Have we been barking up the wrong tree?

First topic message reminder :

Among others, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris frequently present reasoned and rational arguments which show not only the absurdity of much of religion, but also the inaccuracy of those stories which can be checked. For example, isn’t it a ridiculous idea that, for a census, the Romans would have required Joseph to go to a city where an ancestor had lived 1,000 years earlier? And if Jesus was really born of a virgin, wouldn’t Joseph’s ancestry be irrelevant to the Christian story? Then there’s the fact that there was a census, but it was in 6AD, long after Herod’s death.

Most of those who are religious remain unconvinced by such points. Whether through childhood indoctrination, cultural pressure, or maybe because of what they think was a personal experience of God, they continue to believe stories which don’t stand up to scrutiny. Why? Because for them, their emotions count for more than facts. And perhaps that also applies to many people’s political affiliations.

A good lawyer will always know and understand the arguments presented by his or her adversaries, and to be effective the same must be true of those who dabble in politics. I know that I have a weakness because I really can’t understand what makes so many people vote for right-wing political parties, when to do so is clearly not in their best interests. As Nye Bevan asked: “How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? That's the whole art of Tory politics”.

So why do people vote Tory? They can’t all be nasty and uncaring or even stupid; there’s more to it than John Stuart Mill’s observation that "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives". There are snobs; I’ve known people in very working class areas who felt superior if they identified themselves with the party of wealth and privilege. There are those who swallow relentless media propaganda, especially the false perceptions created about such topics as immigration and the extent of benefit fraud. There are those who feel that the internationalist aspect of left-wing politics isn’t patriotic, but who seem oblivious to Tory governments selling the fabric of the state to foreign companies. There are those who don’t accept that there is widespread poverty, homelessness and foodbank use unless they see it for themselves. And there will be some who just don’t care, and they’ll support the Tories if they can have a penny or two off income tax, even if they end up paying more for certain services and extra in VAT.

Ronald Reagan didn’t bother with facts and details, but he was a successful politician, partly through media backing of course, and partly because he made people feel good. Al Gore was a smart and highly intelligent candidate for US president who did do facts by the bucketload, but he lost to the knucklehead George W. Bush. (Gore did actually win more votes and was robbed of the presidency by Supreme Court judges appointed by Bush’s father, but that’s a story for another time and place.) In the UK, Boris Johnson has hid his odious personality and endless broken promises (such as over fire station closures and ending homelessness in London), but he’s been successful because he’s amused people with his bumbling, clown-like image.

Tories don’t worry too much about facts, they just create impressions which Rupert Murdoch and others are happy to reinforce. Cameron must surely be the most prolific liar ever to occupy 10 Downing Street, yet enough voters fell for his deceptions a second time; never have so many lies been told to so many by so few. Why? The journalist Owen Jones explains: “What the Tories understand is that politics is as much about sentiments and emotions as anything else. They excel at distorting perceptions rather than dealing in actual realities. To believe that politics is conducted solely at the level of reason is to lose.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/10/tories-deceitful-political-sorcery-eu-cameron-magician-labour-must-learn

Are those of us on the left wasting our time when we try to present reasoned arguments to all those Tory lies and distortions? Should we just be concentrating on how people feel? The SNP has prospered by provoking feelings of nationalism, as did UKIP for a while. The astonishing rise of Jeremy Corbyn, and his landslide win in the Labour leadership election, has occurred at least in part because he awakened feelings of hope, the prospect of something different, while his rivals were perceived as offering more of the same.

So have we been barking up the wrong tree? Religions and right-wingers get their support from how they make people feel, rather than from facts and arguments; can we learn from them? Without wishing to suggest that we all emulate Cameron and become more economical with the truth, should we be placing greater emphasis on what makes people feel positive?

There's just one future for the left: Jeremy Corbyn

From an article by Liam Young:-

"Most people do not want to talk left or right – most people do not even know what this actually means. Real people want to talk about values and principles: they want to see a vision for the future that works for them and their family. People do not want to talk about the politics that we have established today. They do not want personality politics, sharp suits or revelations on the front of newspapers. This may excite the bubble, but people with busy lives outside of politics are thoroughly turned off by it. They want solid policy recommendations that they believe will make their lives better.

People have had enough of the same old, of the system working against them and then being told that it is within their interest to simply go along with it.  It is our human nature to seek to improve, to develop. At the last election, Labour failed to offer a vision of the future to the electorate, and there was no blueprint that helped people to understand what they could achieve under a Labour government.

In the USA, Bernie Sanders is right to say that we need a political revolution. Here at home we've certainly had a small one of our own, embodying the disenchantment with our established political discourse. The same-old will win us nothing, and that is why I am firmly behind Jeremy Corbyn’s vision of a new politics – the future of the left rests within it."

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/02/theres-just-one-future-left-jeremy-corbyn

Claudine wrote:I agree with that entirely, oftenwrong.

I would not put it pasted the Tory party to blame the Labour party for the next crash Claudine, they will SPIN it as much as they can to the people of the UK so in words to make this point they will "LIE THROUGH THERE BACK TEETH just like they have done since May 2010.

With thre Trade Union Bill and the cut in the Short money Boundaries changes I just hope bobby that the people of the UK see right through the Tories Spinning there LIES whenever the next crash happens.

To what extent should politicians lead and try to change public opinion, or merely follow and reflect it? Can they do both? Would capital punishment have been abolished in the UK in the 1960s, and homosexuality made legal, if politicians had followed public opinion? But in a so-called democracy, isn’t that what they should be doing?

Labour MP Tristram Hunt has gathered together a collection of essays from all wings of the Labour Party and written this thought-provoking article:-

There’ll always be an England … and Labour must learn to love it

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/15/therell-always-be-an-england-tristram-hunt-labour-patriotism

Hunt tells us how the writer Paul Kingsnorth has drawn an analogy between the increased visibility of St George crosses and the Confederate flag in the US south, and that it’s a sort of unspoken defiance from “a people that lost” which says “we are still here”. Jamie Reed MP suggests that, if Labour fails to embrace Englishness, it will face in northern towns and villages the same fate as the Democrats in the US south: a failure to connect “culturally” with a socially conservative working-class electorate, increasingly willing to vote against their own material interests.

Hunt argues that in Tamworth and Nuneaton, Bury and Bolton, traditional Labour voters think the party is out of step with their values. Part of that is a wilful refusal to embrace a positive English identity. But couldn’t doing so be a step too far? Should a party which is essentially internationalist pander to anti-immigrant sentiments and nationalism? Woudn’t it be in danger of morphing into UKIP? Isn’t this an occasion when Labour has to lead and attempt to educate rather than follow base prejudices? So many questions, but no obvious answers.

I guess to some extent it depends on what you mean by Englishness - until comparatively recently, I have been proud to be English - to be part of a country that has core values of religious tolerance, valuing of difference, care for the vulnerable - all aspects of Englishness that I still embrace but that now seem absent from the political landscape.
The kind of Englishness that's about oppressing minorities, going to war in the Middle East and blaming the unfortunate for their misfortunes - I can't go with that - maybe Labour needs to define Englishness and make it clear which parts of our English heritage we support - I suspect if you start with the Attlee government we may be very close to a definition

I think the problem that is making life extremely difficult for the Labour Party is that its members want changes to improve the lot of the mass of people, whereas the great majority of its MPs want to keep the media happy so that their careers may flourish. The contradiction has existed for a very long time (at least since the days of Gaitskell), and the careerists will always cry, 'But we were elected!' forgetting that the great majority of them were chosen only for the Party label. Until we sort this out we shall keep having problems with self-important nobodies on a good thing.

That was nice. Consecutive postings with which I find myself in complete agreement. Why can't everyone be like us?

Well, in order, "English" is no longer quite PC, since "The Union" became subject to a Scottish referendum. (Similarly "Christian belief" which used to direct our children's education but for various reasons no longer does so.) To avoid accusations of "living in the past" our horizons must include other nationalities, ethnic groups and freedom of movement. Political trends in England since the end of WW2 would seem to suggest that the estimable Atlee government is actually "the odd one out" since there has never been a repetition of that defiantly Socialist administration.

Penderyn accurately describes the reason why the Labour Party as currently constructed will always divide between the ideologues and those who just want to get elected. Inevitably the latter group are correct in maintaining that only a majority Party makes the rules.

So what's the way forward for those of us who believe that Society should share its resources more equally, and the evident majority of voters who think, "me first, charity begins at home"?

England is a component part of Great Britain (with Scotland and Wales) and the United Kingdom (with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Add in the Republic of Ireland and you’ve got the British Isles. So is England a nation? It may have its own governing bodies for football and cricket, but you can’t get an English passport. Whenever I’ve been asked to state my ‘nationality’ or ‘country of origin’, English or England has not been an option.

However, a nation can be defined as a large aggregate of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory. The nation may have a claim to statehood or self-rule, but it does not necessarily enjoy a state of its own. More than 80% of the people who live in the United Kingdom are English (or at least live in England), and the surge in nationalism in Scotland, which precipitated the independence referendum in 2014, has probably helped to revive similar sentiments south of the border. Personally, I agree with the Labour MP Chris Bryant that “nationalism is a nasty creed, and the path from well-meaning nationalism to xenophobia and racism is slippier than the luge track in the Winter Olympics”.

https://cuttingedge2.forumotion.co.uk/t546-is-nationalism-evil

When I’ve heard people being keen to assert that they’re English rather than British, I’ve assumed they either have a dislike of the Scots or Welsh or they wish to distinguish themselves from the immigrants who have become British citizens over the last fifty years or so. I think they’re fighting a losing battle; in one of his ‘In Our Time’ programmes, Melvyn Bragg told us that Britain now has the highest percentage of inter-racial marriages in the world.

Cecil Rhodes thought that being an Englishman was to have “won first prize in the lottery of life”, while Jonathan Swift said the English were “the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth”. You pays your money and you takes your choice!

It seems to me that those who consider themselves English are British people who choose to identify themselves, for reasons not clear to me, with the various small foreign groups who have conquered the east of the Island. Otherwise they are just British, as are the Scots, who identify themselves with an Irish conquering minority. These differences, however, have affected history and are not going to go away, The big problem is that so many identify themselves as 'English' that a Federal system is difficult to organise.

“Try arguing with facts and you get nowhere”, writes Polly Toynbee:-

Brexit supporters have unleashed furies even they can’t control

The clutch of England fans in Marseille were unequivocal. “F**k off Europe, we’re all voting out”, they chanted. I’ve spent the week listening to much the same, politer, but just as fingers-in-the-ears adamant. No fact, no persuader penetrates their certainty – and these were Labour voters.  Inside Labour’s London HQ, I joined young volunteers manning the ‘Labour In’ phones with every fact at the ready. The results were grim.

Warn these Labour people what a Johnson/Gove government would do and they don’t care. Warn about the loss of workers’ rights and they don’t listen. “We’re full up. Sorry, there’s no room for more. Can’t get GP appointments, can’t get into our schools, no housing.” If you tell these Labour voters that’s because of Tory austerity cuts, still they blame “immigrants getting everything first”. Warn about a Brexit recession leading to far worse cuts and they just say, “Stop them coming, make room for our own first”.

This is the sound of Britain breaking. Imagine Brexit wins and two years later PM Boris Johnson is still embroiled in quarrelsome EU exit talks. People will see no change, same migrants, same sense of powerlessness. Recession-hit, facing worse cuts, voters won’t blame themselves for their own folly. Old problems are unresolved – an economy reliant on City and property bubbles, low skills, low productivity, atrophied public services, hopes raised and dashed. Gove and Johnson risk losing control of the furies they have unleashed.

For the whole article:-
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/13/brexit-supporters-leave-vote-right

"Gove......  losing control of the furies..... unleashed." (Toynbee)



Some people do, of course, necessarily wear odd attire in discharging their professional responsibilities - but it takes a genuine preening plonker to actually enjoy it...

Ivan wrote:“Try arguing with facts and you get nowhere”, writes Polly Toynbee:-

Brexit supporters have unleashed furies even they can’t control

The weight of evidence is that a sufficiently large section of the British working class have always been prepared to vote AGAINST their own interests, in support of Capitalist entrepreneurial ideology.

Who can say why they do this? Is it to appease a vengeful Master? Aspiration? Or pure masochism?

On June 23 we may be looking into a deep black chasm of unknowable depth -
but always look on the bright side of Life. The next President of the most powerful nation on earth might be a dangerous bigoted warmonger. What larks!

I had a conversation today with a somewhat younger colleague and we agreed that the world has become an uglier place of recent years.

Reminded me of the thoughts I had at the outset of my social work training in the Thatcher years - I imagined to myself that I would be able to combat the advance of the stupid ugly people which had commenced under Thatcher with the battles with the unions, the ugly nationalism of the Falklands conflict and her chummy relationship with the likes of Pinochet (we didn't know then about Jimmy Saville's activities).
Today, I begin to feel that despite all any of us could do the stupid ugly people have imposed their world view - I don't know how the world will look in the next 30 years

oftenwrong wrote:The weight of evidence is that a sufficiently large section of the British working class have always been prepared to vote AGAINST their own interests, in support of Capitalist entrepreneurial ideology.

Well, if they didn't, the system would be finished in five minutes, so they get thorough brainwashing.    Some are consoled by being members of whatever group - national or whatever - they perceive as 'superior, some are ambitious, some believe they've come down in the world and will go back, and so on, but I think they are mostly a bit like the early farmers who were brought to believe in original sin - their world was so aimless and shitty that they thought someone must have done something very wrong way back then, probably their class.   Or they think fighting is just too much trouble.

boatlady wrote:Today, I begin to feel that despite all any of us could do the stupid ugly people have imposed their world view - I don't know how the world will look in the next 30 years

While two of us are still here, they haven't won - and in fact there are enormously more of us.   We need to put our people in contact with their past, and the enormous heroism of those who created us.

thank you

Donald Trump speaks to the gut – and progressives need to do the same

Extracts from an article by Jonathan Freedland:-

“Remainers sought to rebut the case for leave by insisting that the notorious £350m was bogus or that it was false to promise we could simultaneously stay inside the single market and halt EU immigration. But, though correct, those remainers were responding in the wrong idiom. Leave was channelling a howl of pain from those who felt that 21st-century life was passing them by. Too often, remain replied as if they were taking part in a policy seminar.

There has to be a better way for liberals and progressives to counter the surging populism of the right. The centre-left needs to address the sources of the fear, pain and rage that fuels a Trump, Le Pen or Farage. That means having a response to the globalisation and automisation that has left so many millions feeling as if they have been consigned to the scrap heap. It means taming globalisation so that both its costs and benefits are shared more evenly. Right now, those at the top get the rewards while those at the bottom pay the price.

Democrats and remainers alike need to have something meaningful to say about both economic hardship and identity, which together are propelling the populist right. But they also need to find a new way to say it. Trump’s strength is his ability to speak directly to the gut, often bypassing the cerebral cortex altogether. It’s no good for enlightened types to harrumph their disapproval. If such an approach is effective, they need to deploy it themselves. If the political brain is an emotional brain, as the evidence has long suggested it is, then progressives need to start speaking fluent emotion.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/29/donald-trump-speaks-to-the-gut-the-democrats-need-to-do-the-same

To balance the justifiable criticisms of Brexit-campaigners, mainly their use of the truth as a flexible commodity, it's evident that the majority of voters had little faith in the Remain forecasts of woe, despair and the rending of garments if Britain were to leave the EU. Most of that noise came from Business, The City and Gideon Osborne, with the result that ordinary people fed up with the status quo grabbed the rare opportunity to protest effectively.

Thanks for that, Dave.

Danny Finkelstein is a Tory, but not as rabid as many of them. I therefore thought it might be worth reading his opinion on why Trump is now in the White House and left-of-centre parties are currently failing to connect with voters across Europe. Basically, he thinks traditional left-inclined voters have developed a different idea of fairness.

Why the left will never understand populism

“An anti-establishment revolt is not an entirely surprising reaction to a banking collapse and stagnant wages, but why has that revolt turned to the right and not the left? And why is this revolt coming from voters who should be keen on the left agenda, people who are not, by any means, prosperous?

In the past 20 years we have learnt more about how the brain works and about how our social behaviour has evolved. This work has led to the powerful idea of reciprocal altruism. We co-operate with people not out of some vague niceness, but because it is a good evolutionary strategy. We are all on our guard that someone else is taking out more than they have put in. The political issues that excite the strongest emotions are those where we think someone else is committing a sin against reciprocity, such as MPs’ expense claims.

Bankers were earning vast bonuses for years and nobody was all that bothered. Then came the crash. People suddenly became contributors to the banks; we were putting in, they were taking out. This is also true of our attitude to welfare recipients. Because we are hardwired to be suspicious that we are being deceived, we are almost impossible to persuade that enough is being done to prevent welfare fraud.

There is a feeling that immigrants are using public services that others have paid to establish. No amount of data showing the contribution made by hard-working migrants shifts this debate much. Because we are worried about being deceived by people who take our favours, but don’t reciprocate them, we guard against it by using shortcuts to help us decide who to trust. One shortcut, unfortunately, is to trust people who look like us and distrust strangers.”

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/why-the-left-will-never-understand-populism-0n7rkm3wr

He seems to be describing what is happening - whether it's inevitable is another question

"....trust people who look like us and distrust strangers.”
That's a description of Tribalism, inherent throughout human history.

Some observers are now saying that the Referendum result was engineered by ultra-right-wing capitalists with the objective of creating a British version of Singapore. The hysterical reaction in some quarters to intervention by the Supreme Court would seem to support that theory.

some observers may well be right - for the absolute first time in my life I'm ready to believe conspiracy theories