Your Corbyn/Sultana Party - Discussion thread - Part 2

[fromorbit]

The YP starting conference is in the ACC in Liverpool between 29-30 November so only three weeks off. With competing factions involving Islamic conservatives, every variety of Marxist/Communist, former Labour members, trade union activists, entryists from SWP and SPEW, splitters from the Scottish Greens, trans activists and actual left wing feminists [not the nice kind] it is difficult to underplay how much controversy there is likely to be. So we will need a second thread in advance.

Thus far following the internal drama of the UKs newest left party has taken a whole thread. It has been a wild ride and the party still does not have a name.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5394557-your-corbynsultana-party-discussion-thread

People who worked with Blair always said he was unusually good at this - if you briefed him, he might not get all the technical details, but he would very quickly grasp the politics of the issue, how it would play out in parliament and with the public.

It's something I often think about because Starmer has absolutely none of that instinct.

Someone else who used to be great at this was Ben Summerskill. The decline of Stonewall under his successors is an interesting story, but Ben was one of the most effective campaigners I've ever seen, and part of that was what the extremists in his own community derided - he had an instinctive sense for what MPs and public opinion would and wouldn't tolerate, and knew how to translate that into achieving winnable goals.

Johnson had this...for a while.
Today, only one politician. Farage.
You'd be stupid to bet against Farage making history at the next GE

Blair had genuine, wide-ranging, deep seated intelligence, even if he eventually succumbed to misplaced hubris. Thatcher had many of the same qualities, as did Johnson, albeit marred by many character flaws, mainly indecision based on solipsism as well as amorality. I really can’t think of any other politician in the same league. Alex Salmond? But like Johnson, flawed.
I don’t think Farage is in the same league. Weirdly, to me he comes over as a much more European-style politician, insinuating himself into the gaps between conventional political sensibilities and astutely exploiting people’s insecurities and prejudices.

He may have an instinct, but personally not sure he has any vision apart from 'freedom to do things'. I saw he was out with the boxing day hunt supporters, making a show of how he was " in touch with country people".

He was seemingly a very unpleasant person as a teenager and I'm not at all sure that people really change their essential spots.

I'm three weeks younger than Farage, and very nearly went to Dulwich College, we'd have been school colleagues.
With my E. European surname, and very passive shy character at school, I'm sure he'd have crossed swords with me.
Then again, I was a real oik at school, in fact my school was rife with very unpleasant behavior from so many.
And most people especially older Gen X and Boomers are aware of these days and attitudes.
Why we have so many trigger warnings before dramas and sit coms of the day.
For me, my vote for Farage comes down to the formal policy platform, philosophy on governing, his assembled team.
Once I see that, I'll decide.
Likely will happen not much in advance of the GE.
At the moment, he's running on vibes and the caffeine boost he gets from winning elections, May being like a crateful of Red Bull in one go.

One of the things about Farage that you don't notice if you've only seen him on broadcast mode - he's got an ego, obviously, and loves the sound of his own voice like everyone else in politics, but when he's out among the punters, he hardly says a word. He's listening all the time. Sometimes he's asking questions.

It's quite rare to find anyone in politics who engages with voters like that. As a group, they aren't very good listeners. Gove is an obvious exception, though I've always thought he was a better journalist than politician.

I always think of Farage as twenty years older than me. In fact, he’s about ten years younger.
He seems to me a caricature of a type I thought disappeared in the 1970s. And I believe he’s genuinely racist. I remember him speaking on the radio about Obama. He called him “disgusting” and the real contempt in his voice stopped me in my tracks. It was quite shocking.

Empirically, constitutional monarchies have a good track record, I have never understood the sneering about them.

I agree that Gove is a better journalist than politician. His shenanigans with Johnson over Brexit were ridiculous. Also, I think his listening skills are part of his politeness, and he only really hears opinions he agrees with. When he’s poorly informed and pigheaded about something - for example education - his political instincts are way off.

I have tended to interpret those flaws in Johnson as essentially laziness, and lack of self-disapline in his personal life. If he'd had that he would have been very successful I think because aside from his political instincts he was very charming which is a fairly killer combination.

But laziness is a bugger.

To circle back to the subject, I've long believed that, though the right often fail at retail politics, the left have the disadvantage of being much more ideological and working on the basis of (often incorrect) theories about the voters. I think that undermines their ability to listen and reinforces their tendency for what Lenin used to call "patiently explaining".

We just had a hilarious example of that with the African guy who phoned into Lewis Goodall when Goodall was holding forth about Venezuela and regime change, and the African guy was how lots of African countries went downhill after colonialism. It was hard to weigh up his argument, because Goodall talked all over him.

It also became obvious that Oxford-educated Lewis Goodall has large areas of history where he doesn't know very much, like when he said Japan hadn't been colonised and it had done pretty well as a society. The problem with that is that Japan had one of the most brutal colonial empires out there, and switching from massacring Chinese and Koreans to a pacifist society making wristwatches is mostly thanks to the American occupation after WW2. But Goodall seems to imagine that he ex officio knows more than anyone else, and is in a superior moral position to anyone else.

Left wing politics has Lewis Goodalls the way the comedy scene has an endless supply of Marcus Brigstockes. And they wonder why voters don't like them.

We're going to see if all the caricatures of Farage are correct if as I suspect he makes history in 2029.
Thin skinned, can't work in a team, proto fascist, short tempered, Truss 2.0.
I follow Gawain Towler a lot, know Farage is working closely with James Orr, is formulating a big ground game, has a couple of big things to announce in 2026 (one of which will absolutely put the Tory Party in a massive bind).
While the Tories are in his slipstream, and Labour just cannot make Brits feel good in anyway, both looking to go on the attack that a vote for Reform will be a vote for the far right, Farage will instead make the political weather this year.
He's been politically astute enough to draw back from Musk and even Trump, knowing that US politics is not UK politics.
This suggests like Thatcher, Blair and at least to start Johnson, Farage has his finger on the pulse like no other politician in Britain.

I've heard that attitude to Obama from quite a few conservatives, particularly in the US. And not particularly racists or even white people.

I found it surprising because my feeling as an observer was that he had been a pretty solid political figure and person, whatever his partisan associations. But American conservatives seem to see his kind of politics as something much more unpleasant. Not about specific things he did so much, it seems to be about his political thinking.

Certainly in the last election cycle I was really unimpressed by him. He must have been complicit in the cover-ups around Biden's health, for some years, and he seemed to completely lack the political instincts he'd had previously. I think it was the video of him talking to a group of black men about why they should vote for Harris that I found most surprising, not from a partisan pov but because it was so clumsy and ineffective.

I've never seen that Obama merited the over-enthusiasm he got from UK liberal opinion. He certainly wasn't 'pro-British' (and, tbc, there's no reason why a US Prez should be) like might have have been said about Reagan. Big drone fan, though.

Obama is an unusually gifted politician in some ways, but he's also got this very annoying habit of admonishing the voters, with a strong implication that they aren't living up to standards he has set for them. I don't think many US voters thought they were electing Obama to be their dad.

I agree! I think a lot of ex monarchies have a residual desire to recreate one. There is a lot to be said for having a head of state who is non political; and i also think there is something in human societies which seeks out, or certainly creates, royalty - in one form or other.

I'm not entirely joking when I say the main value of the British monarchy is that it stops the Brits making Stephen Fry president.

Or Paddington

YUGE. Also very proud of the extra judicial killing of Bin Laden. Nowt says progressive like executing a man in front of his family in the middle of the night and then burying the body and all evidence at sea.

... and then asking the armed forces to swear allegiance to him

"you'll all be lovely wuvely soldiers. Soupy twist"

With regard to Obama, I recommend anyone who thinks he was ok, to watch Michael Moore’s film about the poisoned water available to the residents of Flint (mostly black).
It shocked me to my core! And made me understand why people were prepared to vote for Trump,

Funnily enough Michael Moore came into my mind today. He always got a lot of stick, but he was one of the few on the American Left who recognised what Trump was all about, and predicted he'd win at a time when many still saw him as a joke.

In the US I think celebrities sometimes fall into that role.

I think what I like about consttutional monarchy is the sense that the state is fundamentally about human relations. People are not citizens in a nation as part of a contract, where we all agree to the arrangement and the rules that govern it.

It's much more like a family, which you didn't ask to be born into, and where you don't like everyone, but you have to be stuck in even with your annoying aunt and weird cousin and make the best of it.

The celebrity thing is a real bugbear of mine. Yes, the entertainment industry has always leaned left, but not the way it does now. In the old Hollywood, a left wing atheist like Henry Fonda and a right wing Christian like Jimmy Stewart could be the best of friends, and most actors weren't overtly political at all.

I put the current situation down to two things. One is that in the 1990s, thanks to those two diamond geezers Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood became more or less an arm of the Democratic Party, and a very influential one. And then there was the advent of social media, so actors we used to only see in curated interviews when they had a product to sell, now they're on X or Bluesky all day long and sharing their opinions on everything and often just revealing themselves as idiots.

Do I need to know Mark Ruffalo's opinion on Venezuela? Do I even have confidence that Mark Ruffalo can spell Venezuela? Get back to acting in romcoms you silly man.

But it doesn't just affect the entertainment industries. You end up with the US Democrats running presidential campaigns that seem to think people will vote how celebrities tell them, and candidates like Hillary and Kamala that seem to treat the campaign as an excuse for partying with celebrities.

I'll say this for Joe Biden, when he was lucid, he didn't care about that stuff. If he was visiting a recycling plant in Pennsylvania, he didn't feel the need to bring Billie Eilish and the Jonas Brothers with him. That went against his whole persona as Blue Collar Joe, your union endorsed candidate.

If YP ever gets off the ground it will have a lot of the same thing, and if it doesn't then the celebs will migrate to the Greens. Corbyn in 2019 had more celebrity endorsements than any party leader ever. And that doesn't fill me with enthusiasm. Hardly a week goes by when we don't have an open letter signed by Olivia Colman or Charlotte Church or Steve Coogan, demanding the government do XYZ, and often the demands are daft, but everyone has to pretend to take them seriously.