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Originally Posted by Damien
I think parts of his underlying point, that the modern left has become disconnected from some of those it seeks to represent, is valid and also that not talking about issues like the grooming gangs and immigration cedes those issues to the right but that isn't something we didn't already know and he spends most of the article with cliched examples of it. It isn't insightful beyond that.
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And herein is another example of the problem - those who are of the new left (younger, socially liberal, educated, i.e. people such as yourself) are simply dismissive of these issues. ‘Isn’t something that we didn’t already know’ … do you not see that for a huge chunk of the population, which feels distant and disconnected from those with power and influence, the obvious follow-up to that is ‘well why the hell aren’t you doing anything about it’? These aren’t cliches. Every one of the examples in the piece is current.
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We know this change has been slowly happening for a while but the terminally online examples he gives are a symptom of underlying democratic shifts as opposed to the left-wing being hijacked by people on social media.
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Seriously …. What is this word salad?
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I think several things are happening. The most obvious one is that the left-wing base in the UK and America has shifted from manual workers without degrees to university-educated service workers. Labour voters are now more likely to have further education and are trending younger.
These people are more likely to be socially liberal rather than just economically liberal which is what I think he is getting at when he refers to 'old left'. This is where there is a disconnect and I agree that the broader left has had a problem speaking to social conservatives. The left isn't one big cohesive block but some elements of the left, especially online, have a problem speaking to the country at large as well. The Corbyn faction of the Labour Party hated Starmer doing speeches in front of the Union Jack but these people are a minority of the left.
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Your analysis is muddled because you’re doing the very thing you’re accusing McKenna of doing, and trying to force people into a limited number of very broad categories and as a result you’re miss-labelling people - badly. You appear to be trying to force Jeremy Corbyn into the ‘Old Left’. It’s true the tabloids would call him a Lefty Dinosaur and point to his support for state ownership and collective bargaining. However Corbyn is extremely socially liberal - something you obviously get at some level as you correctly identified him with flag-haters. But then, McKenna would identify with the New Left. We are used to the left-right divide in the UK being characterised in economic terms because Thatcher, and that habit is hard to break. But break it we must, because there has been a broad economic consensus in the UK since Blair. The fault line now is overwhelmingly as social one. Look at it that way and you stand a better chance of not misunderstanding people like Jeremy Corbyn.
In fact, McKenna’s entire thesis is grounded not in economics but in social policy, whether conservative or liberal/progressive. His complaint about the working class being told what to say, think and eat is a complaint about genderism and food and alcohol regulation, things which I admit may be less obvious to English readers but all of which have been addressed (sometimes very badly, IMO) in primary legislation in Scotland in the last decade. All of these tendencies exist UK-wide but the Scottish government has been under socially liberal control for some time now so the fault line is somewhat clearer here than you’re perhaps aware of.
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But I think he is also making a mistake in thinking the working class is one big monolithic bloc that isn't itself also more fragmented.
What language and what families? I think he is now just invoking a mythical version of a working-class person from an old era. There are plenty of working-class liberals around. There isn't one language of the working class, one way of raising those families, and one type of food or entertainment for the working class.
The left can speak very well to some of them and not at all to others. The disconnect is higher when it comes to culture, age and education as opposed to class.
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Again, a little of it may be lost in translation. He’s addressing a Scottish audience and the population of Scotland is less than 6 million. There is a lot less variation in social outlook here. The Scottish Labour Party is much more socially conservative than its English branch is. The Scottish Tories are socially conservative, obvs. And as the nationalist cause begins to fragment, one of the main fault lines between the SNP and Alba is social policy. But again, as I said to Ian, don’t pick up a newspaper opinion piece and expect an undergraduate essay. Of course he’s writing in broad strokes. That’s the genre. There is however a serious underlying point and the pearl-clutching from Ian yesterday and your subconsciously dismissive approach to the ‘cliches’ he raises (also, predictably, Andrew, who seems excessively relieved that you had a go at a rebuttal) really do illustrate McKenna’s point very well indeed. These are problems that the ‘New Left’ can’t or won’t acknowledge, and mostly won’t discuss beyond a dismissive wave of the hand and a #Nodeabte.