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What will the British left learn from the UK election? — 20 Comments

  1. > What will the British left learn from the UK election?

    They didn’t learn anything from the rise of similar sentiments on mainland Europe in the form of AfD, Vox, PiS, Fidesz etc so they might make some cosmetic changes but not much more. Their initial thought might be to attribute the loss to one-off confluence of rare events.

    More relevant question is, what will the Democrats in the US learn from this? Here is a first stab at the answer.

    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/corbyn-bernie-sanders-socialism-british-election-2020.html

    American Leftists Believed Corbyn’s Inevitable Victory Would Be Their Model

  2. Now they know they will have to have a revolution to teach the bourgeoisie the proper lesson of history, and to save the proletariat from their miserable stupid selves. It is written.

  3. But have the “elites” in the UK learned their lesson – don’t thwart the will of the people or they will turn you out next time they get a chance?

    The lesson they have learned is,
    “Would it not in that case be simpler
    for the government
    To dissolve the people
    And elect another?”

    And they are doing that through encouraging immigration, both in the UK and in the US.

  4. Since almost immedeately after the original Brexit vote, the remainers have been calling for a second referendum on leaving the E.U. Well, guess what? The old addage still holds true; be careful of what you wish for because you may just get it.

    KRB

  5. Elitists lack the ability ask what they did wrong and instead blame others for their failures. A classic example is Hillary Rodham Clinton. So no, Labour will learn nothing same as our dear, conniving democrats.

  6. parker: Elitists lack the ability ask what they did wrong and instead blame others for their failures.

    I once read an article which noticed how mutual fund managers who were Harvard grads tended to underperform other managers. I asked a friend of mine, who is a clinical psychologist, about this phenomenon and he echoed the same view; when everything you have done in life has been right then you simply cannot perceive that there might be something wrong with your stock selection.

  7. In monarchies and dictatorships, it is the rulers who decide where the people go. Labour needs to realize that in a democracy (and in a democratic republic) it is the people who eventually decide where they want to go. That is hard to understand for those who consider themselves superior to the people. “Oui, j’ai aussi trouvé cela difficile.” ~ Louis XVI

  8. The BBC just had an analyst talk about how Labour is a mess, 3 different groups with irreconcilable differences (such differences not spoken of in the program I saw):
    standard-old working class “laborers”;
    middle class educated professionals;
    students & minorities.

    The super rich in the UK are not yet big Labour supporters, but I see all 3 groups. And the big cleavage is that Leavers want a UK / English national identity, while the Remainers want to be part of a bigger, more universal, more globally egalitarian & equal, EU & world.

    I think thousands of the working class folk prefer Leaving, and they went away from Labour, voting for Brexit, some for Conservatives; few for Lib Dems (the professors). In Scotland, Labour was replaced by the Scottish National Party — wanting another referendum on Scottish Independence.

    Boris has said no to that, and there can only be another referendum if the British Parliament agrees to let there be one. Cameron’s Tory gov’t allowed the Brexit referendum, only prepared for a Remain result. Boris is smart enough to not let that happen … unless he decides he wants Scotland to Leave the UK (and try to re-join the EU?). Which might also go for Northern Ireland. Which might be part of why he doesn’t want more splitting, now.

    For the next 5 years, the SNP will most of the time act like part of the Labour Party opposition.

    Both the Protestant DUP & the Catholic Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland preferred Remain, so they won’t be happy to Leave. But the Tories have an absolute majority so don’t need them for this.

    In the BBC analysis, there was no mention of Christianity, and barely a mention of “culture”. But once everybody is actually eating enough, culture is more emotionally important than making 10% more in working wages. And for most “nations” in Europe, Christianity is the most important aspect of culture, after language.

  9. Tom Grey:
    I am not sure what to make of your assertion that Christianity is the most important aspect of European culture.

    Christianity requires practice, the practice of faith. And faith without works is dead.

    It is not evidence of Christianity that the head of the German Christian [sic] Democratic Union party, Angela Merkel, has flooded her country with anti-Christian Muslim hordes living off the dole, and has asserted that visiting a cemetery is the equivalent of Sunday Christian worship.
    It is not evidence of active Euro-Christianity that churches stand empty, that visitors to Notre Dame are almost all tourists, not Parisian worshipers. It is for financial reasons of tourism that Macron has proposed that state funds could be expended on the cathedral’s reconstruction.

    Euro culture is secular and passive, limp-wristed, not Christian and surely not actively so.

  10. Cicero:

    I can’t read Tom Grey’s mind, so this is just a guess, but my guess is that he meant traditional European culture, not its up-to-the-minute present-day manifestation.

  11. “Will the lesson they end up learning be to run someone smoother and more appealing, whose leftism is more cleverly hidden?” – Neo

    Well, our Leftists started with the very smooth subterfuge of Obama, and then went to the slightly bumpier opportunistically leftist Clinton, and now have a potential slate of tough-talking all-out socialists — so my guess is “no”.

  12. Andy on December 13, 2019 at 2:50 pm said:
    parker: Elitists lack the ability ask what they did wrong and instead blame others for their failures.

    I once read an article which noticed how mutual fund managers who were Harvard grads tended to underperform other managers. I asked a friend of mine, who is a clinical psychologist, about this phenomenon and he echoed the same view; when everything you have done in life has been right then you simply cannot perceive that there might be something wrong with your stock selection.
    * * *
    This view of Harvard grads might be extendable to other fields.
    I suspect it is.
    One of our college friends became a lawyer, as was his father, and said that Dad would never hire from the Ivies, because their grads were not really very good at the legal business.

  13. Andy on December 13, 2019 at 1:43 pm said:
    > What will the British left learn from the UK election?

    They didn’t learn anything from the rise of similar sentiments on mainland Europe in the form of AfD, Vox, PiS, Fidesz etc so they might make some cosmetic changes but not much more. Their initial thought might be to attribute the loss to one-off confluence of rare events.
    * * *
    Every loss is a “one-off” to the Left, because (as Andy said about fund managers) they simpy can’t conceive that they might be wrong (in political terms: unable to understand that the voters really, really don’t want the same things they do).
    arguably, in the case of Clinton and Corbyn, they have some justfication in regards to the confluence idea, both candidates having multiple negatives that turned off different groups of voters; however, they also fail to realize that the negatives are no longer rare events, but are the very substance of their policies and persons.

  14. The Left can never learn when they lose, because they are not operating in the real universe.

    https://americanmind.org/essays/something-to-say-to-the-sphinx/

    It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

  15. Yep – no learning taking place on the essential points (the voters really, really don’t like you), but lots of learning about what they can do without suffereing punishing consequences from legal or political angles.

    https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2019/12/13/uk-protesters-chant-not-prime-minister-scuffle-police/
    John Sexton, Posted at 6:41 pm on December 13, 2019

    Earlier today I wrote that the UK election results should serve as a warning to socialists in this country, but I guess there’s a corollary to that: UK conservatives may want to pay attention to the left’s behavior in the US after losing the 2016 election. It seems the UK left is marching down the same path as the resistance. In London there are hundreds of people out in the streets chanting “Not my prime minister!”

    Increasingly, it seems to be the norm for the far left that any election they lose (Brexit, the 2016 US electoin, etc) is grounds to announce they consider the election results illegitimate. It’s not a good trend. I’m confident we’d be hearing a lot more about how dangerous this is if people on the right were doing the equivalent.

  16. how dangerous this is if people on the right were doing the equivalent.

    If the only time the left feel any consequences for anything is when they lose a vote, then of course they’ll think it’s an outrage.

  17. Brendan O’Neill.
    https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/12/13/the-revenge-of-democracy/

    Already leftist elitists are demeaning this mass vote against anti-democrats as the work of racist idiots. These stupid voters remain in the intellectual stranglehold of evil tabloids and populist demagogues, they claim. They will never learn. This is precisely the kind of contempt that made people turn against the aloof left and technocratic elites. More importantly, yesterday’s election shows the opposite of what these anti-democrats claim. It shows that people can think and decide for themselves. For three years people have been bombarded with overblown threats and hysterical warnings about the dangers of Brexit and the vulnerability of our economy and public services if we go down the populist route. ‘We’ll look after you by stopping Brexit and doing the right thing’, politicians assured them. The people rejected all of this paternalistic guff. They thought for themselves and said, ‘Nope’. This was an act of an independent people.

  18. Well, we know what the left in America will learn from this— “They lost because they didn’t go far enough left!”

    P.S. I’m still reading, just not commenting. Don’t want to be a party crasher. ; )

  19. They will never learn anything. The zealots of the post-modern Left have a limitless capacity to ignore reality even when it’s staring them in the face.

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