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sohi
lots of talk about "woke", "working class", "the red wall" etc etc following the election, starmers approach and what comes next. this new piece from ash sarkar is very good (as is all her writing imo), perfect articulation of a positive response to such turmoil for labour which addresses the reality of the situation and proposes a progressive outlook.
I think i generally get turned off by this "red wall" talk because such a one dimensional view of class it's almost a a meme. i think part of it also signals to me is a lack of new ideas to combat an opponent who has capitalised on the shifting landscape, but also new ideas to really embrace the new opportunities and fronts for growth (gig workers, minimum wage office drones, small/micro business owners, renters and so forth)
https://novaramedia.com/2021/05/10/everybody-is-doing-identity-politics-even-if-they-think-theyre-not/
I particularly liked:
For a political tradition steeped in class politics, there’s a stubborn refusal amongst the left to acknowledge that merely referring to ‘the working class’ every ten seconds can’t conjure a shared political identity between a precariously employed tenant and a retiree who’s paid off their mortgage. Many seats represented by cabinet ministers in Blair’s first government are not held by Labour today. Hartlepool is the latest in a trend of the Conservatives picking up seats where homeownership rates are 50% and above. As Joe Bilsborough points out, the Conservatives have “a keen sense of class formulation”. In privatising social housing, Margaret Thatcher fashioned a machine for making Tory voters: four in ten ex-council homes bought under Right to Buy are now owned by private landlords.
And
Politics is the expression of class forces, but we experience it as culture. And it is the malleability of culture which means that the freelancer with a laptop is coded as privileged instead of precarious, and the retired homeowner as ‘left behind’. We end up with an image of the British working class that does not include working-age people, that more often than not comes attached with the prefix of ‘white’, that renders invisible Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders.