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.
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.
"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.
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 mean the sky might just fall in anyway
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.
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.
"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.
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.”