British Politics Thread

I get that you and I have different definitions of political power, but are you really suggesting that newspaper columnists have no influence over the voters who grant political power via determining who wins elections?

You’re right that they’re terrible people, but they’re terrible people with influence. My preference during the Corbyn years was to get into a direct, open fight with them, but Corbyn was unwilling to do that and instead kept jumping headfirst into the press’ traps.

Edited by Silasw on Mar 4th 2021 at 2:58:57 PM

What we've seen with Starmer (and before him, May and Change UK) is both the power and the limitation of the media. They can sell an idea of a person, but they can't sell the person themselves, and much of the British media is so maladaptive that they can only sell ideas fitted for weird, charmless homunculi who flop out of them like loose offal once they've been propelled to the public stage.

The most successful politicians seem to understand the value of being a heel - someone who much of the media hates, but can't stop writing about because they break taboos in such interesting ways. In some ways, Corbyn was sunk by being too conciliatory, by letting them shape his image rather than using them to shape his own on his own terms. AOC, for instance, has incredible heel energy when she puts her mind to it. Picking high-profile fights with the most sacred of cows in the most profane of ways wasn't the sole secret to her success, but it helped a lot. This is a talent that the rising stars of left Labour like Zarah Sultana, Nadia Whittome, and Clive Lewis are starting to develop, which is why they're pro Twitter follows.

Edited by Iaculus on Mar 4th 2021 at 3:42:06 PM

I’m very much in agreement that we need someone who can shape the media’s perception of them rather than let the media shape the public’s perception of them, my hope was that Starmer could do that, but he seems to be failing pretty hard on that front.

Corbyn was very much too conciliatory towards the press, he was neither willing to lie to them or to publicly call them out for spreading lies, I’d have taken either.

Edited by Silasw on Mar 4th 2021 at 3:51:21 PM

It's the difference between making the media like you (bad idea) and being a story they can't ignore (good idea). It's why you should be immediately suspicious of anyone who draws a distinction between a 'party of protest' and a 'party of government' without understanding how one creates the path to the other. A successful protest is an exercise of extragovernmental power that, when properly capitalised upon, builds your road towards governmental power.

COVID-19: 1% pay rise for NHS staff 'the most' the government can afford, says minister Nadine Dorries

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Especially since in real terms NHS wages have declined over the course of this government as a result of below-inflation raises and seven years of pay cuts - for example a newly qualified nurse earns 10.2% less than they did in 2010. It's all a repeating cycle of "let pay sit stagnant for years, give a flashy pay rise that doesn't make up for the stagnation, then use that flashy pay rise to justify more years of stagnation".

I’d take getting the media to like you, but Starmer hasn’t managed that. The press aren’t pushing that Labour knows how to manage the economy, or that we’re strong on security and public services, because as much as the press might kinda like Starmer they really like Boris and Sunak.

I suspect that’s the truth of New Labour’s success, it wasn’t just that Blair was able to get the press to like him, Major wasn’t able to get them to like him, which gave New Labour the opening.

Again, the media likes politicians who are personally charmless, politically harmful to the country, or both. You have to adopt an antagonistic role towards them if you want to get anywhere, because both they and the electorate have enough brain cells that they can recognise insincere sucking up a mile off. The secret is to be interestingly and eye-catchingly antagonistic. It doesn't matter if they hate you so long as they cover you when you're doing things you want them to cover.

You and I have different views on the intelligence of the electorate, this is the electorate who think that Corbyn is a bigger racist and a bigger liar than a Boris. This is the electorate who still believe that the Great Recession was caused by Labour building to many new schools.

The press are smarter, but they can be played, Starmer simply isn’t capable of doing it.

The big difference is that the right-wing media is willing to expose left-wing hypocrisy. Starmer's flag-humping, for instance, was easily countered by the Mail posting a video from twenty years ago where he suggested abolishing the royal family. Appealing to the media and to anyone seeking an authentic left-wing platform requires diametrically opposed public messaging, and the media will then happily broadcast those contradictions to the nation. The only way for a stealth socialist to get in is for them to be a Tory for literally their entire political career (ideally starting in primary school) before swinging left when they gain power and hoping that their entire political support network doesn't re-enact the Ides of March on them. I'm sure I don't have to spell out what a ludicrously unlikely scenario that is.

Left-wing politicians need to be honest because the media will not allow them deception. The challenge is for them to be eye-catchingly honest, particularly if and when said media realise the game they're playing and try to deny them visibility. You need to be the biggest story in the country whether or not you're being covered, and that involves a level of engagement and activism that Labour hasn't mustered since the Kinnock reforms.

And the press is busy playing up the Sussex drama so they can avoid covering the government's screwups.

Blair managed it, we can argue over if Blair’s platform was left-wing but he certainly got the support of people wanting a left-wing platform.

I do wonder how much Blair benefited from not being the leader elected after the 1992 defeat, the very new nature of Blair compered to Major having been PM for 7 years likely played a big role.

Starmer hasn’t got that, Boris has only really had a Boris government since 2019, and Starmer has been opposition leader almost as long. Boris is perceived to be such a break for Cameron and May that he doesn’t get any blame for their mistakes.

I’m starting to think that Starmer would have been a very good leader for the 2017 election against May, but is going to be a poor one for 2024 against Boris.

I want us to be able to win in 2024, but even if Starmer was replaced tomorrow I suspect it will be a very uphill battle, because the public won’t be tired of 14 years of Tory rule, they’ll see it as 10 years of Tory rule and 4-5 years of Boris Party rule.

... why do you think Starmer would have been a better opponent for May? Much of Corbyn's success was because the Tories were geared up to fight Miliband 2.0 rather than a committed, principled socialist who rejected the 'better things aren't possible' philosophy of Labour's late/post-Blair years. Starmer has all of May's weaknesses as a politician, compounded by inexperience, weaker institutional support, and a less popular platform. All that would have done is push the 2019 landslide two years earlier.

As for Blair, he soon proved himself to be more trustworthy in his pledges to help the elites he courted than to the Labour base, so you're essentially asking for a more gullible Labour membership. Certainly, none of the more leftie reforms he brought in proved to be especially lasting or difficult to reverse, while his more right-leaning policies were instrumental in continuing the privatisation and right-radicalisation of the British state. Just look at him now - man's behaving more like a Tory grandee than a Labour one.

Because I don’t agree with you that Starmer is continuing the Milliband failed strategy of “better thing aren’t possible”. I think Starmer would have been the media darling in a May-Starmer matchup, which would have given him the kind of advantage Blair has in ‘97. Part of what helped Corbyn in 2017 wasn’t just that he’d long been opposed to austerity, but that the nation had finally come around to realising how batshit insane the entire policy idea is.

And we’re back to the legacy of Blair. Yes Blair didn’t do enough, but I’m not gonna pretend that NHS wait times didn’t go down, that new schools weren’t built and that we didn’t engage in some level of democratisation with devolution.

I’d take 1997 Tony Blair as leader if he existed, because he’d still do more good then Starmer is currently doing or then Corbyn managed by failing to actually win an election.

Well yeah, Tony Blair has shifted hard to the right since leaving office (or has felt able to publicly express right-wing views that he in the past he kept hidden and didn’t try to implement). I don’t want modern Tony Blair anywhere near anything.

Edited by Silasw on Mar 5th 2021 at 3:42:30 PM

Today's stats:[1]

• 00,124,419 deaths
• 04,213,343 cases
• 21,796,278 first doses
• 01,090,848 second doses

We have vaccinated just over 32% of the UK's population.

So apparently one newspaper editor signed off on saying that Harry will come to have the same regrets about walking away from the Royal Family as his mother did.

That's a pretty unsubtle threat.

Headlines like that really validate his choice, he knows that if he hadn’t run away the press would have eventually killed either him or Meghan.

Yeah, we don't need another Diana.

"You'll live to regret this!" screamed the media,shaking their poison pens

There’s no “live” in that headline, which rather matters when the “you’ll regret this” is coming from the people who killed his mother.

Even if that wasn't meant to be a threat (and I think it was), it's still a really low blow.

Its occurs to me it's basically a headline grabber,a hook,to attract our attention,its purposely a low blow.

I doubt it was a "we're going to kill you" kind of threat, but it was certainly a reputational threat if nothing else.

Well, considering what happened to Diana, it's very much an Implied Death Threat.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Mar 7th 2021 at 6:31:36 PM

Penny Junor is a royal biographer from a long line of aristocratic journalists who managed to make herself a personal enemy of Charles and Diana when she wrote their biographies. This is pretty emblematic of the media-political ecosystem's profoundly sinister relationship with the royal family.

I've heard that name before, but I can't place where.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Mar 24th 2021 at 6:28:37 PM