This interview on @bbcnewsnight with @vicderbyshire is an absolute car crash for Andy Burnham. All over the place. No clue about 'fiscal rules', tetchy, unable to answer basic questions. Why do some people see him as the Messiah who can save Labour?
I’ve had more sophisticated answers about geopolitics and international relations from children I speak to on primary school visits.
This is what happens when politics becomes about vibes and feels, rather than about decisions and results.
@GeorgeWParker “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings". Orwell.
Trevor Philips makes such an interesting point and I want to add something to it that I often feel is overlooked. (Indulge me).
The feeling that people are “losing something, the story of their lives” is such an important point and it’s deeply related to class. Many working-class people live and die in their towns, the towns their families have lived in for generations, often happy to do so, and the sense of home carries a weight that it might not for the aspirational & educated middle classes who move around for work and treat home as secondary to jobs, education etc.
And if you’re wealthy, or grew up in a chocolate box village, you’re often insulated as your birthplace looks the same decades later. And yet some of these very people have the nerve to sneer at the working class for mourning when their own landscapes and communities are unrecognisable.
But at the heart of it, some people seem utterly unable to grasp that memories matter to some people. That preserving something matters. That a sense of home extends far beyond the four walls you live in. That we *all* hold things dear to us and for some people it’s that hotel in town that their parents got married in for example.
Just because places like Bolton or Grimsby don’t matter to you doesn’t mean they don’t matter deeply to others. Some people need to grasp that the absence of their feelings and attachments doesn’t erase someone else’s. And it doesn’t automatically make a whole group of people hateful. In fact, it simply makes them human.
The UK’s growth model in the 90s-00s was driven by:
a) North sea oil
b) Unsustainable financial services
c) Booming house price inflation
d) Easy consumer credit
All four are now a busted flush, and we haven’t figured out a replacement. Hence the perpetual doom loop