This week, the political scientist Matt Goodwin attacked the UK Labour Party, arguing that the party’s probable victory in this year’s election would entail a cultural revolution. For Goodwin, Labour favours radical theories which would irrevocably change society,
I agree with the other comments more or less. Watching from the outside the British political scene it seems people are fed up, that's it. The very young maybe are idealistic and believe in a lot of the identity nonsense, the rest might be voting in hope housing issues will be fixed. I guess the red wall are going back to their traditional Labour voting in desperation after Boris failed them and Conservative voters will either vote Reform or stay home since vote Conservative get Leftie nonsense anyway.
I foresee Labour becoming unpopular quite quickly, but I don't foresee the Conservatives becoming popular any time soon. 2029 could well be 2019 in mirror image - Boris Johnson was never as popular as his fawning admirers would have you believe, but he still cantered to victory anyway, because of the dire state of the opposition.
Labours lead isn't because people have decided they're a decent bunch of moderates, it's because support for the conservatives has collapsed, due to exactly the sort of policies you say Labour only talk about but won't implement.
Of course they will, the assumption that voters moderate parties assumes that voters have a way to express their preferences. With the capture of CCHQ by the cultural left there is no longer any way to vote against these policies and Britain will soon be going the same way as Germany, with Labour in power and calling for any party to their right to be made illegal.
Agree that Labour's lead is primarily driven by Conservative unpopularity, but don't see things turning out like this under Labour. Among other things, the British constitution has developed checks and balances against this kind of thing...
Theoretically Germany and America also have strong constitutional protections but the German ruling coalition just announced an insane crackdown on their political opposition, and Trump is being hit with waves of lawfare. Meanwhile in the UK the supposedly neutral speaker just trod all over constitutional convention to help his former party and justified it by referencing political violence. Unwritten constitutions don't feel very strong right now.
Especially because there are so many workarounds. Most obviously, labour can simply enfranchise immigrants on a large scale any time it looks like they might be able to lose. There's nothing in constitutional convention to prevent it because until recently being able to import so many people it could tip elections wasn't feasible.
Starmer is committed to giving the vote to six million non-UK citizens and to 16-year-olds. Since the electoral register is the basis of jury service, it follows that people from both groups will wind up as jury members in murder trials, terrorism trials etc.
Starmer is also committed to giving us an Islamic blasphemy law. This will define “Islamophobia” as a form of racism. So if a South Asian ex-Muslim criticises the religious beliefs of white Muslim converts, the law will say he’s being racist.
Labour are clearly being hyper-cautious about avoiding dividing lines, as typified by their recent abandonment of the £28bn green investment. CCHQ sure bangs on about stopping the boats a lot for a group allegedly "captured by the cultural left". And the SPD isn't "banning any parties to the right of it", the CDU and FDP are still fair game and it's only the AFD that they're concerned about; and even then, this is a very unusual political stance for a social democratic party, informed by German civic society's longstanding and entirely understandable commitment to an anti-fascist firewall which the AFD is in danger of breaching.
I think this is an interesting discussion which has gone off the rails a bit. Across the West, from the USA to the UK to Germany, the people who are used to running things have become terrified of populism, and it’s energising them to contemplate measures they wouldn’t have before. All of them - not just the Germans - constantly invoke the dread of Germany after 1933, even as their own preferred policies make their countries ever more unstable, and more like the Germany immediately preceding 1933. The obvious lesson - if you don’t want to get Moustache Man running your country, stop imitating Weimar - completely escapes them.
The FDP is in the process of disappearing and the CDU is clearly not what a lot of voters want. But are you really arguing that if they ban the AfD that's ok because there's a substantially different party to vote for?
Of course you are, which is exactly why it's right to be worried by the left.
Like I said, I think it's a lot more understandable given Germany's unique history which still looms large in the country's political culture today (see also their disastrous dovishness towards Russia, welcoming attitude towards refugees, endless patience with the actions with the Israeli state - all of it is traceable back to Nazi guilt).
To be clear, I have wrestled with my conscience about whether it is okay to pursue the defence of democracy by using anti-democratic means to prevent anti-democratic parties or candidates from winning elections. Does the end justify the means? I'm not sure. But what I would say is that I think the German case is unique to Germany due to the political culture of "never again" anti-Nazism; and America's democracy is already in a bad way in any case, again with a political culture that it quite alien to the rest of the west. I don't think they're indicative of a wider trend, and I certainly don't think they're comparable to yesterday's storm in a Westminster teacup.
I think their history is exactly why they would be wary of self proclaimed socialist parties with violent street armies wanting to ban their opposition!
Antifa and immigrant gangs are now regularly attacking AfD members. Weidel had to leave her home and go to a safe house temporarily. Chrupulla got stabbed in the arm with a needle, shortly afterwards feeling nauseous. Andreas Jurca was beaten black and blue. Just recently an AfD politician stood down because of violent threats against his home (forgot his name though).
Antifa have marched with banners demanding the death of AfD supporters. These protests are explicitly encouraged by the coalition.
And into this environment, the SDP want to publish the names and addresses of anyone who donates money to the AfD. The comparison is not ridiculous at all.
"Recently, Labour has embraced moderate patriotism, rejected American race theories and adopted a sensible position on gender self-identification. Polling is consistent with this interpretation"
This is simply not true Thomas. In what way is shoehorning the word "patriotic" into an op-ed equivalent to "embracing moderate patriotism"? In what way is undermining the concept of sex and permitting self-ID without a medical certificate "a sensible position"? In what way is proposing racial preferences for government contracts, and teaching contested concepts like white privilege and decolonisation not grafting the gangrinous limbs of US race extremism onto British society?
Polling is not consistent with majority, let alone plurality support for these contested concepts. You are also extremely naive about the impact these policies will have on a population - evidence from the US demonstrates the backlash it creates and the social cohesion it destroys. A cashless Labour government headed by a dull, spineless bureaucrat who makes policy through focus groups will be particularly susceptible to implementing these extreme policies in order to appease it's extreme activist base. Matt Goodwin may be catastrophisjng, but you've got this one horribly wrong.
As I say in the piece, I also worry about some of these things. Yet why would Labour being headed by a 'dull, spineless bureaucrat' make it more susceptible to such policies? Thus far, Starmer has been more eager to accommodate voter preferences - the Labour left hates him!
The dissenters to this article seem to be echoing exactly the view that the US right makes about Biden. That he is a culture warrior, rather than keeping the radicals at bay with a few carefully selected concessions. Both left and right will be disappointed, each for their own reasons.
A columnist at the Daily Sceptic who goes by the pen-name of “J SOREL” wrote a column on February 16th. It resonates with my own specific fears of a Starmer government. They’re very different from the fears enunciated by Matthew Goodwin. I’m going to quote extensively from it. Please Google the original article and read the whole thing.
“Run the gamut of Keir Starmer’s career and you’ll find a man who has traded not in deals, appeals and backroom manoeuvre, but in moral black-and-white, in iron legalisms and in hard executive power. Starmer’s time at the bar was spent entirely within the domain of human rights law; that is to say, the enforcement of the particular moral dogmas established in 1997 against secular and democratic authority. As Director of Public Prosecutions Starmer had broad personal discretion over how the laws of England were enforced, and against whom. His tenure as Shadow Brexit Secretary - his biggest job in Westminster before winning the Labour leadership - was legalistic rather than political: it was Keir Starmer, more than anyone else, who pioneered the idea that Brexit was not even wrong, but simply “unlawful“…”
“Everything about Keir Starmer’s life so far has taught him that his project - the defence of British society as it existed from 1997-2016 - can be achieved by simply illegalising all opposition. He openly avows this idea, and has never strayed from it.”
“His constitutional reforms, drawn up by Gordon Brown in ‘A New Britain‘, will give the law courts broad new powers to strike down legislation; will create a ‘rights package’ (including welfare payments to migrants) that is to be put beyond the power of Parliament to abridge; and will give Whitehall a statutory existence - meaning it will become virtually impossible to reform its workings or fire any of its personnel. Starmer will complete the process of franchising out democratic governance to independent watchdogs: energy policy will go to ‘Great British Energy’; low-level offences to ‘community payback boards’; much of the budget to an ‘Office for Value for Money’; and what remains of Westminster health policy to an ‘NHS mission delivery board’… Outlets like GB News will almost certainly find themselves censored by a beefed-up Ofcom…”
“What does Starmerism mean? It is a policy of enforcement. It is the declaration that the society created by Tony Blair, challenged after 2016, must stand forever. It is the project of a radicalised British establishment that has, in the face of these challenges, despaired of electoral politics altogether and wants to replace it with an explicit codification of the status quo… Under Starmerism, the rule of the judge, of the quango and of the bureaucrat - long implicit - will at last declare itself openly… What the British establishment wants is an inquisitor, and in Keir Starmer they have found one.”
I'm certainly not uncritical of Starmer - his support of Corbyn was a disgrace - but I'm not sure things will work out like this. Britain is an old democracy and checks and balances would preclude most of this...
The elephant in the room is the New Britain Constitution. I haven’t seen or read a single interview with Starmer where he’s even asked about it. More than anything I want to force people to discuss it.
i mean the sky might just fall in anyway
Maybe ;-)
I agree with the other comments more or less. Watching from the outside the British political scene it seems people are fed up, that's it. The very young maybe are idealistic and believe in a lot of the identity nonsense, the rest might be voting in hope housing issues will be fixed. I guess the red wall are going back to their traditional Labour voting in desperation after Boris failed them and Conservative voters will either vote Reform or stay home since vote Conservative get Leftie nonsense anyway.
It's certainly going to be very interesting. Given the state of the economy and low party loyalty, Labour could become unpopular, quickly!
I foresee Labour becoming unpopular quite quickly, but I don't foresee the Conservatives becoming popular any time soon. 2029 could well be 2019 in mirror image - Boris Johnson was never as popular as his fawning admirers would have you believe, but he still cantered to victory anyway, because of the dire state of the opposition.
Labours lead isn't because people have decided they're a decent bunch of moderates, it's because support for the conservatives has collapsed, due to exactly the sort of policies you say Labour only talk about but won't implement.
Of course they will, the assumption that voters moderate parties assumes that voters have a way to express their preferences. With the capture of CCHQ by the cultural left there is no longer any way to vote against these policies and Britain will soon be going the same way as Germany, with Labour in power and calling for any party to their right to be made illegal.
Agree that Labour's lead is primarily driven by Conservative unpopularity, but don't see things turning out like this under Labour. Among other things, the British constitution has developed checks and balances against this kind of thing...
Theoretically Germany and America also have strong constitutional protections but the German ruling coalition just announced an insane crackdown on their political opposition, and Trump is being hit with waves of lawfare. Meanwhile in the UK the supposedly neutral speaker just trod all over constitutional convention to help his former party and justified it by referencing political violence. Unwritten constitutions don't feel very strong right now.
Especially because there are so many workarounds. Most obviously, labour can simply enfranchise immigrants on a large scale any time it looks like they might be able to lose. There's nothing in constitutional convention to prevent it because until recently being able to import so many people it could tip elections wasn't feasible.
Starmer is committed to giving the vote to six million non-UK citizens and to 16-year-olds. Since the electoral register is the basis of jury service, it follows that people from both groups will wind up as jury members in murder trials, terrorism trials etc.
Starmer is also committed to giving us an Islamic blasphemy law. This will define “Islamophobia” as a form of racism. So if a South Asian ex-Muslim criticises the religious beliefs of white Muslim converts, the law will say he’s being racist.
This is an insane take.
Labour are clearly being hyper-cautious about avoiding dividing lines, as typified by their recent abandonment of the £28bn green investment. CCHQ sure bangs on about stopping the boats a lot for a group allegedly "captured by the cultural left". And the SPD isn't "banning any parties to the right of it", the CDU and FDP are still fair game and it's only the AFD that they're concerned about; and even then, this is a very unusual political stance for a social democratic party, informed by German civic society's longstanding and entirely understandable commitment to an anti-fascist firewall which the AFD is in danger of breaching.
I think this is an interesting discussion which has gone off the rails a bit. Across the West, from the USA to the UK to Germany, the people who are used to running things have become terrified of populism, and it’s energising them to contemplate measures they wouldn’t have before. All of them - not just the Germans - constantly invoke the dread of Germany after 1933, even as their own preferred policies make their countries ever more unstable, and more like the Germany immediately preceding 1933. The obvious lesson - if you don’t want to get Moustache Man running your country, stop imitating Weimar - completely escapes them.
The FDP is in the process of disappearing and the CDU is clearly not what a lot of voters want. But are you really arguing that if they ban the AfD that's ok because there's a substantially different party to vote for?
Of course you are, which is exactly why it's right to be worried by the left.
Like I said, I think it's a lot more understandable given Germany's unique history which still looms large in the country's political culture today (see also their disastrous dovishness towards Russia, welcoming attitude towards refugees, endless patience with the actions with the Israeli state - all of it is traceable back to Nazi guilt).
To be clear, I have wrestled with my conscience about whether it is okay to pursue the defence of democracy by using anti-democratic means to prevent anti-democratic parties or candidates from winning elections. Does the end justify the means? I'm not sure. But what I would say is that I think the German case is unique to Germany due to the political culture of "never again" anti-Nazism; and America's democracy is already in a bad way in any case, again with a political culture that it quite alien to the rest of the west. I don't think they're indicative of a wider trend, and I certainly don't think they're comparable to yesterday's storm in a Westminster teacup.
I think their history is exactly why they would be wary of self proclaimed socialist parties with violent street armies wanting to ban their opposition!
Oh come on! Where is Scholz's "violent street army"? Your comparison is ridiculous and you know it.
I don't make ridiculous comparisons.
Antifa and immigrant gangs are now regularly attacking AfD members. Weidel had to leave her home and go to a safe house temporarily. Chrupulla got stabbed in the arm with a needle, shortly afterwards feeling nauseous. Andreas Jurca was beaten black and blue. Just recently an AfD politician stood down because of violent threats against his home (forgot his name though).
Antifa have marched with banners demanding the death of AfD supporters. These protests are explicitly encouraged by the coalition.
And into this environment, the SDP want to publish the names and addresses of anyone who donates money to the AfD. The comparison is not ridiculous at all.
"Recently, Labour has embraced moderate patriotism, rejected American race theories and adopted a sensible position on gender self-identification. Polling is consistent with this interpretation"
This is simply not true Thomas. In what way is shoehorning the word "patriotic" into an op-ed equivalent to "embracing moderate patriotism"? In what way is undermining the concept of sex and permitting self-ID without a medical certificate "a sensible position"? In what way is proposing racial preferences for government contracts, and teaching contested concepts like white privilege and decolonisation not grafting the gangrinous limbs of US race extremism onto British society?
Polling is not consistent with majority, let alone plurality support for these contested concepts. You are also extremely naive about the impact these policies will have on a population - evidence from the US demonstrates the backlash it creates and the social cohesion it destroys. A cashless Labour government headed by a dull, spineless bureaucrat who makes policy through focus groups will be particularly susceptible to implementing these extreme policies in order to appease it's extreme activist base. Matt Goodwin may be catastrophisjng, but you've got this one horribly wrong.
As I say in the piece, I also worry about some of these things. Yet why would Labour being headed by a 'dull, spineless bureaucrat' make it more susceptible to such policies? Thus far, Starmer has been more eager to accommodate voter preferences - the Labour left hates him!
The dissenters to this article seem to be echoing exactly the view that the US right makes about Biden. That he is a culture warrior, rather than keeping the radicals at bay with a few carefully selected concessions. Both left and right will be disappointed, each for their own reasons.
A columnist at the Daily Sceptic who goes by the pen-name of “J SOREL” wrote a column on February 16th. It resonates with my own specific fears of a Starmer government. They’re very different from the fears enunciated by Matthew Goodwin. I’m going to quote extensively from it. Please Google the original article and read the whole thing.
“Run the gamut of Keir Starmer’s career and you’ll find a man who has traded not in deals, appeals and backroom manoeuvre, but in moral black-and-white, in iron legalisms and in hard executive power. Starmer’s time at the bar was spent entirely within the domain of human rights law; that is to say, the enforcement of the particular moral dogmas established in 1997 against secular and democratic authority. As Director of Public Prosecutions Starmer had broad personal discretion over how the laws of England were enforced, and against whom. His tenure as Shadow Brexit Secretary - his biggest job in Westminster before winning the Labour leadership - was legalistic rather than political: it was Keir Starmer, more than anyone else, who pioneered the idea that Brexit was not even wrong, but simply “unlawful“…”
“Everything about Keir Starmer’s life so far has taught him that his project - the defence of British society as it existed from 1997-2016 - can be achieved by simply illegalising all opposition. He openly avows this idea, and has never strayed from it.”
“His constitutional reforms, drawn up by Gordon Brown in ‘A New Britain‘, will give the law courts broad new powers to strike down legislation; will create a ‘rights package’ (including welfare payments to migrants) that is to be put beyond the power of Parliament to abridge; and will give Whitehall a statutory existence - meaning it will become virtually impossible to reform its workings or fire any of its personnel. Starmer will complete the process of franchising out democratic governance to independent watchdogs: energy policy will go to ‘Great British Energy’; low-level offences to ‘community payback boards’; much of the budget to an ‘Office for Value for Money’; and what remains of Westminster health policy to an ‘NHS mission delivery board’… Outlets like GB News will almost certainly find themselves censored by a beefed-up Ofcom…”
“What does Starmerism mean? It is a policy of enforcement. It is the declaration that the society created by Tony Blair, challenged after 2016, must stand forever. It is the project of a radicalised British establishment that has, in the face of these challenges, despaired of electoral politics altogether and wants to replace it with an explicit codification of the status quo… Under Starmerism, the rule of the judge, of the quango and of the bureaucrat - long implicit - will at last declare itself openly… What the British establishment wants is an inquisitor, and in Keir Starmer they have found one.”
I'm certainly not uncritical of Starmer - his support of Corbyn was a disgrace - but I'm not sure things will work out like this. Britain is an old democracy and checks and balances would preclude most of this...
The elephant in the room is the New Britain Constitution. I haven’t seen or read a single interview with Starmer where he’s even asked about it. More than anything I want to force people to discuss it.