(07-08-2024, 11:31 PM)Ninurta Wrote: I don't understand British political labels very well. That's probably compounded by differing American usages of the same terms. For example, my grandfather was usually called "Whig" as a nickname, but I don't think the term means the same thing here as it does there. As another example, "Tory" was a pejorative term here after the Revolution, and most of our Tories were expatriated to the Bahamas to avoid grisly deaths for them, but there I think "Tory" just means what we would call "Conservative" over here - but I can't be sure.I'll start with a rough guide to the history of British political labels. "Whigs" and "Tories" were originally both pejorative terms. The Whigs were based on a clique of anti-establishment, radical-minded aristocrats, in alliance with the metropolitan merchant class. The Tories were the old-fashioned country land-owners. The Hanoverian kings were brought in by the Whigs, who became the new establishment. But there was a new division later in the same century about the reaction to the American and French revolutions. Those Whigs who approved of the revolutions hi-jacked the proud name "Whig" as their own property and disparaged their government rivals as "Tories". That's why people like Edumnd Burke and William Pitt, who thought of themselves as Whigs, are now regarded as founding fathers of the Conservative party. Since "Whigs" had supported American independence and "Tories" had opposed it, that would account for the way those labels were used in America.
"Brexit" I sort of understand, but only sort of. It seems just a common-sense move to decouple from the EU and what it is becoming, so I don't quite fathom the differing opinions over it there... but then again, I don't live there, so the nuances are not a part of my day to day experience.
To compound my confusion, the Democrats here used to be known as "the working man's party", which I would equate with "Labour" I suppose, and the Republicans were known to cater to financial elites. In recent years, that has entirely flip-flopped, and now the Republicans are "the working man's party" while the Democrats have allied themselves with the elites... a complete 180 from what I grew up with.
The colors representing the parties has even flipped. When I was young, "blue" represented the Republicans and "red" (as in "the red menace" or the color of every communist flag around the world in those days) represented the Democrat Party. Around the year 2000, for reasons never explained, that color association flipped to what we have today, which took me years to get used to - if I ever did. Until 2000, "red", representing "danger", was associated with every Leftist movement world-wide, including the US Democrats... but now it's associated with the Right here.
So "Tory", "Labour":, etc. doesn't do much to explain to me just who is winning and who is losing in terms I can comprehend.
In light of that, can someone explain to me in terms I can understand - in other words, "dumb it down" - just what the results of the recent British visit to the polls were?.
It was Peel, at the beginning of the Victorian era. who formally re-named the Tories as Conservatives. But his government suffered a hiccup over the taxes on imported corn, which benefited the country landowners and annoyed everybody else. Circumstances obliged him to abolish them, and temporarily break up his own party in the process. The next decade saw the formation of the coalition which became the Liberal party; the Whigs, refugee Peelites like Gladstone, the business class, radical intellectuals, Irish radicals, the unions, the working-class in general. So the Conservatives and the Liberals became the two standard poltical rivals.
But the Liberal coalition gardually broke up, in turn. Gladstone lost the Whigs when he wanted to give autonomy to Ireland, and the Irish had already founded their own party anyway. Over the next decades the business class gradually transferred across to the Conservatives. The unions founded the Labour party to be their own political voice, and after the First World War this party was able to capture the radical intellectuals and much of the working-class, so everybody else fled to the Conservatives in fright, leaving the Liberals representing nobody. Having said that, the working-classes and the radical intellectuals frequently don't see eye-to-eye, so the tradition of "working-class Conservatism" has continued to be strong.
Now it seems to me, as an outsider with historical interests, that the Democrat and Republican labels have had a similar evolution, complictaed by sectionalism. At the time of the Civil War, the "establishment" was the slave-owning power, and the Republican party was formed to combine everybody else in opposition, including northern radicals and northern businessmen and the West, leaving the South to be the stronghold of the Democrats. After the Civil War, the business class became the new establishment, enabling the Democrats to rebuild as a coalition of everybody else, including radical intellectuals and the downtrodden masses in general, but still including the South. As late as the Sixties, it was still being taken for granted that the South was solid Democrat. It looks as though the rebellion of Governor George Wallace marked the break-up of that connection on the segregation issue, so that the South was turning into solid Republican from Reagan onwards.
I offer the following descrption of the post-war left-wing party which might apply in both countries. It is, essentially, a party of radical intellectuals trying to mobilise the vote of the downtrodden masses. At the same time, they have in effect become the establishment, working their way into the media, the civil service, the church, and thus controlling what is official public opinion. They have already satisfied most of the political needs of the working-class with earlier legislation (Attlee), with the accidental result that they now have little more to offer the working-class, and can attain power again only when the Conservative party falls down in some way (Wilson, Blair, Starmer; Carter, Clinton). The solution encouraged by the radical intellectuals is to extend the definition of "downtrodden masses", to include groups with whom the working-class might have little sympathy.
I think you might understand the Brexit isssue instantly if you appreciate that the English Channel has becone the exact equivalent of the Mexican border. The EU is what NAFTA could have become if Nafta had been given a supra-governmental body with the power to draft laws which member countries woud be obliged to adopt. In both countries, the left has adopted "open borders" as a standard of self-righteousness, which is why the left is against leaving the EU as well as against trying to restrain migrants. This is one of the areas in which they are losing contact with the working-class.
I might be able to explain the recent election by drawing on my theory of a current "time-lag" between Anerican and British political responses. Supposing it had been constitutionally possible, during the Trump presidency, for the Republicans to remove Trump themselves and continue in power for a few more years under an assortment of RINO's. One could equate this with the removal of Boris Johnson. Then, as the next election approached, a disgruntled faction of right-wing Republicans might have detached themselves and formed a new party, eventually persuading Trump himself to join them. This analogy works best on the recognition that Nigel Farage, the businessman, is actually a closer match to Trump than Boris was. To complete the analogy, we would have to assume that this new right-wing faction, labelled as neo-Fascists by their opponents, had officially named itself "The Progressive Party". Then these "Progressives" would have divided the Republican vote enough to help Jo Biden win control of Congress, which is roughly what "Reform" have achieved so far to the benefit of Starmer.