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Originally Posted by Chris
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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I am not being dismissive of the issues. I am being dismissive of that article. I do think it's an issue for the left that we've vacated the ground on important issues to voters to the right. I don't think this article is good. There has been a lot of writing about this problem at this point.
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Seriously …. What is this word salad?
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It was late and I had come back from the football but my point is what followed about demographics changing. I think that's important because it feeds into who exactly the left is losing and why which I don't think is simply about class.
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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’.
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No. I am saying Corbyn is one part of a left that has been disconnected from the people he claims to represent. Or more precisely the movement behind him. Illustrated by the fact it was his faction of the Labour Party that objected to the party using the flag of the country it aspired to represent. I don't understand how you read that paragraph as positioning Corbyn as the old left when he was an example I cited of the failure of the left to understand the country.
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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.
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And I am saying that I don't think this is about class but education and, to a lesser extent, age. I think this divide exists within classes rather than between them. It's important because that's how we see who we're losing and why. After all the working class can be a young man working in a coffee shop in Edinburgh whilst doing this degree, a retired miner in a post-industrial town or a single mother from Hackney.
We're also seeing an increased gender divide as women go more left-wing and men more right-wing. Why? I think that will increasingly become the biggest problem for the left, how to speak to young men of any class.
Incidentally, the reserve question can be asked of the right. Why are the right losing ground with younger people, especially women, and with people who have more formal qualifications? The ground is shifting for everyone here.
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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.
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This is talked about on the left though, you don't see it because you're not in that ecosystem. Ultra-lefty (far more left-wing that me) Novara was talking about this after the Trump Election:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x776NMQaV6k