“their overwhelming anger was saved for those at the bottom of society ”

There’s a discussion on this in the ragged trousered philanthropists. Plus ca change.

In the main Denver public library in the 1980s, there were so many homeless people hanging out there all day, that the library had taken the doors off the sit down toilets, so to stop people sleeping, drinking, taking drugs and whatever else in them. People still used the toilets, but just without a door to give them any privacy.

This has increased to such an extent that the librarians have had to enforce a strict time limit on how long a person may spend with the Daily Mail

I suspect that’s for Health & Safety reasons. Any longer and your brain would liquify.

Lefty meets ordinary people.
Doesn’t much like ‘em.
You have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

I just think people have a right to moan about Pedophiles and Immigrants, we all know most immigrants eat babies.

If your on the top of the waiting list and have been at the top for maybe two years and then somebody who has just arrived here with a disabled child, then sadly the person on the waiting list will be annoyed, and I do not blame them, I do blame the governments and council who refused to build social housing. Priorities on health or children or disability will always get a house first, and people who say no are really telling fibs.

Paedophiles well sadly we did have one who was known to use, we would not let our children out the front door, then one day my two kids sitting on the pavement eating ice cream, I asked where did you get that from, oh said my daughter that nice man bought them, tell you now that nice man moved away within a day, he’s now doing eleven years in jail for attacking a school boy fact well you do not believe it, I do not give a dam. Like it or not we have problems with this type of crime and criminal and the protection of our kids goes well past this chaps rights, if you do not see that sadly then why are you here.

I’m disabled, in the past four years I’ve written a New record according to my disability advisor a nineteen year old young lady, vastly experienced in the working game, refuses point blank to shake hands without cotton gloves on.

Any way I’ve written job applications 1,890 CV letters 898, and I’ve phoned from the job centre on average twenty five times a week, it has become so bad I was told to only attend my interviews once a month.

But it’s not for the want of trying like it or not for every job I apply for about 100 other people with legs go for the same job, and my wheelchair gets in the way.

Life is a bitch, have you thought about taking your education into the army or perhaps teaching assistant

@4 – I was gonna say exactly the same thing. Hilarious. I love the “Sipping pale cups of tea” were you in a library or some form of gulag?

For those of us on the political left, much mental energy is often spent expunging this side of the public from our minds in an attempt to mentally align ourselves with the majority in the on-going class struggle.

Wow you are amazingly patronising, have a good ol sniff of your farts and shut up you pseudo intellectual whateverism cunt face

Did you challenge the peasents assertions Lord Blood-worth? If not then you are an absolute disgrace, a lowly cur and coward who couldnt be replied upon to do anyhting other than belittle others.

You done now Dave?

Any way I’ve written job applications 1,890 CV letters 898, and I’ve phoned from the job centre on average twenty five times a week

If I were hiring right now then both “literacy” and “grip on reality” would be toward the on my list. Maybe working on those two would help you in your search.

From reading this I get the impression the poster somehow thinks that because he studied and got an MA, he’s entitled to a nice job.

That isn’t how things work. People are not paid for the degree, they’re paid for achieving something the employer needs.

Sometimes this is about times a-changing – economy and technology shifted between the time you picked you field of studies and the time you graduated – but far too often we can see young people who choose a line of studies that is cool and interesting (something in humanities and liberal arts), but don’t give any consideration to what jobs actually pay (often these jobs are with practical applications of technology and commerce) and how many others are competing for the same jobs (as e.g. if you want to become an author, musician or make a career in performing arts – only one rapper or dancer out of many thousands will make anything like a living, and same seems to be true for aspiring journalists).

It’s not that those companies are evil. It’s just that they’re up to make a profit or fill a purpose. If your work contribution doesn’t give a profit or fill a purpose for which somebody is willing to pay, they won’t employ you.

BTW I’m also astonished that looking for jobs in Britain works by reading Daily Mail in a library. Daily Mail is such a badly written piece of trash and right-wing prejudices (as opposed to the Guardian which is well written piece of trash of left-wing prejudices).

Where I live, there is
1) a public employment agency that collects information and forwards applicants to employers (mostly for manual jobs), and
2) Web services where you can find the job offerings based on keywords, leave applications, and also leave you own CV and open application (though the latter seldom works).

(A side note: part of the plight of newspapers, and therefore part of the plight of fresh graduates aspiring to be journalists, is the fact that newspapers get less and less advertising income from job ads, because these Web services have taken over…)

I could also give some advice to writing applications: if you do 50 applications in nine weeks, it may be slightly too much. It’s not yet excessive; sometimes you hear of people who send 100 applications in a month and then complain that they’re not taken seriously. They won’t be, if you send blanket CVs to random job offerings. Advice: look at what is available, pick the jobs that look really likely (I take it you realize it’s good to be realistic with how your application will be perceived), and concentrate on them. Then do some research on the company and tailor your application to that particular position. You’ll want a specific application letter and also a customized CV that shows *you* are interested in *them* so much that it’s good for them to be interested in you.

That’s how it works over in continental EU, anyway. Advice I hear for people in the US is similar.

@8 Yes, I actually came back for another go but realised Ive probably been as uncouth and insulting as required.

I dont think Ive read anything that made me so angry in a long time.

La lutte continue . . .

11
Probably the thing that makes you angry is that James identifies himself as a ‘leftie’ and then goes on to Daily Mail speak. It doesn’t help that he has had a university education and should have identified this.

I take it you didn’t bother to inform your fellow jobseekers that when the newspapers talk about spongers, they’re actually talking about them and not some burberry clad chav hidden within their imagination.

“From reading this I get the impression the poster somehow thinks that because he studied and got an MA, he’s entitled to a nice job.”

Or that after having spent money and taken the route supposed to open doors, that it is a sad state of affairs that there are no jobs at all, let alone a nice one.

“You’ll want a specific application letter and also a customized CV that shows *you* are interested in *them* so much that it’s good for them to be interested in you.”

And this way a different person out of the dozens, scores or hundreds apply for the same job because there aren’t enough jobs will get the role instead of someone else.

This article isn’t about jobs anyway…

The public are overwhelmingly thick as dogshit to be fair.

“the fact that so many people would lap-up the Sun and the Daily Mail in such huge quantities, taking each hairbrain story and repeating it ad nauseum until it became “common sense” – ah, the old dichotomy – it might be easy to advocate for certain social groups in the abstract – just so long as you don’t have to spend too much time in their company?

It sounds like your local library mirrors certain reality daytime televison?

Do you take the chip on your shoulder into interviews? If so thats probably why you can’t find a job.

15 minutes to read the Daily Mail seems a little extravagant… I mean, most peple could WRITE the Daily Mail in 15 minutes…

BB

No, it just shows that all of us are susceptible to a simple, repeated message. The Right have known this for decades and the Left have continually ignored.

I biggest toe curlingly embarrassing posts on here and other Left Wing bloggs in when the Left get something of our internal debates wedged firmly up our arse and then spent hours or days trying to battle it out.

One example of this being the middle of last year when we had a post explaining why it was wrong to use the term ‘ConDems’. Four days later the Left had firmly tied itself in knots whilst people were losing jobs and homes. Christ almighty, why bother?

The other one that gets on my tits is when you get long protracted debates about the political machinations regarding Palestine or a new revelation regarding Iraq trundles out. Before we know it we have a Blairite/Brownite squabble and a return to 2003.

Is there anyone who uses this board who thinks ‘Hmm, we need to remind the voters out there the last time we made a right Royal fuck up’?

The Tories and the Right have quite successfully disconnected the weak and vulnerable from the rest of society to the extent that we have now got an identifiable underclass similar to that of America (North and South) and Apartheid South Africa and many parts of Asia.

These unemployed people that the OP speak of do not feel part of the ‘chav’ even though the Mail are talking about them too.

Remember this is what we wanted. We on the Left are quite willing to prostrate ourselves as the Right move the debate forward. Never defend, never challenge, never attack the Right as they push for further cuts in welfare, destroy the minimum wage, destroy employment laws etc. Every phone in every edition of ‘Any Questions’ will see someone like Starkey say ‘feral youth’, ‘cut their dole money’ or whatever and the ‘Left winger’ on the panel will meekly say ‘oh, I am not sure about that’.

Well look, you got what you wanted. You wanted the Right to dominate politics, whilst we argue about the ‘ConDems’. While we argue among ourselves about things that the general public are not aware of and care less about. The Right have pushed their agenda forword and we have not looked at the long term goals and the positions they want to achieve.

Look at the claim to ‘take the poorest people out of tax’, we sit back and let them make that claim. Never mind that Council tax and VAT are high regressive taxes, never mind that raising tax thresholds is merely shifting the tax base from progressive to regressive taxation, never mind that VAT hurts people on low income. The Tories say they want to do this for the ‘poor’ so it must be true, because the Tories don’t lie, do they?

This is what happens when you allow the scum to go unchallenged, the Country moves further to the Right.

I totally agree, Jim.

John B
Notice I used a capital letter for your name…

Any way I’ve written job applications 1,890 CV letters 898, and I’ve phoned from the job centre on average twenty five times a week

If I were hiring right now then both “literacy” and “grip on reality” would be toward the on my list. Maybe working on those two would help you in your search.

That’s because I use a dragon speech writer which is now ten years old, if you have a few bob a new one would help me greatly,

here is a bit of well spelled English.

Go fuck your self.

Jim:

“Look at the claim to ‘take the poorest people out of tax’,”

A claim that doesn’t exist? Looks like you’re very willingly embracing the “deceive hard enough to make a truth” ways of the Right, indeed.

19. Jim

The problem as it appears to me. Is that the left have lost all self confidence while the right have it in spades, and so the left is now terrified to criticise or challenge the right wings agenda. Effectively allowing the right to win by default as they go virtually unchallenged.

Or to quote William Butler Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

If there is to be any chance of halting the rightward drift. Then the left is going to have to get over this mental malaise, and start challenging and arguing unnashamedly and confidently against the right. The left, in short, desperately needs to regain its self confidence.

@18 – Do you routinely mock the disabled people you meet in that way? Typical far-right nastyness.

@ 19 Jim

If you don’t want people on the left bickering with each other, making ludicrious claims about them “wanting the Right to dominate politics” just possibly isn’t the best way to go about preventing this.

@23. Graham: “Then the left is going to have to get over this mental malaise, and start challenging and arguing unnashamedly and confidently against the right. The left, in short, desperately needs to regain its self confidence.”

The left (by which I mean the majority of Labour, LibDem and Green advocates) placed too much faith in managerial solutions and statism, for donkey’s years. I won’t argue that I agree with all of the LibDem compromises in government, but I thought that coalition was a decent gamble for liberal, smaller state change. Change things by chopping things off at the top.

But Labour and Green leaders are still pushing managerial solutions and a big state. For as long as they do that, I yawn.

Try this illuminating essay on the value of market regulation by Paul Ormerod: “What do the following have in common?: the English, the French, oysters, economics and the environment. The answer is: ‘a lot!’.”
http://www.paulormerod.com/pdf/Adbusters_05_07.pdf

@26 – And hence by default give the Tories a free pass.

…
Great!
*handclap*

The entire concept that most of the left are still involved in politics itself is silly. No, they’re sitting at home on election day wondering where their parties went. (Or spoiled their ballot paper, as I did. Write In for “An honest man”)

Amazing. Really good piece. I sincerely thank you for the courage to write it and publish it.

We need more of this!

As for taking the public taking it out on immigrants, recall that in London, 40% of residents were born abroad.

Remember this is what we wanted. We on the Left are quite willing to prostrate ourselves as the Right move the debate forward. Never defend, never challenge, never attack the Right as they push for further cuts in welfare, destroy the minimum wage, destroy employment laws etc

Really? What blogs are you reading, because it sure as hell can’t be this one. Just because we had one post on the ‘ConDems’ doesn’t mean we haven’t had 100s others pointing out where the govt is going wrong.

Feel free to go through the archive

this idea that the left has lost on some issues because we aren’t pushing hard enough is frankly rubbish. The problem is the tendency for people to spend all their time fighting with those who could be their allies.

Who did the student activists turn on after their big protests? Yes, it was their ‘wimpy’ leader. Since then, loads of ‘anti-cuts hard left’ activists have spent most of their time attacking liberals or Labour rather than the right. Apparently they’re all the same. If you think that – fine, but then don’t whine that you’re not getting anywhere because you’ve alienated other people who could have been part of the coalition

good (?) to know libraries retain their functions as refuge and information sources and that the tenor of arguments haven’t changed much over the years then…
Really sympathise with the writer, but a little historical perspective would change the trajectory of the argument a bit.It is, yes, depressing listening to undigested dailymail and sun prejudices – but this is nothing new.. .the Daily Mail’s historic positioning has always been to direct how the ‘lower middle classes’ think and to divert any analysis of larger, wider political processes in favour of relating everything to individuated experiences and the construction of a particular , usually male, ‘them and us’ personality.
We all have tendancy to hit out at those people nearest to us when we feel powerless and frustrated – when one community of migrants becomes stable and at home it tends to demonise the next, we can understand and imagine the face of the ‘fiddler’ who lives nearby but the ‘real villains’ crown, finance or politician remain faceless.
The sadness -more frightening – thing now… is that Murdoch has taken over so much of the press and there appears to be few other voices creating other forms of more coherent and wider critiques of society … bring back free libraries (sic) and the workers education readers groups..

Let’s see, a working class brought up on largely shit comprehensive education prefer tits in the Sun and scrounger-bashing in the Mail to deconstructions of the the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Graun. Who knew?

It must be a shock for the Sparty-liberal middle class (and with an MA to boot! How could the wicked Tory government let you fall in with these bad men?) to come up against a largely reactionary working class. But naturally the experience hasn’t left him with any degree of introspection; any questioning of whether so many millions might be right and the dwindling thousands of the hand-wringing Guardian-reading classes might be wrong.

“The Tories and the Right have quite successfully disconnected the weak and vulnerable from the rest of society to the extent that we have now got an identifiable underclass similar to that of … Apartheid South Africa….”

No, no we don’t. Really. Even if we did, do you think the Tories magicked it up in the last 15 months?

@ 32 Sunny

“Really? What blogs are you reading, because it sure as hell can’t be this one. Just because we had one post on the ‘ConDems’ doesn’t mean we haven’t had 100s others pointing out where the govt is going wrong. ”

I swear some of these guys will happily buy into any fantasy world as long as it allows them to maintain the warm glow of self-righteousness.

If there’s a problem with lack of engagement from the left, it’s because a lot of lefties aren’t politically active at all (self generally included), and this is true of all political groups. I certainly don’t understand why people come onto a website run by active leftist campaigners and whinge that nobody fights against the right.

Sunny, don’t get me wrong, there are of course, dozens, if not hundreds of interesting posts on this blogg, few better than Sue Marsh’s heart rending stories. There have been a few others that come to mind as well and now doubt we all have our favourite and least favourite writers. However, I get the distinct feeling that we lack a particular focus on the wider community.

Far too many times over the last couple years or so, the Left have simply given up ground that should have be at the heart of our ideology. We have allowed the Right to sew mistrust into things that we fought tooth and nail to implement and now I watch as Labour get the mash hammers out to dismantle these things with about the same alacrity that the Tories do. A couple of examples:

The NHS and ‘too many pen pushers and too much bureaucracy’. How did the Right manage to get that into public consciousness? I often heard that there were too many of this and too many of that in the NHS but few held out specific instances where a hospital had too many HR staff, for example. The Right kept putting that up until it got a hold on the public consciousness. I bet you have had a conversation with people who have said something like ‘there are too many managers’ and when you attempt to pin them down, it turns out they have simply no idea how many managers (or HR staff) a hospital needs, but someone told them, so it must be true.

The other one and the real killer for me is unemployment and incapacity. The Tory party have always been the party of unemployment. In fact their economic policy of the early part of the eighties was based on using unemployment to control inflation, which ended in disaster and eventually abandoned. They became so desperate to get the numbers down they had to put people with even minor illnesses onto incapacity.

Suddenly the Tories are allowed to walk away from that record and are even allowed to ditch the assertion that unemployment is an integral part of the economic system. I have read statements along the lines of ‘we get unemployment because we pay people to be unemployed’, ‘labour put all these people onto the dole to win votes’, these statements go totally unchallenged, unquestioned. Once a Right Winger has spoken, it should be written as truth.

Not just here, Sunny, everywhere.

Last night I listened to ‘Any Questions’ and two questions in particular came up; the 50 pence tax and the NHS reforms. The Tory on such a panel should really be stretched on both questions. No matter how unpopular the Left are now the NHS is treasured, yet I thought Dorrel got of pretty lightly. That is just me, though. His ‘just a minute type’ I bet the Cornwall people could run the NHS better than London fell flat on it face.

Anyway, once sort out the Pinnochet debacle out, we can get on with the minor stuff.

Test: no, but then the right, as defined by actual policy rather than posturing, have been in power since 1979. Aggressive wars, neo-liberal, finance-based economic policy, a middle-class religious values ethic, and xenophobic border policies.

That’s New Labour; left wing? Not really.

And yes, they also did some stuff that was genuinely left-wing. Most of it prior to 2003, when the ‘Our Boys At War’ propaganda machine gave Blair & co. the excuse to move their tanks further onto Thatcher’s lawn. You can see it in the cabinet reshuffles; you don’t see anyone left wing brought into the Cabinet after Robin Cook’s spectacular resignation.

Trust me, no-one thinks that the current coalition created the anti-Enlightenment. We’ve been solidly on that path since, at the very latest, the Falklands War.

@ 37 Jim

“Far too many times over the last couple years or so, the Left have simply given up ground that should have be at the heart of our ideology. We have allowed the Right to sew mistrust into things that we fought tooth and nail to implement and now I watch as Labour get the mash hammers out to dismantle these things with about the same alacrity that the Tories do”

Now you’re cooking with gas.

I think the problem here, and this covers both of your examples, is that the right tend to use phrases that sound true and important but are in fact fairly meaningless*. “There are too many managers” is an empty phrase unless you’ve got the research showing where management is being applied ineffectively, and a game plan for improving the issue.

People (and newspapers) tend to like these phrases because they provide a soundbite that you can use to disguise your own ignorance. So they trot out another of your examples – “‘labour put all these people onto the dole to win votes” – without stopping to consider that the concept of benefit scroungers is probably a big vote-loser, and that long-term dole recipients are not a demographic that are particularly inclined to vote in any case.

So people parrot these phrases, thinking it makes them sound wise, and then end up believing them beyond a doubt, because once you’ve said something you feel the need to defend it.

So what’s the answer? Fight back with our own empty, crowd-pleasing phrases? That might be tactically effective, but it’s a cure that’s almost as bad as the disease. Or stick to rational, factual claims? That feels a lot better, but people will often ignore sensible discourse in favour of exciting, inaccurate nonsense. I honestly don’t know what the best solution is here.

*This isn’t unique to the right in any way, but they do seem particularly guilty of it here and now.

@32
Sunny,
Nobody doubts you personally or this website.
But there is a serious failure by the Parliamentary Labour Party to articulate Lefty arguments and/or to counter Rightist arguments. So, I’m with Jim on this issue.

btw, the Labour Uncut website is no friend of the Left, and LabourList is willing to post anti-Left articles. Just recently, Chris Dillow felt it necessary to write an article on his own site to counter a Luke Bozier article on LL which had suggested that Labour should make a cynical false apology for its economic record (so that the Labour right wing Blairites might be listened to on the economy again), and you to your credit published the Chris Dillow article here on Lib Con.
I looked in last night on LL, and saw someone had an article calling for Labour to stop opposing this Tory-Lib Dem govt on every policy – wow, apparently Labour are opposing the govt … yet it’s clear to me that Labour are NOT opposing the govt on policies. Predominantly, the PLP are not interested in articulating Lefty causes; they’re not interested in SERVING as an effective Opposition; they’re interested only in competing against the Tories to be the ruling managerial party of govt, having seats at the Cabinet table and riding in ministerial cars.
The PLP ought to be the voice of the Centre-Left but, unless their future career comes to depend on cooperation,.I cannot imagine any Blairite MPs serving as part of a Lefty coalition of allies, as you seem to hope for.

Chaise @ 40

The problem for the Left is the Right go for the easy sounding ‘solutions’ and the Left have to defend complicated issues and counter ‘cut their dole money’ with a long winded discussion that Dimbley or who ever will stop within thirty seconds. There are no easy soundbites to cover ‘immigration’ for example, or unemployment for that matter. The Right have stolen that ground from under our feet as we vacated that ground ‘as won’ and move on to other things.

Take unemployment. Unemployment is central to economics and has been for hundreds of years. People have always fell out of the labour market, ever since we had a labour market. Men who came back from the Napoleonic wars found themselves condemned to workhouses and of course child prostitution was rife in Victorian London as orphans had nowhere to go in many case. Those sweet little faces you see in ‘Oliver!’ were not so sweet in reality, broken Britain was really broken during Charles Dickens’ day. We have had beggars, thieves, pickpockets, street gangs, child prostitutes, paupers ever since we had cities. Not only here of course but we have mass unemployment and mass poverty all over the World. Not just backwater failing cities, but some of the most prosperous cities on the planet are often orbited by shanty towns, squatter camps and ramshackle suburbs that could have been transported out of the 1850s

Yet for some reason, we have allowed the Tories and their press to expunge that from the folk memory of the British. How have we let that happen? Why is it that people like John Gaunt can go onto ‘This Week’ and announce that calmly unemployment is an invention of the twenty first Centaury Welfare State? Why do people get to come on here and announce that Welfare is the cause of unemployment and that people raking rubbish tips counts as legitimate work? Why do the Right get away with that? It is because they have got away with chipping away at this for a decade while complacent Lefties where more interested in internal ass wiping over a Brown/Blair repositioning. Over what Blair’s new book said about the reasons for the Iraq War and of course the Iraq enquiry. Everyone on the Left are still fighting that battle, even though Labour face a generation out of power Tory Party who want to dismantle the welfare State and return us back to 1911. But at least will have the satisfaction knowing that the Iraq War was based on a lie.

I know how the OP feels, I understand what it is like to listen to people who have no interest in politics who see the chav as getting everything but who are not really interested in why they themselves are so badly off. I cannot explain that once the chav lose their benefits that the wages will soon collapse too.

We need to get that message out there to people, but that will never happen until we stop talking among ourselves and challenge the Right at every turn.

@32 Sunny

this idea that the left has lost on some issues because we aren’t pushing hard enough is frankly rubbish. The problem is the tendency for people to spend all their time fighting with those who could be their allies.

I think you have somewhat missed the point that I, Jim and others have been trying to make. Namely that for the past 20-25 years, the mainstream liberal/socialist left has essentially decided to capitulate to the right on huge areas of policy such as the economy, welfare, law and order etc, rather than fight.

Nowhere do we see any politicians nominally of the left, standing up and challenging rightwing ideas in these areas with any more. So the right wins by default. One of the main reasons for the steady rightward drift of politics over the past few decades has been the self-imposed weakness of the left.

BTW, there has always been huge sections of the working class that are deeply reactionary, there’s nothing new about that. Does anyone care to recall the dockers srikes in the late 1960s in favour of Enoch Powell?

@ Jim

Regarding the fact that many are ignorant of conditions in Victorian England, people have notoriously short memories for most political issues.

In terms of easy-sounding solutions, one area that really annoys me is crime and punishment. You can point out that rehabilitation is often more effective in cutting reoffending than harsher sentencing, that criminal records make it hard for people to go straight, and that however much people sneer, improving society’s wider problems would, in fact, be a very good way of preventing people from turning to crime in the first place… and the right just have to scream “soft on crime!” and “you care more about the criminals than the victims!”, regardless of whether they’re able to logically counter your point.

Again, this is neither unique to or universal among the right. Some lefties behave like this, and many right-wingers DO approach these issues with evidence and reason. But in terms of winning over public opinion, the content-free screeching seems to be far more effective than it deserves to be.

@42 – Or that among the few organisations both pre and post-war which welcomed the Jews in England – those who had fled Europe – was the communist party, which gave social aid and gained many Jewish members.

At the battle of cable street, the Jewish Board of Deputies told Jews to stay away…they were ignored, and the communist party lead the anti-fascists!

I’m no commie, but the best values of the left have been ignored in recent decades.

@42. Graham: “Namely that for the past 20-25 years, the mainstream liberal/socialist left has essentially decided to capitulate to the right on huge areas of policy such as the economy, welfare, law and order etc, rather than fight.”

My take on it is that the liberal left generally has popular values but lacks non-centralist solutions. Given that the overall instincts of the UK population are non-centralist, this means that the liberal left is unelectable. I don’t regard the 1997 New Labour government as liberal left; it was technocratic and populist.

@ Chaise Guevara
” So what’s the answer? Fight back with our own empty, crowd-pleasing phrases? That might be tactically effective, but it’s a cure that’s almost as bad as the disease. Or stick to rational, factual claims? That feels a lot better, but people will often ignore sensible discourse in favour of exciting, inaccurate nonsense. I honestly don’t know what the best solution is here.”

Agreed!
I’d suggest, the art would be to create a successful blend :
a quick-and-easy memorable first line which appeals to the emotions, or “gut instincts”,
coupled with and backed up by a more detailed intellectual argument.
This is far easier said than done, of course, but isn’t impossible.
Then, in time and with usage, the opening line may become a form of one-line short-hand for the fuller argument.

On crime, Blair said “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, which was good… but as a one-liner it failed to explicitly portray Labour as being sympathetically and naturally on the side of the victim.

@45 – The left is still afraid of sounding, well, communist.

Which is ridiculous, at this stage. Talk about the will of the people, united, already.

@ 46

I think you’re right. Have a good title up front, and follow with something meaningful.

@47. Leon Wolfeson: “@45 – The left is still afraid of sounding, well, communist.”

Correctly. Euro-communism of the CPGB or PCI in the 1980s was stuck with the communist label and failed to develop in spite of its liberal tone.

And communism is not what the UK population want. Anarcho-syndicalism would pull more votes.

@44: Couldn’t agree more. My Grandpa (Liberal/Lib Dem member since 1955!) was once a member of the Communist Party as in the 1930s, the Communists were the only people actively standing up to the Blackshirts and their anti-Jewish activities. He wasn’t really a communist, but an anti-facist with nowhere else to go, but that didn’t stop his phone being tapped (by the security services) until the early 1970s!!

@ James Bloodworth: I strongly advise you to buy the book “great answers to tough interview questions” by Martin John Yate. It’s the best job hunting book I’ve ever come across and it’s not just about interviews, but covers the whole job hunting process from finding vacancies to applying, interviewing and negotiating offers.

@49 – And you’ve deliberately misinterpreted what I’ve said. If we stick to using the language of the right, then it lets them define the argument and we’ve already lost much of the debate with the public.

I’m unsure why you view that as desireable.

As for the Communist crusade against Fascism in the 1930s, it’s as well to recall other salient details of the relevant background:

- “Julie Gottlieb’s Feminine Fascism would disabuse them. Its brilliant analysis of the place of women in Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists does much to change our preconceptions. Where women played comparatively little part in the fascist movements of other European countries, more than 25 per cent of the BUF members were women, many of whom were prominent in the movement’s activities. All this, despite the macho image, so similar to that of continental fascism, displayed by the leader and by so many of his acolytes.”
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=157840&sectioncode=6

- In 1937, George Orwell and wife managed to escape across the border from Spain into France just ahead of a warrant issued by the Republican government for his arrest. Peter Davison: George Orwell – A literary life, recounts how many year later, after WW2, a historian working in Spain’s national archives discovered a copy of an official communication sent by the Republican government to Moscow with the information that a warrant had been issued for Orwell’s arrest. Why would Moscow want to know that?

- The Moscow show trials of 1936, in which dedicated Communists confessed to ludicrous crimes for which they were executed, destroyed any vestigial credibility of the Communist Party as a bulwark against other despotic totalitarian ideologies. Millions in the Ukraine and Belarus had died of famine in 1932/3, a consequence of Stalin’s policy for the collectivisation of agriculture announced in a speech he made in December 1929. This was the speech that called for the “elimination of the kulaks as a class.”

- On 28 September 1939, the Soviet Union signed a Friendship Treaty with Nazi Germany, when Britain and France were already at war with Germany.

@52

Wow, you’ve just set a new record for randomness, incoherence and irrelevance, well done!

@53: “Wow, you’ve just set a new record for randomness, incoherence and irrelevance, well done!”

Thanks – your capacity for abuse is evidently greater than your capacity for analysis.

I was uncovering part of the relevant background to the familiar claims of self-styled leftists that the Communist Party in the 1930s was the bulwark against fascism.

The trouble with that stirring narrative is that Communists and their ideological allies find it convenient to cover over the murdering repression of the allies of the Communists in the Spanish civil war – which Orwell wrote about in his book Homage to Catalonia; the state orchestrated famine in the Ukraine and Belarus in 1932/3, which killed millions; and the Moscow show trials of 1936.

The German-Soviet Friendship Treaty of 28 September 1939 destroys claims that the fascists and communists had completely incompatible ideologies.

The delicious lead about the suffragettes is that after winning an extension of franchise to include all adult women (except lunatics) in 1928 – in time for the 1929 general election – many suffragettes were at a loss as to what to do next. While Sylvia Pankhurst became a founding member of the Communist Party, others went off to join Mosley’s British Union of Fascists – Julie Gottlieb names: Mary Richardson, Norah Elam (Mrs Dacre Fox), and Mary Allen. So much for the democratic sentiments of the suffragettes.

What the British government did about fascist parades was to pass the Public Order Act 1936, which banned uniforms for political organisations, to block the possibility of a British equivalent of the Nazi Brown Shirts emerging.

Btw Orwell in his research diary for a book that was to become: The Road to Wigan Pier, reports that Mosley made a socialist pitch in a speech in Barnsley in March 1936. That gives us an important clue as to the reasons for the political hostility between the Fascists and Communists – both parties were pitching for the support of the same political underclass.

In short, I believe my posts are both highly relevant to the thread and highly embarrassing for those who are wont to persuade us of the under-appreciated virtues of the Communist Party in its relentless fight against Fascism. The claims are all bullocks.

@54 – And the Jews are all evil.

Heard it before.

@55 Leon: “@54 – And the Jews are all evil.”

That is not the first time you have attributed to me sentiments that I have not expressed and don’t subscribe to.

It would be the more impressive – as well as intellectually honest – if you could rebut the facts posted.

@56 – Then don’t go there, quite simple enough. If you chose to, then you’ll have to take the accusations which will be thrown – I’ve heard enough of it direct from BNP members.

The BUF was defeated in the UK largely due to the community party, and they were friends of and lead the Jews in that struggle. I’m really not interested in revisionist worldviews painting them as friends of Mosley’s movement.

@57: “@56 – Then don’t go there, quite simple enough.”

We need to perennially guard against the rewriting of history. Remember the Party’s slogan in Ingsoc?

Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.

The BUF made little headway in Britain politics, even less than that of the Communist Party.

A white paper of 4 March 1935 committed the then national government to rearmament. “The fact is that the rearmament programme was seriously begun under Baldwin, pushed along more slowly than Churchill wanted, but more quickly than the opposition advocated. Defence spending, pegged at about 2.5 per cent of GNP until 1935, increased to 3.8 per cent by 1937.” (Peter Clarke: Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-2000 (Penguin Books))

Fortunately, the RAF and air defence were given increasing priority in rearmament spending over and above the navy and the army, which showed how the establishment scaled the defence risks.

At the general election held on 14 November 1935, the Conservatives won with a landslide, attracting more than half the votes cast. George Lansbury, the Labour leader, was a pacificist and had opposed rearmament. He lost his seat at the election and Attlee, his deputy, took over the Labour Party leadership. That was the last general election in Britain at which the winning party gained a majority in the total vote. The electorate had showed its sentiments very clearly.

Btw the battle of Cable St was on 4 October 1936.

@53 To be fair he was the previous record holder too.

Another of the Party’s regular slogans at Ingsoc was: Ignorance is strength

I never cease marvelling at the perennial relevance of Orwell’s perceptive insights.

@58 – There was enough damage done on the street level by their supporters. And the police fought on the BUF’s side in Cable Street.

You confuse the political picture for the full story.

Also, Orwell? Ha. Piker. Try Huxley…

@61: Leon

You really don’t see the big picture, do you?

The Conservatives won the November 1935 election with a landslide because it became an election about rearmament and George Lansbury, the Labour leader, had opposed rearmament. Appalling rates of unemployment in South Wales, the North of England and Scotland became subordinate to the rearmament issue so the government’s official policy of opposing public works programmes to create jobs – because that would “crowd out” private investment – prevailed.

There are clear and sad parallels with recent times. With the events of 9/11 in 2001, Blair as PM became preoccupied with “the war on terror” – and all those exciting foreign trips to Washington and other places – so the important issues of New Labour’s sad record on social mobility and the inequality of income distribution were downgraded in his government’s political priorities.

George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

60

And I never cease marvelling at your arrogance – the people of Barnsley were not an underclass most who attended those meetings in 1936 were unemployed working-class. I suppose your next literary reference will come from Charles Dodgsons’ stories for children.

@62 – That’s a very *different* story to the one of the struggle on the street between various groups within the population of London, lead by elements *within* the Communists, and the BUF.

(The actual defence was a mixture of all kinds of left-wing and anarchists, alongside Jews and Irish.;.)

@63 Steveb: “And I never cease marvelling at your arrogance – the people of Barnsley were not an underclass most who attended those meetings in 1936 were unemployed working-class. ”

The long-term unemployed in the north of England, Wales and Scotland, especially uenmployed miners, were an underclass because of the persistence of their jobless plight and because there was no respite for them in prospect.

There’s no arrogance in that accurate description. After the Pound was pulled off the Gold Standard in September 1931, the Bank of England was able to cut its Bank Rate down to 2% by the following June. The Pound depreciated by 25% in the foreign exchange markets – thereby boosting net exports – and with lower interest rates there ensued a boom in speculative house building in the south of England into the Midlands – a League of Nations report described Leicester as the second wealthiest city in Europe. But high levels of unemployment persisted in other parts of Britain. That was the Depression.

Try the entry in George Orwell’s diary with his account of a public meeting in Barnsley addressed by Mosley on 16 March 1936:

“Last night to hear Mosley speak at the Public Hall [in Barnsley], which is in structure a theatre. It was quite full – about 700 people I should say. About 100 Blackshirts on duty, with two or three exceptions weedy looking specimens, and girls selling Action etc. Mosley spoke for an hour and a half and to my dismay seemed to have the meeting mainly with him. He was booed at the start but loudly clapped at the end. Several men who tried to interject with questions were thrown out . . . one with quite unnecessary violence. . . . M. is a very good speaker. His speech was the usual clap-trap – Empire free trade, down with the Jew and the foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers. The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews who were said to be financing, among other things the British Labour Party and the Soviet. . . . M. kept extolling Italy and Germany but when questioned about concentration camps etc always replied ‘We have no foreign models; what happens in Germany need not happen here.’ . . . ”
George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940 (Penguin Books) p.230.

The key sentence is: “After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers.”

Mosley was a cabinet minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government of 1929-31 until he resigned in 1930 saying the government was doing too little to tackle rising unemployment. After founding the electorally unsuccessful New Party for the 1931 election, Mosley went on to found the British Union of Fascists in 1932.

From my perspective the key sentence is;

“The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews”

@66: “From my perspective the key sentence is; . . . ”

Yes, but Mosley on his conspiracy theory about jews isn’t the only important insight to be gleaned from Orwell’s diary entry. Note Orwell’s telling description of the reaction of the audience to Mosley:

“Mosley spoke for an hour and a half and to my dismay seemed to have the meeting mainly with him. He was booed at the start but loudly clapped at the end. ”

Another important insight is the reference in the diary entry to “concentration camps”, which shows this knowledge was already in the public domain in Britain in March 1936. How come then – as I’ve mentioned several times before in other threads – Lloyd George, Britain’s last Liberal PM, went to meet with Herr Hitler in Bertesgarten in August 1936 and then on his return wrote a piece for the Daily Express describing Hitler as a great leader?

65
Since the word ‘underclass’ was coined, it has had a negative meaning, and I don’t imagine that when you utilize the term you are being complimentary.
Many people have been bamboozled by the nazi ideology, how do you think that the most scientific and technologically advanced and liberal country in the world (Germany), came to where it was in the 1930s and 40s?
And let’s be clear about Hitler’s popularity with the German working-class, – it was his war machine which created jobs not his delusions about the master race.

How come then – as I’ve mentioned several times before in other threads – Lloyd George, Britain’s last Liberal PM, went to meet with Herr Hitler in Bertesgarten in August 1936 and then on his return wrote a piece for the Daily Express describing Hitler as a great leader?

Because in addition to being Britain’s last Liberal PM he was also a bit of a bellend?

@68: “Many people have been bamboozled by the nazi ideology, how do you think that the most scientific and technologically advanced and liberal country in the world (Germany), came to where it was in the 1930s and 40s?”

That’s an important question. Well respected British economic historians say that Germany’s per capita GDP through the 1930s was not up to Britain’s per capita GDP. What was true is that Germany held most international patents on plastics – a sure sign of its strength in advanced materials technologies. OTOH per capita, British scientists had been awarded more Nobel prizes.

This is the crucial clue about what finally brought the Nazis to power: Keynes had visited Hamburg to give a lecture in January 1932 – DE Moggridge: Maynard Keynes (1992) p.539. On his return, he wrote in the New Statesman: “Germany today is in the grips of the most powerful deflation any nation has experienced . . ”

It was desperation on the part of the German electorate which led to the high but falling vote for the Nazis and a lesser but inceasing vote for the Communists in the German federal elections on 6 November 1932 – the second federal elections held that year after the indecisive result of the July elections.

After prevaricating, President Hidernburg was persuaded by Von Papen and his Conservatives to offer the Chancellorship to Hitler in January 1933, doubtless in a shared belief that this option held the best immediate prospect of averting the ultimate calamity downstream of Bolshevism should another election have to be held to resolve the indecisive outcome of the November elections.

The liberalism of the Weimar Republic was by now thoroughly discredited for having brought the disaster of the depression upon Germany – following on the experience of hyperinflation in 1923, which had wiped out middle class savings. The Reichstag fire of 23 February 1933 provided a credible pretext for rounding up and putting Communists and Social Democrats into concentration camps and banning other political parties. One-party elections with only Nazi candidiates listed and a referendum were held on 12 November 1933, which confirmed the ascendancy of the Nazis.

The fact is that the public works programme of the Nazi government reduced the horrendously high levels of unemployment from: ” . . from 6 million in October 1933 to 4.1 million a year later, 2.8 million in February 1935, 2.5 million in February 1936, and 1.2 million in February 1937.” [CP Kindleberger: The World in Depression 1929-1939 (Allen Lane, 1973) p.240].

There is good evidence that the Nazis cribbed the idea of public works programmes to reduce unemployment from Keynes – who had co-authored a pamphlet on this for the Liberal Party in the 1929 general election in Britain. Their previous advice from Schacht, their economics guru, had been impeccably orthodox – cut public spending to balance the budget.

“The Nazi Party leaders were savvy enough to realise that pure racial anti-semitism would not set the party apart from the pack of racist, anti-semitic, and ultranationalist groups that abounded in post-1918 Germany. Instead, I would suggest, the Nazi success can be attributed largely to the economic proposals found in the party’s programs, which in an uncanny fashion integrated elements of 18th and 19th century nationalist-etatist philosophy with Keynesian economics. Nationalist etatism is an ideology that rejects economic liberalism and promotes the right of the state to intervene in all spheres of life including the economy.” [W Brustein: The Logic of Evil - The Social Origins of the Nazi Party 1925-33 (Yale UP, 1996), p.51]

In Germany, Nazi government was popular for much of the electorate. Historians have remarked that up to the war, Germany did not have an internal security problem: the establishment of the Gestapo was relatively small pre-war and the Gespo relied on information and denunciations handed in by ordinary citizens.

By the accounts of historians, the job creation programme of the Nazis was mostly public works on autobahns, government offices and sports stadiums until 1936, not armaments. Hence the showcase of the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

For more on the Nazis and what they did, try this illuminating BBC series on YouTube: The Nazis – A warning from history
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV57aZmKORk

The series is also available on a BBC DVD.

70
I Would suggest that it was Keynes who learnt that war stimulated the economy, a fact which could not have been overlooked from WW1.
However, it was the 1933 fire of Berlin which most historians agree was pivotal to the establishment of nazi Germany, of course, the economic situation played it’s part, not least the damaging effect of the The Versailles Treaty.
Rearmanent started in 1935, which was against the terms of The Versailles Treaty, some believe it started prior to this. At this stage, Hitler’s main supporters were the nobility (they liked his racist ideology) and the notion of Germany’s future greatness. It was both the middle-class and the working-class who supported Hitler because of the impact upon the economy and, surprisingly, many of the academic middle-class supported his racist ideas. Hitler was one of the greatest bamboozlers.
There is also a theory that Hitler had hundreds of future members of the Gestapo trained even prior to 1933 when he became Chancellor,
Unfortunately, the right and the extreme right are always good at giving easy and simple answers, the BNP can, in an instance, promote the white members of those at the very bottom of society, into the very best, brought down by a lying liberal society.

“The liberalism of the Weimar Republic was by now thoroughly discredited for having brought the disaster of the depression upon Germany”

And it was nothing to do with the Treaty of Versailles, the subsequent dependence on American banks and the immense damage done to Germany as a result in the the Crash of ’29? Ha.

Germany was at the time a relatively new nation, and at the time had a fragile political calculus based on pure PR (without the 5% threshold of the modern Bundestag) which the Nazis disrupted. They were on the wane, though, when Hitler was raised to Chancellor, under the mistaken assumption of his opponents that he could be controlled.

Then he got the Enabling Act through and the Weimar republic was history. “Popular” in a controlled political system is very different from Popular in a democracy.

Here is Keynes eye witness account of Versailles. What is fascinating about the account is that one can get a real feel for how utterly shambolic the negotiations really were.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15776/15776-h/15776-h.htm

The Reichstag fire of February 1933 provided a credible political pretext for rounding up Communists and Social Democrats, to put them in concentration camps, and for banning political parties. But we should ask about why the German electorate was so willing to go along with that in the elections and referendum held on 12 November 1933 when Nazi candidates were the only candidates on the ballot papers.

The sad fact is that the German electorate had no very convincing evidential reasons for believing that the highly democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic – which resulted in over 20 political parties – created a means for effective governance. There is no evidence of continuing active dissent against the one-party Nazi state.

I certainly agree with Richard W that the punitive (and unsustainable) terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 contributed to the economic conditions besetting Germany by the 1930s but the global depression of the 1930s was international in scope – from which Britain came off relatively lightly, arguably mainly because of the British government’s early decision to abandon the Gold Standard in September 1931.

In contrast, Nazi Germany kept the Reichmark on the Gold Standard but by means of introducing extensive trade restrictions and controls over foreign exchange transactions – along with the regulation of prices, wages and investment.

There is mixed evidence on whether the Prussian aristocracy generally supported the Nazis.

@75 – America was hit especially hard, and as I said the war repayments had tied the German economy up with the American banks to a far large degree than would have otherwise been the case.

And yes, a pure PR system with no % limits on participation at all is something which is thoroughly discredited. 2-5% limits, in today’s democracies, for good reason! (I support 3.5-4%)

A party which promised an end to national humiliation and jobs and which was visibly cracking down on it’s enemies? Yea, you stand up first…

@18 – Didnt know anyone was disabled, sorry forgot this was a “liberal” site so disagreeing with soemone who is disabled is a big no no now is it?

@76: “A party which promised an end to national humiliation and jobs and which was visibly cracking down on it’s enemies? Yea, you stand up first…”

In the November 1932 German elections, the total vote for the Nazis was down on that at the July elections but it was still the largest block of votes and seats for a party, albeit short of a majority of seats in the Reichstag. The Communist total vote was the second largest party vote and that had increased since the July elections.

The clearest and sadest message is that the German electorate was looking to totalitarian solutions to resolve the misery of their depressed economy with soaring unemployment. The “democratic” parties had lost political credibility.

What prompted the Conservatives, led by Von Papen, to advise President Hindenburg to end the prevarication and offer the Chancellorship to Herr Hitler was a fear if there were another election to settle the indecisive result of the November elections, the Communist vote might increase still further.

On the evidence, in November 1932, the electorate wasn’t switching voting to support some nationalistic party to end the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty.

A thought on what led to my interest in this period. The received explanation for the Labour landslide in the 1945 elections in Britain, which brought in Attlee’s Labour governments of 1945-51, was that the electorate had turned against the Conservative policies during the depression in the 1930s and wanted a welfare state with a more managed economy. I bought that narrative for many years until I learned that the Conservatives had won the general election in November 1935 with a landslide. How come?

@78 – Ah, so you’re calling multi-party communism totalitarian now? Sigh.

Ah, so you’re calling multi-party communism totalitarian now? Sigh.

Lol, everything boils down to the same thing here, semantic one up man ship. Pathetic

@80 – Er, what? He did, It’s that kind of sweeping radical statement which makes arguing with Bob so frustrating, he can’t see beyond his very narrow worldview and understand that other people have different takes on situations.

@79: “@78 – Ah, so you’re calling multi-party communism totalitarian now? Sigh.”

No, I’m not. The totalitarian tendencies of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union were already apparent. The Soviet Union was already effectively a one-party state. Lenin had created the Cheka – the ultimate ancestor of the KGB – under the command of Dzerzhinsky – and Stalin, Lenin’s successor, was pushing the collectivisation of agriculture to “eliminate the kulaks as a class”, a policy he had announced in a speech made in December 1929 and which led to the 1932/3 famine in the Ukraine. Millions died as a result of that famine.

In November 1932, the German electorate could have voted in a big way for the Social Democrats but they didn’t. The biggest votes in that indecisive election were for the Nazis and then the Communists.

While Hitler made much of his opposition to “Bolshevism” in his speeches, he didn’t denounce “socialism”. He could hardly do that as the official name of the Nazis was: the National Socialist German Workers Party.

Which twunt got Bob B on the subject of Nazi Germany? He’ll be rambling aimlessly for hours now.

“Which twunt got Bob B on the subject of Nazi Germany? He’ll be rambling aimlessly for hours now.”

The really interesting focus is the politics in both Britain and Germany during the 1930s which did so much to shape our modern world.

For instance, in the 1935 general election in Britain, George Lansbury, the Labour leader, opposed rearmament on principle and the Conservatives won that election with a landslide. What would happened if Labour had won?

82
The distinction being that nazi = national socialism where Bolshevism = international socialism. It is a common misunderstanding, I suppose because the term ‘socialism is also used in USSR.

Very sad to know about the current situation . Hope you get a job soon. Good luck !