But another significant argument is why Starmer should appear on Ferrari’s show at all. We can readily accept that callers such as “Gemma” represent an extreme element in Ferrari’s audience while doubting his audience offers a rich crop of floating voters. It is a truism – accepted by commentators on left and right – that the voters who have abandoned Labour are socially conservative but economically rooted on the left. But unless Labour wishes to alienate younger progressive voters who lack the natural partisan loyalties of previous generations, conceding to the right on social issues is a no-go. Instead, an economic prospectus that is convincing and compelling enough to override socially conservative objections must be offered.
Don’t actually talk to voters and certainly don;t listen to them. Instead just make up policies in the bubble and that’ll win, right on!
Certainly, don’t even dream that social conservatism might have a point, or that it might be what voters desire. Because who cares about their desires anyway? There’s power to win here.
Clearly the problem here is that the newly imported electorate isn’t expanding quickly enough to give Labour a government any time soon. All very well having a Leader of the Opposition who can hold his own at the despatch box (unlike Grandpa Death), but those working class “Social Conservatives” that Labour needs to retain and reclaim ain’t watching BBC Parliament or wherever shows that stuff, they are busy working. At best they might catch a segment on the evening news.
Sir Kier seems well intentioned, but like Gordon Brown before him he does not enthuse, nor does he really engage with the issues. Evasion and abstention will not get him to number 10. Thank god.
BoJo, for all his faults does understand the need to ignore the woke and unrepresentative idiots of the left (and the wets within his own party) and bang the gong for Britain. If he can get over the dual problems of COVID and BRExit and winds in the nanny state then he might still do rather well.
younger progressive voters who lack the natural partisan loyalties of previous generations
Citation required.
Because all the younger progressive voters I’ve seen are intensely partisan.
It would be nice if the demise of scum like Jones and the Sakkar female could be on traditional socialist lines. 5000 calories of hard labour in Artic conditions on 1500 calories of food per day with no medical care and just enough warmth and rest so as to torment rather than sustain. And a camera to which they could plead –reality tv style–for help etc-as they decline. With perhaps a few Chicom-style self-criticism sessions thrown in to fill the long evenings.
But unless Labour wishes to alienate younger progressive voters who lack the natural partisan loyalties of previous generations, conceding to the right on social issues is a no-go.
So if I understand Honey’s little dramatics, he thinks that if the Labour Party is not nice to Gays, they will flounce off …. to where exactly/ The Greens?
I find this an interesting assertion:
“…that the voters who have abandoned Labour are socially conservative but economically rooted on the left.”
Wealth redistribution seems to be a thing for the left. Those alienated voters seem to be hard working salt of the earth types who are not too keen on having their relatively modest wealth redistributed. Labour’s core voters now seem to be middle class folk who believe in wealth distribution but naively believe that it will only apply to people who are richer than them.
BoJo, for all his faults does understand the need to ignore the woke and unrepresentative idiots of the left (and the wets within his own party)
His pathetic energy policies would suggest otherwise.
Oh Dear Mr Galt–your usual sound sense has deserted you today.
Stumour is a malignant dead-inside psychopath who was evil shite at the CPS and was involved in entire Yewtree “jail the innocent” caper up to the place his nutsack should hang. He is Trilateral scum who is backing Blojobs UK ruining capers because he wants to inherit the powers whose use Johnson has pioneered.
Blojob is busy ruining the UK both in the hope of saving his fucking career–via vast numbers of perfectly healthy “cases” lined up by shite PCR tests to promote his vax saviour antics. He also has WEF greenfreak plans even if the caper didn’t start out as a conspiracy–it is one now.
Not sure this is a new strategy
All through my life the left have been absolutely convinced that what they want to impose on the great unwashed is good for them if they would only vote for it
Meanwhile the great unwashed have taken a look at it, and it’s abject failure everywhere it has been tried, and said “no thanks”
The hard left have never won an election in the UK on their own terms, they have only achieved political power by masquerading as centrists or subversion of social democratic parties
Their basic problem is Joe public sees through them
Maybe if they had proper jobs and achievements to their credit they would be taken seriously?
Jones for example has achieved nothing outside the groupthink of the grauniad/activism/BBC/lefty media
@DocBud
+1000
“….The hard left have never won an election in the UK on their own terms, they have only achieved political power by masquerading as centrists or subversion of social democratic parties…”
Time to start getting the Dominion voting machines in…..
It being Christmas, I was being generous to our poor benighted Knight of the Realm and Leader of her majesty’s most loyal opposition (hah! my arse). Even BoJo was getting the benefit of a bit of optimism today in the hope that we might snatch a “No Deal” from the very jaws of defeat.
Normal service will be resumed come Boxing Day.
an economic prospectus that is convincing and compelling enough to override socially conservative objections
This is code for appealing irresistibly to the self-interest of these potential voters and is doomed to failure.
Socially conservative voters enjoy give-aways as much as anyone but are sufficiently sceptical of the kind of economic programme that Jeremy Corbyn was offering to abandon “red wall” tribalism in significant numbers.
@Stony
“Labour’s core voters now seem to be middle class folk who believe in wealth distribution but naively believe that it will only apply to people who are richer than them.”
Indeed. Have a play with https://www.ifs.org.uk/tools_and_resources/where_do_you_fit_in and you see that an experienced but not manager-level teacher married to a similarly experienced nurse, the prototypical example politicians often roll out both for what a “typical” family looks like financially and for what it means to be “key workers”, is well into the top 10% of households by income. Even newly qualified they’re not far outside the top 10% and by mid-career will be getting up to about the top 5%.
Okay this is income rather than wealth here, but if you ask these people about how they’re doing they’re quite likely to view themselves merely as “average”. A lot of envy politics is really about the top 10% wanting a slice that the top 1% get, or even what the 1% want from the 0.1%, but many of the top 10% or even 1%,have no idea they’re up there in the giddy heights. I suspect “whoever is at the fringes around the top-end of your social bubble” has a lot to do with it, and well, we’re a lot poorer than them so we can’t be rich can we, not little old us? Still, nice gaff though, and they drive nice cars. Why can’t poor hard-working folks like us get a bit of that?
Yeah I’m aware that if you age-stratify it the teacher/nurse combo aren’t quite so well, and indeed this is partly why they feel they’re getting “behind” contemporaries they met at university, but any income redistribution is going to be done based on how much they earn right now, not how much they earn “for their age”.
Labour should be wary of a rightwing media that only wants ‘culture war’
It’s a weird meme on the Left that likes to pretend the culture war is a product of right wing paranoia. Usually just after they’ve breathlessly praised the latest BBC production which portrayed Horatio Nelson as a gay, Welsh-speaking, Pakistani, transgendered dwarf and/or people taking a shit on the Cenotaph IRL.
Phrases such as “Go back to where you came from” have long been a staple cry of the street-level racist.
Sure, but it’s still a fair question. Seems like a reasonable solution if you can’t stand a country and its people, and no wonder they scream “racithhh!” instead of admitting that the only thing they like about Britain is our money.
For a national radio presenter to evoke this line of questioning because someone dared to critique the nation’s chequered history should have been a moment of scandal, but it wasn’t.
Wokeness usually only wins when weak people start backtracking and apologising.
Neither Ferrari nor Starmer rebutted what was effectively the white supremacist “great replacement” theory
Back to weird memes. In one breath they’ll smirk about how they’re going to rub your noses in “diversity’, and in the next call you a conspiracy theorist for remembering what they said. It must be lying for the sheer pleasure of it.
Luton North’s Sarah Owen declared that the “idea of ‘indigenous people’ of Britain and use of this term, especially by far right, needs to be challenged at every point”.
So apparently Cecil Rhodes did nothing wrong.
this approach holds little promise in winning back Labour’s lost tribes, while conferring legitimacy on prejudices that deserve unequivocal challenging and nothing else.
Owen’s prim obsession with “legitimacy” is exceedingly gay. Did Johnny Rotten teach us nothing?
“Labour’s core voters now seem to be middle class folk who believe in wealth distribution but naively believe that it will only apply to people who are richer than them.”
Ah no, that’s a misreading. The Guardian types are not interested in wealth distribution from rich to poor at all. They want wealth distribution from everyone to them. What matters to them is government being bigger.
If you ever argue opera subsidies with a Guardian reader, you get to the point where you say “well, why don’t we just give the poor the money and if they want to go to opera, they can choose to do so”. You will never get one agreeing with you. They generally go quiet at that point (or in one case, he literally said “but they’ll spend it on other things”). They want the Arts Council machine to exist for the jobs for them and their friends.
One reason Blair was so much more popular with the working classes than anyone since is that he was more of a redistributionist. He didn’t care that a private provider did a hip operation, what mattered was that the hip operation was done. Doesn’t make you popular with a bloated bureaucracy that loses the work, though.
@ MyBurningEars
“you have a higher income than around 98% of the population…
In conclusion, Your income is so high that you lie beyond the far right hand side of the chart.”
Well, that’s cheered me up a bit. But only a bit. No doubt the left would call me a ‘fat cat’ but my lifestyle is such that Ferraris, yachts and top totti half my age are still a pipe dream. I’m currently cursing the unfortunate coincidence of a leaky shower cubicle and a boiler on its last legs which will wipe out savings arising as I didn’t go on holiday this year.
Sure, I can easily afford everything I need but certainly not everything I want. The reality is that even if you’re in the top 1%, that’s still not the gold-plated toilet seat lifestyle the left would have people believe.
@BoM4 +1
the sort of middle-classes who would rather campaign and apply for a grant than simply get together and get something done
“djc
@BoM4 +1
the sort of middle-classes who would rather campaign and apply for a grant than simply get together and get something done”
They’d certainly get up a petition lamenting the lack of decent emergency services after they’d walked by someone who was lying in the gutter after being beaten up by muggers.
@bom4
Some good points there. In practice the National Lottery seems to be the current method whereby proles pay for opera houses.
@Andrew C
Yep. Though I imagine, if sufficiently keen, you could work on the totty thing. But it’s related to what I said, I think. The people in the top 10% or too 1% don’t think they’re up there because they’ve got some mythical vision of what it means to be “rich” and they don’t fit it. Everyone in this situation pretty much assumes that “proper rich” starts in the tier above. And when people say “tax the 1%” or 10% or whatever they think (or at least make out) they’re getting into the Ferrari’N’Yacht club. But they’re not and in fact in many situations are nowhere near. There’s a great big cognitive illusion involved though I’m not sure I know quite what it is.
MBE,
“Some good points there. In practice the National Lottery seems to be the current method whereby proles pay for opera houses.”
National Lottery is the same. The front is that it helps good causes like brass bands, youth football and playgrounds, but lots of it goes on theatre and heritage (i.e. spending a fortune doing up a listed building that isn’t sustainable). Part of the problem is that getting the grants takes a lot of work, so someone running a youth football team just goes and finds a local business to sponsor it instead.
@Steve: ’ In one breath they’ll smirk about how they’re going to rub your noses in “diversity’…’
Like the Tavistock Clinic reacting to criticism of dosing children with toxic drugs by hiring a lecturer for a lecture on how white people are all the problem?
I have to say i see multiple dangers with the redwall levelling up strategem which is arrayed to appeal to the northern economic leftishness. Basically you don’t get credit for it and the left will happily sign up to any spending because err they’re economically leftish too. Also what are you doing making a big song and dance about a northern powerhouse? The only thing you’ve got a hope of delivering, if you don’t bugger it up,a biggish if, is making it a little less shit than it was. The gulf between expectation and delivery will harm you far more.
So how about something that will give more bang for bucks? Perhaps, linking into (or dare i say joining up with) the planning thing government could use the money to help with land remediation. I see a possible opening where you can get -green credits,(sotto voce in case tim hears: Jobs) avoid nimby decredits help local economic growth to boot.
TLDR – spending more money per head on scotland didn’t/ won’t turn it blue, why would you think that works south of the border?
@Stonyground: “Wealth redistribution seems to be a thing for the left.”
I can’t remember whose remark it was but “When I was young I thought I was a socialist. Later I realised that I was merely poor.” has a great deal of truth to it.
JuliaM – Zackly.
HB – it would be trivially easy to shore up the red/blue/whatever wall. Just do what normal voters want instead of what donors and the London-based institutional class wants.
They don’t want to do that, hence fannying about with Northern Groundnut schemes and associated spaffery. Though at least Priti Patel (phwoooar) pretends to be an immigration/lawn order hawk every year around conference season.
@ Steve
“Priti Patel (phwoooar)”
Could be on to something. If they had more politicians you wouldn’t mind banging, men would vote for them in the crazy belief that it might, just might, make it more likely that you would.
Same reason you let attractive women in cars pull out in front of you at junctions whereas you’d accelerate and scowl at some munter who tried to do the same.
Hallowed Be,
“I have to say i see multiple dangers with the redwall levelling up strategem which is arrayed to appeal to the northern economic leftishness. Basically you don’t get credit for it and the left will happily sign up to any spending because err they’re economically leftish too. Also what are you doing making a big song and dance about a northern powerhouse? The only thing you’ve got a hope of delivering, if you don’t bugger it up,a biggish if, is making it a little less shit than it was. The gulf between expectation and delivery will harm you far more.”
I’m not sure they are that economically leftish. Not in the modern sense. Labour used to be the party of the working man, the poor, but it isn’t today. It’s more the pro-state party. If you look at the last Labour manifesto, it had nothing for the less well-off working man. Nationalising rail? Wiping off student debt? How does that help him at all? And of course that working man knows his taxes are going to rise to pay for it.
In many of these places in the North, the state isn’t very big. It’s local services: policing, schools, hospitals, roads. The tranny charities, universities and government departments aren’t in Bolsover, they’re in London and Manchester. So, you have lots of people in the private sector, working in factories, warehouses, call centres. They aren’t going to vote for nationalising rail, because they don’t care. They probably drive or take a bus. They aren’t going to vote to cut student debt because they didn’t go.
The worst thing that the Conservatives would do would be to ape Labour, because that isn’t what people up in the seats they’ve grabbed want. They don’t give two shits about HS2/3 because they’ll almost never use it anyway. The best way to keep those votes would be to cut more waste out of government and give a tax cut.
As I think I’ve said on here before; Labour is the anti-English party. The contempt in which the modern left hold the English people is quite extraordinary, and they seem completely mystified as to why they’re not more popular.
Would add my tuppenceworth, but it’s already been said.
Steve, I just love the word spaffery, I am definitely going to nick it and can’t wait to use it in the future.
Steve- agree. They think its an outflanking move on Labour, but it’s not its a pivot move on the electorate and a boondoggle’s charter with a cockeyed risk reward ratio.
BoM4- yes much better not to take the money off them in the first place, definitely agree. Seeing rishi sunyak agree with an MPs suggestion to use the northern fund to do something about a battered low bridge in his constituency made my heart sink. WTF is the Chancellor doing worrying about road signs in littlebogthwaite? -echos of the cone hotline.
Hallowed Be,
“BoM4- yes much better not to take the money off them in the first place, definitely agree. Seeing rishi sunyak agree with an MPs suggestion to use the northern fund to do something about a battered low bridge in his constituency made my heart sink. WTF is the Chancellor doing worrying about road signs in littlebogthwaite? -echos of the cone hotline.”
Ah, those tedious wanky backbench questions so they can get their head appearing on the local news now and again. Probably done as a rota arrangement. And yes, the correct answer is “you’re asking someone in charge of billions in spending to worry about that? Fuck off, twat”
Beeching 2 will fix that bridge. Close the railway, blow up the tracks and the trucks can get through. It’ll probably be sooner than waiting for National Rail to fix it.
As I think I’ve said on here before; Labour is the anti-English party. The contempt in which the modern left hold the English people is quite extraordinary, and they seem completely mystified as to why they’re not more popular.
Deborah Mattinson of Britain Thinks spend a lot of time in those red wall areas getting to know the people, spending time with them, watching them, talking to them, and she’s just released a book: Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next?
She makes the point that Labour doesn’t need to wrap itself in the Union Flag but it does need to stop acting like it despises the country and accept that being proud to belong to a nation is not in and of itself racist and has much to be admired.
You can listen to her talk about the problems Labour has in those areas here: https://soundcloud.com/thepoliticalparty/show-192-deborah
@MBE
“Indeed. Have a play with https://www.ifs.org.uk/tools_and_resources/where_do_you_fit_in and you see that an experienced but not manager-level teacher married to a similarly experienced nurse, the prototypical example politicians often roll out both for what a “typical” family looks like financially and for what it means to be “key workers”, is well into the top 10% of households by income. Even newly qualified they’re not far outside the top 10% and by mid-career will be getting up to about the top 5%.”
I’m not sure how much you think teachers and nurses earn, but to get into the top 10% on that with 2 adults + 2 kids requires £7,800 net / month. If that is split 2:1 in favour of the teacher, it would require gross salaries of £90k & £45k PA. That means one of us is wrong in our assumptions about how much nurses and teachers earn… (even split 50/50 would put both of them on £67.5k PA each)
Or maybe you did it without any kids, which would bring the salaries down to about £48.5k / £30k…
@samuelbuca
Yes without kids it looks a lot rosier! It’s possible I botched up the input form first time round and ended up with 1 rather than 2 earners but I don’t think that messes things up terribly – £30k and £35k gross salaries gives net (including student loan repayment) roughly £24k and £27k for a total of £51k. Assuming £2k council tax that puts you in the top 15% rather than my more optimistic top 10%, but I don’t think those salary expectations are exceptional for early-mid career. Even just taking newly qualified figures, minimum gross salaries for a teacher are £25k and nurse £24k (more around London etc and for a nurse you can often add extra shifts) so net about £20k each, £40k total – only top 25% but well within striking distance (few years progression up the pay scales) of £50k+. For mid-late career, you can get on quite a lot more (as you observe, probably easier for teachers) if you take up more senior responsibilities, head of department or whatever.
On the ‘its surprising what teachers earn’ theme, I used to play cricket with a history teacher, somehow had been made a head of year and one day he let slip that he was paid £45k/yr. An indication of the sort of person he was can be shown by the fact he was in his late 20s, earned that amount, but had loads of debt (not just student debt but credit card debt and loans) and lived in rented digs because he couldn’t afford to buy a house.
“The reality is that even if you’re in the top 1%, that’s still not the gold-plated toilet seat lifestyle the left would have people believe.”
As far as I can work out, a single person has to be earning a net £100k/yr to be in the 1%. Now thats a very swanky income (c.170k gross), you would be able to live very comfortably on that. But you’d still need a mortgage unless you wanted to live in a very below average property, you’d be able afford any ‘normal’ car you wanted, but not Ferraris and Bugattis, you could go on holiday as much as you like and even fly up front, but its not private jet territory, or personal helicopter. Your life would be very nice, but not totally removed from the average person, in the way they think the 1% live. Your house would be the nice house in the decent part of town (but the town wouldn’t be London) you’d have several nice (but normal) cars on the driveway, you could afford plenty of travel but still to the sort of places the masses can go. And if for any reason you lose this income, you rejoin the masses pretty rapidly. You haven’t escaped into the eternal sunshine of the uber rich. Yet the popular image of the life of the 1%-er would be of a life of Italian supercars, leggy blondes, First Class air travel, houses in the south of France and Switzerland etc etc. When the reality is to afford that lifestyle you’d need a net income in the millions, preferably from investments, which would put you into the tenth of one percent or even higher.