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talkpolitics
So let me be the umpteenth dude(tte) to exercise their quill on the matter. I'm talking of the UK election. What a surprise! What a shock! Didn't see that coming! A freight train ran over the Labour party. The train of complacency, incompetence, and arrogance. They had decided that their voters are stupid and they, the leaders, know what's best for them.
Well, the electorate may or may not be stupid, but it's also superstitious, and it knows it pretty damn well. It's the electorate that ultimately decides who'll rule and who'll run the parties. At least in a civilized country like Britain. The alternative is an oligarchy, which has privatized their respective parties, and is riding them like a horse, until they break down under the weight. And then moving on to the next party, and so on. Not a pretty sight. So, better stick with the stupid electorate.
Here's what happened in Britain immediately after the election. Labour leader Miliband took all the blame for the defeat, and threw his resignation. The LD leader Clegg lost his mandate in his home district, and instantaneously threw his resignation as party leader. Same about Farage, the colorite founder and chieftain of the UKIP.
That's how refreshingly the majoritarian election system works on the British political parties. That's why they tend to overhaul and repair themselves, and move on, and live on for a long time. And that's why the notion that I'm hearing from some corners that the British election system is bad, and some kind of injustice had happened, is stupid. Let's not presume to lecture the British on how to do democratic elections, okay?
But back to Labour, who seemed like they had the election victory in their bag, and were already bracing themselves for a nice sojourn at #10. In reality, they only took 232 seats out of 650. That was a slap in the face by that same electorate they had taken for granted. Why am I saying this? Here's why. Let's take the one issue that's been tormenting the "stupid" electorate lately: the hordes of unwashed heathen foreigners knocking at the gates to steal the jobs of good decent God-fearing Englishpeople.
The bureaucrats from the European Socialist Party and the Socialist International or whatever they're called right now had obviously decided that whoever didn't agree with having their jobs stolen was a mere hateful bigot, a short-sighted xenophobe who hates progress and wants to stop the wheel of history from turning. But the actual working people apparently begged to differ. Even if there's zero unemployment, an immigrant is prepared to work for half, or why not 1/3 of the money your average local Joe would.
By the way, the term "proletariat" has fallen out of fashion now. The new term is "precariat", "a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare as well as being a member of a proletariat class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labour to live". Well, turns out the British precariat doesn't give a cat's poop about Brussels' propaganda which Miliband was full of to the brink, and even had it oozing out of his nose.
"The foreign workers are very useful to the economy", Miliband said on his last debate. So this wannabe-socialist assumes that the economy is something detached and separate from the material interests of his own population? The foreign precariate is somehow more important than your own one, and all is fine, as long as big business gets their cheap labor and fills their coffers better? Well, Miliband, what are you doing in the party of the working proletariat then? You're No True Socialist then.
What many smartheads in London may've failed to realize is that Euroscepticism had engulfed the British society from the bottom upwards, not viceversa. They didn't realize that their people were not as stupid as not to sniff that something was reeking from Brussels' general direction. So Farage the right-wing nationalist played on that tune and sucked in some leftist votes.
Cameron made a win-win move when he positioned himself right between Farage and Miliband: here's a referendum for y'all, let the people decide what they want. I'm so democratic, ya know, and these other guys aren't. And that, too, sucked in some more leftist votes.
Shockingly, it was Miliband the people's tribune who categorically rejected the idea of referendums of any sort - the very thought of leaving the EU is a national tragedy, no way, people! I know what's best for you, people. Just follow me. So what turns out at the end of the day? The Tory leader is the true democrat... WTF? This is turning the whole British political history on its head. Labour says no way, we won't ask the people what they want, and the Tories are playing nicey-nicey, eh? Come on Labour, you can do better than that!
Same thing happened after the previous election. Back then, the Liberal Democrats insisted for a change of the voting system as a condition for a coalition cabinet. Let's do a referendum, let people decide, Cameron countered. Well then, the people did decide. Nearly 90% said they loved the majoritarian vote that they were having. The people had spoken, loud and clear.
Miliband did the same mistake, more or less, regarding those pesky Scottish nationalists. They're traditionally Labour's staunchest allies, but now the SNP took 56 out of 59 seats. First, Labour totally missed to notice the reasons for the ascent of the SNP, and that's exactly in their field of expertise: the periphery lagging behind the metropoly. The working class getting poorer while big capital is wallowing in wealth. Then, Miliband presented himself as the biggest opponent to Scottish independence, and vowed to never ever make a coalition with the pesky Scottish nationalists. He'd rather cut his arm off, he promised (that would've been spectacular, I'll give him that). Again, Cameron proved more flexible than his opponent. He at least gave the Scottish some referendum.
But Miliband's grandest mistake must have been that he was a convinced supporter of austerity, the tightening of the belts that in fact is the main pillar of neoliberal policy. In the day before the election, he promised to tighten the belts even more and cut the deficit - and that, just as Cameron had started loosening the belt somewhat. Thus, Miliband completely succumbed to his own political stupidity, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, allowing the main myth crafted by the Conservatives about Labour to flourish: that the previous Labour governments had ruled with loose fingers, spending themselves to oblivion, and amassing a gargantuan deficit.
In reality, every word of this story is a lie, as Paul Krugman has argued. In fact, neither the public debt nor the deficit were high enough in pre-crisis times to warrant such rhetoric. The big deficit only happened because of the crisis. And the crisis was a global phenomenon, caused by irresponsible banks with zero control, and private debt - not by public deficits. So that myth is bullshit. There was no need for austerity. The financial markets weren't showing any signs of panic about British solvency. But who cares now. The myth was never tackled in a meaningful way. Labour chose to just shut up about it.
And Britain, which was only able to return to growth after it had abandoned budget austerity, has still not fully recovered from the lost two years under Cameron's center-right coalition. And though this stupid parable kept dominating the media, where it was being regurgitated as proven fact, in reality it still remains just another hypothesis. But Labour refused to argue on the matter - maybe because they were so sure in their success that they'd rather not dirty their hands. And that was a stupid mistake, done out of arrogance.
So that's Labour and Miliband's fatal mistake: they swallowed the lies of the neoliberals, hook, line, and sinker - and they abdicated from the battle of ideas. They betrayed their own principles - because a leftist party speaking a rightist language and practically supporting rightist policies, is NOT leftist. And the leftist voters were not as stupid as they were presumed to be, so they figured they just didn't need such a fake lefist party any more.
The most comical thing is that Miliband promised to tighten the deficit just as Cameron had started loosening it (perhaps a pre-election trick, but still). That's just hysterically dumb. Cameron used Labour's own body weight, just as a matador waves the scarlet silk in front of the bull's face, before making a swift move to the side and sending the beast chasing the wind like the stupid cattle that it is. The red bull never even realized what was happening to it before it was too late.
Miliband proved himself a Brussels dogmatist who refuses to listen to his constituents and presumes to know what's best for them. Someone who doesn't grasp the meaning and cannot defend the authentic leftist principles and policies, and on top of that, is a complete noob at political maneuvering. So he had no other choice but to at least have the decency to acknowledge that he's not suitable for this game, and resign. Moving on, let the next one come. Hopefully, he'll understand better what he's there for. He better - or else we'll be seeing another decade of neo-Thatcherite bullshit. Or worse: the final dissolution of the last remnant of the wrecked British empire.
(no subject)
Date: 14/5/15 05:49 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14/5/15 06:39 (UTC)What was that old saying about a lie travelling around the world while the truth was still lacing its boots?
According to many sources, the election was won in England, by the English, who would rather have not been governed by a tail-wagging-the-dog SNP/Labour coalition. The Scottish independence debate's major blowback has been amusingly ironic.
(no subject)
Date: 14/5/15 17:28 (UTC)For one it is predicated on the assumption that worker population / productivity will grow faster than public debt which seems dubious at best considering the declining birthrates and increasingly aged population of many developed countries.
Likewise it discounts the issue of predictability that the OP brought up. People don't worry about debts that they know they can pay. It's the debts you can't pay that cause trouble, and uncertainty about the future is naturally going to make people more leery of taking on additional burdens.
(no subject)
Date: 14/5/15 18:47 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14/5/15 19:00 (UTC)Even with inflation you still need each worker's effective "share" of the debt to go down or you'll end up right back where you started. Likewise immigration requires positions for those immigrants to fill and requires those immigrants to assimilate, otherwise you're just dumping money into functionally independent enclaves for little or no return.
(no subject)
Date: 14/5/15 19:15 (UTC)And inflation normally runs at between 2% and 8% in a well managed economy...or at least it has since Bretton Woods. Over 10% and you have problems you have to address.
(no subject)
Date: 14/5/15 07:50 (UTC)This is not to deny that there is a great deal of misunderstanding and mistrust over Europe.
I have seen many folk on many media pages attribute ECHR's actions to the EU. Some folk don't care enough to disambiguate; it all being "Europe" or "Brussels".
Again, one returns to the complexity of the respective narratives. "Four legs good" still works well, because it is simple.
(no subject)
Date: 14/5/15 10:20 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14/5/15 11:03 (UTC)As an example: my wife, who has two degrees from Cambridge - one in Natural Sciences and one in Law (in the latter of which she achieved a "good first") has taken about four years to be persuaded of the economic analysis. And even now, because Krugman et al go against her natural prejudices, she is still skeptical and looking for better disproof. (As one would, I suppose.)
Now this could be because I am very bad at explaining things, or that she has a wife's understandable disinclination to accept anything her husband says, thinks, or does as being in any way sensible: or any combination thereof. But it is an anecdote which describes perfectly the sort of problems complex narratives have when being discussed.
When educated folk can find it difficult to explain or understand, it shows why (in terms of process) certain ideas will always find greater appeal.
And despite my wife's wonderful educational credentials and her skepticism, this is one of the reasons I'm rather fascist about education. The greater the number of properly educated people, the quicker our problems will be addressed. IMHO it is pretty much just about numbers and critical mass. (And this in itself is one of the reasons I love the internet - certainly one will find mountains of information confirming ones own opinions; nevertheless, I think, over time, that the internet will prove the greatest educator of humanity there will be.)