Labour’s strategy: stirring up apathy
JVL Introduction
Back in the 1950s, Edward Thompson wrote of apathy as people looking to private solutions to public evils, private ambitions displacing social aspirations.
In contrast to political scientists of the day who declared that apathy was functional to the system, the emergent new left saw it as the problem they it was determined to overcome. They were socialists with social aspirations.
Keir Starmer seems determined to return to the old days where nobody appeared to care – at least not in public where they might rock the boat.
As Phil Burton-Cartledge shows the real content of Starmer’s New Year speech was that it had no real content. Demotivation seems his primary goal. Expect, but really nothing much.
But wanting politics to “tread lightly” is another way of avoiding questions that are the bread and butter of politics: the questions of how things should be, whose interests should be prioritised, what policies you stand for.
Labour may well win the next election by default, believes Burton-Cartledge, but when things go wrong, expect them to go very wrong.
RK
This article was originally published by A Very Public Sociologist blogspot on Thu 4 Jan 2024. Read the original here.
Stirring up apathy
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Even in 1997, Labour offered far more to voters than it does now.
Labour is now too right wing even for John McTernan.
The Guardian recently reported that the pledge to bar former ministers and civil servants from taking up employment with companies that they had previously dealt with as part of their official duties was being abandoned.
The commitment to environmental spending is being downgraded.
Starmer’s ‘growth, growth, growth’ slogan has been borrowed from Liz Truss.
Why vote Labour at all?
Whoever came up with the phrase “stirring up apathy” deserves three medals.
sad but true. I miss being in the LP but felt unable to remain a member with Sir K in charge. Still awaiting a reply to my letter to him. Ho-hum………
It will be a Pyrrhic victory. Look around: Reeves and Streeting as the two lieutenants.
I live on the corner of the ninety-ninth floor of my block
And I sit at home looking out the window imagining the world has stopped
Then in flies a Knight all dressed up just like a Union Jack
Says, I’ve won five pounds if I have his kind of detergent pack
I says hey, Knight get off of my cloud
Hey you ……………..
This is one of the most generous articles about Starmer from the Left that I’ve read. Maybe the intention was to kill him with kindness? On the other hand it ignores the scale of his lies and mendacity. And that is at the heart of his politics. Starmer’s first job was to break the Left – not just by suspensions and expulsions – but by changing the rules at all levels of the Party so that socialist ideas and actions can no longer exist within his Labour. Everything else follows from this.
Look at the people Starmer has surrounded himself with – they’re not fluffy Fabians – they’re very hard-nosed apparatchiks who use the Party bureaucracy against the (slowly disappearing) membership. Yes, Starmer wants apathy. But he wants it in order for his politics to be dominant and unassailable.
O, and John McTernan is not a wide-eyed Leftist – he’s a very cynical bruiser who despises the Left.
Apparently Keir Starmer IS stirring up apathy. Not a single message here!
Seems his political aims are to give peace of mind to the rich and powerful, by lessening the hopes and dreams of everyone else. But if people’s role is just to turn out to vote on election day, then the very stuff of politics becomes depoliticized until it’s made to seem suspect, even criminal if one dares to disagree and protest.
And just look at Gaza, fast becoming a zone of abandonment. A place where a people have been reduced to bare life. Palestinians there are so shockingly far from having any say or control over what’s happening (including, I might add, professionals like medics and journalists) yet the politics of what’s happening to them is reverberating around the world. So many people calling for ceasefire now!