Tuesday, June 13, 2017

The rise of Labour, the death of Labourism

The British unions are in serous decline and many of the working class are authoritarians who vote Conservative. So how did Corbyn win such a large part of the vote, well, the middleclass and the upper classes voted for Labour in their droves? Now Blair always warned Labour not to abandon the middleclass, but it looks like they abandoned him.


The rise of Labour without Labourism is actually confirmed by Corbyn’s success. The most striking thing about Corbyn’s impressive showing in the election – against all expectations his party got 40 per cent of the vote, or 12,874,985 votes – is that it has hardened rather than weakened Labour’s appeal to the middle class. The great fear among the Blairite wing of the party was that gruff leftist Corbyn would shatter the party’s standing among the middle classes it picked up in the 1990s and 2000s. Not so. Corbyn has kept those middle classes and won many more, even in Kensington, the richest constituency in Britain, which his party nabbed from the Tories. Indeed, as shown by the exhaustive national Ashcroft Polls, at this election, for the first time in history, the middle and upper classes, known as social class ABC1, were as likely as the general voting public to vote for Labour and were slightly more likely to do so than skilled workers. This is an incredible, historic shift; that it reached this crossover point under Corbyn, that the wealthier finally became more likely than skilled workers to vote Labour under this alleged Red, makes it even more incredible. And deserving of interrogation.

All the stats point to Labour becoming an ever-more attractive prospect to the middle and upper classes.

Spiked News: The Rise of Labour

I worked with working class people all my life and I was always dismayed at how right wing many of them were. Most people weren't political but the ones who were all tended to be load mouthed authoritarians Tories. They hated people on benefits, and some even hated it that old people got free bus passes because they said it came out of their rates. The Sun Newspaper was everywhere with hardly any other newspaper in sight. The Sun would have an interviews everyday called, The White Van Guy Says, where some bigot they had found would spout obnoxious right wing views. And The Sun Say's comment section was just as bad. My colleagues never seemed to complain about it.

Occasionally someone with would read The Daily Mail and the right views seemed to be on an ascendancy. Austerity; lack of investment; the NHS underfunded; everything being privatised so the elite made all the profits while our taxes went up and millions lost their jobs; the ruling elite offshoring their profits avoiding tax; all the industrial jobs being sent abroad; Zero hours (almost going back in time to when people turned up for work each day to see if the boss had anything for them); US wars all over the Middle East; the economy always crashing; the bankers taking all the money; so how come, I thought, was no one was turning to the left? I blamed it on the media, but many people did turn left in the end when there was a real alternative. And when people saw Corbyn on TV and got to know his views bypassing the how the media represented him, they liked him. The last poll put Labour at a 6% lead over the Tories at 46%.

So, despite the fact that my company was privatised and our pensions reduced; despite that we were eventually put on shift work without a pay increase; despite jobs were cut and workload greatly increased so stress skyrocket; despite the fact our jobs were always on the line; despite the fact we had wage increase below the rate of inflation for many years; despite the fact that agency staff were brought in rather than our company employ new people and rumours were going about that our company would like to make us all agency staff in the end; despite the fact that management become tough and mean demoralising the staff; the working class Tories at my place still voted Conservative. The ruling elite had it made (or did do), and if they ever started a war the working class Tories will soon fall behind them. I hardly ever met any staunch Labour people, apart from my friends, now all this seems to have changed. I hope it lasts.

1 comment:

Kaivey said...

Blogger is so slow. I put this together on my state of the art PC and it was even worse than my tablet. It took ages to write, I should have written in a text editor first.