MIllenials invert boomers

Cultural war and class distancing persists, apparently, in a new Facebook group, reports el gurn where millenials can pretend to be boomers. People add all sorts of amusing posts, full of boomer characteristics:

Members-pretending-to-be-boomers enthusiastically share earnest personal news, Minions gifs, and hoax posts imploring friends to copy and paste alarmist messages, all riddled with whacky syntax and redundant punctuation [totally unknown to the Gyuradina, of course] ....At any given moment, members of the group are creating tongue in cheek events with names like “SPEAK ON PHONE LIKE THE SPEAKER IS NOT ON WITH SPEAKER ON,” or sharing quotes such as “When someone says ‘stop living in the past,’ I say, ‘but the music was so much better back then.’”

All lighthearted hilarity, no doubt, but:

Comedic value aside, there are reasons why a younger crowd may want to channel boomers. Their generation boasted affordable college tuition, accessible home ownership and entry into a strong job market – no longer realities for today’s youth. Boomer envy is real.

There is classic new petty bourgeois cultural inversion:

The stereotypes emphasized in the Facebook group happen to have struck a particularly resonant chord with younger demographics, predominantly millennials, long sensitive to being labeled entitled, lazy, wildly selfish and feckless by their elders....Perry [a Psychology prof] explains that the impulse to satirize boomers may be a reaction to negative stereotypes younger cohorts face about themselves – a kind of generational tit-for-tat. “It’s playful at first, until it’s not,” she cautions....[A poster]  has found the group “kind of cathartic”, she says. “It’s sort of like the old comedic standard of punching up, not down, because we kind of feel like we’re being made out to be something we’re not, now we’re kind of turning the tables a little bit.”

There is a note of dissent here:

“There’s this assumption for a lot of people that it’s an excuse to be a Trump/Maga-[?] type, or to write homophobic things,” says Fredericksen. Yet that’s a reductive take on what was in fact an often-radical generation. “Probably most of the trans people who rioted at Stonewall were boomers,” he says....For Fredericksen, the real comedic gems come from transmuting the way people who came late to computers [who they?] communicate on social media into high camp

And there is Guardnia liberal sentiment (positive here, but there is still  P Toynbee roaming the corridors):

“So much research trying to show the differences between generations has actually resulted in showing that we’re so much more similar than we think. If we would just realize we all want the same things in life and in society, I think we could start to communicate better.”

BBC bias -- latest obfuscations*

According to today's Gru

More Conservative supporters complained en masse about the BBC’s news coverage during the general election than Labour supporters... [But this is easily explained away]...Tories are more likely to take the time to write a stern letter of complaint.

Were all the complaints in the form of actual letters then? In a nice blurring of the categories:

Mass complaints alleging the BBC is biased in favour of either Labour or the remain campaign consistently outnumber those alleging the broadcaster is biased in favour of the Tories or Brexit by more than two to one.

Some idea of the scale of the problem appears nevertheless:

The show to attract by far the most complaints was an eve-of-poll edition of the Andrew Marr Show featuring Boris Johnson, scheduled at the last minute following the terrorist attack on London Bridge after he had refused an interview with Andrew Neil. It attracted complaints from 12,172 viewers who felt Marr was biased against Boris Johnson. [who read and coded all these complaints to conclude that, I wonder?]

A bit of tactical vagueness here as well:

One edition of the Andrew Marr Show broadcast in May attracted 1,128 complaints from the public [about what exactly?]. Some [how many?]  claimed the programme exhibited clear bias against Nigel Farage or against Brexit and others claimed the opposite.

Luckily, some complainers are fruitcakes -- the BBC/Graun hopes we will see them as typical?

Some viewers [of Last Night of The Proms] has [sic] taken offence at audience members with EU flags and the US singer Jamie Barton waving a rainbow flag.

Elsewhere, a piece by B Jabour. She is the Opinion editor (Australia), so no need to refer to the B word. Millenials are unhappy, it seems :

Do I hate my job? Do I want a child? Am I not, actually, all that special after all? The end of our extended adolescence is bringing many painful questions

I usually avoid assigning characteristics to entire groups of people. But, every 31-year-old I know is miserable....every 31-year-old seems to be in a state of ennui.

Previous generations probably had their “I’m not actually that special” realisation in their early 20s when working full-time, buying property and having kids. Millennials have had a well-documented prolonged adolescence throughout their 20s, a lot longer to be self-centred.

[Millenials need to] find a way to stop ruminating, to think outside ourselves. One of the unanticipated reliefs of having a child is all of the time spent not thinking about myself. I hadn’t realised how sick I had become of me....There are other ways to move on from the rumination: meaningful work, not-very-meaningful-but-fun hobbies, pets, volunteering, reading, exploration. (I refuse to say travel because it’s a dumb trope that travel makes you a more fulfilled or better person!)

Perhaps they will get over it after all.

They just won't let it lie...

Remainer ex-Tories who were wiped out in the Election are,well, unrepentant, says the Observer:

The Observer spoke to David Gauke, who quit the cabinet; Sam Gyimah, who defected from the Tories to the Lib Dems; Anna Soubry, who set up a new party; and Dominic Grieve, who helped lead the fight against Brexit in parliament, about the crucial year ahead. They pointed to key contradictions in Johnson’s plans that could lead quickly to a Brexit crisis – and predicted he would not pivot towards securing a soft Brexit trade deal with the EU.

Best of all was D Grieve (a particularly apt name I have just noticed):

The prospect of securing a good trade deal at the end of 2020 was very uncertain, said Grieve. “One of the themes of the election that continues to be of great concern to me is the risk of ending up with either a very unsatisfactory deal or no deal at all. I think they are very considerable.”...He also predicted a new constitutional crisis as Brexit takes place. “If the border in the Irish Sea starts to materialise, then I can foresee that politics in Northern Ireland will become very heated up,” he said....With Scotland, the SNP have the grievance to revive the call for independence.

The editorial  has the same old stories, only with more pomposity: failed deal ('People with experience of trade negotiations, and that excludes him, say it cannot be done, unless, of course, Britain meekly accept Europe’s demands'); SNP ('Nicola Sturgeon is the smarter politician') ; Trump ('Trump will demand Johnson’s fealty, possibly even his endorsement.').

This is new, though, perhaps another attempt to explain to plebs what they have done:

The damage that Britain’s departure will do to the already enfeebled EU project is often overlooked in London. Rising instability across the continent, seen in the increased influence of far-right populists and nationalists, is not in Britain’s interest. Yet by their woeful example, Johnson and his Brexit wrecking crew encourage it. The weakening of the Anglo-German alliance is one of the most worrying consequences. Quiet co-ordination between London and Berlin has traditionally provided a steadying counterweight to the EU’s southern states [much more volatile and emotional as we know] . By jointly furnishing economic and financial leverage, military strength and diplomatic clout, it has given teeth to Europe’s democratic values and its influence in the world.

Not only have we refused to pay our round in the pub or our club subscriptions, we have now run away from a fight in the car park!
 
Other splits may be deepening, if anything. Zeitgeist surfer B Ellen has this: 

Jolyon Maugham QC was a hero to many. Then he beat a fox to death

The Remainer lawyer deserved all the bile that came his way for his callous act 

 

E Maitlis reassures us, and maybe herself, by the old ruling class device of denying conspiracy but admitting lovable cock-ups that we can all forgive (overlooking the massive salaries of all concerned):

Maitlis, Newsnight’s chief presenter, told the Observer. “So often people read conspiracy into a thing when it’s really a confluence of cock-ups and the wrong button being pressed at the wrong time, or the guest you wanted gets into the wrong taxi and doesn’t show up.”

She has a book out, you know.

Brexit might sell a few books

News today of a new syndrome: 

possible chronic Post Brexit Insomnia (PBI)

Over a period of months, her sleep disturbances fluctuated. In June 2016 they began to be accompanied by anger at the result of the European referendum, resulting in periods of restless wakefulness

If only we had known it would make novelists angry, I am sure we would never have voted Leave. It might be other things affecting her too.The rest of the lengthy column goes on and on:

On arriving home, she [she writes of herself in the third person] recalls meeting her next-door neighbour at the bus stop, who told her of the death of their lodger. Later that day she was informed of the separation of her sister and partner. Some days after this, she learned of the death of her cousin, who was found in his flat two days after he passed away. Some days later she was informed that her father’s partner had been diagnosed with dementia. A week or two after her cousin’s funeral, she learned that her father had fallen from a ladder, had badly broken his leg and would be unable to walk for a year.

She is a novelist, strangely enough with a book about insomnia:

Dust and ashes though I am, I sleep the sleep of angels....This is the first line of my most recently published novel.... She knew the word ragged and she knew it was an adjective that could describe many things, including sleep, but she knew nothing about ragged sleep. Nowadays she is shocked by the fraudulence of words. Every word claims an authority and every word craves to be believed, and we read others’ words and we find something to relate to, solace in a shared experience. Yet there doesn’t have to be any experience behind a word. A word can be a shadow not cast by any object

I think the link with Brexit was thought up by the PR people at her publishers. It could spark a whole series of commercially-inspired stories -- My Hamster Miscarried Because of Brexit

 

EC has 'serious concerns', but codpiece returns

Slow times for newspapers of course as all the journos are on holiday, or, if they are modern zero-hours stringers, working in Waitrose behind the avocado counter. So understandably, old themes are recycled:

The European commission president said she had “serious concern” over the limited time available for the negotiations and emphasised the need to keep all options open....Should there not be a deal in place on trade, for example, the UK would face major disruption to its economy, with tariffs and quantity restrictions being immediately applied to goods being sold into the EU market.

More bad news in the monthly update on the economic effects of Brexit. They include:

Sterling surges on Johnson’s election landslide

Stock markets rally on Brexit hopes and US-China trade deal

Inflation stays low despite rising cost of chocolate

Wage growth slows despite falling unemployment

House prices fall at fastest rate since April

However, the GRaun always delivers some insights into worlds you never knew existed:

 'Codpiece envy': fashion reinvents 16th century accessory 

Among other startling revelations:

The American designer Thom Browne also featured them in his spring/summer 2020 show, which nodded to deconstructed sportswear...“The codpiece is a whimsical representation of masculinity,” he said....

 There are actual books on this topic:

Victoria Bartels, author of What Goes Up Must Come Down: A Brief History Of The Codpiece...Michael Glover ...Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History Of The Codpiece In Art.

The authors say that:

[the codpiece contributed] to a fabricated, fictionalised version of the male body....signalling masculine power in the absence of real substance...something that Shakespeare also picked up on....Glover said: Shakespeare was the great, instinctive etymologist. He knew how words tricked with their double and triple meanings: ‘cod’ as scrotum, ‘to cod’ meaning to cheat.”

 Explaining fashion’s obsession with the era, the designer Gareth Pugh said: “The Tudors were the first power dressers.” 

 

 

 

Merry Xmas from the Guardian

An item in  the Xmas Day edition

Top 10 books about loneliness

At what can be one of the loneliest times of year, a historian of emotion, [sic! a certain Fay Bound Alberti], picks the best books about a modern malady

As a historian of emotion, these complexities, and the absence of any existing extended historical inquiry, inspired my new book, A Biography of Loneliness.

Weird middle names seem to be compulsory,especially for feminists. Is this the old Victorian habit of remembering mothers' maiden names? The best ones also seem to hint at a fashionable ethnic minority heritage. There are some strange choices for the top two -- Robinson Crusoe, that testament to the resilience of the protocapitalist, and Frankenstein, which is to be read as a novel about -- emotions:

It contains just two references to loneliness (and one of those is a lonely road, reflecting its unemotional origin as a synonym for solitude). Yet the angst of Frankenstein’s monster, guilty of sin, abandoned and lost, [just like an ardent Remainer] expresses a remarkably familiar, modern version of loneliness.

Then more familiar Guardian fare. Radclyffe Hall:

One of the earliest, best-known accounts of lesbian experience in British and American culture

Virginia Woolf:

critical reflections on loneliness in a gendered world.

Sylvia Plath:

Plath’s novel explores a loneliness that again stemmed from social expectation – this time, what it was to be a woman in the 1950s, juggling the expectations of work, domesticity and desire.  

I could go on. I am sure the Guardina will, as the grieving over Brexit works through from anger to despair, and everyone else seems to be getting on with it. 

And as an indication of new petite bourgeois charity and compassion at this challenging time of year:

A London youth club credited with saving children from rising knife violence is facing calls for its closure from new residents who think it would be better used as a coffee shop.

The story is a lot more open and understanding of both sides --but it's Xmas and I am going to rest my stern responsibilities a bit.

Theology on the hoof

News from on high at this holy time! A nice new female and black bishop has spoken out over Brexit. Naturally,the Grun, that organ of the CofE has prioritised her holy words:

Brexit discourse contributed to death of Jo Cox, says bishop 

It’s been very, very damaging and of course I have always believed that the kind of discourse that we had contributed to the death of Jo Cox...“I really believed that then and I still believe it today. So yes, we needed to change the discourse.”

Hudson-Wilkin said: “The way that we related to one another over this wretched topic contributed. If you think about what the person was shouting when he inflicted harm on our dear sister Jo, you will know that the language that we were using with each other contributed to that.”

Working class conservatism or npb social distancing?

K Malik in the Observer analyses Britain's working class

it had become accepted almost as a given that the working class was intrinsically socially conservative.[yes -- dating back at least to the 1950s]  ..The working class, runs the argument, is rooted in communities and cherishes values of family, nation and tradition. It has little time for liberal individualism or for the language of diversity and rights. That belongs to the “metropolitan liberals” and to a different political tradition

The trouble with this argument is that the key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation...On a host of issues, from gender roles to gay marriage, from premarital sex to interracial relationships, Britain has liberalised [including the British working class]

It’s true that there are deep class divides on immigration, with differences between the views of unskilled workers and those of professionals being the widest in Europe. Yet, nearly a third of unskilled workers are “pro-immigrant” and almost half think that Britain should allow in “many” or “some” migrants from poorer European countries.... In societies in which trust is low and social solidarity weak, hostility towards migrants is high, even when immigrants are few in number. Where trust in public institutions is high and social stability strong, people are more open to immigration. The BSA similarly found that attitudes to immigration were intertwined with issues of trust....

Working-class wariness of immigration is not an expression of an innate social conservatism but of the loss of trust, the breaking of social bonds and a sense of voicelessness. [There are some sound studies on this]...Working-class lives have been made more precarious... Immigration has become symbolic of this loss.

We should not, however, confuse anger at social atomisation and political voicelessness with social conservatism.

The abandonment by working-class voters of social democratic parties throughout Europe, and their embrace of populism, was seen by many as a rejection of the liberal values that define the left....[but]...many sections of the left have also given up on traditional modes of social change, retreating instead into the vapidity of identity politics and diversity talk. In so doing, they have often abandoned not just class politics, but their attachment to traditional liberal values as well

We need class analysis here too, though. It is the new petite bourgeoisie in the left who restlessly change the goal posts, so that old liberal causes are no longer enough to claim social distinction. Identity politics is an ideal form because it is also constantly changing and nebulous, giving a constant chance for those in the know to demonstrate their moral superiority.

BBC denials of bias -- nothing but repeats

Stop me if you have heard this one before.The BBC is not biased, says the DG , because (all together):

"... the fact criticism came from all sides of the political divide shows to me that we were doing our job without fear or favour.”

This might be new:

Those sentiments have not been echoed by all BBC colleagues. Earlier this month, the BBC’s head of news and current affairs, Fran Unsworth said: “I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view that if we get complaints from both sides we are doing something right.”

Darker forces may be at work:

Huw Edwards, who anchored the BBC’s election night coverage, has also previously dismissed claims of bias at the corporation, and said any such accusations are designed to cause “chaos and confusion”....The News at Ten presenter said: “You realise yet again that the real purpose of many of the attacks is to undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of stability [?] over many decades.”

Meanwhile,J Harris opts for consolation in art instead of revenge fantasies or the pursuit of Hope (in a woman Labour leader, in Brexit chaos and civil unrest etc) :

the idea of a quiet interlude and the chance to think deep thoughts about the politics of the left does look like something of a joke. But the reasons run... into one of the most vexing questions of our time: whether our current means of communication and discourse allow us any space to reflect on anything at all....At which point, an unlikely segue, away from politics, into the creative arts. 

Not that unlikely,especially if you need another chance to flash your wad of popular cultural capital and do a bit of class distancing. We can learn lessons from 'the band-cum-project Talk Talk,' [me neither] producing 'stuff that was built on space and quiet.' Didn't John Cage get there first?

Music only reflects the way we live. [Plebeian] Thumbs that endlessly jab at smartphones attest to the fact that for millions – billions? – of us, stepping back from the endless fray is now unthinkable [confirms everything you thought about plebs] ...In the offline world, [of the Islington dinner party?] conversation and exchange can be inherently reflective. Other people’s [fellow new petite bourgeoisie] perspectives are empathetically soaked up; time is allowed for thought, and hesitation [really? not aggressive class distancing?]

Harris even thinks, in a small c moment, that smoking and drinking had the social advantage of allowing for quiet reflection. Reading a broadsheet over breakfast too, no doubt, like the GUadinar, say, with its calm thoughtful editorials, or the columns of the deeply reflective P Toynbee.

I am all for quiet reflection. I hope the GUardnia gets a pair of socks for Christmas -- and inserts them into its Remainer megaphone. 

Observer runs special 'vote Labour moderates' edition

There is exclusive news in the Observer -- that an article has been written for the Observer, by new millenial squeeze D Lammy. Lammy gets another spot in a feature on (only nice and only Remainer spokesperson) Labour why-oh-why piece., including Miliband D who gets another go lower down!
 
Lammy is thinking of running for Labour leader, offering:

civic nationalism [that] says that we can be united around shared values and institutions....[EU ones as I recall] ...“To foster this, we need to construct new spaces and places in which the UK’s diverse peoples can engage with each other and belong.”

This is shrewd marketing to appeal to the nationalist white working class, of course, but there may be a problem:.

Lammy, whose support is strong in London

The same article contains another exclusive:

Labour’s former deputy leader Roy Hattersley makes the startling suggestion that if Long Bailey is chosen then moderate Labour MPs should refuse to accept her

D Miliband lends his weight to a Blairite push:

It is not only Corbyn who needs to be replaced, but his politics: the ideology, the worldview, the theory of political change....Of course Brexit was an issue (though smaller than Corbyn and his promises)...I am convinced that Brexit is the biggest foreign policy disaster since appeasement in the 1930s...[Now we need]...a progressive patriotism. 

N Cohen is rapidly morphing into the P Toynbee of the Observer,complete with splenetic rage. His hero is A Turley, former labour MP for Redcar:

[She] tweeted that Len McCluskey was an “arsehole” and recommended joining Unite to vote him out in a forthcoming general secretary election. A passing insult may not seem much to you [although it would normally lead to a twitchhunt for its obvious if only in effect aggression against gays]

She was criticised in turn, for sins including breaking procedure. 'Turley said the article and a press release from Unite painted her as dishonest', and a High Court libel action ensued. Turley was clearly not going to let a passing insult go by even if it would not seem much to us.It sounds very nasty. Turley won.

At a libel trial in the middle of an election campaign, Unite was destroying the good name of a Labour candidate, who did indeed lose her seat.

Overall, this is reasonable.Other bits might be,although they seem a bit one-sided:

All the worst elements of the left’s mindset were on display. Turley was not an honest opponent but wicked, as all critics of Corbyn must be...Then there was the paranoia...Finally, there was the air of embattled virtue.

Turley is doubtless a saint inspired only by the national interest. Cohen sees this wider interest:

the willingness to waste other people’s money, the leftwing sectarian hatred of centrists and the indifference to a woman’s suffering had one benefit: the case of Unite v Turley delineated the modern Labour party to perfection.

But the opening sections are positively Toynbeeish:

the modern left in all its self-defeating ugliness...the former Labour MP for Redcar’s supposedly socialist enemies looked closer to a crime gang than a trade union...Turley was one of the Labour lambs Jeremy Corbyn led to slaughter at last week’s election....

The Observer editorial also focuses strictly on the national interest:

the conclusiveness of the result should not obscure the massive uncertainty that hangs over our future...Leaving the EU on 31 January 2020 under the terms of the withdrawal agreement will not see “Brexit done” in any but the most superficial sense...none of the existential questions facing our country have gone away...What is the UK’s future as a union of four nations? How do we make it a greener and kinder country in which to live, in which older people do not go without basic care and children get an equal chance in life regardless of who their parents are?

But soon plays its old refrains:

Johnson has always prioritised his own political interest over that of the country... the political imperative [is] to tack towards a soft Brexit that minimises its economic impact, protects the union and recognises that over half of voters did not give his version of Brexit their seal of approval last week.

Polling [where?]  suggests that the most important factor in voters deserting the party for the Conservatives was not Brexit, but Corbyn’s leadership

The Observer is still giving us wise advice:

Labour can only win decent majorities by building a coalition of socially liberal and socially conservative voters from every corner of the UK. The decline in working-class support for Labour has been long-term and structural

And it has really been right all along, you know:

Those who have spent the past two years arguing for a referendum – this newspaper included – must take stock and reflect why the case never resonated with enough MPs and voters for it to happen

Not the content just the way it has been presented,as ever. 
 

Seats and popular votes

The BBC and Guard gave themselves all sorts of false hope by reporting how close were the poll returns of popular vote in the UK, forgetting that the votes by seat were different. There were claims that most people actually voted for anti-brexit parties, or against Johnson's deal at least, and calls for PR.

It seems to be the other way around when reporting the Election results in Scotland.
SNP got a large majority of seats, but a Wikipedia item shows the popular vote as follows (raw figures then percentage share) :

UKIP:3303 votes, 0.1% share of vote; SNP:1,242, 380 -- 45%; Green: 28,122 -- 1%; 
LibDem: 263417 - 2.8%; Lab: 511, 838 --18.6%; Cons: 692,939 - 25.1%; Brexit Party 13,243-- 0.5%; Others: 3819 - 0.1%


So SNP actually got less than half the popular vote. Maybe those who did not vote for them supported Brexit and/or the Union (except for LibDems?) Disappointing for any new Indyref no doubt. PR for Scotland?

Agreeable chats, then what to do for 5 years

The Graun has been diverting itself with a return to gathering writers musings about hope, but they are too banal even for this blog. Similarly, C4News diverted itself last night, after a briefish announcement that the Brexit Withdrawal Bill had been passed with a large majority, with a lengthy, harrowing interview with a British actress who is now suing Weinstein. Newsnight did the same brief news item then launched into an agreeable dinner-party discussion with a number of cosmo trendies about social media for about 20 minutes.It is going to be a long 5 years!


G Younge urges us back on to the streets. Canvassing was jolly hard work in the Election:

“We walked (and sometimes ran) in the freezing rain from house to house to get the vote out. But we were often met on the doorstep with bitterness, a hardness that was brittle like a body that’s turned inwards, tight and hunched-over against the cold and wet.”...Despite all its effort, that [Labour] machine evidently didn’t work. We lost, and lost badly. The Tories increased their majorities in both Milton Keynes constituencies. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t exist or make any difference. Those majorities are still lower now than they were in 2015...soon the conversations amongst us started to be about after the election – how we might retain this spirit, this collective energy.”

Sounds like the stuff you always got at the end of academic conferences -- much relief that it is over covered by a loud insistence that it had all been marvellous and ground-breaking. 

not that the left should abandon its activism in the party, but that it might want to consider significantly shifting the balance of its energies beyond it....the left might focus more on local and national campaigns than holding positions and passing resolutions....There is no shortage of issues for the left to get involved in beyond Labour. The Earth certainly can’t wait until 2024.

For J Freedland it is a matter of charisma:

[the left]  wins only when led by someone who is not merely good, but a phenomenon. In the US, it has taken a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama... In the UK, it took a Tony Blair [nothing to do with cynical 'triangulation' or 'Third Way' hokum]...it is maddeningly hard to define charisma, [chap's never read Weber] even if we feel we can spot its presence – or absence – in seconds....a left challenger needs to exude gravitas and competence....Of the current Labour field, the only candidate who even comes close to having that quality is Jess Phillips. 

The ideological theme of 'patriotism/racism/small c conservatism' is doing well with this:

[Old working class voters were] talking about loyalty to a state they expected to be their exclusive patron – and they saw a Labour leader who seemed to invite the whole world to his allotment, offering homemade jam to all, no matter which flags their ancestors spilt their blood for...collectivist language of what we could build together left them sceptical and uncomprehending. It seemed more zero sum to them, where one person’s gain must be another’s loss.[They're not daft] ...the leadership was not trusted to deliver the popular policies in the manifesto. Sensible investments such as state-provided broadband came to be seen as giveaways

To his credit, Pagarani finally connects with a better-argued tradition of studying working class conservatism:

This isn’t about a chauvinistic sense of racial or national superiority. I encountered no Brexit optimism, no sense of “Believe in Britain” boosterism....the good news is that people are not crying out for more racism or war. ... On the contrary, people were fixated on the inevitability of scarcity, and the need to guard against naive hope.

many young, working-class people...were not engaged with politics. Many had never heard about class politics at all, and expressed confusion and boredom regarding Brexit. The idea of voting for a party to tax the rich to pay for redistribution and public services was completely novel, and generally immediately attractive. It was amazing to see how quickly and instinctively they grasped a leftwing agenda while saying they had never thought about it before...There is a huge opportunity for the left to make inroads with younger non-graduates in towns...an opportunity for popular participation – engagement in civic and political life on a local scale – to combat the feeling of powerlessness that saps the ability of people to imagine a radically different future. With five years in the wilderness at the national level, Labour may have to explore the potential of municipal socialism, as pioneered in Preston and seen in Barcelona.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elliott for Labour leader!

Heroic L Elliott is still there at the Graun, praise be 

The Tories have understood that their response to the financial meltdown – a prolonged period of austerity that squeezed living standards – was unpopular and wrong. They also twigged that Brexit was a revolt against austerity and free-market economics more generally – so they have embraced the decision to leave the European Union and positioned themselves as the party of intervention and the working classes.

Labour won seats in 2017 when it said it would respect the referendum result, but saw its “red wall” breached when it moved steadily closer to remain. Having chosen not to listen to what voters in its former heartlands were saying, Labour now seems bemused to find that they have migrated to a party that did.

Voters in the former industrial parts of the country are not mugs. They could see that Labour’s stance on Brexit had moved from respecting the referendum result in 2016, to telling the public to have another think (and to come up with a different result) in 2019...[As for the] expensive, electoral bribes. To many voters, these seemed an insult to their intelligence, which indeed they were.

Instead of seeing Brexit as a vote for a different sort of economy, [Labour] has demonised leave voters as nativists and racists. It decided early on that no matter what form Brexit took, it would be worse than the status quo.

Brexit has already been a catalyst for change. It has forced the government to spend rather than cut

[Elliott offers] the only option that offers a way back for Labour: embrace Brexit and argue for a left version of Britain outside the EU.  

It is not quite the only option for grieving guardianistas:

How to be hopeful: Anne Lamott on the awe of everyday play

'Bookish' Remainers seek consolation in (more) fictions

I really should get on with the day job, but I couldn't resist this in teh Graub

Sometimes, for us bookish types [no plebs need read any further because they just won't understand], a particular moment in time requires a particular author, as surely as a bout of winter flu requires paracetamol. So I was very glad to find myself, last Thursday – in that nervous/tragic/hopeful gap between voting and seeing the exit poll – at a talk by Anna Burns, the Man Booker prize-winning author of Milkman.  

This looks like a good read:

Milkman transcends its setting in war-torn 1970s Northern Ireland, and evokes universal truths [i.e. petite bourgeois ones?] about conflict, power and human relationships. More than anything, Burns’s novels show, in terrifying detail, what happens to a society when people close their minds [we need a novel about NI to show us this?] . Milkman explores a culture in which people have become obsessed with defending their own perspective, against anything they see as “other”.

See any parallels yet? In case you are not that bookish after all, A O'Keeffe spells it out:

we are undeniably [!] drifting towards a very Milkman-esque “othering” mentality

The methodological implications appear most clearly 

the real task, [Burns] told us, is to “wait and hold” – to create the mental space, to stay patient, and to keep the faith...Her message of persistence and patience has helped me get through a week of otherwise bitter disappointment....we can’t actually force the world to give us what we want [that must really hurt] . There are times when we need to push, but there are also times when we do just have to wait, and create the space, and keep the faith that if we hang in here, eventually something will shift....

An important weapon against this small-mindedness is the kind of contemplation that Burns uses in creating her work. Extended periods of contemplation play an important role...and writing and reading fiction – perhaps appreciating any kind of art – similarly requires us to open our minds [not if we only read the stuff we agree with, of course]

It looks a bit like what you do in yoga:

As we look for ways to resist the seemingly unstoppable tide of division, perhaps trying, like Burns, to “wait and hold” is the most important work [!] that any of us can do.

I am sorry I missed an earlier contribution from O'Keeffe:

publishing is far from the only industry that fears the economic impact of Brexit, it faces an additional, very particular challenge: its products are responsible for helping the British public make sense of the deeply divided country in which we find ourselves [only for bookish people, surely?]. How can an industry so fervently remainer in spirit engage with the arguments in favour of leave? How can it reach the people who voted for Brexit – and to what extent does it want to?

Hachette publishes authors from across the political spectrum...Other publishers, however, take a strong anti-leave line. Franklin, for example, told me in no uncertain terms that leavers are not the sector’s target market. “What would we be publishing? Fantasy histories of a Britain in which servants doff their caps?”.

[This] is fuel for the fire of those pro-Brexit writers [where?] whose claim to represent the marginalised is often based on their feeling that they are looked down on by lefty metropolitan types who are the arbiters of culture...the industry’s “definition of pluralism can often be narrow and metropolitan” – while publishers have largely recognised the need to increase racial diversity in the industry, attitudes towards political diversity [i.e.class politics] are more complicated.

Meanwhile, as these debates rage around them, writers have been setting about the hard work of reimagining what it might mean to be British. ...A strong canon of work has emerged that subtly illuminates our national identity crisis....Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, a mythical tale of a Britain in which warring tribes have been afflicted by amnesia, was greeted with some bafflement on publication pre-referendum in 2015. But it has emerged as a prescient exploration of what the Economist has called “the violence that underpins national identity”. Nature writers including Robert Macfarlane, and novelists such as Melissa Harrison and Benjamin Myers, have helped to reinvigorate our emotional connection to the land and our environment. In the turbulent times ahead, their work will only become more relevant.

 

Only some lessons partially learned by the GUardian

Interesting to see two of my favourite Graun columnists trying to explain what went wrong after they had given us the clearest warnings about Johnson and Brexit. Kettle first

to treat Labour rather than the Conservatives as the biggest story in town is at best perverse and at worst a form of denial....While Labour agonises about how to reassemble a coalition of classes and interests for the future, it is the Tories’ success in creating such a coalition in the here-and-now that shows how far the opposition will have to go.

 A strange rather grudging section then:

Few dispute that the emergence of the working-class Tory vote in the north and Midlands last week was catalysed by Brexit. But both the research and the anecdotal evidence [Islington Man] show that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and Labour’s spending plans were also crucial.

No doubt because of the latter rather than the former.

After a result like last week’s it might be wiser to experiment for a while by treating the Tory party as a rational organisation, and its voters as people making reasoned decisions...Poll results show this [factors in reverse order  for Kettle]:
[Tory voters thought] that the party leader would make a better prime minister (58%), that the party would run the economy better (64%), and that the party would get their preferred Brexit outcome (68%)...these swing voters do not seem to be Brexit obsessives to the exclusion of all other issues.

They don't seem to be raving racists or football hooligans either Then nearly an apology, but not half as fulsome and grovelling as I would have liked:

Don’t write him off. It would be premature, less than one week into Johnson’s unfettered premiership, to assume everything he does can be dismissed as merely rightwing. A certain humility is in order in the wake of 12 December.

Behr now. He begins with the same old personal stuff. That might have been justified in the name of campaigning for Truth in the Election, in the nasty petite bourgeois personal  Twitterish mode we now have. But now? It is an ideological surplus, at least for the next few years. Gosh -- it might even be personal class prejudice.

Unreliability is Johnson’s business model, as is attested by everyone whose misplaced trust has been incinerated to fuel the engine of his ambition.[However] Victory buys loyalty. [But] The voters who gave Johnson his majority will not be so easily wooed back if they start to feel neglected or mistreated

Johnson

benefited from intensified frustration that Brexit was not getting done [who knew?], plus hardening of sentiment against Jeremy Corbyn....The obvious and predictable mistake for the opposition to make would be relying on Conservatives to conform to their most wicked caricature [i.e. believe the GHuardian]

Behr still harbours hope in a kind of revenge fantasy way:

Moderate Tories who thought the cushion of a parliamentary majority might be used to soften Brexit have been swiftly disabused of the idea. Johnson plans to amend EU withdrawal legislation to prohibit any transition beyond December 2020. Apparently this is meant to reassure voters and show Brussels that Britain means business. In reality it proves that the Tories learned nothing from the article 50 negotiations or have forgotten that the ticking clock [oh no] favours the bigger, better prepared side in trade talks.

It means the Graun has learned nothing from the Tories's use of confrontation and stubbornness in negotiation. So what of the future:

Labour is currently feeling too jilted by leave voters to dare raising its already dampened pro-European voice. [Graun columnists too, we might have hoped]...But over time, [new Tory MPs for Northern constituencies] will feel a tension between their constituents’ interests and a Brexit model conceived by the older breed of southern, pinstriped Conservative Eurosceptics. Workington Tories may be pro-Brexit, but that does not mean they are acolytes of the ideology that scorns state intervention as an affront to liberty and treats worker protections as shackles on the spirit of buccaneering enterprise [Behr knows them so well] .... If it comes down to a choice between serving the traditional Tory base that brought him this far and cultivating the new electoral terrain that opened up for him last week, which would [Johnson] prefer? 

Working class voters will not be aware of this sophisticated contradiction, of course, the mugs, and none have agonised over it on TV vox pops, have they? No 'reasoned decisions' are possible for Behr, and there are no awkward compromises in politics, only guardianista lofty abstract moral principles.

At the end of the day, Behr knows Johnson is a cad and we will see through him:

The unknown quantities are how many [blunders], how soon and how long he will get away with it.

Labour hears the owl?

Some signs of hope for Labour today according to the Uardian

Other MPs who won in their constituencies have placed the blame firmly at the feet of the party’s Brexit policy. Last week the party chair, Ian Lavery, who narrowly held on to Wansbeck, told the BBC: “What we are seeing in the Labour heartlands is people very aggrieved at the fact the party basically has taken a stance on Brexit the way they have.” He added that ignoring the wishes of 17.4 million voters was “not a good recipe”.

The other main candidate for being burnt at the stake is still running (horrible mixed metaphor -- sorry) though:

Many former and aspiring MPs who failed to win on Thursday have told the Guardian that Labour’s outgoing leader and his views were the biggest single factor that contributed to their downfall.

This, by C Onwura,Labour  MP,  is quite promising too:

 The current [Labour leader]  is neither the evil villain nor the martyred saint of factional casting, just someone trying to do a very difficult job. But the next one does need to do better. Much better. They need to recognise the varied qualities the job requires, so that even if they can’t deliver on all of them, they can surround themselves with those who can....

So away with the cult of Magic Grandpa and any subsequent Labour Wonderwoman.

The election was about Brexit. Brexit is not about economics, but it is rooted in economic realities. The map of Labour’s defeat shows that the geography of loss matches the contours of economic despair....In the northern heartlands in particular, people want a return to a productive work that is part of something meaningful – ending the threat of the climate crisis, curing diseases, restoring broad-based prosperity to our country.

What links the disastrous Brexit 'policy' to charges of antisemitism is this:

People will not trust a party whose leader appears unable to make up their mind about critical political and moral issues.

Sensible here too

Patriotism and wealth creation do not have to mean racism and isolationism. They can mean solidarity and productive industry. These were at the heart of the Labour movement in the north-east.  

There are still fantasy politics for the new petite bourgeoisie though. G. Monbiot:

A new politics, funded by oligarchs, [this is new?] built on sophisticated cheating and provocative lies, using dark ads [ah yes] and conspiracy theories on social media, has perfected the art of persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich....[By contrast] In Finland, on the day of our general election, Boris Johnson’s antithesis became prime minister: the 34-year-old Sanna Marin, who is strong, humble and collaborative...in 2014, the country started a programme to counter fake news

The answer:

To the greatest extent possible, parties and governments should trust communities [see below] to identify their own needs and make their own decisions.

Monbiot turns to Nature for examples, but not migrating swallows and fertile grasses:

When you try to control nature from the top down, you find yourself in a constant battle with it....rewilding – allowing dynamic, spontaneous organisation to reassert itself – can result in a sudden flourishing...The same applies to politics. 

There are some good examples,verging on Autonomism, which he has mentioned before:

The results have been extraordinary: a massive re-engagement in politics, particularly among marginalised groups, and dramatic improvements in local life.

The missing variable, I suspect, is the nature of the local 'community', whether or not there are organised groups with alternative visions -- like trades unions, radical parties, Labour clubs or workingmen's institutes used to have. If not, guess who will fill the vacuum and step forward to press their demands for the whole community to have cheap strawberries, and the right for all machines to be addressed with gender neutral pronouns.