claret_in_exile wrote: ↑Tue Dec 31, 2019 4:08 pm
The Labour Party has embraced what the Democrats in the US have been pushing ever since 2008: a huge, previously-unthinkable lurch to the left and then demonising anyone who disagrees as racist, stupid, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc.
I will never understand why they think this will work - human nature is to push back against anyone who treats you this way - which is why you've seen significant electoral upsets over the past 5 years. Voters now believe that the left does not advocate for them and that they are completely detached from reality.
I think most people are in the middle politically, but the left has gone to such extremes, the voters consider the Tories a far more palatable option. They might not agree with everything the Tories stand for, but there are more parts of the platform which speak to them than Labour's, nor do they treat them like evil idiots.
As much as people claim "Johnson is a racist" (laughable) or that "Johnson is a clown" (a lot more accurate), he is still less extreme than Corbyn and the utter bilge that was the Labour Party manifesto. So as much as the ultra-left claims the Tories are racist, etc., most people thought the Labour Party were WORSE.
Until Labour realizes quite how far down the socialist rabbit hole they've gone, electoral results such as these will be the norm. It wasn't just Brexit, it wasn't just Corbyn, it wasn't just the manifesto, it was EVERYTHING they did.
A former Labour voter.
There was nothing in the Labour Manifesto that wouldn't look out of place in the manifestos of many centre right Nordic parties. That you insist on calling it "extreme left" only shows how taken in you have been by the propaganda (both from our far right media, and the discontented side of Labour. Go ahead and find me something from the manifesto that is "extreme left wing". To give you a slightly different example, when Ed Miliband introduced the idea of capping energy bills, the Daily Mail called it "marxist" - however when Theresa May took up the idea only two years later, the Daily Mail said it showed how she was on the side of working class people. To consider your double standards a little more, the idea of Johnson being racist is laughable, despite the fact he's made racist comments in print. You won't find a single comment in print like that by Corbyn - nothing anti-Semitic - yet for many people he is so, or at the very least is tolerant of it (again despite having stated many times in no uncertain terms that he's not anti-Semitic). The economic record of the Tories since 2010 has been woeful, both by their standards and by those of decent people. Austerity has been a failure, as has neo liberal economics in general (which the last Labour government was also in thrall to. Labour have moved away from this, denouncing public private partnerships as the scam they are, and looking to take some sectors of the economy that clearly haven't worked well under private ownership back under public control - and yet the narrative runs that "Labour will crash the economy". Even a real comparison of Johnson and Corbyn as political figures doesn't work out for Johnson in the cold light of day - him being in politics for himself, whereas Corybn has served most of his time as a backbencher, and worked tirelessly for his constituents and various causes. Corbyn's ideals of social and economic justice remain the same, and Johnson's ideals (does he even have any?), well we know he'll say whatever it takes to get him in to office, and as London mayor and Foreign Secretary was considered very poor. It was always predicted that Corybn would drive out the so called moderates in the Labour Party. Purge them, and this would be a sign of how extreme he was, but it didn't happen (how many MPs did he remove the whip from?). Johnson on the other hand, fired the most moderate people in his party within weeks of becoming leader, and has arguably the most right wing cabinet in modern times, yet you insist Corbyn is extreme (surely this makes Johnson even more extreme?)?
This idea that Labour has moved to the extreme left of politics isn't one that Labour has created themselves, and as I've just shown, holds no water when held up to scrutiny. This "consensus" was built on a fiction and nourished by the right wing press. They relied on lots of people not even looking at the manifesto and dismissing it as "marxist" - but when you strip away the real meaning of words in politics, you do democracy a great disservice. As Goebbels once said: "if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth"
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