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Zzyzx_Road
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That’s rich coming from someone who feels free to comment on the US.
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Vouthon
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I don’t watch it myself but I’m pretty sure that the English language serve is pretty much the same across the board.
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Zzyzx_Road
Guest
Correction accepted.
But the fact that there were no Brexit-favoring candidates outside of Tory and Labour isn’t saying that much about the rise of Remain sentiment. Have to remember it takes time, money and organization to field candidates for the thousands of local seats involved. Voters finding no Brexit option on the ballot decided they weren’t sticking with the old standby Tory and Labour candidates. I see no better explanation for the rise of the Lib Dems. The fact that the Lib Dems are firmly in the Remain camp shouldn’t be confused with actual voter sentiment.
Now the Brexit Party is standing candidates for the European Parliament: this is the election to watch. That and possibly the Peterborough by-election on June 6. If the Brexit Party does poorly in both of these, then Brexit is likely over and it will just be a matter of time before the MPs find the gumption required to revoke Article 50 and be willing to face their constituents over it in the next General Elections.
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Vouthon
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Whether or not that’s true, it doesn’t change the point I made to Johann that the deliberations of the various member states on “life issues” have no bearing at the EU level because they are a national competence.
There are no EU positions, policies or laws on abortion, accordingly.
They were the Brexit choice in them, alongside the Tories.
Labour has a policy of constructive ambiguity on Brexit, so I don’t think we should even include them in the discussion. They are neither fish nor fowl.
There are no EU positions, policies or laws on abortion, accordingly.
UKIP, the original Eurosceptic party, were up for votes in these local elections.
They were the Brexit choice in them, alongside the Tories.
Labour has a policy of constructive ambiguity on Brexit, so I don’t think we should even include them in the discussion. They are neither fish nor fowl.
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Zzyzx_Road
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UKIP has long since been discredited since Farage split away from them. Nothing to see here.
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Vouthon
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Farage himself said the other week that there is absolutely no difference between his new Brexit party’s policy on (unilateral) Brexit and UKIP.
There are other issues dividing them outside Brexit, but if one wished to register a protest vote in the locals and get the message across that hard Brexit needed to be delivered, then UKIP was the obvious choice in this one, just like the Lib Dems with their militantly unambiguous “stop Brexit” campaign, were the obvious choice for Remainers.
Everyone in Britain knows that Liberal Democrat = staunch pro-EU Remainer. They are the only British party that has been consistently supportive of European integration since the 1950s and it’s the glue that sticks the movement together.
Every other party has shifted it’s stance over the years, from one direction to another. Not the Libs/Lib Dems.
There are other issues dividing them outside Brexit, but if one wished to register a protest vote in the locals and get the message across that hard Brexit needed to be delivered, then UKIP was the obvious choice in this one, just like the Lib Dems with their militantly unambiguous “stop Brexit” campaign, were the obvious choice for Remainers.
Everyone in Britain knows that Liberal Democrat = staunch pro-EU Remainer. They are the only British party that has been consistently supportive of European integration since the 1950s and it’s the glue that sticks the movement together.
Every other party has shifted it’s stance over the years, from one direction to another. Not the Libs/Lib Dems.
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Vouthon
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No, your quite on point here in your analysis.
Younger Labour supporters are overwhelmingly pro-EU, including the hordes of students in English university cities who formed the main support-base of Corbyn’s Momentum campaign movement.
Something like 80-90% of registered Labour Party members are Remainers, as are about 60 - 70% of their voters overall and most of the trade unions who are very influential in the party machine.
However, there is an old-guard of Cold War-era socialists and Trotskyists who resented the party’s turn to social democratic, strongly pro-EU and centre-left Blairism from the late 1980s onwards under Neil Kinnock and then Tony Blair himself, and retained the old-fashioned Labour stance that the EU is a “capitalist club”, which was typical of the likes of Tony Benn back in the day. (It was actually Benn, while a minister in a Labour government, who first proposed that Britain should hold it’s first referendum to decide whether to Remain in the EEC/EU, in 1972. Three years later he was the leader of the original Leave campaign in 1975, alongside the far-right rabble-rouser Enoch Powell, an odd couple if there ever was one).
Corbyn and many members of his shadow cabinet hail from this Eurosceptic side of the party, which is in the minority but has managed since 2015 to seize the reins of power.
Apart from this contingent among the MPs, the influential minority of “old Labour” voters are overreresprented in many northern English constituencies that are considered traditional working-class heartlands for the party.
Oddly enough, though, Labour lost votes to the adamantly Europhile Lib Dems in many of these old heartlands in these local elections, which has shocked everyone; whilst in a recent Welsh by-election in a strong Leave seat they won with a Labour candidate who was a Remainer campaigning for a second referendum.
So everything appears to be in flux and unpredictable at the minute.
Younger Labour supporters are overwhelmingly pro-EU, including the hordes of students in English university cities who formed the main support-base of Corbyn’s Momentum campaign movement.
Something like 80-90% of registered Labour Party members are Remainers, as are about 60 - 70% of their voters overall and most of the trade unions who are very influential in the party machine.
However, there is an old-guard of Cold War-era socialists and Trotskyists who resented the party’s turn to social democratic, strongly pro-EU and centre-left Blairism from the late 1980s onwards under Neil Kinnock and then Tony Blair himself, and retained the old-fashioned Labour stance that the EU is a “capitalist club”, which was typical of the likes of Tony Benn back in the day. (It was actually Benn, while a minister in a Labour government, who first proposed that Britain should hold it’s first referendum to decide whether to Remain in the EEC/EU, in 1972. Three years later he was the leader of the original Leave campaign in 1975, alongside the far-right rabble-rouser Enoch Powell, an odd couple if there ever was one).
Corbyn and many members of his shadow cabinet hail from this Eurosceptic side of the party, which is in the minority but has managed since 2015 to seize the reins of power.
Apart from this contingent among the MPs, the influential minority of “old Labour” voters are overreresprented in many northern English constituencies that are considered traditional working-class heartlands for the party.
Oddly enough, though, Labour lost votes to the adamantly Europhile Lib Dems in many of these old heartlands in these local elections, which has shocked everyone; whilst in a recent Welsh by-election in a strong Leave seat they won with a Labour candidate who was a Remainer campaigning for a second referendum.
So everything appears to be in flux and unpredictable at the minute.
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PickyPicky
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I don’t read The Times because I decline to support Mr Murdoch, but I understand from those who do that it is “relatively” neutral. As is the FT, of course.
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Vouthon
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Yeah, the Times is one of the few newspapers in Britain that is neither Remain nor Leave, strictly speaking, but appeals to both and has journalists writing from both perspectives.
And is still a decent quality paper as well, despite being part of the Murdoch press empire.
The Telegraph is now an unreadable Brexit, conspiracy-theorist rag, like it’s lower quality sisters the Daily Mail and the Express, while the Guardian is staunchly left-wing and pro-EU.
And is still a decent quality paper as well, despite being part of the Murdoch press empire.
The Telegraph is now an unreadable Brexit, conspiracy-theorist rag, like it’s lower quality sisters the Daily Mail and the Express, while the Guardian is staunchly left-wing and pro-EU.
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Vouthon
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Generally speaking, the FT is pro-free market economics (or ‘economically liberal’) because it is the UK’s traditional business daily, and is avidly read by everyone working in the City or other financial centres for the latest news on mergers & acquisitions and the like, but it is not aggressively marketeer in a “neo-liberal” kind of way or for that matter slanted firmly on the ‘right’ of the spectrum.
It’s actually reasonably moderate and even-handed, if one were to compare it with the Wall Street Journal.
In the 1980s, the editorial stance backed Thatcher’s privatisation reforms but it also supported the centre-left Labour Party under Neil Kinnock in 1992, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s response the financial crisis in 2007-2008, the Liberal Democrats in 2010 and called for the continuation of Cameron’s Tory-Liberal coalition in 2015.
It therefore has no “fixed” partisan outlook in terms of party affiliation, hence why it is fairly reliable as an impartial news source.
However, it is also very much in favour of what some in America would call “globalism” (I mean, it published an editorial piece last year called “Why globalism is good for you”) and tends to be rather pro-EU in its articles, especially in terms of the single market. Certainly, the editor is supportive of the European Union, as well as Britain’s membership of it, and globalization - although it has one somewhat quasi-eurosceptic writer, Wolfgang Munchau (who always gets right up my goat, accordingly) and the paper as a whole, pardoning its individual journalists, isn’t as hot on deeper political integration from what I can tell (i.e. EU federalism).
It’s a good quality newspaper and indispensable (alongside The Economist, which is more fundamentalist in its classically economic liberal/free-marketeer tone) for anyone working in business, especially in the City of London or associated financial centres.
In the 2008 U.S. election, the FT endorsed Barack Obama, along with his subsequent health-care reforms, and again in his second term race against Mitt Romney in 2012: “Obama is the better choice” ran the headline, although it raised a few quibbles about certain alleged protectionist tendencies of his. In 2016, it backed Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
So, its editorial stance over the last decade has been consistently (if sometimes a bit sheepishly or cautiously) pro-Democratic so far as American politics is concerned, which is quite in contrast to its varying endorsement of different British political parties over the same period.
It’s actually reasonably moderate and even-handed, if one were to compare it with the Wall Street Journal.
In the 1980s, the editorial stance backed Thatcher’s privatisation reforms but it also supported the centre-left Labour Party under Neil Kinnock in 1992, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s response the financial crisis in 2007-2008, the Liberal Democrats in 2010 and called for the continuation of Cameron’s Tory-Liberal coalition in 2015.
It therefore has no “fixed” partisan outlook in terms of party affiliation, hence why it is fairly reliable as an impartial news source.
However, it is also very much in favour of what some in America would call “globalism” (I mean, it published an editorial piece last year called “Why globalism is good for you”) and tends to be rather pro-EU in its articles, especially in terms of the single market. Certainly, the editor is supportive of the European Union, as well as Britain’s membership of it, and globalization - although it has one somewhat quasi-eurosceptic writer, Wolfgang Munchau (who always gets right up my goat, accordingly) and the paper as a whole, pardoning its individual journalists, isn’t as hot on deeper political integration from what I can tell (i.e. EU federalism).
It’s a good quality newspaper and indispensable (alongside The Economist, which is more fundamentalist in its classically economic liberal/free-marketeer tone) for anyone working in business, especially in the City of London or associated financial centres.
In the 2008 U.S. election, the FT endorsed Barack Obama, along with his subsequent health-care reforms, and again in his second term race against Mitt Romney in 2012: “Obama is the better choice” ran the headline, although it raised a few quibbles about certain alleged protectionist tendencies of his. In 2016, it backed Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
So, its editorial stance over the last decade has been consistently (if sometimes a bit sheepishly or cautiously) pro-Democratic so far as American politics is concerned, which is quite in contrast to its varying endorsement of different British political parties over the same period.
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Kaninchen
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That would be an awesome riposte if it came with examples.
Hint: I have no interest whatsoever in what Americans do to one another.
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Kaninchen
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I think the local elections had something of an element on the Remain side of what has been a strong current on the Leave side - the surge of the LibDems and, particularly, the Greens does rather suggest ‘away with the old politics’ and one does wonder where we go from here.
Until Brexit, I’d been a Tory since my teens (of a fairly ‘dry’ variety), now I couldn’t imagine circumstances that would lead me to vote for them again, while voting Green or LibDem, including the politics involved, seems perfectly natural.
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Vouthon
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@(name removed by moderator) I don’t fault you for being bewildered, at times, by the gulf in meaning separating the political nomenclature.
In Europe, we use the terms “economically liberal” “classically liberal” or the slur “neo-liberal” in it’s original nineteenth century sense of the term, to mean what you in America appear to call “economic conservatism” - that is, laissez-faire right-wing beliefs supportive of free-market fundamentalism, deregulation and privatisation reforms benefitting big business and corporate interests.
This is also the sense in which papal encyclicals employ the term “liberal” (as in “neo-liberal”), relying upon European categories, which always irritates me when Americans read them and entirely miss the significance of what the pontiffs are saying (i.e. a European instantly “gets” that the pope is speaking about right-wing capitalist fundamentalism, or economic liberalism, whereas Americans get the wrong end of the stick and think he’s referring to leftists).
Our social liberalism is closer to what Americans understand liberalism to mean - it combines support for traditional, liberal market economics with regulation, a welfare state, a healthy balance between Keynesian government intervention in the economy and individual liberty, along with progressive political and civil reforms.
The Liberal Democrats are a centrist to centre-left party that combine elements of both “liberal traditions”, with Orange Bookers (more classical economic liberals, albeit moderate) on the right of the party and avowed social liberals on the party’s left-wing. They are not libertarians - we don’t have a significant libertarian movement here in Britain.
@Kaninchen Makes you wonder what the point in “ChangeUK” is (silly, irrelevant name notwithstanding). Their entire existence was predicated on the fundamentally mistaken assumption that the Lib Dems were a spent force. Well, they aren’t - so the UK already has a centre-ground, unashamedly pro-EU party that can appeal to both moderate europhile Tories and moderate non-socialist Labour supporters of a pro-EU bent.
And the Greens now increasingly occupy the radical pro-EU, environmentalist, mainstream left, which poses a peculiar problem for the Labour Party. And Caroline Lucas is fantastic to boot (just sayin’).
This article published today in the Guardian backs up your perceptions of a major shift in political affiliation:
www.theguardian.com
In Europe, we use the terms “economically liberal” “classically liberal” or the slur “neo-liberal” in it’s original nineteenth century sense of the term, to mean what you in America appear to call “economic conservatism” - that is, laissez-faire right-wing beliefs supportive of free-market fundamentalism, deregulation and privatisation reforms benefitting big business and corporate interests.
This is also the sense in which papal encyclicals employ the term “liberal” (as in “neo-liberal”), relying upon European categories, which always irritates me when Americans read them and entirely miss the significance of what the pontiffs are saying (i.e. a European instantly “gets” that the pope is speaking about right-wing capitalist fundamentalism, or economic liberalism, whereas Americans get the wrong end of the stick and think he’s referring to leftists).
Our social liberalism is closer to what Americans understand liberalism to mean - it combines support for traditional, liberal market economics with regulation, a welfare state, a healthy balance between Keynesian government intervention in the economy and individual liberty, along with progressive political and civil reforms.
The Liberal Democrats are a centrist to centre-left party that combine elements of both “liberal traditions”, with Orange Bookers (more classical economic liberals, albeit moderate) on the right of the party and avowed social liberals on the party’s left-wing. They are not libertarians - we don’t have a significant libertarian movement here in Britain.
@Kaninchen Makes you wonder what the point in “ChangeUK” is (silly, irrelevant name notwithstanding). Their entire existence was predicated on the fundamentally mistaken assumption that the Lib Dems were a spent force. Well, they aren’t - so the UK already has a centre-ground, unashamedly pro-EU party that can appeal to both moderate europhile Tories and moderate non-socialist Labour supporters of a pro-EU bent.
And the Greens now increasingly occupy the radical pro-EU, environmentalist, mainstream left, which poses a peculiar problem for the Labour Party. And Caroline Lucas is fantastic to boot (just sayin’).
This article published today in the Guardian backs up your perceptions of a major shift in political affiliation:
In Rees-Mogg heartland, angry voters embrace Lib Dems over Brexit chaos
For the first time in living memory, the Mendip ward has elected a councillor who is not a Tory
www.theguardian.com
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Vouthon
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@(name removed by moderator) here’s a characteristic example of what I mean about our different political nomenclature on this side of the Atlantic.
Years ago I quoted the following sections of Pope St. Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio to a GOP supporter here on CAF and as soon as he saw the term ‘liberalism’ he remained convinced that the pontiff was condemning leftist ideologies!
Years ago I quoted the following sections of Pope St. Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio to a GOP supporter here on CAF and as soon as he saw the term ‘liberalism’ he remained convinced that the pontiff was condemning leftist ideologies!
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Kaninchen
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Well, given that the average age of the Conservative membership (ie the people who do the work as well as pay dues) is approaching ‘deceased’ and young people don’t seem to be flocking to the Party, just who is going to be keeping the thing going - given that they’ve annoyed great swathes of the business community in the chaos of Brexit while they’ve been at it?
Meanwhile, arguing for greater financial support for Leave areas (the lack of which is, supposedly, much of the reason for the way they voted) in the face of the difficulties their decision has forced on us is hardly likely to gain enthusiastic support in Remain areas who would be footing the bill. Not much fertile ground for Labour there.
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