I am as angry as I am baffled by the result. 

How mining communities and those who have been shafted by the aftermath of the banking crisis have voted the way the have has dumbfounded me. I thought it would either be hung or a tiny majority. Underestimated the power of bullshit and the anger of English nationalism that has still not been vented. Wasn't helped by a lukewarm Labour leader.

Bit baffled by this notion that all the young people voting left means that we just have to wait 20-odd years for all this to be fine again. Presumably members of the younger generation have been saying similar since the Thatcher years. My mum remembers as much from her teenage days anyway.

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

I've always liked Gregg Palast. Found his take very interesting. https://www.gregpalast.com/boris-win-is-victory-for-anti-globalization-movement/ The free broadband thing has cropped up in many post mortems, but I think this whole post Twitter / Facebook campaign tech thing is a huge problem. I dunno. One possibility, is that perhaps, with the communication technology now available, there really might be an optimal campaign strategy, or at least an objective path to developing one... Trump, the referendum, the Brazilian election, and now this... Perhaps Corbyn's core message was absolutely fine, but this was a tech war. Not an idealogical one. Perhaps.

Out of interest, is this someone you just follow or was this passed around in some way? (I should say, it's a hilarious piece)

In his heyday, he was a fairly prominent BBC and Graniud freelancer (specialising in financial journalism), who was best known for breaking the story about voter fraud during G.W Bush's re-election.

He's not dead, just marginalised (he became a staunch Blair critic when he threw his weight behind the war on terror. The BBC froze him out immediatey), so I thought he might have some opinion.

And sure enough... 

Like arseholes, they say...

Kazuo wrote:

Bit baffled by this notion that all the young people voting left means that we just have to wait 20-odd years for all this to be fine again. Presumably members of the younger generation have been saying similar since the Thatcher years. My mum remembers as much from her teenage days anyway.

Yeah, pretty sure we covered this ages ago. Voting habits swing to the right as the population get older. It’s a well-established pattern.

Nesrine Malik and John Harris on Labour's lost election

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/16/leave-voters-clinton-trap-nativist-economics-labour
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/15/labour-revival-change-community-activists-plymouth

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

You might want to re read the first couple of sentences and ask yourself what this guy is about... It made me lol anyways

I find it funny, because not long ago, 'Globalisation' was seen to be the de facto tool of capitalist oppression...
And suggestions of, and theories about it's misappropriation became a common socialist meme.

So I find that blog post somewhat ironic.

Doesn't mean I agree with Palast, I just found it unusual, and interesting.

Tbh, my personal take, I believe that Corbyn doubling down on saving the NHS and holding a second ref, was just as appealing to the country as the Cons trumpeting a blind Brexit...

But I think the Cons found a hack (a fair one this time, unfortunately. Fuck Cummings), and have short circuited all classic campaigning techniques, somehow.

Thing about kids turning Tory as they age is that it's not going to happen if they don't score the things i.e. property that turn people into meaner and narrower people. The higher education train went off the rails in the last couple decades, spewing over-trained grads into shitty jobs, for instance. That will have some kind of effect on generational character for longer.

That's essentially what the Tories are going for - they can't deliver material boons in fact, so they're left with nativist horseshit to shovel.

Brooks wrote:

That's essentially what the Tories are going for - they can't deliver material boons in fact, so they're left with nativist horseshit to shovel.

Unfortunately, the lessons from history seem to be that the more desperate things get, the easier this form of horseshit is to shovel.

"uh" would be "fight" but I haven't actually yet seen anyone with a combat programme that is concrete enough to adopt.

Can’t leave, parents are getting older and they won’t leave - and I have no brothers or sisters.

I couldn’t abandon them anyway, but especially not to the miseries of the Tory social care system (should they require it).

I think I'll be alright, Jack, provided I get through the upcoming restructure at work. I might have mentioned it somewhere but we had a meeting last week which boiled down to "Congrats on your section making a saving of £2m to date this financial year, here's how we're going to decimate the management as a reward".

Hopefully the post w/a certainty and tax cuts work for u Liv. Fingers crossed

@Gonzo
Cheers mate. It is a thin veil of a silver lining but market certainty really would steady the ship a bit.

I’d like to fight but not really allowed to thanks to my job.

This again is probably someone's strategised outcome. I doubt you're in any way alone.