Weasel Words

I think it was in his last hustings, but I apologise if it was not, Jeremy Corbyn said he was calling for ideas from everybody and anybody about how things could be improved.

This struck me as an eminently sensible idea.  We seem to have got so used to our leaders telling us that this is how it is going to be, that this is what we want, that many, of us, myself included gave up bothering.  We had no voice, no-one cared what we thought, our political masters had the answers which they presented every so often in the form of a party manifesto.  If they were elected they took this as a sign that everybody who voted for them agreed with every policy in the manifesto, and thus mandated them to carry out that policy.

The truth was somewhat different.  Those of us who actually bothered to listen to what they were saying would weigh up the different policies, balance that with our recent experience, and choose the least bad manifesto.  It might be that all the manifestos contained policies which we disliked so we ignored those particular policies while making our decision.  The parties however continue the fiction and claim they have a mandate when in reality they have no such thing.

The great majority of the electorate however merely voted for whichever party they had voted for before, or if that party had done something which they disapproved of, the party opposite.  For a while the Lib Dems seemed to hold the possibility of a third approach to politics, something which they effectively destroyed by siding with one of the big two and thus betraying (at least in the eyes of supporters) their electorate.

Enter UKIP.

Led by the Chief Weasel himself, Sir Nigel de Farage, Nige, no doubt, to his friends. 

Let us consider UKIP for a moment, because UKIP, while only managing to win one seat in 2015 nevertheless managed to bring about the downfall of a Prime Minister.  This happened, I believe (pace Owen Smith), because David Cameron fundamentally failed to understand the demographic of the party.  

He knew that there were deep divisions within his own party on the subject of the EU.  He also knew that at some point something would have to be done to address this.  Two Tory MPs defected to UKIP and he obviously feared that more would follow.  In his manifesto for the 2015 General Election he faced this head on and promised an in/out referendum within the lifetime of the parliament.  Well we all know how that went and bye bye Dave.

David Cameron assumed that because MPs from his party were defecting to UKIP and that the Chief weasel was an ex-public school, ex-city man, that it was a direct threat to the Tory Party.

In fact UKIP is a chimera.  It has as its head right-wing disaffected Tories.  The main body of its support though, comes not from the squeezed middle classes and the naturally fascist privileged classes. although I am sure they are sympathetic, but most of the support came from the disaffected working class, concerned that immigration was the cause of their woes. They inflicted a lot of damage on the Labour party in the General Election and used the referendum to give those they thought had let them down a bloody nose.

Those who used UKIP to achieve their desires, the leaving of the EU, used every old trick in the book.  They nostalgically talked of 'being great again', of 'taking back control', of 'controlling our own borders', of 'not taking orders from unelected (b)eurocrats in Brussels', and they pulled the oldest stunt known to nationalists the world over, they blamed foreign migrants for their/our woes. 

It was what they didn't say which was more significant.  The question of migration is an extremely complex one at the best of times.  This time it was further complicated by a flood of millions of refugees fleeing from wars in the middle east. So migrants might be either refugees from conflict, economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, migrants from non-EU countries coming either to work or to study, and EU migrants coming to work as is their right. These are all conflated in the minds of many, something I believe (sorry Owen again) was a deliberate policy on the part of those politicians in favour of leaving.

Anyway whatever the reasons behind it we are now faced with a situation where many working class voters have moved from Labour to UKIP, it is definitely a problem which needs to be addressed in a very positive way by the Labour Party if it is to have any chance of victory.  The party cannot do that by introducing swingeing limits to migration.  In fact in reality no party could. The NHS would collapse as would much of the agricultural and horticultural sectors.  Seasonal jobs in fruit and veg picking exist in large numbers.  It is hard work and many locals don't want and can't afford to do seasonal work.  Eastern European migrant workers can earn enough in the picking season to see them through the winter in their own countries where the cost of living is significantly lower than here.  Stopping these migrants from coming would not significantly improve the lives of the local unemployed.  Similarly many EU migrants and also many from outside the EU are vital to the running of the NHS.  We just do not have enough qualified personnel to fill all the posts.

I could go on but I would merely be repeating stuff we have all heard many times before.

The real problem can be laid at the door of global 'free-market' capitalism and the destruction of the manufacturing and other industries in this country.  If you replace traditional manufacturing with service industries, these service industries will only thrive if people have money to spend on them.  Otherwise everything will be done on credit, which is great right up until the moment the bailiffs knock on the door.

Jeremy Corbyn had said "Nobody left behind'.  It is a great slogan, a great concept, and represents a hell of a task when it comes to convincing the dispossessed and disadvantaged that it means that money will be spent on making sure their lives not just better but actually good.  If everybody had enough to live on and a decent affordable place to live, decent schools for their kids and a properly functioning health service, do you think that the prospect of looking after a few more Middle Eastern refugees would create so much dissatisfaction?

If we cannot convince those who believed the half truths and downright lies peddled by the likes of Farage, then what is the likely scenario when the realise that 'taking back power' didn't mean that they would have any sort of a say, merely that their political masters would run things on their behalf as usual?  When making Britain great again was a meaningless phrase?  That controlling migration meant that they had no A&E department within 50 miles and when you got there you had to wait for twelve hours before seeing an overworked junior doctor waiting for a reply to his job application in Australia?  By then it may be too late. 

I watched a short film made by Owen Jones in Nuneaton, a bellwether seat.  It is in paces like this that those who have moved to UKIP must be won back.  In 2014 just 6% of the population there were born outside the UK, not a particularly high figure, yet voters seemed to have moved to UKIP because of the perceived problem of immigration.  We must convince them that we can make life good enough for them that migration is not a problem.  Unless we succeed we are in for a bumpy ride and the UK could become a country of which I would be ashamed to be a citizen.