Thursday 19 December 2019

Denial of the Labour Kind. Chapter 4. A Case Study.

Guido has a good clip from the today program here.

Labour MP Claudia Webbe was asked the question "In what way was the Labour Manifesto Popular when you went down to your worst defeat in decades?"

True to type, she started to revert to spouting rhetoric, rather then answer the question. When (with some difficulty) pressed further, she then started to rant about the media, Brexit and anything else she could use to blame on Labour's failure. Rather than the Labour party leadership and by extension their policies and manifesto.

Yes, it's a laudible aim to house the homeless, it's a laudible aim to take in genuine refugees, and all the rest of it.

But only in the Leftist Labour Twitter bubble does rhetoric win elections.

Policies need to be credible, costed and above all they need to be rooted in reality.

Labour's manifesto was all rhetoric and nowhere was there an accurate description of how it would be paid for. Stealing companies and putting them back into public ownership is not a credible policy.

Nor is the open borders policy. Not without a massive surplus of cash in the exchequer to cover the cost.

Nor is a plan to build millions of houses without the money or permission to build. Unless the green fields of the home counties are to be replaced by shoddily-built Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks.

Claudia Webbe's appearance, her lack of engagement, her inability to listen and instead spout rhetoric rather than answer a direct question, is the epitome of why Labour lost.

They are doing too much talking an no listening. They are plucking policies from thin air that their Twitter bubble likes, but everyone else can see would bankrupt the country.

It's frightening that a constituency would elect an MP like this to Parliament. At the very least after the biggest party defeat in 70 years or more the least you'd want is your MP to be reflective, humble, understanding, able to listen and accept change.  Not to be dogmatic, blame everyone including voters for the losses. That's a bold strategy to win votes right there.... and yes, I'm being sarcastic.

Wednesday 18 December 2019

Denial of the Labour Kind. Chapter 3. Labour Party Reflection and Reform?

Reform? HaHaHa, don't make me laugh. It's not Labour's fault they lost the election, it's everyone else's.

Certainly not the Labour leadership (according to the Labour leadership that is).

It's interesting to read from reports that Labour candidates were given support from the party apparatus based not on the marginality of their seats or just a plain need for some promotion in the face of withering voter support, but instead based on their ideological purity. That's the sort of Labour party we have at the moment. A microcosm of Socialist dictatorship, with un-personing and removal from the benefits of the party for not toeing the exact party line.

In essence the Labour party would rather cast off those MPs that don't toe the ideological line than support them and win an election.

Such is the slavish adherence to Socialist doctrine in the higher ranks of the Labour party. Yes folks, it's actually worse than we thought.

Comrade Corbyn and his acolytes would even un-person their own Party members just on the basis they don't toe the extreme socialist ideology of the Momentum movement.

Just think what that sort of government would be like if they got into power? Yeah, we dodged a bullet there, that's for sure.

I'm quite sure that within the life of a Corbyn government, given a decent majority in Parliament we would have gone from democratic choice to little red books, boiler suits and socialist dictatorship. With Corbyn the "dear leader" installed in power in perpetuity.

Think it's preposterous? Think again.

Of course now that the Labour party lost so badly, you'd think that there would be a want, a desire to move away from the rabid Socialist doctrine that lost them the election.

Sorry, don't make me laugh again.

No, they will double down with the rhetoric. Those not ideologically pure in the party will be purged and Labour will slip further into a Socialist swamp. The pressure in Labour at the moment is not to blame the leadership, but the poor thick fools in the country that didn't envision the sunny socialist uplands that awaited them under the beneficent dear leader.

IF Corbyn does trigger a leadership contest, I suspect the replacement(s) for him and/or John McDonnell will be cast from the same extremist socialist mould. I say If, mainly because I think that Corbyn will be persuaded to stand in any leadership contest or his bully-boy momentum mates will force it to happen. It could just be that Corbyn and McDonnell get re-elected by the extremists and Labour continue as normal. Such is the way with extreme Socialists.

I predict within 5 years the moderate Labour MPs and party members will have moved away and formed a more moderate party. This is like the early Eighties all over again, with Michael Foot's Labour party sparking the formation of the SDP.  Last time, the Labour party moderates clawed the party back from the extremists under John Smith. This time the Momentum bully boys won't be removed from the party quite so easily.

The one certain fact of this, is there is no party that truly reflects the working class in this country. Labour are not that party.

Tuesday 17 December 2019

Denial of the Labour Kind. Chapter 2. Labour's 2019 Election and future

Okay, so in my previous blog I pointed out the decades where Labour either ignored the lot of the working class, or just plain ignored them and sided with the big corporations (as during the Blair/Brown years).

"By ye deeds shall ye be known" is exactly how Labour failed. They in effect lied: saying they would respect the referendum result, but effectively campaigned for remain by blocking the Conservative's Brexit plan even when the Irish backstop had been removed by Boris Johnson's team. Voters are very canny and you can't lie to them for three years without being found out. The mixed messages from Labour MPs just convinced the voters Labour couldn't be trusted. There were times when two Labour MPs on two different TV channels were saying exactly opposite things. Nor are the people happy when political parties block legislation they ask for just for political purposes.

The voters are not fools. By Labour not ruling out remain, the voter knew that remain was the real focus and the pseudo-Leave viewpoint was just a smokescreen to try and con Labour leave voters into voting for them. The working class Labour leave voter had been conned during the 2017 election. They wouldn't be conned again.

That's effectively where Labour stood: diametrically opposed to their Northern Labour heartlands.

No amount of freebies promised by Labour would have changed that. The people know that someone has to pay for the freebies. Whether it's in the form of higher taxes or their children paying off the national debt in the future, the people are wise to false promises. The WORKING class, the poor that work and pay taxes are the ones that always get hit worst by Labour's schemes.

And they paid the price. Labour lost 50 seats and handed the Conservatives won a landslide majority.

Labour seats that had always voted Labour, switched to the Tories, such was the depth of feeling. Labour-voting wards that the party had taken for granted for two long, had been ignored by Labour for too long, voted Tory.

Quite clearly the policies included in the Labour manifesto were seen as a threat to the living standards of the working class.

How did the Labour leadership respond to this major defeat? Denial.

Really? At first glance you'd have to think "how could the Labour leadership be so thick?", but the Socialists do have a habit of denying reality.

Yes, Brexit was a festering sore that needed lancing in the Labour heartlands. But also spunking trillions on freebies for those out of work paid for by the working poor, or saying you'd pay for it by taxing corporations whilst conversely saying you'd vote remain so they can offshore tax to Luxembourg, is just ludicrous.

Corbyn laughingly came out with a speech that said they needed a period of reflection. Which I take to signal he's not going anywhere soon and takes no responsibility for the crushing defeat.

Immediately after the general election, Labour leaders were also saying it was Brexit that had caused the problem and not their policies or the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

It's even been said that some Labour MPs have called their constituents thick for voting Conservative.
Way to go guys, blame the people you ignored for decades for giving you an electoral slap.

No, you need to start supporting the working classes whose votes you rely on and you have been consistently ignoring for decades.

The working poor understand that unfettered unskilled depresses their wages and also increases competition for job places. That's why they voted to leave the EU. They want immigration limited to people with skills we need. No more cheap labour for the big corporations: lets start improving wages and living standards for the working class.

They don't want (as Labour voted to in this year's party conference) to give illegal or undocumented immigrants the automatic right to settle.

They also don't want those immigrants to have automatic access to welfare, the welfare that the working poor pay for in taxation.

They don't want immigrants to have automatic access to education and housing and all the other things that taxation pays for. The working poor are burdened with enough tax, they don't like other people that haven't paid to get things for free.

They also don't want anyone in the world to have access to the NHS they pay for.

The working class believe in fairness and equality. They saw that Labour's 2019 manifesto was unfair, unjust and unequal.

Despite the delusions of the Labour leadership, the working class rejected their manifesto wholeheartedly. They are not put on this earth to slave away for the rich for a pittance, neither are they put on this earth to pay for everyone else in the world to get free education, housing and health care. They want their country to be fairer, more just and more equitable.

Deliver that  Labour, and the working class will vote for you without hesitation.

What of the Labour leadership that brought them to such catastrophe? I predict nothing will change.

Not the policy, nor the leadership. I predict Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters along with bouncer McDonnell will strive to stay at the helm. The cult of Corbyn and the Momentum acolytes will see to that.

After all it wasn't the dear leader's fault they lost, it was the media, the J*ws, Twitter, YouTube political bloggers, the weather and a vast number of other excuses including the thick, gullible Northern voters.

No, no, no, it wasn't dear leader Corbyn's fault. He is sainted and above reproach. If only the voters would listen to him....

Monday 16 December 2019

Denial of the Labour Kind. Chapter 1. History (Laying the seeds of failure)

Okay, so here's my reflection on Labour's crashing election defeat, their response and where I think they will go from here. A bit of a different layout, I need to sectionalise this blog.

So, in this chapter let's lay out the background for Labour's defeat.

Chapter 1. History.

Labour was borne out of a necessity for a political force to represent the people. Those in the mills and factories that were exploited by rich owners. Labour's ideals were better living conditions, working standards and a requirement for equality.

Initially, with the support of the Unions Labour became strong enough so that it could win the General Election of 1946. Almost immediately it went to work improving living standards. The main thrust of this being the inauguration of the NHS in 1948.

Since the 1950s however, there has been a sad decline in the standards of the Labour party. The party gained a elitist core, just like previous Socialist institutions. The "Intelligentsia" who think themselves better than the common working man they are supposed to represent. For decades the Labour party moved from their primary focus.The low point being the 1970's where Labour were held to ransom by the all-powerful unions. Finally bringing the country to it's knees in 1978/79 and hurting the very people it had striven to help way back when it was formed.

The Socialist experiment of the late '70s brought forth the mighty Margaret Thatcher. A thorn in the socialist side and a very bitter adversary of the unions. She effectively smashed and Neutered the unions to an extent that they could only play in their own paddling pool. The Labour party consigned itself to irrelevance for a decade of more. All the time moving further away from their original goal of bettering the lot of the working man. After all if you're not in power, you're not making the rules.

During the Thatcher years, Labour circled the drain, failing to find a credible solution to the initial prosperity that the Tory government created by using oil revenues and selling assets like nationalised industries. All the while wages in real terms fell like a stone. After the massive unemployment of the early eighties, the working poor would take anything. Wages were massively depressed and did not recover in step with the economy.

John Smith started the reform of the Labour party, by curtailing the extremist left-wing elements who essentially wanted a Marxist party. Unfortunately John died before he could reap the reward of a truly moderate Labour party being in power. Instead the Red Tories emerged out of the Labour party, led by Tony Blair. He looked and talked like a Tory. He was in link step with the big corporations.
He promised to BE the Tories, promising not to change things too much for the big corporations and thereby winning himself the support of the Murdoch media empire.

This "New" Labour party did little to increase living standards for the working poor. The only notable exception being family tax credits. By now wages had fallen so badly in real terms that it required the Labour government to step in an syphon taxpayer's money to prop up the wages of people with families. In the most convoluted and inefficient way possible: by paying the tax out in PAYE and then applying to a separate agency to pay some of that tax back.

As well as the decline in wages, the Blair years saw the housing price bubble start to inflate. As opposed to the previous Tory governments, the Labour government saw house prices as a way of (wrongly) making ordinary people feel more well-off by inflating house prices.

The Blair decade in power also fostered an elitist, entitled attitude, just like it had done with the Tories and their years of power. The deceit over the Invasion of Iraq brings into sharp focus the level of duplicity in the Blair government.

The sense of entitlement was best shown by Gordon Brown. The wannabe PM. The eventually manoeuvred Tony Blair out of the picture, only to be tripped up by his elitist attitude. His comments about Gillian Duffy during a tour of Rochdale, calling her a "Bigoted Woman" when she took him to task about the economy and immigration summed up the attitude of the Labour party at that time.

They were out of touch. They had allowed a huge influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe which depressed wages of the working poor even further. They saw the patriotic working class as right-wing (even though they still voted Labour). They failed to support the working class.

We had suspicions of where their allegiances lay,  but our suspicions were confirmed when Gordon Brown ordered the bailout of the banks. His chums in the Banks and the City of London had made a catastrophic financial error, but instead on letting them fail and mitigating the affects on the poor directly, Gordon Brown chose to support the bankers, propping up their six-figure salaries and their corrupt institutions.

Along with the Bigoted woman comment, the working class saw by their actions that the Labour party and the political elite had turned their back on them.

In 2005 the working class could no longer vote for Labour, but also could not decide who could best represent them, so brought forward a hung parliament.

In 2015 thanks to his promise of a referendum on EU membership, David Cameron's Conservative party were elected with a slim majority. Enough to push through the legislation for the referendum.

In 2016 the working class geared up to give the elites of the Labour and Conservative parties a bloody nose. They had been ignored for decades. Even the Labour party, the party that supposedly represented their interests had left them in the cold and instead had depressed wages and bailed out the bankers with taxpayers money.

The 2016 referendum was a chance to make a point. And boy, did we. The shocked faces on the televisions during morning of the 24th was to put it bluntly marvellous.

But then...… the machinations of Parliament, desperately trying the reverse the decision. The outright lies of the 2017 election, the promises of honouring the result, all fell apart when it came to the crunch.

MPs finally showed who they were working for.

So we waited for our opportunity... again.

Election Post Mortem.

Well, wasn't Thursday night a treat! One of the best election nights for decades and one certainly for the YouTube vloggers who streamed their opinions through the night.

I mean, where do I start?

First, it's quite clear the electorate has resoundingly rejected the remain option. That's rejecting the result of the referendum (the Lib-dem option) and also having a second referendum on the proposed plan with the option to remain (The Labour party option).

Like I've said before, it is REMAIN that should have been taken off the table by Labour and the other MPs in the previous Parliament, NOT the no-deal option.

The Lib-Dems, who proposed reversing the referendum decision to exit the EU, were given a kicking, even losing their leader Jo Swinson. I'm sure she thought that in remain-voting Scotland, she'd be safe on an anti-Brexit ticket. She was wrong.

The other good news from the night was that ALL of the MPs that left the parties they were elected under in 2017 and formed various independent factions, or moved to the Lib-Dems lost their seats. Quite right too. No-one likes a turncoat. All the bollocks about "I haven't changed, but my party has" (The most lazy excuse not to stand in a by-election) was absolutely rejected by the electorate. You can't get elected and then change sides without the voters behind you. If you change sides, then you test your position in a by-election. Period.

Finally, we come to the biggie, the really big news of the election: the collapse of the Communist-led Labour party. The so-ca;lled "Red Wall" of the Midlands and North lost a number of seats. Some wards having been staunchly Labour for decades. These wards didn't even vote Tory back in the Conservative high-water mark of the Eighties.

It's quite clear that the UK rejects Communism whether it's Corbyn Communism-lite, or the full on Maoist variety. It just isn't palatable to the British palate.

Wrapping it up in promises of free broadband, or anything else, just won't wash. The UK rejects the far-left lunacy that was the Labour manifesto.

The interesting thing is the complete denial of the reasons for Labour's losses. They blame the media, Brexit, the J*ws (just reinforcing the reports of Labour anti-Semitism), they even blame (drum roll...) the voters!

Yes, the gullible, racist, thick voters that couldn't see the promised land that Labour had ready for them...

I'm going to do a blog especially about Labour's denial to face reality and where I think they will go in future.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to Prime Minister's question time this week. Let's see what questions Corbyn comes up with. I see already in the press that there are reports of Boris wanting to make privatisation of the NHS impossible by legislation. I hope he does, although any new legislation involving the NHS needs to be scrutinised with care, because changes to legislation can provide back-doors to changes that are unwanted.

I can't see Corbyn doing anything but his usual soundbite special, where he provides a series of soundbites for his Twitter echo-chamber.