UK Politics: The Love Song of A. B. de Pfeffel Johnson

[mormont]

6 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Now we have a situation where Corbyn (whether you like him or not) has suddenly made talking about nationalisation mainstream again - he's moved the left-side of the Window leftwards. May's response has been to move the Tories to the centre - the right-side of the Window is now shifting leftwards.

I know that Jeremy Corbyn's leadership credentials are built on taking credit for everything and blame for nothing, but... nationalisation of the rail and energy companies was widely popular with voters for years before Corbyn became leader, and was widely discussed in the national press, at Labour conference, and elsewhere. Talking about it was undeniably mainstream before Corbyn became leader.

As for the whole notion that the Overton window has shifted leftwards in a country that just months ago voted to leave the EU largely motivated by a desire to cut immigration: in a country where there are massive cuts to the NHS planned because of austerity: in a country where even the hint that you might raise taxes is unthinkable even for the party currently regarded by most voters as too left-wing to be trusted to govern: yeah, right. One race audit is hardly a seismic change, people.

What May is doing is being a smart politician. She's taking advantage of the disarray to the left and right of her to stake a claim to the centre ground, which is still where elections in the UK are won and lost, but cautiously, without making a huge shift on policy. Giving Corbyn credit for this is like attributing Blair's success to William Hague. True in a way, perhaps, but let's not mistake who's in the driving seat.

[Shryke]

14 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Thatcher moved the right-side of the Overton Window to the right (self-explanatory). Blair (by embracing the neoliberal consensus) moved the left-side of the Overton Window to the right - the sort of policies traditionally associated with Labour became unthinkable under him.

Now we have a situation where Corbyn (whether you like him or not) has suddenly made talking about nationalisation mainstream again - he's moved the left-side of the Window leftwards. May's response has been to move the Tories to the centre - the right-side of the Window is now shifting leftwards.

Corbyn hasn't moved the Overton Window leftward, he's left the Overton Window. That's kinda the whole problem. He hasn't made his ideas publicly acceptable.

Blair pulled Labour rightward to become electable. Corbyn is trying to pull them back left (and back 30+ years ago) and making them unelectable.

[Mathis]

18 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

 Blair (by embracing the neoliberal consensus) moved the left-side of the Overton Window to the right - the sort of policies traditionally associated with Labour became unthinkable under him.

 

Blair oversaw a 10% swing in the national vote from a right wing party to a left wing party. He made typically left wing polices such as a national minimum wage an acceptable policy to the electorate that had consistently given majorities to the party that vehemently opposed them. Shifting what is considered an acceptable policy to the electorate is part of moving overton's window, no? In this case it moved leftward.

Not to mention a shit ton of socially liberal policies that have moved the window leftward in the last 30 years.

 

 

[The Marquis de Leech]

9 hours ago, Shryke said:

Corbyn hasn't moved the Overton Window leftward, he's left the Overton Window. That's kinda the whole problem. He hasn't made his ideas publicly acceptable.

Blair pulled Labour rightward to become electable. Corbyn is trying to pull them back left (and back 30+ years ago) and making them unelectable.

You move the Overton Window by being outside it, thereby making less extreme variants of your ideas mainstream. That's how Thatcher did it in 1975 (hell, back then, she wasn't even the first choice of the Right of the party, but Keith Joseph had screwed up his candidacy with some comments about poor people not being allowed to breed).

In Corbyn's case, the only reason he stood last year was to get Andy Burnham to adopt more leftist ideas - he didn't expect to win. Had Burnham offered a list of policy stances analogous to what Owen Smith is offering now, Corbyn wouldn't have stood at all. The fact that Corbyn's challenger is now basically being forced to agree to policy prescriptions out of the pre-Blair era is a sign of how things have shifted.

(I would also really question the Blair and electability narrative, since, frankly, by 1997 the Tories - via Black Wednesday, the VAT betrayal, sleaze scandals, and the civil war over Europe - had made themselves toxic, while by then the British Left had finally figured out the principle of tactical voting, rather than splitting the vote 1980s-style). 

[Shryke]

2 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

You move the Overton Window by being outside it, thereby making less extreme variants of your ideas mainstream. That's how Thatcher did it in 1975 (hell, back then, she wasn't even the first choice of the Right of the party, but Keith Joseph had screwed up his candidacy with some comments about poor people not being allowed to breed).

In Corbyn's case, the only reason he stood last year was to get Andy Burnham to adopt more leftist ideas - he didn't expect to win. Had Burnham offered a list of policy stances analogous to what Owen Smith is offering now, Corbyn wouldn't have stood at all. The fact that Corbyn's challenger is now basically being forced to agree to policy prescriptions out of the pre-Blair era is a sign of how things have shifted.

(I would also really question the Blair and electability narrative, since, frankly, by 1997 the Tories - via Black Wednesday, the VAT betrayal, sleaze scandals, and the civil war over Europe - had made themselves toxic, while by then the British Left had finally figured out the principle of tactical voting, rather than splitting the vote 1980s-style). 

But Corbyn hasn't shifted anything. He's still got no support from the electorate. You are confusing "takes a position" with "moves the Overton window". One does not necessarily entail the other.

And Corbyn's challenger is trying to not look too far from him only because the tiny slice of people voting in the Labour leadership race are pretty out there. As evidenced by the difference between Corbyn's support in the leadership race and in the general polls.

[The Marquis de Leech]

If Corbyn hasn't shifted things, why is the centre of debate in this leadership contest so much to the Left of the 2015 one? It's got to the point where the Right of the party is reduced to supporting unthinkable policies, just to try and get rid of him. It's no longer a case of how best to manage austerity, it's taking opposition to austerity as the baseline. Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband would have never nationalised the railways, whereas now it's impossible to stand for Labour leader if you don't support rail nationalisation. 

As for the Tories, they themselves have toned down austerity policies: the debate *has* shifted. That in turn was always the flaw in the Blairite model - the centre ground shifts.

[mormont]

The Overton window is a strong candidate for most useless concept ever in political discussions. It's inherently reductive, and is invariably either misunderstood, misused, or over-simplified. I can recall no discussion where people brought it up in a way that actually told me anything useful about events in the real world.

The simple reason that Owen Smith is offering more left-wing policies is that he has (rightly or not) calculated that he needs to do that to appeal to Labour party members, who no-one seriously doubts are currently significantly to the left of the general electorate in their views. Applying the Overton window to that discussion is, pardon me for saying so, daft. If you're talking about appealing to a specific subsection of voters, defined by their ideology, the Overton window doesn't come into it.

[Jo498]

I think the Overton window works best in hindsight. Until the 1970s it was just normal that trains, phone and other services were nationalized in most of Europe. Privatization of such services might not have been outside the window but it was certainly fringe, not centrist/moderate and unthinkable for Social Democratic parties. Recognizing state-sanctioned partnerships or marriage for gay people was as far outside the window in the mid-1980s (at least in Germany, maybe not in the Netherlands) as recognizing four official wives for devout muslims would be today in Western Europe. There are other examples where stances have been almost reversed within only about 20 years. So obviously such windows do exist. (Another small example: until the late 1990s people smoked everywhere in Germany. When I was a child in the 1980s adults would smoke in cars regardless of their children or their friends being present. I was amazed at the smoke-free restaurants and even discotheques in the US.)

So I think it is an interesting and illuminating concept, not sure how well it applies to UK politics of the last few years. I guess Brexit was thinkable all the time, even in the 90s or so, so this would not be a case of extreme window shifting.

[Shryke]

20 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

If Corbyn hasn't shifted things, why is the centre of debate in this leadership contest so much to the Left of the 2015 one? It's got to the point where the Right of the party is reduced to supporting unthinkable policies, just to try and get rid of him. It's no longer a case of how best to manage austerity, it's taking opposition to austerity as the baseline. Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband would have never nationalised the railways, whereas now it's impossible to stand for Labour leader if you don't support rail nationalisation. 

As for the Tories, they themselves have toned down austerity policies: the debate *has* shifted. That in turn was always the flaw in the Blairite model - the centre ground shifts.

Because a shift in the parameters of the Labour leadership race do not reflect a shift in the electorate, they represent a shift in the Labour leadership electorate. You can see this, again, in Corbyn's polling numbers among the actual electorate compared to stuff from the recent yougov poll on the leadership race, which suggests things like the biggest factor in Corbyn's support is people who recently joined the party. As in, within the last like year.

What is acceptable within the Labour leadeship race is not the same as what is acceptable within actual political discourse. You wanna see another example, just look over at the problems the Republicans have been having with their primaries.

 

And the Tories are not shifting away from their old policies, they are stretching out to suck up the middle that Labour is abandoning but, as can be seen from May's comments on Brexit today/yesterday/whatever, not actually moving away from their stakehold on the far right that's keeping the UKIPers at bay.

[Shryke]

Other interesting things from that recent poll I saw are that:

1) Corbyn's supporters are huge fans of deselection. The new members are looking to have themselves a purge it seems.

2) Corbyn's support in the leadership electorate is quite stable across age groups, so this isn't a movement of the young it seems.

[SeanF]

While it's true that right wing voters backed Leave, by about 7:3 and left wing voters backed Remain by 2:1, I don't think the EU vote  easily matches the left/right divide in the UK.  After all, those numbers mean that 30% of right wingers voted Remain, and 35% of left wing voters voted Leave.  Labour-voting areas like Sunderland, Oldham, Wigan, the South Welsh valleys backed Leave, whereas the Stockbroker Belt around London mostly voted Remain.

The EU vote was more a win for small c conservatives against liberals.  At one end of the spectrum, are people who favour tradition, sovereignty, and national independence, at the other, people who favour internationalism and the free movement of people and capital.

[Shryke]

7 hours ago, SeanF said:

While it's true that right wing voters backed Leave, by about 7:3 and left wing voters backed Remain by 2:1, I don't think the EU vote  easily matches the left/right divide in the UK.  After all, those numbers mean that 30% of right wingers voted Remain, and 35% of left wing voters voted Leave.  Labour-voting areas like Sunderland, Oldham, Wigan, the South Welsh valleys backed Leave, whereas the Stockbroker Belt around London mostly voted Remain.

The EU vote was more a win for small c conservatives against liberals.  At one end of the spectrum, are people who favour tradition, sovereignty, and national independence, at the other, people who favour internationalism and the free movement of people and capital.

It seems to be mostly about people with no economic opportunities actually.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/31/people

Quote

 

People who felt that they had been pushed to the margins of society, on low incomes and living in low-skilled areas, were the driving force behind Brexit, according to research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

It found that the way Britons voted in June’s referendum was deeply divided along economic, educational and social lines, with a lack of opportunity across swaths of the country resulting in people opting to leave the EU.

 

Basically it seems at the moment that the divide is based on income, education and opportunity. People doing badly in the current UK economy voted to leave.

It's only about internationalism in a loose, second-hand way.

[Chaircat Meow]

3 hours ago, Shryke said:

It seems to be mostly about people with no economic opportunities actually.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/31/people

Basically it seems at the moment that the divide is based on income, education and opportunity. People doing badly in the current UK economy voted to leave.

It's only about internationalism in a loose, second-hand way.

Not at all. People didn't think they were voting to leave the EU because they were on low incomes or were less well educated than other people. They voted to leave because they objected to immigration, loss of sovereignty etc. A lack of economic opportunity or a certain type of education may well have predisposed people to have such views and/or caused them to ignore warnings of economic doom (and vice-versa for Remainers) but that's not the same as saying the referendum was actually about income/education. It was about the issues it was fought on. And those issues cut across the usual right/left divide, as SeanF rightly said.

 

[Shryke]

4 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

Not at all. People didn't think they were voting to leave the EU because they were on low incomes or were less well educated than other people. They voted to leave because they objected to immigration, loss of sovereignty etc. A lack of economic opportunity or a certain type of education may well have predisposed people to have such views and/or caused them to ignore warnings of economic doom (and vice-versa for Remainers) but that's not the same as saying the referendum was actually about income/education. It was about the issues it was fought on. And those issues cut across the usual right/left divide, as SeanF rightly said.

 

Nope. If it was about the issues it was fought on (a ridiculous proposition given the amount of misinformation flying around during the lead up anyway) why is there a pronounced divide along income/opportunity/education/etc. It's because that's a large part of what it's about. Things like the opposition to immigration or sovereignty are a second-hand indicator, a result of different cultural/economic/etc issues.

If it was just about the issues, the demographics of the voters would reflect that. The rich and the poor can equally be concerned about EU encroachment on UK sovereignty after all. The fact that votes are, apparently, biased towards specific demographics tells you this is about something different. ie - something about having lower income, less education and/or less opportunity makes one more concerned with immigration and sovereignty and all that shit. The data suggests it was about something different.

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

10 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

Not at all. People didn't think they were voting to leave the EU because they were on low incomes or were less well educated than other people. They voted to leave because they objected to immigration, loss of sovereignty etc. A lack of economic opportunity or a certain type of education may well have predisposed people to have such views and/or caused them to ignore warnings of economic doom (and vice-versa for Remainers) but that's not the same as saying the referendum was actually about income/education. It was about the issues it was fought on. And those issues cut across the usual right/left divide, as SeanF rightly said.

 

I have to agree with this. Loss of Sovereignty and Immigration were the reasons Brexit happened, thats what people were voting on. Their anger at those issues might have stemmed from the view that their own crappy circumstances were caused by those symptoms, rightly or wrongly. 

If you live in London and are reasonably well educated then the EU is usually quite beneficial for you, you can travel where you want, work where you want, you perceive the EU to be a good thing. For everyone else you see all those problems in your country, failing public services, lack of jobs, stagnating wages, a changing demographic and you know that something needs to change. You feel that despite being unhappy with the way things are going nothing has changed, nobody is listening. 

Also if you've been listening and reading for 20 years about how the EU has been screwing you over, how immigrants are flooding the country and you see things are getting worse.. but there has been almost no effort by anyone to do anything to change it, then its understandable that so many people voted for Brexit. 

At the same time, since Brexit I've met a lot of well educated people who voted for Brexit, who did so because they say that 'something' needed to change, that it was a vote for.. something else. 

I see it as a protest vote, from people who are unhappy about the way things are, and who feel they don't have any power. Poor people are more likely to fall into that category. The fact that there is almost no plan of what happens after Brexit isn't really a concern to most because things are bad enough that it doesn't matter.

[SeanF]

15 hours ago, Shryke said:

It seems to be mostly about people with no economic opportunities actually.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/31/people

Basically it seems at the moment that the divide is based on income, education and opportunity. People doing badly in the current UK economy voted to leave.

It's only about internationalism in a loose, second-hand way.

Income was a factor in the voting, but only up to a point.  After all, 43% of professional people, and 43% of graduates voted for Brexit.  For that matter, 36% of the poorest voters voted Remain.  A majority of people who own their own homes outright also voted for Brexit.

Attitudes and geography were probably the most important determinants of voting.  Centres of government, like Inner London (72% Remain) Edinburgh (75% Remain), cities dominated by universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter, Brighton, Scotland, Nationalist-voting parts of Northern Ireland, and the London Stockbroker Belt, supported Remain, often by very big margins.  Most of urban England and Wales outside London voted Leave, as did most rural areas and Unionist-voting Northern Ireland.  Some of the latter were actually pretty well-heeled places, like Solihull, Sevenoaks, Hertsmere,  North Yorkshire, Cheshire, North Essex.

Without doubt, I think that people who do best out of globalisation and/or the activities of government were most likely to favour Remain, and those who don't were most likely to favour Leave, but there's a big overlap between different classes.

[Chaircat Meow]

New Yougov poll on Scottish Independence; 54/46 to the UK. Also big opposition to a 2nd ref before the UK leaves the EU 50/37 (with 13 don't knows). More evidence that the polls just after the ref were only a knee jerk reaction.

[ljkeane]

1 hour ago, Chaircat Meow said:

New Yougov poll on Scottish Independence; 54/46 to the UK. Also big opposition to a 2nd ref before the UK leaves the EU 50/37 (with 13 don't knows). More evidence that the polls just after the ref were only a knee jerk reaction.

The UK voting to leave the EU is a bit of an odd situation for proponents of Scottish independence. On the one hand with the UK voting to leave the EU I could see why as a Scottish voter you might take a dim view of the UK political system. On the other hand there's not much doubt the case for Scottish independence not having a significant negative impact on the Scottish economy was a lot stronger if both an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK were in the EU.