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.