Ed should listen to Lord Glasman

Eddie

Nothing would make any difference in South Wales, Rod - people here would vote Labour even if they chose a sheep as a candidate - though at least that candidate wouldn't prattle on for hours using PC management jargon approved by Labour HQ.

And yep, marble-mouthed London monkeys will be parachuted all over the land - but they will mostly be female and/or ethnic minorities, for sure, it being acceptable to be racist and sexist against white men these days.

Ditto for the Tories, who pander to the women's vote they desperately need - though with boundary changes, only a miracle will get a Labour majority next time; and if Scotland becomes independent, Labour will never have a majority in England again.

I just can't see Milliband as PM though. As a cartoon character maybe...

Rhoda Klapp

Rod is right, of course, but it is pretty much impossible for the current incumbents to realise that they are the problem. Indeed their aim is to impose their particular set of beliefs and values on a party which is only nominally for the working class electorate at all. The party was hijacked decades ago. How could Ed reverse the capture, and still be the leader? Can't be done. And the policy implications? What exactly about the current lot is supposed to appeal to a Gillian Duffy?

startledcod

Just where is this 'working class'? The horny handed sons of toil of yesteryear, who marched into and out of factory gates or mineheads in their thousands don't exist as a voting majority anymore. I fear that when Labour politicians and commenters on this blog refer to the working class they are actually referring to the benefit recipient class, a much more accurate description.

WetherspoonThree

Ron, as you know the Labour Party does not remove its leaders until they have given the great British public the opportunity to thoroughly reject them at the alter of public opinion (as a General Election is sometimes known).

Sorry to be author of such bad news, but within the Labour Movement loyalty is seen as something virtuous. I rather doubt that Ed will do the honourable thing and move over in favour of his brother as all politians are such driven creatures and convinced of their own self-worth.

Anyway the great British public will need some time to forgive and forget the Labour Party for past sins committed by Blair, Brown, Mandelson and that other bloke who spent all the money and left a note on his desk in the Treasury mocking the Coalition.

Noa

Did I detect an increase in passion from the start of the article?

Ch...calm down, Rod!

Robert Taggart

For the sake of Britain one hopes Red 'stupid boy' Ed proves to be more a man of 'steel' than of 'Glass' !...
UKGBNI cannot afford another Liebore government !

Jeremy

Chill your chat, dad. The moment I took the pill I was heaped to the gills. Totally out to the wide, baby...

disenfranchised

@ Eddie.....

and rod, no matter how much he might moan about his party, come election time will unthinkingly vote labour along with almost every welshman and northerner.
infact most people in this country have a default vote, no matter how much the particular party they vote for defaults.
then there are the minority rest of us, who aren't tribalist, aren't eaten up with class, and who, as a result, vote for a party that given the chance will give us back our country.
no prizes.....

kara

StartledCod. Couldn't agree more. I went to a debate at SOAS chaired by Seumas Milne, featuring Paul Mason and some other lefty-romantics, with the motion 'Breaking Up? A Route Out of the Eurozone Crisis'; anyway the 'debate' turned into a rallying cry for the supposed working classes/student populous to join trade unions.
Unfortunately the problem is all these people are living in the past: we (the UK) don't have any national industry left, the moment we allowed national companies to outsource all their production to countries where labor was a tenth of the price our economy stopped serving our nation and swathes of people were left to rely upon state subsidization.

We will now play a waiting game for the rest of the world to develop up to our level and for labor costs to balance out; but until then we will have an ineffectual underclass.

Amanda

Startledcod:
Exactly. Labour is a dated concept most favoured by richies. It's a historical relic -- just look at the party anthem. I suppose one could drape a flea-ridden moth-eaten dead-eyed fox fur round one's neck as well, but I don't know why one would.

I like your avatar on the Telegraph, by the way.

Amanda

Happy New Year, Rod.

For some reason the Ornery Awkward Pill of a Comment Guard didn't let me say that in my previous post. I'd tell him to chill but fear that my posting gauntlet could get worse.

teledu

Why do you persist in your support of Labour Rod if it no longer reflects the opinions and hopes of those you want it to?
I'm a working class son of toil who used to be a card carrying Labour Party member, but haven't voted Labour for years and have no intention of doing so ever again. Their policies on Immigration, their imprudent destruction of our economy, inability to accept blame, refusal to allow the people a democratic say on our EU membership, Politically Correct claptrap? Just who the f@@k do they represent? Certainly not you or me. So get some balls Liddle and ditch the bastards. Be a man (sorry, in New Labour Speak that's "person".) Be a "person". Make it your New Year's resolution never to vote Labour again. You can do it if you try.

Victorian Medea

I ought to be a classic Labour voter and even activist - but am not! Why? Because this party is more interested in pandering to minorities than the bedrock of the British working and lower-middle classes. I have seen myself swindled out of eligibility for social housing in London (where I am that rarity, a 4th generation Londoner) because I have an education and a job and because I married the father of my child before she was conceived. Yes, I did marry an immigrant but I'm afraid he's a despised white one from a politically-incorrect Zionist entity in the Middle East, so no sympathy there mate. I am not gay but am thinking of trying it out to advance my moribund career prospects as a mid-life perimenopausal woman and be shortlisted for a safe seat somewhere Up North.

adrian drummond

"its working class support".

How I hate this expression. As if I don't work and someone else does. There'll always be a class divide if comments like this perpetuate this (now) oxymoronic term. Once it might have been applicable but no longer. Rod, you are far to intelligent to retain its outdated use. Move on please.

PS If you are unsure what I mean, please refer to an article by Tony Parsons, "The tattooed Jungle" - Arena, September/October 1982

David Lindsay

My politics have their roots deep in those of the reviled Labour Movement that gave this country the Welfare State, municipal services, workers’ rights and full employment. Those roots are trade union, co-operative, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, and Social Catholic and Distributist. They are not so much anti-Marxist as simply non-Marxist, though contributing to a searing critique of that monstrous fallacy, as also of Jacobinism and Whiggery before that.

In June 2014, at least 14 British seats at Strasbourg will be up for grabs, since the 12 Liberal Democrats might as well spare themselves the humiliation and all retire, while the BNP is increasingly unlikely to exist at all by then. Two candidates per mainland region and one in Northern Ireland? If we can be bothered to make the effort. Also true of funding. But we need to start now.

Labour is usually ahead in the polls, and it has won five parliamentary by-elections in a row, all with healthy swings from the Conservatives. But it would benefit from a body of MEPs, and then also of list members at Holyrood, Cardiff and City Hall, plus beneficiaries of the Stormont electoral system. Perhaps initially to act as Labour’s conscience. But at least potentially to provide a real alternative.

Forest Fan

I don't 'support' any political party. It's not like it's a football team or anything.
Some things I'm conservative about and some things I'm liberal about.

Happy New Year everybody.

Noa

The 'working class' now mainly consists of millions of Brown's public sector drones and not the long gone horny handed sons of toil that constituted the Triple Alliance.

So its perfectly reasonable to conclude that their interests, and those of Labour's leadership, are one and the same.

Amanda

Forest Fan: In that case, your vote is the one that is sought. Whereas I am simply one of 'the base', the person that sees conservatism as classical liberalism, thereby encompassing many liberal positions, and therefore I have no trouble voting for the conservative ticket, which in America means Republican. And from that I never deviate. From government to government, one may find more or less juicy good apples in the pie, but I need to be sure of apples come what may, and not have -- watermelon.

But as I say: it's your vote they're courting.

Amanda

By the way, I was meaning to say 'more or less juicy', not 'more or less apples'. For those that get heartburn from grammar mistakes!

fergus pickering

Eddie, you must, you really must stop blaming women for all the ills that assail us. The only good PM in my adult lifetime was... GUESS WHO?

lomasekto

There is no way back for Liebore. They flooded us with undesirable 'immigrants'; spent all the money;
made a host of stupid laws and worst of all: they are ugly!

fergus pickering

As you well know, David Lindsay, it was Lloyd George wh gave the cuntry most of the things you list, and Churchill who, for fighting the war, gave us full employment. The Labour party gave us endless bloody talk and the loyalty that Bevan showed to Attlee and Gaitskell, Brown to Blair, and most of the party to Brown.

Freeborn John

How you can support those multiculturalist, London centric West Hampstead Guardiansta clique is beyond me. I too supported the labour party once, but after watching Tony 'man of the people' Blair metaphorically r*pe the working class and erode and denigrate the very fabric of England, never again, never again. Noo labour's brand of multuclralist PC funky uber liberalism has seeped into the very fabric of the society to a degree that may never be erased. One of his most enduring ''achievement's'' has been to change the Tory party by inadvertently making them a 'funkier' 'sexier' party, it was they that caused Saida Warsi to the become the Tory party chairman and forced Dave to create A-lists, pretend he cares about gay people, climate change and hug a hoodie. It was new Labour that made the old northern Gillian Duffy grannies of this world feel like Neo Nazi Volkish fascists. It was Nu Labour that sacked Brian True May. It is they who turned London from being a cosmopolitan yet still recognisably English city into a utterly foreign 3rd world country. The most fundamental impact is not so much the multiculturalism, diversity quotas,the sprawling festering crime riddled ghettos, but it is fact we no longer have the mere ability to publicly question it without being hounded as a racist as David Starkey was.

RubyDuck

Why do you support the Labour Party?

Maybe because, one day, it might do what is says on the tin ?

It won#t. Get over it.

Simone

I guess Rod that you only stick with Labour out of some nostalgic thoughts of the party it once was and not the current party that when faced with losing its core working class vote, decided to import millions of new voters through mass immigration in a cynical and destructive ploy to rub the right's nose in diversity.

However the most remarkable fact about modern Labour is how its senior ranks were taken over by lawyers and 3,000 new offences were created in a huge legal job creation scheme, the consequences of which will reverberate for many years to come.

Lungfish

We need a government that brings us out of the bureaucratic nightmare that is the EU. We need a government that encourages the export of goods and services and investment in research and development. We need a government that provides a good and free education to those who wish to study useful subjects and not bullshit. We need lower taxes and all the good stuff will follow.

Michael Sweeney

Maybe if the American term 'blue collar'was used it would make more sense. ASBOs were very popular under the last Government, but hated by metropolitan liberal types (often encouraged by criminal lawyers). 'Psycho' Stapleton and his ilk will be despised in his Labour voting neighbourhood, but to date our institutions have been pre-disposed to 'support' him. Our stalinist metropolitans seem to have a point of view that one need not work and may not only hope to be provided for but to insist upon it too. And it was dearly beloved Maggie who entrenched welfare dependency in the 80s. But there are deserving and undeserving poor, as any fule know. An open goal for any labour politician brave enough to upset Polly Toynbee, John Snow and the sociology departments of what now passes for Academe.

arnoldo87

@ Wetherspoon Three

"...the Labour Party does not remove its leaders until they have given the great British public the opportunity to thoroughly reject them at the alter (sic) of public opinion (as a General Election is sometimes known)."

Too true. In Tony Blair's case they had three such opportunities and failed to take any of them.

This was too much for the Old Labour crew. They couldn't put up with all that unprecedented success and popularity.

So when Blair supported Israel against Hezbollah in 2006, they took their chance. One year later, the Master was gone, and here we are now in 2012 with their wishes fulfilled.

No leadership, no strategic vision, not much talent on the front bench and permanent opposition beckoning.

But never mind - the New Labour project continues apace with Dave & Co..

......Thank goodness.

Oedipus Rex

Michael Sweeney

Totally agree.

As for Startledcod and others, your posts remind me why I still am one of Rod's 'dwindling few'.

Are you suggesting there are no longer any working people in this country? Obviously the 19th C class division and large scale heavy industry has changed. I suppose you're blind to the builders, electricians, train drivers, shop workers, road construction workers, cleaners, engineers - I could go on and on.

The benefit culture (and housing benefit now costs this country £20billion p.a.) burgeoned under Thatcher's government. Most of her supporters seems blissfully unaware of this - I presume because they were having such a great time pleasuring themselves as their short term standard of living went through the roof while the long term prospects of the country were heading towards the basement.

Amanda

Hi everyone. I can confirm, since a certain commenter directed us over there of his own presumably free presumably will (sic), that the current Coffeehouse Wall, especially when read from the bottom backwards, is rather entertaining. It certainly gave me a few smiles.

john miller

But the Labour Party voter has simply never cared who the local MP is.

It could be a ferret in a flat 'at.

They vote for the red rosette and sod all else.

Why else does the average Glaswegian vote for a party that ensures he lives in poverty for all of his 53 years?

Old Slaughter

Chillax man

Mark Gullick

You're a nice guy and all, and your views on multiculti are spot on, Dickie [as the West Indian bowlers used to say approvingly to Richard Bird], but your grasp of politics verges on the pinball gutter. LABOUR IS IN POWER, YOU MUFFIN! As Caine says in Carter; Stroll on!

Noa

Damn it Rod.

What happened to your peerage then the other day?
A CBE at the very least...

MikeF

The basic fact is that the ethos of the Labour Party is one of contempt for the values and identity of many of the people who actually vote for it. I not only used to vote Labour but was once a member of the party. I now regard it with contempt - it is nothing but a vehicle for a mix of conceit, control-freakery, nepotism and authoritarian narcissism that convinces itself of its virtue through its espousal of bogus, mock-altruistic doctrines such as 'multi-culturalism' and 'anti-racism', which usually have the opposite effect to the ones they claim to want to create. It would be nice to see it cease to exist, but there is no reason to suppose that the values it currently represents would disappear as well. They would simply find another vehicle.

Edward McLaughlin

All was lost, the minute that children of the working class were handed the narrative of osmosis, and could pronounce 'pyloric sphincter'.

RichieP

Michael Sweeney
'... as any fule know.'

With respect Michael, 'as any fule kno' is the proper term, on a sad day for Molesworth fans.

I'm an old South Wales Labourite. Stopped voting for them in 1997 when I saw what a narcissist and twister young Tony was and when the Labour Party ended. They tried hard to be pink Tories, did very well, then turned the UK into the most crushingly destructive authoritarian statist spied-on hole.
Once you've made the decision, it's fine Rod. It's like toothache, the relief is wonderful.

RichieP

MikeF
January 3rd, 2012 6:35pm

Spot on.

Herbert Thornton

Ideologies seldom seem to work out as the naive hope. Instead they provide power-hungry people with the opportunity to be tyrants.

Marxism appealed to the naive (and still does) but it led, for example, to power being concentrated in the Kim Il Sung's dynasty - a de facto absolute monarchy and a murderous one at that.

Similarly, Labour's ideology also appealed to do-gooder minds, but Britain eventually ended up not just with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown but with Parliaments containing MPs almost all of whom are in thrall to the insanities of Political Correctness. And moreover with an electorate that stupidly continues to vote for political correctness as North Koreans continue to revere their own crackpot monarchy.

Even Rod seems unable to shake off the shackles. It makes me despair.

David Ossitt

“But those dwindling few of us who support the Labour Party”

Rod is it not the time for you to come across to the right, your loyalty is to be admired but you have grown, you have evolved and your party and the socialist ideas it still espouses are discredited.

Just think you might even write for the Daily Mail.

John P reid

TAKE NO NOTICE OF THEM Rod, I'm glad you've stuck with labour, keep up the good work

JulesVerne

Maybe all the immagrants will vote for them Rod. You know, the people so unlike you (i.e. racist Millwall supporters) that makes you hate visiting London so much!

Eddie

The thing that really made me turn away from the left was the same thing that annoyed Christopher Hitchens: the appeasement by those on the left of Islamists, simply because Muslims are in a minority religious (and usually racial) group. The appeasers actually see themselves as 'liberal' and accuse all who disagree with their insane multiculturalist tolerance of the intolerable of being 'Islamophobic'. All very topsy-turvey and odd. And massively hypocritical. Left and right mean nothing any more really.

I too squirm whenever someone instructs me to 'chill out'. I can date this to 1986 when my sisters shared a flat with acid head hippie dopehead dropouts (well, she is one).

I decided to get a Chinese takeaway so went to the hall and got my wallet from my jacket - a tenner was missing (all I had). I asked the assembled 'chilling out' hippies 'has anyone been in my wallet?. Eventually one longhaired mumbling loon said' oh yeah man i forgot i was hungry so i like borrowed ten quid'.

I told him that was really not acceptable - in so many words - to which he said 'chill out man - don't be such a bread head' I explained to aforementioned hippie that it was actually MY brea and not his - and that if he didn't give me my money back so I could get some food, I might well use the breadknife for purposes not intended at the place of manufacture. I was, I am happy to say, persuasive, and walked said hippy to the cashpoint myself!

Chill out? What, and end up a useless unemployable parasitic stinking hippie piece of thieving turd? No thanks.

fergus pickering

Three cheers for you, Eddie. And I am with you about muslims too. AND bloody silly discussion groups in primary schools. Now if you could rethink the stuff about women being agents of Satan we could start a beautiful friendship.

J Scopes

Fergus Do you really support a self confessed pioneer of knife crime and the further criminal act of demanding money with menaces?

Prodicus

Love the 'about' photo of you, top right. What were you then - 17? Aw.

Maggie

Ed should listen to Matthew Parris who said it first and more elegantly. If Ed is listening to secondhand ideas palmed off as his own by Lord Glassman, then he's a bigger fool than I took him for.

David Lindsay

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a need to engage with the initially marginalised or excluded voices of the environmentalist, feminist and gay movements, and of those black people exemplified by Stuart Hall.

However, at least since 11th September 2001, that approach to defining and redefining the Left has been in crisis due to its inability to work out how to engage with political Islam; or with the strongly neoliberal, socially libertarian, and geopolitically neoconservative views at which many on the New Left have arrived; or with people who have departed from more obvious Stalinism, Maoism or Trotskyism only far more recently or far more partially, if at all.

That crisis is exacerbated by the ongoing collapse of the globalisation and the European federalism to which the New Left distinguished itself from its predecessors by subscribing.

A generation on from the New Left’s heyday, the marginalised and excluded are precisely those who are best placed and best equipped both to reach out to and to critique political Islam while opposing globalisation in general, European federalism in particular, the neoliberal-libertarian-neoconservative nexus, and the Marxism to which they have never subscribed in any form.

Those are trade unionists, co-operators and other mutualists, working-class patriots, orthodox Catholics, attendees at the black churches, and many others who likewise have their political roots in the wholly non-Marxist traditions out of which, but ultimately always within which, the Labour Movement was created and needs to be recreated.

teledu

MikeF says it all so eloquently about New labour. Spot on MikeF.

fergus pickering

Demanding money with menaces? The Revenue do it to me all the time. And I have an inch long penknife attached to my car keys. That's probably knife crime.

Lungfish

David Lindsey- you sound a bit like Wolfie from the Tooting Popular Front. Lots of very impressive big words.

Toxteth O'Grady

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100127409/was-diane-abbotts-tweet-racist/

OHHHHHH BY GOD I CAN'T WAIT!!!! Come on Rod - tell us how you really feel!

Tom Macheath

"Chill out" and "take a chill pill" are piffling in comparison to that awful portmanteau word "chillax", which pushes me towards throat-ripping.

Kingstonian

David Lindsay
January 4th, 2012 5:55pm

Sorry, can you repeat that, I only speak English.

David Lindsay

Lungfish and Kingstonian would clearly be happier on popbitch.

Lungfish

Yes, good site, I'll make it my homepage immediately.

Walker

We both agree that the metropolitan marxist chattering labour party really has contempt for the working class.Hence the Duffy incident when Brown revealed his real views on them. Today the target for the Tories should be that very working class who actually think very much like them.Sadly their leader shares many of the same values as labour and for example thinks ukip members are "closet racists". A genuine conservative right wing Tory Leader could garner a lot of votes from "working class" people.

fergus pickering

What has ukip to do with the working class? Ukip. like the Liberal Democrats, is a middle-class party. Do you KNOW anyone from the working class that votes Ukip?

Karl Crawford

The Labour hiearchy has been captured by the Labour middle class. I cant believe that there isnt a working class Labour MP up to leading the party who is both down to earth and intellectual. What Labour needs is a leader who can hit it home at PM questions that the Tories have an agenda on cutting the size of the state and that its leaders ,Cameron and Osborne in particular have been groomed from an early age that it is their right to lead (irrespective of their own unsuitability),and this right came from their public school background. But as long as you have Miliband from a Marxist intellectual background,such a criticsm of the government would be fall flat as Miliband would be accused of also coming from a silver spooned back ground.
There must be a challenge to the Labour leadership,but not from the current shadow cabinet.

magicern

I think Mr Liddle is a little harsh on the usage of the word chill.Perhaps he needs to chill out? However the rest of his item is sound though I doubt that the Labour Party will take any more note of him than of Lord Glasman for whatever my view is worth which is not a lot in the grand scheme of things but there you go. I'm off to chill out now on this less than warm day. I must say I do like RL's Sunday Times footie/sport column though it's a pity about Milwall FC.

Lungfish

If Peter Oborne is right in his current Telegraph column then half the membership of the Labour party are teachers. Say no more.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/peteroborne/

C Cole

In the photo above Lord G looks a bit like the splendid actor Eugene Levy, who played the dad in the American Pie films. A good mentor for Mr Ed, then. But maybe Ed would be even better off listening to the lovely Diane Abbott (that's a hint for your next blog, Rod...).

Richard of Christchurch rubble

Spot on, MikeF.

Rod, what are you doing in that party of prissy, puritannical ponces?

Walker

Fergus you got the wrong end of the stick, unfortunately the word Cameron was missed out on my Comment. The point is that cameron's political instincts are really the same as the Blair malignancy.He
enormously admires Blair and automatically translates right wing concerns about immigration and national identity as bigotry; though for political expediency he may posture slightly differently.

Walker

Rod you say your really labour.I can understand that anyone who worked for the BBC today program would have to be.But you work for the specie now so you can come out of the closet.. Everything you say is right wing and don't try to play it down to yourself by calling it 'libertarian'. Do you really think your readership in any way identifies with the left.

David Short

Tony Blair once said on the BBC that the working class no longer existed. It being the BBC, it did not ask him why he was the leader of a party called 'Labour'.

The working class does indeed exist, which is why there are so many safe Labour seats. But fewer of them like the Labour party as it is, which is why the Labour vote has fallen in all the safe seats. They cannot bring themselves to vote for any other party, so they simply don't vote. But not enough. That's why David Miliband is MP for South Shields, the safest seat of all - it has never had a Tory MP since the 1832 Reform Act. Before Labour was founded, it was Whig or Liberal.