One of Labour's frontbench spokespeople Rachel Reeves says that the reason Labour is struggling is because traditional, working-class Labour supporters are abandoning the party, while the middle class are sticking by them:

 

‘Traditional voters, who perhaps at times we took for granted but had nowhere else to go, are now being offered an alternative by Ukip.

 

‘Our voters, if I can still call them that, see Ukip [as]a party who are offering a vision and a hope that things can be better.

 

‘They hear something from that party that resonates with them and with their fears for the future and that’s something very real that we have to contend with and it’s something real that we have to contend with for two reasons.

 

‘First of all, for purely electoral reasons, we have to hold on and build that coalition again of our traditional voters.

 

‘The Labour party came into existence to give a voice for ordinary working people. What I saw… were middle class, public sector, well-educated young graduates voting Labour, but the people who the Labour Party was set up to help, abandoning us.’

 

‘Our very raison d’etre will be threatened if the working people, who the Labour Party have got to be there for, and got to be a voice for, start to drift away because they don’t see us as the answer.’

 

http://labourlist.org/2014/06/rachel-reeve...doing-about-it/

 

(I'll be charitable and not mention that Rachel Reeves embodies virtually every reason why working-class people have abandoned Labour.)

(I'll be charitable and not mention that Rachel Reeves embodies virtually every reason why working-class people have abandoned Labour.)

That went well.

That went well.

 

I actually had to restrain myself from going on an even bigger rant :lol:

It would be nice to have a party on the left

Leaving aside any comments on her, the substance of the statement appears to have validity. Take Mansfield, former mining community, staunch Labour supporting community my whole life. UKIP won the European seat and weren't that far behind the local councillors in the the votes in 2013. It's not an affluent area, Labour should be head n shoulders over all other parties combined....

It would be nice to have a party on the left

 

Or hell, even a party that would once have been considered "centrist". (I said it before, but I looked through the SDP/Liberal manifesto for the 1983 election a while ago, and the type of stuff in there would be considered un-credible radical Marxism in today's climate)

State intervention into markets is and always has been left-wing. And spending cuts occurred in Labour governments pre-Blair too...

and runaway free markets bring only disaster when unregulated, as history shows, greed destroys economies, always has done.

 

We currently have state-supported banks, foreign-owned utilities, and foreign investors buying up British assets looking to make a profit. London is like another rich country that just happens to be located in bankrupt UK plc.

 

Previous spending cuts are chicken-feed though, compared to what we owe these days. I can personally vouch that even under the worst years of Thatcher local government wasn't as "lean" (to use the buzzword of the moment) as 2014, not even close. The madness of it all is that non-jobs are still there, sat getting government grants for pet projects designing cad all the live-long day on strategies that don't matter while day centres shut and the elderly sit going mad with loneliness at home (among many many things I could rant on about).

 

Priorities are all wrong. One member of my family gets paid more per month to not work than I've ever taken home (professional graduate). Good luck to her, those are the rules, of course...

 

Point being, I think if you talk to low-paid working people they are perfectly well-aware of what's going on in the benefits system and any other issues they see with their own eyes. Time to address them directly and plainly or the extremists will continue to jump in....

But the benefit cuts are chicken feed compared with the deficit. They are all about politics and winning votes, nothing to do with cutting the deficit.

 

Most of the benefits bill goes to pensioners who are unaffected by the cuts. Most of the rest goes to people IN work. Most of the children defined as living in poverty are in households were at least one parent is in work. As I've said before, if anyone deserves the label "benefit scroungers" it is the major companies paying their staff so little that their income needs to be supplemented by the state. To make matters worse, some of those same companies pay next to no tax so they are not even paying for that top-up.

Haven't a large proportion of Labour voters moved on to UKIP? Seems as if the middle class are comfortable with the establishment which the working class desire change perhaps no matter what.

But the benefit cuts are chicken feed compared with the deficit. They are all about politics and winning votes, nothing to do with cutting the deficit.

 

Most of the benefits bill goes to pensioners who are unaffected by the cuts. Most of the rest goes to people IN work. Most of the children defined as living in poverty are in households were at least one parent is in work. As I've said before, if anyone deserves the label "benefit scroungers" it is the major companies paying their staff so little that their income needs to be supplemented by the state. To make matters worse, some of those same companies pay next to no tax so they are not even paying for that top-up.

 

Absolutely. I forgot who said it, but "socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor" sums up all mainstream politicians' attitudes right now. Lazy, feckless and selfish employers are absolved from their social duties and bailed out by government whenever. But if you were born into poverty and can't find a job despite your best efforts? Sorry, you're on your own.

 

**

 

Great article nailing Labour for their responsibility for the current sorry state of affairs ("Labour's political philosophy is simply stated: if at first you don't succeed, flinch, flinch and flinch again"):

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2...rket-inequality

Haven't a large proportion of Labour voters moved on to UKIP? Seems as if the middle class are comfortable with the establishment which the working class desire change perhaps no matter what.

'A large proportion' is distinctly overstating things. About 8-10% of our 2010 vote, which works out as about 3% of the vote.

What on earth is 'sorry you're on your own' about the current Labour policy? We have a jobs guarantee for those out of work for a year or more! Quibble all you like about the detail but that absolutely isn't laissez-faire.

What on earth is 'sorry you're on your own' about the current Labour policy? We have a jobs guarantee for those out of work for a year or more! Quibble all you like about the detail but that absolutely isn't laissez-faire.

 

Do you still genuinely think that the public's perception of Labour right now is that they're radical?

Edited June 10, 201411 yr by Danny

Your point wasn't about the public's perception.

My new point is about that though.

It depends what you classify as radical, or whether you think the public are naturally attracted to radical policies by the sole virtue of them being radical.*

 

I think most people who are undecided, or who lean Labour but won't commit, don't really know most of our policies apart from one or two things like the energy freeze, and think if we won the next election we'd go on a spending spree** and continue all the media myths about benefits and immigration. I don't think the prevailing perception is that we wouldn't do a thing to help the worse off per se (at least, in the way that the TUSC/Another Angry Voice/'you're all neoliberals!' tendency mean it when they say Labour won't do a thing), but that we'd do all those things and they wouldn't be the ones who'd see the benefits of it. I think the more well off people that are undecided/lean Labour but won't commit would be worried their taxes would go up to pay for it too.

 

(*Speaking personally, I think radicalism's for radicalism's sake is a load of wank and the obsession with appearing radical has buggered up politics by promising big change which doesn't really translate into much practical difference, which breeds distrust in mainstream politics and hands it over to the easy 'do this and we solve all society's problems!' type radicalism peddled by UKIP et al. I think genuine radicalism is rarely ever successful unless it's been road-tested to death beforehand.)

 

(**this isn't necessarily something they'd think of in terms of 'the deficit', and that misunderstanding also leads to an expectation that running up debts would lead to the economy doing badly again)

The madness of it all is that non-jobs are still there, sat getting government grants for pet projects designing cad all the live-long day on strategies that don't matter while day centres shut and the elderly sit going mad with loneliness at home (among many many things I could rant on about).

 

Priorities are all wrong. One member of my family gets paid more per month to not work than I've ever taken home (professional graduate). Good luck to her, those are the rules, of course...

The madness is that despite all this, unemployment figures still show a disproportionate number of young people out of work. What does that tell you?

(*Speaking personally, I think radicalism's for radicalism's sake is a load of wank and the obsession with appearing radical has buggered up politics by promising big change which doesn't really translate into much practical difference, which breeds distrust in mainstream politics and hands it over to the easy 'do this and we solve all society's problems!' type radicalism peddled by UKIP et al. I think genuine radicalism is rarely ever successful unless it's been road-tested to death beforehand.)

 

I don't actually disagree with this, but I'm guessing we'd differ on what "radical" is. I don't consider the type of policies I'd want to be "radical" at all, even if they were moreso than Labour's current timid policies; like I said earlier virtually everything I'd want probably would've been in an SDP manifesto.

 

But what I was getting at was your comment that Labour are promoting "state intervention into markets" and other past comments, to mean that YOU truly think Labour's current policies are radical. And there were some Labour spokespeople, on the day after the elections last month, who when told that many Labour supporters had defected to UKIP because they thought "all the main parties are the same", looked totally nonplussed and claimed that there was a huge gap between the Tories' current policies and Labour's current policies. I'm sorry, but it's just not the public perception that Labour are offering something drastically different to the current government. At all.

 

(Plus, goes without saying, I completely disagree that people fear Labour would go on a "spending spree", and there is certainly no opinion poll evidence to back up the view that people fear Labour would overspend...)

We're not helped by most policy announcements coming in the last six months. It's notoriously difficult anyway for opposition to be heard (can anyone remember anything Cameron pledged a year out from 2010?) and it certainly takes time for proposals to make an impact.