To wonder where the left has gone?

[KenAdams]

Ironically, this is somewhat of a rant.

Is everyone too scared to stand up to the constant hate filled rants for fear of being called "woke"?

Is the constant inference that VAWG is only perpetrated by brown men not worth standing up to?

Is the rhetoric that all of our problems are caused only by small boats and not legal migration or billionaires not problematic? For the record, I believe it is a problem, but not the only problem and not even the biggest problem. I believe the system is the problem.

The increasingly hostile movement against anyone that is non white is making people fearful of going about their every day lives and people seem to just want to sit on the sidelines and refuse to call it out.

Where is everyone?

I feel like this post might turn into a gaslighting shit show, but fuck it, I've had enough.

She won't because it might cause cognitive dissonance that a man with an educated accent and international, mixed race family background might suddenly be pointing out the sort of stuff that only the great unwashed "racists" did.

This is a joke. Since the 2010's the left has been galloping towards a leftoid abyss clutching the Overton Window. The correction to this has not even taken place yet.

Did you actually see the 'festival' of masked jihadis acting like a militia and shouting belligerent slogans? Some had weapons. Many leftwing and BAME Mumsnetters seem to live in an alternate reality.

Right, that is it. Institutional racism is the go to answer as always.

I went to a girls secondary school and it was the most toxic place I have ever been in my life. I can easily imagine and it will not be peace,kindness, roses and motherhood. It will be women assiduously polishing selected men's balls, legions of pick me's, class monitors zealously taking down the names of those infracting the pettiest rules, airheads squealing over boybands and the sexy girl athletes, bullying via social exclusion and perennial victims making the same stupid and dangerous choices over and over again and whining why it never works for them.

Society is crap not just because of toxic masculinity but because many women genuinely seem to think they don't shit and if they do, it doesn't stink. Current fashionable thought is that in the oppressor-oppressed dynamic, only one party is at fault. Predators cannot exist without prey.

That is a convenient excuse, do you have any evidence to support that?

In the real world, I think there's a lot going on. For example, I read that the far right wanted to stage a march in Whitechapel. They weren't allowed, and instead the council had a festival with acts from all the diverse communities that make the area up.

I certainly wouldn’t call a very large crowd of men dressed in black, some armed, with their faces covered so the couldn’t be identified by the police, screaming for the death of another racial group, and proclaiming taking control of the area for Islam, blocking roads as displays of dominance as a ‘festival’ or at all ‘diverse’.

I notice there was a clip of the sort of naive leftists like this PP telling one of these masks Islamic extremist that they were on the same side and getting told ‘no we are not’ by the masked up man. Like the leftists who helped bring the oppressive Islamist regime to power in Iran and were promptly executed by them once they were in power.

Yes, being detached from the concerns of WC and low income people is exactly what I mean by 'not left enough' because fighting class and wealth inequality is what 'left wing' means to me and many other WC people, and that should be the focus.
So much as the left has lost its way in becoming rent an ally for niche causes that don't benefit WC people, equally it would be wrong to pander to the idea that this or that group in society is the cause of their hardship.
WC and low income people are disadvantaged because resources are disproportionately in the hands of the privileged. They are not adequately rewarded for their labour and they face barriers to accessing opportunities gatekept for the already advantaged.
For this reason when there is a problem Iike poorly executed approaches to migration they are at the sharp end, as they are with any other problem.
However this is a symptom of their hardship not the cause. WC people voting for right wing parties may find this one symptom alleviated, but the price for this will be that the true illness will become much worse.

Can you just ask Ann Russell to clarify exactly how many people have been murdered by banks and how many women raped by them please?

We are not ‘punching down’ on the violent men who have entered our country with an intention to kill us. Over the last 20 years, hundreds of lives have been lost to terrorist attacks and thousands have been injured. The vast majority of terrorist attacks are carried out by Islamists, either immigrants or sons of immigrants.

Ann Russell may be good at cleaning but her political analysis is rubbish.

You don’t win over the working class by telling them they are wrong. That they are not experiencing what they are experiencing.

As for being adequately rewarded for their labour - that is why they are looking to the right.

please can you lay out how she reached the numbers she did? The latest costs for hotels and supports for people arriving by boat etc is £15 billion or over £200 per person. And that doesn’t include cost of benefits, nhs care, education etc for that given permission to stay.

I never suggested you do. Of course we should listen to what people are experiencing.
Where I have a problem is when that extends itself to manipulating people into believing that what they are experiencing is caused by something thats suits your agenda, while ignoring the real causes that don't. Which it what I see happening here.
I've said this before. 'The Right' don't give a damn about the struggles of the WC. Their ideology is either that's their god ordained place in the world, or it's their own responsibility to work harder to improve themselves. Not one would be in favour of policies that might result in a fairer distribution of wealth and opportunity.
The WC are ignored, sneered at and avoided. The 'poor white boys' we're suddenly so concerned about are typically framed by the privileged as dangerous, stupid, lazy, undesirable, until they are suddenly useful to push an agenda against an even more despised group.
Any WC person who feels this is going to change once the right have used them for their purposes is going to be sorely disappointed. Because get rid of the immigrant men, and the poor white boys are going to take their place again as lowest of the low.

I never suggested you do.

But you just did. Poor working class people manipulated by the right, unable to better themselves. As for the ‘poor white boys’; those are the ones the left proclaim are far right racists.

Ordinary working class people no longer feel that “the left” are on their side.

The reason for this is that the left loudly obsess about causes such as Palestine and welcoming immigrants at the expense of traditional left-wing causes such as boosting employment, decent and affordable housing, well funded public services and the like.

This leaves a hole in which the likes of Reform (who really have the interests of the wealthy at heart) attract votes by pretending to be on the side of the working class who are suffering from
levels of poverty unseen since before Second World War.

Struggling British people (of all colours and religions) perceive (rightly or wrongly) that those arriving illegally get handed everything on a plate and go
to the front of the queue (taxis to GP appointments etc).

That is the problem that the left need to address.

To those who say Labour needs to get back to its socialist roots, didn’t that happen under Corbyn? Remind me of the election result again?

What is needed is a Labour Party with policies like those it had in the 1960s, or
in 1945.

Not the “Tories in disguise” version that we have now (and had under New Labour) nor the Palestine-obsessed 6th-Form debating society that we were offered by Corbyn and co.

i thought ‘the left’ was supposed to care about the poorest in our society. However, they don’t seem to realise that all these people coming in from other countries, legal or not, are competing for all the low-cost housing and the low-skilled jobs, making it difficult for the people already here to find housing and work.

Race doesn’t come into it. Hull is full of immigrants from all over the place. It’s an absolute nightmare now and so many areas have been completely decimated and are no-longer anywhere I’d ever go. Fighting and shouting in the streets. Crude behaviour towards girls. It’s awful.

Don’t get me started on the impact on public services.

I think people who don’t care about this issue or don’t see it as one, aren’t living with it.

I'm drawing a distinction between listening to people speak about their experiences and identifying the cause of that experience. Right wing people identify the cause as being immigration. Left wing people identify the cause as being wealth and class inequality.
Poor white people have been the most visible perpetrators of racist behaviour. This doesn't mean they are inherently racist, more that they've been used to fire the bullets made for them. Many WC people are not remotely racist. Some are, or can be encouraged towards it, and these people have been made good use of by the right.

So you listen to them and then tell them they are wrong?

Blocking free speech is a slippery road. People might offended by a far right point of view, which is fair enough, but others may be offended by a far left/woke/call it what you will point of view. Which is also fair enough. 🤷‍♀️

Do we ban everyone from all sides expressing themselves? Extreme views, from whatever point of view, will offend some people, but has anyone got the right not to be offended?

I’d sooner keep free speech and just choose for myself what I listen to/watch/download.

Do you not see the distinction I'm making between experience and cause of experience? Both sides can listen and agree that WC people are correct that their neighbourhoods are run down and they feel unsafe. However the two sides then diverge in what they believe to be the cause and the solution.

You mean that lovely diverse festival in Whitechapel that ended up resembling an ISIS rally?

With masked men dressed all in black calling for death to other groups and for Sharia in the UK?

That festival?

The Far Right and religious extremists are two sides of the same coin, frankly!

You are still just telling them they are wrong.

The Overton window has shifted significantly rightward imo.

I'm old, so can remember the Wilson governments of the 1960s and 70s. They would be regarded as far left now, and Labour under Starmer are more like the Tory governments under Heath. Consequently, the left has become fragmented and marginalised. I doubt if the Corbyn/Sultana party will make much difference, either. It'll be just another to add to the long list of small parties on the left.

But there is still plenty going on. Check out your local "Stand Up to Racism" group, OP, and see what they're up to in your area. Where I live, there was a big march in the nearest city two weeks ago, a local event last weekend, another in a nearby town this weekend and in two weeks time there will be a big demonstration at the nearest asylum seeker hostel. Plus people have raised funds towards the cost of repairs to a mosque that was firebombed a couple of weeks ago. All these events have been well attended, and this is in Sussex, hardly the sort of urban area where the left have traditionally thrived.

Sussex is exactly the sort of area the current ‘left’ represent.

The mosque that had a car firebombed in front of it was fundraising before the car fire incident.

Middle-class, university-educated Labour party supporters / Guardian readers / 'left-wing activists' have long rested on the comfy assumption that their, often theoretical, concerns align with the working class they originally intended to rescue.

They have ignored the social and cultural gulf between their classes and have hugely overestimated their own understanding of the demographics and socio-economics of their adopted politics. In my lifetime experience working with highly academically qualified people, the progressive left politics they all defaulted to was often just as emotional and simplistic as a George cross on a roundabout.

The 'left' - an increasingly meaningless term - have long abandoned the industrial working class and its inheritors to champion a whole range of racially, sexually, culturally different 'others' instead and dismissing working-class community concerns - about immigration and lack of cultural integration in particular.

I don't think I've ever been able to explain to progressive-left-identifying colleagues what working people in established communities, outside of the professional classes in well-kept urban and suburban centres, feel like when they can't see the mechanism by which a seemingly endless stream of new people are billeted in their already struggling and fragmenting neighbourhoods, knowing their local Labour politicians will only scold them if they raise it, or worse, will explain that the same intangible forces are oppressing both groups, but sadly the complainers are not educated enough to understand it.

In many working class inner city areas of Birmingham, Bradford or London you would struggle to find a white working class men or women in order to tell them they are not affected by immigration.