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We can see the problem here

After a decade of reinvention, Labour has again fallen short electorally. Thursday’s dramatic loss in Hartlepool and in councils across the country has raised the perennial question for parties on the left: “What is to be done?”

Much of the discussion of Labour’s woes concentrates on British particularities, its Brexit strategy and the relative merits of the Blairite and Corbynite reinventions. However, the dilemmas Labour faces are far from particular. The last decade has not been kind to social democratic parties across Europe. The centre-left parties that dominated European politics for the second half of the 20th century have suffered a string of losses.

In France, the Parti Socialiste fell to under 8% of the vote in the last legislative elections, with no signs of recovery. In 2017, the German SPD experienced its worst postwar performance, a showing likely to worsen in September’s election. Even where social democrats are in power, their position is tenuous. The Swedish Social Democrats, the most electorally successful socialist party in Europe, struggled to form a government after the 2018 election.

The moment you say that socialism, socialists, and social democracy are the same thing then you’ve lost the argument. For they’re not, they’re alternatives.

Socialism is the idiocy of trying to replace capitalism and markets with clipboardwielders. Social democracy is taxing the snot out of capitalism and markets to pay the clipboardwielders. As the Scandinavian experience shows – countries that are indeed higher tax than we are but also more capitalist and more market – one of these two works and the other doesn’t.

Of course, not taxing the snot out of people has its merits too. But baby steps, baby steps.

12 thoughts on “We can see the problem here”

  1. I’m hoping they realise that the reason for their failure is that they aren’t left wing enough.

    I’m also hoping they don’t get hold of the means of counting, like the Dems.

  2. A party founded by industrial workers to represent the interests of industrial workers starts to flounder when there is a dearth of industrial workers and the leadership is taken over by academics?
    I don’t think there is a cure for that!

  3. “I’m also hoping they don’t get hold of the means of counting, like the Dems.”

    Blair made baby steps, didn’t he? Highly corruptible postal voting, biased constituency boundaries, …

    So: stop the postal voting nonsense, demand voter ID, square up the boundaries, and Hang Blair.

    While we’re at it: never mind The Sombrero, squash the Beeb.

  4. “the leadership is taken over by academics”: which academics do you have in mind?

    Starmer, Corbyn, or Milliband?

  5. The real problem for the Labour party is that it is, quite obviously, the anti-English party. The amount of vitriol and hatred directed towards the English on a daily basis by Labour supporters and politicians is quite extraordinary and, if directed at any other group would result in prosecutions.

    Labour needs to die.

  6. Dennis, Pointing Out The Obvious

    Labour hasn’t been taken over by academics, it’s been taken over by the sort of person who, on the off chance they’d once been offered a shovel for use, recoiled from said shovel in horror. The last thing you’ll find in the leadership of Labour is, well, those familiar with labor.

  7. Somewhere on Twitter there’s a spoof poster that sums it up:

    BRITAIN IS DREADFUL.

    YOU PEOPLE ARE SCUM.

    VOTE LABOUR.

  8. Your distinctions are academic Tim. It is all socialism and it all needs to be shut down.

    Labour lost and the Tories are next up for big losses. Socialism wont work any better for their crooks than it did for ZaNu .

    It remains to be seen how the dim fuckers are going to produce zillions of jobs via freeports and free markets, Brexit dividend etc. While simultaneously sucking the dick of greenfreak Marxism with shutdowns of most UK industry to be zero-carbon. Result will be mass impoverishment First of plebs and then almost everybody. Lets see the fucks square that circle.

    Social Credit tyranny is the whip hand the cunts want of course–but that cant help them go in two directions at once. Esp when they aren’t going to get their social credit shit anyway.

    It will be high comedy –unless we fail to stop it when it will be high tragedy.

  9. You could make the argument that Labour has done what it originally aimed to do. Or perhaps other parties have done it for them. The group of people they represented no longer exist so it’s just inertia keeping them going. It took them longer than UKIP, but the result is the same. The end state has been reached so it’s time for them to fade away.

  10. “it’s time for them to fade away.”

    I’d rather hear their screams as they roast in hell.

  11. Party of Pakis and teachers has little resonance with voters who are neither. Pictures at eleven.

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