To think a lot of left wing people are actually close minded?

[DeepFatFriar]

Close minded as in not receptive to other peoples views.

Disclaimer: i consider myself left wing.

But at the same time, I'm quite happy to have a talk with someone down the pub who might be anti immigration or anti abortion. As long as they've thought their point out properly, im open to debate and i dont feell offended by their views.
But it feels like a lot of the left wing people i come across just go into "racist twat! Fucking tory!" mode- like theyre incapable of seeing that situations are often a bit more complex than just this is right/thats wrong.

For example with Brexit, i voted remain and was gutted by the result - at the same time, i felt a bit irritated by fellow remainers "theyre all little englander tory twats" attitude to brexiters. Yeah, some of them are. Others just have a different POV, you know?

I was discussing this with my mum and she said back in her day (im assuming this means the 70s!) "conversation felt more nuanced".

It sometimes feels like a lot of left wing people just want to live in an echo chamber. I think you need to try and keep an open mind to different points of view. You clearly dont have to agree. But you can at least accept that people have different mindsets because they've had different experiences - it doesnt make them a worse person though.

Just yesterday in the Morrissey thread, there were lefties complaining about him being racist and then laughing that he had been called "gammon".

How do you know that they were "lefties" though? Plenty of Tories also think Morrissey is racist and plenty were very strongly in favour of remain.

LadyWithLapdog

If you state a trans women is not indeed a women see how long you will last
Even though it’s the actual truth

Danci - I don't believe you. More likely, your friends spouted some racist, homophobic, misogynistic shit at work.

Well this is another post that sort of proves the point of the OP and shows exactly the reason this sort of thing happens as well. Somebody says they vote Tory so they must be racist and misogynistic. No, it’s never that. And the incidentally, just out of interest, the VC I referred to claims £4 million pounds per year in expenses. That might give you an idea of why public sector bosses are not keen to have Tories who advocate careful public spending around them in their staff!

Incidentally, not friends of mine either. It’s incredibly, incredibly rare that it happens, because people in the public sector know if they’re Labour supporters, they keep their gobs shut. I do know since leaving the NHS (so people feel like than can be honest with you then) a lot of people behind the scenes have reservations. Particularly about wastage and organisation.

Just as an example, when Gordon Brown did quantative easing, I was one of a group of contractors hired on massively inflated wages for the NHS to do...nothing. We had fantastic job titles and sat in a lovely shiny office but we did absolutely bugger all. Our only purpose was to take the quantitative easing money and pump it back into the economy via our salaries. Meanwhile I know for a fact there were services on the ground short of staff or needing more manpower who didn’t get it. Typists 4 weeks behind with vital letters they needed to get out to patients with important information and similar. Yet in our shiny offices they would have consultants coming in for £2k per day giving completely useless and meaningless seminars about ‘blue sky thinking’ and ‘pushing the envelope’.

I quite guiltily voted Labour in 2010 because I knew I’d be out of a job otherwise. And we were by June, it was one of the first things Cameron did, cut out what they knew were useless non-jobs designed to move money into the economy rather than serving a purpose.

As I frequently did between project jobs I went back and did a few temporary jobs back in the NHS typing pools and saw how awful and understaffed they were and how they were struggling. I know people who have since left there who now their out of the NHS will admit to voting Tory because of waste and disorganisation. But if a contractor or temp who didn’t know the score was silly enough to express shock at what was happening their contract/assignment would be cancelled the next day. No racism or misogyny but ‘how can the government let this happen’?

I grew up in a very right wing area where to be a centrist was considered to be a lefty. I then moved to somewhere more left wing and being a centrist there was considered being a righty. I now live again in a right wing area. I have personally seen more shutting down from right wingers historically, but recently more from left wingers (their declaration not my assumption) which you'd think was odd given my locality.

Having said that, centrists are not immune to this either. It's definitely a spectrum wide thing.

danci If you still worked for the NHS you would perhaps understand just how much has been wasted with the reorganisation and redundancy costs under the Conservatives.

FormerlyPickingOakum

I can do a similar breakdown of the right wing

Do it! I'd love to read it. I recognise both the left wing tribes you describe, particularly the Establishment Pod type, because I worked in one of the organisations you mention. I find them deeply frustrating to talk to. They strike this pose of tolerance and respect for others' views, but in reality all that means is that if you go off the script, you become one of the people that need to be handled, rather than people who are One Of Us, and they'll stay quiet while you talk and use gentle words when they argue back, but they come at any discussion with the cast iron belief that they're right and you're wrong. The most frustrating discussion of this type that I ever had was with someone who put my views down to privilege, and then went on to explain to me how "our" privilege blinded us to the reality of others' lives, even though she was actually more privileged than me but didn't know it because we met at university and she didn't know that my upbringing was different to her default upper middle class one. That one still pisses me right off.

I actually - I'm from a part of the country where they used to say they weighed the Labour votes rather than counting them, but in the 2012 London mayoral election I voted for Boris Johnson. Then, in the 2015 Labour leadership election, while I obviously couldn't vote, I hoped that Jeremy Corbyn would get in. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn I think it's fair to say are pretty far apart in their politics but for me it was more a voting against than a voting for. I had a truly shitty time with the NHS in the 2007-2012 period while I was going through recurrent miscarriage, not just like waiting times but total careless incompetence, notes being lost and referral letters being written but never sent and things like that. And how rude and unpleasant some of the people were, it was a fucking horrible experience, I mean nobody enjoys recurrent miscarriage but in 5 years of hospital admissions in three different parts of the country I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who treated me with any care. It made the bereavements significantly harder to deal with. But when I spoke to my left wing friends about it, what came back was some very equivocal sympathy, with a strong suggestion that I was letting the side down by criticising the NHS. And like, although I grew up working class I have money now, and the NHS is the only bit of government apparatus I had much to do with as an adult - never had any contact to housing or social services or the dole office - I can easily imagine that anyone who does have contact to those services, if they're being treated in the same way (you should think yourself lucky that we're deigning to help you) then I can easily see how people might start moving towards UKIP or the Tories or anyone really, other than new Labour. I got to the point that when any of those well meaning identikit PPE graduates in suits came on the TV I had to turn it over, I couldn't even look at them.

Am I out of steam? No I'm not. Then came Brexit, and suddenly all these people that I know who speak about three words of French and are in their late 30s and settled in careers and nice houses in the home counties and London are bemoaning the fact that they now won't be able to take up the opportunity to go and work in Europe. I actually fucking live in Germany and precisely zero of these people asked me what I think. And what I do think is, I don't like change generally, and this change is ill thought out and has made lots of people like me vulnerable and has fucked up the NI/RoI border and I'm fed up watching the Tories try to have their cake and Labour try to eat it - you're not going to get a better deal than the Swiss, guys, and they have less single market access and more free movement then either of you want - but apart from that I can understand why people wanted Brexit. It's shite, if you're coming out of school and you don't have a job and you need experience, but you need a job to get experience, and you can't get your foot in the door at anything because there's this massive pool of labour from the whole of Europe and there's always going to be someone better than you. And there's lots of sneering talk about how British wouldn't lower themselves to e.g. fruit picking but good luck living off a fruit picker's wages in SE England for any length of time. The EU free movement gives maximum opportunities to the people who're the best able to take them (who will be fine if they can't work outside their home country) and just makes life harder for everyone else.
It kind of worked before the financial crisis, because there was enough tax money to keep benefits high and fund the NHS and schools and stuff properly so you could say OK, some people are not going to be able to compete in this cutthroat job market but we'll look after them, and the growth in the economy will keep demand for labour high enough that for most people it'll be easier to find a good job than it would have been otherwise. Then we had the financial crisis, and it was fucking big, and we're still 10 years later dealing with the effect, you know there are these massive debt overhangs of e.g. the Greek government, banks with tons of shitty commercial property on their books and stuff. This is the new world, it's not going away. And so like tax revenues are down, and it's not possible now to support those people who can't compete in a job market where supply is as high as ever but demand is much lower, and even if it were possible, we have the Tories in power and there's nothing they like more than to kick people who are unemployed as a result of the economic cycle. So what are people going to do? Cutting the supply of labour from the continent should push wages up and make it easier to get a job, all else remaining equal. It should also take the heat right out of the housing market. It's still a crap idea because of what it'll do to trade but if the government had made any effort to address the problems faced by the unemployed and working poor in the UK then maybe people wouldn't have been forced to this point, you know?

I still wonder how it happened. Was David Cameron really that fucking naively confident in his own abilities that after the Scottish independence referendum damn near went through at 45/55, he thought that nothing could go wrong? When the Remain campaign was having to sell "shit as things are, they can always get worse" to a population suffering the effects of the austerity on top of a fucking housing boom? Could he really be that arrogant? It's easy for me to think that it was planned, that he like Fox, Davis and the rest were simply using the vote as a way of turning the UK into a giant tax haven. But do you know I think that's the mistake that my Labour supporting working class family and friends have always made, looking at the Tories and thinking conspiracy rather than cock up. Because it's hard to believe that people in careers like that could be that shite at their job when back in my world I had trouble to find a Saturday job when I was at uni because I was competing with people that had families to support and were working two or three jobs just to pay the rent. How much better at their jobs they must be, these people, to be able to have so much power. That's what you think. But it's not true.

Right. Fucking hell. I might have to go and have a lie down after that.

@danci
One person disagreeing with something you have said proves that the whole of "the left" is closed minded?

That is a stereotype of an extreme left-winger drawn by an over-imaginative conservative. Maybe expand your reading sources?

Not from reading. All my family are left wing and most of my friends too and plenty of colleagues as I have worked mainly in the public sector. So it’s from conversations, not reading.

Not from reading. All my family are left wing and most of my friends too and plenty of colleagues as I have worked mainly in the public sector. So it’s from conversations, not reading.

So you don't actually know many Torie voters. Close-mindedness does not have much to do with whether you vote Conservative or Labour. It probably just relates to the people you know.

Danci - now you're just ranting. The tories are destroying the NHS. It's not efficiency, you have no idea.

Also that pathetic list of predictions?!

@toomuchtooold
Great post

Meetoo - I don't know why you addressed me about trans issues. I stay out of them because I don't know enough. I have my own views, probably limited, I read up if I come across a conversation and have the time. Is this even a left vs right thing?

👍@toomuch

Good post, toomuchtooold.

Well yes I do know a few. They do tend to be an awful lot quieter about it though (shy Tories) partly because of the type of vitriolic attacking from the left that the OP described.

And yes I do think they have more diversity of option and it’s much more nuanced.

There’s less of the black and white thinking of the left. I find on the left it tends to be benefits good, immigration good, Israel bad, privatisation bad.

But on the right it’s not a direct benefits bad, NHS good, immigration bad, Israel good, privatisation good mirror

I think that’s one of the reasons they can cherry pick lots of Corbyn’s policies, show them to people blind and then claim ‘everybody supports Labour policies when they don’t know they’re Labour’ because there are far more grey areas on the right.

I don’t know anybody Tory who wants to do away with the benefits system but I know several who are concerned about the freeze at a time when cost of living is going up. I don’t know any Tories who want to end free at the point of use healthcare, I do know lots who favour reform, increases spending and a move to a European style system. I don’t know any Tories who want to end immigration. I know lots who value diversity and are grateful for the skills it has bought us and the positive contribution to the economy. I don’t know any Tories who think atrocities against Palestinians are okay. I do know Tories who don’t attempt to ignore or play down some of the virulent anti-semitism of the Palestinian side or pretend that some on that side wouldn’t be happy with less than wiping Israel off the map. I do know some Tories who are anti-nationalisation, but I also know plenty who think that privatisation has failed in some areas where competition hasn’t proved possible to adequately stimulate (railways).

On the other hand, it’s very, very unusual to meet a Labour voter who is prepared to say in the presence of other Labour voters that perhaps there was a bit of piss taking regarding benefits in the 00s it might not be wise to repeat or the NHS could probably do with a bit of reform before we throw more money at it, or that some areas of privatisation have worked quite well or that we could maybe do with a bit less unskilled migration and a more efficient immigration system or that there are some quite unpleasant Palestinians.

Haven't RTFT but I feel social media has a lot to do with it. It's very easy to exist on a bubble of like minded people online (and profs fly offline too). If you only add ppl to your circle that your agree with, you're only going to have your own views enforced and not have to debate anything in a balanced way. The art of debate is severely lacking as there are hardly any tv or radio programmes that give time for anything more than a sound bite.

@MeTooDear A huge round of applause for that post of 23:17:16

I agree with you. My Dsis and her dh ourport to be left wing and/or liberal. But my dh and I often comment (privately) that they are really anything but liberal in their views because they cannot entertain the notion of anyone having another POV! Or rather everyone else's POV is wrong if it doesn't agree with theirs. It's a bit frustrating sometimes!

I think people of all political persuasions are mostly closed minded and listen to what they want to. The amazing long article in theatest London review of books on Grenfell tower and the reaction to it is a good, detailed account of lefty hysteria (I’m a lefty myself).

*purport

Although there are lots of people who float around in the middle and have a mix of views who get shouted down and are too scared to voice their views too. But I don’t think many lefties would call them lefties even though they hope they will vote with them.

@danci
You make some good points.
In reply I would say that I don't know personally any Labour voters or "Lefties" who hold the opposite of the views you mention. But I know it doesn't mean that they don't exist.
I still think that many people are lumping anyone with left wing views into the sheep like Corbyn supporter category and that simply isn't true. Just as not all on the right hold the extreme right wing views.
It's a spectrum.

I think BonnieF makes a good poing above. Like her, I feel like politics has changed around me, and left me high and dry.

As far as my own politics go, I would describe myself as liberal: ie, we should allow diversity of views and ways of doing things, along with support for the individual together with individual responsibility, together respect for a person's private beliefs. I would contrast this with socialism on the left, whose ideology is to treat people as part of a group, and traditionalism on the right, neither of which allow individualism or individual beliefs, public or private.

Back in the early 90s, liberalism was generally the preserve of the centre-left. The right, which was dominated by the Conservative Party, was stagnating. They were on the wrong side of every debate. The people thinking most carefully and articulately about the UK's future were Lib Dems or Labour - the latter of whom were increasingly thinking more in a liberal direction and less of a socialist one, as evidenced by the election of Tony Blair and the removal of Clause 4 from the Labour Party constitution.

Skip forward to now, and what's changed? Well, the Conservatives have been a lot more liberal in government this time round than they were in the 90s; partly because they've modernised, and partly because of Lib Dem influence, at least early on. Speaking of the Lib Dems, the treatment of Tim Farron shows how things have changed. In the 90s, it wouldn't have been a big deal that he was an evangelical Christian in his private life. Skip forward to 2015 and it was all anyone said about him. Incidentally, the Conservatives gained a lot of votes directly from the Lib Dems in that election. I suspect that part of the reason why UKIP emerged is because the Conservatives had moved in a liberal direction.

In the meantime, Labour have moved back towards the left and are increasingly going back to socialist ways of thinking - not yet economically, but certainly in terms of how society is analysed. This is bound to lead to a level of intolerance, because everyone has to fall within the rules of the group.

Within society generally, Marxist class analysis has come right back. You see it on these boards, particularly on FWR. Five or six years ago it simply wasn't there, or was the preserve of a few contributors. Now it is the dominant theme, and the reason why trans rights have become such a headache is because in Marxist analysis it pits one apparent oppressed class (transpeople) against another (women) and there is no ideological framework for working out how their rights should coexist. I suspect if the issue had arisen in the more liberal 90s, discussion would have been more generous and easygoing on both sides.

Having said that, I absolutely don't buy the notion that right wing people are any bit more tolerant. I have a Facebook "friend". His page is a constant rant against gays, greens, cyclists, public transport, foreigners, the EU, immigration, #Metoo, Muslims, and anyone who doesn't like Trump or Tommy Robinson or guns. There is no discussing any of the points he raises because he's simply not interested in rational discussion. I know plenty others like him, and I think their views are pretty well reflected in the media.

So I suspect what's actually happening is that those of us who remember the 90s instinctively expect only the liberal/left to be more tolerant and open-minded, and what we're actually noticing is not that the right is more tolerant, but that it's more tolerant than we expect it to be.

Great thread!