Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blair wasn’t being sabotaged by his own party that bought Facebook ads to sabotage him. I’d say Corbyn did superbly. https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/labour-hq-spent-50...
> I’d say Corbyn did superbly Poe's law never fails
The strange case of Britain’s demise
181–190 of 584 posts
Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise
#182Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise
#183The neoliberal publication fails to mention "neoliberalism" as a cause. Shocking. Probably the worst thing it says is this: > For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity. Corbyn was only "hard-left" in the sense that he wasn't anti-labor. Lots of people like give lots of different reasons why Labor was eviscerated in th…
The Liberal Democrats were unabashedly pro-remain. They did terribly.
If the reason why so many remain folks didn't vote lib-dem was out of a fear of splitting the vote or that they were deemed "unelectable" due to historic reasons, well then the problem here is clearly FPTP, which induces all sorts of nonsense "strategic" voting and yields inflated false majorities.
Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise
#184I recently posted some of my feelings related to watching the UK post-2019 from the US as a Brit that left as part of the ongoing brain drain.[1] I received my Green Card since that post and I've booked my flights for a visit to the UK for early next year. Mostly I just want to share how sad reading this article made me feel this morning. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33682030
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Here in the Valley, I actually noticed an increase in number of international hires coming from commonwealth countries in the last few years.
Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise
#185I’m going to name the English language as one of the suspects. A common language with the US makes many of the political and business elite focus on the U.S. It also makes them less inclined to put the effort in to engage with Europe politically and culturally. That in turn helped to fan the flames of Euroscepticism that in turn led to Brexit. It’s no accident that the focus of trade deals post Brexit has been with E…
English is the lingua franca within Europe as well. And last I checked Europe displays a similar obsession with US politics as the UK does. How many Germans bother to learn Polish or Greek or whatever, who do not have family ties there? The reason british people don't learn languages is that it is not economically beneficial for them to do so. But otherwise, I don't think it is the case that in Europe everybody is en…
I’ve worked in Brussels and whilst English is spoken an awful lot communication is still not as straightforward as working in the US.
Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corbyn and McDonnell were essentially communists and therefore unelectable. Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy. I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were act…
The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else. Brownites sound good but say nothing specific...often the specific stuff is bad too. I agree with you in that there is a route in the centre, but Labour aren't. The party is fundamentally broken. Starmer isn't it, Reeves isn't a leader, Streeting is a joke. Obviously, they have moved to the centre on immigration…
Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise
#187Like in the US, democracy in the United Kingdom is faltering. Our first past the post electoral system means the Tories can retain power with a third of the (active) electorate voting for them. Labour believes first past the post serves them well, but it doesn’t, because they would have been leading a coalition government in the last several elections under Proportional Representation. Instead it requires Labour to b…
Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the goal here to make Corbyn look good by comparison to Johnson? The median voter seems to think they are both unfit to lead, so it’s probably not an effective argument.
The goal is to refuse to let Conservatives leave that kind of spin uncontested. Everything the comment accused Corbyn of doing leading to "you people will never win in the real world" was done by BoJo, and it didn't stop him winning in the real world.
Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
"is 3x the rate of SF" -- citation needed. I live in Edinburgh and have been in SF and very much struggle to believe it.
You need to find the data yourself. There is no public source that makes this comparison. I have lived in Edinburgh for two decades btw. Most people who work here have absolutely no idea how many homeless people live there (it has been in the thousands for years) because almost none of these people live on the street or have substance abuse problems (and Edinburgh has very effective segregation so the wealthy don't h…
Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. They even wrote it in their manifesto. What do you call nationalising companies and handing control to the workers? (It's in the 2019 manifesto) That's my point: people, especially the young, don't even recognise it when described under a microscopically thin veneer. That's very worrying. They didn't hide it, either. McDonnell did say clearly that he was a Marxist [1] and Corbyn is a socialist in the very…
I'm the first person to criticise McDonnell and Corbyn's radical postures, but the idea that Labour's manifesto proposal to renationalise the railways, Royal Mail and some utilities is communism is utterly laughable. Somehow we managed state owned railways and utilities for basically the entire Cold War without ever once feeling tempted to join the Warsaw Pact, and the Royal Mail was a government agency for nearly 40…
And of course there's also the little thing about McDonnell and Corbyn being Marxist and socialist.
Again, too many people still seem not to be willing to see what's not even hidden. History should really be compulsory over the whole of secondary school.
Edit: they had hinted it very strongly but did not mention it in the 2017 manifesto apart from calling to promote coops. But in the 2019 manifesto it is explicitly written that nationalised utilities would be "run by service-users and workers".
McDonnell is a Marxist and so, obviously, he wanted a Marxist economic policy in which nationalisation does not mean state capitalism but really indeed workers in charge of the means of production.