. This will mean that differences in performance will occur which means the worst can copy from the best. In industry one bench marks against the best companies not the worst.
5. Select a broader range of people to be MPs and councillors . Ensure that there is a Labour MP who is former senior sister or doctor when talking about health, a senor NCO or officer with combat when experience talking about defence issues, a senior foreman or engineer when talking about industry etc.

Historically the British considered character more important than brains. Character is shaped by experience .Ashdown is the most credible politician when it come to defence/ foreign affairs / nation building and Cable on economic matters because of their experience.

“What has been the left’s main problem over the last decade? ”

Support for a party that shares none of their aims or views.

Hmm, but what is the ideology that the left wing faction will bring to the table?

Much left wing ideology remains wedded to a class-based politics, whereby class is determined by belonging to “first sector” manufacturing professions (i.e. mining, docking, ship building, factory work).

Yet those manufacturing jobs are gone or going. The class system which rested on an economic structure where people were clearly delineated by what they did to put bread on the table has gone.

Which is NOT to say that Britain is no longer a class society. It is very much a class society – but rather than being defined by tangible, obvious things like what you do for a living, it is more to do with things like where you live, how much you earn (regardless of which “sector” you work in), what you can expect to get out of life in terms of future success, life expectancy etc.

The modern class system is more straightforwardly about poverty and (lack of) opportunity equality than simple occupation.

The left hasn’t caught up with that. But it matters, because the old politics doesn’t transpose onto the new.

Class still matters, enormously. But fairness, equality, justice, opportunity, environmental conservation, individual liberty – these are things that *all* people can agree upon and fight for, regardless of their class (though in practice class will affect how people react, feel and vote). But the left will not make progress on these things if it remains wedded to a view of class whose real-world basis was decimated by Thatcher, burried by Blair and whose last remains are in their dying days.

Class politics still matters – but it’s a different kind of class, and a different kind of politics is needed.

[6] There is, alas, two major problems with seeking to rebuild the Left around an anti-poverty strategy.

One is psychological. There are lots of people who would sooner have £25k a year if there are lots of people on a lot less, than £35k a year if everyone else had the same or more. As my mother once said of some consumer goody: “I wouldn’t want one if everyone else had one.”

And the other is parochialism. I worked for a left-wing council in the 1980s (oh, long-lost days…) and remember saying to a front-bencher: “well, Councillor, do you want me to abolish poverty world-wide, or just push it over the borough boundary?”

The latter problem means that the Right will always have a point when they accuse us of “impossibilism” and are also able to suggest – when we sound reasonable – that we are concealing an impossibilist agenda. And “blaming the victim” – which they are also very good at – is a psychologically sound strategy. In the days when women were hanged for witchcraft, it was a feature of the majority of trials that the “witch” had in fact been wronged by her accuser. Social cohesion requires the ritual punishment of powerless scapegoats – discuss.

Might respond to the substance of the post later (I agree with some of it), but I wanted to knock on its head this idea of Sunny’s that Labour doesn’t do grassroots campaigning.

In all the areas I’ve lived in – Yorkshire, two geographical extremes in the South East and London, Labour has done more door-knocking and put more materials out than any of the other parties during the time I’ve been living there. I suspect it depends where you live and whether local parties are atrophying or active.

But it’s more than that – a large part of the party machine’s organisation (I’d say certainly the majority of party staff) is designed at getting ordinary members involved in campaigning. (Without great knowledge of other parties, I’d say they tend to employ many more press officers than us, and less organisers.) Of course, I’m not going to get into an extensive conversation outside party circles about how we do that, but it certainly happens. In the last 3 elections (and it was key at the last – we might have lost without its effects) we won loads of seats by slim majorities because we placed organisers in the field and ran better organisational campaigns than our opponents.

If you’re comparing it to the Obama campaign (and I suspect the comparison is implicit), the difference would be that Labour place organisers into areas to stir up grassroots activity at an earlier stage in the electoral cycle (having many who are permanent, such as is the benefits of having a stable party organisation rather than a new campaign organisation for every election), but can’t afford the sheer numbers of organisers that characterised the Obama campaign.

Goodness – how many more “the left has lost it’s way” posts can we put up with.
Especially when they don’t contain much more than platitudes about “harnessing energy” without any sense of the precise direction to which that energy is to be harnessed.

You guys know what you don’t want; but you don’t know what you do want.

The “right” seems to know both things. A big advantage.

Richard: The problem for the Left is that these tend not to come high on a list of voter concerns. On issues that do, such as immigration, the Left finds itself out of step with public opinion. The question is, how do you address this?

You’re assuming these are the only issues that I think the left should pay attention to. I’m not. But on the others there are long standing goals and strategies – and I’ve said that our failure to have an economic strategy is also a problem. I’m just saying these are three issues which have a lot of energy that could be harnessed to push on those issues, as well as others.

On immigration I think we’ve failed to adequately make a case too, and instead allowed the agenda to be dictated by bullshit merchants such as Migration Watch.

Curly: Don’t you think that there is a collective strategic apathy from the general populus about most things political and that politicians are not held in the highest esteem at all at the moment?

Yes I think there is that too – partly because politicians are far too obsessed with the Westminster bubble…

John Q – good post, though I did say explicitly I meant the broad left, not the Labour party 🙂

Andrew – I think that is partly the problem. Whatever party that gets in will betray its ideological roots if there aren’t enough movements putting pressure on them on those issues.

So even if the Libdems come into power, I would expect them to do the same because we don’t have the organisational capacity to complain and put pressure on them on the issues we care about.

Labour got away by ignoring the left because the left was too complacent about the people it thought it had elected and assumed they’d do the right thing, until it was too late. They should have been organised and constantly campaigning from day 1 for their agenda…. like how Democrats in the US are doing.

More replies later, gotta run out.

Just posting to say that I like this post a lot more than the ones about Guido and Damian McBride. Keep it up!

Charlie @ 4:

5. Select a broader range of people to be MPs and councillors . Ensure that there is a Labour MP who is former senior sister or doctor when talking about health, a senor NCO or officer with combat when experience talking about defence issues, a senior foreman or engineer when talking about industry etc.

It’s unlikely that Thatcher’s cabinet (let alone Major’s) ever fitted this model. In the case of New Labour, would mean Major Eric Joyce as Defence Secretary and (more intriguingly?) Glenda Jackson as Culture Secretary. And would the Transport Secretary have to have passed their driving test, or would the motorist lobby cry foul if they only rode a bike?

“On immigration I think we’ve failed to adequately make a case too, and instead allowed the agenda to be dictated by bullshit merchants such as Migration Watch.”

One thing I’ve always wondered is the extent to which many people oppose mass immigration not because of fear of higher crime or the strain on public services but because, although they like the nice Asian family down the road, they really don’t want too many of them in the country. In short, how do you make a logical case for immigration when significant opposition is based not on logic but on an instinctive resistance to change?

The authoritarianism has got to stop, and the spending.

Reductions in civil liberties, and daft schemes like ID cards, have got to stop. These are right-wing, authoritarian measures. Couple that with the right-wing, pro-business attitudes and they’ve failed in my opinion to present a credible liberal policy-base. Hell, in some areas they seem to be further to the right than the Tories.

And the spending waste – it’s been the same under both parties to be fair, but the billions spent on failed IT systems, ID cards and so on… measures like the 50% tax rate won’t even begin to bring back that cash.

The weaknesses of the British liberal-left are symptomatic of the weakness of British political culture as a whole: the threshold for involvement is too high for most people to begin to engage, the culture is exclusionary and dominated by a professional class (of largely Oxbridge educated commentators, journalists, think tank and non-profit workers who obtain their positions through nepotism and an ability to work unpaid) and the centralised structures we use to manage our organisations divert talented people from local/small scale involement where innovation develops.

The role of a website like this, or an organisation like Compass, or a news magazine shouldn’t be to tell people what to think and do, it should be to inspire them to act in the capacity they can and empower them (by providing them with tools) to take their own actions.

@Christopher: “, it should be to inspire them to act in the capacity they can and empower them (by providing them with tools) to take their own actions.”

Exactly. The role of good political blogging should be to start highlighting facts and evidence, because when people have access to evidence they can make up their own minds.

I would say, in addition to those three issues, the Left has totally failed to articulate an alternative economic model, let alone a response to the financial crisis. Otherwise, you’re spot on with everything here Sunny – and I admit, you are right that the Green Party hasn’t made best use of the web yet. I hope to get involved in sorting that out.

I also agree with the comments about those still clinging to Labour, although I suppose I would, wouldn’t I? I think the people who came to the CoML, perhaps those at Six Billion Ways, and all of those who care about civil liberties, green issues and feminism encompass many many more people than the Labour Left, the Greens and left-leaning Lib Dems put together. If those people aren’t interested in joining a party or helping to get a party elected, at the very least there should be some kind of democratic membership-based mass pressure group that can lobby government effectively.

@ Martin: I don’t think it’s enough to simply present information on the internet and expect change to happen. There is a need for networks that make political action and involvment easier. Now obviously blogging and other web applications are an excellent way of popularising and consolidating those networks, but information will only take us so far.

Let me explain what I mean using LibCon as a example. I’ve come to the site and been confronted by a wall of journalistic articles on varying subjects produced by an unknown elect chosen one presumes for their writing talents. All well and good, and it makes a diverting read, but it ends there. I can comment on one of these articles as I might at the Guardian, but my input is not highly valued and my efforts not sort. You don’t know my email address, you don’t know where I live, what I do, what I know, who I know, what motivates me or what valuable skills I might have. So I read for a bit, and then I move on.

Now contrast this with somewhere like DailyKos (which I know isn’t fair but go with it) which has similar blogging front pieces but whch actively encourages the formation of communities. They’re giving me the information, but they’re also providing a mailing list of people who might share my interests, providing a network of invested and informed commentators who can refine my message or improve the exceution of my actions and provide the plurality perspectives that lead to new ideas and actions.

@Christopher: Absolutely, I didn’t mean to imply that was all there was to it 🙂 I’m a keen advocate of the sort of approach you’re describing. The individual, non-community blogs dominating in the UK at the moment are imho very poor in quality. CiF and LibCon at least have a community of writers, but could still improve.

If you look at the comments above its clear that non-bloggers have a plenitude of views. Sadly these things are more resource intensive and require greater technical skills than most politically interested people in this country appear to have. I know I don’t have them anyway.

Anyone know of any sources of funding for people to be trained?

Anyway, enough thought for the afternoon, to the Gym!

[21] I agree. When I asked (via e-mail) for where to get help starting my own blog I was told – just do it! But (this may be an age thing, or there again it may not) I find html tags – let alone embedding images and all the other bells’n’whistles – intimidating, perhaps I should check with my LEA to see if they run an Adult Ed course or something.

And yes, ideally LC would become big enough to support local (“real world”) groups but at the moment we’re some way off that. Indeed, if it is to happen it will probably need several sites to come together. Another difference from the States is that here, unlike there, there is a marketplace in political parties who define themselves as “left-of-centre” and who would doubtless be reluctant to see any of their few remaining activists peel off into pressure-group politics.

@ Mike: You might try libraries as well. Sometimes local FE colleges offer courses using their facillities. HTML might be a bit advanced for them though.

I agree that our multiple political parties make pursuing a similar model to that of American activists very difficult. One of the things I admire about what LC is trying to do is build a movement independent of party affilation, but there are limits to what can be achieved with blogs alone.

The Tories are not coming to power because the Left (however defined) has paid insufficient attention to the intense amount of energy, activism, interest and action over climate change, feminism and green issues.

The Tories are coming to power because the public can see that Labour have spent an enormous amount of public money; can not see a proportionate improvement in public services; and can see that they are about to be presented with a bill which, unless the economy picks up dramatically, will increase by one hundred and seventy-five thousand million pounds per year.

The governments own figures suggest that it will take a quarter of a century to pay off this debt – and those figures are based on assumptions widely derided as hopelessly optimistic.

That is the issue the Left in this country has to deal with, before it can reasonably expect to see public office again.

With the New Labour project almost over

.

Seriously – if you think it is then…

http://willrhodesportmanteau.com/2009/04/26/final-full-stop-on-the-new-labour-era/

New Labour isn’t dead – far from it.

But what ideas do you want? More Guardian posts by Peter Hain fear mongering about the BNP?

13. redpesto. Healey has been considered the best post WW2 Secretary of Defence , in part due to his wartime experiences . Churchill could not have been such a brilliant war time prime Minister without his military experience. When Argentina threatened The Falklands, Callaghan, a war time CPO in the RN, realised the threat and sent a submarine to intercept any taskforce. Argentina backed down. Kate Hooey’s understanding of grass roots sports comes from her experience in this field prior to becoming a MP.

E Bevin’s success as Minister of Labour in WW2 was due to his founding the TGWU.

Politicians seem to believe that if a little knowledge is dangerous , then it is best to be on the safe side and be totally ignorant.

Sunny, some good criticisms but I wonder how/where you intend to build up this intellectual firepower? In the pages of The Guardian, New Statesman, perhaps this blog, local Labour party meetings… where?

For me the terribly intellectual discussions at Compass et al are interesting, but they’re a tiny dot in an ocean of grassroots energy for real politics that deals with real issues for people on the ground.

For me, waking up the left requires that we wake people up to the connection between left political parties and the wider spectrum of non-electoral political movements. Electorally successful left parties like the Greens can do good work outside of Parliament and may yet get in there next Spring. In many areas of the country we’re also good at linking up with — not harnessing — the energy of more grassroots movements. So are some local Labour and Lib Dem parties, no doubt.

http://tom.acrewoods.net/blog/2009/may/waking-greens

The way the Labour party is structured, I’ve never seen much evidence of effective local campaigning, or effectively joining up with / boosting social movements. Maybe this will begin to happen once they’re out of power?

An important post. But where are the comments apart from the 25? I think most are frit – unlike Sunny. Or feel untouched – wrongly – if they are Lib Dems. So here goes:

Clearly the government deserves to lose. In the battle for Labour after this happens it is going to have to face some big moral-strategic issues: the invasion of Iraq (from which David Miliband does not “resile’); the embrace of neo-liberalism; the authoritarian state. This is not a balance sheet of the pluses and minuses, it’s about fundamental issues where the party will have to answer for how it governed. That’s before it gets to the national question.

There are two kinds of answers. Take 18 years until most everything is forgiven or forgotten and hope for the best. Confront the issues now and show how Labour will not govern in the same way again.

This is where Sunny is spot on in looking for the energy needed for successful renewal. This is not about policies. The Convention on Modern Liberty touched a nerve because it said, hold on, we can’t be treated like this (locked up without charge, being surveilled, kettled, tracked and controlled). Did our saying so “assist the Tories” as some on the Labour left muttered? Well, whose fault is that! You have to say it like it is, if you want renewal. Going on about ‘The Good Society’ isn’t, well, good enough as Gerry Hassan has pointed out, after all, who is for a bad society? The issue of liberty is critical because it addresses the way people feel about how we are governed. Yes, it is process if you want to put it like that. But it isn’t abstract. Everyone knows that means determine ends.

Which is why Curly @ 2 is wrong about the “average bloke”. There is no such bloke. If he is young and likes clubbing he will care about civil liberties. Sunny is generous about the CoML. But a third of those who came were young and had £20 concession tickets (and got lunch and coffees!) And people learnt, it wasn’t just about protesting and being right and beating the other side. The videos both beforehand and of the day show how the issues open up to a wider public. http://www.modernliberty.net/

But if lethargy threatens to reduce Labour to squabbles and displacement exercises – I mean what kind of part re-opens the doors of No 10 and Chequers to Draper! – there is still a puzzle about the Lib Dems. Why aren’t they on a huge roll? Their leader wants to reinvent politics. He sees that it was a broken system that permitted the economy to crash the way it did. Why if they are so right are they not making a breakthrough? It should be easy to write a fierce attractive manifesto that captures the imagination of the media. I _think_ the answer is that they still want to reform Westminster from within. Their words are undermined by their body language. In other words, they too are not catching the energy.

Spot on, Anthony.

@Anthony: A very interesting analysis but I think you’re missing the main reason the Lib Dems aren’t roaring ahead.

Politics is the art of building and holding together a coalition to pursue shared interests. The reason the Lib Dems are unable to outpace Labour is that they are unable to gain their constituency. The Lib Dems are too concerned with middle class urban/suburban values to engage people in Labour’s heartlands and without the secure base they provide will never be in a position to form a government.

I do agree though that a concentration on Westminster politics is part of the problem. Perhaps the answer is to create a broad church movement, and worry about the party politics of it later? That’s how the Labour movement was founded afterall. While people on the left differ passionately about means we usually share a vision for a free, fair and equal society. Party politics is discredited amonst the general public, but people are politically involved through other organisations, pressure groups etc.

All very incestuous. The best thing the left can do is shut up for a few years, or preferably forever. The people don’t want to hear a word from you. While you take a vow of silence you might consider the appealing and disgraceful record of this Labour Government, which you all helped to elect and maintain in power. The guilt is widely shared. Not only is it the most corrupt government in our history it is also by far the most incompetent.

Anthony talks about some of the issues, but will be less keen on the obvious solutions. I hope Gordon Brown remains in power and leads Labour into the next election. The following morning, when the scale of the defeat is plain for all to see (Labour lost the popular vote in England last time round by the way) there will be no excuses, nowhere to hide. The defeat will not be just Labours, but it will be the Lefts too.

“What has been the left’s main problem over the last decade? ”

Too many kept their mouths shut whilst the Labour Party were implementing Tory policies, in case they rocked the boat and the Tories got in !!!!!!

The Lib Dems will never roar ahead whilst the public are placing their bets on a corrupt two horse race.

[31] I fail to see how people like me who haven’t voted Labour in a general election since 1992 can be in any way associated with the failure of NuLab. And I presume Andy is looking forward to elections being contested between the Tories and the BNP.

@Anthony

“Confront the issues now and show how Labour will not govern in the same way again.”

I for one do not want them back again.
Here are just a few reasons:-

Iraq
PFI’s
10p tax
Academy Schools
Reducing capital gains for hedge funds
Micro management of just about everything
Massive surveillance of the public
Slavish adherence to U.S. policy.
Sycophancy towards bankers and anyone with money

and lots more ……….

[33] One is glad to hear you have not voted Labour since 1992. And you are wrong: I do not look forward to contested elections between the Tories and the BNP. An idiotic thing to say by the way. But the actions of the Labour Government have increased support for the BNP no end. However, want I want is a complete realignment on the left of politics. Basically I see a return of the Liberal Party as the traditional left of centre party. Labour will become more and more marginal. Let there be no doubt. The last 12 years have proved that Tax & Spend ala Brown has been an unmitigated disaster. David Starkey was right: Brown should, like Thomas Cromwell, pay for his incompetence and stupidity with his head.

[33] I don’t think the Liberal Democrats (not the Liberal Party, btw) under Clegg even want to be left-of-centre: they understand dinosaurs to the left of them as well as to the right of them, and quite like it like that. Nor do I think that the rumoured defection of Blairites in their direction after Labour’s upcoming electoral catastrophe will move them leftwards, quite possibly the reverse.

The LDs may well be the party which is most consistent in its defence of our personal liberties, as you would expect from a party which will never have to take responsibility for national security or the implementation of its policies in social matters. That in and of itself does not make them more “left wing”.

And no I don’t think that suggesting that elections may in the future be contested between the Tories and the BNP is idiotic. There will, sadly, be some constituencies at the election after next where that is what will happen.

My basic point is that the centre of political gravity has moved far to the right in the last quarter of a century – someone with the views of, say, Michael Heseltine is probably now left of centre. A major cause of this is the intellectual failure of the left during this period, as discussed on this site at some length.

[36] I used the term ‘Liberal Party’ quite deliberately. The return of the traditional liberal party would be a good thing. Labour is more and more resembling a bigoted rump, nasty and irrelevant. Damian McBride was no isolated case and it showed the real face of the Labour Party so many of us have seen.

I disagree that the BNP will be as strong in some constituencies as you suggest. But again the BNP gain because the mainstream parties fail to appreciate what a slice of the electors are saying. You can’t discuss (till recently) immigration and asylum policy because the Left scream ‘racist’ at every verse end.

The left have failed because they have been wrong on virtually every issue in the last century. That is why the centre of political gravity has moved slightly to the right. The last 12 years where we have had an old fashioned ‘Tax & Spend’ Labour Government have been a total and utter disaster. It will take a generation at the very least to clear up the mess, if it can ever be properly cleared up which is a matter of debate. Why anyone would even contemplate voting for the likes of Gordon Brown is frankly astonishing.

[37] Andy, I don’t know how old you are, but if you really can’t see any difference between NuLab and the Wilson/Callaghan governments of the 1960s/1970s which among other things supported workers exercising their rights through trade unions and the ethical discipline of collective solidarity (which played its part in glueing communites together), promoted the construction of public housing and free University education and refused to join in America’s nasty neo-colonial wars – well, I can’t help you and I don’t suppose others can either.

As for the BNP – at least they’re open in what they’re about. They know that the possession of a white skin is an unmerited privilege and their entire raison d’etre is to defend that privilege.

Sooner or later the penny will drop with the Left that the “parliamentary road” is about as relevant to the global class struggle as electoral politics were to South Africa’s ANC before the 1990s. White voters in the UK – including most of us conspirators – are part of the problem hypocritically masquerading as (at least potentially) part of the solution.

And people in the “Third World”, the “South” or whatever you want to call it, have seen through us and have got thoroughly sick and tired of us. Whether it’s Islamists, educated young Indian women rejecting western notions of gender equality just because they are western or African politicians calling for reparations for the slave trade – the majority of humanity is in the process of rejecting Western values, whether those are dressed up in left-wing or right-wing rags. And if you believe both in the greatest good of the greatest number and in the ability of people correctly to identify their own self-interest, there are only two alternatives: to agree with them, or to propose a political line which defends the unmerited privilege of the white-skinned whilst hypocritically pretending to do no such thing.

[38] I well remember previous Labour Governments, so I am quite aware of the differences between Wilson/Callaghan and the Blair/Brown administrations. One is also well aware of how Trade Unions exercised their ‘power’ and having dealt with Trade Unions I can assure you it was not as rosy tinted as you make out. Lady Thatcher was the Nemesis of their arrogance and their fall was richly deserved. Often they felt a great interest in ‘class struggle’ and revolutionary politics than the interests of their members jobs and livelihoods. For your writing it seems you are still stuck in this late 1960/70s time warp. World has moved on and left you behind.

Do you seriously think the average person on the proverbial Clapham Omnibus have any interest whatsoever in ‘global class struggle’ ? Get real. They are interested in their local services, their jobs and being able to walk down the street without being mugged or blown up by some nutter with a fictional grievance. You fail to address the points about how the stupid and idiotic polices and ideas of Gordon Brown have all but bankrupted the state. The people I meet are seething with rage at how Brown & Co have Taxed and Spent and yet they see no meaningful improvements in their services. So carry on with the student politics if you want, but you merely underline the point of why the left is increasingly irrelevant and that is exactly what Sunny is talking about.

[39] I am well aware that the world has moved on. My point is that the self-interest of ordinary (white) voters is now part of the problem, not part of the solution.

[40] Why are you banging on about ‘race’ ?? I never mentioned it, and it has nothing to do with what Sunny was writing about.