• We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies from this website. Read more here

Politics Today

Alistair20000

Very well known Exeweb poster
Joined
May 5, 2009
Messages
52,249
Location
Avoiding the Hundred
If so he wasn't very effective. I remember it on a hoarding near SJP
I think Major vetoed it before it was used more widely. It was a daft poster.
 

tavyred

Very well known Exeweb poster
Joined
Aug 23, 2004
Messages
13,915
I don't think you need to be a raging Trot to attend a picket line. When you reach the pearly gates just ask Shirley Williams
The problem of course if you’re not to be accused of hypocrisy you can’t attend picket lines in opposition but then stay away when and if you become the governing party.
 

arthur

Very well known Exeweb poster
Joined
Aug 18, 2004
Messages
11,490
I think Major vetoed it before it was used more widely. It was a daft poster.
I fear that, for once, you are mistaken. It's not often a vetoed poster wins an award!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Labour,_New_Danger

 

Spanks

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Jul 9, 2019
Messages
1,506
A good line from new Tory Chairman this morning that behind the great reformer Starmer, the party of Corbyn still exists.
Well, yes, to a certain extent. To say the opposite would clearly be untrue. They aren’t running it though.

In The same way we can say the Conservatives, under Rishi, are still the party of Trussonomics, parties and deceit. Which is most recent, and which is most relevant?
 

arthur

Very well known Exeweb poster
Joined
Aug 18, 2004
Messages
11,490
Sir Keith backed him…..rather enthusiastically.
My recollection was that Starmer was locked in a cupboard for much of the campaign lest he upset northern leavers. Rumour had it that he was sharing a flat with Rees Mogg who had to be similarly hidden from public view after his "Grenfell victims lacked common sense" remarks
 

tavyred

Very well known Exeweb poster
Joined
Aug 23, 2004
Messages
13,915
Well, yes, to a certain extent. To say the opposite would clearly be untrue. They aren’t running it though.

In The same way we can say the Conservatives, under Rishi, are still the party of Trussonomics, parties and deceit. Which is most recent, and which is most relevant?
Can’t deny the divisions in the Tory party obviously, but this will be about what resonates in a general election campaign. The Tory playbook will always include the excesses of the ‘looney left’ narrative.
 

arthur

Very well known Exeweb poster
Joined
Aug 18, 2004
Messages
11,490
The Tory playbook will always include the excesses of the ‘looney left’ narrative.
..and when has that made any difference to the result?
 

tavyred

Very well known Exeweb poster
Joined
Aug 23, 2004
Messages
13,915
..and when has that made any difference to the result?
Didn’t you say Corbyn lost you the GE in 2019? 🤷‍♂️
 

Alistair20000

Very well known Exeweb poster
Joined
May 5, 2009
Messages
52,249
Location
Avoiding the Hundred
I fear that, for once, you are mistaken. It's not often a vetoed poster wins an award!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Labour,_New_Danger

Other sources available

 

arthur

Very well known Exeweb poster
Joined
Aug 18, 2004
Messages
11,490
I was reading this in the Speccie and thought of my friend Alistair

When reality fails to conform to the theory, the problem is not that the theory is wrong but that its courageous proponents have been hindered by saboteurs. In communist states these were ‘class enemies’, kulaks or ‘bourgeois elements’. In Truss’s article, these slots are filled by ‘the economic establishment’, ‘the media’ or that catch-all bogeyman ‘The Blob’.

The right, whatever its shortcomings, was for many years resistant to the seductions of this way of thinking. Otto Von Bismarck, whom I think we can safely call a creature of the right, is credited with the observation that politics is the art of the possible. Conservatism in this country has long been associated with an accommodation, even if a reluctant one, to reality as we find it. Sometimes that reality is an electoral one: we’d like to do X, they say, but public opinion won’t wear it so if we’re to be able to remain in power to do anything at all, we’ll have to do Y. At other times that reality is an economic one: we’d like to do X, but we really can’t afford to so we’re going to have to do Y.

That is, or was, the great virtue of mainstream conservatism


But then he went on to say:
But, ever since the party split over a version of Brexit borne aloft on winged unicorns, many of its leading lights have plunged into great swamps of unreality. Only yesterday, the Sunday Times carried an article aspiring to get ‘inside the minds of frustrated Leavers’ and asking: ‘How would they fix Brexit?’ Inside the minds? Lasciate ogni speranza… As it becomes clearer and clearer that this quixotic project has given us a national slow puncture, the rejoinder that its partisans give to its critics is identical to the rejoinder that hardcore tankies give to critics of communism: ‘It’s never been properly tried.’

The problem isn’t that you can’t simultaneously diverge from European regulatory standards and bask in the profits of frictionless free trade. The problem isn’t that it’s legally impossible to have a Schrodinger’s border between Northern Ireland and the Republic that exists only when you want it to. The problem isn’t that stopping freedom of movement and having a large and flexible labour market are incompatible aims. The problem isn’t that you can’t simultaneously be Singapore-on-Thames and a worker’s paradise. The problem, rather, is that the glorious opportunities of our emancipation have not been seized. We just haven’t believed hard enough.


But we can agree again with:
But, yes, petulant anger at the refusal of reality to accommodate itself to our pet theories is by no means confined to the right. Just look at the eminently avoidable stew Nicola Sturgeon got into over her doctrinaire assertion that there’s no real-world difference worth recognising between transwomen and natal women, even as public outrage grew at a male-bodied double-rapist being housed in the female prison estate. Keir Starmer is continuing to try to fudge just the same issue.

And with the conclusion?
In other words, I think the big new divide in politics is not between left and right, or liberal and conservative, but between boring old members of what’s sometimes called the ‘reality-based community’ and those fired up with ideas that work best when kept well clear of reality. One of those ideas that only works when kept well clear of reality, incidentally, seems to me that Liz Truss returning to the political frontline would be a vote-winner for the Tories.

 
Top