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Tuesday, 10 March 2020

The future is Local

You'd be hard put to invent anything as singularly stupid as Corbyn's spiteful and vindictive scorched earth policy as his grip is forced from the Labour Party. He, Milne and McDonnell have spent their term getting as many as possible of their own people into Labour's key positions, and no doubt a new leader will find employment contracts impossible or hugely expensive to break. However, the absolute moronic icing on the stupidity cake is the suspension of Trevor Phillips on the grounds of preventing reputational damage to the party.

The May elections will be a test of how far Corbyn's party have evicted the Trad Lab local government nexus in the heartlands. I've written before how I once knew well, liked and respected the old Labour culture in south Yorkshire. We share many values; a passion for fairness, equity, probity, transparency, stewardship, trust and democracy. Our beliefs are grounded in a moral absolutism that is Christian in character. We believe in merit, in the rewards of ability and application, and deprecate everything that Corbyn's Labour stands for - privilege, nepotism, moral relativity, racism and discrimination, avarice, partiality, dishonesty, twisted political manipulation, bullying, stitch-ups and corruption. 

Where the trad Lab people and structures are still in place, the Labour vote will hold up. Where the Corbynites have taken over, openings will be created - and we are starting to see the rise of new, Labour-replacement parties, locally focused, with no London blow-ins, party functionaries, remote from the Corbynista nomenklatura. Ieuan Joy in the 'graph describes them as 'microparties'. Of course my own party will hope to make inroads here in May - but trad Lab voters I know will be reluctant to vote for the local businessmen who will stand as Tory councillors in red wall country. Boris was different. These places are not Tory, though the voters are conservative. The mill owner and the landlord are still the enemies.

The hate parties and personalities will also seek to make inroads here in May, looking to exploit local tensions. Social media users will know that they have started their campaigns already. I have great confidence in the ability of local voters to dismiss them. They are rightly loathed every bit as much as Corbyn's NKVD.

I used the meme below as part of a jokey dig at Labour in the December election, but after the voices in the media questioning, following the suspension of Phillips, just how nasty and authoritarian the metropolitan party can get, it will raise just a scintilla of real caution. It's what parties such as the one Corbyn, Milne and McDonnell want to create can become.


 
09/03/20

EU/EEA and the UK Cases    Deaths  
Italy 7375 366
France 1126 19
Germany 902 0
Spain 589 5
United Kingdom 273 3
Netherlands 265 3
Sweden 203 0
Belgium 200 0
Norway 169 0
Austria 102 0
Greece 73 0
Iceland 55 0
Denmark 38 0
Czech Republic 32 0
Portugal 30 0
Finland 30 0
Ireland 21 0
Slovenia 16 0
Romania 15 0
Croatia 12 0
Poland 11 0
Estonia 10 0
Hungary 8 0
Slovakia 5 0
Luxembourg 5 0
Bulgaria 4 0
Malta 3 0
Latvia 3 0
Lithuania 1 0
Liechtenstein 1 0
Total 11577 396

20 comments:

JPM said...

Your style is what I'd expect, but the substance has a thread of truth running through it.

I think that giving prominence to Trevor Philips' perfectly reasonable observations will do Labour a lot of good, suspended or not. Everyone knows who the clique are behind that too.

Thud said...

My old home town of Liverpool is still run by corby fanatics and they will see no diminishing of their vote, some people are beyond saving.

JPM said...

PS, if anyone tries to assert that this shows a huge divide between Labour and Tories over avoiding the various questions on Islam, let's just remind ourselves that the Tories' spokesperson on these matters seems to be Baroness Warsi, who is a more vehement critic of Trevor Philips than anyone of any standing that I have heard from Labour so far.

Dave_G said...


You have to admire the current Labour Leaderships 'self belief' though. It's on a par with the usual minority concerns pushing the usual BS like XR - and yet Government will still take such beliefs on board to develop policy despite the clear and obvious errors, misunderstandings and even outright lies that even a school kid could expose (provided they didn't rely on Wikipedia for their research).

Labour - well, politicians as a whole - fail themselves and their electorate by failing or refusing to do any work themselves and relying entirely on SPADS who themselves are corporate owned spooks.

In fact ANYONE can discover alternatives to the narrative if they care to look but, sadly,too many people simply aren't interested anymore and we should recognise that this apathy-generation has been policy of government/parties for decades.

It's like the (now long gone) total belief in the output of the BBC - people are finally waking up to BS and the loss of Labour votes to the Tories should be a wake up call for all parties given yesterday's example of aversion to the Tories GND proposals.

Voters are no longer a captive, reliable or tradition source of support. People now want ACTION on subjects, not supplication. The idea of 'woke' needs clarification as there are an increasing number of voters 'awake' to the deception and it's not going to be tolerated anymore.

DeeDee99 said...

Bolton for Change, one of the micro-parties mentioned in the DT article, is a former Brexit Party activist.

It was good of Nigel to galvanise individuals in these Red Wall Constituencies and give them the confidence to organise themselves to challenge Labour :)

I can't see the Labour Party recovering regardless of who becomes the next Leader. Starmer is just a member of the globalist metropolitan elite who has no connection with working people and is a charisma-free zone. He was on the wrong side of the Brexit argument; the wrong side of the immigration argument; and the wrong side of the British, as opposed to ECHR, Human Rights argument.

John Brown said...

I believe Labour lost Scotland to the SNP simply because many voters believed the SNP were fighting for them at Westminster, and as a result the SNP gain votes even from those who do want full independence.

If Labour continue to promote open door immigration and are seen to be only interested in fighting for minorities then I can see Labour continuing to lose the majority vote and declining as they have in Scotland.

jim said...

I agree Corbyn et al have lost the plot. Thankfully Labour has another 10 years, possibly 20 years to think about their policies because their present offering can please no one.

In the UK parties do not win elections, the incumbents lose them. Traditionally the Tories lose through arrogance or incompetence, it used to be sex, but we are all open minded now.

Politics is a selling job, the product should look nice, smell nice and appeal to peoples instincts. Down here in The South we always have huge Tory majorities. But we almost never see an MP and they do almost nothing. Tory HQ could put a blue rosette on a donkey and it would romp home with a 20,000 majority. Why, what do the Tories offer?

In bald terms they offer selfishness. Tories protect us from too many houses, not much in the way of roads either. Roads = noise, traffic and houses, so no. A bit on hospitals and keep the schools Grammar. That way people can bring up their kids, get them a tutor and into the Grammar or go private. A spot of uni and into a reasonable job. Meanwhile house price goes up and when granny pops off there is a rental earner.

Corbyn on the other hand kept to a 19th century notion of harsh industry, dirt, grime and sharing out the nations wealth. He failed to looks attractive, looked smelly and failed to appeal to that most important instinct - selfishness.
If one bothered to look, some of his ideas were quite good but rooted in a socialism of long ago.

Politicians are not the nicest of types anyway, but they like to look nice. How they will manage to present an illusion of niceness whilst developing their selfishness offering time will tell, quite a lot of time probably.

JPM said...

Jim, Labour have about eighty more MPs than did the Tories in 1997, even having lost Scotland to the SNP.

This public health emergency will show where this IEA bean-counter approach to running a country lands one, as if Grenfell and the floods weren't enough.

Alexander doesn't seem to be finding the job to be the one that he'd hoped.

Mark said...

What are you drivtrolling on about?

JPM said...

Go and practice your arithmetic, Mark.

Dave_G said...


1997 was TWENTY THREE years ago.....

Typical Labour lefty - living in the past.

Mark said...

Say again, what are you drivtrolling on about?

Go and practice your trolling as I think you're all trolled out here

Anonymous said...

JPM is a Blairite.

That explains the total idiocy and the desire to submit to anything non British.

Everything that Blair touched turned to shit. Everything.

jim said...

Don't knock Blair too much, he comes with a strong recommendation.

"Late in 2002 Lady Thatcher came to Hampshire to speak at a dinner for me. Taking her round at the reception one of the guests asked her what was her greatest achievement. She replied, 'Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds'."


Thatcher and Blair were both useful for a short period and then lost their respective plots. We shall have to see how Boris goes.

Raedwald said...

Ah Jim - all political careers end in failure, as we all know.

But I really hope Boris gets his 10 years first.

Anonymous said...

I'm afraid that Raedwald is mistaken in his belief that ex-Labour voters are going to return to the fold once the Corbyn swamp is drained.

Return to what ? Local authorities still in thrall to the EU Committee of the Regions visions: the same hankering after easily-controlled 'Metro Mayors' and large cities having dominion over all the rural towns and villages in view ?

Labour's survival depends mostly on one thing - the demise of the old white working class.

As for the 'progressive' JPM - Blair came to power on a wave of Tory sleaze, Maastricht, and the ERM fiasco; and even after Blair came to power we watched old Labour voters drift away by the million.
But that's what happens when a party sacrifices its voters and gets too close to the EU's fundament - they begin to stink themselves.

JPM said...

Nah, Blair's lot did nothing much about the bean-counter mentality.

Two out of three NHS beds have gone since 1979.

We need them now, don't we?

Mark said...

Blair/Brown gave us PFI. How much has that cost?

JPM said...

Who's defending that?

Mark said...

Nobody I hope!