Quo Vadis Labour?

[Montmorency]

During this time our 'anti-immigrant' government has basically given a free-pass to hundreds of thousands British National (Overseas) status holders arriving from Hong Kong, so I wouldn't put too much weight in that argument:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/hong-kon...al-authorities

A free pass like in Monopoly? Hardly counts if it isn't redeemed; the UK can hardly give anything up by accepting a few thousand mostly-affluent, educated Hong Kongers in excess of what it normally would, who are among the least-disliked people even among anti-immigrant extremists ("China flu" doggerel notwithstanding). If the Conservative government extended such a free pass to an equivalent population of Muslim refugees, I would genuinely be impressed.

Once brexit was voted on the salience of immigration as 'a problem' in the popular public consciousness diminished very significantly. It ceased to be a first order issue, and Pew Global polls on social attitudes continue to show the UK as one of the most tolerant countries in europe (and significantly more tolerant than most EU neighbours!).

*ahem*

There's little reason that attitudes preexisting Brexit and intensified by the Brexit era would be mollified moving beyond Brexit. A clearer phrasing of Brexit being about legitimacy exchanges "legitimacy" for "identity," the sensation of its loss or loss of control over it. And remember, the better or worse internal attitudes toward immigration in any other country are a different subject than what concerns English traditionalists particularly.

Despite the pandemic, immigration is Conservative voters’ number one concern

Labour's problem is also one of illegitimacy - in that the values the public see do not appear to have strong appeal to the sections of the electorate that would in previous times have been considered its core voter base:

https://twitter.com/paulmasonnews/st...66280811778053

At first I thought this was the economist JW Mason, but they're different people. Anyway: "Core Tory voters will accept any level of corruption/malfeasance" sounds like a tough row to hoe. Do you have any more recent and detailed analysis of English political geography to share than that?



Regarding the Atlantic article, this insight has been attached to Trump for a long time. Moreover - though this analogy, for all I know, would seem alien in the UK - Trumpism has been characterized as a mastery of a certain professional wrestling aesthetic in political form. That is to say, in professional wrestling, all the action is directed and scripted, something the audience is conscious of, yet the action is also treated on some level as being real; the rivalries, the defeats, the characters, all attain some sort of higher veridicality within the audience's (self-aware!) doublethink. Thus for redcaps and MAGAts (and here, arguably Ultras), the political arena is a field of contestation against hated effigies roamed by the heroic character of the Leader. Just a matter of selecting one's preferred protagonist?

But that bare description of course doesn't attempt an external explanation or ordering. That is, the fact that Johnson or Trump supporters have a certain worldview doesn't tell us whether that worldview is good or right in any capacity (it isn't), or - more importantly - why the majority of people consistently reject it.

Every notorious dictator and tyrant was beloved by millions you realize, perhaps according to the same underlying psychological principles of, I dunno, egoistic entanglement, cult of personality, newthink, whatever. And as Hannah Arendt wrote:

A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic
of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses.
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the
point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing,
think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture
in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion
that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism
the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that
its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd,
and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held
every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based
their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such
conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one
day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their
falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders
who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along
that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior
tactical cleverness.

What had been a demonstrable reaction of mass audiences became an important
hierarchical principle for mass organizations. A mixture of gullibility
and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements, and
the higher the rank the more cynicism weighs down gullibility. The essential
conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that
politics is a game of cheating and that the "first commandment" of the
movement: "The Fuehrer is always right," is as necessary for the purposes
of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline
are for the purposes of war'"·

Whether or not you would be willing to interpret this as an enduring psychosocial pathology, it is clearly aberrant and deviant psychology in the bigger picture, one that almost always contributes to great harm.


Here's another relevant article, to be read in its entirety. Though it isn't about UK politics, it gets at a core issue. There are enough weakly-aligned, politically-passive/unengaged, and cross-pressured voters that in FPTP a major party simply cannot lose the majority of its support in any given election (unlike the fate of some traditional parties in European proportional systems). To reiterate, the UK Conservatives, despite being scum, are not fascist lunatics trying to bring down the whole country, but this exactly gives them a certain optical advantage over US Republicans, which in combination with structural biases and trends n their favor (not all the same as exist in the US) strengthens their grip on power. For 30 years Republicans have only once carried the presidential vote, half the time in House elections (almost all under Clinton and Bush), a third of the time in Senate elections, but if they were only debased to the level of that immigration-cuck Reagan, or more publicly diffident on the value of the government's role in social and economic support as the Tories are, they probably could reach a similar level of performance to what Johnson's Conservatives have enjoyed so far.

Yet the ratchet only goes one way: one level of corruption, malice, and entitlement always abets the next, becoming a mere transitory stage. It's hard to imagine the UK Conservatives will either improve or remain stable in 10 years' time IF they start losing in this global climate; ironically, they might already be there had Brexit stalled in 2016.

Most of the ministers of the last pre-Blair Tory government absolutely despise the current Tory government. Both in what they do as a government, and how they conduct their politics. It's like the Republicans pre-Trump and post-Trump. The current Tories are Trumpian in nature.

You greatly underestimate the corruption and complicity of pre-Trump Republicans (who, after all, didn't suddenly die, disappear, or get replaced by body snatchers when Trump ran for President): Bob Dole (GOP VP candidate '76, presidential 1996), who died today, was a firm Trump supporter from the beginning, one of Nixon's staunchest defenders during the Watergate controversy, and one of the many proponents of proto-Trumpist tactics in the Republican Party from the 1970s on.