Labour Leadership 2016

Do you think immigration is a problem ? Do you support austerity ?

Reducing it down in this way forces the discussion into a binary choice which is unhelpful.

Yvette Cooper gave a speech soon after the referendum where she said

Those who saw globalisation as an opportunity voted in
Those who felt globalisation was a threat and didn’t trust “the system” to make it better voted out

Which I think is fundamentally correct. The problem is that a lot of the middle class southern left are internationalists, and saw the EU and its four freedoms through an internationalist prism, whereas a lot of traditional labour voters in the more deprived areas of the country have seen their industries destroyed by international competition, and now believe that job growth and pay are so stagnant because of an influx of foreign workers. They're not internationalists - they see globalisation as having hurt, not helped them, and they'd like to get that under control. UKIP are currently the main lot claiming that they can and would do so.

So, to me, the Labour Party under Corbyn feels like it is currently engaged in a massive fight between those who think moving the party to the centre for electoral success is a good strategy, and those who think that the party needs to be more to the left and then maybe either a) non-voters who lean left will vote for it, or b) the population will skew more left when it sees what the left could be if it weren't tacking to the centre.

I think a) might happen, but I suspect it'll be more middle class voters in safe Labour areas, which thanks to FPTP won't change who's in government. I think b) is deeply optimistic and refer you to the Bertolt Brecht poem I posted up-thread. I think this not least because the leftist vision that's being portrayed so far feels like student union politics - where there's no power, so taking stances is all you can do. (Which is why, IMHO, so few people think Corbyn could be PM. We know what he doesn't like, but there's little sign of real policies that he would implement - this is student politics writ large).

That said, I don't think tacking to a Blairite centre will work either, because Blair was also a middle class internationalist who thought everyone would just make the most of globalisation.

Both wings of the party are failing to articulate a solid leftwing strategy that addresses some voters' fear of globalisation, reconciles it with others' internationalism, and packages it in a progressive economic programme.

Instead, they're making Gordon Brown's mistake and assuming everyone who doesn't automatically share the views of the internationalists is a nasty bigot.