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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit like blaming the Democrats for the political crisis in the US but I have to ask "what the hell is wrong with Labor?" The Tories have dominated politics in the UK since the later 1970s except for the Blair administration, and Blair was an honorary Tory.

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There's something wild going on there, too. Leaked documents have shown how their best chance at real Labour-style governance (Corbyn) was intentionally smeared from within as an antisemite, among other things, in order to torpedo his popularity. Instead, Labour has the hugely ineffectual Tory-esque Keir Starmer now. Feels very much like a managed opposition.

Corbyn seems to have done a fine enough job smearing himself over his long and illustrious career of far-left populism and terrorism apologia. His campaign signed up a lot of fly-by-night party members and was successful in getting him elected party leader, but convincing the general public was far more difficult.

(Part of the answer to why Labour has been out of power for 13 years is the Corbyn disaster, it explains half of that time span).

There's an alternate history in which it was David Miliband who became Labour leader, not his brother. Who knows of course, but there's a decent chance it would have prevented the disaster of Brexit (and the related disaster, for Labour and the country, of Corbyn).

He's just another diet Tory like Starmer though.

In a sense, I don't disagree. But when the only Labour politician of my lifetime to win an election is Tony Blair, you have to consider that the UK is a pretty Tory country, and you have to work with what you've got...

Eh, they did quite well in 2017 - in fact, the best performance for the Labour party since Blair was under Corbyn[0].

[0]: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

And then they lost 60 seats under Corbyn in 2019. Winning 202, the lowest number of seats since 1935.

That was the result of the aforementioned internal torpedoing of Corbyn though, right? Cutting off the nose to spite the face or something.

I think that's a part of it, but I think a bigger deal part that, when the media and political establishment saw he was electable, they also saw him as a real threat, and so they made a much more concerted effort to damage him before the next election.

That's why you got stuff like his face getting greenscreened onto a clip of voldemort on the BBC.

One thing that people underestimate is just how far to the right of the general population the media and political class is. They tend to be private school dominated, overwhelmingly drawn from southern england, and personally wealthy.

Sounds very similar to this, from the original author, in the comments:

The situation is not irretrievable in theory, at this point.

The problem is that in practice a solution requires the political elite to collectively admit the falsehood of the axioms they built their entire careers on.

If an individual political leader defects from the nationalist-neoliberal consensus, then they get treated exactly the way Jeremy Corbyn was. Corbyn was a soft-brexiter -- his distrust of the EU was based on it having emerged from the EEC, as a capitalist institution: what they hated him for was for being an unreconstructed hang-over from the 1970s when Labour was actually a left-wing party.

Neoliberal politicians can't admit that the crisis is rooted in neoliberal policies.

A couple of things:

Tories have done well to court the people that show up at the polls with things like keeping the Triple-Lock pension guarantee[1].

Like the Democrats, Labour's demographics have started to shift more to the well-educated (though I suspect this will swing back massively, come the next election). This alienated their traditional working class base who care more about their own economic realities than whatever social crusade is the flavour of the week.

Young Labour went out of their way to paint pro-Brexiters as racists and bigots. The dirty secret is that even Corbyn has been a long time Euro-sceptic. Because of the in-fighting on the correct position, Labour didn't take a hard stance on Brexit until very close to the end, IIRC. At which point, anti-Brexit votes were being siphoned off by the Liberal Democrats, with pro-Brexit votes going to the Tories.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Pension_(United_Kingdom)...

But if an euro-sceptic like Corbyn (distrust of the EEC more than the EU idea) was in power to negociate brexit, i'm pretty sure the negotiations would've gone better. I don't believe the EU technocrats would've sabotaged him, they care much more about being right than supporting their political side somehow (worked with them two years ago on a project, it was enlightening, made me appreciate technocrats much more than politicians)

>Young Labour went out of their way to paint pro-Brexiters as racists and bigots. The dirty secret is that even Corbyn has been a long time Euro-sceptic.

I'm pretty sure that a reason Labour did much better than expected in the 2017 general election is that Brexit voters suspected that Corbyn had secretly voted for Leave.

Funny, from the outside, UK always sounds as if it is overrun by leftist politics. I wouldn‘t have guessed tories were in charge most of the time.

London has a Labor major and it is the economic Center, so maybe there was a lot of Labor influence on the economy after all?

Maybe if you know nothing of Margaret Thatcher...

UK doesn't have much in the way of Left wing politics.

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