Labour is betraying women

Maybe what women need to do to get a fair hearing from Labour is to club together and buy Keir some nice suits.

One of the things we used to take the piss out of Tony Blair's government for was the obsession with styling - you know, Barbara Follett telling Robin Cook that he should wear earth tones.

That doesn't seem so bad now. If you're promoting Angela Rayner as the representative of working class women, "stylish but affordable" could be a really good brand for her. Putting her in designer labels seems to miss the point.

I wouldn't let Rayner style herself, because left to her own devices she makes some very weird clothing choices, but surely it isn't beyond Labour to call in Gok Wan for a consultation.

Because, you know I hate to be cynical, but one might start to think that the trappings of power are more important to them than doing right by the voters.

Rayner surely knows that lots of people struggle to afford clothes. Or if you don't struggle exactly, you might still budget for it. I need a new pair of shoes, but I'll probably put that off until next month when I can spend a bit more on a good pair that will last.

Angela Rayner has been in a well paid job for quite a few years. She's even better paid now that she's a cabinet minister. Nobody elected her to be a fashion model.

Dear lord, it took Cherie Blair quite a few years to earn a reputation for liking freebies.

Great post, Resister.

The upper echelons of Labour have utterly debased themselves. I find myself in agreement with LOJ:

"Can we agree on something.

If a Tory leader

a) Backed policies which condemned vulnerable children and pensioners to poverty

b) While accepting £100,000 worth of freebies on a massive salary

Labour supporters would unite in outrage. Yes or no?

www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/18/keir-starmer-100000-in-tickets-and-gifts-more-than-any-other-recent-party-leader"

x.com/owenjonesjourno/status/1836352992645169462?s=46&t=WHoOZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

Their response seems to be "OK
OK we'll put a stop to the free clothes". Nothing said about the holidays, parties, pass to no10 for a donor or box at Arsenal. No real apology or contrition. Part of justifying letting another man dress you (and your wife) was that they needed to look good. Really? Rayner garbled something about being working class as part of justifying the free clothes. It's risible.

It would be more noble - and honest - to have dressed to your budget and then told any critics in no uncertain terms where to get off if they'd dared criticise any of them for doing so. That would have formed an opportunity to demonstrate they're in touch and normal.

But here we are instead.

Meanwhile they're happy to let pensioners freeze. No wonder ol Free Gear has plummeted in the polls.

Has there ever been a shorter honeymoon?

The whole premise of Labour's campaign was that the adults would be back in charge. Look at the manifesto, and once you get past all the pictures of Keir in heroic poses, it bangs on constantly about service and high standards in public life.

What we're seeing at this point is a government that's riddled with cronyism, whose leader is more addicted to freebies than Boris Johnson - which I suppose is an achievement - and disturbingly keen on euthanising granny.

Or indeed that anyone at this point with a plan and a bit of oomph might be a better answer than the lot of wibbling twits we have.

That's the danger.

I don't think Nigel Farage would want to be PM. He throws bottles from the back, like Corbyn.

The only vision that the Labour Party are offering right now is that Nigel Farage might be the answer to everyone's prayers.

That's how bad it is.

I don't think I've seen a better take-down of where the Labour Party has gone wrong than this thread. Can they come to their senses? Although there's plenty of good people in there doing their best, I'm sadly not optimistic. They used to think, we have to get the vote of the PMC, cos the w-c will vote for us anyway. Isn't it case of, more the other way round now? The PMC aren't going to start voting Tory in any great numbers anytime soon. If the Labour Party had a better vision to offer working-class people, perhaps the whole country would benefit?

I'm pretty sure that there were many posters who told us that we would enter the golden sunlit uplands just as soon as we elected a Labour government. Why are none of them telling us how we are misinterpreting what is actually happening?

Yeah, I always thing the PMC are really missing some insight on this.

It's not completely true, but I think that is no far as the Tories represent a kind of traditionalist position (so not so much libertarian types, but people whose wealth was more attached to land and the countryside) they have a lot more in common with working class people than the PMC types.

Some of that is down to urban vs rural, but even for labouring classes in towns and factories, there are a lot of commonalities in terms of values between them and the landowner class. I think a lot of it is about the "somewhere/anywhere" or local vs globalist. Even when you find MC people who are ostensibly anti-globalist, often practically they are living a very international kind of lifestyle, they don't have deep roots anywhere, and in some cases they are attached to a kind of socialist rhetoric that is in it's own way equally globalist.

WC and the Boris Johnson types tend to be naturally conservative, value hard work, close community ties, self-reliance, and sense of place, and see traditional family and community arrangements as being mainly positive and supportive for people. They aren't necessarily so concerned with class mobility either, as in, solving social issues by having everyone go to university and become members of the PMC.

I think that many 'working class' people liked the humorous and unvarnished way in which Boris Johnson spoke. When it came down to it, he was direct and articulated key values well.

Clem Attlee was a proud Old Haileyburian and even owned a top hat.

Harold Wilson, I suppose, was the great example of succeeding by sounding more working class than you really are, but Sir Keir Starmer KCB KC ain't no Harold Wilson.

They worked for a long time on an assumption that working class people would automatically hate Boris Johnson. But for a working class voter, Boris is so far removed from my experience that he may as well be a space alien. He became unpopular with working class voters because he fucked up in government, not because of what school he went to. The people who really hated him for his background were Guardian columnists who were slightly less posh than him.

In my experience, Johnson got the benefit of the doubt initially from many working-class voters, cos he 'that funny bloke off have I Got News For You'. But it didn't take long for them to wise up.

I use the term most loved to mean, the ones who got voted in with a wave of support

They are completely wrong. All our most loved PMS have been posh white boys, apart from Maggie who just sounded ridiculously posh.

Centre left parties around the world have mostly become parties representing the sectional interests of the PMC classes.

There's a theory beloved by highly educated middle class socialists, that working class people have a deep hatred of the rich and/or posh. Look how readily Labour people bang on about Tory toffs.

They're not entirely wrong about that - think of how tone deaf a George Osborne or Rishi Sunak can be when telling us to make sacrifices. But they're definitely not entirely right about it either.

They worked for a long time on an assumption that working class people would automatically hate Boris Johnson. But for a working class voter, Boris is so far removed from my experience that he may as well be a space alien. He became unpopular with working class voters because he fucked up in government, not because of what school he went to. The people who really hated him for his background were Guardian columnists who were slightly less posh than him.

If working class voters hate any class of people, it's middle class managers, public sector administrators etc who boss them about and tell them what to do. Now look at the jobs Labour MPs did before entering Parliament. It would be even more interesting to look at the jobs their parents did.

Interesting detail from the last election - in one of Lord Ashcroft's focus groups, he asked about Labour's proposed tax on school fees. None of the focus group participants had kids at private school, but they all hated the idea. They thought it was a tax on aspiration. Many people are also aware of how good Labour MPs are at getting their kids into those nice comprehensives that are grammars in all but name.

Couldn't agree more with both @TempestTost and @Pluvia . I live in a Red Wall constituency myself, and most of the LP members I know are older, working-class people. But they don't direct the party any more.

I suspect this is why the sense of betrayal. Those voters are voting for a party of decades ago, on tribal memory. That's why we expect better of Labour.

Labour are now out-Torying the Tories.

Sadly I think you're absolutely right.

I would argue that although some of those people exist, they very much represent what the party was, not what it is now.

The policies the party has no longer represent those people, their needs, interests, or values. Which is why people like that are no longer reliable voters for the LP. Assuming each party stayed where it was now (which of course won't be the case but notionally) what would be the chances those families would continue to see the LP as representing them or even an important part of who they are.

It's pretty clear every time they talk they despise people like that, except when they need to wheel them out to establish some kind of credibility.