Tag: Corbyn

All That’s Political Come To Pass

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

With this day comes the final seven day countdown to my last piece on here. In the last day or two I’ll write something self-indulgent about the whole experience but in the mean time I want to use today to mark the end of what feels like a series of pieces on the US election and Trump. Naturally with these words he will do something ridiculous tomorrow and I’ll be left no choice but to comment on it but it would be nice not to allow him to take up the last week of something that is not supposed to be predominantly taken up with politics and especially not Trump.

I would like to draw your attention to a video I discovered by independent media organisation Double Down News. I’ve mentioned them before because I find their videos to be highly agreeable and I want others to agree with them too. It’s called spreading the word or something like that. I’m not someone who spends hours watching videos online, I come across them more then anything, and will always call out people who call watching videos on YouTube ‘research’ or try to use them as evidence of anything. They are an easily accessible medium though and it is no surprise YouTube has become a battleground of sorts.

This short video discusses the issues facing the Democrats and how they’re incapable of dealing with them when their core donors expect a continuation of neoliberal economic and political choices. It discusses the similarities between the Democrats / Labour and Sanders / Corbyn and the self-destructive response from establishment figures within the parties. This feels like a video which successfully encapsulates my beliefs but it’s important for me too to understand whether my beliefs simply encapsulate the ideas put forth in this video and many things I read. Narratives do exist and while we’re capable of conscious thought as well as forming opinions objectively by ourselves, we’re easily convinced of things and it’s not always clear what comes first.

The video is only ten minutes but it is interesting and gives insight into the rumblings inside my head if my previous words over this year haven’t. There won’t be another year to clarify. In fact, there won’t even be anything this time next week. Everything has a time, all things come to pass. That includes political ideologies and that in a way feels like a reassuring thought at the very least.

Where Did We Go Wrong?

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Is it possible to talk about anything else right now? Covid-19…Palestine…god forbid people remember Brexit is just around the corner…the spectre of climate change looming around the other. Our newsfeeds have been taken over by the finals of some political sports tournament which has forgotten to include a referee in the rules. The people have been given the honour apparently but we all know the fallacy behind that. It’s ticking along though. Georgia has just swung for Sleepy Joe, others will likely follow. This was always going to happen as the Democratic heavy postal vote count was done. It feeds into The Donald’s narrative but nobody except his support take that or him seriously. Unfortunately his support is seventy million people but lets not think about that. Actually we probably should.

It’s good to start on the point that even though Biden is on something like seventy-three million it doesn’t mean the country is split fifty – fifty. It’s not even my country but it has such a reaching influence we treat it as such in these moments. Of course not everyone with a political opinion votes and voter suppression is very real. Trump himself has been quoted as saying that if the entire country voted it would likely be the end of the Republican party. That doesn’t say much for conservative values, in fact it suggests these values are held by an active minority. The same accusation applies to the UK as we endure our own version of Trump with our departure from the EU. An unknown future of extreme neoliberalism, not that the EU isn’t neoliberal because it very much is, and tax haven UK. Not paying taxes sounds great until public services become underfunded and it’s never the lower or middle earners who ever really benefit from tax cuts.

But seventy million people believe he has done well. That is serious. To break it down some will just not like Biden, some the Democrats, a large number who have simply voted Republican for generations, some through economic hardship are desperate and of course those who see The Donald as some cult like demi-god. Regardless of their reasons, they’re still willing to vote for someone who is perplexing in his corrupt self-serving lies. I don’t think highly of centrist politics, of Democrats like Biden or Clinton, but Trump? How do you get in the head of people willing to support him to understand where the left have gone wrong. Because ultimately it comes down to that. Biden scraping over the line against someone like Trump isn’t a success, it should be the bare minimum. Has it got so bad we’re willing to celebrate the bare minimum as some kind of great success. Is that all we have left?

In the UK working class Labour heartlands are switching to a Conservative party that will only ever look after it’s own. Where have the left gone wrong, because they have. We have Trump and Brexit as proof of that. Yes the media are corrupt and capable of manipulating, think Sanders and Corbyn, and while they have the money to get their message further, maybe we just need a better and new message to counteract that. Something is not working. We need to find out what this is otherwise it will just repeat itself, or likely next time be far worse.

Gobble, Gobble, Gobble

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

And just like that the turkeys voted for Christmas. Or how about the Turkish proverb “The forest was shrinking, but the the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that as his handle was made of wood he was one of them”. The Conservatives won with a majority of forty seats, it was a landslide and Labour were arguably crushed. Previously safe working class Labour seats which had voted Labour for seventy, eighty, ninety years voted Tory. For some reason the residents of Grimsby think that the ruling elite somehow represent and will look after them. It’s a shit show.

I’m also angry. I’ll try not to be bitter or a bad loser but there is no surprise when seemingly the entire media has spent the last four years attacking Corbyn. Crowing, barely able to contain their excitement throughout the election show. Despite spending the last forty years fighting racism they have somehow successfully painted him as an anti-semite racist. He stood up for the Palestinians and was anti-Israeli. That is not anti-semitism. He fought the billionaires with the intention of them actually paying tax and slowing the cash grab that has been going on these last ten years. Unsurprisingly they have been terrified he may actually get in. His social policies described repeatedly as extreme left wing marxism when in fact all they would have done is put us on par with Germany and France. This was him standing on the first real working peoples manifesto for the last forty years and the working class rejected him. It feels like he was the last great hope for change, that’s what hurts so much. It will now get worse.

It turned out people couldn’t look past Brexit. The Tories managed successfully to make it the Brexit election while the rest tried to have some actual policies other than ‘get Brexit done’. 88% of their ads were found to be misleading, Labour – 0%. The Leave and Remain traditional Tory voters continued to vote Tory but the Leave Labour voters switched their allegiances and voted Tory. That was it really. And of course those who switched feel disenfranchised, they’ve been left behind, they have nothing but leaving the EU won’t magically fix what in reality is the result of forty years of neoliberal policies and neglect within Britain by British governments. It’s always the same, we think that by just buying that new car, getting that new job, winning that referendum, we will somehow wake up the following day and everything will be great, our lives will no longer suck but that’s just not how it works. All that’s going to happen is we wake up the next day to find someone ramming stuffing up our arse and placing strips of bacon across our back. We did vote for it after all.