Progressive voters who oppose the Conservatives should still want the party to recover to ensure British politics does not lurch towards populism based on “negativity and division”, a Tory leadership contender has said.
As far as I can tell it means what people want but I don’t want them to have.
Had exactly this discussion at a party yesterday. ‘Populist’ is one of those words used as a pejorative by our betters.
The ‘Conservatives’ have failed to conserve anything for the last 35 years. That should tell you all you need to know.
I don’t see it happening as they are all so completely out of touch, they don’t even seem to understand just why they are so unpopular. What little that they do understand they dismiss because they know better and those pesky voters are just wrong. Even if they were to come up with a vote winning manifesto, I wouldn’t vote for them as I simply don’t trust them. They have lied so consistently for so long that their word is completely worthless.
Why has nobody thought of this strategy to defeat ‘negativity and division’? It merely requires our betters to tell us that we are all having a nice day and .. problem solved? Potemkin Lives!
Stonyground,
“I don’t see it happening as they are all so completely out of touch, they don’t even seem to understand just why they are so unpopular.”
I think that out of the contenders, Kemi Badenoch might get it, but she’s in a party stuffed full of Blairites with blue rosettes.
Stride was one of the Cameron A-List of 2006 which local parties were nudged into selecting filling the parliamentary party with more people like him rather than some bloke who understood what the local people wanted. So, top heavy with London/Oxford PPE types who think the state is a wonderful thing.
Nail/Head interface
I remember discussing and writing essays on this when I did my degree nearly 50 years ago. Even then, the concept was considered by political scientists (sic) to be completely useless.
My personal definition is that populism is what we call democracy when the voters get it wrong.
‘Populism’ is a vague term. It can refer to any ideology that presents “the people” as a morally good force and contrasts them against allegedly corrupt and self-serving elites. As such, it can be combined with other ideologies, so there can be populism of the right, left and soggy centre. Blairism was populist in this sense.
The pejorative sense of ‘populism’ is synonymous with ‘demagogy’. It is used to describe politicians who present allegedly simplistic answers to complex questions in a highly emotional manner.
Alternatively, ‘populism’ can mean no more than attending closely to the wishes of the electorate…
Progressive voters who oppose the Conservatives should still want the party to recover
Well, someone’s got to. Who else would pricks like Stride appeal to?
Progressive voters who oppose the Conservatives should still want the party to recover to ensure British politics does not lurch towards populism based on “negativity and division”, a Tory leadership contender has said.
That’s funny, I’d prefer the Conservative Party, and everybody involved, died of AIDS.
Populism is what’s popular among the native populus.
James – that’s why the Nigerian con artist, “Kemi” Olukemi Olufunto, won’t get very far even if she succeeds in being the next leader of the annoying gay dodo party.
She’ll fool a few diehard blue rinse pensioners, until they die, and that’s it for the Tories.
No flowers. 😀
The Conservative party has spent the last three decades courting unpopulism, with the results we now see.
“Why has nobody thought of this strategy to defeat ‘negativity and division’? It merely requires our betters to tell us that we are all having a nice day and .. problem solved? Potemkin Lives!”
Perhaps we could be told to eat cake too?
“Progressive voters who oppose the Conservatives should still want the party to recover to ensure British politics does not lurch towards populism based on “negativity and division”, a Tory leadership contender has said.”
Translation: ‘I don’t want to be thrown out of the Uniparty Establishment class, so I’ll do whatever it takes to retain my membership card’.
Populism is an approach to politics which assumes that the electorate are not merely soverign, but also divine. If they vote for more spending, that must be right: if they vote for lower taxes, that must be right: if they vote for lower national debt, that must be right. And that they can vote for all of these and get them simultaneously by their mere force of will – no need to ever make difficult decisions or balance one desire against another because there is no limit to their power. The natural consequence of this is that when the Will of the People is defeated by harsh reality, there can be no acceptance of this and the only acceptable explanation is that the Will of the Majority is being frustrated by the Will of a Minority – since Will is all that matters.
Whether it results in blaming things on greedy capitalists, landlords, etc or moral failings of some of the people, such as laziness, fraud, homosexuality, Jewishness, etc depends on where the politicians and their followers fall on the left/right spectrum. With enough populism you can get the dictatorship of the proletariat or Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.
Charles – yes, this is all about “populism” and not the biggest human invasion in the history of the British isles.
no need to ever make difficult decisions or balance one desire against another because there is no limit to their power
That sounds like the Blairism/post-Blairism we have been afflicted with for the past 25 years, in a nutshell. Worried about open borders and the consequences of importing violent peasants? No problem, we’ll simply make it verboten to complain about this. Net zero? Never mind the physical or technological constraints, we’ll enshrine this in law and reality will bend.
With enough populism you can get the dictatorship of the proletariat or Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer
Careful folks, give the proles what they want and next Wednesday it will be Literally Hitler.
Populism would be announcing you’ll fight to keep Swifties safe, and can think of some policies that could help with this such as putting kids who bring knives to schools in YOI prison until their 25th, and not allowing dedicated religious spaces in prison. We need the space for more cells anyway.
Elitism announces you’ll fight to keep the Muslim community safe, and tells you that anyway Swifties are not a community as if you’re thick.
Charles:«…they vote for more spending…
…they vote for lower taxes…
…they vote for lower national debt…
… they can vote for all of these and get them simultaneously»
That’s certainly true for the poor lugs who read the political manifestos and the promises that politicians make. We’re about to see Two-tier Keir and Rachel “there will be riots” Reeves kick-start the UK economy but meanwhile the truth is that it is possible to satisfy two out of three of your populist aspirations and no recent government has attempted to achieve that.
We’re about to see Two-tier Keir and Rachel “there will be riots” Reeves
One thing I’m finding very amusing at the moment is the dialogue the left habitually use. It ‘s always this or that will be fought or fought for. It’s always couched in the terms of violence. Now they’re actual being fought with real violence, they really don’t like it do they?
But then contrary to the “Liberal values” tosser over on the other thread, it’s always been obvious to me than any dialogue from the left is always subscripted with the clause “and we’ll use violence if we don’t get what we want”. It’s implicit in socialism. Socialism requires compulsion.