[Malcolm Armsteen]

The one reason he could come up with was Corbyn (and Corbynites) support for the IRA.

That meme will persist until they are all gone.

[Oboogie]

For those who missed it, this is the phone call Malcolm and Abers are talking about.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Corbyn's gone. Reckon Abbott might follow. They're the only ones anyone can name.

[Oboogie]

I heard a while back that Abbott was planning to stand down before the next election but time's rolling on and there's been no announcement, so that may have been BS.

[Boiler]

Electorally, the hill that Labour could die on is the gender issue. Can you imagine the fun a certain columnist would have with the idea of "your mother's got a penis"?

Except someone got there twenty years ago.

[Nigredo]

For those who missed it, this is the phone call Malcolm and Abers are talking about.

I'll save a deeper analysis for another thread but this phone call right here is a sign o' the times. When critical thinking has been so poorly fostered so as to be non-existent (probably by design by successive Tory governments), there's only raw libidinal energy left to be tapped into. Which the alt-Reich are far better at doing than anyone else.

[Andy McDandy]

I read a book that defined this as "truthiness" - basically stuff with no facts to back it up, but people buy into it because it just feels right to them. Ties in well with Johnson quoting Scarface - "I tell the truth, even when I lie".

John O'Farrell pointed out a few years ago that in the late noughties, the Tories used "broken Britain" as a narrative. Everything was failing, nothing worked properly, schools were gang-infested hellholes, hospitals were swamped, gangs of Asians were beating up soldiers, and the caahncil insisted on you using a recycling bin. The problem with it was that it was bollocks. He said that if you pointed to waiting times at their local hospital, or the conduct/results of kids at the local comp, they were fine. But the narrative had taken hold that "everyone knew" that things were dire. So your local school or hospital was the exception and everywhere else was crap. And if that applied to everyone, why did nobody notice it?

Partly because a hospital functioning properly isn't news. When one goes wrong, it gets a lot of attention, and people buy into the belief that it's symptomatic of the entire system.

You can see the same thing under Trump, in the run up to the referendum, in Johnson's performance at PMQs. His and Trump's supporters have something in common - a sense of grievance and frustration and a need for a scapegoat. With the obvious one ("stop electing people who treat you like shit") too uncomfortable to face.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The Tories didn't do all that well with their "everything's going to the dogs" lark v Blair. Michael Howard went hard for it in 2005, but the best card he had was Iraq, which shifted some Labour voters to the Lib Dems and won the Tories seats by default. Howard was much more focussed than Hague had been in 2001, but he put on 1.4% to Hague's vote.

They had more success with it in 2010, but I think without the Crash they would have struggled there too.

[Andy McDandy]

In 2005 he could have played Iraq, but had to acknowledge that he was as complicit in that as Blair and co were. So he went with something something gypsies.

By 2010 the Labour party had the crash, the exies scandal, and the increasing shitshow in Afghanistan on their plates. Plus, they looked tired. The crash saw government spending increase with nothing to show for it, because it was all done to basically keep treading water. Once that's done, "it was that or economic collapse" sounds like retroactive scaremongering.

While subsequent events put Afghanistan and the expenses to shade, and they were deliberately stoked by a very hostile media (not just hostile to Labour, but to the conventions and institutions of the state), they resonated.

[mattomac]

Electorally, the hill that Labour could die on is the gender issue. Can you imagine the fun a certain columnist would have with the idea of "your mother's got a penis"?

Except someone got there twenty years ago.

Mind you the issue is what can be said when you have that from Sarah Vine it’s entered realms of Pizzagate