The 'progressive left' - a vent.

[CassOle]

Arrrrgggggggghhhhhh!

No, I don't want to join the Omnicause, thank you.

Petition to rename them the regressive left.

Not even sure they're all that left, either.

Most of whom will have probably already left the Labour Party by now. And the new Corbyn/Sultana party is, unsurprisingly, another missed opportunity, as noted upthread.

There's a small left wing group I'm familiar with who, a few years ago, were patting themselves on the back for having a majority of women on their steering committee (it's a TWAW group but to be fair they were biological females). This showed they were being truly intersectional.

I kid you not, every single one of those women was an Oxford graduate.

The idea of socialism that I grew up with, which is working class representation, is completely alien to most modern leftists. If they were being honest they'd admit that they hate and fear the working class. They've certainly got no concept of how to have a conversation with working class people.

I expect the Corbyn/Sultana party will have the same problem - yet more Cultural Studies bullshit.

It's interesting, I find in so many ways the left and right have flipped causes. To the point where I think it has become difficult to talk about "being on the left" meaningfully.In fact a number of the old hippies I know, people who moved to where I live in the 70s to escape the American draft and get "back to the land" now seem to be getting involved with conservative politics. It's truly weird.

Just as an example, up until three minutes ago, people on the left were generally suspicious of global capitalism, international trade deals, trading blocks, and free trade. As well as movement of labour and movement of capital.

Just as soon as Trump in the US started to talk about these things, they became coded far right - the most bizarre flip I have ever seen and people don't seem to even realise they did it. And while I appreciate people may not think Trump's plans will actually work, or may think that his policies are working to contradictory ends, I would have expected them to realise that when he is talking about this stuff he was taking over left talking points. Not centre left, but pretty hard economic left.

Similarly the flip with attitudes to Big Pharma on the left have left me with my jaw on the floor. I remember when Mother Earth News was a lefty publication.

I also would say, I don't think this is the first time we've seen serious failings on the left. The right has had to some extent to deal with, as in integrate, some of its historical and ideological fuck-up tendencies. Sometimes I think the left has not so much, they've tended to no true Scotsman them, which means they are not on guard as they ought to be.

There is no left in the UK.

Labour isn't left and is proud not to be. They are totally torified, all about following the money market, etc..

There certainly is a progressive left. TRAs etc., aren't left. They are culture warriors, taking up trans issues on a shallow basis that somehow it is left.

In a way they know they are pointless, and constantly go over the top to try and compete with former issues, such as Section 28, which shows they neither understand history, nor (which as we all know isn't a surprise) that trans rights as trumpeted by TRAs are an attack on women's rights.

What has changed, and quite honestly it started with Thatcher is the "there is no such things as society". Everything now is about the individual.

Do you remember (and sorry cant remember his name) how the MSM got totally obsessed by the train union's leader because he didn't have a middle class voice. It was extraordinary.

That is how far the country as a whole has drifted from the (proably impossible) vision of post war Labour, which the 60s were the decade when it seemed to be bearing fruit. ie more working class people had been to university, were welcomed into the elite art world etc.. Then we had the 70s, and it been downhill since then.

And much as I like to blame politicians, and politicos, you have to wonder why so many people in the country have just accepted the drift right. The americanisation of attitudes and way of looking at the world.

For anyone who is interested in easy to digest history, and you have the time, try listening to this series about UK politics directly after WWII when may people thought there could be a progressive / left consensus and compare it to what it has become. BBC Radio 4 - Politically, Postwar, Trailer

Couldn't agree more, @IwantToRetire .

Great thread with many excellent points.

The UK labour party has a few years to stop fascism from getting into power. Is the left able to listen and change? Right now it looks unlikely

I don't know about it being Thatcher's point.

She went on to say in that very same speech that one of the reasons it was important for individuals to be productive was in order to allow them to contribute to the state as a whole and those in need.

That speech was part of the aftermath of the UK having to be bailed out by the IMF. Her point was that there is not some kind of unconnected money-producing entity called "society", like some Platonic form made real. When the state offers a benefit, it comes from the productivity of real working people. And when we expect a benefit from the state, that represents the labour of our fellow citizens who have contributed.

Good wages, benefits, and the rest hadn't been fought for so that people would have to keep relying on the state to give benefits to their families, but so that people would be able to use their own wages in the way they want for their own families.

Two things strike me with this. One is that in the "socialist utopias" of the North, you bet there is a strong social pressure that everyone needs to work in order to fund the social benefits the state offers.

The other is that we're now in a position where we again have the state responsible for wealth transfers and benefits for working families, that effectively make them a kind of corporate welfare so that companies get away with paying the real value of a wage.

It's not actually very clear to me that the latter situation is better for workers, even if it is supposedly the solution of the "labour" party.

Sorry, but Queers for Palestine says it all. The love of the activist left for extreme Islam is, frankly, baffling. If Islam ever prevails there are a lot of Lefties in for a big shock.

When the Shah of Iran was overthrown all the Iranian communists and socialists were out rejoicing, and actively helped the return of the Ayatollah Khomeni in triumph.

He had them all purged and executed.

Sometimes it does seem like for certain people who identify "left", it's more about the over-throwing than anything else.

It doesn't seem to occur to them to consider what will come next.

We have a similar lesson in own history, the Levellers were big supporters of Cromwell, even though he was a rich landowner, as soon as they helped him overthrow the King and gain power he had them rounded up an executed. The Utopians are history's eternal useful idiots.

KeepTalkingBeth
The UK labour party has a few years to stop fascism from getting into power. Is the left able to listen and change? Right now it looks unlikely.

Tolerationism is the opposite side of the same coin as Fascism, the Labour party are in a race to dictatorship, they're not going to listen or change, they just want to win the race to be the dictator's.

Well it's not dating, it's having a conversation between people with opposing views. Sophia sounds like a fairly typical 19 year old if a bit more extreme than many.

I don't understand what this means:

Sophia I’m a gender abolitionist. He doesn’t like jargon, whereas I quite like that people use labels, because that makes it feel more real, as opposed to people thinking they’re abnormal.

edited for typo

The "left wing" political class at the moment, extremely middle class, appears to be living in a completely parallel universe to the rest of the country, and is every bit as tribal. Often very self-referencing, appears to see the working & lower middle classes are "them" (uneducated plebs who at best need educating into righteousness, although of course, the most middle class lefties will often trip over themselves to find ways of somehow "identifying" themselves as working class).

I agree with all of this. The hypocrisy is what gets me - you get progressive lefties sneering at the ‘uneducated plebs’ who want to display the St Georges flag, yet these very same people will happily wave a Palestinian flag on a march.

And yes to the middle class obsession with identifying as working class. There’s a lot of cherry picking which grandparents (or great grandparents) to foreground. So you get someone loudly proclaiming how one of their grandparents was a low paid factory worker in Hull, while keeping quiet about their three other grandparents who were all raised very comfortably in middle class villages in Surrey.

St George is venerated in Palestine of course , having been martyred there . As well as being a Christian saint , many Muslims equate him with al Khidr the ' green prophet '.
There is a shrine near Bethlehem where people of many faiths pray for his intercession. If he could sort all this out he'd be patron saint of the world....

I don't know about it being Thatcher's point.

Late at night so didn't go into more detail, but the other negative consequence of Thatcher was the selling off on the UK's assets.

This isn't about who runs things better but effectively in selling of rail, water, gas etc., which in monetary terms if still in the control of the Government would be assets in terms of balancing the books, has gone. Not just to private companies in the UK but to companies in other countries.

The biggest asset stripping was housing.

And without making it a party political point, it didn't work.

All of these assets, ie basic needs of day to day life are now the biggest worry for most people.

And that is because as private companies running these basic services their primary purpose is to provide dividents to share holders.

There was a paper published showing just how much this has cost us, and every day we are paying the price for that ideological decision.

Yeah, a lot of the 'Progressive Left' bombast is what used to be called Anarchist. Granted, anarchy can be far-right as well as hard-left: the two ends of the political circle meet somewhere around the point where dismantling the power structures means installing a new, absolute authority which demands obedience. Plenty of examples from history. They even use the same language, regardless of left/right positioning.

I've read great tracts of 'trans' theory, thinking this is just a rather brilliant anarchist technique - when you can make people and, crucially, authorities deny basic facts of life, punish those who refuse to lie as instructed, you undermine everything and can make them do anything. On paper, it's a post-modern thought experiment put into real-world practice. In philosophy, post modernism is self-consciously anarchist. Dangerous to bring it into public policy; I'm still bewildered that it's actually happened.

I keep up to speed, but think in words from the 1970s or thereabouts. They were more realistic, I feel!

Yes, it seems to have not worked as she hoped. Though the housing point is interesting. The idea seems solid, why keep people paying rent forever that won't turn into an asset? It almost seems like a way to keep the poor from getting on the property ladder. Had the population not continued to rise I wonder how it might have played out.

But it is important to remember that when you have an IMF loan you have very few choices , their demands in terms of economic management are heavy. And that had nothing to do with Thatcher.

In a way the last few governments have been in a similar position, as Starmer is discovering. If there is no way to produce funds, you have to cut. And tricks to produce some money - apart from actually raising productivity - seem to have run out.

why keep people paying rent forever that won't turn into an asset? It almost seems like a way to keep the poor from getting on the property ladder. Had the population not continued to rise I wonder how it might have played out.

That is the American view of housing, and never forget it was the collapse of the US model of the free market to provide housing failed that we all went into recession.

ie if the UK hadn't been such a passive follower of the US we could have followed a number of European countries, many traditional more right than the UK, that have a very sucessful social housing structure that has allowed people to live a far better life than paying hiked up prices to finicial companies that are benefiting from the shortage of housing. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city

It is a total disgrace, and somehow still the UK public buys into this nonsense of home ownership.

As the old saying goes, voters get the Government they deserve.

Denis Healey discovered - too late - that the IMF bailout was unnecessary. The Treasury had wildly over estimated the amount required to sort out public finances. But that's sort of their job ... they're always looking to cut spending.

The rising population wasn't relevant to
the failure of Right to Buy. What totally screwed it up was Thatcher's insisting that the resultant revenue could not be spent on building new houses to replace those sold. Instead that money must be used for current spending. Pissed away in other words Like the proceeds of privatisation in general. And it's not just foreign companies that own British utilities - foreign state bodies own them too , like SNCF the French national rail system.

Still I digress. None of the foregoing means anything to the lanyard people I expect....

Yes that's my experience too

What totally screwed it up was Thatcher's insisting that the resultant revenue could not be spent on building new houses to replace those sold. Instead that money must be used for current spending.

Absolutely, and every subsequent Government who could have changed that. More asset stripping.

I feel like I need to find my people. I wish I had a women’s rights group near me (I’ve searched online but can’t find anything 🙄)

The 2008 mortgage crises is quite a stretch, come on. That was caused by greedy people giving loans to those who couldn't pay, not by turning rent people were already paying into assets they owned. Many people did in fact do very well buying their home, unlike the mortgages that caused the crash, which ruined the people who had bought the homes.

You also keep ignoring the problem of the IMF loan, which necessitated the raising of large amounts of cash, and the selling off. of assets to raise it. That loan happened under, and because of, excessive spending under labour governments.

And much of the debt that necessitated the loan was at the council level. Councils that were faced with swathes of housing in dire need of repairs and absolutely no money to do them.

I always wonder what plans people have when they are so critical of what Thatcher did with this. It's not liek Labour has had magic answers either. Blair brought in crippling partnerships with private money. Gordon Brown sold off the gold reserve. And Starmer doesn't know what the heck to do.

I think what it came down to, and comes down to, is that you need productivity to have money to spend. And globalism has just been throwing a wrench in that in a big way since the 60's.

I don' t think Thatcher really wanted the state to own housing, ideologically. But whatever they did with the money, it seems like no governments are making real investments that will create real new productivity or even domestic economic sustainability. They sell off some assets and they spend.

Society seems to be living so far beyond its means.

Society seems to be living so far beyond its means

It is. It's like the world's one big Ponzi scheme. On economics, the environment, everything.